The way I saw it...
It went something like this...
Bombing down a steep, rocky washed-out old fireroad, Bill leading at a ridiculous pace and the rest of us doing our best to keep up. Norm right behind Bill. Me about 50 yards behind them, about 50 ft higher than them, around a curve. Trees are bare, so I've got a good squirrels-eye view of them down there at my 10 o'clock. Suddenly I see Norm flying through the air with his back tire headed skyward, Norm still on the bike in riding position. (maybe he still thinks he can ride it out? or has it been so long since he's crashed that he's forgotten how to do it?!) Looks to me like his hands are still on the bars when his front tire and then his face hits the ground, and then he slides down face first and comes to a stop with his bike on top of his legs. He doesn't get up right away which is the first Bad Sign. By the time I catch up with him and ditch my bike, he's still not budged. I try talking to him and asking him what hurts and there's nobody home. At first, it looks like any part of his upper body could be broken. Arms are both pinned under his body at awkward, busted-looking angles. Face is pushed into the dirt.
We are on a pretty steep descent, and while he is on a relatively smooth boulder-free patch of dirt, it is still pitched at a pretty steep angle, so his head is about about 12" lower in elevation than his feet. Very uncomfortable looking. But as we all know, you're not supposed to move an injured person, and it is clear at this point that he is in that category. I pick his bike up off his legs and set it at the side of the trail. And then he starts to mumble and move his head a tiny bit. And I try to talk to him again and I hear him mumble something like "never gonna bluh again". Never gonna ride again? Is he telling me he's paralyzed?! So I get out the phone and dial 911. While I'm waiting for an answer, Norm starts to wake up, it's clear that he's uncomfortable, and slowly trying to reposition himself, but his arms are still pinned under him and he only manages to turn a little onto his side, which he evidently decides is even more uncomfortable, so he returns to his original flat-on-his-belly postion. Then he starts pushing dirt out of his mouth with his tongue. (Norm, where are your manners!?) Nobody's picking up my call, so I look down at my phone and I see that I didn't press send. Then Norm really starts to come to and decides he wants to sit up, which I discourage him from doing, but he starts to do it anyway, so I close the phone and Chris & I steady him while he slowly rolls over and up onto his ass under his own power. Good Sign. There's a very pronounced bump on his temple, like a super ball lodged under the skin. I ask him his name. "Norm" (slurred). A few other questions followed by slow, slurred responses and spitting dirt out of his mouth. I ask him what hurts. "Nothin...but I can't see out uh my left eye." Bad Sign. I dial 911 again, and this time I get thru. I give the guy the low-down and attempt to tell him where we are using Joe's Garmin. That in itself is a project because the guy doesn't understand the format that I'm giving him the coordinates in and he keeps cutting me off as I get two or three digits into it. "Is that a plus or a minus?" "Is that decimal format?" So I tell him to just write it down the way I'm saying it and then go figure out what format its in. Apparently he is able to do something with that information because he figures out which local emergency dispatcher he needs to transfer me to, which he does.
After getting up to speed on the situation, this lady tells me that Norm should be laying on his back with his head supported, in case he has a neck injury. So I tell Norm that he should lay down, which he either doesn't understand or doesn't want to do because he doesn't do it. She asks us where we are, and again with the GPS coordinates. Perhaps this lady doesn't realize that I have just given her our exact pin-point location, or she can't figure out what to do with that info, because she proceed to ask lots of other questions about our location like "where did you park your cars?", to which I answer "nowhere near here!".
Finally, with Joe's thorough knowledge of the area, we are able to give them the names of the road and the lake down below us, along with the information that we had somebody down at the road to flag them down. Now we can finally get back to the matter at hand...Norm. She asks me if he's laying down with his neck supported. I tell her "No." She tells me that he should be. "Tell him that youself." And I hand the phone to Norm. She apparently asked him his age, because he responded "uhhhh...38". I'm not sure what else she says to him, but he pulls the phone away from his mouth and says to me "The paramedics are coming?" To which I respond "If you didn't gather that by now, it's a good thing they're coming." All the while, he keeps rolling his head around checking range of motion and I'm cringing because I imagine that's that last thing he should be doing if he's got a potential neck injury. She must have a pretty convincing arguement for him, because he eventually hands the phone back to me and he lays down on his back with his head on a Camelback. The lady tells me that the police have located our guys down at the road (Bill and Mike), and presumably that we are now in good hands, so we don't need to stay on the line, and we hang up.
And Norm promptly sits back up. "The gound is too cold." "The fog is starting to clear." And he must be feeling considerably better because he slowly stands up and starts walking around unsteadily. And then sits back down. And then back up a few minutes later. This time he is pretty steady on his feet. I ask him if his left eye is doing any better. To which he responds: "Yeah, I can see out of my left eye now, but I gotta be honest...I have no idea where we started or where we're going." I'm fascinated by this, and I proceed to ask him all sorts of questions in an attempt to figure out exactly where his memory has crapped out. He doesn't remember going to Tim's house to meet with Chris. He doesn't remember meeting at Bills house to start the ride. He does remember going to bed last night, and he remembers getting up at 4:44 this morning. So he's missing somewhere around 3-5 hours of his short-term memory. That's just wild to me! And a little scary.
Norm walks over to his bike and declares that we should start heading down...on foot. As we're walking down, Norm's memory starts to return, first recalling that Dave had called out sick on this ride. Then going to Tim's place first thing this morning. And on forward in time. Eventually, we get down to somebody's back yard and we cut through to the street where the ambulance and police and fire department are waiting. After some questioning and icing his face down and cleaning his wounds (and photo session), I'm surprised to find out that he wants to pedal a few miles down the road to Tim's place, and that the EMS folks were not trying to talk him out of it. And we pedal away.
I think I finally figured out what "never gonna bluh again" means..."Never gonna follow Bill again!"
