Tag: bicycle

I’m an emphatically utilitarian cyclist.  My bike is my only ride.  It is my way of going.  It is point A to point B with a pile of stuff.  But that’s not all it is, and sometimes I forget.

I started biking 20 years ago when I was 14 and living in Japan as an exchange student.  It was how everyone got to school.  Every morning was a flood of blue wool uniforms on classic bikes going clickety-click and ding-ding.  Baskets, fenders, and not much in the way of gears.  So it was utilitarian there too, but I also used my bike as an anti-depressant.  I didn’t speak Japanese when I got there.  My family didn’t speak English.  All the other students were always busy with homework.  I was lonely to the point of tears.  Sometimes I’d ride around after school until dark.  Sometimes beyond dark, in the rain and the wind.  I discovered fireflies in a peace park one night.  I let a typhoon blow me across the plain.  I climbed hills and had crashes.  It was a kind of love affair, it was something I could feel unabashedly good about, even if my host family thought I was crazy for staying out and getting drenched.  It was deep rhythmic breathing and endorphins.  It was still lonely, but at least I was focused.  I felt free.  When I came back to the US, I traded the circuitous hour and a half long school bus ride for an additional seventy nine minutes of sleep and an eleven minute bike ride each morning.