AdventuresNW
I turn 60 this winter, which means I’ve been riding bikes for 55 years and change now.
More than any other activity, bicycling has shaped my life—physically, mentally, socially, economically, professionally, and even spiritually through the connection to nature that bikes enable.
Aside from the danger of biking on roadways, my relationship with bicycles, the most efficient transportation machine ever invented, has been utterly positive.
I learned early, watching my older brother struggle to balance the red steel paperboy bike on the lawn of our childhood home.
“Pedal, pedal, pedal,” our father encouraged.
But my brother didn’t pedal. He wobbled and repeatedly crashed onto the soft grass. Even as a five-year-old, I could see that he was afraid.
My brother feared gaining speed and generating the forward momentum necessary to balance a bicycle. I watched and learned.
Fear exists only in our heads. It is not a physical force. Yet it can take on physical properties and become a barrier to learning and progress when we allow it to stop us.
Everyone who learns to ride a bike must overcome their fear, their apprehension of gaining speed, and heading into the unknown.
With speed comes momentum. With momentum comes balance. In this way, bicycling is a metaphor for life—or at least mine.
A life of bicycling for fun, fitness, transportation, exploration, adventure, and friendship has led me to the doorstep of a new chapter, my sixth decade, the early winter of my life.
Today I work as a bike advocate because, duh, individuals and societies that bike are healthier, wealthier, and wiser. Bicycles are freedom machines. Any child pedaling to school or a friend’s house knows this.
Yet the dum-dums and bullies who have seized control of our government fail to see this obvious truth. They defund, deregulate, destroy democratic norms, and lead us backward because they are afraid of a free society. Their fear is tipping the balance and leading us toward a crash.
Fear is the mind killer, I learned from reading Dune as a boy. I take that to mean we must not let fear paralyze us.
“Do you want to try?” Papa asked me, holding up the red paperboy bike.
“Yes,” I said, wanting to make him proud and conquer my fear.
“Pedal, pedal, pedal,” he said, guiding me down the lawn.
Unlike my brother, I pedaled and broke free, gained speed, generated momentum, and found my balance.
With balance comes a life well-lived. So I pedal onward, up hills and into headwinds, the future uncertain, as it always has been, but knowing that forward is the only direction.
Paul Tolme, the Journalist on the Loose, is an outdoors writer, award-winning environmental journalist, and blogger for Cascade Bicycle Club. He lives with his wife in a Seattle houseboat crammed with bikes, skis, snowboards, kayaks, and paddleboards, but no regrets. His work can be seen at paultolme.com and cascade.org/news.
