Fragility

This morning I started the usual commute to work along the bike trail as the sun was rising. Beautiful chilly September morning. I was still trying to wake up after another night of not enough sleep when I saw the two bikers coming toward me suddenly collide and fly over their handlebars, crashing onto the pavement in front of me. I threw down my bike and ran over to find a man with a scraped-up leg rushing over to a woman who was lying on the trail between bicycles and making terrible moaning noises. There was also a high-pitched squealing sound, which I thought was coming from her as well until I looked down at her bike on the ground by my feet and saw a squirrel with its head and front leg wedged between the front tire and the bike frame, clearly in great pain, but still very much alive and squealing its head off. My attention snapped back to the injured biker as another man rode up, asking if he should call 911, just as the woman, who had been starting to talk, suddenly lost consciousness and dropped her face into the pavement. He called. She made frightening noises on the ground with the first man kneeling beside her. The squirrel screeched in pain. And I just stood there, terrified, mind racing through CPR training and first-aid lessons, coming up with absolutely nothing I could do, feeling entirely helpless. He got an ambulance on its way. She opened her eyes. The squirrel somehow freed itself and ran zigzagging into the woods on three legs. She told us that her back and neck were hurt (and her head would have been, too, had it not been for the now-cracked helmet she was wearing), and asked me to find her phone and call her husband, which I did. Within minutes, we heard sirens and saw the ambulance come flashing down the trail to where we were waiting. The paramedics asked a few questions and bundled her onto a stretcher, leaving the rest of us, still somewhat in shock, to pedal off to work and never know the end of her story. Had I left my house two seconds earlier, it could've been mine.