The Kilominator — First Ride. My relationship with the bicycle can be…
By: Matthew St. Amand
Tags: Excerise, Cycling, Mental Health, Fitness, Outdoors

Photo by Jaysin Trevino from Evanston, IL, US, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

My relationship with the bicycle can be divided into three distinct epochs: Riding, Cycling, Kilominating.

This may give the illusion of an organized effort. It was not. It was the bumbling, left-field idea of someone who was scattered of mind, bloated of body, utterly out of sorts, at complete loose ends, coming apart at the seams, in a continuous state of upheaval, having no idea what triggered the turmoil, the origin of its mystery, or the ultimate expression it wished to take.

Riding.

Winter 2005. B.C. (before children).

Precarious times. After blowing through four technical writing jobs in as many years — due to lay-off, obligatory jumps from the frying pan into the fire, and outright shitcanning — I found myself married, two years into a 20 year mortgage, pasting together a living writing advertorials for a local magazine.

Through the magazine, I landed a gig ghostwriting the biography of a local tool shop owner. A self-made man who escaped Hungary in the ’50s and emigrated to Canada. His first job found him in the unspecified North, cutting wood for a pulp company. During one of our early sessions, he described defending himself against a bear attack by swinging his axe at the bear’s snarling face, smashing its mouth, seeing sparks fly as its teeth shattered.

The assignment kept me busy, and there were moments where I felt like an actual working writer.

Other days, there was the old familiar slide:

Watching the garbage collectors from my front window was the highlight of the week. When I was a kid, I thought hanging off the back of a garbage truck was the best job in the world.

Envying the weatherman on the local news: Look at this guy, my resentment groused, working on television, probably making a hundred grand a year, doing a job within the city limits of science. Doesn’t have a worry in the world. Wrong 75 percent of the time, but steers us toward the fluky 25 percent with a self-effacing shrug and folksy grin: “Well, folks, the weather always keeps us guessing!”

The rest of the time I spent stuffing myself with food.

Those were the days of the purple lid jars of chocolate-peanut butter, four lb frozen deep dish spinach pizzas. No clue how I thought such farcical fare factored into a sane adult’s diet, but they were frequent contributors to my 270 lbs frame.

My ignorance about food was total and complete. Going through the supermarket, I thought, Food is food. I understood it wasn’t good to eat an entire bag of cookies in one sitting, or an entire tub of ice cream, but I had no idea about carbohydrates or the poison of processed foods, the whole Salt-Sugar-Fat quagmire, only vaguely disturbed how I could stuff myself and remain totally unsatisfied. Worse, stuffing myself and still having an urge to eat. Like a gambling addict, certain that the next pizza/burrito/sandwich/hot-pocket I jammed into my mouth would ring the bell.

It never did.

Booze had lost its fun as hangovers ground into days-long tournaments of suffering, internal tribunals presided over by Cotton Mather, inflicting equal measures of spiritual and physical pain and nausea.

The food binges were not freebies, either. A briny net, woven of guilt and vanity, pulled around me from all sides. I had once been an athlete, knew how it felt to be fit, once a recreational jogger, pickup basketball player, nothing organized since high school, but knew the experience of coming up against my physical limitations and the exhilaration of busting through. By 2005, the memory shamed me, and all I knew were the aches and nagging pains of a person whose physical limitations now closed in, inch by inch, year by year.

That winter morning, after my wife left for work, I paced the living room. No garbage collectors to watch, no weather reports to catch on TV, my nervous system crackling like a Tesla coil with anxiety and fear of the future. I bundled up and went out to shovel snow from the driveway. It had snowed the night before — the local weatherman was as surprised as everyone else by its appearance — and I thought some manual labour might check my malaise. At one point, a snow plow blasted by and I envied the driver, though his work was probably as seasonal and sporadic as my own.

When the job was done, I went to put the shovel away — and stopped.

On the other side of the garage was one of my father-in-law’s only earthly possessions: a battered entry level mountain bike. Arthur Murphy, a ginger haired man who smiled with his eyes, who had lost his battle with the frailties of the body far too soon. He had died two years before at age 53.

Aside from a plastic bin filled with Steven Seagal movies and other assorted VHS video tapes, the mountain bike was the sum total of his legacy. In the fullness of time, it would be more than I could have hoped for.

That winter’s day, for no reason I could discern, the bike stood out to me like an oracle.

Aware of the griping aches in my shoulders, lower back, and forearms, nagged by the undying desire to eat something, mulling the writing awaiting my attention: a plumbing supply advertorial… toilets with nubble-gripped handles, odometers, eight-track players. Retro, ironic toilets. If only they were that interesting. No, all these toilets had to offer were sleek lines and the ability to flush in low tones. I had to find 800 words to describe their world view.

Clad in my winter vestments, breathing hard, the wind already negating my work on driveway, it was as though I stood naked, looking at an artifact.

It is about a bicycle? chimed a memory of Flann O’Brien’s novel, The Third Policeman, where the murder of a bicycle was the center of the story. The Atomic Theory: if a man rides a bicycle long enough, the bouncing causes enough man-molecules to pass into the bicycle and enough bicycle-molecules pass into the man. After a period of years, the man becomes part-bicycle and the bicycle becomes part-man. An old bicycle was found thrashed in The Third Policeman, and the blackguard who perpetrated the deed had to be found.

I went to the mountain bike, put my gloved hands on its handlebar grips. It was like gripping electrodes that sent sparks of memory erupting through my nervous system: Cameron Avenue… J.T. Hurley… Leslie Desmarais… the old faces and voices of my youth…

I walked the bicycle onto the snow-scarred driveway; a caveman with a contraption. Surprising myself, I heaved a leg over the seat and sat down. Lifted my boots from the ground and slowly coasted down the driveway, through the slushy berm left by the snow plow.

Reached for the hand-brakes — then stopped.

I turned right, onto the road.

As my momentum ebbed, I placed my boots on the pedals and pedaled the bicycle. The motion was transforming. Simple as picking out “Chopsticks” on a piano or doodling a smiley face. Satisfying as jumping through a ring of fire on water-skis. I pedaled the bicycle.

When I came to a corner, I turned and headed down the next street.

When I came to the next corner, I made another turn. The slushy snow of the road was like cake batter beneath the front tire.

I pedaled and trudged and heaved and gasped through the inclement morning, recalling the old neighbourhood — stomping grounds was my father’s word for it — where my friends and I explored the streets and alleys of West Windsor on our bikes, racing through school yards, vacant lots, honing our skidding stops on gravel driveways.

The ultimate display of skill was “riding a wheelie”. Everyone could “pop a wheelie”, meaning, pull on the handlebars and heave the bike’s front tire off the pavement for a moment or two. “Riding a wheelie” meant popping a wheelie, holding it, and then pedaling some distance. Four pedals was the minimum threshold one of the neighbourhood gurus determined.

None of us ever got it. Best I managed was to pop a wheelie, one afternoon, only to promptly lose my balance and slam onto the sidewalk flat on my back, knocking the wind out of me. Every screeching alarm in my body came alive in that moment. Scared the living hell out of me.

Into this house we’re born… into this world we’re thrown…

There was one boy, from another neigbourhood — didn’t know his name — who did it. I was shooting hoops with some friends, after dinner one late spring day, when we heard whoops and cheers coming from up the street. We turned and watched the kid riding a wheelie all the way down the block. He was king that day.

Thought of Curry Avenue, and Leslie… first girl I ever loved. We were classmates from kindergarten to eighth grade. She was my magnetic north, blonde and pretty and one of the gentlest souls I ever knew. Magellan navigated by the stars. I navigated those burgeoning years by Leslie. And never spoke a word of it to her, or anyone else. Riding my bike down her street, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Sometimes, I did, but never often enough.

Thought of my old friend, J.T. Hurley and his bike — a battered orange jalopy with a banana seat and chopper handle bars. Remembered the afternoon in 1977 when he demonstrated a ramp he had built from scrap wood that a neighbour gave to him. Those were the days of Evel Knievel, where a ramp was pointless unless you had something to jump. So, he asked me to lie down in front of the ramp. And he jumped me.

I chugged down Malden Road on my father-in-law’s bicycle, past Sandwich Secondary School, all the way to the LaSalle Public Library, nearly eight kilometers from my home.

There, I leaned the bike against the unused bike rack out front.

Desperately overheating, I unzipped my parka. The cloud of steam that rose off me probably queered barometers throughout the county.

I lurched into the building, pulling my damp hat from my head. A lone, wide-eyed librarian watched me from the counter. I lumbered to the nearest seat, an empty study table.

It was approximately eleven o’clock in the morning.

Legs throbbing, breathing laboured, a thought slowly dawned on me: Now, I have to get myself home.

As I pondered my situation, I heard someone enter the library. A moment later, a voice as familiar to me as my own filtered over: part bard’s baritone, part leonine rumble. I turned in my seat and saw my old friend, writer Robert Earl Stewart, delivering copies of the LaSalle Post newspaper, for which he was the editor. He looked in my direction, did a double-take, and regarded me with a look of bemused confusion.

“What happened to you?” he said, approaching.

I explained my sudden desire to ride a bicycle.

“Do you need a lift home?”

“No, but thanks,” I said. “I got myself here. I’ll…” and trailed off. I was still breathing hard.

“OK… Good luck.”

Bob departed, continuing with his morning deliveries.

Soon after, I rose from my chair, legs cramping beneath me. They were intensely wary of the nature of my next move.

I donned my clammy parka and hat and went outside to the bicycle.

Part of me recoiled from it. A deep and abiding exhaustion enveloped me. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so physically spent.

Wasn’t sure if I was more reluctant to get back on the bike, or return home where the advertorial about new showroom toilets awaited me.

As I mounted the bicycle, an image of the bear who moved on the man I was interviewing for the biography came to mind. Imagined the old guy — now suffering with Parkinsons — as a young man, escaping Hungary, he and his friends intent on entering Austria, but accidentally crossing into Czechoslovakia. Frying pan into fire.

After being unwillingly conscripted by the Nazis in Hungary during World War II, escaping two Communist countries, journeying to Canada, he found himself confronted by a bear in the north country woods.

“I didn’t want to hurt the bear,” the man explained, “but it was either him or me. I treated him better than he would have treated me.”

The swing of the axe at the bared teeth. And then… sparks.

I had sparks of my own as I rode home — shooting up and down my legs and back.

When I arrived and returned the bicycle to its place, I was a sodden exhausted mess. The ride was such a shock to my system, I didn’t even feel like eating. After showering, I positioned myself on the living room couch, where I spent the rest of the day feeling as though I was turning into stone.

There is little about winter riding to recommend itself, but that was all right. I needed almost nothing. I was back out the next day. And if Flann O’Brien’s Atomic Theory could be trusted, Art Murphy was with me every part of the way.