We Just Shared a Moment
The author and her sisters with their bicycles in 1978. (Source: Author.)
The first time I visited my relatives in Germany in the mid-1990s, my dad’s cousin, Ursula, picked me up at the train station. As we drove down quiet, narrow streets to her home, we came upon a man on a bicycle wearing a black topcoat and polished shoes, a white fringe of hair visible beneath a jaunty, wool cap.
“There’s Opa!” Ursula said, slowing to a stop beside her father, my great uncle, Georg. She lowered her window, and the hale, ruddy-faced octogenarian stood straddling his bike, animatedly recounting a tale in German that, sadly, I couldn’t understand. Ursula translated that he was just returning from the funeral of an old friend in a town some 12 kilometers away.
It runs in my family, I guess, this thing with bicycles.
My father often rode his banana-yellow 1968 Schwinn Le Tour to work when I was growing up, sometimes coming home with a paper sack full of groceries tucked under one arm.
The author’s father’s Schwinn Le Tour bike. (Source: Author.)
My mother used to take a nightly “bike spin,” during the summer, a slow cruise around the block just before dark, reportedly to cool off from the heat of the day, but more likely to experience a few, private moments of joy away from her three children.
My sisters and I took to bicycles early, motivated by Lou’s Dairy Way, a mile and a half up the road. It became clear that the further we could ride our bicycles, the more autonomy we would have. The youngest of three, I left kids my age in the dust in order to keep up with my sisters, coasting a two-wheeler down the street while my neighborhood friends stood up on the pedals of their trikes, pumping them as fast as they would go.
There's only one wheel difference between a bike and a trike, after all.
Get it?
It’s been a while since I hit you with a pun, so here goes another one:
If you ride your bike twice in one day, is that re-cycling?
Sorry. I’ll give you a brake from my bicycle puns; they do get wheelie annoying.
Riding a bike was my main mode of personal transportation as a child, adolescent, and into early adulthood when, at the age of 22, I got my first used car: a 1981 Honda Accord hatchback, sky blue, which I immediately fitted with a bike rack.
Though I now live in a town where most drivers see bicycles as worthy of sharing the road with, it hasn’t always been that way. I remember riding my bike to work in another town, another time, and a driver passed by me with that unmistakably impatient acceleration, laying on their horn. Then he did a curious thing, slowing down long enough for me to ride up beside him where he honked again, then turned to face me and threw his hands in the air in an expression that seemed to convey his feelings that I was an idiot for simply not driving a car, but I can’t be sure—we never learned that hand signal in bicycle safety class in the 80s.
The author at Sun Road in Glacier National Park. (Source: Author.)
I know the cyclist rules of the road, and follow them, but even so, I’ve had my share of traffic mishaps and near misses. I’ve had water balloons thrown at me, firecrackers, rotten fruit, and colorful insults hurled; the most common one, “GET A CAR!” always makes me laugh, especially these days as I coast past the Sinclair near my house, where gas is $4.84 a gallon.
I’m one of the lucky ones, though, hit only a couple of times by cars over the years as I’ve pedaled through towns and cities, down two- and four-lane highways. Both times I escaped major injury, and both times the drivers stopped, remorseful, admitting that they just didn’t see me. This inspired purchases of all manner of flashing lights, reflective gear, and obnoxious neon clothing to announce my humble presence on roadways.
Encountering a red light on a bike is an opportunity, a chance to rest for a bit, a moment to observe the clouds, or to notice a couple of ravens hopping around in a pile of Cheetos in the gutter. It’s also a chance to smile at the people behind the wheels of their cars sitting next to you, staring blankly ahead, fuming, cursing, or scrolling through the phones in their laps, thinking no one will notice.
Red lights are also a chance to look down. I once snatched up a $20 bill that was cartwheeling down the street on a breeze, found a coffee shop gift card that still had $11.72 worth of credit, and another time, a handwritten grocery list where item #6, just under cat food, was, “I love you!”
Possibly the best of these windfalls was a pristine, unopened pack of Butter Rum Lifesavers, which I didn’t know were even made anymore, found in the home stretch of a sixty-mile day bucking a headwind.
On my ride to pick up my CSA farm share the other afternoon, I started off with a slow cruise through my neighborhood to check in with the bed of irises down the block, still confined in fat, purplish-black buds almost quivering in anticipation of bursting into bloom. I pedaled alongside rows of lilac bushes dripping with white, lavender, and grape-colored flowers, trailing my fingers through them as I rode by. Poppies, I noticed a block later, resemble something from the Little Shop of Horrors before they bloom, but when the pods crack open, instead of revealing the teeth of a flesh-eating monster, the poppy unfurls into soft crimson petals; like taffeta, tissue paper, or silk.
I rode past unblemished lawns, uniform blades of green clipped to the regulation three inches, and beyond that, stretches of native grasses, shrubs, and flowers; little lady bug signs peeking out through Delphinium and Blue Flax, announcing a Pesticide-Free Zone. I notice moths, butterflies, and bees fluttering around dandelions’ sunny, golden faces, and wonder for probably the one millionth time in my life what everyone’s got against dandelions.
(Source: Author.)
Further down the street, a cardboard box of raspberry plants at the end of a gravel driveway—free to a good home—and a pair of ladies’ running shoes, size ten. “Barely used!” the woman sweeping the sidewalk shouted cheerfully when I slowed to take a look.
You see, on a bike, everything is closer.
A few miles later, I pedaled up to the popular brewery where the veggies are dropped off weekly, casually gliding by people jockeying for on-street parking, smiling to myself as I wheeled up to a bike rack, mere feet from the front door. Smug, yes, but I’ve earned it.
Afterward, riding home with a pannier full of leafy greens, I hit the last stoplight at the edge of town, a notoriously long one, just turning red. This particularly long red light also has one of the best views in town, I realized, looking out at patches of dappled sunlight and plum-colored shadows sliding across the face of Mt. Sentinel, as puffy cumulus clouds drifted through the otherwise sunny sky.
And, all of a sudden, there were raindrops; big juicy drops falling out of a blue sky, splashing onto my forearms. As quickly as it started, the rain was over, leaving the air feeling equal parts warm and cool, redolent with the perfume of sun-warmed lilacs, apple blossoms, and cottonwood buds, sticky with resin.
Across the intersection, standing on the corner of the sidewalk stood a man holding a cardboard sign, squinting into the sun. At his feet was a big black bear of a dog in repose, chin resting on a big, red backpack.
When the light turned green, I began pedaling toward the man, the dog, and the backpack. As I got closer, I could finally read the sign, which said:
“WE JUST SHARED A MOMENT.”
And, right as I passed, the man extended his hand out into the bike lane, and before I even had a chance to think it through, I reached out, too, our palms smacking together in what I am certain was the most satisfying high-five of my life.
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