It’s 3:12 PM on a Saturday.
I’ve been planning this bike ride for about four years. Maybe it’s slightly ridiculous for a fifty-year-old man to be excited about riding a bicycle. Even considering the cost of grown-up bicycling today, that somehow legitimizes the sport, it is still, maybe slightly silly for a grown up to be so vested. Luckily, I am not too wrapped up in social norms. I’ve just done my own thing and picked up passengers along the way.
I’m at peace with that.
Four years ago, roughly, life as I knew it upended. Divorce. Scandal. Mental health. The aftermath left me with the support of my family, a handful of friends, good friends, the kind you think of affectionately as real motherfuckers. It’s all a long, convoluted story that is really just stupid no matter how I frame it, so I won’t bother with the details.
What matters is that prior to finding myself starting over I had a big life, trophy wife, and career most would kill for. I also hated it. For fifty minutes though, twice a day I was in heaven. Simple and absolute. The bike I had did not fit no matter how much fiddling I tried. Nonetheless, I loved that bike. An old Cannondale R400 road bike, complete with old-style down tube shifters, handmade aluminum, covered in a chipped and scarred, road rage red.
That bike measured 54cm, and I actually ride a 56cm. So even though I put on a longer stem and found a seatpost that would scootch me back a little, all it did, effectively, was make a mess out of the ride quality. The thing was so nervous and twitchy that no one besides me could really ride it. Even so, I loved that bike.
That’s me. Doing my best to make something fit that doesn’t fit. I sold that bike. Along with my house, my kitch, my tools, my whatever. I kept an old SUV and stored it with family, until I came out the other side, or didn’t, to rebuild my life.
I crossed the border into California with only the clothes on my back. I would sort out the past, get counseling, get right. Repair the broken or opt out. Dying was preferable to anything less than peace.
This time, I wouldn’t be making the unfit fit. Everything mismatched in my world was gone.
I received divorce papers in the mail on Valentine’s Day a few years into the reckoning. The cosmic symmetry here is something you just can’t make up. Some gifts are just slow in unwrapping.
Looking inward you have an opportunity to ponder every life choice, time to scrutinize every wrong turn. I spent years thinking about this day. This perfect Saturday. The ritual of unpacking the bike, checking tire pressure, doing a preflight on the mechanical. Keys, wallet, flat kit, water bottles. Months mentally planning the perfect route.
I would start at the off-leash dog park under the Sellwood Bridge where I worked for a fisheries commission building an app that counted anadromous fish in Idaho. From there I would cross over the bridge to the old cemetery. A short but brutal switchback climb up to Burlingame that plateaus all the way to Beaverton. From there, climb two takes a less steep yet longer run to the top of highway 217 and the doorstep of St. Vincent’s Hospital, as well as the headquarters of a family-owned lumber company I used to commute to via bike. Climb three is up Burnside to the radio towers at the top of the ridge, a long slow climb of a hill that on its own is easy enough, but, after being gassed from the first two climbs, would be a heartbreaker. From there a decadent, high speed juggernaut into downtown where I used to commute to a litigation support company, and a quick bridge hop and flat few miles along the river back to Sellwood.
I had imagined every inch of that ride. Every pebble, every cigarette butt, every glinting piece of broken glass.
I just had to endure.
I have this habit, not sure where it came from. I didn’t lift it from a passage in a book, didn’t take the idea for mine after hearing a friend tell it. I just like words. I will ruminate on a word for days. For fifty minutes, on the bike, twice a day, I would go lizard brain where there isn’t much room for anything between my ears, only about a word’s worth.
Using that little, what’s it called, labeling machine; I’d print out whatever word I was obsessing over at the time and print it on the top tube of my bike. When the burn ignited in my legs, my lungs hot from the effort. I would inevitably look down and see my word. Lizard brain shutting out everything that wasn’t imperative to my immediate survival and my word. No mortgage, no regrets about the alcoholic wife, no cringing about the mistress I had mistreated the week before. None of that matters when you are reduced to the most immediate functions.
Spin, look for danger, breathe.
Other words I have put on my top tube: Strip, Abraid, Rend, Excavate, Relentless, Essential, Truth, Redemption.
Some months ago, after a year’s worth of physical therapy, doctors’ visits, xrays, learning how to walk normally again. I received a check for pain and suffering. A young woman texting instead of looking, failed to see me stopped for road construction and hit hard enough that both directions of Interstate traffic were shut down until I could be extracted from that SUV I had kept. I had been back in Portland exactly thirty days.
With some of that blood money I bought a road bike.
A little beat up, like me. A little old, like me. It was however a 56 and felt right.
On the top tube I affixed the word ‘Endure’.
After eight pinch flats in a row I gave up and just let it sit in the living room and stewed about that planned ride.
Buying a new wheelset was out of the question. These days I live on Top Ramen and eggs. Well, until Covid. There is no ramen left on the shelves these days. Or rocky road ice cream for that matter.
I did however make a trade on Craigslist. Now I had a set of old, heavy, but working wheels.
Flash forward to Saturday 3:12 PM.
I’m praying to whatever the gods name is of rubber bicycle tubes for a good day.
One last inventory for keys, wallet, phone, water. And I’m off.
I’m a mile in before I remember that I had a bike fitting at the bike shop last fall. A lavish splurge, though money well spent. I don’t even feel the bike under me.
I have an agenda of all the things I am going to think about, and how I’m going to rend all the feels out of every section of this ride. Past loves, old jobs, things I should have said. Things I should have done. I’m done excavating. I’m done mourning. It’s time to lay the past to rest. I am going to cleanse and absolve. Baptism in my own sweat.
Begin again.
I’m not even one third up the first climb and I’ve gone lizard brain. Oddly, I fixate on the movie Fight Club, which is not as odd as it seems. We’ll save that conversation for another time. There is that scene where Brad Pitt kisses Ed Norton’s hand before pouring powdered lye on it.
Tyler Durden: This is your pain. This is your burning hand. It’s right here. Look at it.
Narrator: I’m going to my cave. I’m going to my cave and I’m going to find my power animal.
Tyler Durden: No! Don’t deal with this the way those dead people do. Deal with it the way a living person does.
By the third segment of my ride, flashes of burning forest go through my mind.
I could stop, could zig zag, could rest on the inviting green grass of the cemetary on top of Burnside. Different than the first one I rode through when the journey began, I don’t.
I go the hard way. Straight up. Grinding it out. That’s my way, always has been. Face what’s in front of me and just be relentless. I want to go to my cave. And I remember I have no cave to go to. There is only me, right now, on this hill, on this old bike, realizing a dream.
My cave. My safe place was my father. Flawed as he was, he was my safe place, my refuge. I talked to him on the phone from California a few minutes before they pulled the plug at his request in the hospital. What do you say at that moment? What final words make the best lasting impression? What final words can you live with for the rest of your days?
I told him I was sorry life wasn’t easier for him, and that I hoped whatever came next was better.
I look down and laugh… like actually out loud laugh.
The top tube of my bike says ‘Endure’.
My vision gets blurry. I’m emotional. Future me has already seen this day unfold and is sending messages backwards in time.
So I do.
