On Monday morning and early afternoon, I took Dee-Lilah, my Mercian Vincitore Special, for a spin out to Point Lookout and back: 120 kilometers (about 75!mikes). Yesterday morning I took Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear, for a shorter ride—about 40 kilometers (25 miles) to Fort Totten and back.
What did these rides have in common, besides the fact that I enjoyed them? Well, both bikes are purple, though in different shades. Also, I timed both rides to, as best I could, finish before the most intense heat—and worst air quality (those Canadian wildfires, again!) of the day.
Both rides also have something in common with every other ride I’ve taken in my life: I rode without headphones, eat buds or any other audio device. Sometimes I feel I’m the only person who still rides that way.
I think I’ll always ride that way. For one thing, I don’t want to impede my ability to hear traffic or other ambient sounds—including bird sings and ocean tides. But I also believe don’t need devices to hear music, if only inside my own mind.
Back in the day, the term “ear worm” didn’t exist. (At least, I hadn’t heard it.) I would,!however, find myself riding to a tune playing through my head—usually, somethings I’d heard not long before.
I first noticed myself riding to a tune I was carrying with me during a ride when I was, probably, fifteen years old. I’d been pedaling a long, flat stretch of New Jersey Route 36 from Sandy Hook to Long Branch. The ocean stretched thousands of miles to my left—it years would pass before I saw the other side. The sky stretched even further above and beyond me. And, even though I knew the road ended—or, more precisely changed direction—in Long Branch and I was gliding toward it on a combination of youthful energy and the wind at my back, I saw myself pedaling forward, forced, even further than that road could take, or my own vision could guide, me.
That ride’s ear worn before there were ear worms? The long guitar riff of Black Sabbath’s “Rat Salad.” It’s trippy yet hard-driving and expansive: the way I was pedaling on that long-ago ride.
And what did I hear as I pedaled, with a light breeze at my back, along the long,f flat—and surprisingly deserted—Rockaway Boardwalk? You guessed it: Rat Salad. As Kurt Vonnegut would have said, I was woozy with deja vu.
Oh, and during yesterday’s ride, my “ear worm” was an overture from Debussy’s “La Mer”: one of the first pieces of classical music I came to truly love—and an “ear worm” on another long-ago ride.
Given what I’ve described, you might think I was a strange kid. I wouldn’t try to disabuse you of such a notion. Of course, you may think I’m an even stranger adult—one in mid-life—because I’ve never ridden, and intend never to ride, with headphones, ear buds or any other audio device.
