Like Wheelin’ a Bike
Everyone’s biking nowadays. Summer, fall, winter, doesn’t seem to matter to these people, people out there on their hybrids, their mountains, their recumbents, with the doofy triangular orange flags and bells, having a grand ol’ time. They say biking is the best way to see a city. The vantage point of the cyclist is not one preoccupied with storefronts and shiny things, like the pedestrian, or with road signage and rising levels of ire, like the driver. You can gaze upon the city at your leisure, looking left and right, watching people spill out of nightclubs and into Metro stations, or sitting on city benches. Bikers have entrenched themselves in recent years as a group not to be fucked with, commanding their fair share of the road, some might say sanctimoniously, but rightly, too. Watch how parking spots in big cities are crumbling off and being replaced with bike lanes, and how talk of “sedentary lifestyle” floods us with guilt. Cyclists and drivers now share the road like siblings—tense and petulant at times, but ultimately accepting.
Thinking about biking gets me thinking about big-city traffic, that tumultuous trench of wooshing machinery. Invariably, I grope back in time to when I visited New York City in high school and saw a shaven-headed guy in frayed jean shorts and rollerblades, holding a handle and being pulled along by a delivery truck on 116th Street. He would ride the truck until it had to turn, and then he’d grab onto something else. He did not seem to be giving it much thought, being carried along in a current of traffic and grasping at the nearest moving vehicle he could reach for a burst of propulsion. To treat your unprotected self as a car’s equal is, at least in urban terms, to live totally without fear. And not even a helmet! To me, that is crazy in the clinical sense, and to see a chasm separating his nonchalance with my round-cornered world is where I begin to see my problem, and that’s that I’m terrified of being a small body in a sea of hurtling machines.
Only once have I braved the cacophony of cars and arm-signals, and that was in polite Ontario, with a cute little bike path carved into the side of the road. Never in Quebec, where road signage is wholly perfunctory, and rules of the road take more the shape of a communal ethos of mutual aggression. You have not felt fear until you have watched a car with a Quebec license plate attempting to merge into your lane without entertaining the pretense that you might already occupying that space. I don’t wish to spread a bit of folklore; that’s really how the French drive. And the English, even. When they change lanes here they simply drive into the next lane with an innate understanding that those cars in the vicinity will react accordingly, and for the most part, they do. A cab driver once took me clear across the city in seven minutes, changing lanes every few seconds without once looking in his mirrors. It works, somehow. There are double- and even triple-parked cars everywhere, and all moving objects are assumed to be hazardous and unpredictable. You must be God-fearing and ready to die.
Cyclists occupy a different stratum in the natural order of the road. As a driver, I’ve had a few close calls with cyclists. Face it, they are hard to see sometimes, especially since many cyclists are prone to taking liberties to which drivers are not privy. Sure, I know the dangers of the door prize. I’ve heard of broken arms and worse. The defining characteristic among cyclists I know, though, is that even if they have gone sailing over their handlebars a few times in the past, they’re not about to give up cycling. Hell no. That would be surrender, even treason. I admire that. I admire the quality that allows cyclists to say “I could break my neck biking to work, but I’m going to do it anyway” when in fact, they hadn’t even considered the risk until you asked them about it.
So I’m going to buy a bike and start cycling in the city. I’ll keep the bike in my apartment—where, exactly, I haven’t figured out yet, since there’s nowhere between the couch, the wall, and the hall table for this thing to go, so perhaps I’ll just lay it on its side in the middle of my living room—and I’ll drag it out every morning into the elevator, with a helmet and a man-bag containing a spare inner tube, pump, tire, and tool kit. Rounded corners for this guy. I’ve got nothing to hide, no shame. I’ll ding my bell every few seconds just in case someone in a parked car was thinking of opening his door. Goofy-ass arm signals? Hell, yes. But most importantly, I’ll get to see the city for the first time, the way it was intended, and for the cost of a few door prizes, I’m getting a pretty good deal.
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(3 comments)
Welcome to the world of the living, man.
Still, you ain’t experienced biking until you’ve rode down the side of a mountain.
Welcome aboard! You’ll just love it. :o)
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