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At least once a day on my 10-mile round-trip bike commute to work, as cars zip past me on a road that only occassionally has a bike lane, or as I muscle my way up any of the several hills, or as the wind blows my toes (still sandalled, because it still feels approximately as warm as Maine’s late summer) red and cold, I ask myself, “Lindsay, do you want to get a car?”
And so, at least once I day, I get to remind myself of my answer to that question: nope, not really.
Some days, what I love is the consistent physical exertion, the fact that I don’t have to drag myself to a gym to be able to clock about 14 half-hour exercise sessions every week. Other days, as I breathe deeply in the exhaust of trucks, I’m glad that I’m being environmentally gentle. To and from work, I’m mostly biking along with rush hour traffic, and few things in life give me more joy than getting to pass by a line of twenty cars waiting at a red light and move myself to the head of the line.
Mostly, though, I wouldn’t give up my compulsory biking because I like that it keeps me close to the ground. Every single day, I not only know what the weather’s doing, I feel it. I get to wave at the city workers cleaning up the flower beds and the gullies. I’m moving slow enough to look for egrets and herons in the little patch of wildness I pass midway through the ride. When there’s roadkill in the bike lane–squirrels, turtles, possums, armadillos, and, one awful time, a collarless but well-fed soft grey cat–I can pick it up and lay it down in the brush lining the street. I get to feel the changes in elevation, get to push against them with my feet and then feel the wind blow back my skirt and hair when I get to coast fast downhill.
When I’m on a bike, I’m moving at just the right speed to pay attention to what’s going on around me, and that’s a sort of mindfulness that I don’t want to give up.
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Putting Down Roots 