We all have things that make life worthwhile, because it is for them that we love life. For me, it's the bike
It is November, and a cold morning in in New York. I walk two blocks down to Central Park North, where a line of blue CitiBikes wait in a stand. It’s just before eight and there are still plenty there, so I choose carefully; one of the latest ones, with the infinitely-variable gears, a lovely smooth twistgrip, and a seat post that is not so worn that one can’t see the seat-height markers. My bag goes in the basket at the front, then it’s time for some quick pre-flight routines. Check the brakes and tyres; you don’t want to take the bike out if it has a problem – you’ll only have to put it back and report the fault before the stand will let you take another. Adjust the seat-post; after much trial and error, I now put it between four and five. Then the key with the barcode goes in the slot; there’s a clicking and whirring, a flash of amber lights, then a green one, and the bike slides backwards onto the sidewalk. Time to go.
*
The
bike’s been with us a while. Its ancestor was the Velocipede, a
sort of weird wheeled hobby-horse that appeared in Germany in the
1810s. Pedals arrived much later, but there was, as yet, no way of
gearing them; they had to be attached to the hub of the front wheel,
and the only way to get gearing high enough for progress was to make
that wheel enormous. The result was the lethal penny-farthing, with
its huge front wheel and tiny rear one and its rider sitting some
feet above the rocky roadway onto which he would, all too often, be
ejected by some emergency, vagary of the surface, or his own lack of
adroitness when mounting or dismounting. Nonetheless, as BikeSnobNYC
(of whom more later) puts it: “for the first time people could move
themselves quickly without the aid of steam, wind, or hairy,
flatulent animals.”
And
it wasn’t long before, for the first but not the last time, some
idiot decided to ride round the world. His name was Thomas Stevens;
born into a poor family England, he had moved to the US at 17. He
made it round the world in less than two years, via Constantinople,
Delhi and Hong Kong, arriving home at the end of 1886. The tradition
of the eccentric cyclist had begun.
But
by the time Stevens got home, the roller chain had been invented and
in England J. K. Starley had invented the safety bicycle, which had
(in general) two wheels of more or less equal size, a diamond frame
and a saddle not far from the road so there was less far to fall. And
it’s a safety bicycle that, in all essentials, I’m riding today.
It’s a Bixi bike, first built for the Bixi bike-sharing scheme in
Montreal. They’re now the mainstay of New York’s CitiBike scheme,
while in London they’re painted red and called Boris bikes after
the mayor who helped introduce them. They weigh 20 kg, about 43lb,
and going up the Great Hill of Central Park, you can feel every
ounce. I don’t care. Bikes are freedom. And it beats the rush-hour
subway train on which you breathe in someone’s armpit.
The
Central Park perimeter road is traffic-free and takes me up through
the North Woods. The trees have shed their leaves now; it’s late in
the month. (In New York City the trees retain their colour well into
November.) Every morning ride through the wood marks the calendar. In
winter the trees are bare but for the brownish remnants of the
year’s foliage, and patches of snow linger on the verge. Then as
February rolls into March the daffodils appear, buds poking through
the remaining snow, and within a week or so that snow is gone and
clumps of daffs line the road, which still bears a grey film from the
salt of winter; the seasons are changing but your hands are still
frozen as you sweep down the far side of the Great Hill, past the
Pool and across the Glenn Span Arch, a masterpiece of fitted stone.
Later, in April, a green fuzz appears on the branches and then spring
takes you by surprise in a blaze of white, blue and green. You do not
see this if you take the subway. I am sure Thomas Stevens felt a
sense of wonder as he rode into Constantinople on his penny-farthing.
I feel one crossing the North Hill on my way to work.
I
felt that sense of wonder from the beginning. Some time in the early
1960s my parents removed my beloved dark-blue tricycle with the
little luggage boot on the back; it went, I suppose, to a poorer
family (or maybe ended up in the canal). I was taken to a shop to
choose my first real bike. There was not much of a choice. I could
have a red and white bike, or a light and dark blue one. I chose the
blue. It was wheeled into the back garden and I was mounted on it and
told to pedal. Of course I kept swaying in different directions. Then
the day came when I rode down the garden for the first time without
falling off. I was six; I am now over sixty, but nothing has
entranced me the way that moment did. There was a sense of autonomy,
of something achieved, of a barrier not so much broken as smashed to
a thousand pieces.
My
elder sister tried to knock me off my bike. We played a game called
Nine Lives; we rode side by side and tried to steer each other into
my father’s rose bushes. I can see us doing that now, some 55 years
ago, and the lawn and the sky and the trees and the roses are as
bright as a restored Kodachrome.
*
There’s
some pedalling to do now. Once past the Pool, the ground rises and I
twist the grip to get a lower gear. The North Meadow drifts past on
the left; it’s quiet now but in the spring there’ll be basketball
there, and brightly-coloured caps and vests. On my right looms the
twin towers of 300 Central Park West, one of my favourite buildings
in the city, and once home to Sinclair Lewis. More recent residents
include Alec Baldwin, Faye Dunaway and Moby. Good luck to them;
Irving Berlin once lived opposite me. New York’s like that. The
building’s two huge Art Deco towers pass by framed by bare
branches; in the spring they will be masked by vibrant white blossoms
and in the fall by the flames of the dying year.
I
know I’ll see traffic here. There’ll be the odd person who passes
me in another CitiBike – of course they do, when you’re 61; once
I would have raced them. And there’s a man on a tandem who sweeps
along with his six or seven-year-old on the back, a trailer behind
for the groceries. He’ll curve gracefully onto an exit somewhere on
the Upper West Side near 96th Street and dump his son somewhere, and
rejoin us on the Central Park circuit going south, overtaking me
again somewhere near the Dakota Building. One or two Lycra louts also
pass me by, heads down, ass-in-the-air, on custom-made road bikes
built of the finest unobtainium.
When
I see them, I think of my sister’s bike. That was red and white,
with a single gear when they were not fashionable, just cheaper and
simpler to maintain. It had rod brakes. The brown plastic saddle was
surprisingly comfortable. One day when my sister was in her teens, my
parents bought her a better bike, a maroon Elswick Hopper with three
speeds. The red-and-white bike was relegated to a country cottage on
the moors in the West of England. She still rode it sometimes, when
we were on the moors in the spring or summer. One day when I was
about 10, and she 15, she sat me on the saddle and I clung on behind
her, legs spread wide to avoid the spokes, and we careered off down
the narrow vertiginous country lanes on a late spring morning with
the sun lancing through the fresh, bright new leaves. It was a Sunday
and the church bells chimed as we shot through a village, and later
we splashed through a ford near a chapel where people were preparing
to worship, and they looked at us daggers drawn for our godlessness.
Later, as I grew into my teens, I took over the red-and-white bike
and darted through the lanes with their gravelled crowns and their
high hedges that fell away now and then to reveal a valley of steep,
bright-green fields and bracken-coated hills crowned with granite
outcrops called tors, standing out against against blue skies lined
with clean white clouds. Now and then one swept round a blind bend to
find a car (the rod brakes worked surprisingly well, when one was
frightened). More often one encountered the rumps of cattle on their
way to milking, packed tight into the narrow lane, the sweet smell of
their dung filling the air.
*
As
I approach Columbus Circle the perimeter road sweeps round to the
left, and just for a while there are cars with me in the park. I
start paying attention, and prepare to cross the traffic stream for
my exit into Seventh Avenue. The latter is wide and straight, and
heads down to Times Square, which I can see in the distance. I’m
headed for 46th St, which I will take across to Second Avenue. I go
carefully here; three miles through Central Park has relaxed me but
now I must remember than I am an infantryman in a tank battle. But I
shan’t let that stop me trying to catch every light. Once, just
once, I got every single set on green and sailed down to Times Square
in three or four minutes. But I mustn’t forget the bitter lesson
that every New York cyclist has learned at one time or another: Don’t
run a red unless you are very, very sure.
There
are more bikes now, and I’m enjoying spotting the two-wheeled
tribes of the city. There are a few of these. For definitions, I
recommend Bike Snob’s. Or, to give the official author’s name,
BikeSnobNYC. (It’s
his website. He does have a real name – it’s Eben Weiss – but
Bike Snob will do fine.) His book’s
title is Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly
Realigning the World of Cycling. Which he doesn’t really
because he has too much sense of humour. Anyway, Bike Snob’s
classification is a masterpiece of Linnaean taxonomy.
Let’s
start with the Urban Cyclist. S/he (it’s usually a he) is a devotee
of single-speed, fixed-wheel bikes, preferably with no brakes; large,
impractical messenger bags; relentlessly casual clothing; and (though
Bike Snob does not say this) a sort of sod-you mien which assures the
rider that he is a rebel even if his destination is actually a
merchant bank where he will shower, don a tie and defer to the senior
analyst.
Am
I an Urban Cyclist? I do worry about this.
“Urban
Cyclists endlessly seek ‘authenticity,’ and are often fond of
‘vintage’ bicycle frames,” rasps Bike Snob. “However, since
most Urban Cyclists are roughly half the age of their vintage bikes,
they’re clearly not the original owners. So really, this means
they’re actually less authentic and more contrived than the riders
of off-the-rack bikes.” Hang on, Bike Snob, I ride a 45-year-old
bike, and I’m authentic. Mind you, I actually am old enough to have
ridden it new. One day an Urban Cyclist past me in Central Park, not
far from Columbus Circle. “You’re doing all right on that old
bike,” he said kindly. I explained that the combined age of bike
and ride was 104.
Still,
I’m not an Urban Cyclist, because I don’t ride a fixed-gear
single-speed bike with narrow bars or carry a messenger bag. Neither
do I have the ghastly road manners of the Urban Cyclist, who seems to
consider all other traffic an excrescence and road rules an affront.
Maybe I’m what he calls a Retro-Grouch (“the Retro-Grouch always
dwells approximately fifteen to twenty years in the past. This is
because the Retro-Grouch has a passionate respect for the tried and
true...”.) This may fit me. I do prefer steel frames. I loathe
integrated shifters and dislike indexed gears, both being a pain in
the arse to repair and adjust. The absolute limit, for me, are
electric dérailleurs. I mean, just get a bloody car.
*
Today
my CitiBike is taking me to work. But once upon a time a bike was an
escape from hell.
At
13 I was packed off to a boarding school in North Oxfordshire, in the
heart of England. Built in the 1850s, the school was basically a
cut-price Hogwarts, without the magic. The dormitories were cold and
the food indifferent. One of
the vilest
things about the school was the cadet force. As a young elite, we
were supposedly being trained to control and direct the less
fortunate of
the Empire
(which
even then had slipped away).
So we were expected to emerge from school with a basic military
training. Every Thursday we would parade in full uniform in a windy
playground and learn drill, and in the summer months we would bump
through country lanes in the back of army Land Rovers to a firing
range where we would learn to shoot with .303 rifles that had been
obsolete in 1939 and whose
recoil smashed
back into your shoulder. Meanwhile the parades were the occasion for
near constant screeching
as some empowered 16-year-old, made an “NCO”, would find fault
with your webbing straps. I hated the place.
One
memory is especially stark. On Sunday morning there were two chapel
services. You could go at seven or you could go at nine. If you went
at seven and had breakfast afterwards, you would get butter. If you
went at nine and ate after that, you got margarine. A nasty, cheap
value judgement on those who chose to get some sleep on a Sunday; God
knew we got little of it for the rest of the week. But I went to
early chapel, had my butter – and then slipped out of the school on
my racing bike and hit the country lanes around the school.
In
those years I acquired a love of the Middle English countryside; the
gentle hills, hedgerows, woods and soft light, the hazy clouds
drifting across the horizon, the winding roads and the sudden vistas,
the ancient pre-Roman fort that rose above the
fields near
Banbury, the long quiet roads between sleepy country towns. Nearly 50
years on, random images are with me. Riding across the
Oxfordshire-Warwickshire border and feeling that the quality of the
light had changed, that it was softer; an old man in a Mini on his
way to market, with collarless shirt, watch-chain and pork-pie hat;
Land Rovers so
well-used that they seemed to have merged with the countryside.
I
had an Ordnance Survey map that became crinkled and creased with use.
I would search it for the strange diagrams that told of an abandoned
airfield, for there were still many of them then, a legacy of a war
that had really not ended that long before. Some turned out to be
ploughed up; at others, a farmer’s gate lay across the entrance.
But sometimes you could ride onto the main runway and feel the ghosts
all around you. At other times I would sweep up and down the rolling
South Midland hills, through stone-built villages, past abandoned
quarries or huge churches whose bells tolled on Sundays and whose
sound lingered from village to village. For a few hours, the bleak
aggression of school was forgotten.
I
learned then that the bike has a special purpose. You need no fuel,
no-one’s permission; you are gone. It is a way of saying, fuck you.
*
I
rattle south down Seventh Avenue. I’m quite lucky with the lights
today, but there’s an Urban Cyclist who thinks I’m in his way.
(I’m not. He seems to think I should ride into the back of a parked
car rather than move to its side and make him do so too.) It’s the
usual obstacle course of yellow cabs pulling in, yellow cabs pulling
out, beer trucks, somnambulent pedestrians staring at their phones
and people darting out between parked cars. (The beer trucks I do not
mind. They do God’s work.)
 |
| Williamsburg Bridge (M.Robbins) |
Bike
Snob has plenty of other stereotypes for us besides Urban Cyclist and
Retro-Grouch. I rather like what he calls the Beautiful Godzilla
(“...who rides as though the rest of the world were created simply
to yield to her. She’s generally young, good-looking, and clad in
expensive clothes. ...She’s on her cell phone at all times...”.)
I give her a wide berth. In fact, I give a few things a wide berth.
As Bike Snob says, “It is sobering to think that, as a cyclist,
all that’s between you and being run over by a Ford Explorer is the
driver bending down for half a second to retrieve a dropped
McNugget.”
I
was reckless once. One day in the early 1980s a friend from
Birmingham was staying with me in London and I spent the night
drinking with him in the Ship and Shovel below Hungerford Bridge.
Tossed out at closing time, we decided he should not take the Tube
alone (my part of London was then dodgy at night). “Get on the
saddle,” I told him. He did so, and it promptly tipped backwards (I
kept the saddle loose so I could tip it forward when I stopped).
Finally he got his balance and I drove us south across Waterloo
Bridge and around the big roundabout at its base, along the South
Bank, through the Vauxhall Cross and down South Lambeth Road without
serious incident. I would not do it now.
Bike
Snob reckons you’re safer if you obey the rules. Cross on a red, he
says, and you’ll probably hit some other idiot cyclist doing the
same thing. He’s right. In New York City the bike lanes have
dedicated lights for bikes, designed to let you cross the junction
when no-one’s turning across your path. Jump those lights and they
might be. Neither do I approve of what New York cyclists call
‘salmoning’ - going the wrong way up a street or bike lane like a
salmon going upstream to spawn.
Here
the main offenders, apart from Urban Cyclists, are the takeout
delivery riders. These are a menace. Many ride electric bikes – not
power-assisted pedelecs, which are legal in New York, but actual
powered bikes, which are not, but are widely tolerated. They weigh
three times as much as an ordinary bike and are a lot faster. You do
not want to meet them coming the other way. And yet I have a certain
sympathy. The pizza delivery riders (a tribe Bike Snob doesn’t talk
of much) are at the bottom of the city anthill, striving to make a
living in the cold and the heat, often born somewhere else, maybe
undocumented, almost certainly uninsured.
One
day I am riding north along the bike lane on First Avenue. It’s a
busy spring rush-hour and the lane is packed with Urban Cyclists,
commuters on old road bikes, young women with full baskets and people
like myself on CitiBikes. Ahead of me is a large young man on a very
smart mountain-bike, dressed in the latest Lycra gear and
brightly-coloured helmet. Suddenly a short, squat man of Asian
appearance, with backward baseball cap and grimy anorak, appears
around the corner ahead and charges towards us on an old mountain
bike, not powered, the sort of old wreck the pizza guys use, with
tape round its frame to guard against knocks. The two brake, feint to
one side and another and nearly collide and then the large man blocks
the Asian and screams
at him “You’re going the wrong way! You… Are… Going… The…
Wrong… Way!” as if he were a drill sergeant and the Asian guy was
a raw recruit who just shat the bed. I rode past. Dude, I thought, I
hope you order in a pizza tonight and it comes late
and cold, with a roach in it.
*
One
tribe that Bike Snob does not discuss much is the Righteous Cyclist,
who rides because it’s a green thing to do, has a bike rescued from
a dumpster and is convinced s/he are saving the world. Bike Snob does
not seem to like them. He may be right. No-one loves the miasma of
self-satisfaction that wafts around the righteous. And yet the fact
is, they have a point. Journalist Peter Walker’s splendid 2017 book
How Cycling Can Save the World
is an informative and readable guide to how
bikes can do just that.
Walker
points out that the cyclist’s emissions, for a start, are lower. Of
course cyclists do have emissions. Bikes are built of steel, or
aluminium, or titanium, which takes energy to manufacture (unless you
have a bamboo bike; still, that’s not a big business just yet).
And of course cyclists use extra energy, so consume more food, which
takes up more land, and if they’re on a healthy diet they’re
probably emitting quite a lot of methane as well. Still, Walker cites
a 2011 study by the European Cyclists’ Federation that factored in
all of this (except perhaps the methane) and found that a cyclist
emits 21g/Km of CO2, against 101 per bus passenger and 271 per car
passenger. Interestingly, e-bikes emitted only 1g/km more than bikes
(though it’s not clear what kind of e-bikes they’re talking
about). But Walker also quotes a US study that found e-bikes can be
more efficient than rail.
And
of course cycling is good for you.
“Along
with lower weight, cycling brings astonishing improvements to
cardiovascular health,” says Walker, and reports a study in the
north of England that found 32 regular cyclists had a “very
significantly lower incidence of blocked arteries or other coronary
obstructions.” Mind you, this survey was from post-mortems, and
some of those cyclists had perhaps been killed in traffic, as
cyclists far too often are. Walker acknowledges the dangers but
again, he marshals evidence; the health benefits outweigh the danger
of cycling. This time he quotes a Utrecht University study that found
the health benefits of cycling exceeded the danger of accidental
death by nine to one. This was in the bike-friendly Netherlands,
where bikes are often separated from other traffic. Even in more
dangerous Britain, however, “the life-extending benefits were
greater by a factor of seven.” Walker does not say how the
comparators were defined; after all, a non-cyclist need not be unfit.
But it’s true there’s widespread evidence that the health
benefits of regular cycling outweigh the dangers of accidents and
pollution.
In
fact, bikes can make you better. The exercise releases endorphins,
gets your weight down, strengthens your heart and, maybe just as
important, it makes you feel better about yourself. “In an age
where there’s a pill for everything, exercise is the billion dollar
drug that never gets prescribed,” says one cyclist, Phil
Southerland, who took up cycling and found it greatly helped with
Type 1 diabetes. He’s quoted in a rather nice book by Anna Hughes,
called Pedal Power: Inspirational Stories from the World of
Cycling (2017). Hughes teaches
cycling, repairs bikes and writes for a living, and has cycled around
the coast of Britain and down its length. She quotes a couple of
stories like this – the most astonishing that of Dr Nan Little,
who turned to cycling as a treatment for Parkinson’s and saw a very
marked improvement in her condition. She took to bikes as part of a
trial treatment programme for Parkinson’s run by a Dr Jay Alberts,
who says that vigorous cycling increases brain function and this
seems to ease the symptoms.
*
Of
course, some of this is in your head. But it’s no less real for
that.
Cycling
really is
inspirational. As we’ve seen, Hughes’s book tells us how bikes
have made people better. But she has
much else to tell, and this is a delightful book to dip into, or keep
by your bed, or to read when the world seems dull. Hughes tells us
(for example) of
the Women’s Rescue League of America, which at the end of the 19th
century warned that cycling was unladylike and unchristian and could
cause both infertility and sexual satisfaction (they thought the
latter evil). They had opposition. Hughes quotes one Ann Strong,
writing in the Minneapolis Tribune
in 1895: “Bicycles are just as good company as most husbands, and
when they get shabby or old a woman can dispose of it and get a new
one without shocking the whole community.” Meanwhile
in Britain two years earlier, a 16-year-old called Tessie Reynolds
had ridden
from Brighton to London and back in just eight and a half hours.
Moreover she did it in pantaloons, to the horror of some. But the die
was cast. The new safety bicycle was a liberation, and women did not
intend to be left out.
Annie
Kopchovsky wasn’t, anyway. Hughes records that this mother-of-three
set off from Boston in June 1894 to win a bet by cycling around the
world. She left home, says Hughes, with a change of clothes and a
pearl-handled revolver, riding a Columbia women’s bike weighing a
stonking 42lb, very nearly as much as a CitiBike. Rechristening
herself Annie Londonderry, she had a bit of a false start; the
Columbia was too heavy and after riding it to Chicago, she swapped it
for a 21lb Sterling and started back the other way. From then on she
was in business. As Hughes recounts:
Bold,
charismatic and beautiful, she captured the imagination of the
world’s press … she proved to be an excellent speaker,
enthralling audiences with her tales, and an excellent rider
...Posters and placards covered her and her bicycle, and she was
often dressed head to toe in ribbons advertising anything from milk
to perfume.
She
won her bet.
Men
have never had it their own way in the cycling world. Hughes talks
too of Eileen Sheridan, who
in 1954 smashed her way from Land’s End to John o’Groats
in just two days, 11 hours and seven minutes. It is 870 miles.
Sheridan kept riding to make
it the round 1,000 miles, which she did in three days and an hour.
Hughes inspired me to find out more about Sheridan; now 95, she was
just 4ft 11in and famous for the gusto with which she rode –
pictures show her wearing a big, cheerful grin on
her bike. The 1,000-mile
record stood until 2002. Sheridan’s London to Edinburgh record has,
to this day, not been beaten. The 1,000-mile bike rests today in
Coventry Transport Museum. One day I shall go there, and stand before
it in awe.
 |
| Greatest ever? Eileen Sheridan |
There
is much more to inspire in
Hughes’s likeable book. Not least the story of Rob Holden, who
decided to ride up Mont Ventoux on a Boris bike. This
is the London version of the CitiBike (it is, in fact, the same bike)
and is named after the mayor who brought it about. Mont
Ventoux is the 6,000ft+ peak in the South of France that has tortured
many a rider on the Tour de France, and has killed at least one (the
great British cyclist Tommy Simpson, who collapsed and died just
below the summit on the 1967 Tour – an incident I can just
remember). A Boris bike weighs about 43lb
so Holden was
clearly mad. In any case, he could
only book it out for 24 hours. But he decided to get it there, make
the climb and get it back in that time. “We didn’t really know
what we were getting ourselves into,” one of Holden’s friends
admits afterwards. Did
they succeed? The answer’s in the book.
*
This
November morning
I’m on much the same bike as
Holden was, but my more
modest journey is nearly over.
I’ve made it down Seventh Avenue nearly to Times Square, and it’s
time for me to steer for the East Side. I
swing into 46th Street, which
crosses Park Avenue just where the latter vanishes under the
buildings to make its bifurcated way past Grand Central Station.
Today the junction’s busy and I pause for a while; it’s quite
cold. Nowadays the cold affects my hands; even in mittens they become
numb.
As
a young man I had no fear of it. In 1985 I was a traffic broadcaster
for the motoring organization, the RAC, and sometimes worked an early
shift, with my first broadcast at 5.30 or so. The tube trains were
not reliable enough at that
hour, so I rode in the three
or four miles from Stockwell on my bike. In summer this could be a
wonderful journey, free of traffic, passing along the Lambeth
Embankment and across Lambeth Bridge and seeing the Palace of
Westminster mirrored perfectly in the Thames in the calm of the
morning. But January 1985 was very bad. I borrowed bright-blue
salopettes from my cousin and disinterred an old pair of high-heeled
cowboy boots that had been fashionable some years before; I also wore
a balaclava with a narrow space for the eyes. I looked like a
Ruritanian paratrooper on his way to commit a burglary.
Here
in New York I mostly find a leather jacket and jeans sufficient; only
when it dips below 40 deg F will I need an outer coat. But sometimes
when it is very cold, the ride has its rewards. One bitter day in
mid-December 2016 I was a little late, and found myself the only
person riding north through the darkness of Central Park. I breathed
deeply as I struggle up the hill towards the reservoir. Then I came
out on the long stretch past the Guggenheim; it was deserted, but a
huge full moon has risen above the Upper East Side and was flooding
the world with gold, and the frost on the surface, the snow and the
ice glistened like jewels in the half-light.
*
When
spring does come, I may ride both ways, using either of my two road
bikes. One’s a Fuji that is light and well-made but has somehow
never charmed me. And there is my Panasonic.
 |
| Fuji up on the roof (M.Robbins) |
Bike
maintenance has its nice side. In a warm garage on a chilly night,
for instance, adjusting
things while listening to the radio and dreaming of rides in the
spring to come; or making things work when they didn’t before. Here
in New York City, though, there’s no garage and I must get the
bikes up on the roof of our brownstone, where there’s a hose to
wash them. The Fuji’s
indexed gears need careful adjustment, with the bike on a chainstay
stand, and I’ll clean and oil the chain. (Not
sure quite what to use for this, I once
googled
“chains and lubrication”, but what I found
had
little to do with bikes.)
The
Panasonic Villager, with its friction gearchange, is easier, and
after 10 years I still find it a delight. It weighs in at 34lb –
not bad for 1973, when it was built, but heavy
now. But it always feels faster, with its smooth steel frame and
good-tempered gears. The freewheel, oddly, is in the bottom bracket,
not on the rear wheel, so that one stops pedalling and the chain
continues to move. It was meant to make slow-speed gearchanges easier
and it does, but it never caught on.
My
first proper road bike was a Carlton Corsa that I got when I was 15.
That summer a friend and I rode across country from Banbury in the
Midlands to the north-west tip of Wales. Snowdonia was steep and
beautiful and yet it is not the mountains I remember, but a very long
day’s right across the Marches, that great long stretch of
Shropshire and other counties that most English people barely know,
yet has a quiet beauty and remoteness. We crossed a series of hills
and valleys, following a tangled skein of narrow lanes, through
half-forgotten villages, past farmhouses where black-and-white
collies lay in wait between the gateposts, seemingly asleep but
springing up as we passed and barking and chasing off the wheeled
invaders. It was a soft overcast day of deep greens and greys. Even
now, 46 years later, that day is somehow England in my mind.
But
the ride of my life was
somewhere else, far away. In
1992 I went to Bhutan, the small kingdom in the Eastern Himalayas. I
was to work as a development volunteer for the Department of
Agriculture, setting up a communications unit. I stayed for two and a
half years and was eventually very happy there, but the first few
months were not so good; the other volunteers were clannish and
withdrawn, the (English) head of the project did not seem pleased to
see me there and the monsoon season was closing in, making me feel
trapped in the narrow Thimphu Valley. Most
of all, I wanted a bike. I have never felt right without one. A
fellow-volunteer down on the Indian border heard about this and got a
friend to bring one from the nearest large Indian city, Siliguri. It
was a Hero Hawk, a five-speed racing bike built in the Punjab, and it
looked very smart in its red and white paintwork. It also weighed a
ton and, although of good quality, had not been assembled properly.
The handlebars moved around, the gear cable was too short and the
pedals started to fall apart. Bit by bit I dealt with all this.
That
year, the monsoon lasted a month longer than usual. Then at the end
of October, it was as if a tap had been turned off. Suddenly it was
warm and bright, and pleasantly cool at night. One day I decided to
ride up the road that led to Dochula, the pass
into Central Bhutan. I did not plan to reach the pass itself, which
was some 20 miles away and was at over 10,000ft (3,000m), a climb of
some 3,000ft from Thimphu.
The
road to the pass was the main East-West road that links the country
together, but to an outsider it looked like a country lane; there was
barely room for two cars to pass, and one of them would
usually pull in. Yet the very
presence of the lateral road,
as it is called, was a triumph in such a landscape, rising and
falling through immense elevations and clinging to steep, unstable
terrain. It had been built by the Indian military. Until 1962 there
had been no paved roads in Bhutan at all.
 |
| Hero Hawk. And monk (M.Robbins) |
I
began my climb slowly; there was little traffic; to my left the
mountainside rose steeply, covered in pines and carpeted by
pine-needles, and there
was a fresh, heady scent. To my right the ground fell away
increasingly suddenly as I climbed, until the isolated farmhouses in
the valley below were dots in the variegated landscape, surrounded by
poplar-like trees and intricate terraces of rice paddies, the latter
bare now although some would soon
be planted to winter wheat.
Bit by bit I climbed until I realised suddenly that I was not so very
far from the pass, and after two hours or so I came out on the clear
patch of land on the summit,
beside a long prayer-wall, surrounded by prayer-flags. Ahead of me
lay a sight such that I had never seen before, and shan’t again;
the whole of central Bhutan spread out before me in the clear
afternoon sun, the Himalayas rising above it, and in the distance to
the left the long line of snowpeaks that marked the border with
Tibet. The
eternal snows. A little nearer was a huge mountain with a strangely
square shape; this was Masangang, at nearly
23,500ft (about 7,100m) one of the great peaks of the earth.
I
stayed for two hours. Then
it was getting dark. I had no lights that worked, and besides I
should not have wanted to make the descent without
daylight. Reluctantly I swung
away back down towards Thimphu. I picked up speed as the light began
to fade, pushing my luck on the sharp mountain bends, mindful of the
weak pressed-steel brakes. A frantic journey brought me to the only
decent straight stretch, some five miles from Thimphu; here I
released the brakes and shot forward with the wind in my hair, and I
was laughing.
After
that I was happy in Bhutan.
*
Now
there are only the concrete canyons of Manhattan. I bump and rumble
over the broken road, mindful of manhole covers that are not flush
with the road (and are lethal when wet), construction barriers,
potholes with savage little lips to them, opening car doors,
sleepwalkers in the cross walk, dogs on long leads, the elderly, the
distracted and the plain rude. A dog-leg down Lexington, past the
great marble post office at Grand Central and left into 44th Street,
then down to First Avenue and prepare to dock in the long CitiBike
stand between Tudor City and the United Nations. The UN itself looms
all large and dull glass, the flags outside it flapping in the wind;
in the summer they hang dispirited in the still, muggy air. The sky
over the East River is light grey, variegated, with fast-moving
clouds. I push the bike into one of the last empty stand; there is a
click and a green LED tells me it is docked. Freedom, for now, is
over. I will reclaim it in the evening, when I will put my key in the
slot and sweep away up First Avenue.
 |
| Journey's end, winter (M.Robbins) |
If
I have the energy. I am quite old now, and maybe tonight I will go by
subway. Those rides across Shropshire, or up a Himalayan pass, are a
dream; in a few years, perhaps, I shan’t ride a bike at all. I
wonder how I will deal with that. We all have things that make life
worthwhile because we love them, in effect, more than we would care
for life in itself. I suppose that for me, bikes have filled that
role since that sense of wonder when I first realised, aged six, that
I could stay upright.
I wonder what images will come to me as I come to the end. Drifting through Central Park on a spring
morning, surrounded by flowers, or on a winter night bathed in
moonlight. Flying through green lanes under a soft grey sky past farm
gates with collies maybe, or zipping through a shallow ford between
high hedges under a bright blue sky with high white clouds, the water
droplets from the wheels catching the morning sun. Looking for a last
time towards the ramparts of Tibet before climbing back aboard a
red-and-white bike and sweeping back down round curve after curve in
the gathering twilight, hauling back on the brakes, laughing. Or a
Kodachrome vision in primary colours, of a six-year-old boy in an
Aertex shirt and leather sandals, tottering through the garden on a
small blue bike on a bright green lawn, past lines of vivid roses.
Mike Robbins’s books are available in e-book or paperback from
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