Shriek. Screech. Thud. Three sounds hard to get out of my head these days.
It was about 8:45 on a Thursday morning. Brisk and sunny. My day had started routinely: piling my two young kids into the trailer that attaches to my bike, strapping on their helmets, making the short ride to their school, heading off to work.
Biking to work has become my favorite way to commute these days. And not just because it’s the fastest. That little sweat does more to help me gather my thoughts in the morning and unwind in the evening than any pill, therapist, or self-help book ever could.
It helps that there is no easy way to get from Jamaica Plain to Dorchester. The stoplights always make it at least a 20-minute, herky-jerky drive to go barely 4 miles. The T, while reliable, requires the Orange-to-Red transfer and takes 40 minutes. But on my bike, I’ve discovered enough back-road shortcuts to make the trip in about 17 pleasurable, if slightly hilly, minutes.
It’s a route that takes me through the best and worst of Boston. I leave JP and cut up a hill behind Stonybrook into Roxbury, crossing Washington Street and passing through a pretty neighborhood of parks and beautifully restored triple-deckers I would otherwise never see. From there I pass by Boston Latin School, cross Warren Street, and cruise down Quincy, stopping at the corner of Blue Hill Avenue. Here I always look cautiously to my right, into Jermaine Goffigan Park, named after the 9-year-old who was shot and killed there in 1994 while counting his Halloween candy. In a terrible coincidence eight years later, a gang member named Joseph Cousin aimed his shotgun out of a car at a rival gang member, missed his target, and killed 10-year-old Trina Persad. One park, two stray bullets, two dead children. What are the odds?
I reach my top speed in the next stretch on Quincy, as I try to keep up with traffic and get up to about 25 miles per hour. I cross under the train tracks, come up to Columbia Road, and veer over to Glendale, the one place where I commit the sin of biking about 20 feet the wrong way on a one-way street. Then I swerve down a quiet side road before landing on busy Hancock Street, where MBTA buses make the road feel just a little too narrow for comfort.
On this recent Thursday, as I approached the rotary that connects with Bowdoin Street, I tucked in behind a blue SUV and glanced down to see that we were both going nice and slow, about 15 miles an hour.
Shriek. Screech. Thud.
I had seen the kids on the opposite side of Hancock step off the curb and in between the stopped cars on their side of the road. They looked like young teenagers, with backpacks, on their way to school no doubt. But I assumed that when they reached the yellow dividing line, they would look for oncoming cars. They didn’t.
The first one, a boy I would later learn was 14 and almost completely deaf, stepped right into the path of the SUV. The others, his brother and his sister it turned out, yelled to him and the driver braked hard, swerved right, and bumped into the sidewalk. I swerved too and jumped off my bike. But not before I had heard the thud and thought the worst. I came around the SUV to see the boy on the ground, grimacing but alert, and holding his leg. I didn’t know how hard he had been hit or how bad his leg was. I only knew that if he had taken one more step, or if the driver hadn’t been so quick to react, he would have been dead. That’s what I told the first police officer who arrived on the scene in about 30 seconds, before giving him my information, getting back on my bike, and pedaling off slowly, and shaken, for work.
The last three minutes of my ride, my mind raced back and forth between the boy’s mother and the phone call she would be getting and my own 4-year-old daughter. I try to hold her hand whenever we walk busy streets in JP, but sometimes she insists on letting go and exerting the independence only the mind of a 4-year-old can understand. I know that one day she’ll be walking to school by herself, just like that boy. And I know that one day holding my hand will be the last thing she’ll want to do. I’m just in no rush for those days to get here.
