There is the Brooklyn Bridge. Weathered wood and stone. The sun has a weight this afternoon, gold on everyone’s shoulders. Monumentous women hold forth, thundering into each others’ faces. A stroller rolls away from its mother. An old man hunches over a bowtie. “Annie.” Two boys spitting Spanish squeak by on a junker, all sweat and bare skin. “Will you.” A girl with long brown curls who rides to the city between 8:34 and 8:41 am. “Marry.” The best behind I’ve ever seen on a red fixed gear, shoes to match. “Me.” A Burma-Shave wedding proposal down the off-ramp. Pay close attention. The city on a bicycle is made for being free.
My first foray on two wheels ended in a blackberry bush, and I didn’t try again until I was 19 and living in Chicago, experiencing my first true panic at the confining spaces of adult life. I’d leave the office and enter the mouth of the Loop, first on someone’s borrowed garage ornament, until its bottom bracket finally failed, and then on a friend’s boyfriend’s borrowed Cannondale. The first time I pushed off I fell over. The experience left me with a new right bicep -- funny what hoisting a steel frame up four flights will do -- and an unshakeable conviction that I could learn a great deal about life from a bicycle.
The day I fixed my first flat tire, I fixed three. Nothing had prepared me for the idea that sheer stubbornness would not guarantee success. But in Chicago, where the clanging of the El startles the doves all the way down Jackson Avenue, I would learn to race the midnight train, biking furiously over the heat-drenched streets. I would learn. A sense of entitlement is always stupid. A symphony of dogs, enemy nations from across the street. Signal to others where you’re going. The woman I didn’t hit as she spilled off the sidewalk, more grocery bags than bones. Making assumptions about the world is a dangerous thing. Sheepish skittering in front of traffic at a red light. Don’t be an asshole. A white girl with dreadlocks I can smell from here. Impact depends on balance. Glass on cracked cement. Plan ahead. Pothole.
One weekend in July the sand-hill cranes arrived and I shoved my bike on the commuter rail north past Al’s Polish Sausage and the Greek hot dog red-striped street-side grease puddles and the black man at the train station with white, white teeth, selling newspapers and giving his smiles away for free. At the last stop, a little town sat on the endless horizon and I rode until there were just farm houses and then not even those. On the side of the two-lane country highway, a pair of cranes stalked crickets through the baby corn. Once full, they stopped pecking to court, cocking their slim throats back, crying out, sinking to bended knee. When they bounced high into the air, they never thought to come down.
Biking away the long winding down lane I shouted out that Naomi Shihab Nye poem into the sweaty air, “Pedaling hard down King William Street...A victory! To leave your loneliness / Panting behind you on some street corner / While you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas / Pink petals that have never felt loneliness / No matter how slowly they fell.”
A victory, two wheels.
Photo by Jonathan Percy/Flickr