A Bike Messenger in Berlin
A bike on asphalt. A messenger could call it a desk. (Photo: Photo Booth Works)
The winter seems to be never-ending. The streets are paved with snow and ice glitters all around. Bike messengers pass by at regular intervals. A coffee shop at a crossing in the center of Berlin turns out to be the perfect meeting place for a chat with Daniel*, a bicycle messenger, about his more or less tragic falls. A bike messenger is supposed to thrive on high risk situations. From the loudspeakers, rock songs are playing, followed by French chansons. They are smoothly telling stories about life and Daniel starts to tell me about how cycling caused him to fall without any fault on his part.
The Hamburg Trauma
Daniel was originally a racing cyclist, someone with a great deal of self-discipline, a good technique and a sense of team-work, experiencing his first shock at the age of 17 when he was riding as a frontrunner in the Cyclassics in Hamburg.
"Just imagine", he says, "you are coming round the final bend, finishing. The stage victory is at stake. And just as you start to put on your final spurt you try to increase the power that you put onto the pedals, with your arms through handlebars."
However, all of a sudden the stem cracks. He slips, falls down and all leading cyclists fall over. Some of them make it in time and go past him, but the others just dully crash into him as he lies on the ground. Suffice to say, Daniel was lucky to get away with a few scratches and escape the chain ring of another rider. But there was another horrific side to this: Whenever Daniel closes his eyes at night, the accident reappears.
In these dreams, the stem of the bike cracks and he falls down right in front of the finishing line. Once, he nearly broke one of his feet on the edge of his bed while he was having the dream. A sports physician sent him to a psychologist who gave him this piece of advice: "Check that everything is alright with your bike before you get on it."
But it was not easy to quickly dispel the obsessive thought, only behaviorally. To do so took him a year. At that time, whenever he was about to leave, he was likely to get the idea: "There is something wrong with my bike, something has to come loose." And then he would have to stop at the roadside. But, when he checked, everything would be fine.
A bicycle track along the Berlin wall. Not only messengers benefit from Berlins infrastructure. (Photo: Federation European Cyclists)
The Tragedy
Unfortunately, the Hamburg trauma turned out to be the prologue to a much worse tragedy, which is the very reason why Daniel doesn’t want to see his name in print: "I don’t want to make a penny at the expense of a casualty."
Only three days after the accident he was riding his new bike, a Koga-Miyata, down a cobbled street in Berlin. On this summer day, he was just coming back from training. Daniel claims to have been doing about 20 km/h. One of his neighbours would later swear as a witness that Daniel had had no chance. One second, an elderly man stormed into the street. Before Daniel could even touch the brake, they collided into each other. Daniel's forehead hit the man's temple; the man fell down onto cobbles and immediately started to bleed from nose and ears. Ten days later, it was over: the old man didn't recover from the after-effects of the crash and died.
Besides the shock, Daniel also received a letter from court, which said that he has been charged with manslaughter. Later on, the legal proceedings were suspended.
However, the man's relatives couldn't put the accident behind them. They reopened the proceedings and appealed to several authorities. Consequently, as a teenager, Daniel lived for two years under the threat of jail because of the accident. To make matters worse, the victim turned out to be a neighbor of a school classmate.
At that time, he had to deal with the nagging thought: "If I had only come into the street a minute later, he would still be alive."
But the man had just dashed into the street without taking a single look to the left. And so he thought, it wasn’t my fault. "If the man had lost his life through my inattention, I would feel even worse about it."
Only after the last court found him innocent did he start to feel free. But was it enough for him to feel relieved only because he believed the drama to be bad luck? And Daniel immediately remembers the symbolic actions he took and starts to speak about a small, naked squirrel he found at the roadside. He put it into the bag for his jersey and took it home where he nursed it and fed it with powdered milk. It was because he wanted to save somebody's life.
A bike and a bag and you are set. (Photo: Photo Booth Works)
The Open Car Door
Daniel calls himself a do-gooder who was already removing rubbish from the street when he was a child. But doing the world good didn't exactly comply with his ideas. Facing a career as an environmental-engineer-to-be, imprisoned in a dull nine to five life, the racing cyclist became a cycle messenger during his student life.
According to reports bike messenger are maniacs, whizzing across crossings on their bikes without slowing down, blowing every red light and even knocking off the odd car mirror when the chips were down. Daniel himself had a bad experience with one Hamburg magazine that first pretended to be his friend, but finally only tried to fulfill Outlaw's clichés. At the same time, he was a professional cyclist using brakes, guards and lights. He is not an anarchic freak, and neither are most of his colleagues in his view. When he starts to talk about the high accident rate, he mentions the fact that he has always been in the saddle.
It was on a wet and cold day in January. He was coming down Rosenthaler Street in the Hackescher Markt direction with a letter in his bag. He was riding between the right hand tram track and the parked cars. A tram was approaching him from behind, ringing its bell and speeding up. Which was why he made the mistake of getting closer to the line of parked cars. A door of one of the parked cars opens just as the tram rushes by about 15 centimeters away from him. There was just a tiny gap.
"A door that opens wide just knocks you off, but a door that opens only a little is the worst thing you could hit" Daniel says.
Doing about 30 km/h, Daniel strikes the sharp edge of the corner with his chest and falls. It’s only because he gets stuck between the A-pole and the door with his right hand, that he doesn't go under the wheels of the tram. Lying there on the street, he hears the voice of the car driver shouting: "My car, my car!" Then, she addresses him repeatedly. But he cannot answer because he can still hardly breathe. The lady quickly gets into the car and drives away.
Some passers-by lock their bikes and call an ambulance. But, as the emergency doctor finds his chest pains a little bit suspicious, he cuts his clothes open. "Do you know how much this crap costs?", he is angry. They arrive at the Berliner Charité just as the third layer is being cut open – whereupon they immediately turn on their heels again. The top of the upper arm below armpit is completely lacerated like a war wound; which is why they are now heading for a German military hospital.
There he will get his tendons, nerves and tissue sewn together there during a five-hour operation with local anaesthetization. When Daniel gives a wince of pain, the surgeon looks up saying: "I've just come back from Yugoslavia. There we sometimes carried out similar operations without using any narcotics." A week later, the doctors find out from his x-rays that his ribs and breastbone are partially fractured. He has to keep still for weeks and cannot work as a messenger until the fractured parts have grown together. The little finger and the ring finger have felt numb ever since. But Daniel philosophizes: "That also could have been the end."
Flight of Hermes
Daniel doesn't believe that strokes of fate that should balance each other out. He rather takes a rational stand, analyzes all circumstances of the accident for himself: a fault in the material here, and the other guy's fault there or a violation of right of way against the tram. Anyway, he may well speak about Angel of Luck when taking the sole accident he has ever caused into consideration. It might have been about the year 2001. He was on the way again as a messenger. At a crossing, he came up against a bus turning left at the same time as him.
"We should have turned to the right one ahead of the other. I had already taken a look but there was nothing coming. So I passed through from behind the bus being sure the way was free. When I emerged from behind the bus, there was a Golf Estate driving straight. Just as I spotted it, it drove into me."
The car hit him at an acute angle at the axis of front wheel and the bottom bracket. He struck the windscreen wearing his bag with its document compartment made of fiber material and then was catapulted into the air. "This is the picture I still have in front of my eyes: I am flying through the air and so is my bike, but much higher than me."
The car stopped beyond the walkway. The airbag had been deployed, the bonnet and windscreen were broken and the roof was buckled. All around people were getting out of their cars unable to believe their eyes. The guy, who moments before, had been swirling through the air, picks himself up again and runs toward his bike.
"The bike was totalled and so was the car and they thought I was dead. But I had nothing at all," Daniel says. When the police arrived, he was told: "You cannot be all right." However, the overall force of the crash was dispersed through the bag all over the surface of his back. That's why he got away with no spinal injuries. When they got it, they said: "You were so goddamn lucky."
One of the reasons for bicycle messengers being in demand in metropolitan areas, are the missing parking limitations for bicycles. This makes deliveries much easier (Photo: Photo Booth Works)
The Ride Goes on
"If you never get really hurt, you can never learn from it," says Daniel. "When I started to work as a messenger, I would go past other messengers and think: What are they doing, why are they going that slow? But they had already been doing the job for five or six years and so they told me: Try to be more relaxed."
There is no order that is so important that you should sacrifice your job or life for it, he explains. Speeding doesn't belong to the very reasons of Daniel's personal accident rate either. But these days, he tries to look into every car window and he keeps a safe distance from parked cars. When going by bike, he looks ahead as much as possible to minimize the risks and abides strictly by the traffic rules. Even though the professional gets insulted for this by Sunday drivers when waiting at a red light.
However, none of the accidents have discouraged him from cycling yet. Even as a child when he fell off his bike on the track, his trainer added insult to injury immediately. "You want to go on crying right after something starts to hurt you or your knee is bleeding. But the trainer says: 'Get back on and keep going!'"
Later on, it was also one the advice given by his friends: "Get back on the bike again as soon as you can so that you don’t start feeling scared!" This is the only way to keep going.
We are looking through a window at the crossing. When his colleagues pass by, Daniel raises his hand. How is the next messenger going to act at the crossing? Just observing the crossing for a mere moment, nearly everybody’s head takes a turn to the left, right and left again. Only one of the guys is staring at the asphalt while gliding over the crossing with peace of mind. In the coffee shop the Twin Peaks' title song "Falling" plays.
*The name has been changed.
This article by Wolfgang Scherreiks was originally published in issue 10 of German quarterly fahrstil – das Radkulturmagazin. For more bicycle culture visit: www.fahrstil-magazin.de