They Can Ride

 Tall, rawboned Felix is about my age but looks younger. We often pass each other when entering or leaving the building.  Today, as he often does, he asked where I planned to ride.

I told him I had no destination in mind; I simply wanted to get out. “I’m going to do that, too,” he declared, “when I get my bike, after the new year.” Sometimes he and Sam, my neighbor and sometime riding partner, hang out beside the building. “Perhaps me, you, Sam and a few other people.  We could have our own little cycling group.”

“Maybe…,” he intoned.

A couple of weeks ago, “Elena,” who lives two doors away from me, wheeled her machine—a mountain bike in white and Easter-egg hues—into the elevator next to Tosca, my Mercian fixed-gear. “I would like to ride like you,” she sighed.

“You don’t have to ride like me.” I was about to suggest riding with me when the elevator stopped on another floor and someone, apparently a friend of hers (whom I don’t know) started chatting with her. I didn’t want to interrupt.

And then there is “Richard,” who lives on a lower floor. When he sees me with my bike, he has to tell me about the rides he took “all over the city, and even further away.” I believe him; he seems to know about riding and looks like a former athlete. But, he explains, his life took some “really bad turns” through illnesses, which led to homelessness and “losing everything, including my bike.”  Many years have passed since then. “I wish I could ride again, but it was so long ago,” he lamented.

Not so long ago, I would have been dismissive of them, at least in my mind. I was one of those young (even when I wasn’t so young) cyclists who thought anyone who didn’t spend a certain number of hours or miles (or kilometers) on the “right” kinds of bikes and clad in “proper” bike clothes wasn’t a “real” cyclist.

Though I had begun to change long before I met Felix, Elena or Richard, I feel another shift (pun not intended) has happened for me since my trip to Japan. There, I saw probably as many, if not more, people pedaling to work or for pleasure as I saw in France or other European countries. But there didn’t seem to be the kind of self-consciousness (and, at times, self-righteousness) about equipment and other things that “cycle culture” seems to engender in my hometown of New York and other cities.   Most people rode utilitarian bikes with wide tires, fenders, racks and generator lights. You can’t one-up anybody who is riding a bike like yours, or those of most other people, for the same reasons you and they are riding. 

Even the cyclists—mostly young and male—I saw on lighter racing bikes didn’t seem to define themselves by their bikes (or, more precisely, those bikes’ price tags) or what they were wearing. They, and the commuters and families I saw, reminded me of why I came to love cycling. And I wish Felix, Elena and Richard could see them and realize they don’t have to ride like them, me or anyone else. Oh, and I don’t care that Elena’s bike is a Kent:  She’s riding it.