LITTLE ROCK — Dirk van Wyngaarden’s accident at 2 p.m. on April 11 was a one-vehicle crash.
Just Dirk and his high dollar bicycle and the asphalt on Arkansas 165 in Scott.
There open the mysteries.
“Where I crashed was a perfect place to ride,” he says of Harper’s Loop, which links North Little Rock to the villages to the east. “I was knocked unconscious. I have no recollection of crashing. ... No clue what happened. I had stopped in England for lunch ... at a Subway. The last thing I remember is going through Scott.
“I came to in the emergency room, and a nurse was sticking staples in my head.”
The nurse was closing a gash, and the medical crew also had to doctor up several bruised ribs and a pulled muscle in his thigh.
Dirk is not from here, but he comes every other weekend - which is a little out of his way - because he likes central Arkansas.
The day he wrecked his bicycle, someone provided proof conclusive that his affection is well placed.
Dirk earns his paychecks in an 18-wheeler, dropping Voortman cookies along a nine-day round-trip route that starts in his hometown of Brantford, Ontario, and terminates in McAllen, Texas, about as far south as you can go in Texas and remain in the United States.
On his return trip, he often stops in Brinkley for a load of rice, which he delivers to a plant where Lipton processes it into instant soup.
For the past decade, Dirk has carried a bicycle on the back of his tractor, and it was on a bicycle that he lost his heart to central Arkansas.
The first mystery perplexing Dirk is exactly what caused his crash, which was the first time he ever has fallen. (It also was the day he chose - “to my everlasting shame” - not to wear a helmet. “I guess I wanted to feel the wind in my hair,” he said, punctuating his admission with a chuckle of rue.)
The person who can solve the first mystery might also solve the second: When Dirk left the emergency room, his bicycle was waiting for him in the foyer, tagged with his name on it.
He has no idea who rescued it. It wasn’t the state police or the ambulance crew. Someone apparently stopped while the medics were caring for Dirk, picked up his bicycle and then followed the ambulance the 17 or so miles to UAMS.
Latricia Maynard was the ER charge nurse when Dirk arrived, out cold and bloody. She remembers only that “it was a bystander who brought his bike,” reports Amy Niemann, also an emergency-room charge nurse. “They put it out front.”
Dirk, 54, is particularly fond of this particular Specialized road bike, which he bought for a nine-week, 3,800-mile tour from Seattle to the Statue of Liberty in 2008.
The gesture, in Dirk’s view, was a “selfless act of kindness” for which he wants to express his gratitude: “A lot of people wouldn’t even think of doing that.”
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 06/24/2010