SJ: Bicycle Icicle

For those of you who don’t keep up with the news, I am delighted to let you know it is now, officially, spring! Hooray!

You can be forgiven if you’ve been slow to notice winter’s wane and spring’s springing this time around. Ideally, one could just, you know, go outside and get a pretty good idea of what’s happening season-wise, but not so this year. Perhaps the lingering weeks of below freezing temperatures, mocking gusts of wind, and can’t-quite-quit-us snow flurries coaxed you into believing we were just having a really long February. Or, perhaps you stopped going outside at all months ago and have opted to ease into outright despair. However you’ve dealt with – or failed to deal with – this year’s god-awful-endless winter and the long delayed thaw, one thing is certain: the biggest failure around these last weeks has been the f&$#ing weather.

I’m a cold weather girl and I’ve waited on a lot of thaws. I grew up in Wisconsin. Once when I was in high school, it got so cold they had to close the mall. Closing schools is one thing, but the mall? That’s cold. Still, undaunted, I signed up for more and went to college in Vermont, and there, I met a winter so completely crazy that it stole my bicycle and held it hostage until April.

Seriously.

Well.

Sort of.

Okay, that one might not have been on winter. That one might have been on me.

When I headed off to Middlebury College, I got a lot of ideas in my head, most of them dumb. Ideas like, “Maybe I’ll change my name to Harper!” and, “Probably I’ll meet some Kennedy cousins and get invited to summer in Hyannis Port!” and “Once I’m in Vermont, my closeted outdoors-y person will be liberated and I will become like one of the people from the Patagonia catalog!” I had never done any of the things I had seen people doing in the Patagonia catalog, but obviously I would be doing all of them very soon, so I’d better be equipped with at least the basics. I got a couple fleeces and some hiking boots and after much begging, my very own brand new Trek mountain bike, presented to me in my parents' driveway as a graduation present. I was all set for a new me in a new life.

Things started to go wrong pretty much the minute I got to campus. I quickly discovered that the outdoors-y people at Middlebury were not dabblers. These people had very likely already been featured in the Patagonia catalog. They were terrifying. And since my only real move for making friends was to share cigarettes on stoops, I was unlikely to meet any of them anyway. In about a day I realized I had no idea why I was wearing all these preppy clothes and – wait, is this a vest? Am I wearing a fleece vest? -- in about a week I realized I was probably just gonna keep being… the way I’d always been. A crushing blow.

But I had this bike. This bike I’d begged for. And even though I loved the bike, I felt like an imposter riding it at Middlebury. A shiny new mountain bike did not go with my leather jacket or the brand it projected. It was not a sanctioned accessory for A Person Like Me. Occasionally when I rode the bike, someone I knew would say, “Oh, you have a bike?” with the kind of bewilderment and surprise one might exhibit upon seeing a Weimaraner driving a Camaro down a freeway. I imagined the bike would belong in Middlebury, and I was right – the trouble was, whenever I rode it, it’s belonging in the place made me feel all the more keenly that I didn’t.

One day in early November I took the bike down to the arts center and locked it up outside. When I left the building after class, I wanted to walk with some friends - or more precisely with some people I was desperately hoping would become my friends – so the bike stayed behind. And it stayed behind the next day. And the next. And the next. And though it was hitched up directly outside of a building I went in and out of many, many times a day, I kept ignoring it. When I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye, I pretended we’d never met.

I’d been giving the bike the cold shoulder for two weeks when the weather came, a brand of weather the Farmer’s Almanac describes as “rain/drizzle/snow/ice pellets.” The temperature dropped and the snow started floating in, and I finally figured I should probably, you know, do the right thing, make up with the bike, and ride it home. Trouble was, when I went to retrieve it, the couple days of “rain/drizzle/snow/ice pellets” had frozen my lock shut, fused it with Vermont chill, making the key totally useless (but I guess, on the upside, making the lock supremely secure?).

At first I deluded myself into believing I could just come unlock it when it warmed up one of these days, that I would just have to check it every day until it thawed out a little. But no, no, no, there would be no thawing. This was November, this was Vermont, and the next five months were going to be nothing but North Face parkas and J. Crew cable knit sweaters dotted along a back drop of white-washed, snow-sputtering sky. The bike was in for the long haul. Or out for it, I should probably say.

I felt terrible and I felt stupid. Stupid to believe a bike would be enough to turn me into someone I wasn’t, stupid to feel betrayed when it didn’t do just that, and terrible to know I’d now betrayed the bike in return. This beautiful gift I was meant to care for I had instead abandoned and locked in an icescape – something else to add to the list of ways I felt myself failing at college. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t turned into a Patagonia person or met any Kennedys. I couldn’t seem to get a toe-hold anywhere. I felt friendless and alone and displaced all the time. I never knew where the party was. I never knew what time we were going to the dining hall. I had never even heard of Goldschlager. I was lost. And now I’d lost my ride.

The “rain/drizzle/snow/ice pellets” of middle November turned to the just plain “shit ton of snow” that late November to early April offer up. The holidays came and went, January term and February break came and went, the second semester got rolling, and the bike stayed put. Every day it greeted me outside the arts center, buried in ever more snow, and every day I met it with a mix of humiliation and pity. It sat there in the bike rack, alone and defenseless, reminding me of the unfair expectations I laid at it’s wheels and shaming me for treating it so cruelly. Passersby wondered aloud, “What kind of idiot leaves their bike outside all winter?” It seemed a fair a question.

I began to wonder if it would survive the season. I’d meant to take better care of it, I really had.

Slowly the winter passed. March came in like a lion and went out like a slightly smaller lion, April arrived, and finally, the thaw came. The weather warmed and the snow melted and I could at least see all the parts of my bike at once. I began checking the lock every day, knowing it was just a matter of time, until at last, the moment came when the key slid into the lock and with a little jostling, turned, clicked, opened. Rescued, at last.

I pulled the bike out of the rack and spun its wheels, pulled its brakes, gave it a layman’s once-over. A lot of the screws had rusted, and so had the chain, but it looked like all was not lost. It looked like it wasn’t all that worse for the wear. I had stacked the deck against it, and it had still survived the winter. It felt like a miracle, it felt like an absolution. We made it.

A few weeks later, it was full-on spring. Suddenly people had visible skin and discernible body shapes and I no longer had to fear I was going to Little Match Girl myself on the way home from some late night party. One of those friends I thought I didn’t have offered to fix my bike for me, so I had it in working order before the end of the semester. I buzzed around campus on it until the end of the year, and didn’t worry so much anymore about belonging on the bike, or the bike belonging in the place, or my belonging anywhere. The bike and I had been through something, and now I knew whatever else might have been true, this was certain: the bike and I belonged to each other.

I’m happy to say that bike and I continue to belong to each other. Now that this year’s thaw appears to be here, I look forward to touring around Brooklyn with it for another summer. It’s a little out of its element in this borough of fancy Linus bikes and hipster fixed-gears, but it takes me where I want to be. And unless you’re looking really closely, you’d never know how it suffered through that first long, harsh, winter.

Happy Spring, y’all.

MD: Remedial Varsity

Hope springs eternal, and spring renews hope. That’s not always a good thing. It’s a common phenomenon to shed winter and its drudgery with a new sense of self: this is the year I learn French; I’m going to get certified in CPR because the world needs more heroes; who says I can’t become a ventriloquist? These delusions of enthusiasm and discipline usually pass after the initial shock of sunlight and temperate weather, but I’m a late bloomer where these things are concerned.

I have never been particularly sporty, despite my penchant for coordinated casuals. I grew up before this current age of “everyone’s a winner,” in which youth coaches were the closest things to a Dickensian villain that one could find in the leafy suburbs of New Jersey. Little league was terrifying. Coach Romero would motivate us by calling us sissies. Being a down-low sissy as I was at age eight, I felt particularly ill at ease; so much so, that I did not complain when he dropped cigarette ash onto my head. After it was clear that baseball would not be my bailiwick, my mother enrolled me in tennis lessons. That didn’t last very long after the coach put me outside of the court to practice against the wall and forgot about me for the next hour of the lesson, then looking me over, asked if I “were one of hers” only to then chastise me for not knowing better than to return to the group. Still, I wanted to be part of a team and every spring when the earth was waking up, I seemed to think I could muddle my way into some skill.

Sophomore year of high school, I decided to try out for the golf team. What I failed to appreciate was that, at this point, kids who pursued this game had already had a long history with it. There was no Remedial Varsity for novices like me. Yes, I had swung a golf club a handful of times at a driving range. Mistakenly, I thought that and my ability to pull off a saddle shoe-chino combo would count for something.

Golf team tryouts were held at Echo Lake Country Club. I lugged the half-set of clubs that my father had inherited years earlier, probably from a bar patron in Brooklyn who couldn’t pay his tab.

We were divided randomly into groups of four and used the honor system to tally our own scores. The others in my foursome were all members of the country club and had knowledge of the course, a familiarity with each other and fluency with the fairway etiquette. I didn’t know anything. This gave them an advantage, but one that proved negligible considering that my immediate (and persistent) problem was simply making contact with the ball. Teeing off for the first time, I whiffed twice before I made contact with the ball and that was only to clip it off the tee and roll it down the greenway.

I made light of it as best I could, laughing at myself to diffuse the tension, but no one else joined me in the joke. It wasn’t that the others were mean. They were purposefully not mean, but also unwilling or unable to meet my embarrassment with humor in order to ease the situation. Their stone faces and averted eyes, I can now only classify as Presbyterian compassion. At the time, however, I realized that if goodhearted self-deprecation was not going to win the day, than my only recourse was to either summon some hidden skill like a Matrix download or conjure some supernatural good luck to get me through the next eight holes.

Neither happened. I continued to miss contact with the ball, wind-milling my way down the greenway, occasionally managing to chip the ball a couple of feet or so. I could have picked up my ball and said, “You know, I think I’ll just walk the rest of the course with you guys.” In retrospect, that’s what I should have done, but then I didn’t think it was an option. Surely, I thought, that would break some golf etiquette and would be considered unsportsmanlike. I may not be a sportsman, but I can at least aspire to sportsmanlike behavior. So, I suffered and made others suffer my lack of experience for the next two hours. While others finished the hole in three or four strokes I was averaging about fifteen. We all found relief when I lost balls to the brush and could just tick off an extra stroke rather than draw out the farce of me inching my way along the fairway.

Then something extraordinary happened. It must have been midway through the course, at the fifth or sixth hole tee-off, when my body was so fully awash in humiliation that there was no need for resistance. On my first swing, I drove the ball clear down the fairway, just shy of the putting green. The others emitted coos of appreciation and envy. Even by their own standards, this was a nice fucking shot. They congratulated me in a tone of casual familiarity, that was neither put-on nor patronizing. I felt like I had gained entry into this clique, this sport, this codified, rarified world, at last. And that lasted the distance from the tee to the putting green. It took me a good six to seven strokes to get the ball in the hole. I continued to play poorly for the remaining holes and my one moment of grace was quickly forgotten and with it the eye-contact and casual chatting from the others.

Once we were back at the clubhouse, the cognoscenti circled their wagons and compared their games. I waited apart from them for my brother to pick me up. He arrived in my sister’s car that had recently lost a muffler and exhaust pipe on the Garden State Parkway. I got in, not waiting to see if I made the cut for the next round, not to say goodbye to my foursome. That may have broken some rules of golf etiquette, but I was sure I wouldn’t have much truck with golf anymore or with these folks, so it really didn’t matter.

I have never revisited golf since, though I have, in my adulthood, picked up soccer and tennis without too much embarrassment to myself. I’m a decent soccer player and I can wipe the tennis court with the three or four Park Slope moms with whom I’ve taken beginner lessons. Still though, there remains something terrifying about first getting on the court or on the pitch; an anticipation of my modest skill failing me. So I mostly spend my time running.

This spring I’ll be tempted to take up a new pastime: breakdancing, capoeria, flying yoga or rugby. Although, I will probably just continue to jog; it’s inexpensive and easy to schedule. And as long as I can remember to breathe and move forward, I can claim to be pretty good at it. Besides, aren’t those the basic skills of any champion?