Bicycle Dreams

If I’m going to write essays about segments of my life, personal philosophies, and whatnot, a bicycle should certainly have a place. I’ve never trained for a cycling event, cycled around Europe, gone coast to coast, or anything like most people who document their great cycling event in life and find all sorts of epiphanies and spiritual awakenings in doing so. But that a bicycle has quietly followed me along in life, like a perpetual pet, waiting for me like Argos no matter how long I am away on any particular odyssey of life, it deserves recognition.

What really inspired me to actually put pen to paper (or this digital equivalent) came in reading an article in Quillette by Damien Platt. It was on his experience with skateboarding, but his thoughts and his inspiration from Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry seamlessly--in my mind--apply to a bicycle. In the book, Saint-Exupéry said self-discovery “comes when man measures himself against an obstacle. To attain it, he needs an implement.” His “implement” was an airplane. For Platt, it was a skateboard: “This implement takes me to places where I never planned to go and facilitates human encounters I never expected to have. Sometimes it allows me (very briefly) to fly. But it is not machine powered. Nor does it consume precious resources. It keeps my feet much closer—although not always firmly—to the ground.”

For me, the implement is a bicycle. But Platt’s words describing his experience are exactly the same I could use.

The earliest bike I can remember owning was a red, 20” Huffy. In fact, I still have the chain guard I found in my current garage many years later. Whether it was that bike or another, I also remember the first time propelling it by myself, free from training wheels down our suburban street like a young Orville Wright. Not a far run, but when I stopped, I looked back at dad, a smiling Wilbur, sharing my sense of accomplishment. My big world then got smaller.

Not that walking didn’t have its own specialization for exploring that I have also used all of my life, but a bicycle was something different. It was mobility to and with friends, freeing us from a level of dependency on our parents. As I grew, the bicycle grew--from the 20” Huffy to the 24” Schwinn Tiger to the 26” English bike with the complexity of gears and derailleurs and hand brakes. The Huffy was later rebuilt into a “stingray” with high rise handlebars, banana seat and rear slicks, spray painted a wicked black. The bike went from mere transportation to perform feats of derring do.

There were a few interruptions in bike use. The first during early teen age when bikes were briefly shunned as kid stuff. But not long after that, college kids could be seen on 10-speeds, so its adult status returned--even when drivers licences and cars became available. But the entry into the world of employment and paying bills caused the biggest interruption, and for many, the end.

But fortunately for me, later in adulthood, a parking deck was being built in our existing employee lot so employees in my department had to park at the nearby mall and be shuttled over. This extra time expenditure and the fact that I lived only a few miles from work inspired me to purchase a new bike and pedal to work. That feeling of freedom from machine powered transportation returned like a long lost friend. Instead of circling the parking lot looking for a decent space, I smugly rolled my bike right into my office and began my day.

After getting used to transporting myself to work each day by pedalling, one summer weekend some friends invited me to join them for a ride around Salem Lake. There, I rediscovered that a bike can be a source of recreation as well as transportation. I thereafter introduced myself to organized bike tours locally and beyond and use my bike for both fun and utility.

Again, back to Platt’s article on skateboarding, his words serve my cycling life the same: Cycling “is simple and complex, pointless and transformational. It has taught me that by doing something for the sake of it, without any expectation of compensation, I can reap priceless rewards: self-esteem, happiness, health, and friends.”

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