I became a bicycle commuter
…because i was (again) waiting for an extremely late bus. At one time I started every day of my life like everyone else: left the house, walked two blocks, boarded a bus, and went to work. It was suffocating and automatic but I had not noticed because I it just felt like normal life. Then one day, annoyed that my bus was almost an hour late, I boarded– chafed and pissed beyond speech– and sat there steaming until the bus came to a stop in front of a bike shop. I stepped off the bus at in front of a local bike shop, and less than one hour later left riding a Schwinn High Sierra mountain bike home. Smoking a few Camels along the way.
Although that first week riding to work was a brutal hell of uphill-both-ways, sweating, panting, testy balance and veering off the road every time I glanced back over my shoulder, by the end of the second week I had discovered the payoff: total freedom to alter my course, to experience the world in any way that I chose, at any given time- an unmitigated, secret freedom. I could stop at a café and read the paper for the same hour that I used to spend on the bus and still be home for before the bus entered my neighborhood. Once I added a set of panniers to my bike, I could go shopping on the way home and forever be free of those wrist-severing plastic bags. Once I got commuting down, it got me.
Many of us started bicycle commuting out of necessity or annoyance: the car is in the shop, can’t afford gasoline, second DUI, and some of us fell totally, head over heels in love with the lifestyle of getting there by bike. In love with the way our bodies felt, infatuated with the acquisition of new gear each season, with the identification of being outsiders who follow their own paths and did not care to follow others (literally). Commuting radically changed some of our lives. I’ve been commuting with some of the same people in my hometown for almost 20 years. I may only see them one or two times a month but I know that their lives have endured everything from divorce & death to falling in love and finding themselves- stuff I caught up at the post office and in passing at a light. I have never been to my fellow commuters houses or met their families but it’s hard to explain the type of human exchange you can have catching up to one another, day after day, pedaling home at sunset in the cool-air, the sound of gears whirring, dogs yapping, cars coming way too close, birds flitting in a mad dash to settle lodging for the night, with Camel cigarettes and conversation being handed over handlebars. The feeling of that immediate, intimate, exclusive experience among relative strangers has endured and nourished me for two decades.
I hope this year you will try to incorporate a bike into your life. We are here to show you the many ways you can ease into that or take it to the next level. I promise you that I will never forget that first week (where I didn’t even really know how to get to work, even where it really was on a map) so you can benefit from that feeling of me figuring out Step 1. Which, by the way, not “get a bike” but “figure out your route.” When i started to ride to work I did not know what to wear, or even how long it would take to get there and I arrived annoyed, sweaty. late, but the frustration passed so quickly into this elegant privacy that I savored. Let me be clear- I hated getting on the bike ten minutes before I punched out; I loved being on it fifteen minutes later. I have to kick my own ass some days to get on the bike- but not having the master-slave relationship with an auto is SO worth it that all I have to do is tell myself one thing: If I ride, I don’t have to look for parking– and bingo my ass is on that and your innate, outlaw sense of choosing total freedom but we hope that like us, you’ll love taking the long way home.