When I was 23 years old I started commuting by bicycle. Getting me from school in the mornings to four different part-time jobs in the afternoons was more than Boston’s public transportation system could effectively handle. Unfortunately, I had not grown up riding a bike, and I wasn’t in particularly good shape. My childhood was spent curled up on the couch with a book. One night, when I was 10 years old, my parents noticed a slight smoky smell in our third floor apartment. They were not terribly worried but called the fire department anyway. My sister and I were awakened by four firemen in full gear, tromping past our bedroom. While my sister stood there gawking, as would any normal child, I took the opportunity to read another chapter in my book. You get the picture.
On the first day of my new biking life, I was nervous as I slipped into the humid morning, down lightly traveled back streets to a bike path along the Charles River. I passed within five feet of a black-crowned night heron tucked into a clump of reeds; I’d never seen one before. In the early evening, I snaked along flowerbeds in the Public Garden, past workers pulling up spring tulip bulbs and their long, summer-wilted leaves. I stopped to ask them what they did with the bulbs. “We donate them to other places around the city, but they don’t go back in the Public Garden because the blooms will not be as big next year. Would you like a few?” I left with my panniers overflowing. The dozens of scarlet blossoms were plenty big in my garden for years to come. By the time I carried my bike down the basement stairs that night, I was hooked.
12 years and thousands of miles later, my enchantment with biking has only deepened. I have biked through banks of fog, clear purple twilights and driving rains. Within minutes of my house, I’ve cycled through flocks of wild turkeys on snow-salted roads. More times than I can count, I’ve stopped my bike on the crest of the final hill into Lewiston to watch the bridges and mills glowing in sunrise, steam curling from the night-dark rivers. Once, in the middle of a long day’s ride in a chill Down East summer drizzle, I was tempted off my bike by the steamy windows of a tiny lobster shack. I had by far the sweetest, most tender lobster I ever tasted. Was it the hours on my bike that made it so yummy? Perhaps.
As a traveler, I’ve been invited into far more houses when arriving by bike than arriving by car or train. Being on a bike tells people you are trying to experience their world, to feel every up and down of their land, to take off your sweater when the sun comes out and put on a windbreaker when clouds blow in, to talk, to eat, to listen. I’ve slept in places I never would have chosen had I not been forced to notice them by the simple fact that night was falling and I had to stop. In one such bedraggled Ecuadorian village, a storekeeper gave me quarts of homemade yogurt in tall glass pitchers to take to my room. I’ve pedaled through sheets of color in Washington state’s tulip beds (past bumper to bumper sight-seeing traffic). And best of all, on an Italian vacation I ate three courses every night (and drank a half bottle of wine), all without gaining a pound. At cheap Italian campgrounds the food was so startlingly good that the first bites would make me laugh.
Despite the countless miles I’ve biked, I am still last up the trail on backpacking trips. When I go for a jog with a buddy who hasn’t gotten off the couch for a month, I’m the one who has trouble keeping up. But, in the end, none of that matters in the slightest. It was clear to me, from the first day I experienced the pleasure of parking my bike just inches from my destination, that there is no better way to go.