Artans intervie

Anita Ely recounts her encounter with a moose while out biking. She was hit by a yearling moose and then the mother moose grazed her face and helmet. Anita was injured but managed to find help from a neighbor and called her husband. She suffered a broken arm and had to undergo surgeries to repair her arm and hand. Despite the incident, Anita's perspective on moose hasn't changed much, although she finds them annoying and still exercises caution around them. Today we are interviewing my neighbor who has had an encounter with a moose. What is your name? Anita Ely. Very nice. So, tell us about your story. So, it was Father's Day 2022, so I think it was June 12th. And I was going out for a bike ride by myself, getting ready for the Ned Gravel Race. And so I took off down the road and went down Cold Springs Road, where I saw a couple of dogs out and yelled at the dogs. And as I got to the bottom, just before the bridge at the very bottom of the hill, I looked up and I see an animal running out of the woods. And I think, that's a big dog, because I've just seen some dogs. And then it hit me. So that was a yearling moose. And it T-boned me, so it hit me on my left arm. My bike kind of flew up in the air and I landed on my left elbow. And then I looked up and the mama moose was coming out of the woods. And I'm laying there looking at her come at me and thinking, okay, this has been a good run and all right, I'm going to be killed by a moose. But she ran over me, she grazed my face and the side of my helmet with her hoof, and then they just kept going. So something had clearly startled them and I was just in the way. I was going about, so I was recording it on Strava, I was going about 23 miles an hour when it hit me. So I didn't, I had about two seconds between when I saw it and when it hit me. So there was absolutely no way to avoid it. So I laid there on the ground for a couple of minutes just sort of crying and cursing. And then I sat up and I could tell my arm was broken. Got up, yelled a few times to see if anyone could hear me. No one did because I was right by the creek there and it was running pretty high. So I walked, I dragged my bike off the road and walked to the first house beyond the bridge, which is over on the right. I walked up to the door, knocked on the door. No one was answering, but it was just the screen door, the inside door was closed, or it was open, as if someone was around. When I turned around to go walk to the next house, the man came up from his garden. And he was probably, I think he told me he was 84 or 85. And that was his summer house, he's been there forever. And asked if I could use his phone. And he said, of course. So I go in and I called Mark. Mark, of course, didn't answer because it was a number he didn't recognize. So I tried calling again and, you know, same thing, he didn't answer. And then I noticed I was bleeding all over the man's phone. So I'm like, I'm bleeding on your phone. And he's like, that's fine. We had talked a little bit so he knew where I lived. And I told him I could call 911 and just wait. But he said, no, I'll drive you home. So he drove me home. He kept me talking, which was important because I think I was going into shock a little bit. So he kept me talking, kept me engaged, brought me home. I knocked on the door at home because I wasn't going to go in. We have two dogs, one of them is big. And I didn't want them to jump up on me. So Mark comes around the corner, like, my door. Sees me and goes immediately into firefighter mode, EMT mode. And took me down to the hospital. And, yeah, my elbow was broken. They did a CAT scan. The head was fine. And I remember my head bouncing off the ground. It was a pretty hard cut throat. And no concussion or anything. So wear your helmet. Always wear your helmet. And, yes, they did surgery to put my arm back together that night. And a few months later I had problems with my hand. So I've also had a surgery on my thumb to repair a torn tendon. There was a broken bone in my hand. So he took that out and fixed a few things up. And just last week, my elbow, just last week, or no, not last week, last month, they took out, there was a plate in here, and they took that out about a month ago. So that's my story. Wow. So how did that change your perspective on moose? You know, a lot of people ask me that, and they ask me, you know, how I can go ride my bike alone again and all of that. And, for me, it was such a fluke incident, an accident, that there's no way it could ever happen again. I mean, it would be unbelievably remarkable if it happened again. So I don't think it really changed my perspective that much. I still find them highly annoying. I don't like it when they're, you know, we've had a couple over the fence in the yard, and Juna, the littler dog, loses his mind. So I still find them highly annoying, but I don't get, like, panicked. I'm not any more afraid of moose than I was before, which is always just kind of cautious.