Pedaling prose

I bike pretty much everywhere I don't walk. I will drive only if the situation demands (the situation has been known to include sheer laziness, but that's fairly rare). Win-win-win situation, here: I spend less on gas and parking, I get more exercise, the environment gets less polluted. I don't have many opportunities that are so well balanced with good, so I enjoy this one.

Funny backstory: I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was in about 5th grade, and even then I was pretty bad at it until recently. I lived on a farm on badly/unpaved roads with lots of hills. There was nowhere to safely learn to ride and nowhere to safely ride to. When I did learn, it was because my best friend, who lived in a town with sidewalks and flatness, wanted to go somewhere that was too far to walk. She taught me to ride in one quick lesson (at least, that's how I remember it). That may be why I was pretty unstable until now.

The bike was my vet school graduation present. I think we all figured: hey, Kansas, flat, good biking. Also, the amusing joke my father can tell about a car for college, a bike for vet school, maybe sneakers for the MS.

The truly lovely thing about biking, for me, is nature. Don't get me wrong, Manhattan is a nice small city, with lots of trees and some nice small hills, a number of parks, about as much as you could ask for, nature-wise, in a town this size. But . . . I moved here from Ithaca, NY. As in Ithaca is Gorges. As in a backyard with a private entrance to a 5-mile city trail and gorge access. As in, once, a 16-mile hike from my backyard without backtracking or more than 1/2 mile of road. I like nature and in Ithaca it was literally right out the back door. Even barring the fact that, in my basement apartment, there are no backdoors, nothing I have now comes close. I live in a complex surrounded by student rental properties. On sunny afternoons, the pool area has a radio competing with the deck radios of the upper dwellers. Even campus is short on the gardens and high on the square sandstone buildings.

But on the bike. Not during the day, usually; I spend most of my road time after 8am keeping an eye on drivers doing stupid things. First thing in the morning, though, at 5:45 on my way to the gym, I can appreciate what nature there is. It's a bit like a soul shower, refreshing and cleansing if a little short. There are sunrises that take my breath away. In winter (when I'm trying not to breath too much, anyways), the stars are like a bowl of eternity, even through the streetlamps. The birds sing. One morning, I came across a murder of crows, clutching every branch big enough to clutch in a row of trees on campus, occasionally taking turns wheeling on sentry and calling the news ghoulishly; I learned why it was called a murder from the chill it gave my spine. Beautiful. I get the same sort of thing on a different route on weekends, during Saturday runs to the Farmer's Market and Sunday walk/rides to church (the side of the slash I'm on depends each week on when I get up and what service I'm trying to make). Happily, most of this town sleeps in on the weekends, so I can have my morning nature-solitude fix and a bit more sleep.

On days I get my hit (and it is an addiction), I'm happier and calmer and generally better off. I have the bike commute to thank for that.

Biking. What won't they think of next?