Bikes

One Wednesday morning in June, when unemployment and adolescent depression led me to spend my days alone in the house, pouring through thick tomes of philosophy and history, I went for a bike ride. I hopped on my old mountain bike, like most of my possessions not really mine but appropriated from a brother who had had a job, who had bought his own things, but who moved out and left them in my grasp, and headed up the mountain. The gears creaked and snapped the whole way, the brakes squeaked, and I envisioned myself soon enjoying a long walk home, as is often the end result of my bike trips, eternally ill-fated. Filled with a peculiar blend of self-destructive energy, I pushed my way up the windy, steep curves of Dimple Dell Drive, following the canyon. I stopped in front of a house I recognized, from one other summer night, in the happier days of high school, when while driving in my friends Taurus (nicknamed “Pinckley”) we were greeted by the ghostly specter of a group of teenage girls, flitting across the road in their underwear, mermaids before the eyes of hungry sailors. I dismounted my bike, took a big sip from my water bottle, and promptly puked the remains of my oatmeal into the bushes.

I finally made it up the hill, to my destination, the Bell Canyon Trail parking lot on the top of Wasatch Drive. Despite my shaking legs I decided to climb to the lake, about a mile and a half up ridiculously steep trail. Memories, though, made the journey easy; memories of a thousand past adventures at this our favorite stomping grounds with friends and family, of dreams built and jokes made while marching the same path not alone but surrounded by those friends around whom I built my consciousness, of the ecstasy of a fleeting glimpse of swimsuit clad buttocks on whatever girl we conned into joining us, of the intoxicating wildness of being a group of teenagers roaming in a pack, into the wild, free from supervision, of a time when possibilities seemed endless and joy the only reason for being.

The river at the trail’s end was pouring into the lake at a steady rate, no longer at the flood stages of early spring but not yet dried up by August drought. I collapsed amongst a heap of rocks that serve as the dock for this unofficial recreation area, propped up against a sign with dogs, fish, swimming suits crossed out in futile prohibition. I relaxed in the summer sun and half-slept, filled with a wonderful exhaustion of muscles pushed to their limits. Seeing no one around, I removed all my clothes, and enjoyed the sun on my naked body. I put one toe in the ice cold water, feeling that tingling rush of exhilaration, then plunged in completely. I swam out into the lake. Swimming in cold water is one of the purest types of pleasure; it feels wholesome, baptismal, free yet chaste. I swam to a pole 15 feet away from shore which is supposed to indicate the lakes elevation and grabbed on, resting as I bobbed up and down. My limbs, which at first ached from the pain of the change of temperature, settled into a strange tingle, then went completely numb. I pushed off and headed back to shallower water, where I established myself amongst some rocks and enjoyed my cold bath some more. The sky was clear blue and the sun bright with a young heat not yet the scorching onslaught of afternoon; the perfect calm of mid-morning. I longed for its heat and got out of the water. I lay down on a large flat rock facing the sun, cold and wet until its rays penetrated my cocoon of hypothermia and gradually warmed me up. I lay there, dozing, spread-eagle, my body offered up to the nature which surrounded me, cared for me, washed away my fears and exhaustion and replaced them with tranquility, when a young mother hauling a small child on her back crested the trail in the direction I was facing.

Earlier this week, we got Agata’s old bike out of storage. This was part of our offensive to cheer me up, as she had grown tired of my existential moping and we thought some physical exercise might jolt me out of this slump. I bought a dorky little hand pump for 10 zlotys and a patch repair kit, knowing my luck with tires, and quickly became excited about taking the thing out for a test run. Simultaneously, the beautiful early spring weather we had been enjoying turned to a real Polish March, full of rain and fury, signifying cold. I decided to postpone my biking adventures but the next morning I awoke with a strong desire which couldn’t be forestalled by the brewing clouds. I ran around in my usual pre-exercise morning ritual of searching for my long unused exercise clothing, taking 10 times longer than I thought and in the end forgetting the most important things, the pump and tire kit. I finally made it out the door and down the elevator and out of the building, followed, at least in the nervous subconscious of a foreigner forever breaking unknown rules, by the disapproving stares of those I passed. As soon as I was out of the building I realized that I had forgotten the pump and the tires were in desperate need of inflating; but as it had taken such effort to leave the apartment and I was sure the front desk manager was going to yell at me in Polish at any minute for some infraction of public decency, I decided to ride on anyways.

Polish Manhattan, like the real one, is chalk full of people, so riding on its sidewalks is a difficult endeavor. Polish drivers, however, seem almost vindictive in their desire to squash anything so foolish as to venture into the road, so the sidewalks seemed the best place for riding, despite the fact that I had to navigate through crowds of hunched-over babcias with shopping carts and outraged expressions. After several wrong turns and circling around the intersection twice, I finally found the bike path which Agata had described to me as leading to a park. I took off on it, excited to finally be able to get some speed and not put off by the squeal the brakes were making nor the first drops of rain. I rode down the path a mile or so before it ended, but as a fairly empty sidewalk took up where it left off I continued none the less.

Ginsberg’s cry of ‘moloch’ filled my brain. My sidewalk had on one side a 6 lane freeway which would have made Robert Moses proud and seemed right out of the surbuban wastelands I thought I left behind me when I boarded the plane for Europe. On the other side lay a vast track of identical apartment blocks, Communist-era tenement houses built on the same concrete-box pattern of architecture, spiced up with some socialist-kitsch light brown line painting or the faded outlines of large murals advertising the state department stores or even Lida, where, if one had American dollars, one could buy rare products from the West, such as oranges or Barbies. I made my way down the uneven and potholed sidewalk, splashed by giant puddles and an increasing rain, in shock at the sight of the sheer number of dwellings. They seemed almost vulgar in their placing, in their multitude, in their utter lack of character, these housing tracts which stretched as far as the eye can see. I attempted some quick calculations to see what the population of my field of vision was at the moment; never before had I literally seen hundreds of thousands of people’s homes without even having to turn my head.

Caught in this state of wonder, I hit a large bump, which rocked me back on my seat. A large crack signaled that my seat was not quite ready to meet my ass with such abruptness. I managed to wrench the seat back into the normal position but immediately found that as soon as I placed any pressure on it it fell back down again. I decided this was probably a good time to turn around, so I abandoned the idea of seeing the park and drove 5 miles back home in the rain standing on my pedals poised above a seat bent backward whose tip was perfectly positioned to give me an unwanted anal probing should any sudden jolt knock me off my balance.