The Pure Cyclist

I was in Wales. I went looking for adventure. I went looking for a rest. I went looking for my father, whose ashes I’d laid in the small cemetery in the village he was born in, two years ago. I’ve written about Wales here before, a lot of words for a small country most of you will never visit. But this isn’t about Wales any more than it’s about my family, or yours, but rather about how we come to know ourselves.

For a lot of us that’s the bike, which is, of course, all the things in microcosm: transportation, exercise, freedom, therapy tool, protest, social vehicle, environmental cure, etc., a prism through which to understand the world, a strangely shaped decoder ring for life.

My story is a weird one, or feels that way. My father grew up on a dairy farm in rural Wales, the oldest of eight kids who were farm labor as much as children. Somehow he left the village, went to the town school, then onto the national university, a PhD, moved to London, came to the US on a boat in the ’60s, met my mom. We lived in New Jersey, Rhode Island, Alabama. It’s all so random that multiverse theory begins to seem plausible. The upshot is that I’m an American with an enormous Welsh family, and I have always wondered what that means, always wondered if I’m where I belong.

Like you, when I found the bike, it felt like finding that puzzle piece you’d been straining your eyes to find for so long, the whole, fragmented picture suddenly coming into focus. This is similar to the feeling I get when we crest the rise on the backside of Bettws Cedewain, and the farms are all of a sudden familiar, memories of childhood visits bursting on cue.

On this trip, we visited parts of Wales I’d never seen, Cardiff, the capital, and the rugged, green sea cliffs of the south coast, St David’s Cathedral, and I read Welsh history as we moved from one town to the next, struggling with the pronunciations of the place names and the people who’d built their forts and churches and castles along the way. All the while, I looked for myself in the story. Could I be descended from the Silures, short, swarthy, dark-haired refugees from the Iberian Peninsula? Might I have a direct line to the Druids who moved in mysterious ways in the days before the Romans reached Britain’s shores? I found myself very much wishing for this kind of pure Welsh backstory (although Welsh history is anything but pure, coherent or consistent).

That’s when it struck me that this wish for purity is tremendously dangerous. What begins as a desire to connect deeply to your past, quickly transforms into a value judgement about whose origins are better than everyone else’s, and you can see how ugly that gets almost immediately. Wales is, in the end, a curious melting pot of people, cultures and overlapping histories. We are all mutts. All of us.

I have known a lot of bike riders who want this same sort of connection to our sport. They are all in. Their entire persona is a reflection of the bike. They learn the history, fetishize all the refinements, race, ride, explore, etc. This is both an expression of love for cycling and a staking out of territory, a statement of pureness.

It cuts both ways.

I am no more Welsh than anyone who thinks of the place as home, whether they were born in the Dyfi Valley to Welsh-speaking parents or they emigrated to Cardiff from Pakistan or Spain or Eritrea. I am no more a cyclist than anyone who loves to ride a road bike, a hybrid, or a hand-cycle. There is something attractive about purity, and something gravely dangerous too.