A goal I have for myself as I age is that I turn out like the proverbial little old lady riding her bike to the grocery store. While this may be a distant and maybe even frivolous goal, it’s not a regular habit I have right now. Well, I tell myself, starting a new habit may indeed be “just like riding a bike”.
As a youngster, I was the very last kid on our block to master riding a bike. I had training wheels when the other kids were doing “wheelies”, spinning around on their sting rays, one tire in the air, showing off. How I envied their agility! For inspiration, I read the biography of the Wright Brothers. Most people thank them for their contributions to flight. I thank them for taking bicycles to the next level where you don’t have to be an acrobat to ride one.
After reading their story, I confidently hopped on the training-wheel-less bike, ready for a ride down our short driveway. The blue bike was used briefly by my siblings during their rapid ascension to riding Schwinns. I wanted a sting ray, but this was the “training wheels off” bike I had to master first. There was a car driving by slowly, a good citizen, smiling at me from their window. Or were they laughing? I clumsily turned the handlebars and took a dive into the prickly hedge at the end of the driveway. Maybe roller skating is a better option, I thought, looking at my skinned knees and running back into the house in search of motherly triage. Merthiolate in hand, my mother dripped the pink-orange stuff on my knees, applied bandaids, and told me to scoot back out there and try again.
By the end of that very long and frustrating day, I was riding my bike around the block “sans training wheels”, waving at my cheery mother while she looked out the kitchen window each time I passed by. I was free! I was independent! I was probably going to fall again, but right now, all that mattered was I had the wind in my hair, a bell on the handlebar and a spokes-whirling adventure! I could be Amelia Earhart on my bike, I could be from the Pony Express. I could stop and turn the bike upside down and fiddle with the pedals and chain, like an apprentice for the Wright Brothers. If only they lived next door, I would daydream.
We lived in a suburb in east Detroit and there were sidewalks and curbs everywhere. The roads were wide but pockmarked from snow, ice, and salt. Faux wood-paneled station wagons carried large families to Mass on Sundays, to Catechism on Tuesdays, and to get ashes on their foreheads once a year. I always liked that day because our family was Presbyterian and did not partake in Ash Wednesday services. To me it was the only day during the cold dark winter when I could ride my bike after school while there was still enough daylight to avoid the patches of ice. Never mind the kids who told me I’d go to Hell for not observing the ceremony. I’d be Hell on wheels.
The pavement was uneven and so were the social divides. Our street was somewhere between the poorest people in east Detroit and the ridiculously rich people living along Lakeshore Drive. The line of disproportionate wealth was quite clear as you drove along East Jefferson past bigger and bigger homes to the lake. Even Lakeshore Drive was pockmarked, the waves and weather relentlessly bashing the edge of the road and icing at the shore. Mother Nature didn’t seem to care how rich those people were, she was going to destroy that road one day at a time, one flake of asphalt at a time.
Sometime in this early block-by-block adventure of riding, I started having vivid dreams that I was riding my bike through neighborhoods and down very detailed, mappable streets. In one dream, I would be riding down our old street in Virginia, on a trike, because it was when I was little. I would be very careful not to fall off and into the storm drain. The hills there were hilly in a weird and exaggerated way, as if Grant Wood had painted them. In my dream I had to pedal fast to keep from falling off the hill and out of the dimensionless picture.
In my next dream we were all school age kids, riding and racing down the streets of our neighborhood. One kid was a bully and he strategically placed himself in the sidewalk where no one could get by without paying a toll. In my dream I stood up to him, pedaled really fast and flew over his head while he went crying home. In reality I think he took the nickels and dimes I used to hide in my shoes, and knocked me off my bike.
In the next stage of life I rode my bike everywhere. The little blue beginner bike became a stingray with a banana seat, and then I graduated to a pretty bright yellow Schwinn. I would ride past the palatial homes we called the Mafia Mansions to summer swim practice. I would ride twelve blocks to middle school, my clarinet and books fitting neatly into the handlebar basket. The basket was useful but a magnet for taunts and jeers. It eventually was replaced with a backpack and rack above the rear tire. My short hair became longer and flew in the wind. It was sometimes a pony-tail, sometimes clipped to the sides with barrettes, and sometimes under a stocking cap.
My bike dreams started again. The blocks and street signs would run through my head in a beautiful Detroit gothic font. Each block had a name, some French, like Cadieux, and some a slightly more pretentious and anglo, like Harvard. I could visualize the names, and I made up clever acronyms to memorize them. We learned everything using songs, phrases and poems. My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles, we would say in our heads before reciting the planets. Everything we learned was by rote memorization. If you had to memorize a locker combination, you came up with a clever saying or math equation that in reality was harder to remember than the locker comb itself. If you had to remember someone’s name you would make a rhyme and then you’d have to be careful not to call them the rhyme by mistake. There were twelve blocks to a mile, my father told me. And twelve was when we could ride in the street and not stop at every block corner to walk our bikes. Twelve street names were easy to remember if you divided by four and chanted everything in groups of three. I memorized the bike map of my childhood and to this day, it permeates my dreams.
My father, being mathematically inclined had bought the house because of its location, exactly twelve blocks from the middle school in one direction and twelve blocks to the high school the other way. That meant there were twelve new names to memorize along my high school trek. High School was twelve times the agony. I would try to avoid puddles in my nice outfit and keep my hair from getting tangled in the wind. My hair was shiny but I thought it was dull and problematic. In old pictures, I can see it was a pretty color, but at the time, I considered it more dirty blonde, too much brown, too mousy. When it was under a cap, I’d worry about how it would look when I took off my hat by my locker, near the popular girls. I would ride without the cap and freeze my ears before subjecting said ears to their snide remarks. I switched to wearing a headband. My face was as pockmarked as the salt crusted pavement beneath my tires. The cold wind felt good after a long day of memorizing things and taking it on the chin.
I packed up my bike and my courage and tried to leave my high school self and her bad-hair days behind. Off to college I went, all the way to Minnesota. The first week there it snowed. While the snow fell all night long, I dreamed I was still riding my bike past every street on the east side of Detroit. In my bike dream I was riding along East Jefferson, over to Chalmers and the Water plant, past the Chrysler plant and Belle Isle. The Uniroyal factory in my dream was not a burned-out shell, it was an iconic, cathedral-looking monument. In real life we would only drive down East Jefferson with the doors locked.
In this dream, the neighborhoods were all banding together, fighting a different war, my high school friends and I riding camouflaged bikes and watching each others backs. We would hop off and hide behind the red and brown brick duplex porches lining the streets. There we would fight on principal anyone saying anything negative or mean about us or our hat-hair. The dream ends with everyone okay, and our hair and bikes look great. We all head off to college in separate directions. In the Minnesota snow I would find a new gang. My face would be less shiny and my cheeks rosier, peeking out from underneath a scarf and a thick hat. I had found a new home, and everyone there had hat-hair.
After college, I lived west of Minneapolis and sometimes rode my bike to work. On the weekends I would ride south and then east across town to visit friends in St. Paul, winding down along Minnehaha Pkwy, past parks named Nikomos and Hiawatha, over the river, near Fort Snelling. Sometimes I would ride up Snelling or Lexington to visit Como Park, then take Como, Hennepin, or Lowry back across the north side to Minneapolis. There I had to make a wide arc north to avoid the one bad neighborhood in the city. I would sadly observe that a bad neighborhood in the Twin Cities might be better than a good neighborhood in Detroit. In my dreams I would be riding around Lake Harriot, on a treadmill of sorts, trying to get off the main path, the smell of lilacs permeating everything except for the chill in the spring air.
I followed a bicycle riding boyfriend to Iowa. He convinced me to stay there and trade my fading yellow Schwinn in for a blue Centurion touring bike. We trekked across the midwest and ducked into barns when the thunderstorms threatened to knock us over. In Iowa we’d ride with friends up and down real Grant Wood hills to small Amish towns where we would sit outside in a park eating fresh string cheese or ice cream and gulping down water, the air clear and our legs tired. In the springtime, a hint of manure permeated everything. The relationship didn’t last but I still have that bike, hanging upside down in the garage, waiting for the Wright Brothers to move in next door.
I married a guy who owned a canoe and we moved to Texas. About ten years into the new life here, I am teaching our kids to ride their bicycles and we are riding the trails near our house. My husband has surprised me with a maroon mountain bike for Christmas and we all go for a ride. Our daughter’s sense of direction works better than her map-maker Mom’s and she tells us when to turn right by that one tree or left by the fence, and the tunnel is over there. My son and his friends take their bikes over to the fake hill by the tunnel and see who can ride down the hill the fastest and jump off right before the crash. They skin their knees and we use Neosporin because Merthiolate had either mercury, or red dye, or both, and my generation was the chemistry experiment. Their generation has superbugs and predators who grab little kids off their bikes and I’m wondering when the idyllic bike ride dream will turn into my worst nightmare of potentially bad people and germs lurking about. I have trouble letting go of the handlebars as they confidently ride away.
Years later I am sitting in the kitchen looking out the back window past the mature house plants. There is my mountain bike, a little rusty but beckoning that its a nice day for a bike ride to the park. The park is still closed. A recent hurricane dumped more than fifty inches of rain in Houston and thankfully our house was spared. The subdivision less than a mile away was hit by devastating floods. The only way around our little temporary island is by bike, or by boat, as damaged cars and relief teams block the streets. I ride my bike over to help with cleanup. The neighborhoods are full of helpers, people bring in sandwiches and water, and there are many heroic rescues still underway across the city. A smell of wet carpet permeates everything. The streets are coated in muck and lined with water soaked furniture, refrigerators, pianos, mattresses and family photo albums drying in the sun. It looks surreal, like one of my war zone bike dreams.
I continue past the debris-ridden streets with suburban names evoking images of towering forests surrounded by tranquil waters. I ride along and run into a friend, she is out riding her bike to see if there are any stores open. While we stand there talking another friend rides up. We compare our trendy bike baskets, helmets, and hurricane stories. I have helmet hair from working on houses and riding around in the heat. All at once, we come to the realization that here we are, like those little old ladies, but perhaps not that old yet, who ride their bikes to the grocery store every day. We laugh nervously, shaking off the stress from the storm and pain we see around us, and head off our separate ways.
I pedal back home, soberly piecing together the past week, trying to avoid the glass and nails and storm debris. I realize that twelve or more years behind me, I was riding these trails with my school age kids, and twelve years in the other direction, if I’m lucky, I just might become that little old lady I secretly admire. Life is just like riding a bike, after all.
(lwr 01/24/2018 🚵♀️)
