Gesture of Caring Amid Big City Ways

She was more than a little worried when she sent her first-born off to college last month, dropped him off here in Southern California at a bustling suburban campus with 24,000 more students than the 2,500 residents of their hometown.

It wasn’t like Cody Borgis had never been off the farm. He’d traveled with a youth group to England last year and visited Washington, D.C., this summer.

Still, he had lived all his 18 years in Armona, a hamlet in the cotton fields of Central California, a town so small that nearby Hanford and Lemore qualify as big cities, with 30,000 residents between them.

“But Cody’s always been adventurous,” said his mother, Cheryl. He chose Cal State Northridge because “he’s going to be a doctor, and he thought it had the best biology program” of any college the family could afford.

So Cheryl Borgis drove him down last month and spent four days settling him in.

“I wouldn’t let him have a car--too dangerous,” she said. The traffic on the busy streets “made me sick to my stomach.”

So they mapped the routes he could take on his bike to get to the grocery store, the library. And they found a retreat a few miles away--a park nestled against the mountains, up a steep hill . . . a park whose beauty and solitude reminded him of home.

He was coming from that park last week when he collided with an ugly reality of urban life. An accident led to a phone call to his mom that--for a moment, at least--conjured up every fear she’d ever had of big city life:

Cody had been hit by a car.

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He was cruising downhill fast, hunched over his handlebars, blond hair blowing in the wind. The car, it seemed, came out of nowhere, a silver BMW that turned from a side street into his path.

He hit the bumper at full speed, catapulted over the car and smashed, face first, into the street.

He remembers little of this and none of what happened afterward. Nothing of the BMW driver. Or of Kimberly, the red-haired woman who stopped to tend to him.

She had been taking her children home from school when she saw Cody sail over the car and land in the street.

“When he hit the ground, I didn’t know if he’d be dead or alive,” Kimberly said later. “There was blood all over him. But he kept insisting he was all right; he didn’t want to go to the hospital, didn’t want to cause any trouble or inconvenience anybody.

“All I could think of was I couldn’t leave him, that this was somebody’s child.”

So she helped him up, set him on the curb, wiped the blood pouring from a gash on his face. Then she loaded him and his mangled bike into her van, drove him back to campus and left him with friends, with instructions including: Call his mother right away.

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Cheryl Borgis drove the three hours from Armona to Northridge that night, retrieved her boy and took him home.

The next day, she called the local doctor--at home, because “you can do that in a town this small.” Because Cody couldn’t remember the accident, Cheryl called the man with the BMW.

“He said, ‘Well, it could have been tragic, but my car wasn’t damaged and your son was not hurt.’ I told him, actually, my son was hurt . . . then he started yelling,” disputing her son’s injuries.

She was bewildered, then hurt.

“I started thinking, where is this man coming from? Does he not even care what happened to my son?”

She knows accidents happen. And she knows Cody was courting disaster by riding without his bicycle helmet. Still, she was disappointed by the driver’s reaction.

“Maybe he’s worried about being sued,” she said. “But we’re not the suing type.”

If this had happened in Armona, she said, there would have been a lot more folks like Kimberly around. “Somebody would have recognized Cody, I would have been called, the police would have been there.”

Here, police did not want to get involved in an accident so minor, she said. “I had to argue with them just to get them to take a report. I guess it’s different, the way they do things in Southern California.”

Her son intends to stay at Cal State Northridge. And although the accident has made her more apprehensive about leaving her son alone in the big city, its aftermath has comforted her.

“I thank God Kimberly came along, that she stayed with Cody,” she said. “That, even though I wasn’t there, my son was in a mother’s hands.”

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.bankslatimes.com.