There was a graceful fall of land on the street where we lived, from the top of the block, north toward the south, bowing in the direction of the lake. If you looked at a contour map, you would see roads shaped by shoreline, connected to others that radiated away like rays from a child’s drawing of the sun, that gradually straightened and conformed to the surrounding grids of houses.
I didn’t know this yet. What I knew is that, from our driveway to one friend’s house, I had to walk uphill from left to right; and that, in the spring, the thaw created trickles that grew to boy-sized rivers that tunneled under snow and ice, and whose bubbles and other amoebic water sprites were carried away from right to left. The horizon was close in those days, like a square Earth.
On one of those early days, a couple of melted weeks after the ice had finally gone, you would find me perched atop a hand-me-down single-speed Schwinn, twice as heavy as me and armed against catastrophe with those anti-intuitive coaster brakes. My father jogged behind me, first from the garage to the end of our short drive, then turning us both and trotting back, hand on the seat to hold me steady and slow me down. This was the day the training wheels disappeared.
So the “training”, we have to suppose, was complete. When we turned a second time, away from my home, I began to peddle toward the street. It was working! My father relaxed his grip to a touch, then nothing, measuring my balance; and, in what turned out to be rather a surprise for both of us, I accelerated out of his reach, and to the end of driveway and then out of it, gravitationally urged left and drawn down the hill to the lake boulevard, then right along the edge of the road, still downhill and out of sight…
Heaven knows I would have kept going had there been more downhill available: I hadn’t begun to master the art of stopping; I suppose that is lamentably still the case. As it was, I followed the line of least madness downhill, shunted onto a quiet side-road that angled away from the lake toward Afton Park, where I finally slowed enough to topple over in the grass, just where the skating rink had been a month before. I stood up. I felt the line between where I stood and where I lived. I walked the bike all that way home. Victory!
As I am a father, I can well imagine how it must have felt, to give your son a gentle, supportive push and see it carry him into the void, the steering somehow (miraculously!) steady, the small back receding, your power to protect or to steer taken from your hands, watching, watching, holding your breath. I suppose he ran after me – I can’t recall, though, and my eyes, like every child’s eyes, were riveted on the road ahead, my road, all my attention given to staying upright.
“Urban Flow – Passing Bicycle” by ThroughMyAperture @ DeviantArt.com
This is how the map of the world is drawn: you place the pencil at the center of your existence, right where you stand, and trace a circle outward, without lifting the tip. Look out as far as you can see: draw the line to David’s house, and there is the Fitzenburger’s; that is Story’s wooded lot and the dirt hill we imagined a mountain, sometimes, or an island, or the sea. There’s the road to school, and somewhere along it, the school itself. There is a road behind my road that I reach by walking through our back yard and our neighbor’s back yard (the pencil line does not recognize borders) and, turning left, I reach John’s house. There is a road that intersects my road in a “T” that, walking, I can take to Todd’s house. You write a web of ways.
From that summer forward, Two wheels beneath me, my world expanded in exuberant spirals, broken here and there by roads too big to cross, forded there and here by alternate routes, the hunger to know so much greater than the fear of the unknown, an irresistible force really, a big bang which is no theory but lived fact.
The Big Bang – public domain, ‘shopped
The map of my inner world is written over and over again. I think of it as refinement, though it is possible that these are in fact new worlds, and while what I trace with my inner eye looks familiar, it is in fact the art or re-creation, a sentiment I recognized as a friend was instead that friend’s brother, or sister; and color I saw as true was instead a shade lighter, or darker, or its complement.
It is all slightly surreal, imagined, illusory. The only way to feel this earth stable again is to feel it underfoot or, in my case, under wheel: I started my life as a travel on two wheels, and here I am once again, riding an old Schwinn I bought second- or fifth-hand in the States for $125, and flew across the ocean for free. There’s no coaster brake on this one, and the frame is both much larger and much lighter.
Yesterday I rode the parkway from the Parc de la Ciutadella, with is dragon fountains and life-sized statue of a mammoth, uphill through the neighborhood of Eixample to the Vila de Gracia, a town in its own right years back, now gathered into the hill-contained sprawl that is Barcelona. Each area has its own flavor and charms: here the high-end elegance, surrounded by shops to feed that lifestyle, and there the slowly-decaying brick of middle- and lower-class families, their plazas noisy with children and dogs; here’s the stretch along the sea which doesn’t seem to have one owner but has amazingly been shared; there’s the spire of the Sagrada Familia reaching out of the bustle of dust of our passage as some symbol of striving, not yet complete.
As I make my way to the public market, get lost, find myself again, connect the dots (or the stars of this new galaxy), I draw the map. The lines make an outline, and the outline begins to look like a face, I begin to recognize the features, unique from any other, the face of myself in Spain.
Beachside bike trail, Poble Nou, Barcelona – Mark Schultz
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