Missoula Notebook

Why Are You Not Riding a Bike?

By Sutton Stokes, 5-31-08

	This is not what my bike looks like. (Photo: Flickr user Faster Panda Kill Kill)

I can tell you from personal experience that it seems to be true: you never do forget how to ride a bike. Not that I was worried as I wheeled a demo model out the door of a local bike shop a few weekends back for a test spin, but I was at that moment as eligible a candidate as anyone for having forgotten.

The last time I’d ridden a bike had been five years earlier, when I piloted a used Panasonic Tourist home after buying it from a friend for sixty dollars. The Panasonic sat in the living room of one apartment, in storage, and finally in the basement of our first house — hanging around for four years and three moves — before I finally got rid of it without having put one additional mile on it.

So perhaps I should have been a little rusty as I pedaled off into the side streets of the University District, but it all came right back. And not just the physical knack: what also came right back was the sensation of joyful freedom that I used to feel as a kid once I was old enough to set off on long rides by myself, the earth rolling smoothly past beneath me like in a dream of flying.

I bought my bike on that hot weekend a few weeks back, when it seemed summer had arrived early. It was the sun that pushed me toward the bike shop at the tail end of a Saturday-morning stroll to the downtown farmer’s market. The sun glinted on spokes and fenders and shiny paint on the hundreds of bikes locked to racks or rolling past me along Higgins, inspiring the question: Why am I not riding a bike in this beautiful weather, this beautiful town?

So the salesman at the bike shop didn’t have to sell very hard.

After my purchase was complete I spent the next three or four hours riding around town in a state of disbelief both at the pure pleasure of it and at the fact that I had waited so long before getting back on a bike. But then it wouldn’t have felt like this back in Baltimore, where I was living when I bought the Panasonic. Where there are no bike lanes, and the drivers seethe with anger and impatience.

No, nothing about Baltimore ever caused me to wonder why I wasn’t riding a bike. Even if I had wondered, there was the example of my brother to consider. Of all the phone messages one can find waiting at the end of a relaxed afternoon at a coffee shop, perhaps one of the more unpleasant is a notification from a stranger that he’s just helped your brother to the emergency room after a bike accident. That was the first of two occasions so far on which I’ve had the pleasure of watching my brother get biking-related stitches in his face.

What was unclear to me was why — after these accidents, and given the overall bike unfriendliness of Baltimore — my brother felt such a strong urge to keep biking through the city.  When my parents would fantasize in my presence about how relieved they would feel if he gave it up, or restricted it to parks and trails, I didn’t disagree.

For me, the incomprehensible thing about urban cyclists was their willingness to put their lives in the hands of whatever driver happened to be cruising past. Whenever I squeezed around a bicyclist in my own car, on one of Baltimore’s narrow-laned avenues, I couldn’t help but think about the mere inches that were separating the cyclist from the ER and me from having to fill out a lot of forms.

And there’s the rub: the situation wasn’t life or death for me, the driver, so — while of course, being a good egg, I was going to try to be careful — I wasn’t necessarily not going to take a bite of my bagel or look for something better on the radio at the same time. No matter how skilled the cyclist, all it takes is a driver having a bad day or even just trying to staunch a mustard drip from his lake-trout sandwich and everything changes.

There are worse things than having your face stitched up or even dying, though. I’ve been riding almost daily for the past several weeks, and it’s clear to me now that leaving the casual joys of bike riding behind in the dusty back room of childhood memories should rank high on that list. No doubt some of the novelty will wear off, but at this point I think it’s safe to say that this is an activity that needs to be part of my life from here on out, no matter where I end up living.

From behind the wheel, a bike may just look vulnerable to the weather and dangerous and slow. But you can always pack a windbreaker along for rain, and when you are the one doing the biking, you notice all the thousands of times cars don’t hit you, which makes you start to feel like the odds are a little better than you once thought.

As for slow: perhaps, but at least you don’t have to hunt for a parking space. Besides, when is the last time your fast drive to the video store thrilled you, relaxed you, made you feel more alive? Even on a simple trip to the video store, when you are riding a bike the earth rolls smoothly past beneath you and you feel free, just like a kid again, just like in that dream of flying.

P.S. Wear your helmets, dummies.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.