When the Lights Go Out

Before the day the lights went out, I was a really smart kid. I was also an extremely athletic kid. I loved to run; in fact I got the fastest time in my elementary school for the mile run: 6:31. I was a third grader at the time, and I beat every one from first through fourth grade. I’d been playing soccer since I was in kindergarten; my favorite story is when I said to my dad before a game that I would score three consecutive goals or a hat trick that day, and I did just that. I also participated in karate and got very good at it until I didn’t feel like having to remember all the different techniques and forms. Most of all, I loved to ride my bike, competitively or just for fun—it didn’t matter as long as I was on it. I mountain biked the most, but I did BMX racing as well. When I was 8 years old, I was so good at mountain biking that I earned the reputation as the #1 mountain-bike racer in New England for kids between the ages of 8 and 13. Another pretty cool thing is that when I was BMX racing, I was so good that I achieved the nickname “Flyin’ Ryan.”
When I went mountain biking it was usually in New Hampshire because there are a ton of really great trails there, hence a lot of races too. We had a cabin up there where we were supposed to go to spend Columbus Day weekend of 2003. Our cabin was on Rocky Bound Pond in Croydon near Lake Sunapee, and I was looking forward to kayaking with my brother, Matt, and riding my mountain bike with him. A lot of my trophies came from winning races in New Hampshire, but adding more trophies to my collection on that particular weekend wasn’t meant to be.
My Great Aunt Eileen—my dad’s aunt and one of my favorite relatives—had died the week before, and my dad got appendicitis and had to have emergency surgery. That’s how I ended up going to a party at my friend Kenny’s house that would forever change my life.
It was Kenny’s 10th birthday. To celebrate, he had invited me and some of his other friends to play paintball and have a sleepover at his house. The next morning after breakfast we all went outside to ride his Big Wheel-type toy on the driveway. It was blue and yellow and shaped like a rocket ship with yellow wheels. It had rained during the night, so the pavement on the driveway was wet. We thought it would be fun to use the “rocket ship” to do doughnuts. In case you don’t know, a doughnut is what you call smoking the tires of a vehicle while driving it in a circle. We knew we couldn’t really smoke the tires of a toy that had no engine or rubber tires, so we tried to make it slide in a circle. This was made easier by the fact that the driveway was covered with wet leaves, which made it difficult for the hard plastic wheels to gain any traction.
We were all taking turns and having a good time. Then it was my turn; you might say the “having a good time” part was over. I got in and started to slide the back end out. I forgot to mention that their driveway was on a steep hill. Somehow, I lost control and started sliding backward down the driveway. Once I lost traction, I never regained it. Maybe two cars come down Kenny’s road each day, but that morning a freakin’ Dodge Daytona pickup truck happened to be barreling down it. You guessed it. I slid right into the path of that truck. That’s all I remember. Everything went black.