Girls, Bikes And The City

On my way home from my "Hasidim and Hipster Fixies" ride, I met and chatted with another woman on a bike.   She's been living in Brooklyn for a while and wants to find some new rides.  And Bruce has told me that I make a good tourguide. So, we exchanged e-mail addresses and today we went for a ride along the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts, across the RFK Bridge into Randall's Island and alongside the East River in Manhattan. 


Helene was definitely "up" for this one.  She's wanted to have a girl's night, or day, out in the city!

One of the wonderful things about introducing someone to places you know well is that you discover new things in and about them.  We ventured into a part of Greenpoint I hadn't visited in a while, where we found a workshop of some kind:

Look at her, and look at the second statue from the left.  Of course, I had to get into the act:

I guess I'm not quite the performer she is.  Then again, I may not have had the right role.  Last week, in the midst of the sleep deprivation nearly all instructors experience at during the last days of a semester, one of my colleagues said I was looking a bit like Pierre de Wissant as he appeared in Rodin's Les Bourgeois de Calais.  

Anyway, I enjoyed the ride and the company of my new riding companion.  After we parted, Helene insisted that we stop here:

I mean, she has a point:  I have three Mercians (including her) with paint finish number 57:  a purple that turns green when you look at it from certain angles.  So now I need a house to go with them.  Hmm...If my book sells....

Reflections Cycling

All of my kidding aside, I really am a rather reflective and contemplative woman.  I've had to be.  Maybe that's why I sometimes, while riding, I see images of cyclists I might have been, or appeared to be:

Was this man riding to exhale?  Or would he be inspired?  Or some of both?  Actually, those questions apply to just about every cyclist one might encounter as a Saturday afternoon turns to dusk behind a curtain of high clouds.  For that matter, those questions could apply to pretty much anyone who cycled, walked, skated, skateboarded, fished from, or sat on the benches lining, the promenade that passes under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.


But what of two people on a tandem on the Coney Island boardwalk?

One doesn't see tandems very often in New York.  I'm guessing that the riders are a father and son or, perhaps, an uncle and nephew. 


When I was growing up, there still weren't very many adults who cycled.  None in my family did.  Even the owners and operators of most bike shops weren't riders:  They, like most adults, saw bicycles as the means of transportation people used only until they got their driver's licenses.  


The few adult cyclists one saw were almost invariably male.   And now I realize that, even today, the vast majority of adults I see riding are male.  Perhaps that is the reason why I see those images of who I was, or might have been.

Now I remember cycling along the ocean in New Jersey as a teenager.  From Sandy Hook south to Sea Bright, the wind and tides exhaled through shells and bones on the other side of the sea wall that separated the ocean from Route 36; south of Sea Bright, they sluiced through mounds and valleys of sand that stretched even farther than I could have cycled on any day I cycled, or the one after it, or the one after it.  How far, exactly, would it go?  To Key West?  At least I knew that if I were to cross the ocean--which, of course, I couldn't do on my bike--I'd end up in Portugal, in Spain, in France.   


Nobody I knew then had been to any of those places.  And they hadn't been to the places where they wanted me to go:  the colleges, Annapolis, West Point or any of the other Armed Forces academies.  Or, for that matter, the offices  they hoped I would occupy, or even the schools in which I would study and teach.


None of those schools existed, at least for me, when I was riding along the ocean so many years ago.  And nobody followed me:  nobody, that is, except for a middle-aged woman who told me to inhale deeply and exhale completely, and that everything would be all right because she was going to be there for me, no matter where I rode. 


And I was present today, as I always was, for that teenaged boy who spent sunny days and overcast afternoons cycling the Jersey Shore.  Perhaps I saw the person he might have been, too.  


  

Nocturne

Today I didn't go to a social function that I didn't really have to go to, but it might have been a good idea even though I might not have had the chance to see and talk with the people I really would've hoped to see there.  You probably have an event like that every year or two, or even more, especially if you work in the arts or "people-oriented" or "helping" areas like education.


Truth is, I was tired and wanted to sleep late.  I took care of a couple of errands and, at the very end of the day, took a quick spin out past PS 1 to the Long Island City piers.

The Long Island City Piers is one of the places to which I would bring a first-time visitor to New York.  I think the only  way one can get a view of the Manhattan skyline that's as good as the one from the LIC piers is to go to the Brooklyn Heights promenade, or to take the B, D, N or Q subway lines across the Manhattan Bridge or board the Staten Island Ferry in Staten Island.  However, each of those views is more limited in scope.  The wonderful thing about the view from the piers is that it's just about picture-postcard perfect, for only the narrowest part of the East River separates it from the United Nations, Chrysler Building (which has always been my favorite New York skyscraper) and Empire State building.  

Actually, the half mile width of the East River (which is really a tidal basin) wasn't stretching in front of me, exactly.  It was Marianela who got up-close and personal:

As I was sitting on one of the benches, munching on something called a "French wrap" (ham, Brie, Dijon mustard and a couple of other things) I recalled the times in my youth when I watched the sun set from the Christopher and 14th Street piers in Manhattan.  It was all lovely, although the view wasn't what I had today.  From those piers, you can look only toward the New Jersey side of the Hudson River.  That I sat there and gazed for as long as I did tells you that I was indeed intoxicated.  I can say that, as it was more than half of my lifetime ago!


So, instead of alcohol and illicit substances, I got "high" on the ride, the food I was eating and the view.  To all of you young people:  This may be what you have to look forward to in middle age!

Back in the day, I didn't know about the view from the Long Island City waterfront.  Then again, the piers were falling apart and the neighborhoods around them were a mix of grimly entropying industrial and residential areas.  That's also a pretty fair description of  what the 14th and Christopher Street piers, and their immediate environs, were like .  

As it got dark, I started to feel chilly and I hadn't brought a sweater or jacket with me.  That was all right:  I left feeling peaceful yet energized with twilight images of the city I reached on my bike.