There are many reasons to ride a bicycle. For exercise. For competition. For transportation. For fun. But no matter the reason to get on, I find that often, riding a bicycle is not really about the bicycle at all.
Much like road trips aren’t really about where you’re going, these forms of movement are instead about how you get there. The intrigue is what happens between point A and point B. There is more to be found in the process of getting to the destination than the destination itself.
There are, of course, the more sports-driven reasons for riding a bicycle, and I find myself called by some of them. Some crave power and speed, the warm feeling that’s left in your legs after a long ride, and then there are those who feed off the adrenaline kick of a descent. There are the more existential reasons that attract us to two wheels: Riding a bicycle can be a chance to escape from the everyday; for others it’s a way of exerting independence and finding freedom.
For me, a bicycle ride is a brainstorm in movement. It’s an easy way to kickstart new ideas, an activity that slows me down and helps me to focus. It challenges me to see.
Fantastic ideas aren’t automatically born every time I get on a bicycle, of course, but there is a link between physical and mental movement. So much of our lives are spent being busy — we rarely carve out moments of silence or uninterrupted time to just let our minds wander. The bicycle facilitates exactly that. Whenever I feel like I have a creative block, or my brain feels murky and full after too much time in front of a computer screen, even a short ride allows me to hit the reset button.
I haven’t always thought of the bicycle in this way. Growing up, bicycling was the thing we did on weekends, long group rides with my dad — captain of the tandem — and me perched behind. I was young when we bought the blue Burley tandem bike, probably 7 or 8, and short enough that I required a kidback, a system that brought the crank and pedals up high enough for my little legs to reach.
We logged many miles on that bicycle, riding Seattle to Portland five times. As a child, those miles on the back of a tandem weren’t always fun, but I at least ensured that I had enough snacks in my small handlebar bag. Looking back, those slower moments — where I most certainly must have been bored — were good training for a long-term love affair of the bicycle, the realization that not everything has to be fast paced.
Last year, my husband and I rode Chilly Hilly, a very hilly ride that I had done many times as a kid with my dad. We passed a father-daughter team on a tandem, the father gently coaxing his daughter as she bawled her eyes out in the pouring rain, slowly working their way up the ascent. It brought back a few memories. I saw them at a rest stop later. The daughter had stopped crying, and the father was removing her helmet for her. She had a snack in her hand and all was well.
As an adult in Portland, I found my way to the bicycle for transportation. I never owned a car in the near decade that I lived there, and to this day I’m still better at navigating through the city’s bike routes than I am on major thoroughfares. I didn’t even consider myself as a cyclist when I lived there, thinking that I would need to clock a certain number of miles a week on long rides in order to earn that title.
Life later found me moving to Paris, first as a self-imposed creative sabbatical and later for a partnership. Here, the bicycle was a way to explore, my Velib bikeshare member card a key to unlock the ins and out of a city I wanted to understand better. There were many frustrations — fast drivers, poorly planned bike lanes, pedestrians who walked in said bike lanes — but there was nothing quite like the reward of crossing a bridge over the Seine when the sun was just right, or the feeling of having navigated across town without once having to look at the map. It was thanks to the bicycle that I felt like I began to know the city, to see both its beautiful and its ugly sides up close.
A few years ago, I moved back to the place where I grew up, a small town outside of Seattle. It’s a rural, spread-out community, tucked on a peninsula, with access to saltwater and tall cedar trees. What we lack in public transportation we make up for in enormous trucks, lifted high off the ground, driving fast and rarely making any effort to heed those on two-wheeled devices. Unless, of course, it’s to speed up and pass on a blind corner (at least a weekly occurrence).
Saying a little bike prayer every time I get on my two-wheeled steed, I ride anyway, almost every single day. The small town center is only two miles away from my house, a tiny distance for any normal bike commuter, and yet a seemingly impossible distance for most people in this area who have never ridden a bicycle as a mode of transportation. That’s actually how most of this country functions: while a pretty significant chunk of our everyday trips are short, very few of them are done on bicycle. Even the EPA challenges people to consider alternative modes of transportation for trips one mile or less.
Four miles roundtrip isn’t enough for a workout. Working from home, heading down to the post office or the bank is instead just an excuse to get out of the house for a bit. I can’t really justify calling it my exercise for the day, and it certainly isn’t enough to train for anything. But these afternoon bike rides are my saving grace, mentally. Even if I only have one letter to take to the post office, something so small it could wait until tomorrow, I go anyway.
Along this route, I get to watch the seasons change. I get to experience small moments that remind me of the world at large. I see what trees and branches have fallen after a storm, how many trillium flowers are up in their regular patches. I sneak a handful of sweet pea flowers from a patch in the parking lot of a deserted building, an apple from the tree next to the community tennis court. I smell when the tide is out, I see when a pair of ducks are bathing in the ditch.
In a culture that is ever more swayed by the desire to be faster, bigger, stronger, I find myself often navigating in the direction of slower, smaller, simpler. I love long bicycle trips with lots of miles, like when I biked down the coast to San Francisco a few summers ago, but only because I can sink into the scaled-back pace that comes with them. The kind of pace where you get to see things, feel things. A pace where you are more in tune with the natural world around you.
I need that reminder on an everyday basis. We all do.
Last spring, I was biking to the post office. A bird was in the middle of the road, hopping around as if it had been stunned, or perhaps something had happened to its wing. I slowed down to look at, and while it didn’t seem to be doing so well, it wasn’t scared by my presence either. It continued to stand there in the middle of the road, and soon I was worried that if a car came it might be the end of the bird.
I planted my bicycle on its side in the ditch and walked to the middle of the road, carefully trying to escort the bird to the side. A car came, and then another, slowly backing up the road as I tried to coax the bird along. Who knows what all the drivers thought about a woman in the middle of the road wearing a bicycle helmet and talking to a bird. At least they were patient with me, and eventually, the bird got to the side of the road, somehow getting its energy back, and quickly making its way on to other adventures. I waved at the drivers as they went on their way, crossing to the other side.
It was quiet again. No cars, just the wind in the trees.
I got back on my bicycle, and kept riding to the post office.
Photo by Johnie Gall. Get inspired to explore on two wheels with Machines for Freedom and their 300-mile biking adventure through the desert.
XX Anna Brones