Out and Back
The most popular vehicle in the world is the Flying Pigeon. It's made in China and the company has sold 500 million of them. The design was established 135 years ago and even though all sorts of little parts have been improved, it is basically the same machine. You can walk outside almost anywhere and there is one rolling by. Today there are over a billion bicycles in the world. A very fast woman rode 184 mph behind a very fast car. A wickedly determined man rode across the U.S. in seven days and fifteen hours. My brother Kevin rode 272 miles with 20,000 feet of climbing in 26 hours. For his sixtieth birthday. Athletes. One woman rode the equivalent of nearly four times around the Earth in one year. Endurance athletes.
From my bike saddle, I've seen lightning, way way too close (KA BOOM!), snakes, (yeah, too many of those), hawks, eagles, falcons, pigeons, wooly bears, slugs (one rainy day was slug-a-palooza, super gross), redwoods, a microburst thrashed forest, a dead owl (might have been napping, but I think not), a very alive mountain lion (Go Aero, Eyes Up), fog, sunsets, deep green forests, the rain they used for Noah's flood, poppy fields, blue ridges, blood and broken bikes. (Sorry Kev). I've eaten bugs, dust and mud, been injured in my driveway by my bike, and I have been helicoptered out from the high Sierra after a stupid crash. (Sorry Kev). I have ridden with close pals, friends, lovers, a wife, brothers, strangers, lots of strangers, sweet strangers, and mean people. I met a couple at the top of Middlebury Gap just south of here who, when asked where they started, they smiled and said, "Portugal." I rode 167 miles one day around Vermont with Kev and Steve, a day I will savor forever. One day with these two, while they were fixing a flat on Whipple Hollow Road on the ride Steve calls "Castle Flow," I fell asleep on my bike. Story for another time.
But why ride? It's not like I accomplished anything while zooming across the countryside. Sisyphus pushes his rock. I ride out and back. What's the allure? Mark Twain said, "Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." (See above, Life Flight, woo hoo). Well, there's dopamine -- brain synthesis chemistry in high gear. Endorphins, yes please and thank you, I'll-have-a-bit-more-please. There's ADHD management in real time when stuff is sailing by at forty miles an hour. I'm a better animal in motion than sitting in a chair. Clarity prevails on a bike.
But mostly, the answers are all above. It's private time to understand the landscape. It's social time to understand people and my place in the fabric. It's internal time to go all-out crushing the climb in full sufferfest mode, or coast along the coast. It's being out in all weather and saying howdy to all the critters who live here. It's oxygen in and problems out. It's the visual food for the creative soul -- the time to wrestle with the art piece smoldering in the back of my brain and placidly laughing at me from the studio. It's being one with the universe with an elevated heart rate. Don't ride? Should you get a bike? In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the bike salesman says, "Sure, it'll change your whole life for the better, but that's all."
AND, finally, what's this have to do with art? Read every tenth word above (you know what I mean). Velocity of reality. Light. Clarity. The universe and my place in it. Blood. Brothers. Mist. Out and back. Endurance.
And suddenly, these paragraphs written a couple weeks ago seem so flip. Who cares? The world is on fire! Disease. Murder. Politics. HAVOC.
On the radio was a story this week of a man in India who got injured and couldn't do his job. His wife, home and kids were 700 miles away. The pandemic came and his daughter who had moved in to nurse him to health was down to their last $20. She bought a bicycle, put her father on the seat, their meagre belongings on the back and rode a single speed bicycle all the way home. In a week. Standing up the whole way. 100 miles a day. She is fifteen years old. They had no money and no food. People along the way fed them and they slept in the fields on the side of the road.
I have neighbors who put together fifty bags of groceries a week to give away because they didn't want anyone suddenly out of a job to be hungry. I have a friend who is an ER doc and stayed away from his family, sleeping in the basement or in an empty condo after treating Covid patients all night. An artist buddy is selling art online everyday and sending the money to a food bank fifteen hundred miles away. Each of us can play a role. If you have some to give, give.
Now more than ever we need love, humanity, and patience. We need a sense of dignity and restraint, respect for each other and their challenges. Get up from the crash and say, 'I'm sorry, we can work this out." Picture that angry person at their limit and imagine them as a child on a tricycle. Just trying to make it go. Will a bike save the world? Nope, but the person making it go can. We need the fresh morning air and effort to get over this big hill. It's raining hard and the road is slippery? Go carefully. Head home. Out and back. We can do this. AND, consider that this is not about going 184 mph. It's endurance. In the Tour de France, almost any of those badass skinny athletes can win one day. It's the ones who survive every heatwave, snowfall, stomach bug, elbow, deluge, flat, shunt, cramp, crosswind, breakaway, sprint pile-up, nasty climb, fan freakout, and screaming mountain descent, that prevail. The world is inside-out right now, but, quoting my brother Kev, "The point of pain is the place of growth".
Anything I sell before July 4th, I will send 20% of the money to The National Black Child Development Institute. Do your part just a little bit extra right now when it's really needed. Somebody somewhere is sleeping alongside the road. Just trying to get home.
H.G. Wells, England's brilliant futurist, said, "Everytime I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." I wonder if he had a Raleigh. They were British, biggest bike makers on the planet at the time, based in Nottingham and started by a chap from Sherwood Forest... Sound familiar?
