The sidewalks of Beijing are rife with dangers.
A lot of it is down to the trees - of which there are far too many, and not planted very deep (and, I suspect, being starved of water for most of the year spurs them to even greater zeal in extending their root systems). Thus, there are loose, broken, and wildly uneven paving stones all over the place.
Of course, it is the 'concealed' ones, the ones with the subtle trompe l'oeil effect that convinces you they're perfectly level when in fact they're somehow sticking up a crucial quarter or a half an inch above their neighbour - it's those that are the most hazardous.
Then, of course, you have piles of rubble and building materials spilling across the sidewalks everywhere.
And frequent holes and trenches to facilitate mysterious construction work (there are some of the hutongs near where I live that seem to get their drains relaid two or three times a year, yet they never seem to work any better); holes and trenches (and manholes with missing covers) that are rarely fenced off or signposted, and never illuminated at night.
And then, despite all of these other hazards and the great shortage of actual usable space for passage to and fro, you get a lot of people riding bicycles on the sidewalks - or, these days, quite often the super-deadly electric bicycles; or even, on occasion, driving cars.
But perhaps the most vicious of all of these lurking dangers are the little bits of metal that sometimes rear up unexpectedly out of the ground: almost-invisible metal studs that once secured some useless piece of street furniture but whose only purpose now is to trip up the unwary pedestrian; those wretched, pointless, ankle-entangling bits of mini-fencing that appear to be made out of croquet hoops; or those brutally unyielding bollards that are (presumably) designed to deter people from parking their cars on (or cutting corners across) particular sections of sidewalk.
These last are relatively uncommon, at least in my neighbourhood; so my highly-attuned internal 'threat radar' sometimes gets caught out by them.
As happened yesterday afternoon. I'd been doing some shopping in a foreign supermarket over in the Embassy district, and it was a savagely hot day. So, I was rather more intent on trying to flag down a cab than maintaining a maximum level of risk-awareness..... and I failed to notice a row of these beastly bollards along the edge of the sidewalk.
They're steel tubes filled with concrete - very, very hard indeed. They're painted in yellow-and-black wasp stripes to try to make them conspicuous, but it just doesn't work. They're quite small - only 8" or 10" high - and so completely below your sightline if your attention is focused on the traffic approaching on the road. I'd got one of these little bastards right under my feet, and didn't have the slightest idea it was there. When a taxi finally hove into view, I hailed it gratefully, and - since the unhelpful driver pulled in three or four yards down the road from where I was standing - took a big stride towards it.
Or.... I tried to take a big stride towards it. Unfortunately, my rear leg was right up against the unseen steel bollard, so, as I bent my leg forward, with my full weight upon it (and the weight of a lot of shopping too), I suddenly found myself braced against an unyielding obstacle, the sharp edge of its upper rim catching me exactly half-way up my shin.
I consider myself very lucky that I didn't snap my tibia in two like a twig. I reacted very quickly, transferring my weight to my leading foot and deftly unhooking the trapped leg in a fraction of a second. But all the same - OUCH!
The first blast of pain was so acute, I thought for a moment it might make me vomit. Fortunately, that gave me enough of an adrenalin-rush to help me keep it together until I got home. I discovered I had gouged a small but deep groove down the middle of my shin (right down to the bone, although - thank heavens - the wound closed up again of its own accord very quickly), and in the space of just a few minutes this trauma had raised a bump nearly 1" high and 4" or 5" long on the front of my leg. That disgusting super-lump soon subsided, but then I suffered more modest swelling from my ankle to just below my knee.
Luckily enough, the pain and stiffness are on the wane already, and I don't think I've chipped the bone or anything.
It was a terrifyingly close call, though: a taunting reminder that I (still) don't have any medical insurance.
If you relax your vigilance for even a moment in this country, you can be made to suffer for it very heavily. I'm usually so good about keeping a lookout for these pavement hazards. What caused this lapse in alertness yesterday?
2 comments:
Yikes.
You didn't say -- have you ever said here? -- whether you reflexively reach for the blue-language solution to such surprises.
Sometime after 9/11, the more nervous town fathers here got it into their head that City Hall was a likely target for terrorists, and they installed bollards all around it. These aren't 8-to-10-inchers, though; they're two or three feet high -- meant to discourage armored vehicles, I guess.
Now, I carpool with The Missus and, on days when she's got the car, she drops me off and picks me up at the curb by City Hall. One evening a year or two ago, as I strolled out the front door, I noticed some wires hanging down from a tree by the sidewalk. It was just hanging there, and I kept looking at it, trying to make out if it might be a danger (and in need of reporting), or simply unsightly, or---
WHAM. The damned thing caught me dead center. Let's just say that for the next couple days, any fantasies I might have had of someday fathering children seemed destined to remain always so.
And my cursing was especially creative.
I think I became fairly disinhibited about my swearing (when occasion demands) by my stint of training with the Army reserves - where expletives, particularly the f-word, are used freely as condiments to season every sentence, even where there is no strong emotional content underlying the statements.
However, I did not swear, or make any kind of sound, on this occasion. I may perhaps have restrained myself because I was in public (although there weren't many people around, and they were probably all non-English speakers). More likely, I think, the incident was too extreme for that: I think a really strong pain/adrenalin reaction tends to overwhelm the swear response - you either scream or you shut up.
I usually turn the air blue if I stub a toe or something, but on the few occasions in my life when I've hurt myself really badly I've been pretty much completely silent. I wonder if I'm unusual in that. I haven't made any kind of study of it.
Post a Comment