Here’s the deal: I love to ride my bike.
Yes, it’s Bike to Work month. And everybody is talking about the positive environmental impact of taking a car off the road and how good it is for one’s mind and body to ride a bike to work. I’m not disagreeing with any of those things. In fact, I took great pains to make those points during last year’s Bike to Work month. But that’s not why I ride my bike to work. I ride because it’s one of my favorite things to do in the world. Better than eating donuts.
When I was a kid, my brother used to build bikes in our garage, using parts he’d acquired from who knows where. He built my first bike. From scratch. And he painted it bronze (apparently the only color spray paint my dad kept in the garage). It was my sister who taught me how to ride a bike. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of my sister pushing me down the street when I was five (on the bike my brother built), letting go and watching me race down the road, no training wheels, shouting after me with encouragement. Only then did she realize that she hadn’t taught me how to brake. About three hundred yards later, I dove off my bike into the ditch – the only way I could imagine getting off the thing alive.
There were of course also the epic bike rides with my brother and his friends – racing through the no-trespassing dairy down the street, fleeing from the owner of the apple orchard next door, and clearing the home-made bike jumps in our back pasture. All with minimal visits to the hospital.
When I moved to Seattle nearly twenty years ago (long before the city’s ubiquitous bike lanes), I rode my bike up and down Queen Anne hill to and from work every day. Admittedly, as a broke recent college grad, riding my bike was more out of financial necessity than it’d ever been before. But it wasn’t an issue. And it’s not today. Because I love to ride my bike. I love to take in the scenery that otherwise passes by without notice inside a car. I love being so close to the mechanics of the whole thing. I love the adrenaline rush of speeding down a hill. Sunlight on chrome, the blur of the landscape, every nerve aware.
So, I’m not here to make a plea for you to bike to work, save the planet. I’m here to say I love to ride my bike.
Are you participating this month? I’d love to hear passion around biking to work below.
Photo courtesy of eva101.
