This summers bike tour came to a conclusion on Wednesday August 5, 2009 as I fell off the side of a cliff on an attempt to climb to the far side of the Aguasabon Gorge outside of Terrace Bay, Ontario.
Clambering along the edge of the cliff I slip and fall about 10 feet, landing abruptly on my left foot. A cracking noise and the sharp pain coming up from my foot pretty clearly let me know that something is not quite right. So there I am, lying half in the water and half on a jagged rock gasping and gulping. Looking around I think to myself that it took me a good 10 minutes to get here in the first place as an able bodied human, and nobody is going to come rescue me.
Well, I pull myself up to my good foot and try and put a bit of weight on the left. This proves impossible, and I collapse back into the creek. "Ok, now what" I think. I guess that I had better deal with the mobility issues as best I can on my hands and knees, and start swimming upstream to the nearest outcropping that will get me back to the path. This looks like it will work for a little while, but pretty quickly it becomes apparent that the sides of the creek are not going to be scalable in my current condition and I head downstream to a jagged rock which I am at least able to crawl up.
It takes about five minutes to drag myself out of the water to a sandy point 10 feet onto the shore. Ok, so far so good, except now there is about 25 meters of very rough rocky terrain with an assortment of climbs and descents before I get to the most climbable section of the rock wall which will lead me back to the woodland pathway that got me here in the first place. This climb is one of the most painful experiences of my entire life as I am forced from time to time to depend on my injured foot for support as I get my body ready for the next heave up the hill.
Finally I am lying on the forest floor, and am now probably getting close enough for someone to hear me call for help if they are at the Aguasabon lookout, however, my calls for help go totally unanswered. Just like before, I have no idea if anyone is even out there to hear my calls so I get on my hands and knees and start crawling up the path. The forest floor is covered in pointy needles, and each time I put my knees down they are subjected to a variety of sharp pricks.
Now I really want to make something clear about all this, at no point during this process am I suffering. There is definitely lots of pain, but there is no suffering. I grab onto a nearby tree and drag myself to my feet, or rather to my foot. I am standing there looking out into the forest, calling for help, and thinking how nice it was when I could walk 30 minutes ago, when a new thought occurs, "As far things go, this is going pretty well".
Looking around I see a fallen tree branch which I break into a staff of sorts and begin half-hopping and half-limping along the path all while literally singing a song about having a broken leg. The words escape me at the moment, but the next fifteen minutes pass as I stagger along the path, calling for help and singing my heart out. Finally as I arrive at the landing I collapse on my hands and knees and look up to see and elderly couple out on some sort of sight seeing adventure. They call down to me that they will go call 911, and I climb up the stairs onto the boardwalk leading to the lookout.
It's at this point that a cyclist I had met a couple days earlier (Bruno) finds me at the top of the stairs and helps me climb the ramp back to the parking lot. At first he doesn't believe me that my leg/foot are damaged probably because I am smiling and cogent, but soon enough he gets message and we get arrive back in something like civilization (the parking lot).
The ambulance arrives after a couple moments, and they take me straight away to the hospital. There I lie back finally comfortable while my nurse (a lovely young woman by the name of Elizabeth) takes care of me. After a while they take me to get an x-ray, and then a few minutes later the Doctor (a jovial guy named Ian) arrives to tell me that yes indeed, I have broken my foot.
And so ends this summers tour just shy of 4000 kilometers cycled over the course of 64 days.
Thanks for loving me.
Ted Bullock
Cross Canadian Cyclist
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