The paved over earth rising from the Patapsco River has made way for protests, parades of traffic, and farmer’s markets. Despite Baltimore city’s best efforts to arrest the soil, it breathes and expands cracking the handcuffs of asphalt poured over it. Somehow the land stays intact despite the weight of human life.
From the river’s harbor I turn onto Charles Street, the gravity of the valley sloping into this concrete mountain grips my bike tires, though my will intervenes, pressing every pedal stroke propelling me forward. Time dissolves into an abstract concept. I count each pedal stroke searching for a rhythm, a distraction from what feels like certain failure. My thoughts sprint unimpeded by the Earth’s resistant forces unlike my depleting stamina. My gaze falls below the horizon, the immediate future is too far.
Instead I look to the past to find the future.
At Phoelix Elementary, I was for the seventh time the shy new kid in unfamiliar surroundings having moved into the neighborhood over the past summer. I was determined to catch up to the other kids and would teach myself to ride a bike…slowly and surely. At five thirty, the cul-de-sac for morning and afternoon drop-offs became my evening training ground. I was a petite fourth grader straddling a magenta mountain bike learning the physics of balance. All the while the self consciousness of adolescents simultaneously crept into my psyche, introducing imagined scenarios of my crush seeing me attempting and failing to ride a bike.
“What if people see me? What if Corey sees me?”
Each afternoon, I stared out the window anxiously peaking through the curtains in my mom’s front bedroom, watching for her nineteen ninety-nine forest green Dodge Intrepid to pull into the driveway and listening for her heels tapping the pavement leading to the front door.
Before her keys could even enter the lock, I swung open the door. There was no time to waste and she always told me “If I sit down, I’m not going back out.”
“Hi Mom! Can we go now?”
The hood of her car had not even cooled yet before she restarted the engine and followed behind me as I walked my bike down Old Beach Road to my spot.
“First step, get on the bike. Hmm, what do people do next? They just start pedaling, right?”
I tossed my leg over the cross bar, wrapping my hands over the handle bars and pushed off with the force of an airline jet rushing through the sky. A breath later, my four foot eight frame crashed to the earth.
“Faster! I gotta go faster. I’ma go so fast, I can’t fall.”
Over and over, I pedal as fast as I can before gravity calls me back to the ground with the rough guiding hand of a playground bully.
“Oh my goddddd, why is this so hard?!”
Tears are convening in the corners of my eyes, blurring my vision even more than my perpetually smudged rectangle glasses.
For weeks, I fall, stand up, push off, pedal fast, and glide a little bit longer each time across the cul-de-sac.
“Fall, stand up, push off, pedal fast, and glide.”
I didn’t know how long it would take me to ride a bike with ease or how many falls it would take until I could balance myself on two wheels. But, I learned that each glide stretched longer and longer. So, I simply kept trying.
“I did it! Look Mom! Look! Loook!”
Returning to the present moment, scaling Charles Street’s steep incline, I remember the mantra of nine year old me, “fall, stand up, push off, pedal fast, and glide.”
Coping through a young adult life of layoffs, heartbreaks, and health scares I learn again to “fall, stand up, push off, pedal fast, and glide.” Except this time, the course wasn’t weeks long, it was years of falling, rising, pushing off, pedaling fast and not gliding.
“Fuck! Why is this so hard!?”
Everyone seems like they have trained for the Tour de France and I have thrown on my Nike Pro biker shorts and simply hoped for the best. It seems like gliding is second nature to them, having learned in Kindergarten and now buoyed with the support of an E-bike. To me, Charles Street is a mountain and to them a slight rolling hill.
I want to be on the road well traveled, rubber tires gliding across the asphalt with ease. Where I find myself is the road less traveled on a city bike clawing my way up the woodland hills of Appalachia. It has felt more like crawling, succumbing, pushing, and stalling. Maddening unrequited desires for community, companionship, and stability have etched away at the belief in my elementary motto. As the tide of belief has receded, the wet sands of hope have lingered.
“I hate it here, I wanna go home.”
Shelter and safety were perpetually elusive, I was forever falling in a room without a floor. Vigilant and weary, enduring and fragile, wearing a thousand watt smiling mask shielding outside eyes from seeing me.
Irrational hope kept me pedaling and pushing and rising even as I continued to fall.
“I guess this shit just not gon’ work out, but I’d rather be trying til’ the end than doing nothing at all, so fuck it.”
Tears gently meander down my rounded cheeks like a river wandering around a worn coastline. The tension in my body flinching at the touch of nine year old me.
“fall, stand up, push off, pedal fast, and glide,” she whispers.
I sigh so deep the ancestors have to prop me up and inflate me once more.
“fall, stand up, push off, pedal fast, and glide,” they whisper.
Standing, I settle into the saddle of all that’s been lost and the potential of all that could be. Pushing off the limitations, failures, and distrust, I pedal as fast as I possibly can.
I am gliding.
As the pace slows and the hills raise the ground out from under me, I shift into the gears of wisdom. When it gets hard shift down, focus on each pedal stroke, not the mountain ahead. As the road unravels into ease shift up, survey the landscape enveloping your senses, remember how far you’ve come.
Leave your maps and journals behind, clear the way as you go and finally, create a rest stop for the cyclists riding behind you when your journey ends.
And so, the motto of wisdom becomes, “I trust myself, I trust my knowing, I trust the chaos is being ordered without my intervention.”
cover image: Biking (Solo) (2017) Frank Ocean