How do you see your city?
The one most see is from the interior of a climate controlled car blasting along at sixty miles per hour. Experienced this way, cities can seem bland and lacking in history, with nothing but franchises and big box stores substituting for local culture.
Even if you have a bike and join weekly group rides, things can become monotonous pretty quickly. You could live in a city for years and never really see it.
But the hidden city waits.
In the mid-1970s, I persuaded my mom that I would get much more use out of a bicycle than I would from the typical college grad gift of a nice suit for all those job interviews I would soon be going on.
The bike I got was a ‘sport touring’ bike. It was a French import, a white Francia with black lugs and gold striping, center pull brakes, a five cog freewheel and a heavy steel crankset. Weighing somewhere in the range of 30 pounds, it was a true 10-speed in ‘70s speak.
The summer I graduated, I worked the 3 pm. to 11 p.m. shift at a local hospital, so it was no trouble to take my new magic carpet out for several hours in the mornings before work. I always aimed for the countryside just beyond the city limits, two lane blacktops with hills I was ashamed to have to walk at times. I can still hear the cicadas buzzing in the summer forests, the airless heat and the sense of solitariness I felt as I rolled past fields where cattle twitched their tails at flies and hawks circled overhead.
I thought this was what cycling was all about, and I even contemplated the upcoming year’s Ride Across America—but never got beyond contemplation.
My senses came alive, and I felt a deep excitement at seeing the city I’d grown up in from this vantage point.
One day, instead of heading for the southwest county hills, I pointed the front wheel toward downtown—something I’d never done before. I rolled through the melting asphalt streets of the old inner city neighborhood where I once pedaled my gold Schwinn Stingray. I saw the turn of the century houses, smelled breakfast wafting out the screen doors and heard crows cawing in the pecan trees.
I rode on, leaving the neighborhood and entering the industrial belt ringing downtown. I’d never been through here except by car. I felt like an explorer on another planet. My senses came alive, and I felt a deep excitement at seeing the city I’d grown up in from this vantage point.
Next thing I knew, I was rolling into downtown and passing much that was familiar—from inside a car anyway—but now surprisingly new and alive and visceral. Horns honked, street workers shouted, motors revved and the scent of lunch coming from an unseen grille flooded my senses. As the day wore on, I knew I needed to head home to get ready for work. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep seeing my city in this unfamiliar way.
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