I don’t necessarily like to wear a helmet. Do you like to wear helmets? They’re so constricting – they make me sweat, and cause my goggles to fog up. That’s just when riding snow. If I was ever going to surf Pipe, which I don’t necessarily have a desire to surf Pipe, I might wear a Gath. Helmets on land are generally kind of itchy, too. And if I had braids, or a ponytail, or even, ahem, wore a wig, they would be really, really itchy.
But I’ve also seen people get hurt really, really badly when not wearing them: walking around like zombies after getting knocked out by a handle bar or bleeding like a cracked ketchup bottle when a fin opens up a gusher. Our brains, of course, are certainly our best assets so we best protect them.
That’s why I got a chuckle out of this Danish PSA recently released by the country’s Council for Safe Traffic. It’s suicidal to not wear a helmet when mountain biking but it isn’t a whole lot safer to not wear one in traffic where tons of metal is often moving at inordinate amounts of speed as you pedal a 15-pound bike to and from work. Or to go get a beer at the pub. Just as going to war in the middle ages without a helmet probably wasn’t a good idea either.
Well, the council made a pretty brilliant parallel between the olden days and the modern days, dressing a bunch of people up in Braveheart garb while the leader waits to lead his tribe into battle, sans helmet. The son asks his pop to put on a lid. The sidekick tries to convince him as well. Of course it takes the real boss to get him to go with the brain bucket: “You can go looting and pillaging all you want, but you have to wear a helmet,” she says.
The takeaway? Go loot and pillage every wave or trail you can find, just cover up that scalp when you do it. Helmets aren’t so bad, I guess.
