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I got my Rivendell Atlantis when my grandmother died. She left behind a safe deposit box with about five grand. That’s essentially nothing. I chose to spend it on something that would be durable and essential to my life, and settled on an Atlantis, Rivendell’s touring frame. It’s a posh bike. My friend, Ben Tabor, built it in the shop where he worked. I asked him to build me the bike of his dreams.  Ben and I went on rides together. Ben is perhaps the best storyteller I’ve met. He has one of those mothers who always brings something, always has a present for someone when she visits. It’s a gift. Even if it is a Costco pack of imitation crab. Even if that someone is a vegetarian. Ben might have been able to tell great stories without her example, but she gifted him with some fabulous content. They taught me that there’s deep love in the relationship between the one who is heavy handedly ridiculous and the one who narrates the other’s antics.

In my vision, the bike would take me everywhere. In a way it did. We went camping together. I say “we” because the bike was also a protectant against loneliness. We travelled. We rode between 100 and 120 miles, on some stretches, alongside rivers, through the high desert of Eastern Oregon, and over Cascade range. I rode to meet a friend, or just to meet the coastline.

Growing up in a suffocating house with my volatile parents, my bike gave me a chance to wear out my restlessness and find balance. It gave me access to places and people, but I generally chose not to stop. Stopping is beside the point. Destinations are beside the point. The point is to ride and ride. I covered my neighborhood in larger and larger circles. As I got older, I found it easier to make friends by adding bike rides to the mix.

When I graduated from college, I took my Atlantis to Spain. I rode over some mountains from Granada to Malaga to meet my dad. I hadn’t seen much of him since I’d first had my bike built. I was the last person in the family to be on speaking terms with him after the divorce. The ride there took everything out of me. First, I’d arrived at the airport the day before my bike, and I’d slept in clay ditch beside a road leading to the airport. It had flooded earlier that week, and I awoke with my things covered in the clay mud into which I’d spent the night sinking. It was still not quite sunrise, but I think I must have been a little scared. I carried my things to a gas station, used the hoses at the car wash to rinse my bags and sleeping mat. Over a cookie bar breakfast the attendant gave me directions. He let me pass the next hour before the appointed time for my bike’s pick up playing my ukulele. I’d taken it up as an extremely portable instrument, but it sounded a lot like a cheap toy guitar played by a clumsy amateur. After I retrieved my bike, I rode south. It was easy to find people to stay with and talk to in southern Spain.

When at last I arrived in Malaga and met up with my dad, he talked me into visiting our family friend in Sweden for the winter. I think he worried about the both of us. We packed up my bike and I flew with it to Malmo, across the water from Copenhagen. Kurt was kind of an uncle to me. He’d been an engineer on a boat that took commuters between the cities, and no one needed his services once a bridge had been constructed. It blew him out of the water in another sense, I guess, because he gradually stopped caring about various details of his life. I spent a weird winter of circumnavigating the town by foot and pedal, coming home from the library and reading to him on the couch. His satellite services had been cancelled, so instead of finding his eyes glued to a program I found him mesmerized by a blue screen.

In previous trips to stay with him, I rode a bike that I kept behind the house in a shed. A Monarch, it was the Swedish equivalent to, say, a Raleigh. The same brand was used by the post office to deliver the mail. My tattoo has an owl on a bike because of a night I lost my way on a ride back to Kurt’s place. I’d wound up in a church graveyard, riding through high hedges, and I felt besieged by the droves of hares who’d been lying on the pavement and were darting in all directions to get away from me.

When I went back to see Kurt after graduation, he’d become so sad. In fact, he died a year later, because he sat so much and for so long that it ruined the blood flow to his legs. I lasted a couple of months of looking for a job here and there, getting short-lived stint delivering the news, but mostly just walking and riding between the library, the café, and the mall. I found the mall comforting, and I liked to take a walk there in the evening and look at things. There was something exotic about being in such an everyday space as an outsider, examining the way Swedish companies packaged their crap.

When the New Year arrived, I agreed to meet some Swedish friends in Berlin to party.  I rode partway there, starting out for the ferry at Trelleborg not long before nightfall. It was exciting! I remember grabbing a hot dog with mashed potatoes at a gas station, sprinkling fried onions on it, and thinking that Europe was full of useful road food for long distance cycling. I got lost and frustrated, but I arrived at the ferry well before boarding. I’ve ridden it a few times now, but I’m not sure I understand. After locking my bike to a pole on the car deck, I headed inside and looked for a seat. There aren’t really seats. There’s a café, there’s one seated area that, for some reason, I always avoided. There’s a corridor that leads to a sauna with one-person cedar barrel bath in one corner and a tanning bed in another. It would be cool, but it’s impossible to lock the door. When Kurt was alive and well, he frequently made trips to Germany to bring back loads of undeclared alcohol and cigarettes whose taxes were much lower outside of Sweden. I imagined this was the same task of some of the men who, like me, wandered around the common spaces with a cheap ticket and occasionally shared the aisle floors in the little red-lit movie theater that never played a film.

At dawn, the ferry arrived in Rostock. It’s not actually Rostock, I learned. I had a long, winding, often misleading ride to the town itself and its train to Berlin. I thought I might just keep riding south again, and I tried, but my first night camping outside of Potsdam was miserable. The exercise had worn out my ability to stay warm, the trees creaked together in ways that sounded like laughter, and I was not unreasonably terrified of wild boars. The next morning, I rode back to the same youth hostel in Berlin where I’d spent New Year’s Eve. On the way back to Rostock, I got lost again. I wandered through the strangest place, some kind of disused factory with a huge campus and no one, no one around.

When I brought the bike back to the States, to try out life-after-college, I lived several miles from work and rode for about three hours every day. Over a bridge. Across a park. Late at night. Late enough to hear the birds wake up. I taught bike safety at elementary schools by day, worked as wine bar and hostess at an Italian place at night. On time off, I’d go bike camping alone or with friends. I usually found someone on the road to ride with in the summer.

Bike culture is different on the East coast. People who do not bike believe biking here is crazy. It is. However, it is less crazy than not biking. Ask any cyclist; they’ll tell you. It’s how we work the crazy out.