Being Prepared, Before Uber

As a teenager, I learned bike repair and basic first aid because I wanted to be self-sufficient on the road. 

As a Scout (We were still “Boy Scouts” in those days!), I had to learn first aid to advance from one rank to another, if I recall correctly.  Also, I learned some first aid techniques and lore—some of which contradicted what Scout leaders taught us—in one of my high school Health/Phys Ed classes. 

On the other hand, when it came to bike repair, my education was home-made.  Most of what I learned came from the first edition of the late Tom Cuthbertson’s wonderful Anybody’s Bike Book.  If the “For Dummies” series of books existed in those days, ABB could have been part of it:  It began with the assumption that, before you opened the book, you didn’t know the difference between a flat-bladed and Philips screwdriver, let alone a Schraeder and Presta valve.  But Cuthbertson would not have allowed his book to be called Bike Repair For Dummies; he had too much respect for his readers to do that.

Anyway, I wanted to learn bike repair and first aid, among other things, because I wanted to get on my bike one day and pedal some place far away, never to be seen or heard from again by anyone who knew me.  That fantasy came, in part, from being an adolescent and taking some things I read—from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to A Doll’s House—as well as movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--perhaps a bit too literally.  To be fair, I must say that I wasn’t suffering the fate of some Dickensian character.  Though I butted heads with my parents, teachers and other authority figures in my life, none were abusive.  However, I also knew that I couldn’t live any of the lives my parents and teachers, or any other adults in my life, envisioned for me, even if I didn’t quite know what sort of life I actually wanted to live.

You might say I wanted to run away.  I suppose I could have done that by joining the circus or the French Foreign Legion.  Believe it or not, I actually thought about giving myself over to the Legion one day when I passed by their recruitment office.  But getting on my bike and riding into the sunset, the fog or whatever else was on the horizon was more appealing. 

Even though I wanted to disappear, I didn’t want to get stranded someplace.  I wanted the power to move out, move away, move forward, move on — all on my own terms, in my own way.  I didn’t want to put myself at the mercy of anyone or anything else in an emergency.

That would mean, of course, having certain skills and tools when I was on my bike.  It would also mean carrying dimes (and, later, quarters, or whatever the local coinage was) for pay telephones—at least, for those places where there was a pay telephone!  By the time I took my first long bike tour, I had those things and some textbook knowledge of Spanish and French—and perhaps even less knowledge than I thought I had about a lot of other things!  But that is the topic of another blog post, perhaps another blog.

I am thinking about all of that now, after the bike ride I took today.  Every inch or centimeter of the route on this day’s ride was one I’d ridden numerous times before; my intent was simply to ride vigorously and enjoy myself on a gorgeous day.  And, yes, I planned on getting home:  After all, I have cats (and myself!) to feed.

I was descending the ramp of the Cross Bay-Veterans MemorialBridge (“the bridge to the Rockaways”) on the Beach Channel side.  I’d pedaled about 80 kilometers (50 miles) and had about another 25 (15) ahead of me. The wind blew at my back, so I expected to be home shortly.

There is a fairly sharp turn in the ramp on the Beach Channel side.  I have long since learned not to yield to the temptation of descending faster than Lindsey Vonn on the Super G at Val d’Isere; there isn’t much room if you have to dodge another cyclist—or, worse, a group of riders—coming in the opposite direction. Even a pedestrian, skater or dogwalker who’s “in the zone” and not paying attention to surroundings can lead to your being entangled. 

However, someone else hadn’t learned those lessons.  Or she simply lost control of her bike; from what I could see, she’d probably never before ridden so fast—or much at all.  When I saw her, she was flat on her back, crying in pain. 

Her boyfriend confirmed my suspicions.  He said she “couldn’t steer out” of the path of the retaining wall she crashed into.  She gasped, “It hurts to breathe”. I immediately suspected a fractured rib—or, judging from the scrapes and bruises on and around her left shoulder, a broken collarbone.  I also feared a possible concussion:  Neither she nor her boyfriend was wearing a helmet.  However, she said she didn’t feel dizzy and, after a few minutes, was able to stand up.  And, from what her boyfriend said, her shoulder, but not her head, hit that wall.

This is not the accident about which I've written today. 

I offered to help:  Call an ambulance, get ice from the bagel shop at the foot of the bridge, whatever else they needed.  “We’re OK,” he said.  I offered her my water bottle, which was about half full.  She drank from it. 

I then glanced at her bike.  The front wheel was a “pretzel”, but there didn’t appear to be any damage to the rest of the bike.  I opened up the front V-brake, which made it possible to move the bike, albeit with some difficulty.  I then apologized for not having a spoke wrench:  Although the wheel couldn’t be salvaged, I explained, at least it would make it easier to push the bike.    I also apologized for not having a wound dressing or other things the bagel shop probably wouldn’t have.  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said.  “We’re glad you stopped”.

They live about halfway between that bridge and my place. I asked if they had a way of getting home.  “We called a friend but he wasn’t home,” he explained.  “But don’t worry—we’ll just call Uber.”

Uber.  Nobody had even thought of such a service back when I was plotting my Great Bike Escape.  The only time I had seen the word “uber” was in one of those books I didn’t understand as well as I thought I did—or, more precisely, understood in the way only an adolescent, with no guidance, can understand it.  For all I know, that just might have been the way Nietzsche wanted it to be understood.

But I digress again.  I told the young man to be sure to remind the Uber-man (or woman) that he and his girlfriend have bikes.  Turns out, the Uber person was driving an SUV.  But he had no idea of where we were; he claimed his GPS couldn’t find it.

If he couldn’t find that, I don’t think any Uber driver—had such a person existed in my youth—could have found the places I thought I might ride to when I left home, my head full of the stuff I’d been taught and the bike repairs I’d learned on my own.  And, even if the driver could find them, he (who almost surely would have been male in those days) would not have wanted to go there, any more than many New York taxi drivers would want to take a big black man who wanted to go to Brownsville.

Finally, the young man called a local car service the girl at the bagel shop counter knew about.  They indeed had a van and said it would be “no problem” to go to the young couple’s apartment.

In some of the places where I’ve ridden, there aren’t car services.  Or bagel shops.  Or, for that matter, bike shops.  Perhaps I wasn’t as ready for them as I thought it was. But I survived and had fun, and I had a great bike ride today.

The Bridge, When We Come To It: A Shuttle

A couple of years before I started this blog, the walkway of the Veterans’ Memorial Bridge, which connects Rockaway Beach with the Queens “mainland”, closed for repairs.  The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls the bridge and most others (as well as tunnels, the PATH trains and the Port itself) in this area, provided a shuttle van across the bridge during the “cycling season”, which PATH deemed to run from May to October. 

Of course, it wasn’t as convenient as riding across the bridge walkway.  And, of course, it stranded those of us who ride year-round.  But at least the service was reliable and the drivers courteous and helpful.  

 

I can say the same things about the driver I encountered today on the shuttle across the Bayonne Bridge.  He is a Port Authority contractor, as were the drivers who ferried us across the Veterans Memorial Bridge.  I don’t know whether he’s a cyclist or not, but he said there needs to be more bike access on bridges and other byways.  “Cycling and walking have to be encouraged,” he said.  “There’s just too much traffic.”

As courteous and helpful as he was to me, I didn’t get the sense he was parroting some party line or simply what he thought I wanted to hear.  If anything, I had the sense he’s the sort of person who doesn’t do—or, perhaps, is incapable—of such things.  So, when he unloaded my bike on the Staten Island side of the bridge, I thanked him profusely.  “I’m just doing my job,” he demurred.

But that, of course, wasn’t the only reason I was expressing gratitude.  As I get older, I am more grateful for my opportunities to ride as well as for the great and small ways in which people are helpful or simply hospitable—and, of course, for a gorgeous day like today.

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.