I Want To Ride My Bicycle

When I was a kid, I remember marking the passing of the seasons with little interest, generally speaking. I mean, there was obviously a difference between the school part of the year (drudgery!) and summer (freedom!). I played baseball in a community league for about a decade, and so there was always the beginning of the season to be aware of, but I never really got excited about it, per se, because I was never really sure why I was actually playing (I was bad at batting and thus the whole rigamarole was terrifying). I always looked forward to our family's spring/summer vacation(s), but those happened sporadically and at different times each year.

Basically, my life (again, generally speaking), sort of all blended together into one big, long, agency-less Thing that I sort of just rode along whilst being mostly ambivalent. Now, I'm aware of the fact that I was a weird kid, and I'm sure that played a part in my perception of summer as mostly being warm winter and fall being cold spring, but I think not really having the ability, as a child, to choose to do and then actively do things that emerged from my own mind on my own meant that everything always sort of felt like it was happening to me more than that I was making it happen, and that made it hard to really value any experiences as "mine."

Of course, this totally makes sense: I should not have had the hypothetically endless, adult freedom I have now when I was a kid, for all of the obvious reasons. So I'm not complaining; instead, I'm taking a really roundabout route to saying that now that I'm (sort of) an adult and can do what I want when I want (at least when I'm not working), I've managed to successfully dig really deeply into establishing a lot of season-centered rituals that are my own and that, as a result of being something I've built of my own volition, imbue certain seasons with a layer of significance I never attributed to them before.

Okay, so, all of the above bullshit was just me saying "As I get older, I realize I'm making my own traditions, and that's exciting!" Sorry about that.

Do you really not have anything better to do than to keep reading?

April is now not only the time that school gets out for the summer (and the cruelest month), but the time when Playing Frisbee starts again. July is when it's safe enough at high altitudes to start climbing mountains. August is when it's time to go see Phish concerts. November is when it's time to strap on snowshoes or skis and play in the snow. And so on.

May is quickly becoming the time when the weather gets nice enough to start riding my road bike again, and that is awesome.

You may not have already realized this from the context clues earlier on in this post, but I was a kid once. And when I was, holy damn shit did I love riding my bike. I imagine I loved it for the same reason that most kids love their bikes: because having the agency to travel on your own is rare and valuable when you're eight years old, and because the feeling of going really fucking fast is awesome. But riding was also pretty dangerous where I lived, due to my neighborhood being a labyrinthine suburban construction that was nonetheless intersected by a few high-speed-limit streets (it was an older, 70s-style surburb, not one of these new-fangled, self-contained safety-bubbles). So, I wasn't allowed to ride much at home because there was always a chance that an errant turn would launch me into a 45 mile-per-hour traffic flow and end with my entire torso getting SHREDDED LIKE CARNITAS.

So I was only really allowed to ride in controlled environments, like within campgrounds and such when we were on vacation, and by the time I got old enough to be allowed to ride at home, I was fourteen or so, and thus less interested in being someone who STILL RODE A BIKE than I was in  eventually getting a car and DRIVING FAST and PICKING UP CHICKS or whatever people do in high school. But man, for awhile there I really loved bike riding on vacation and wished fervently that it was something I could have done more regularly.

When I moved to Kent to go to college, I sort of got back into bike riding again, but it was more practical than anything else. I rode to and from school so I didn't have to buy a campus parking pass and I rode to and from downtown and the grocery so that I didn't have to pay for gas. Kent was a very comprehensively sidewalked town, but there weren't a lot of wide-open stretches to ride on, and so while I preferred riding to driving and often to walking during those years, there wasn't much whimsy inherent in riding from intersection to intersection for miles at a time.

Pictured: Fascinating riding territory.

When I moved out to Pullman, I initially planned to ride my bike to and around campus in much the same way; however, the overall hilliness of the town and my then-massive-laziness combined to discourage me. Plus, most of WSU's campus is surrounded by house- and apartment-living assholes who have little to nothing to do each weekend but to smash a bunch of beer bottles in the streets (and I mean a lot of beer bottles), so that makes riding without extreme tire protection a gamble. Anyway, I got used to walking everywhere, I liked walking everywhere, and I never thought much else about it until Lindsey started expressing her enthusiasm for riding the Chipman Trail between Pullman and Moscow and, fortuitously, my friend Daniel chose to sell his old but snazzy road bike. That was almost two years ago now, and over that time, I've pretty slowly but surely reacclimated myself to the ways of brake adjustments, tire inflations, and chain repairs, in addition to learning to ride a road bike for the first time (which is really, really different than riding a mountain bike or hybrid bike, and really, really fun).

The first time I rode my Peugeot, the tires seemed irresponsibly thin and it the bike impossibly fast; it seemed inevitable that I would die riding a two mile loop around Lindsey's parents' suburban neighborhood. Maybe the old adage about remembering how to ride a bike is true, but clearly there are different kinds of bikes that require different processes of learning, and I was starting this particular process from scratch.

Anyway, eventually I got the hang of it, and the speed of the bike compared to a mountain bike and the ease of riding (supplemented by padded gloves and padded bike shorts) won me over. For much of last summer and fall (and a very little bit of winter), I worked up to riding the Chipman Trail from Pullman to Moscow, and then, eventually, rode the entire loop at least once a week just for fun. The Trail basically parallels the Moscow-Pullman Highway, the road that I've been taking back and forth between the cities for years in my car, and there's just something really fulfilling and self-sufficient about riding back and forth alongside that same road under your own power. Plus, unlike the bike routes I "explored" as a child, the Trail is free from motorized traffic, is well-paved, and yet takes you through some gorgeous, open Palouse country in its run between the cities. Basically, in rediscovering the joy of biking, I've gotten to ride like I'd always wanted to be able to ride as a kid: the Trail is aesthetically beautiful enough that I often find myself dismounting in order to snap a few pictures and yet travelling its length serves a practical purpose as well: transportation between cities.

The trail continues to run to the next-over city of Troy, and later this summer a few friends and I have a plan to ride that entire loop (Pullman > Moscow > Troy and back, about 50 miles) over the course of a Saturday or Sunday. It's the first bike ride I'll ever have been on that could rightly be considered an adventure, and I can't wait to see how my rediscovered excitement about biking stands up to the challenge of an entire day's worth of riding.