In the saddle on an extra-small women’s bike—I’ve named her Gidget—I travel eastbound alongside a steady stream of commuters in cars. This ten-year old comfort bike, its aluminum frame tinted cappuccino, sports a box-shaped rear pannier bag made of rain resistant fabric. The helmet I wear has a wide streak of highlighter yellow to match my cargo bag. Three months ago, I used to be one of those drivers in a car—with coffee in my right hand and my left palm on the steering wheel. But, today, my fingers curl around the white grips of my upright handlebars. At 7:25 a.m., it’s a nine-mile ride to work and I’ve got to keep pedaling.
Sloping southward, the East Bay Bike Path continues to follow the shoreline. I must ride uphill before the pavement narrows to form a causeway, a pencil-sized strip of land with water on both sides. It’s a brutal first climb; with each pedal stroke awakening the muscles in my legs and the racing thoughts in my mind. Can I even do this? At the crest of the hill, I begin to see the vessels that float up from Narragansett Bay. They have journeyed from far away, continuing to move cargo throughout a pandemic. Along the opposite shore I spot the mustard-yellow hull of a freighter, the height of its bridge as tall as five stacked shipping containers. It is the color and size that steal my attention and I stop to snap a photo, then text it to my dad. Look what I found on my first bike ride to work!
Back in the saddle, I notice more activity in the harbor. A group of scullers is picking up speed. Balancing in their slim boats, they row north with oars gently lapping the water the way a family of dolphins swims together. The sunlight shifts where the path enters a shaded section. Here the air smells sweet and floral, but I don’t see any flowers. The full-bellied robins don’t hide. They welcome me into their world with a chorus of chirps. And I continue rolling, past marshland fields of towering phragmites with their soft plumes waving, wheat-like, in the early morning breeze. The path here is flat, as is most of Rhode Island. A ribbon of pavement slips us into suburban backyards laced in newborn foliage. I shift up a gear and take on a cruising speed. Gidget and I make it to work by 8:30 a.m.
Driving a car has always been my default. At sixteen, I gleefully ditched my Huffy bike and accepted the keys to a silver blue 1986 Honda Accord—the kind with the headlights that slowly blink open as if they are eyelids waking. When I grew up in rural New Hampshire, there was no reliable public transit. If you met someone who didn’t drive, they possibly had a handicap or had been cited with a DUI. It wasn’t until I was eighteen and in college that I first learned how to ride the bus and take the train to get around. Yet, despite these services, I still felt at a loss for the use of my car, which I could not bring to campus. This panicky feeling swelled like a wave inside of me. Then a friend loaned me her bicycle.
But, like most Americans who live in suburbia, driving continued to remain my default as I emerged into adulthood. One week before Covid shutdowns, we had roamed the used car lot at the local CarMax searching for a replacement for my husband’s twenty-year-old Toyota Corolla. I steered us toward the environmentally responsible choice. Saddled with student loans and not wanting to be renters forever, Scott turned to me as I opened the door to a Toyota Prius and said the thing I didn’t want to hear. “We can’t afford a hybrid!”
The onset of Covid forced most dealerships to pause test drives and six weeks after that initial spin through the lot, we still did not have a replacement vehicle. It was then, that I noticed a flat tire on the aged gold Corolla. I had been driving it to the laundromat and to the grocery store—the two essential places I could go—in observance of the lockdown orders that kept me working from home. Scott was deemed an essential worker and it made sense for him to start driving my much younger car, a Honda Fit, on his sixty-miles roundtrip to work in a neighboring state. As two weeks turned into more, it was clear I wasn’t going anywhere, and I took it as a further sign when I spotted the flat tire and listened to the eerie silence of traffic-less streets. Was it time to panic? With no distractions from the chatter inside my head, I was forced to answer this nagging question—Could I ride my bike instead of driving a car to get around?
“Let’s try it for a month,” I suggested to Scott in early May. We were seated outside waiting for the charcoal grill to heat up. Smoke billowed from the vent in the dome lid and ventured off into the neighborhood. “We can donate your car and I’ll start to cycle to get around. I could even take the bus. We could get by with only one car, right?”
His expression was one of tepid agreement, “If you think you can.”
Two months later, it’s now July and I wear a CamelBak to help replace the fluids I am losing to sweat. That sweat, it’s clingy—beginning as wet beads on my forehead, my upper lip, and down the center of my back—burrowing into the blend of polyester and spandex activewear that is beginning to make up most of my wardrobe. Aside from staying hydrated, my summer challenge is figuring out how to bike with two panniers stuffed with vegetables from the farmers market, along with a yoga mat, and a watermelon.
Pedaling home from Providence brings me through neighborhoods I never ventured through by car. I am used to traveling in the protective bubble of a personal vehicle, but out here in the open air of Gidget’s roomy saddle, there are…people! They lounge on shaded porches, they hang their arms out of rolled down car windows, and they stop and ask me for directions. Some even cheer me on as if a sidewalk spectator at the Women’s World Tour.
“You keep going, girlfriend!”
At a cruising speed of nine miles per hour, I will not win any medals today. It is more important that I am seen by the drivers in cars. When I must make a turn, I sit taller and use my hand signals, stretching my arms out as wide as they will go. Until now, I could never picture myself as anything more than just a fair-weather, weekend bike adventurer—one who rides safely in pairs or in groups but seldom travels alone. To have this space to think and to feel a sense of forward motion when the world has been catapulted into the breakdown lane feels novel, almost scandalous. My panic converts to fuel, and onward Gidget and I ride.
October brings wet leaves in muted golden tones to the surface of the bike path. Autumn storms shed branches, more leaves, and even tree limbs that require some maneuvering, either by an off-road detour or dismount. I try to avoid the squirrels who dart across the bike lane, busying themselves in the task of preparing for the dark days ahead. I used to follow these natural rhythms of the season, sensing the right time to stow my bike away inside the garage, and while there, retrieve the snow scraper for the car. But natural rhythms don’t make much sense right now. Rather, I feel the tenseness in Gidget’s aluminum frame. There’s more uncertainty in the air. The presidential election is near. The upcoming holiday season too. Do I need a new winter jacket? Warmer gloves? Gidget whispers Promise me you’ll ride through at least the end of December?
The bike path appears deserted on a lifeless January morning where the temperature hovers around freezing. Along my route to work, I pass by only two fellow bike commuters. The first one nods in our direction. Hey, he’s nodding at us! Gidget whispers. The second performs the same gesture while cresting to the top of one of the bikeway’s two hills. Hello stranger! she chirps. With each exchange, there’s a feeling of solidarity. It makes me think we’ve been initiated into an exclusive all-season cycling club. The price of admission: learn how not to freeze your extremities off and just keep pedaling.
Riding home at six p.m., it’s dark as black licorice and the beam from my bike headlight is too dim for this section of the path bordering a small state park. Here, there is only the inky black void where shadows of oak limbs and stoic white pines close in around us as if inside a tunnel—one that swallows Gidget and me whole for a mile or two. My breath is an inhale of raw cold, followed by an exhale of wet snot that I smear along the fabric of my right glove. Each chain revolution around the bike’s gears moves as if cycling through a river of blackstrap molasses. I was never interested in being an athlete. The physical stamina always seemed too hard. You can do it! Gidget whispers. And somehow, I do.
A few weeks later, on a Saturday morning in February, I stand at the bus stop near our apartment. Steadying Gidget in one hand and my phone in the other, I play a YouTube video over the din of traffic, taking cues as to how to load her to the front of the bus. When the RIPTA 22 sputters to a stop at my feet, it hisses as it lowers, offering me a more gracious entrance. On the front of the bus, just below the driver’s window, the bike rack awaits. There are instructions for where to pull, release, and secure the hook-shaped-arm around the bike’s tires. I lift Gidget from the sidewalk and place her front wheel in one of the two cradles followed by her back wheel. A quick tug at her frame and I can tell she is safe.
It is only a fifteen-minute bus ride to my stop in Providence and then a ten-minute bike ride to the farmers market. I feel smart at having discovered this hybrid form of transit. At my stop, I remind the driver I am taking the bike with me and reverse the process. But the bus lets out a scolding beep of the horn because I failed to raise the bike rack back into its place. With fingers tingling, I complete the task. It is twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit with a real feel of fifteen. For me, this means it’s a double wool sock kind-of-day and the only way to stay warm is to keep pedaling.
I perform my errands and return to the bus stop where I find, seated on a cold metal bench, a middle-aged man with his jacket unzipped. The border around the bus stop shelter is littered with discarded to-go containers, plastic bottles, empty coffee cups, a forgotten sweatshirt, and other detritus. These scattered remains create a visible social line, delineating the city’s south side from everything else. The frosted tip of the man’s nose pokes out above a blue paper mask, and he rises when the bus appears.
I stand on the edge of the sidewalk, readying myself to maneuver the loading of Gidget back onto the bike rack. I plan to attempt mastery on this second try.
“Let me get that for you,” he says, coming closer.
I lift Gidget up off the ground as the bus lurches to a stop. “No thanks, I’ve got this.”
“Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like to see a woman have to do things for herself.”
His words hang in the bitter air between us. I turn to face him and raise Gidget higher. This change within me has been picking up speed all along. You can do it, Gidget whispers. You are doing it!
Three months later, it’s May again, and the path is riddled with puddles after a soaking overnight rain, but my new highlighter-yellow fenders keep me dry. The bugs are becoming a real nuisance as I ride. Tiny black gnats, even an aphid is stuck to the front of my shirt. Further back at my favorite spot along the causeway, I spied two blue herons. Earlier this spring the hollow tap of a woodpecker gave me pause, as it also did to a young couple walking together on the bike path. We three stopped to listen to one of the first sounds of the season. How alarming, that I never noticed this trumpeter of the vernal equinox in years past. All these sights and sounds! There is so much less room for that panicky feeling when I believe I am soaring through the air—and trust, I am held strong in Gidget’s roomy saddle.
I like sharing this pathway with the mother goose and her gaggle of goslings that parade along the wetlands at Brickyard Pond. This past year has shown me that sharing with motorists is more like trying to reason with a two-year old who honks and shouts at you to “get on the sidewalk!” Earlier this month while pedaling south on Warwick Avenue, heading to a work meeting, Gidget and I were forced onto the sidewalk from sheer claustrophobia, as the cars and a couple of tractor trailers encroached on the twelve inches of shoulder available to us. Doing what cyclists are not supposed to do, we rode on the sidewalk. Gidget’s aluminum frame rose and fell like a miniature roller coaster at a decrepit theme park. Weeds shot up from the cracks in the pavement and at each side street crossing, I looked around for signs that anyone dared to walk here. If a sidewalk is for pedestrians and a roadway is for cars, I wonder—where do bicycles fit in?
Despite that sidewalk encounter, this month I am feeling a surge of happiness. May is National Bike Month and I’ve joined a virtual bicycle challenge. I set a goal to ride a hundred miles, but today on May 18, I will soon hit my 150th mile and am now a contender for the honor of Top Commuter. I stop for a cortado at a cafe that marks the halfway point on my ride to work and here I splurge for a biscuit with jam. With Gidget secured to a nearby bike rack, I sit on the newly reopened cafe patio, sip from my cup, and scroll through the emails on my phone. There’s an invitation to a full moon ride next month with the group Bike Newport, a virtual high five from my bicycle challenge teammate Betty, and the latest newsletter from the League of American Bicyclists. Inside of me, there’s a miracle vaccine offering immunity to Covid. Outside of me, the world is opening back up.
In that first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, humans all over the world experienced a loss of independent movement. Standing in one place we learned, feels unnatural and brings with it as sense of great unease, but I was able to manage that panicky feeling. Riding on Gidget’s two wheels during the months of lockdown, freed me to experience Rhode Island more as a tourist than as a hostage. And giving up on what I always thought to be a core American value—owning and driving my own car—proved to be a way to build savings towards other goals. Maybe we will spend some of that money on a second bicycle or a cargo trailer? Or upgrade to an e-bike? I can hear myself saying to Scott, “I think we can afford a hybrid after all.”
The world turns, the seasons change, life continues. Most bicycles will not pedal backwards. Our kinetic energy creates a momentum that keeps the wheels turning, balances the bike to stay upright, and makes each pedal stroke feel like there is only one way to go: forward. You can do it!
Find her photos on Instagram @jfayedavanza or connect on Twitter @jessicadavanza.
- Solace in the Saddle - June 8, 2022