Geared Up: On the Road to Two-Wheeled Transcendence. One Man’s Love Affair With His Bicycle
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I started riding to school in grade two. While my high school classmates parked their rides in the lot, I locked my ten-speed to a post. After grade thirteen, I mailed my Chiorda to Banff. I rode it through an undergraduate degree in Calgary, weather permitting. Then, during my second year of graduate school at Waterloo, a woman driving a compact delivered a right hook. That’s when a car zooms ahead of you, then slows down and hangs a right, unaware of your velocity. I bounced off her passenger door, and typed my master’s thesis with a broken right hand. Now I pedal from my home near High Park to work at Ryerson University downtown. Except in snowstorms, it takes about twenty-five minutes.
Without the bike, maybe I’d be less ponderous, wouldn’t have two degrees in philosophy, would’ve made good on my childhood fantasies of owning a hot car like Steve McQueen’s green Mustang inBullitt, I think. But I didn’t, and I’m happy with the level of freedom (and speed) my bike affords me. The novelist Henry Miller considered his bike his best friend. “I could rely on it,” he wrote, “which is more than I could say about my buddies.” Maybe I’m like him; maybe that’s just pretentious, if not ponderous.
It turns out I’m not part of any visible biking subculture. Rather, I’m part of a culture hidden in broad daylight: a utilitarian rider, according to a recent academic taxonomy of Canadian cycling types. Unfortunately, even with new bike lanes coming on stream, Canadian cities aren’t built for riders, utilitarian or otherwise. We manage by slipping through the cracks in the urban bustle, finding the seam, whether through a traffic jam or in a designated lane. Still, the act of riding encases us in a protective fantasy. With one push of the pedal, the rider is bombing around the neighbourhood — ignoring the dull parade of adult duties, full of youthful optimism, insulated from the stultifying conformity of public transportation, the headaches of car ownership, the myriad rules awaiting any adult who steps outside the front door. On a bike, each directional choice is active, not passive, and something forbidden nearly always lies beneath. Each decision creates the possibility of finding the next secret route, riding the wrong way, negotiating a sidewalk, or slithering between cars jammed in like sardines, waiting for the go signal. And there is danger. If Icarus’s tragic flaw was flying too close to the sun, the rider’s is brushing too close to a car…