Miss Mercian Arrives

So…The day after I crossed state lines to ride my bike, I’m rewarded for my bad behavior.

My next bike has arrived.  The Miss Mercian I ordered back in February arrived at Bicycle Habitat.  Hal Ruzal, Habitat’s longtime mechanic and Mercian maven, has just unpacked it for me:

He wanted to leave it wrapped so it won’t get dinged if someone decides to move it.  It’s funny:  A frame is actually at more risk of marring when it hasn’t yet been built up. 

The finish is the same as on Arielle and Tosca, my other two Mercians .  My new bike will have many of the same components as those other bikes (e.g., King headset, Phil Wood hubs, Mavic Open Pro Rims, DT spokes).  However, the lady will sport “porteur” handlebars rather than the dropped bars on my other Mercians.  It will also have fenders and a rack, which my other Mercians don’t have.  Also, I will ride it with wider (700 X32 C) tires.

Getting a new bike is always exciting.  However, this one is special for me because it’s my first nice ladies’/mixte frame.  And I think of it as a birthday present to myself, even if that seems a bit self-indulgent. 

Finally, it’s my first new bike since my surgery.  And my three Mercians were all purchased in my life as Justine.  So, in a sense, they’re all mine in a way that none of my previous bikes, however good, were.

Crossing Another State Line From Memory

Is Arielle inspiring wanderlust in me?  Or does she have it all on her own, and does she merely take me along for the ride?

Today we crossed another state line.  So that makes two-- Pennsylvania two weeks ago, when I rode to the Delaware Water Gap, and Connecticut today—since my surgery.

Going to New Jersey doesn’t count.  Not really.  Or does it?  We New Yorkers sometimes say that Jersey is a foreign country.  I wonder whether the Brits say that about the eponymous island in the English Channel.  Although it’s a semi-independent part of Great Britain, it’s actually much closer to France and has a language--Jerriais-- that bears more resemblance to French than it does to English.

Then again, lots of people would like to think of anyplace where Snooki would live as a country different from their own. Otherwise, they’d start campaigns to deport her.

Anyway, I started my ride by crossing the RFK Memorial (nee Triboro) Bridge to Randall’s Island and the Bronx, through neighborhoods where women don’t ride bikes.  I made a wrong turn somewhere north of Fordham Road and ended up on a highway and riding a square around the perimeter of the Botanical Gardens.  From there, I managed to find my way to Westchester County.

For someone who lives in New York, I really don’t spend much time in Westchester County.  Occasionally a ride will take me to Yonkers or Mount Vernon, both of which are just over the city line from the Bronx.  But I never have felt much inclination to explore the rest of the county.

Part of the reason might be that my first experience of cycling in Westchester County came the year after I came back from living in France.  That in itself can make Westchester, and lots of places, seem like a comedown.  (I think now of the time I ate a particularly bad take-out dinner the day after returning from a cycling trip through the Pyrenees and the Loire Valley!) But I first entered Westchester County on a bike near the end of a cycling trip from Montreal to New Jersey, where I was living at the time.  I had cycled through some nice Quebec countryside, the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain and the Berkshires before entering New York State near the point where it borders on Massachusetts and Connecticut. 

That night, I slept in a cemetery that was in or near the town of Austerlitz, NY.  It was a clear, moonlit and pleasantly cool evening.  I had no idea (and wouldn’t find out until the next day) where I was, and I had almost no money left.  So I simply rolled out my sleeping bag.   I slept fine:  There was absolutely nothing to disturb me.  And I guess I was a good neighbor.

After all that, Westchester County seemed like just a place with lots of big houses and lawns and a bunch of golf courses.  It wasn’t bad; it was just a bit of a letdown, I guess.

Later, Westchester would become the place where friends of Eva, Elizabeth and Tammy lived.  And all of those friends didn’t like me, or so it seemed.  Going to their homes felt a bit like going to the in-laws’ or to a relative of one of your parents—and that relative didn’t like your other parent, and saw you as his/her child.

Fortunately, I didn’t think about any of those things today.  I didn’t see as many houses that seemed like ostentatious versions of houses the owners saw on their European trips as I recall seeing in previous treks through the county.  And, when I stopped in a gas station/convenience store for a bottle of iced tea, I saw the friendliest and most polite attendant I have seen in a long time.  He’s from Liberia.

I hadn’t started out with the intention of going to Connecticut.  But after stopping at the gas station/convenience store, I realized that I wasn’t far from the Mamaroneck harbor.  So I rode there, along a fairly meandering road where two drivers pulled over to ask me whether I knew how to get to the Westchester Mall.  It’s funny:  People assume that because you’re on a bike, you live nearby and are familiar with the area.

From Mamaroneck, I took another road that zigged and zagged toward and away from the shore of Long Island Sound to Rye.  There, I knew that I wasn’t far from Connecticut, so I continued along the road to Port Chester, the last town before the border.

I only took a few photos, and none of them came out well.  But that part of the ride was pleasant, even charming at times.  Then, after crossing the state line, I ventured up the road into downtown Greenwich.  I’d have gone further, but I started later than I intended to and didn’t particularly want to ride the last few miles of my trip in the dark.  I’m not adverse to night riding; I just didn’t feel like doing it tonight.

In Greenwich, about half a mile from the state line, there’s an Acura dealer.  Just up the road from it is an Aston Martin/Bentley dealer, and a bit further up the road are a BMW, then a Mercedes, dealership.  So, I’m guessing that the annual per-capita income of that town is probably not much less than I’ve made in my entire life.

On my way back, I rode down Huguenot Avenue.  It’s in Little Rock.  Actually, it’s in  New Rochelle, a town founded by the people for whom the avenue is named. (The town is named for La Rochelle, the French port from which most of them sailed.  “Rochelle” means “little rock.”)  If any of you recall The Dick Van Dyke show, which featured a young Mary Tyler Moore, you’re old.  Seriously, you might remember that the show took place in New Rochelle.  The town has changed a bit since then, as you can see from new structures like this:

It connects the local Trump Tower (How many of those things are there?) with another building on the other side of the Avenue.  I wonder whether cyclists are allowed to ride in it.

Assembling the Pieces

Whenever I visit my parents in Florida, I see people riding "adult trikes."  They're different from the three-wheelers some of us rode as toddlers because the adult versions have chain-and-sprocket drives, just like almost any other adults' bike, while most toddler trikes have cranks that are attached to the axle of the front wheel.  And, of course, the versions some of us rode before we could balance two wheels are smaller than the ones one sees in the retirement communities.


Most of the adult trikes also have baskets, or some other sort of carrier, between the two rear wheels.  Those bikes are something like this:

However, what this man is riding didn't start off as one of those bikes men in golf hats pedal around artificial ponds.  Rather, it was once the sort of balloon-tired bike many kids--including, perhaps, you, dear reader--rode during the 1950's and early 1960's.  Some were quite elegant, in their own ways.  Some others made conscious efforts to emulate the "streamlining" of the vessels made during the automobile's baroque era/the space program's early days.  


I tried to get the man to stop and tell me how he put the bike together.  But he didn't hear me or didn't want to talk.  Given that he was porting something in his rear basket, he may well have been in the middle of some appointed round or another.  Having been a bike messenger, I understand how he might have felt.


My guess is that the rear wheels and axles came from some kind of bicycle pushcart.  When I was a kid, Good Humor ice cream and other things were sold from them in Prospect Park and other large public spaces.  Or the parts may have come from a regular pushcart or vendor's wagon.   Whatever went into that bike, making it was certainly a creative endeavor.


Here in New York, one can see all sorts of odd, interesting and sometimes scary permutations of bikes and parts.  Nearly all of them are contraptions I would never think of riding myself, much less putting together. Then again, I've been fortunate enough to have worked in bike shops and to have found ways to gather the means necessary to put together the sorts of bikes I've wanted.  (I can't remember the last time I bought a new complete bike; I've either bought frames I've built up or have bought--or was given, or found-- used bikes that I've modified.) I have custom bikes and others I've modified, but bikes like the one in the photo are unique in ways that I never could imagine.


They make me think of some of the ways people take whatever they find and use them to create, or at least assemble, something that suits (more or less, sometimes) their needs and whims.


So, perhaps, it's no surprise that they should remind me of how languages are formed and how literature and other creative forms of expression come to be.  Much about the "product" may not make sense to those who had nothing to do with creating it or who don't use it.  It doesn't make any sense that a word that sounds like "thru" could be spelled "through" or "threw" until we realize where each of the words--and the combinations of sounds and letters that comprise them--came from. 


English, like most living languages, was assembled from bits and pieces of other languages and other kinds of sounds in an attempt to communicate as e ffectively as possible in the environment in which it was created.  Dialects and other variants of the languages come from the grafting of still other pieces in an attempt to portray realities that previous speakers didn't encounter.  The kid who first rode the bike that became the trike in the photo probably never rode a poorly-paved street in an urban area or had to carry much beyond his or her bookbag to school.  But the man riding the trike contends with those realities.  He probably doesn't have much money, so he (or whoever put the bike together) used whatever could be found that could be made to do the job.  In the process,  some of those parts were altered; on some bikes, things might be altered beyond recognition.


That's not so different from what's happened to all those words we use every day but are pronounced differently--and might mean entirely different things--from the way they were used by those who first used them. Something similar happens to music.  Listen to Julie Andrews' My Favorite Things, then hear what John Coltrane did with it and you'll better understand what I mean.


When I was young and broke (as opposed to merely poor), I assembled a couple of bikes from what was available to make those bikes work in ways and under conditions the makers and orginal owners may not have envisioned.   I have also made meals, put together outfits and, yes, written reports and even poems in a similar way.  And, as you might've guessed, I was doing something similar, in a way, when I tried to explain how I feel to members of my family and friends, not to mention doctors and others from whom I sought help.  I pulled together various words and other expressions, images, metaphors and other ephemeral intellectual and emotional flotsam to convey something that would be as new a reality to them as it was for me when I first understood it about myself.


To be one's self and to master, rather than to be subsumed by, one's environment is itself a creative act.  So is making whatever is necessary in order to be able to function in the situations one encounters.  Whoever built the bike in the photo did exactly that.


I'd love to know what that person would do with this: