Biking, Bruising, Real Uplift
By Christopher Schaberg
Photo courtesy of the author.
2019 was a frenzied year of travel: Flying to a multitude of conferences, universities and workshops that I’d organized with my collaborator. By December I was exhausted, even though I refused to admit it to myself; I just assumed that I’d have to keep up this frantic pace.
In January of 2020, my 9-year-old son, Julien, set a goal: He wanted to learn to ride a bicycle by summer break. We do live near a greenway in New Orleans and could use it for practice, if indeed we procured bikes for both Julien and his almost-six-year-old sister, Camille. But I wasn’t sure where we’d fit bikes into our busy schedule.
So we put this idea on the back burner as we revved up for all the normal beginning-of-year things: back to school for the kids, mid-winter house cleaning, a new semester at my university...the grind. Then in February we started hearing more and more about the novel coronavirus. By March, cases were rising exponentially—especially in our city, one of the early hot spots.
After New Orleans schools went remote, but before lockdowns went into effect, we packed our car and headed north to the woods of Michigan, where we have family and where we usually spend summers. We quarantined. The usual airliners in the sky, inbound or outbound from Chicago’s O’Hare, were noticeably absent.
The touristy haunts were desolate, roads quiet, parking lots vacant; no one was around. That back-burnered idea suddenly had new life: Maybe Julien and Camille could learn to ride this spring after all.
My generous mother-in-law bought two bicycles before they all but disappeared from the market, due to a surge in demand and interruptions in the supply chain. I got helmets, and on a cool but sunny Sunday morning we walked the bikes to a totally empty church parking lot.
Julien and Camille learned to throw their legs over the frames, push themselves up onto their seats, balance—and fall. Then they pedaled and fell, pedaled a bit longer, wobbled—and fell. They kept falling, and kept getting up and trying again. Camille got the hang of it first, racing circles around Julien and bragging about her prowess. Then she tumbled and really scraped her leg this time, and was briefly humbled.
There’s a video of Julien I took on my phone when he first stayed on. Watching it again now I can hear his nervous panting as his knobby knees pump to keep forward momentum. In the last moment he turns the handlebars too much and he plummets to the ground—the video pausing as he falls, a look of terror on his face. (In the next video, though, he’s grinning.)
Within a couple days they were riding together, a miniature bike gang of two, razzing each other but pedaling together and gaining confidence with each ride. At a certain point, Julien paused and realized: “I did it!”
It was still the early months of what would become a wretched, drawn-out year of illnesses, deaths, paranoia, political fanaticism and heightened awareness of public health. Looking back now, I see that those weeks when my kids learned to ride bicycles were a rare bright spot of 2020.
Seeing their faces as they zipped along a trail through the pines, watching them gradually master this quiet form of transit—it all gave me hope. We’d get through this time, find ourselves in a better place. And not just the “same” place, the normal pre-pandemic manic hustle.
No, watching my kids learn to ride gave me a different kind of hope: a hope for younger generations to not just rebound from the ecological catastrophes and economic structures based on inequity, but to change these material conditions for the better. Maybe, even amid the most trying of conditions, it would be possible for me to work with and learn from them, too.
I hadn’t thought that watching my kids learn to ride bikes would have such a profound impact on me. I knew it would be difficult, an investment of time and lots of bruises and skinned knees. Plenty of encouragement along the way. But I never anticipated the rush of emotion and hope that would come from seeing them ride away from me, steadying themselves, discovering that new forms of mobility, of living, are still possible.
This is the first in the series “Finding Renewal.”
Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, author of six books and deputy editor of Transformations. His most recent book is Grounded: Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic