Peddling Fool

In April 1993, at the age of 35, one month after completing my Ph.D., I took Effective Cycling, a class for learning to bicycle. I didn’t buy spandex quite yet, but good student that I was, I did buy the book for the class. I didn’t know it then but bicycling would change my life. Maybe not as much as Harry Potter or a thousand years of psychotherapy, but it is definitely up there in the top three.

I thought it odd, but we brought our bikes to class. I guess riding in class was experiential learning. Our instructor never told us our distance – that was his trick. We were too young to know about computers and mileage obsessions. Our greed for speed or distance hadn’t been awakened. In fact, the only thing that had been awakened was I now noticed the guys in spandex

The rest is history. Now I watch the weather as landscapers do. I believe I can feel when rain is longer than an hour away. I now blow snot out of my nose without a Kleenex. One time I got cocky with my technique and the drip ended up on the right shoulder of my fluorescent yellow jersey. I now talk openly in mixed company, sometimes even with strangers, about my crotch.

At the end of the class, I used my graduation money to buy a Trek hybrid bike. The salesman convinced me to go an extra $400 by saying, “At our age this may be the last bike we ever buy.” My last bike, huh! I was just getting started. I mean really we still have to put his kids through college.

I am the kind of person who has been on a serious inner search. I have studied with healers in the rainforest, I have meditated with the Buddhists, chanted with the Krishnas, danced with the Sufis. I’ve been around in some funky places in my day, I can’t even tell you the half of it. But, Biking has taught me way more than all of that. There’s beauty and green. There’s summer and fall and winter and spring. There are dead smelly animals in every stage of decompose until there is only a hide. No red, no bones, no hair, no smell, only a crumbled disheveled hide in every shape imaginable. After the flesh is gone, you soon forget that an animal once lived there. The snakes are the most interesting because no matter how knotted up, there’s no mistaking that a snake lived in that body.

There are animals running from each other and animals feeding on each other. The squirrels do their back and forth cha cha dance, and the crows eat them for morning breakfast. I am a vegetarian and even this sight seems charming when on my bike. There are leaves flying, flowers blooming and life everywhere. Green buds emerge from trees and then the brown leaves scramble across the pavement when the leaves are done with their life. There’s the sun, and the rain and the snow and the wind.

I am a psychologist, when people ask me if my job is depressing, I always respond, “I have the best seat in the house – it’s a privilege to sit in my chair.” But, maybe I’m wrong about that, maybe being in the saddle is the best seat in the house? You get to travel through so much space, seeing so many different things. You see kids dragging big giant trees across their lawn, kids fighting, kids street hockey, kids looking up waving at you as though you are a UFO. You see every configuration of toys strewn around lawns. You see sidewalk art. You see fathers chasing their kids with play guns or hoses, you see mothers yelling at their children. You see family and friends arrive for parties, you see them depart. You see neighbors talking to each other.

There’s landscaping to notice, houses to lust after, and flowers to identify. There are so many people who labor over their homes, and so many who hire folks to labor. There are streets that get fixed, sewer pipes installed, highways paved, and sidewalks torn up. You see how construction projects work. This is a pretty interesting seat to sit in, this moving vehicle, which permits me to be a pumping fool taking it all in.

I see land developments. Each day as I see the progression, I wonder where the animals and critters go when trucks come and park on their homes, and when cement comes and covers the land. Where do those fellows go?

I now know just how much trash trashy people throw out. I can’t help it, I look down on the litterers of the world. I see cigarette packs, teenagers who dump entire cases of beer bottles, Evian bottles, Gatorade bottles. I now see Burger King bags, Styrofoam boxes, plastic bags, pop cans, smashed plastic cans everywhere. In Suburban Detroit, we have folks who throw ten cents out their car windows. On leisurely days, I collect these cans and cash them in for Gatorade.

 But you know this; it is nothing new to you if you spend hours in the saddle. You already know about the pumping pleasure and the sights along the way. You already love riding 25 mph and not pedaling. And maybe like me, you also know how satisfying it is to climb at 3.5 or 4.2 mph in the granny gear. It is a great way to impress yourself with yourself at the top. A few weeks ago, a friend in my club asked me why I didn’t see the pothole, after I complained about the sudden jar. What could I say; I was admiring my computer reading 33.9 mph down that hill!

From biking, I have learned about thirst, about salty skin, about what pancakes taste like with salt on them, what cantaloupe is like with salt. There are sweaty days and snotty days, foot freezing days and oh-so-happy-for-Gortex days. Tired days, sore days, and everything breaks down days. There are days when you go slow no matter how hard you try and days when you can’t figure out why you are going so fast – the wind can’t be blowing that hard. There are hills that look like hills and some which only feel like hills

There are discussions with other bikers about all sorts of things: mortgage rates, failed relationships, routes to conquer, how to cope with others who don’t bike, bike trips we

hope to take, equipment to buy, whether we are on a hill or not, movies we saw. One time we passed at least 40 miles by discussing a possible sequel to the movie American Beauty. I mean, really how are all those characters going to cope the day after the movie ends?

I sing songs from my lonely childhood. Peter Paul and Mary, James Taylor, Carole King, Melanie. I love to dance also. I swing my arms, I reach for the sky, and I extend my arms out like I am an airplane. It is great grooving in that saddle with the sights sliding by. I became a very good no-hands rider as a child because we used to tie a rope from one handlebar to the other and steered from the rope – pretending these were the reins and we were on horses. These days, my friends recognize me from far away because they recognize my bipedal upright stance on the bike – turning corners without holding on.

But, the best part of riding for me is what happens in my inner world. Ideas serenade me when the endorphins pump. Round and around and around the legs go, sometimes I do complicated math to assess what it would take to raise my average miles per hour rate up. Round and around my legs go, I remember the dream from the night before when the Dalai Lama solved all my psychological problems -- well at least the ones left over after therapy. Round and around they go, green possibilities hit the sky. I talk to my deceased father, and somehow my future comes crystal clear. I see myself as lovable and loving.

One day I even saw God in the trees – out there in the wind, rustling in the sky and planted in the ground. I saw God in the air when a tree shook its leaves free and then light shone on everything. I was in the flow, the every lasting glory of nowness, whatever that is. I saw that all was okay.

Another day I was contemplating how short life is while riding no hands on my favorite training route. It was a fun part of the ride, more downhill than uphill. The sun was shining and a quiet question emerged, “What if this is it?” What if the heavens come to take me now? What if I have a brain aneurysm or heart attack or I hit a pothole and I land on my head? What if a teenager who just fought with their parents drives crazy down the street or a vulture picking road kill decides to carry me away. What if I vanish now?

I was pedaling fast in this lonely moment with summer green everywhere. Here I was; little old me in my preposterous life, my so uncommon and so common life. All my insecurities, all that rejection by men. Maybe I really did wear the wrong nail polish? And all that money in therapy and schooling. Chubby little me, pedaling fool, the wind blows, my endorphins are loosening in my blood stream and I wonder if the sky will open for me at this moment. All that screaming and pleading with God all those years. I have not gone down easily. All the pain of all the years when life was unbearable. All the lostness, all the struggle. My ancestors, my karma, my life. All those paintings I painted and songs I sang and dances I danced. All those fun zany parties I gave, and journals I wrote. What if this was it?

All the fights with my mother and all the joyous laughter we have now. All the outrage and sweetness at the end of hard work. All the beginnings and promises that did come true. And here I am: wind, quiet, sounds, hope promise, circles go around and around. What if this is my time? This day was a crossroads of sorts, one of those moments of complete utter connection to the whole universe. Buoyant evolution was carrying me and I wished someone could predict that my worst heartaches were behind me, but the truth is that no one knows when the winds will shift direction again. So, on that day, I realized there’s joy here already in my life and I better just ride the bull and hang on for dear life, like any other ordinary pedaling fool would do.

Sometimes it is like this, one transcendent experience after another, they just keep coming right in a row. Being a woman, I know what this is like to have one orgasm after another. You just open to the sweetness.

A few years back, Bicycling magazine had a contest: “you knew you were a biker when…” My losing response read, “When I didn’t cancel my subscription to Bicycling even though you publish no articles for chubby 40 year old, 12-14 m.p.h. women.” I’m sure the winner probably isn’t even biking anymore.

But, I don’t care much about that. I know it’s official. Alchemy has done its trick and turned a regular girl into a person who loves being outside and keeps in shape only to bike. It became really official the day I put a helmet on 2 hours after paying $93 for my hair dye, cut and blow dry. My hairdresser was horrified when I told him I was going biking that evening. He scolded me and said I should go look pretty and site in Starbucks sipping tea. 

This is an excerpt from a collection of essays and short stories from the book: Bicycle Love; Stories of Passion, Joy, and Sweat. The essay above was written by Dr. Sally Palaian, the complete book was edited by Garth Battista, copyright 2004.