Bicycles

A few weeks ago, I bought a bicycle.  It was a sort-of impulse buy -- I was actually in the shopping complex as moral support for a friend who was buying paint (and why would anyone bring me to help buy paint? It shows a tremendous amount of faith in my decision-making abilities), and while we were there we wandered into Decathlon, the Chinese equivalent of -- well, I'm not even quite sure.  It's something like a combination of Big Five Sporting Goods and Target and REI, and it has bicycles, and I bought one, and it was delivered two days later.

I say it was a "sort-of" impulse buy because I've actually been planning to buy a bike since I arrived in Beijing.  A confluence of forces -- exhaustion, cash flow issues, a quiet but intense terror of riding a bike in a city -- had kept me from doing it so far, but there was I at Decathlon and there was a beautiful olive green cruiser with my name on it right in front of me and clearly, it was time.

And thank goodness I did it, because the second I hopped on my (my!) bike and eased out into Xingfucun Zhong Lu, I realized that Beijing by bike is a completely different city.  It's quicker, it's easier to navigate, and let's face it: it's impossible to ride a bike without a smile on your face.

(Unless you're riding up a steep hill, or against a stiff wind, or through three feet of snow, or you're about to run into a small tree -- ALL OF WHICH I'VE DONE -- in which case, the smile is definitely on the inside.  I maintain that it's there somewhere, though.)

It helps that I've had a love affair with bicycles from an early age.  For one thing, it's the perfect speed at which to experience the world:  slow enough to notice things, but fast enough that you don't get bored.  I rode my bike to school every single day between eighth grade and twelfth grade, except for once, when I had to bring in a cake.  In the winter, I learned that unplowed snowdrifts were easier to ride through than an unplowed road; the compacted ridges of street snow made the day's journey a terrifying exercise in rigidly focused balance.  In the spring, I alternated between feeling gloriously warm-cool air skimming against my bare skin and covering up in a massive rain poncho that barely kept me dry during Ohio's spring "showers".  I experienced one major spill every year -- the worst when I skidded out on our icy driveway, ripping into my knee and hand and face with the jagged rocks that poked out of the ice.

I made it to school each morning anyway.  And almost every morning, my father rode his bicycle with me.  Sometimes he went in earlier, sometimes he had to drive, but mostly?  We did it together.

I'm thinking about this now because this year turns out to have been a Father-Daughter Bicycle Reunion Tour, the Year When My Dad And I Rode Around Things Together, and (not incidentally), the Year I Learned To Take Pictures On My iPhone Whilst Pedaling And Holding Onto The Handlebars With One Hand.

Pelee Island

Every summer since I was about three, my parents and I have gone to Pelee Island.  It's the biggest island in Lake Erie, but still relatively small; it's also the southernmost point of Canada.  From when I was five to after I graduated from college, my parents owned the old one-room schoolhouse on Stone Road, and that was where we stayed when we were there.  It was completely isolated -- the schoolhouse is the only building on Stone Road, in the middle of a nature preserve called the Alvar -- and it was one of the places where I was lucky enough to learn about wildflowers and birdcalls and turtles and snakes.  

At the Island's Heritage Center (run by a friend from a family so close they were practically our own family), I studied shipwrecks and arrowheads and kettlestones and the story of Hulda's Rock.  With those same family-friends, we had cookouts on the beach and ran from thunderstorms and spotted bald eagles and turkey vultures and water snakes.  We made our way through wilderness to Fish Point and Lighthouse Point.  We went swimming off the dock and chased fireflies and threw up sticks in the air to make bats swoop down at them and got chigger bites.

(I never did get used to the spiders, though.  Those were never okay.)

In the back of our blue Dodge van, my dog Kodie jumped out of a window to chase a rabbit down the dirt-path road.  (She was fine.)  In that same van, my mother taught me my first canon, "Little Jack Horner," and I remember learning to pause during the rest that falls on the downbeat in the third section of the round, giggling as we each smacked the surface nearest us to emphasize the pause.

It's an important place, Pelee Island, a special place.  And this summer, when I was there with my parents, my father and I casually decided to ride the 20 miles around it on bicycles.

I'm not even sure we were initially planning on riding around the whole island.  But as we started out on the west side and cruised down south, the lake blue and glittering on our right, soybean fields and grass Seattle-green on our left, and the sun baking down pleasantly, I guess we just figured that we might as well keep going.  

Past the dump and into the shade we went, sun dappling down through the trees.  We coasted through golden fields of wheat, big machines harvesting the crops on either side.  At some point, we rounded Fish Point.  The Marina -- an inlet that used to be full of sailboats, and one that is much smaller than I remembered -- is no more, and we whipped through its cove quickly.  The docks are old and unkempt now, as the lake reclaims them.

And suddenly, we were pedaling up Stone Road and the surface below us turned to gravel on solid rock and I remembered that this was a holy place.

Sun filtered down through the trees.  The world hushed, so that we could hear the great golden hum of the Alvar:  birds twittering and insects chirping and that ineffable resonance, impossibly rich, that seems to sweat out of the air in summer.  All of a sudden, I was every age I'd ever been.  I could hear my mother calling me in for dinner when I was five years old, hiding in a clearing of tall grass and reading a book, and I saw those bats swooping down over the schoolhouse yard, and the white ghost of my dog Kodie danced down the road, clearly hoping for a rabbit but still turning to look back at us every now and then.

And I was able to turn to my father, riding beside me, and say, "This road is special," and he said, "Kodie," and we understood each other perfectly.

We completed our 20-mile circuit -- past the cabins on the east side, into a sharp wind as we turned west to ride along the north end, with a stop for bottles of water at Scudder.  I had to take a nap once we arrived back out our friends' house; my 74 year-old father was still spry and ready to go.

Okay, I thought, that was good.  I'm glad we did that.  Maybe next summer we can go around again.  And I pretty much assumed that was it for me and bikes for the year.

Xi'an

The last time I was in Xi'an -- one year ago -- the highlight of my trip was renting a bike and riding a complete circuit on top of the old Ming-era city walls.  My parents saw a picture of me doing so, and said, as one, "THAT.  When we're in China, we want to do THAT!"

Unfortunately, Xi'an was not initially in our plans.  We were going to go on a grand journey down the Silk Road during my October break, and while Xi'an was the easternmost stop on the Silk Road, it was not actually part of our itinerary.  Events conspired to cancel the Silk Road trip, however, and as such we found ourselves on a week-long tour of Xi'an, Pingyao, and Datong.  (I had no objection to returning to Xi'an; it is by far my favorite city in China.)

Our first full day was disgustingly rainy and full of glorious Terra Cotta warriors; our second day, we set forth to the Ming Walls.  Much to her sadness, my mother was unable to clamber onto the rental bikes; the crossbar was set far too high for her hip to accommodate, and we had to leave her behind.  It turns out that it would have been a disastrous exercise for her, anyway, as the cobblestones were regularly irregular, wreaking havoc on our wrists as we gripped the handlebars.

One of the best things about having my parents in China has been being able to see my new home through their eyes.  My mother, incredibly, has been able to pick out beautiful flowers in Beijing even on a disgustingly smoggy day, and managed to spot an egret on our way to the Great Wall.  Accordingly, she regularly finds (metaphorical) gold amongst the dross of the little antique shops and somehow managed to recognize some of my students during a Beijing-wide school scavenger hunt.

My father, along with making friends with every Chinese baby he's met so far, has been slowly but inexorably absorbing all the sights around him.  He walks about ten steps behind my mother and me, not because he's an especially slow walker (see: 20-mile bike ride around Pelee Island) but because he looks hard at everything he passes.  He notices the drivers who honk their horns and the drivers who don't, the orange juice in the grocery store that's "100% Tasmanian Owned," the painted numbers on the backs of trucks, and, yes, the baby girl in her grandmother's arms, reaching out for his silver beard with fascination.

So I was looking forward to circling the wall with my father; I thought new things would pop out at me, and that I'd love the Xi'an bike ride even more. 

Turns out, you don't just notice the good things about an experience when you're watching through the eyes of another; you notice all the damn things.

So I felt every rattle of the cobblestones in my wrists.  I watched my father adjust the seat on his bicycle again and again (it kept sliding down, unused to tall people), paid rigid attention to the irregularities in the stones so that I wouldn't go flying, and heard my father observe (correctly) that the springs on the bike seat must be purely ornamental.  It was far from a perfect ride.

Still:  I also saw the other tourists on the wall, both Chinese and Western, and they waved at us as they passed.  There was a strange team building exercise involving about two hundred people in yellow shirts jogging in formation, yelling slogans, and waving flags.  A dance crew blasted hip hop next to the wall and rehearsed some new moves.

To our right, Xi'an's old city whipped by.  A street market bustled away below us, women bargaining over big chunks of tofu and a wild nest of bean curd.  In the Northwest corner was a Tibetan Buddhist temple, quiet and almost deserted, its delicate golden roofs gleaming in the sun as a young woman prayed before the altar, incense held high. 

And all around us waddled tandem bikes from the rental company.  They're popular, I realize, but I never really got the point of a bicycle built for two, and this particular outing didn't exactly help that.  Those riding the tandem bikes were tied to each other rigidly, one in front and capable of steering and seeing, the other only to be used as brute pedaling force in the back -- although in many cases, I noticed that the rider in the back simply ceased to pedal and made the rider in front do all the work.  Why on earth, I wondered, would you ever choose to be so suffocatingly tied to someone as you pedal and steer and see?  Is this why I'm still single?

But no, I don't think so.  I much prefer to see the world from a bicycle built for one rather than two, but it is more fun when you have someone there on another bicycle to pedal along with.  You can swoop around separately or together, noticing things at your own pace or learning the pace of another.  You can feel active, independent, liberated, pumping your legs as fast as you can to break away from everyone around you, and then you can wait for your companion to catch up -- or vice versa.  You can notice the world together, whooping as you go down ramps, laughing with surprise at the same things, falling into conversation, or simply coasting along in companionable silence.

I'll say it again:  it's the best way to experience the world -- on a bike, or off it.  And obviously riding a bicycle with your father doesn't and shouldn't exactly count as a metaphor for All Relationships In Life, but it is a pretty good metaphor for how I feel about traveling and also for how I feel about family and friendship and companionship and a lot of the other ships.  You don't gather people around you because you're in desperate need of a pilot or a method of propulsion (or rather, you shouldn't, or rather, I shouldn't; after all, I don't know your life).  You do it because you need to know that if you go shooting up off ahead, they'll trust you to wait for them later; that if they see the golden roof of the Tibetan temple first, they'll point it out to you; that they're pushing through the same deep snow that you are; and that if they're the one to race into the distance, at some point, they're going to pause and wait for you to catch up.