I am just back from Wales, where my father was born, where a small village in a narrow valley contains an awful lot of people with whom I share some large percentage of my DNA. While there, I visited my father’s grave, which is two over from my grandparents, which sits across the paved walk from my great grandparents. The cemetery is about 400 yards from the farmhouse, Cwmcignant, in which my father was born, and which, in 1880, became our family’s way of making their way in the world.
My grandfather milked cows and raised other livestock, and eventually retired, leaving the farm to my uncle Cyril, the second oldest son after my father. My grandparents built themselves a little bungalow, Glan Garreg, that perches on the hillside overlooking the village, on a small parcel cut out from one of Cwmcignant’s lower pastures.
It was in Glan Garreg’s sloping driveway that I learned to ride a bike, and I can’t pass the little house by without immediately thinking of that day and what it has meant for my life. much of which is obvious, only in retrospect.
The key thing, I think, is that they finally just left me alone. I’d been trying to learn to ride, back in the States, my father holding the back of my seat and running alongside me, over and over, but my young mind failing to take to the task. In Wales for the summer of 1979, I was presented with a small red bike with hard white tires, and after a few minutes of watching me tentatively pacing around the driveway with it, my parents and grandparents went inside to drink tea and eat the gloriously sweet cakes my grandmother was known for.
I have always liked being left alone to think my own thoughts and make my own decisions, and so, standing there at the top of the drive, I threw a leg over this borrowed bike and thought about how it might work. It came to me suddenly that, with the slope of the driveway, I likely didn’t need to pedal, that I could focus all my fragile attention on just keeping the thing upright, and so I lifted my feet and glided away, swooping down one side and up the other like a small bird gliding between tree branches.
You know how that felt. Revelatory. Ground-shifting. As if in the space of 40 feet I’d become a different person. After another few runs, to confirm my expertise, I ran inside to summon the grownups, to demonstrate my inchoate brilliance.
The next day I took my first bike ride, out of Glan Garreg’s steep drive into the narrow lane that led up the hill to Cwmcignant. I was fortunate to be the only one on the road that morning, because it is indeed a sketchy stretch, hemmed by high hedges with not nearly enough room for two cars to pass each other, though they frequently did and still do at high speed.
I recall a feeling of unfamiliar elation as I escaped the orbit of my parents, as I pushed out into a realm I hadn’t previously fathomed, independence, this ride culminating 3-4 minutes later in the equally steep paved yard of the farm, where my uncle strode about in a pair of coveralls and Wellies after the morning’s milking, my younger cousins, Hailey and Melvin bubbling around in the house, just waiting for their American cousin to join whatever nonsense the day might offer.
Of course, I didn’t know at the time how concisely this experience would encapsulate my personality and path, how a short ride on a terrible little toy bike would mark me out as problematically independent, restlessly adventurous, and absolutely obsessed with taking myself places under my own power, in my own time and in my own way.
Last week we drove into the village from the west, the A44 from Aberystwyth, skirting the edge of Newtown, up through Caersws, and passing first Cwmcignant on the left and then Glan Garreg on the right, before dropping down into the village, Bettws Cedewain where much of the family lives now. I didn’t bore my kids with this story. They’ve heard it before and likely forgotten it. But I never will, and I will never pass these holy bits of manure smelling countryside without a giddy sense of joy for what they gave me.
