Silver, Black Thunder, Cinnabar, Moondancer, Ultraviolate. These are the names of some of my bikes over the years. Each one has been ridden into the ground and has more than proved its mettle. I rode Silver as a kid; Black Thunder in my late teens and twenties; Cinnabar through the twenties and thirties; Moondancer and Ultraviolate in my forties.

My mother assembled my earliest workhorse bike, Silver, one Christmas Eve. I think it was a Royce Union English racer. I rode this bike all around the streets of Bridgeport, Connecticut and the surrounding suburbs. Once I rode it very fast down steep Algonquin Hill and suddenly realized that the front tire had spun off. Not too many seconds passed before I spun off as well. I escaped with only skinned elbows, knees, and forehead. No one wore helmets then, and I guess I grew up riding so long without a helmet, I've never kept my annual New Year's resolution to wear one.

Black Thunder, another English racer, was my most conventional bike. I rode it as a student in Boston, an ordinary enough thing to do. I rode for transportation to school, work, and for pleasure. There were no Kryptonite locks then; a simple chain or cable lock would do. My friends shared combinations and keys, and our bikes were interchangeable. But Black Thunder always beckoned to me among the wire gaggle of bikes along Commonwealth Avenue. In the early '70s there was far more broken glass in the streets of Boston. When I tired of changing tires at strange hours, the communal bike pool was a good thing to count on.

I remember discovering the back paths through Jamaica Plain to the Arnold Arboretum and thinking I had found a world hiding in green behind the streets, sidewalks, bricks, and concrete of Boston.

After I left college, I began working at part-time jobs cobbled together that required me to be equally adept at cobbling together identities and bike itineraries. In my life outside biking, I found myself married and pregnant. We had no car, and I continued to ride my bike throughout a long winter of living in Charlestown, working in different sites in Cambridge, commuting to Boston for a few evening courses to clinch my degree. My belly found its center of gravity in the triangle made by my back and arms clutching the handlebars.

In May when the baby was due, I finished school and took a temporary leave from my jobs. I rode for hours on peaceful routes around the Charles River and in the outlying suburbs, absorbing the bucolic beauty of Boston. This was a rare episode in my biking, where I rode for the pure pleasure of the experience. Biking for the sake of biking rather than to escape the cost, cars, and casualties of commuting. The baby was very overdue, and I was still riding, riding even when I went into labor, laboring even as I carried the bike up the three flights of stairs to my walk-up apartment. The teenage boy who lived downstairs stared at me, perhaps seeing something amiss, and asked if I wanted a hand. But I was proud and wouldn't let on I couldn't do anything that needed to be done as far as my bike. The baby was born that night, and the next day when the news spread in my close-knit East Cambridge neighborhood, there was some disbelief. Hadn't they just seen me riding my bike yesterday?

It was only a few days before I fastened my baby to the front of my body in a red corduroy carrier. He now filled the triangular space over my bike that had formerly been my belly. He hung from my shoulders and looked up at me or the sky beyond me as I continued my pedaling to the grocery store, the library, the places I worked. Black Thunder bit the dust and Cinnabar, a simple generic discount store bike, hit the track. The baby moved to my back, clutching the bread, bananas, or book, depending on what particular trip we were taking. He learned to tap me on the shoulder or pat my cheek to get attention or to point things out. A few years later, he was in a seat mounted on the back of the bike and liked to serve as my directional signal. Twenty-some odd years later, I hear from my son how chagrined he was to have been relegated to this bike seat for years past the time that it was "fitting." But this was how I traveled in Boston, and he was my traveling companion through these years.

As soon as I could teach my boy to ride, our biking experiences took us off in different directions, and the story becomes once again my own. We finally acquired a car, and life became a bit more conventional in my late twenties through mid-thirties, when I juggled jobs that carried increasing responsibility. Cinnabar was a good bike, but not my steady mate as I now often drove the car or took the T. Biking took a backseat for a while when I joined the T commuters. But soon the crowds, the pushing, and the wasted time made me cancel my T pass. I thought I knew my city and surely knew a better way to get around than the underground.

Mountain bikes had rolled into use, and Moondancer rolled into my life. Moondancer lasted thousands of miles of daily commutes into Boston from Cambridge and all around the city, witnessing my evolution as a rebellious executive, a student attending law school at night, and an increasing renegade that emerged as the pedals turned countless revolutions. I became an expert at changing from mud-spattered cyclist to impeccably dressed publisher. I found ways of compacting an entire life into two panniers that hung off the back rack of the bike: 25 pounds of law books, work files, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, clothes for work, for a lunch-time workout, for the cold or heat somehow found space. I learned how to seal them in plastic when it was raining or snowing. My test in purchasing any clothes was to see how they responded to being rolled into a ball. I learned about year-round use of dark wool in clothing that could be warm or cool and always regain its shape. I was surprised to find out how well some of the fine Italian wools and silks could survive the constant compression and stress from being changed. I wore the chosen items constantly, and I have never since bought clothing that couldn't survive a spin on my bike.

I learned about the advantages of fabrics that shed water and repelled wind. The clothes I wore for winter biking reminded me of sleeker versions of the snowsuits I wore as a child that made me impervious to the elements. Instead of sliding down hills on my sled, I was barreling through the streets of Boston, indifferent to the rain, slush, and snow thrown from above and below.

I became a quick-change artist. It wasn't always possible to enter even the outer sanctums of the places I worked in my riding gear. Sometimes there were meetings in the evening held at tony restaurants or lacquered law offices. I learned how to use the dark to change pants to skirts, boots to pumps. I learned how to change in telephone booths or behind parked cars. I figured out a way to wear my hair that could be wet or dry and still work. I accepted that there would be many times I would walk into a work or school setting, glossy and breathing deeply, and that was that.

Each morning, as I approached the Longfellow Bridge that stretched from Cambridge to Boston, the city seemed set apart, Oz like, a true destination. I was convinced that this was my kingdom, whether the buildings glowed yellow gold at sunrise or hung behind gray drapes of clouds and rain. The bridge sometimes pounded with traffic. I often resisted the temptation to tag on a truck for what appeared to be an easy tow. After crossing the bridge, there was a harrowing traffic circle to negotiate at Charles Street. Then I chugged a slow upgrade along Cambridge Street. After three to five minutes of pedaling in the lower gears, I was on a curved corner that led directly to the down ramp in my 1 Beacon Street building. I often imagined hearing Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries" as I rounded the bend and headed down the ramp.

I never realized until these years what a bike could do, although I remain convinced that this particular bike, Moondancer, had magic in her wheels. These were years of deep snow, and somehow this bike took on drifts as if the wheels were runners of a sled. Sharing the road with traffic was a problem in bad weather, but often my day began before dawn and ended around 11, and the plowed center of the road was my track. When I finally arrived home, the snow was everywhere, in the derailleur, clinging to every spoke, frozen around the brake shoes. I spread newspapers in the front hall to catch the melting snow. I groomed that bike with brushes and rags to remove each day's accumulated salt, slush, and sandy grime.

No bike before or since Moondancer has been able to handle the snow. The techniques I learned such as keeping the wheel very straight to maximize traction, shifting my weight to absorb a slipsliding to the side, gauging where slick ice slept beneath slush, have held me in good stead on rides on other bikes. But there is a distance between my body and other bikes that never existed with Moondancer. Moondancer was a two-wheeled, multiple-geared extension of my self.

Despite my dependence on my bike, I wasn't particularly good at making repairs. When something went wrong with my bike, it was a serious matter. A bike was the only means of transportation that shaved time off the many destinations of my daily commute, allowing me to carve out work and school into the 18 available hours of a 24-hour day. I developed a good relationship with the bike shop and endured the head-shaking grimaces each time I brought my abused bike in for a fix. When Moondancer was finally retired from full-time use, one of the mechanics said that the spindle of the crank set was the most worn-out piece of metal he had ever seen.

But sometimes the bike needed repairs in the dark hours after I came home from school close to midnight. No bike shop was open. One particular cold winter night, I had a flat tire and broken brake cable on the rear wheel. I had walked the bike a good way home, and it was already very late when I arrived home. I had an important meeting at 8 am the next morning with the CEO of my company. I had to prepare for that meeting as well as for an exam the next evening. I began working on my bike shortly after midnight. I worked for hours but could not pry the repaired rear tire back into the frame and align the brake shoe. My hands were coated with grime and grease ground into every crevice and under each fingernail. It was 4 am before I finally finished the work. To this day, I don't know exactly what I did. But I knew I had to get ready for my 8 am meeting. I clipped my meeting notes and exam cards with clothespins to a towel bar. I soaked for more than an hour in the bathtub rubbing my hands raw with a pumice stone and baking soda to try to get rid of the grease. But the bike was working, and I was on time for my meeting, reddened and roughened but mostly looking the particular part I had to play.

My bikes have been through so much with me that they acquire anima. I see them tied up to a post or pole waiting for my return, and they seem so alive. If I walk past them, I can't resist giving them a pat on the seat, handlebars, or fender. In those days when I worked in a Boston highrise at 222 Berkeley Street, I used to have meetings with my boss in her office with a large bay window. From my seat in the bay, I could see down to the street to where my faithful steed was tied to a parking meter. It was a quick and lovely reminder of a life outside static walls and pushing paper. One day I saw from several floors above the street, a brilliant red sticker like a blood spot on my bike. I went down at lunch to see what it was and found that I had been "ticketed" for parking my bike on "private property." Since when were parking meters and sidewalks private property? On pain of having the bike "towed at owner's expense," I found another place to park.

But I missed that delicious moment of seeing my escape every time I went in the office with the bay window. The rebellious "don't chain me in" side gained a bit more strength, the scofflaw began to upstage the generally cautious, reserved professional.

When I ride my bike, parts of me emerge that are otherwise silent. For the good, loud raucous singing of songs that I never sing, or even think about, often serves as my radio. For the bad, I swear loudly and foully, curses that I never would consider uttering in my off-the-bike self. Raw emotions born out of my rather ordinary experience of living are calmed and corralled by the repetitive motion of the wheels and my legs on the pedals. The pains and problems of living are not dissipated by riding, but visually and physically feeling the outside world moving allows the interior landscape to regain balance and perspective.

The cityscape demands a high state of awareness. I hear the door click that is the precursor of a car that suddenly will sweep out into my path. I feel the heavy lumbering of an approaching truck on the shared ground, see the slight shift of a person, cyclist, or animal about to dart into my path.

But even experience and awareness cannot immunize a city biker against accidents. Sooner or later exposed skin meets rough pavement or hard metal, and every incident is a reminder of just how fragile the pumped-up energetic body can be. Over the years, two of those opening car doors swung directly into me. A bus taking a right turn swept me into the curb. A van sent me flying on Boylston Street. I sometimes wondered if Moondancer sprang an invisible shield around me to absorb most of the impact.

Moondancer still serves as my favorite mount. But over the past five years, Ultraviolate slowly usurped the role of chief steed. Ultraviolate was a gift bike that I looked very closely in the mouth. I was embarrassed and chagrined to receive this very costly bike from a dear friend who never should have spent the money. For nearly a year, Ultraviolate kept Moondancer company in the front hall, or stall as I think of it. I argued that a bike like Ultraviolate would be stolen in no time, that it didn't fit my body type, that I couldn't accept such a gift. The giver taped up the entire beautiful violet frame with black tape, added cumbersome but extremely functional fenders to make it look less desirable. My commute was now shorter as I had graduated from law school and was now working in Cambridge. I started riding Ultraviolate when my brother-in-law offered to rehab Moondancer in his spare time. Ultraviolate was a kicky upstart kind of bike that was at least as much a boss of the road as I am.

Cambridge and Boston are perfect cities for biking except that one has to share the roads with Boston drivers. Boston is compact and relatively flat, and there is no question that the bike is the closest way to approximate "as the crow flies." To bike Boston is really to know Boston. The urban trail that provides the best sense of the variation in neighborhoods is along Massachusetts Avenue. Starting from Cambridge, you ride from North Cambridge, Porter Square, Harvard Square, Central Square, past MIT, over the river, and through as many individual neighborhoods, Symphony Hall, South End, Roxbury, and then toward Uphams Corner in Dorchester.

In biking such a route, I have a chance to see the eyes of the people I pass and pick up bits of their conversation. I feel the beat of the drums from Central Square in my own heartbeat followed by cool intake of sugary mint emanating from the Necco factory just a bit beyond. I embark on an olfactory tour of all kinds of foods in the shops and restaurants along the way: Chinese food, curries, doughnuts, barbecue, punctuated midway by the smell of the river. My skin registers the temperature, the wind velocity, barometric pressure, and dew point.

There is a camaraderie among bikers. For years when I biked to work in Boston, I was able to recognize other bikers from considerable distances just by the "bike stride," the way they rode their bikes. One time I returned to my old route one morning three or four years after I stopped working in Boston, and from behind, a courier raced by me, asking, "Where you been?" I've seen bikers riding with puppies in a backpack, carrying golf clubs, bookshelves, and other bikes. In most cases, we pass each other with a silent nod, which I think of as the cyclists' salute.

My life has changed enough that I am no longer absolutely dependent on my bike for my livelihood or getting around in the world. But I have not yet found any way of getting around Greater Boston that offers the pleasures I discovered in biking.

Photo by Jeffry Pike
Copyright © 2000 President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved. Comments. Last modified Fri, Oct 6, 2000.