Rider to the Sea

Today I went for a ride by the sea:

Yes, that's a photo of me...in another life!  

Actually, I got the photo from the blog Bike by the Sea.  It's already become one of my favorite photos, or images of any kind.  In fact, I've made it the wallpaper on my laptop.  What do I have in my computer on my desk at the college?  A photo of Rodin's Je Suis Belle, which is actually part of his La Porte d'Enfer:

It is my favorite piece of sculpture.  And the image of the woman on her bike by the sea may well become my favorite photo.

Anyway...I actually did take a ride to the sea today.  I started late, but I felt motivated when I saw this after about a dozen miles of riding:

Although I had seen it many times before, a tear came to my eye when I saw the sea horizon from the apex of the Cross Bay Bridge, which connects an isthmus that's about four miles long and three blocks wide (Broad Channel, in Queens) with the Rockaway Peninsula, which is also about three blocks wide but about twelve miles long.  

On the peninsula is Rockaway Beach--yes, the one the Ramones sing about!

As much as I have always loved the Ramones, though, that's not the reason why a tear came to my eye.  What happened, at the moment I saw the sea meeting the sky, was that I was having a very intense memory.  The first time--that I can recall, anyway--I ascended the arc of a bridge on my bicycle and saw the horizon of the ocean, I was about thirteen or fourteen.  My family had moved to New Jersey a year or two before that, and on that day I crossed the Highlands Bridge from the eponymous borough to Sandy Hook and Sea Bright.

That day, I had taken the longest ride I had taken up to that time in my life:  25 miles.  It was, believe it or not, the first ride I took for my bicycling merit badge.  (Believe it or not, the Boy Scouts actually had one.)  But that's not the reason why that ride was so important to me.

You see, back then, I knew that I was alone--or, at least, that not many, if any at all, people would ever know me.  Other kids picked on me for all sorts of reasons,  So, I wasn't going to make any effort to get to know them better, and I certainly wasn't going to make any effort to get closer to them.   

But in that horizon of the sea, where light and water become each other, everything is as fluid and seems as graceful as the waves of mist that rise from the sea or fall like a curtain from the sky, depending on how you look at it.  

I could immerse myself in that vision and, for a moment, transcend my ill-fitting, ungainly body and see myself as a nimble mind and blithe spirit swimming through the world with the wisdom of the ages.  

In other words, I could dare to see myself, if only for a moment, as the person I was within myself:  a female, with both the lightness of those waves and the weight of rays refracted through the mist.

That day was the first time in my life I felt tired but somehow fulfilled, filled with an understanding of how difficult things would be but with the knowledge of who and what I was and would need to be in order to live through it all.  It's almost as if the woman I would finally begin to live as was telling this boy who was just entering his teen years that, yes, things are going to be difficult, but that he would be all right.  

And somehow it was all connected to riding my bicycle.

So what happened today?  I ended up here:  

I took that photo from Point Lookout.  Behind those birds and to their left is Jones Beach; even further to their left is Fire Island.


Those birds probably flew further than I rode my bike up to that point:  33 miles.  When I got there, a woman named Catherine, whose husband was sailing in the bay, started a conversation with "Nice bike!"  She was impressed that I'd ridden from Astoria, even if it's the first time I've done it in more than a year. She asked how I felt.  "Tired, a bit sore," I said.  She wondered how I'd get back.  


"I'm going to ride back," I said.


"Will you be OK?"


"Well, there are a couple of places where I could bail out.  I could get on the LIRR in Long Beach or on the A train in the Rockaways."


"Sounds like a plan.  They don't charge you extra."


"No.  You're supposed to have a bike permit on the LIRR, but the conductors never enforce it.  At least, I have one, but they've never asked to see it."


Even though I may never meet Catherine again, I wanted to be able to say "I did it!"  And I did.  So I did a total of sixty-six miles--a bit more than a metric century.  So far, that's my longest ride since my surgery.


Surprisingly, the first twenty-five miles or so back were easier than the ride out to Point Lookout.  Part of it had to do with the direction of the wind.  But I think I also just knew that I was going to finish that ride.  I have done it many times before; why not today?, I asked myself.


By the way, this is--believe it or not--the A train:

It may not be what Duke Ellington had in mind.  But passengers can stay on that train and, in about another hour and a half, end up in Harlem.  


After seeing this along the way,

I got back to Astoria.  It's next to Hell Gate, where the East River (which is really an inlet of the ocean) meets Long Island Sound.  


I guess I am still, and will always be, a rider to the sea.  Really, I didn't want to change that.