Bicycle Face

More like a Vocab Phrase o'th'Week...

Or, A Wild and Haunted Look of the Eyes

Ah, Bicycle Face. One of the more ludicrous entries in the annals of the long and storied history of men not having any idea what women are or how they function. And with said lack of understanding, thereby restricting them from the silliest things, for their “protection.” Remember when they said that women shouldn’t ride trains, because …I dunno, their uteruses would fall out of them if they traveled so fast, or something… This was around the same time as Bicycle Face, of course, with widespread train travel being one of the most important new technologies being used by the public. Bikes were the same way–they were a new tech, and they did a lot for nascent feminism, allowing women to have much more mobility than they had in the past (both the ability to move about their world independently, and also being able to wear less restrictive clothing to do so).

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I received a mid-level mountain bike, with all the accessories, for my big high school graduation present (this was 1991, kids). Unlike a few of my graduating classmates, who got cars. My parents didn’t have that kind of money, and I wasn’t interested in a car as much as a bike anyway. It was nice, if not particularly high end, and brand new, replete with all the fixings (lock, helmet, light, luggage rack, etc.), and I appreciated it. I rode it around campus later that summer at freshman orientation, which was a little teaser into what it was going to be like to be a college student. Then, at the end of the summer, in a still-hot August, both my parents dropped me off at the CU dorms, to live away from home for the first time (across town only, but that didn’t stop them from beaming at me a little mistily as they left).

That first day when “going home” isn’t your parents’ place, but a space of your own, is a quiet explosion of a coming of age moment. I remember that day, having unpacked my meager belongings into my half of the dorm room (which felt spacious compared to having shared one back room in a trailer my whole life till then), and taking off for a bike ride around campus, and then down the hill into town. That first day I was on my own schedule: nowhere to be (classes hadn’t started yet), nothing particular to do, and every choice I made about the rest of the day was all up to me. I didn’t have to coordinate my choices with anyone else—I was quite suddenly an adult, with a day ahead of me, a week, a semester, to do the things I, and only I, deemed best to do.

That was the first time it hit me that I was an adult: I could go where I wanted, when I wanted. I could eat when I was hungry, and make or buy food for myself, instead of dinner dictated by when and what my family was eating (beyond dorm cafeteria meals, which were somewhat scheduled, but not mandatory in the same way). As relatively free and mobile as I was as a teenager in Boulder, and as good a kid as I in general was, this was a big milestone for me. I hopped on my bike, went out to Trident Café and Bookstore by myself, locking my new bike in front, after having registered it with campus police. Trident was a go-to, a place I’d been frequenting since junior high; certainly nothing unusual about me going there in the late afternoon, any day of the week. But it all felt different, somehow. I stayed as long as I wanted, went home whenever I felt done. I didn’t have to tell anybody where I was or when I’d be anywhere.

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It was rare that I felt that free again, even during those brief post-college years when I was alone. I didn’t really feel that kind of freedom again until moving into the Birdhouse (my inexpensive studio apartment which was my safe haven during and after the divorce). Though I did have a few excellent cruiser bikes, through the duration of my marriage. And I rode them through Boulder, too, and hoisted them, laden, onto buses, until I started to work more and more in the urban downtown area of Denver. My bike use petered out, till our cruiser & townie got stolen from out of our car park. So that was that, for me.

I remember one awful biking moment, during the earlier days, back when I taught gymnastics as my full time job: it was very cold, but bright, and snowing, with lots of snow still on the ground and packed slickly into the roads. Husband at the time and I rode our bikes to work, as we always did. It wasn’t that far, but it was towards the mountains and therefore uphill. Also, you know: all the snow. He had a fat-tired town cruiser but I had an ancient Schwinn number, heavy as though made of solid steel (which it probably was). I stared at the snow packed road under my tires the entire way there, for survival. Good thing there was no traffic out because of the snow. It was an example of the kind of punishing physical endurance I regularly found myself needing to survive through during that time. When we arrived, we put plastic bags over our seats, because the only bike racks were outside. Then we taught gymnastics to kids all day. Then we cycled home. Cycles and cycles. The wheels on the bikes go round and round…

That was before I got deathly ill from that job, the first time out of two. The second time, I had to be rushed to the urgent care clinic just before it shut for the weekend. The doctor took one look at my swollen-closed throat, backed away not-so-slowly, said, “Whoa,” in an albeit calm tone of voice, then, with a dry chuckle, said, “Welp. I’m gonna go wash my hands immediately.” I was sent home with steroids and high power ibuprofen in my belly, and a prescription in my hand. And a bill for my empty HSA.

Later, the husband’s fat cruiser bike would be stolen from our back porch. It was an orange and black conveyance with a big squishy seat, named The Great Pumpkin. Funny enough, he ended up seeing a kid riding it in the parking lot of the gym we went to, about a week or so after the theft. He confronted the kid and demanded his bike back. Scared the kid’s daylights out of him, sounds like. Got the bike back. Later sold it to my Dad, who even later crashed while riding it and so sold it himself, thinking it had bad juju. Maybe it did. I wonder who rode it after that?

As recently as 2018, when I was celebrating the filing of my divorce with my mother’s friend’s fine wine, she asked me if I wanted her old cruiser bike (she had gotten a new one with a softer seat that accommodated her hip surgery better). I had to admit that the way I’m getting around these days, starting back then, where I was living (times two) and how I’m dressing all did and do not fit the bicycling lifestyle, even the city cruiser type of bike.

Which is another milestone of adulthood for me—I’m much more myself than the biking-everywhere-me was, Boulderite that I still somewhat am. My style (both life- and fashion) is just not a biking one, I’ve found. I’m too urban, if that’s the right term. I wear heels a lot more. I walk, and take the train, and Uber, and have no desire to lug a bike around with me.

I used to enjoy biking to some degree, though not in the hardcore way that friends Happy, Fry Guy, and sometimes then-husband did back in the day, going up to Betasso Canyon and hurtling themselves down the scanty dirt tracks mounted on their “Full Sauce” titanium skeletons. That wasn’t for me (I like my pain-pleasure in different forms, meself), but I did enjoy tooling around town, filling my copious bike baskets with groceries.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before I was walking and taking public transportation just like a Londoner or New Yorker. But once Uber burst onto the scene and became a thing, it gave me even more mobility than before. I’ve taken gigs now that I couldn’t have bussed to in the early 20-teens, which expanded my professional reach. And half time living alone in a tiny studio that yet felt spacious after almost two decades of being crowded out, with no privacy, by an overbearing spouse, made me feel like I had wingspan room. A room of one’s own. My own little adult dorm room. Even then, though there were many bicycles locked in clusters at the cheap studios where I lived, I didn’t, nor did I have any desire to, own one myself.

And now? I’m taking driving lessons. Sigh…

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Anyway, that’s just the way, isn’t it. New technology is always scary, and usually sends people into a panic, moral and otherwise. What’s the one now? AI, especially chatbots? Is ChatGPT the next thing that’ll give us a “wild and haunted look of the eyes?”