I love my bicycle. There, I’ve said it. I love every inch of its aluminum body and every greasy gear of its triple ring. I love the comfort of my well broken in bicycle seat, how the headlights illuminate my path home at night, and how the pedals grip the bottom of my shoes. I love coasting downhill. I adore how quietly it travels the roads. Not a sound! I even love my helmet because wherever it is, so is my bicycle. I’m besotted with my bike. And I am not alone in this love affair between a human being and their bicycle.
I came to this revelation two weeks ago on an unseasonably hot spring day. It was too hot to continue biking so I stopped and sat under a shady tree. That’s the nice thing about a bike. You just put your foot down and stop at a moment’s notice and then you can notice other things. Like the fact that I was sitting in the middle of a bed of clover.
It’s surely been more than 50 years since I sat down in a bed of clover blossoms. Who knew that there are pink clover blossoms? Why didn’t someone tell me this? What a revelation and it’s all thanks to my bike, and putting a foot down and noticing things.
I’m a coaster on a bike and a ponderer under a tree. It was time to ponder things from pink clover blossoms to our love affairs with our bicycles. And bicycle advocacy and how was I going to get a hundred pound German Shepherd to a vet appointment on my bike.
I have never met a person yet who does not have two stories to tell. One about the first time they rode a bike all by themselves; and the other story about getting their driver’s license. Both feed into and nurture our primal instincts. An automobile fans our primal nature about the technology of speed and power, while a bicycle empowers us with a sense of freedom generated by the mechanical power of our own body. With both we can fly. And yet, with both we’ve crashed.
In the early days of bicycle advocacy, a troubling offshoot developed with the thinking that CARS are BAD and BICYCLES are GOOD. Black and white thinking. Automobiles should be driven from the face of the earth in order to allow the saintly bicycle to take its rightful and primary place on the landscape of our fragile planet. The problem with this untenable proposition was that for as great as was our love of bicycles, practically every cyclist also had an unrequited love affair with automobiles. It’s in our American genetic coding.
Out of this schizophrenic dichotomy within all Americans, voiced or unvoiced, understood or not, grew the ugly roots of the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s blood feud between motorists and cyclists. It raged unchecked for decades where no one took cyclists seriously (not even the cyclists themselves) and few, if any, gave heed to the need for modifying our national transportation system that was rapidly making us prisoners in our own housing developments if we did not have access to an automobile.
Meanwhile the bicycle was still mistakenly viewed as a luxury item or toy of a privileged few rather than the trusted economical transportation friend and leisure companion it is in so many other countries. With the advent of disposable income so readily available to most college graduates in the 70’s and 80’s, custom high-end and high-priced bicycles became the norm and were strapped to custom high-end, high-priced automobiles. Meanwhile, lower income citizens found the whole charade especially offensive. They were working people and proud of it and these mama’s boys and weekend warriors who never worked a lick in their life in a “real” job and all dressed in Spandex and on their titanium bikes just better watch out. The gap widened between the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s.
Fortunately at this point, two things happened. Behind the scenes, cooler-headed advocates were making slow but steady inroads with their efforts to harmonize transportation systems to include all forms of “traffic,” motorized and non-motorized. Also, fortunately, our economy nearly collapsed forcing us to rethink our spending habits, question whether six trips in a car every day was perhaps too much, reassess our life goals, wonder what were our real inalienable rights, and how were we going to proceed with an economy in shambles and our cities strangling us to death.
The most intense love affairs are born or prosper exponentially during times of greatest strife. We now have an opportunity to fall in love again with both our bicycles and our automobiles, and ultimately then fall in love with ourselves and others. Both the automobile and the bicycle has a rightful and useful place in our life if we choose it to be so.
It’s hard to figure out how to take a 100 pound German Shepherd to a vet appointment on a bicycle. It’s even harder to stop on a dime and be able to pick a bouquet of pink and white clover blossoms with an automobile.
Bicycle advocacy has finally come into its own day in the sun where it’s not an either or situation. If we want it to be so, we can have communities and our entire nation as an open source solution to providing every citizen with equal access to their surroundings in a safe and life-affirming manner.
Do YOU love your bicycle enough to join Bike Delaware and pick a few clover blossoms with us as we fly to the privilege of changing Delaware forever into the 1st State for Bicyclists?
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