By Dan Cohen, EMT-P
Everyone has a special friend. You know — the one that’s always suggesting you do something that seems crazy.
I have more than one of these “friends.” Motorcycling from Texas to Alaska, squeezing through a tiny passage to find unseen caverns, and smoking tumbleweed stalks (I was only ten!) no longer have a strange ring.
Four years ago my wife’s bicycling buddy — and my fellow EMS worker — Susan became another in a long line of special friends. She insisted year after year that I do the National EMS Memorial Ride.
So, after a few years of power dawdling and one major surgery, I finally relented. I caved in as an excuse to rehab myself and to get Susan to stop bugging me about “the ride.”
I purchased a really nice road bicycle that may be lighter than a bag of saline. I purchased bicycle shorts that were Italian suit pricey. Then I began to ride.
And then it happened. A co-worker at Williamson County EMS who had retired with over twenty years of service was killed. She died when her fixed-wing air medical transport crashed on takeoff.
Tracy had moved from central to west Texas to semi-retire with her family. She had only been gone a few weeks when the accident occurred at her new part-time job.
Tracy Chambers and I weren’t partners. We weren’t close friends. I did see her at shift change for a year and had nothing but good memories of her. We took pictures together on her last day with the county.
Logic dictates that a person who gives so much of themselves for so long should have some leeway in life. Nine lives even. There was no logic in Tracy’s death. There is logic in riding to remember.
May arrived and I joined the team for the drive from Austin to Boston. The next morning bike-thirty came early. We rode for seven days. We covered as little as 30 miles and as many as 100 each day. Riding through Manhattan on a weekday in parade formation with the police keeping traffic at bay is a cyclist’s dream!
I enjoyed our final 100-mile day the most for the beauty of the ride. We were delayed a few times or had to sacrifice small parts of our route for flooding and strong storms. Staying in a slow parade formation when I wanted to water roadside trees was really tough. I think I finally graduated to a man-sized bladder!
Each ride day included multiple rest stops, almost all provided by first responders. These fire and EMS crews opened their bay doors and hearts to all of us. We were fed, watered, and even dried! Our ride days weren’t complete without at least one frog strangling rain.
All of this meant a lot to me. What I didn’t understand was how much our presence meant to them.
We were met at some stops by medics who had lost partners, parents who lost children. Many of our riders carried their own grief. At each ceremony the names of those lost were read.
I often feel like EMS is the forgotten element of public safety. Our work goes unrecognized. If only briefly, those who had lost so much saw their loved ones recognized for the everyday heroes they were. That’s a label that most would certainly eschew.
I thought the ride would be about how I could prove something to myself. Not for the first time in life I realized it wasn’t about me.
The ride provides an opportunity to grieve and celebrate the lives of friends, family, and those in the wider EMS family. The Central Texas Paramedic Cycle Team was kind enough to let me figure this out in my own time.
Thanks to Ariel, Mark, Susan, all the Muddy Angels and, of course, Tracy.