It had been decades since I’d flown over a pair of handlebars.

One moment I was bouncing along, knee-deep in sagebrush, mind reeling from all the natural beauty zipping by, and the next I’d caught a wheel on a rock and gone sailing into that familiar somersault: butt rising from the saddle, shoulders twisting violently, hips lurching up-and-over, heels actually clicking midair, sunglasses and water bottle and half-eaten Clif Bar hurtling into the trees, the ground closing in.

Because I was aimed steeply downhill, partway into a soft-clay gully, I landed more or less on my feet, like a gymnast, before flopping onto my stomach with an “Ugh!” and briefly bodysurfing. Miraculously unscathed, I dusted myself off and glanced around. Out here, alone in the wilderness, at least nobody was watching.

Looking back, it seems strange that I kept going. I was just one-sixteenth of the way into a 96-mile-long bike-packing trip with an old friend, Dacus, whom I had abandoned an hour earlier with a broken chain. It wasn’t even my first wipeout. My shins were already pulped after crashing through a wall of thistle. Most alarmingly, I had scant cellphone reception.