My neighborhood – six intersecting streets in an un-leafy suburb – forms a large cul-de-sac that makes it great for trick or treating. Kids can just dress like super-heroes and not have to act like X-Men to avoid dangerous traffic. It is also a haven for kiddie bike excursions, as well as, for better or worse, a route for aging but fit baby boomers like myself who want to bike without testing their waning reflexes out in the open road, and who can forget that they once cycled at the speed of fright down steep Vermont hills.
My Tour De Neighborhood takes place 2 or 3 times a week. The safe lap around the neighborhood measures .85 miles and features vistas of unimposing small colonials and capes over pretty much flat ground. I maximize my aerobic intake by always pedaling in the highest gear, so after 8 laps (6.85 miles) I have completed a good workout in an economical 40 minutes. A real bike tour on the open road would burn a lot fewer calories and take more time, I reassure myself.
My neighborhood exercising loop is no Heartbreak Hill – so even at 12 miles per hour, I whiz by my fellow recreation seekers. This implies that all the tricyclists just see my bike as a blur. I can lap the mother and daughter walking team twice, and the hunched-back grandmother three times. The phalanx of tween biker girls scatter when I roar by. Luckily I can leave untethered, vicious labs who give chase, in the dust, panting loudly. If I had a newer bike, I could truly be the Lance Armstrong of the neighborhood, but alas my ten-speed Miyata was purchased in olden times when Lance was actually clean.
Looping the neighborhood means that the scenery is drably repetitive compared to the open road. But I always make the best of it. True there are no roadside farm stands with the luscious harvest bounty overflowing the stalls, But there is trash day – barrels overflowing with junk – where I quickly snapshot the lives of my neighbors as I power cycle by. Recently, I noticed a fish aquarium discarded curbside and realized that the owner’s listserve pleas to neighborhood guppy lovers had tanked.
With thousands of loops to my credit, I’m still searching for the elusive discarded sofa bed. My other boredom-buster is, I sheepishly admit, to compare the size of neighborhood houses to my own. Then there is always the payoff when ascending to the highest point in the ride, steep for maybe an aging dachshund. There I can see one corner of a backyard swimming pool – so who needs a waterfall vista?
Often when I hit the wild side of the loop which is the sidewalk of a main drag, I nod to a real cyclist in the midst of traffic. It’s less a nod of recognition than a nod of deference to his bolder journey. It’s then that I ponder riding to the Minuteman Bikeway in Lexington, a couple of open-road miles from my neighborhood. I would really like to test my endurance on the 16 bikeway miles. But the two miles of no-man’s land to reach it is a little daunting, and I doubt my road instincts. My friends who are experienced riders – or at least dress like they are – tell me of their lucky aversions of collisions and sideswipes. At my friend’s daughter’s wedding I saw the groom’s father, paralyzed for life from a bike accident. Besides, as a driver, bicyclists annoy me a little so in a parallel universe I could just run myself off the road. But cheating by vanning the bike the two miles would cut down on the exhilaration factor. Yet right then I envision myself spinning proudly on the Rte. 2 overpass towards the bikeway, wind and exhaust at my back, but still somehow mindful of the traffic on my left.
Rambling through time, I’m joyfully zooming down a Martha’s Vineyard hill at 12 as a summer camper with only gravity – and not a counselor – o slow me down. I see my wife and me as a young couple bicycling up the hilly Vermont countryside with a sense of accomplishment, and a desperate need for a lemonade stand. Then a few years later, we’re gliding across a pineapple-scented paradise with funny spellings, on a bicycle tour of Kauai. Finally, I see my son Craig and I actually biking – believe it or not – in Alaska, home of disappointing scenery.
Hopefully soon I will have my Miyata back out on the real roads, thus breaking out of this endless loop of aging boomer complacency and ageless fear, After all, now most open roadshave special safety lanes. They are called bike lanes not kiddie lanes.