Riding Your Bike (Instead of Driving Your Car)

My first bike had a banana seat, a cool pony logo on the chain guard and gave me more freedom than I had ever imagined possible. 

I was allowed to ride alone all the way around the block.  Away from the mustard yellow parsonage. 

Past the church, past the filling station past the one house on the block who we did not know.  Past Pastor Cross' house where my friends Suzie and Julie lived,  past the church again, past the house with the big big bushes we sometimes hid beneath, past the Darling's house who had a pool and then home.  The entire ride was .4 miles. 

And it made me feel so independent, so in control of my destiny, so fast.   Even then I understood that the relationship between velocity and effort was one of the most satisfying things.  I also understood that as I looped around and around, the things I raced past  developed a kind of coherence with each other that existed only in my mind.  My speed, my bike created a bond between buildings, trees, parking lots, bushes, a stone porch and the wagon wheel resting against it.

To this day I love walking because of the way it slows things down and lets us see things as independent and unique.  But bike riding is slow enough to allow attention (compared to a car) but fast enough to change your perception of things.  They become things together, a sequence of things.  Almost like the difference between a photograph and a movie.

Just after we moved to Muskegon, Michigan in 9th grade, a bad girl who rode my bus invited me to ride bikes with her and another 9th grader to the sub shop.  I told her I'd ask my parents but I knew they would never let me ride my bike across town with strange new people whose parents they didn't know. 

They said: Sure. Fine.  That sounds nice.

I enjoyed the sub sandwich and the bike ride, but the feeling of bewilderment permeated the whole afternoon.

Had I changed in essence and suddenly now I was allowed to roam free? 

So yes, bike rides have always been charged with liberation for me.  But as an adult they give me a gift better than that adolescent freedom.  A gift I had started to sense on that city block in Perry, Michigan.  They root me in a place.  I can understand specific neighborhoods and streets and blocks in a wholistic way that is related to me.

I'm sometimes sad to not be "from" here.  Or from anywhere.  But a bike gives me the sense of a little bit of belonging in a way that a car can never give me, and in a way that I rarely feel.