I think I wore my first helmet of any kind in Little League.  It was this pathetic thin fiberboard thing that only went around your ears, suspended from the top with straps with a tiny bit of padding around the edges, at a time when many big league guys didn’t bother with helmets at all, as Those Were the Days.  Of course my helmet provided no protection at all on the day that some kid’s fastball hit me squarely on the nose, and even now I wonder about my total lack of reaction as the ball rapidly approached all those years ago.  Was I frozen with fear, or simply clueless as to how to respond to this first (and last, as it turns out) particular kind of threat in my life?  Has it ever happened to you?  Of course the pitcher’s mound in Little League is only 46 feet away, though on the other hand a nine-year-old’s fastball isn’t all that fast;  at any rate I never flinched and my face took a direct hit.  And my youthful nose proved to be quite durable and maybe that fastball was a really slow one.  At any rate, when everybody got over the shock, the game went on.  So did I.

Of course baseball helmets got a lot better and even the big-leaguers all came around to the wisdom of head protection or maybe they felt the need to send an important message to America’s youth.  Most of them no longer smoke cigarettes either,  at least not in the dugout, or so I hear.  Nowadays of course we are a much-helmeted society, especially among our youth, and on the local training ground for wheeled youth activities, the Arnold Arboretum, every kid is protected, even if they’re just pushing a scooter at two-scoots-a-minute and barely moving.

I never played football or obtained that motorcycle, despite much dreaming and yearning, so it’s possible I never donned a helmet after my baseball career.  Of course I rode a bicycle around, lots, but nobody wore a helmet because there was no such thing.  And nobody seemed to care.  

Cars didn’t have seat belts, either, because the benevolent auto industry and our wise government told us that the rising death and accident rate for those in vehicles could be solved with better enforcement of the traffic laws and by appealing to drivers’ good will and common sense.  Hey, driving is dangerous, so for gosh sakes be careful! and “the life you save may be your own!” which really got the message across, as you might remember. I am sure the story about how we all got seat belts is a good one, but not the topic here.  I will say that when I went to sports car races I was impressed with how beefy and elaborate the belts and shoulder harnesses were in the racing machines, but of course driving cars in competition is hideously dangerous.  It is also true that the spectacular crashes I witnessed now and then did not seem to lead to serious injury, so that equipment really must’ve worked.  Oh, and they all wore helmets.

We all crashed our bikes as kids now and then, with lots of scraped skin and bruises, but nobody from my childhood ever had an encounter with a car while riding, and I guess none of us ever hit our heads either, at least not to any serious degree.  And most kids matured and left their bikes behind, along with all that potential for cycling injuries.  I was not one of these, and even though I was riding longer distances in heavier traffic, my accident days for quite awhile seemed to be over, at least while on a bike, or so I believed.

As most of you know by now (and if you don’t you don’t know me very well or haven’t looked around this blogsite much) this bike thing never died out, in my case.  In fact, it became a big deal after I left college and it is likely I did more miles in my twenties than at any other time in my life, working in bike shops and riding all over Chicago and later around Northampton MA, then Boston.  I was moving much faster then  –  I was strong and full of youthful vigor and there are some awesome descents in central Massachusetts, dropping from the hills into the Connecticut River valley.  I recall only one accident, which was in fact spectacular, hitting gravel and having the machine disappear out from under me.  I was Superman for a magical three seconds or so, before slamming down, hard, on my chest.  Did I say I rode fast in those days?  Having no health insurance, I endured the sharp chest pains for about a day and fears that I’d punctured a lung or something (I had no idea what that was but it sounds scary, doesn’t it?) until my partner-at-the-time convinced me to go to the local hospital and figure out a way to pay later.  I may have been unemployed about then, too.  They probed and listened with a stethoscope and did an x-ray, and said it’s just a bruise, buddy, or something like that, and aspirin helped me get through the next month.  I tried to pay them  –  about 20 years later  –  when I did a self-help program (not 12-step but like that) which dictated that I go back and ask forgiveness from those I’d wronged in life.  They had no records of it and might have said don’t worry about it and I think I made some donation to complete the task.  

So that was during the ‘70s and it was only towards the end of that era that the first bicycle helmets showed up on the scene.  Correct that:  for decades there was, in fact, something called a “hairnet” helmet and one look will tell you why.  It was pretty much the cycling equivalent of my Little League helmet, and you saw them on people in bike races and nowhere else.  It was useless and pathetic but better than nothing, evidently, and might’ve helped with insurance claims or in lawsuits, but as protection it appears it worked best at averting ugly scratches or lacerations on the rider’s beautiful skull.  As for mitigating the effects of impacts on the brain, maybe not so much.  At least it was cheap, unless you got the Cinelli version, as everything Italian in the cycling world was expensive.  Italian style and fashion still are, from the look of things.

I forget how I ended up buying a Bell Biker helmet, which along with the MSR was the very first protective headgear for the broader cycling market.  They made much of the fact that their product met “the Snell standards”whatever those were, whereas anybody could see those hairnets met no real standards, at all.  I was living a long way from my mother, so no pressure from that end;  besides, I would guess she had no idea how much time I spent on a bicycle, or in what kind of dangerous surroundings. Of course any discussion of serious head injury can get pretty scary pretty fast, and the helmet people knew how to market their products.  It is likely I got a nudge from somewhere, or that some long-buried survival instinct kicked in.  It is also true I was terrifically bald at that point and always wore hats of some kind, anyway, and by some kind of logic a helmet worked  like a ventilated hat, with air flow through and under the shell, so why the hell not?  I probably also worked in a shop and could get it wholesale, and wearing the thing might promote further sales by putting product on the street.  Who knows? Making it in the bike biz was never easy.

It turns out the Biker looked well ventilated, covered with NACA ducts like you’d see on airplanes, but the thing could get hot during the summer.  Hats were always hot, too, for that matter.  Most of the year it was easy to wear it, and that layer of styrofoam actually insulates from a cold wind better than it controls heat.  It helped that MA was not California.  At some point I also got the idea that improved visibility was a great idea in Boston traffic, and I plunked it on the sidewalk in front of the shop one day and sprayed the whole thing DayGlo orange, which looked hideous but was really really visible and safer by that measure, which cannot be denied.  The Biker, by the way, was only available in white, which no doubt helped with product identification.  Bell had all these warnings to not paint their product, but I’d spent an entire childhood painting plastic airplanes and cars with enamel, and damned if they ever softened up or anything.  It was my first rebellion against the Man telling me what to do when my experience suggested otherwise, and me saying “try and stop me” or something like that, no doubt inspired by James Cagney yelling “come get me, coppers!” in White Heat, one of the all-time great films.  I had no idea at the time that my small and ridiculous gesture questioning bike helmet orthodoxy was merely my personal opening of a can of worms that was to expand exponentially over the following decades.  And the controversy is far from over, even now.

Of course, such accepted beliefs as “bicycle helmets make you safe” or “only an idiot with a death wish would ride without one” have achieved something like religious fervor among Americans after all these years, with the odd thing being that this seems to hold most fervently for everybody who never gets on a bicycle in the first place. Reports of bike/automobile collisions and the frequent death of the rider commonly cite whether the poor victim was wearing a helmet or not, as if that were a crucial piece of information.  The fact is, it’s now been 40 years and endless models of helmets have come and gone and it is now a huge industry with many players.  It is also a fact that helmet use in the most enthusiastic bicycle cultures in the world, places like Denmark and Holland, has hardly grown at all, with a large majority unlidded just like it was before 1980.  Of course they have elaborate infrastructure just for cyclists, but please remember they are car cultures, too, like all of the developed world, so it’s not like the bikers ride in a car-free environment, far from it.  And curiously, the country with the highest rate of helmet use in the world, these United States, is also way out front with the greatest cyclist fatality rate, as well.  We’re number one!

There’s more:  whereas once the Snell safety standard was the final word in bike helmet science, we now have the ANSI, the CPSC, and the EN-1078 standards, as well, with all of the product testing that that involves.  And helmets now come in all shapes and sizes and porosity levels, breaking down further into certain fashion styles to appeal to the cultural factions of the cycling public, basically “road” and “mountain” and “urban/hip/other”.  One can also add “kid” which includes all the coolest helmets of all due to children’s lack of self-consciousness, allowing for whimsy and humor and free rein of imagination.  

There’s also been concerns and skepticism for at least ten years questioning how safe and protective are these things, really? and is it possible that the level of protection is nothing like so many people assume, biker and non-biker alike?  It’s a fact that some governments have had a deep enough faith in bike helmets that they’ve mandated them, most notably Australia and certain Canadian provinces, along with several US cities.  Other places have introduced mandates and withdrawn them later.  

The skeptics who care about expanding the health benefits of bicycling to more people (as well as promoting the health of the planet) point out that ridership in Australia went down significantly with the mandates, which is unfortunate if the safety gains of helmet use are truly limited.  It is also true that any concerns about his have not prevented the vast majority of cyclists from using helmets anyway.  Why force anybody off their bike and deny them a way to reduce the far greater health risks of things like heart disease, high blood pressure and cholesterol, as well as diabetes?  Is it not of far greater value that more people ride, period, than insisting they also must benefit from limited advantages of reducing concussion in an event that for most will never happen?  When there’s a good chance that their helmet might won’t save their ass anyway?  This is particularly true if a motor vehicle is involved.

It is interesting that some of the most skeptical voices have included well  known figures in the US cycling community.  What’s their beef?  One can start with a Bicycling! magazine piece from about 2010 that demonstrated how all of the standards for helmets are based on testing methods that hardly reflect the dynamics of a cycling accident, which can involve some very complex physics, indeed.  Bike helmets are tested by dropping a weighted helmet onto an anvil from various angles and measuring impacts on an instrumented “skull”.   Note that a bicycle helmet is designed for someone who is exercising, in constant motion, and that person has limited tolerance for weight on their head or heat buildup.  In brief, the things must be light and airy and kind of   –  pardon the expression  –  flimsy, or no one would wear them.  So when it comes to protecting the head against concussion, especially when the accident involves the awesome kinetic energy of an automobile and the biker is sent flying, the impact most likely will hugely traumatize the head along with many other parts of the body.

That is, in the big tragic picture, the bike helmet most often makes no difference at all in the overall damage produced. To offer any meaningful protection would require a device considerably heavier and less ventilated than all the wonderfully cool and lightweight bicycle helmets out there.  To quote Robert Hurst (maybe my fave cycling author, who writes with great style and clarity and also knows of what he speaks) in The Art of Cycling:  “it’s called a motorcycle helmet,” and nobody who rides a bicycle (at least one NOT powered by a battery) would wear one. There are definitely a few bikers who bring on their own demise with recklessness and idiocy (which makes it no less tragic), but many more suffer tragically because a driver thoughtlessly opens their door without looking back, or does their damage because they’re impaired or distracted by a phone, or driving recklessly themselves.  Such people should not be taken off the hook because “rider was not wearing a helmet.”  You know this;  it’s called blaming the victim and the news media, pandering to prejudices in a mostly non-cycling public, does it all the time.

Another piece of this is that aside from the relatively small number of vehicle collisions, various studies show that 40-60% of cycling injuries are from abrasions and around 15% are fractures, while concussion numbers run from 2-15%.  All those common playground and sidewalk accidents of childhood predict what will happen later in life, for the most part, except for the crashes with cars, which for all the news they receive and the tragedy involved, are a relatively unusual event, much less common than one’s chances for being in a car crash.  It is also true that abrasions and fractures are worse with rising speed, and some my own crashes (you probably wouldn’t believe how many, over 50 years of serious adult riding) have included terrible “road rash” as it’s called, but no fractures, which borders on miraculous but I am not complaining.  I have puzzled over this, and can only say that luck plays a crucial role in life, and what else is new?.  It is also possible I instinctively fall in the gentlest way when the unexpected occurs (my thanks to the Great Spirit!).  Also, the majority of my crashes have happened in winter, at slower speeds while wearing lots of padding/clothing when I was also being extra careful.  

Robert Hurst prefaces his discussion of helmets with a quote from Thomas Paine:  “…no falsehood is so fatal as that which is made an article of faith.”  People’s belief in the absolute value of helmets when the science is rather weak borders on magical thinking.  It has reached a point where a rider without a helmet (which includes a majority of those using bikeshare bikes) gets condemned by motorists and other bikers as a fool with a death wish.  When two well-known skeptics in the cycling community, Eben Weiss who wrote the widely-selling BikeSnob books, and Peter Flax, long-time editor-in-chief of Bicycling! magazine, went public with their well-reasoned decisions to start riding without a helmet (which you may find incredible, but these are two very rational, thoughtful people), they received loads of hate-mail via social media.  That’s how volatile this whole thing can get.  One of the reasons for their decision was how riding without a helmet made them much more careful and alert and safety-conscious, in all the ways that this can make one safer on a bike than a helmet can.  It has long been argued that wearing a helmet often leads to taking greater risks, and most cyclists, myself included, will admit to this tendency, especially when we were younger and more ignorant (and perhaps were working as a bicycle courier in downtown Boston and it’s a miracle any of us survived that, or is it just possible we knew what we were doing?).  It is called “risk compensation” and there is at least one study that claimed this as a factor in its finding a correlation between cycling fatalities and increased helmet use, as paradoxical as that may seem.  Or maybe it’s just black magic.  Of course you can say it is wiser to wear a helmet even if the safety gains are minimal, and for you that might seem obvious, but for many it is not that simple.  And anybody has a right to choose not to wear a helmet if they choose to put their faith into doing the far more important thing of riding watchfully and responsibly and with respect for others, in full awareness of the extra risk they are taking.  For some it can be a mature, well-reasoned decision, and that “idiot” without the helmet might just be one of these people;  you never know.   

Oh, and one more thing, as Officer Columbo might say.  Did you know that the most common severe injuries for motorists are head-related, with whiplash at the top, and severe head trauma not far down the list?  There was one Canadian study that showed 75% of motorist hospitalizations following a crash were due to head trauma. Hmmmm. Another far-reaching example of magical thinking regarding these matters is the fervent belief that driving is safe, or at least far safer than bicycling, so long as one buckles up and drives “safely” and trusts their air bags.  Sorry, the evidence suggests that people in vehicles have far greater reason to wear a helmet than the poor vulnerable cyclist.  Sounds crazy, no?  A hundred years of promoting the cocooned safety of your vehicle, despite a hundred years of truly ugly accident and death statistics (that are on the rise again in these great United States at record-setting rates), has resulted in the overwhelming cultural conviction that motorized vehicles aren’t dangerous, which is magical thinking on its grandest level.  To which everyone would answer “Of course they’re dangerous!” while not reflecting this at all in the ways they operate their vehicles.  And most would agree that “drivers are worse than ever” but around here, at least, the response to this is traffic law enforcement so minimal it has become a kind of joke and nobody’s complaining much, or not at all. It’s the Wild West out there, and you don’t need a gun for a weapon.

Case in point regarding traffic law:  much was made of a “hands-free”cellphone mandate in MA for drivers, that took many years to finally enact and which finally became law on February 23rd of 2020 and was lauded for the great leap in road safety that would result.  Reflecting our observations in California a few years prior, which had passed a similar law, drivers and law enforcement for the most part carry on as always, as in “what law?.”  Just sayin’.  

If you find this worrisome, it is a fact that excellent helmets for motorists have been around for decades, designed to handle serious impacts, and you see them all the time on motorcyclists and race car drivers. Nobody else wears them of course, despite the great danger they face in their cars every day, out of the same mass cultural denial described above.  Those helmets are also heavy and clunky and hot and kind of claustrophobic  –  hey! they really work when it counts, at least sometimes  –  but you start wearing one and people will look at you sideways and assume you’re some kind of nut.  If someone came up with something more user-friendly, maybe a kind of  bicycle helmet only beefed up a bit to handle the cranial dangers inherent in a car accident, that might be worthy of consideration, especially if promoted by government or public health officials.  Well, would you believe this product showed up in Australia awhile back, made and sold by Davies Craig as part of their accessory line in the late ‘80s?  It did not catch fire with public health officials or the general public and you can’t get them anymore, but nowadays a good bike helmet would probably work just as well.  Of course using one in a car would brand you as a nut.  Just why that is so might be worthy of some reflection.

So where’s the fun in all this?  Hey, have you been looking at the pictures?  What you’re seeing here is a history of this writer’s attempts to take a commonplace cheap-looking plastic consumer object and have some fun with it, while aspiring to produce Great Art. Or maybe not Great Art at all but something that is fun or at least distinctive.  Face it:  bicyclists suffer from an image problem.  Too many of them ride in a rude and thoughtless and childish fashion, flaunting the fact that law enforcement truly does give them a pass, which makes many motorists insanely jealous when they’re not worrying about clobbering one of these idiots;  they clutter up the sidewalks by locking up their bikes to whatever they please;  their bike lanes and “protected infrastructure” rob motorists of road and parking space they desperately need that was rightfully theirs in the first place;  and they’re always IN THE WAY.  And though the magical thinkers want to require all bikers to wear helmets for the huge safety advantage this clearly offers, at least in their presumptuous minds  (and which might get a few of these pesky bikers off the roads completely, a bonus), everybody knows that all bicycle helmets look kind of stupid in one way or another, while also lending a kind of visual combat-ready uniformity to the whole stupid lot of them.  Except for some of those kid helmets, which are cute and/or whimsical or even bad-ass sometimes (camo with mohawk!).

So all the brain-buckets presented here portray examples of what is on one hand the evolution of helmet design, as determined by an industry dedicated to safety and airflow science –  and let’s not forget style and marketing determinations  –  while on the other hand one can witness how their intentions got perverted by my own personal whims and inspiration and mostly impulsivity.  Unfortunately that DayGlo orange (and as I recall quite hideous) Bell Biker that started it all has been lost to history, or maybe recycled into somebody else’s art project and is now sitting atop some noggin far away.  Or it’s in a landfill where the styrofoam and plastic might just stay intact forever, forget about ashes to ashes or dust to dust.  Anything is possible in this best of all possible worlds.  

That crude but groundbreaking effort was followed by the more ambitious and carefully wrought watermelon theme brushed onto a Bell V1-pro, which I vaguely recall was Bell’s next design following the classic Biker.  After having few rivals in the market in the early years, competitors jumped into what was clearly a growing market and the V1 was Bell’s attempt to stay ahead of the pack, with a product that suggested “lighter and racier” or something like that, and if you think it is reminiscent of the racer’s “hairnet” helmet of the ancient era  –  well, isn’t it?  Of course, they also must’ve figured WWII was far enough behind us that nobody’d recall how the first German “terror weapon” used against London, a crude but innovative cruise missile that had nicknames like “buzz bomb” and “doodlebug”, had the official military designation  –  you guessed it  –  of V1.  Maybe Bell marketers figured we won that war so no problem, but I wonder what the reception was in England, or if they even sold them there.  For many years the market for bicycle helmets hardly existed outside the US.  I would guess finally getting the professional European racers to wear them made a huge difference and would you believe that didn’t happen until 2003?

Anyway the rest of the story is best told by the pictures.  Next came the updated V1-pro model that begged to receive a Medusa-themed snake motif, though I cannot recall anybody ever looking at it and asking “where’s Perseus?” or anything like that.  The somewhat chaotic white sticker-bedecked head protector came next, and I still use it in winter as it is capacious enough to accommodate a heavy wool hat.  Please note it has been repaired with a few nuts and bolts, which I suppose could be called a Frankenstein leitmotif, and if the paint job does not void any warranty, you can bet that hardware surely does. 

The other two helmets depicted are the yellow Louis Garneau I was wearing up until a few weeks ago and its brand spankin’ new replacement, a Lazer MIPS technology plastic and styrofoam life-saving wonder that guarantees I am at least as safe on a bicycle now as I’ve ever been.  You can’t beat that kind of reassurance.  Please note that neither of these have received quite the total makeover treatment of their predecessors.  Neither has had its hard plastic shell painted, though the yellowish Louis Garneau was given a pair of eyeballs, in the interest of hindsight, along with kind of a mask-motif painted on to the styrofoam at the rear, now quite weatherbeaten and wasted-looking.  Over the years a few drivers and fellow bikers have made bemused comments.  Note this helmet also has a biggish visor constructed mostly of duct tape that was always unraveling, so call it vanity or an old man’s self-consciousness (is that possible?) but I decided that for whatever reason I’d lost interest in wearing a helmet that just looked kind of worn out and kind of odd.  Call it vanity.

The Lazer fulfills a long held dream of finding a helmet that is really bright and not in need of painting.  MIPS technology is one of a range of current helmets that claim to prevent torsional injury to the brain, which happens when the helmet twists when it hits the pavement (yeah, it happens sometimes, maybe a lot) and rotates the neck violently or some such horrific outcome that traditional helmet designs could sometimes cause.  Yep, the helmet was the cause of the injury.  Of course the jury is still out on this, as it is on all helmet science, if you’ve read this far.  Not all helmets are MIPS designs and people still buy both kinds, which should tell you something.  I bought it for the color and its pleasing rounded shape.  Of course its overwhelming plastic-tech slickness was still a bit too much, so I could not resist messing with it a bit, as is my way with such things.  Some habits are hard to break.

So maybe that nine-year-old getting nose-punched by a baseball learned something:  how wearing a helmet is one thing but staying alert and being ready for the unexpected at any moment is quite another, and may be far more important most of the time.  It’s how our ancestors stayed safe in the jungle, and the jungle is still with us, and shall always be.  Many joys in life involve some degree of danger and this is especially true any time you leave your house, but it pays to be extra careful in the bathroom and the kitchen, as well.  Face it:  it’s a great big wonderful and dangerous world out there, and helmeting up when you ride your bike might bring you a bit more peace of mind, but be open to the possibility it might not be as essential to the safety equation in most of the ways that matter.  There are fastballs coming at us all the time from every direction and having confidence in one’s ability to be ready and take effective action is how we deal with life, and needn’t interfere with finding joy, for which wearing a helmet is always optional.

---