5.1

Today, fourteen and a half miles from the house and up in the hills where the snow only melted a week ago, I have stopped riding my bicycle. I made the ridge line, or the pass, or whatever you would call the highest point on the road, seventeen hundred feet above where I started. I have drank half a liter of water and laid out on the road in the sun with my shirt off. Where's that bird I hear, I wonder? Who put in the culvert behind me to divert the water gushing through? What was the person's name whose hands sunk the signpost for my bike to lean against?
I've regained my breath. I'm about two thirds cooked, and I know I overdid it today. I can make it home, I know I can. It's all downhill really, and some of it very steep. Besides, there's hours until sunset still. I flip my leg over the saddle and push away down the hill.

There's red cinder on either side of the road, and my tires crunch into and through it, down the lane. I'm going fast. Maybe twenty, thirty miles an hour. I'm not even pedaling; I don't have to. And then--an oscillation--(small at first, but enough to be troubling. I have had the bike worked on only a few weeks ago, but I have also been extremely hard on the old girl for a very long time, so who knows how well a check up would catch and solve all problems with her anyway) and the tire has begun to overcorrect itself, despite my hands gripping white-hot, driving all the blood up my arms and into my panicked heart, my breathing fast, my brain incapable of any thought but slow down. I squeeze the brakes ever so slightly. I can't remember which brake is front and which is back. I wish I could pull the back full-bore, but I can't risk pulling on one only to find out it's the front, to feed the shimmy and send myself into the asphalt. I'm still going twenty five, maybe. Too fast. I would lose a lot of skin. I could break something. Many things, if I land especially badly. I'm pulling on the brakes and pushing hard against the bars, hoping against hope that the oscillation will abate. It doesn't.
It gets worse.
The front wheel is flipping back and forth crazily now, faster and faster, and I'm staring at the road ahead, willing there to be no cars. The shoulder is across the opposing lane, and it's wide and rocky, and at its lip is the line of red cinder. If I cross that badly, it's game over. there's no friction in the cinder, not for lateral movement, and it seems like all my tire wants to do is move side to side. I unclip my feet just in case I need to jump from the bike. I'm panting. I'm squeezing the brakes. I'm slower, slower, slower, stopped. Putting my feet on the ground, I can feel my heart ripping against my tongue, trying to claw its way out. My mind is blank.

I lean down, pull the quick release, replace it. There's nothing wrong with my tire, nothing wrong with my wheel, nothing wrong with my bike. I push off, waiting for the worst. The brakes are singing at me--maybe it's that? I'll buy new rotors, I swear it. The tire behaves. It rides true for fourteen more miles. I feel like I'm going to die for the next half hour. I'm fine.