Confession: I Cannot Ride a Bike

A personal history.

It was lovely to read Brendan Leonard over at Semi-Rad’s recent post about his cruiser bicycle, and how he had no utility for such a large, heavy thing until it became the perfect (and only available) vessel for trips with his young son. A great reminder that an old, forgotten object gathering dust may have yet to play a critical role in your life.

Also a great reminder that I can’t ride a bike.

The grand total of my life’s experiences with a bicycle:

1. 1994/95— I find momentary balance on one of those kid bikes where you press the pedals backwards to brake (which made me think that was how all bikes worked). I never ride it again, because, I thought, “Ok, now I’ve learned to ‘ride’ a bike” and I check it off the life list and go back to my fossil collection and The Weather Channel.

2. 1995-2013— I avoid suggestions of bike rides at all costs (with family, with friends, with potential girlfriends, at camp, at the beach, at school—perhaps hundreds of invitations over the years). My deflections achieve a certain brilliance, something like, “Oh, man, that trail’s terribly maintained. I hate to say it, but driving is probably better.” During this time I grow to understand that most bikes work via handbrakes and gears, which are something I genuinely don’t understand to this day and give me anxiety just to think about. I’m sweating as I write this.

3. 2013— My then-girlfriend-now-wife (who is Swiss and therefore adores bicycles) and I get sufficiently drunk in Tribeca for her to suggest we Citi Bike back to our apartment, and for me to accept. I still think often about this real-life fever dream: how the bike felt like an anvil when I popped it out from its rack, the danger I put myself in from thinking I could pick up where I left off nearly twenty years earlier, how I—a drunken 25 year-old man—started crying as I watched my bicycle-loving Swisslass nearly slip out of sight going north on Sixth Avenue.

Bicycling isn’t something I can think about without shame and anger, not principally for my lack of skill but for all the fears of being found out and all the lies I’ve told to cover the fears. I think that people assume someone like me—a person who loves to run, a person who loves the outdoors and journeying through it, a person who wants his children to love the world in whatever way they want—should be able to ride a bike. I can’t.

But in a few years, my kids are going to put the pieces together and find out that the parks department isn’t actually to blame for the fun they can’t have. And because I won’t be able to lie to them directly when they ask me, “Daddy, can you ride a bike,” I will learn to ride a bike. And because they will not think less of me when I topple over with spasmodic indignity, skinning my elbows like I did many years ago and muttering frustrated self-recriminations, I will learn to ride a bike. And because in their presence I have learned to forgo such sensations as mortification caused by the judgment of the populace, I will learn to ride a bike.

Just not right now.