It seems strange to have to say this, but helmets are designed to keep your head safe in case it comes in contact with things it shouldn't. Like asphalt or concrete or fence posts or walls or dirt roads. I'm pointing this out because this summer it seems a lot of people don't understand this.
Helmets are like seatbelts. They don't work unless you actually use them.
Not too long ago, I drove past an accident where a motorcycle rider tangled with a car. You know who's going to lose in that one, and he lost even bigger because his helmet was strapped to the seat of his motorcycle -- or what was left of it. You only need to drive slowly past that kind of scene once to become a helmet convert.
It reminded me of a friend I once had who loved riding her dirt bike. She was pretty free spirited about it, especially about the helmet part. So now she's a completely free spirit because she met up with a fence post one day, and they just don't give, at least not as much as a person's neck. That was a heartbreaking day for her family and friends. Hopefully they gave her helmet to someone who chose to use it more than she did.
This helmet issue surfaced recently when my family and some friends spent some time up the canyon. We went there for the fresh air, the sunshine, the smell of the pines, and the peace of the mountains. We got one out of four. We had sunshine, but the fresh air was filled with road dust which blocked out the scent of the pines, and the peace of the mountains was ripped apart by the roar of kids on 4-wheelers. All day long.
Call me old fashioned, but I worry about a generation that thinks the only way you can get from point A to point B is by riding there. And these kids weren't on those machines to see the forest. They rode around and around a large, dusty loop that took them up the side of the mountain, then down past all the campsites, then back up the side of the mountain, then back down past the campsites. By evening our campsite needed dusting.
The really disturbing part of this was at least half of those kids weren't wearing helmets. I wondered if it was because their parents didn't believe in helmets, or just thought that being in the mountains was somehow safer. Which was grimly hilarious, given the hillsides these kids were climbing. And some of those riders were young kids -- maybe 10 years old.
I watched one pint-sized girl wobble past on a mini-sized 4-wheeler. She was wearing a helmet that must have been her dad's because it was at least twice the size of her little noggin. She could turn her head in it while it just sat there on her little shoulders, giant and deadly. If she had happened to run into something or roll her machine, that heavy helmet would have snapped her tiny little neck. The law says anyone under 18 should wear a helmet, but it probably means a helmet that actually fits.
Helmets and their use, or lack of, were the topic around the campfire that evening. One group member bluntly stated his belief that if a person is really set against wearing a helmet because it infringes on his rights, or it's not comfortable, or he wants to feel the wind rushing past, then maybe it ought to be OK for him because that could result in a kind of Darwinian natural selection process, a sort of thinning of the herd, so to speak, where people who wear helmets eventually outlast those who don't.
Watching helmet-less kids buzzing around the next morning, I pondered his logic and wondered if their parents understood that he was right. Dead right.
Keep your head on straight. Wear a helmet.
You can contact D. Louise Brown at maven_55@yahoo.com or leave a message with her editor at 801-625-4244.
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