The other day, I took a ride I hadn’t taken in a long,
long time.
I ended up in Long Branch, New Jersey, as I’d
planned. I rode there back in December. But I made a wrong turn just
as I was leaving the industrial and post-industrial necropolis of north-central
New Jersey took a very different route from the one I’d planned. I didn’t mind: It was a very satisfying ride
that took me away from the traffic streaming in and out of the shopping malls
that day, the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend.
But on Sunday I took the route I rode so many
times in my youth, through the weathered Jersey Shore communities that line
Route 36 from Keyport to the Highlands.
So much was as I remembered it from the last time I rode it, twenty years
ago, and the first time I rode it, twenty years before that. Then I crossed
over the arched bridge that spans the Shrewsbury River where it empties into
Sandy Hook Bay and drops into the spit of land that separates the river and bay
from the Atlantic Ocean.
At the top of the bridge, the ocean stretches as
far as you can see. Whether it was bluer than any eye or stone I’ve ever seen,
or grayer than steel, nothing made me better than seeing it and descending that
bridge.
Here is something I wrote about the experience of
doing that ride for the first time as a woman named Justine—after many, many
journeys as a boy and man named Nick:
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Yesterday’s ride brought back memories of the
race.
I did not make the turn. I could not.
I did not for many, many years.
But yesterday I did.
Either way meant pedaling uphill. To the left I went. Two hills, instead of one. Between them, a brief flat, where I could
regain some of the momentum I’d lost.
But the climbs were neither as long nor as steep
as I remembered. I forgot that I’m not
in as good shape as I was the last time I did this ride, this race, more than
twenty years ago.
To get to the ocean and back. That was all I had to do in those days. To the ocean and back before dark, before the
air grew as cold and night as false as the water, as the reflections on
it: my reflections.
All I had to do was get back for dinner. At least, that’s all I was told to do. Sunday; you simply did not miss dinner. You couldn’t even be late for it. So there was only so much time to get there,
to get to the ocean and back.
I am pedaling on memory now. My body’s memory: the only kind. The first time I did this ride, when I was a
teenager. The last time, twenty years
later, twenty years ago.
Before the memory, I knew nothing. I could only move ahead, I could only
pedal. Gotta make it. I could not
stop. My memory of this ride, this race, could not, could not let me. You
will. I could not hear; when you’re
in this race, you can’t.
On that flat between the climbs, a woman walked
toward me. She says something; I can
only see her. She knows me perfectly
well; I don’t. She does not stop me; I
cannot.
She would climb these hills many more times. You’ll
make it! How does she know? I have no other choice.
The climb is easier when you have a memory of the
race. It’s inevitable. You couldn’t go any other way. There is only the race, the climb, that ends
at a bridge that you’ll cross because there is no other way over the bay, to
the ocean.
Because I made the turn. Because I couldn’t have
gone any other way. Not when a teenaged
boy’s elbows and knees slung him forward on his saddle and up the hills. Not when the memory of a woman in late middle
age, the electricity in her flesh—his flesh—guides the wheels beneath her,
beneath him, over the bridge and to the ocean.
The day is clear.
Reflections of the sun pulse; she moves the weight of his bones down a
narrow strip between the bay and the ocean all the way to the end. His end, where he turned around for the
race. He would have to get there and
back while he could; she knew he would but he could not. He could not have known. He could only push; he could only pump.
The sunset is even clearer. Weathered houses stand ready; the abandoned
ones lost to the tides. I am pedaling
into the wind but my bike rolls as easily and smoothly over cracked asphalt as
boats, sails like wings fluttering between ripples of water and clouds.
They will reach their shores, whoever is guiding
them, whoever guided them years ago. I
came to the end of yesterday’s ride on my memory of a race: the teenaged boy who first followed these
roads, the young man who did not know how to turn; the man who would not—and,
finally, twenty years later, the woman who could not. She crossed the bridge to the ocean.
Yesterday I rode on the memory of that race, the
race that I am.
