Back in the Saddle Again

due to weather and work, I had been off the bike for over a week when I finally found time for a ride last Thursday night. As a matter of fact, I had been off the ROAD bike for almost 2 weeks before we headed out into a beautiful, warm evening on our velocipedes. I wasn't sure if I could make it around the full 25 mile Perry lap, or if they'd have to leave me hunched in a ditch somewhere quietly crying and rocking myself gently. Luckily, I found my groove and avoided all but a little crying and rocking. Really, half of my mental malaise was just being off-bike, I think. Somehow things always look rosier perched on a good bike. My dear wife even commented that it was plain sickening how quickly my mood improved once I started pedaling. I countered that she therefore assumed I was in a BAD mood to start, which wasn't the case. Of course looking back, it was the case.

As it usually does when I've been bikeless for a while, the peculiar grace of our hobby struck me solidly about two miles into the ride. Here we are, bipedal creatures, whose limbs have evolved (or were created) for piston-like resistance to the anchor of gravity, whirling along whilst straddling an ungainly contraption that, if left to its own devices, would topple resolutely to the tarmac and lie like so much scrap. There is nothing obligitorily natural between the motion of a cyclist and the motion of a walking man. Having one leg on each side of a solid rail is usually not the way to get somewhere. Small rubber tires that hold less air than one swimmer's lung are generally not what you want for covering distance.

And yet,
Here we are. With the open fields of soybeans slipping by in near silence, save the rush of the breeze, pouring ourselves over the asphalt into the cool shade of the pecan grove. Not for some short distance that can be seen or grasped, but over miles and miles, ending where we began in geography but leagues away in experience. Having surveyed the usual countryside, we return by circuitous route, to the place where we first mounted the odd contraption, and we are all - slightly - changed by the journey. As peculiar as the motion and the form of the cyclist might be, more peculiar still is the change wrought on the cyclist. How differently does a wren exist having jumped the nest and flown? Can a robin, back in the safety of a nest, still smell the high air currents that sift occasionally from a ruffled wing? we are cyclists not by the ownership of a bike, or spandex, or any other item. We are not cyclists because we think bikes are the great white hope of alternative transportation. We are cyclists because of the miles and leagues and centuries of wind blown past our forearms, through our helmet vents and spun crazily out through the whirling spokes of our driving wheel. We are cyclists because now matter how clean, the smell of the wild breeze and open path cling to us.