Walker on Wheels
I was a child who couldn't learn to ride a bike. It was one of the endless ways that my body, and my command of my body, seemed so different than that of other children. I didn't learn how to balance a bike until I was at the edge of my teens. Out alone, on my seventh ride, I collided with a car on a high speed arterial and limped away with a broken tailbone that I hid from my family and a cold-sweat shaking case of bike-triggered PTSD that I couldn't hide. Over the next twenty years I would manage to get on a bike maybe four times.
That whole combo of way-high anxiety plus way-low physical co-ordination? I don't drive, either. (You wouldn't like me driving.)
And bus fare hereabouts costs way too much to spend it on trips within five miles..
So throughout my decades of adult life, when there was somewhere I needed to go, or somewhere I needed to get away from, I've walked.
This means, as a newcomer to bike use, I am not coming from the same place as someone whose normal transportation is a car.
While the rest of bicycling America is raving about the inherent serenity, the increased mindfulness, the greater sense of connection between self and environment that happens on a bike, I'm pretty much all WAAAA-OOOO HOUSTON DO WE HAVE LIFT-OFF LOOK OUT HERE I COME TEN MILES AN HOUR LET'S EASE OFF THE WORLD IT IS *FLYING* BY NOTHING'S GONNA STAND IN MY WAY BORN TO BE WIIIIIILD DOO DOODOO DOOOOO DOODOO-
I am intoxicated with the power of being my own vehicle. I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and never for one second forget it.
Transcendence is mine. The way in which I connect to the world, the possibility of my place in it, and my relationship to myself are all transformed.
And I never want to take that for granted.
