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The Selfish Act Of Riding A Bicycle

By Joe Kurmaskie

While tuning up my wife's bike, her daily commute as a school teacher about to begin, one of the neighbor kids stood off to the side for a few minutes, looking like he wanted to ask me something. That or use the bathroom. We were standing in the August sun, tools and tubes and tires spread out from the carport to the grass. We have something of an open door backyard policy on the block, and lots of toys, so the kids end up in our yard the way those little fish swim alongside whales, whether my own sons are around or not.

Once he'd messed with enough of the equipment, I put him to work. As he helped find a bucket for soaking a chain and learned the different uses for all those Allen wrenches, he tossed out the question that had been making him fidget.

"Why do you guys ride your bikes so much?" Not why do you love riding your bikes so much? Not what does it feel like to ride so much? He'd gotten to the root of it. He asked for my core motivation without all the window dressing.

Why do people do anything? Didn't seem like the right time to talk about binge drinking and peer pressure. He was eight years old.

I was about to launch into a holy roller speech involving peak oil, Robert Moses, the pitfalls of our car culture, the curative powers of exercise, the egalitarian aspects of this mode of transportation, how it combines several activities at once, all of which being good for you and at a dollar savings that runs into real money, not pocket change. I mulled over quotes from Mark Twain, CS Lewis, and The Big Lebowski.

I mentioned that my audience was an eight-year-old. He deserved the truth.

"I ride a bike so much because I'm selfish. It's my happy place, a little vacation every time I get into the saddle and go."

He looked me over a little more closely. I'd seen this expression on the school kids at the zoo trying to spot the snake in the rainforest exhibit.

"What I'm saying is that sometimes you can do things in this world that are good for it, but you're really doing it for yourself."

He smiled. "I like chopping down weeds on our fence with my Pirates of the Carribean sword."

Come to think of it, I'd heard his mom praising him for the ingenious combining of yard work and imaginative role playing - until he started beating up the roses.

"Exactly," I told him.

Later, back on the bike, with the simple act of movement under my own power setting me free once again, that old spinning magic works every time, I put another question on the table. If I found out tomorrow that bicycling hurt the planet, created pollution, caused traffic jams, forced us to build and expand more roads and highways, reduced the amount of exercise I got and killed and injured large numbers of people every year, would I still love to do it?

I'm glad I don't have to answer that, because giving up something you love is the hardest thing to do in this world.

You Might Be A Cyclist if... is Joe Kurmaskie's latest book [-] a collection of inspiring and humorous affirmations that every cyclist will recognize themselves in.