my ride
I haven’t ridden my bike in weeks. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to ride my bike, it’s just that our household is dominated by people who can’t drive legally, and they seem to have a lot of practices and about three cubic tons of gear that needs to be carted around. So lately, mostly we drive. I know that is a big fat first-world privilege. It’s dark, we can drive. It’s raining, we can drive. The soccer bag is too heavy, we can drive.
I know there are mothers and daughters all over the world walking and bussing and schlepping gear without the option to toss it in the back of the SUV. But even so, I miss my bike. I miss greeting the neighbor girls walking off to school and watching the nearby yards melt from season to season. I miss showing up to work a little rumpled and sweaty but tingly from the exertion. I miss searching the ripples of the Willamette for the sea lion, which I have seen twice from the seat of my bike.
Today, I got to ride. It was a bright crisp morning and a warm and languid afternoon. In the early light—and in the late—the trees were shimmery and magical. I grew up in a town dominated by evergreens, so I am still amazed by the show-offy transition of elms and maples and oaks. The river sparkled and the mountain was sporting some kind of pink nimbus as I rode toward home this evening.
Truth be told, it makes me feel like a poseur to write about bicycling. I read the other day that 20 percent of the weekday traffic over the Hawthorne Bridge consists of bike commuters. Many of my friends ride hundreds of miles a week. They race on Saturdays and grocery shop on Sundays, all on their bikes. They have a bike for commuting, one for road racing, and one for slogging through the mud. Me, I’ve had the same bike for 10 years. It’s one of those old-lady bikes with elevated handlebars so you can sit up really straight, and it has a deep dip so you can ride in a skirt. The seat shifts as I ride, and I can’t use the upper gears because the chain slips.
But, that’s ok. The fact that I measure my bike rides in –begging forgiveness from T.S. Eliot –coffee spoons, jars my consciousness in a way that it didn’t when I was riding closer to every day. Now, I get a surge of fear when the number 9 city bus passes just a little too close. And why shouldn’t I be fearful? After all, it’s a bus. It’s 12 tons of steel and glass. And even though I am a tall woman, I am made of skin and blood and rather fragile bone. That’s a substantial mismatch, but I don’t feel that fear when I’m inside my car.
I love waiting at the base of the bridge into downtown, jostling with the other cyclists as we wait for the light turn. It is as close as I will ever come to the starting line of the Tour de France.
Today, the thing that moved me most was getting stuck behind a trash truck as it moved through our neighborhood. I got trapped behind it for two blocks as we crawled through a street crowded with parents dropping their kids off at elementary school. The trash collectors must have been at work a good long time because by that point, the truck was overflowing with plastic bags of exploded trash. At first, I just tried to hold my breath, look at the street, and teleport myself away from my close encounter with garbage. But, it really wasn’t possible. The smell was—shall we say?—persistent. And, I just couldn’t stop examining the trash. One of the bags seemed to be from a pizza shop – an entire, full-sized bag brimming with smashed pizza. And next to it, a bag of full of sticky household detritus – wax-covered cups and wadded up papers and a dark-blue t-shirt tangled into the mix.
And suddenly, I was grateful. And glad—even then—to be on my bike. Because I was so close and had nowhere to go, I could not escape. I could not escape the knowledge that there are hungry people sleeping 100 yards from here yet there is a whole bag of pizza being carted off to the landfill. I couldn’t escape the pang of melancholy, knowing that somebody wore that t-shirt while he laughed with friends and played catch with his cousin and cried on his first girlfriend’s shoulder. But one day, something changed, and it was out in the trash bag. I couldn’t miss the mortality of it all. One day we’re going about the daily tasks of our life. And the next day, we aren’t. I couldn’t escape the fact that we pay people to whisk from our sight – and our smell—the things that we separate from ourselves, that we determine have no worth. And I couldn’t help but to be grateful to those people—those men—who are the whiskers.
But that’s all to say, I’m grateful for the bike. I am glad to be gazing at the trees and feeling the wind and yes, smelling the trash. I am glad to be close to the ground in this mixed-up, broken world.
