How To Ride Your Bicycle

It occurred to me this morning that a good bike ride is like a wedding. There are requirements that must be fulfilled in order for the thing to be a success. Instead of something old, n., b. and b., a real bike ride must possess its own assortment of traditions.

You must, firstly, have the chance to make an ass of yourself. This can involve a number of instances, the most exciting of which involves clipless pedals. For those of you who, like my mother, believe that clipless pedals mean that the rider must tie her feet into shoes that are permanently screwed to the bike, I can put your mind to rest on that one. A nice twist of the ankle is all it takes to remove the foot from its clipped-in position. However, there are occasions upon which the ankle does not have the time or inclination to twist. Sam once rode all the way into our garage before throwing himself onto the lawn mower, but with this exception accounted for, the clipless fall will usually only occur when there are bystanders. My friend Anne went over in Central Park, which, while famous for many things, does not note “isolated” on its resume. Last summer I nearly went over when stopping at an intersection in Dairy Farm Quagmire in front of a large tattooed man, whose day I made as I hopped desperately in a small circle, determined not to lose the skin on one leg by toppling into the dirt. My friend Eric has a better story, in which he not only went over while still clipped in, but rolled right onto his back like a turtle. I’m only sorry I wasn’t there to cheer him on.

But there are other ways of making an ass of yourself on a bike. My favorite of late is my decision, when stopped on a side street in Route One Morass, to give in to the extremely pressing need to snot rocket (a common need among cyclists, though one that I find gets much less press than it deserves), only to discover that I’d done so directly in front of a hair salon’s picture window. My reflection slowly dissolved into the understandably distressed face of a woman having her hair put into curlers, and I giggled for about five miles afterwards.

There is also the requirement, while we’re talking about interacting with others, of being out long enough to have a condescending interaction with an elderly character. I’m grateful for these people, who don’t seem to mind me sitting on the benches outside their shops, snarfing down my boiled eggs and swilling water. Someday I will work up a prefab list of thoughtful conversational topics, but for now, I’m still in a slightly stoned state when caught resting during a ride, and can only manage an idiotic grin and sound something like “Yeahahahhh,” when confronted with a “Good ride?” or other pleasantry. But this is a requirement of the ride; if you’re not out long enough to interact with other humans, you’re just out in the morass of your own mind, pedaling against your own thoughts. It’s so much more rewarding to be going about your business, and suddenly be interrupted, as I was last spring, by an octogenarian gardener who called to me, “Looking good! Keep it up!” And I ask you, if an 80 year old man can’t say “Looking good,” without raising eyebrows, who among us can? The serious, glowering-at-the-pavement kind of road ride may be good for those of us into self-flagellation, but I am of the opinion that the more cyclists interact with those around us, the more likely we are to be given a wider berth on dangerous roads. It’s important to be nice to people, if only to keep them from running you over.

Interpersonal interactions aside, there is always the weather to contend with. If we assume that a real ride lasts at least three hours, we also assume that at some point during the ride, we will be rained on. This will sometimes be a torrential affair, but will usually be just half-assed enough to make us spend the next ten miles debating the wisdom of whipping out the rain jacket. A smart rain can keep you arguing with yourself for the full loop, and will leave your shoes squishy and musical.

You must also ride, at some point, into a cruel, ball-breaking headwind from the north. This wind must be intent on ending you and your will to live. It must gust with dedication. Once you’ve had your balls, or ovaries, or whatever you most cherish, broken by the wind, you must also climb a ball-breaking hill as well. This hill should have no ostensible end. It should last for days; your thoughts, which so frequently go along their own contented way like Venetian gondoliers, should have the chance to flit from topic to topic like they’re attempting frenetic canal changes. One thought that will always come to light, no matter how fit you are, will be, This sucks. You might, at some point, reach a higher consciousness. You might, at some point, have a thought not voiceable by a 13 year old boy. You might, at some point, realize that you are climbing this hill, that you’re not even tired, really, more like just waiting until you get to the top, because you know you will. My aunt asked awhile ago, “Do you ever get off and walk?” and I remember being kind of shocked by the question. It’s not that I’m a riding snob; I’m still the slowest cyclist I know, and I still refuse to ride with my friend Nick, whose cycling persona is a frustrating combination of the Roadrunner and The Song That Doesn’t End. Whenever I insist that we compare our speeds, he tries to comfort me with the claim that beating my average by four miles an hour isn’t really that much. He’s nice enough to pretend that I’ll catch up in no time. The truth is that I’ve been riding all winter, getting up at 4:30 to grind away on the trainer in my living room, while his bike has spent the winter chained to his banister. The fact that he’s spent the winter sitting around watching Soylent Green while I’ve been pedaling my brains out, and that he can still smoke me, causes me no end of ire and tooth gnashing. But. Speeds aside, the fact is just this: if you bike, you don’t get off the bike. Even when it’s attached to your feet, and you’re on the ground.

At some point in a real ride, when your boiled eggs have come and gone, you will start remembering the leftover pizza in your fridge. At first this will be a pleasant memory, but as the ride continues and one last wave of showers drives into your face, you will begin to think of this leftover pizza with an almost indecent affection usually saved for members of your gender of choice. You begin to love that pizza. You have plans for you and that pizza that go beyond simple consumption; you have a future with your pizza. You will give it the best possible care. You will put it on a nice plate. You will wait the extra ten seconds for the microwave to reestablish the lithe and melty spirit of the cheese. You will treat that pizza like a small god. Men may come along and break your heart, but it doesn’t matter right now, because you have that pizza waiting at home for you, and by God, it’s gonna treat you right. And it never disappoints. As you slump in contented gluttony, you enter a Jim-Henson-like vision, in which you feel like calling up men from the past and having the pizza talk to them, giving them critiques on how to really treat a woman. Yes. Post-ride pizza really knows where it’s at.

The only thing that competes with the post-ride refueling might be the post-ride shower. A real post-ride shower is one of life’s most pure indulgences. Yes, there’s sex, there’s unhealthy but delicious food, but for pleasures that can’t possibly give you regrets, the post-ride shower has to take home the prize. You might just sit down on the floor of the shower and enjoy the general sense of being warmed by an outside being. All you have to do is remain motionless, and road grime and sweat are whisked away as your body, after a constant torrent of rain and the kind of wind only a dump truck intent on going in the opposite direction can create, is restored to room temperature. If we’re allowed to choose our own afterlives, this may be where you find me for a large percentage of the time, especially if Gerard Butler’s going to be busy elsewhere.

And speaking of the afterlife, a real ride involves at least one incident that causes you to recall your own mortality. This may be while breaking 40 on a curve while a Mac truck crumbles the pavement as it passes you. It may be while suddenly discovering that the shoulder is about to drop off and you’re seconds from an “involuntary dismount” into a pile of broken asphalt, or it may be when your presence causes a rottweiler to decide that it could use some exercise and possibly a snack. Or it may be when you’re halfway across the Route One Morass Bridge and a gust of wind comes from upriver in an attempt to knock you and your runny nose into the flow of traffic. Or it may be when you’re tearing down a hill, a good long one, and your eyes begin to tear up, and all you can do is keep a nice easy grip on your handlebars, and you start to feel yourself leave your body, because you’re going so fast, because no one has ever gone this fast, and there are no such things as brakes, because who would be crazy enough to stop this feeling, this blind, catch-me-if-you-can screaming down towards a river bottom, and you forget how to breathe but it doesn’t matter because the air’s just swimming through you, and you think, if I had to choose a way…. That’s the good part. That’s when gravity lets us have a good time, when it says Hey! I can be fun, too, and after that whole long, heart-crushing winter of pedaling into the dark, pedaling without going anywhere, without seeing anything but the confines of the same empty living room, you’re out in the world, ripping past lilacs and tulips and rain-soaked pavement and a world of other smells as they pass through you, and they have to pass through you, because you can’t even see them for the tears in your eyes.

How To Kill Daffy

I’m not sure how I got roped into adopting ducks. It probably all began because I mentioned my pond. This one-tenth of an acre, in the middle of my field, is a haven for wild ducks when the seasons change. In spring there’s always one day when the whole backyard seems brighter, and it’s because the ice has broken and the pond reflects the sky again. It has a muskrat, too; a scarcely visible rodent doing the backstroke up and down its borders. It’s a good pond.

At some point I mentioned it to my students. A few days later a senior girl named Gladys sidled up to me. “How would you like some ducks?” I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I had a small flock of chickens to care for; I didn’t need ducks. I had fishers and foxes to worry about, feed to buy, poop to shovel. I was full up. But Gladys was persistent. They were homeless ducks, abandoned by their meth-addict mother, fluffy, helpless. So I agreed. “Great,” Gladys said sunnily. “They’ll be here in about a month.”

Here’s what happened in that month: my husband moved out, for starters. My chickens were decapitated by a weasel. I refinanced my mortgage. Which required me to get a summer job of about seven hundred hours a week selling handcrafted jewelry to women with boob jobs and fat husbands, to whom they would always turn vaguely when the matter of the bill arose. So, yes, silly me. I forgot about the ducks.

I forgot about the ducks until Gladys called me to tell me they’d arrived. There was, of course, a hitch. “The orphaned ducks were already adopted. But I still wanted ducks, so I ordered some baby ducklings.”

This had not been the deal. My ducks were going to be adolescents, cynical and bitchy ducks who would roll their eyes at me, whom I could pop in the pond and watch fly away in the fall, which was mercifully only three months away. I was not equipped for ducklings.

“Can you pick up the ducklings tomorrow after work?” Sure. Absolutely.

First, however, I had another task. The minute Sam moved out, my friend Anne told me that I should start dating. “Just because I don’t want you to be disappointed with the selection when you start actually wanting to date.” Tito didn’t count. I tried to convince her otherwise; I was better around Tito: I didn’t need sleep, I didn’t need food. I lost five pounds and was so antsy that my biking speeds were the best they’d ever been. Tito was good for me.

“It is not good for you that he wants to keep sleeping with other women,” Anne said.

Well, yes. There was that. Grumble. Getting over Tito required a certain amount of languishing. But while I languished, Anne insisted that I date. So, oddly, with his gregarious knowledge of every person in the state, did Tito. The last time he left my house, before I’d ended things, he told me, “You should date this guy I know... Mike Shepherd.” The guy Tito knew was a guy everyone else knew, too, and Anne, after we’d cursed Tito good and proper, supported the Tito Proposal. The guidance secretary supported it. The curriculum coordinator supported it. I am a vegetarian, and Mike has hiked the Appalacian Trail. Using these statistics, everyone was convinced that Mike and I were made for each other.

Fine. Who am I to disappoint an entire town.

So I’d asked Mike to coffee, and we’d agreed on the night of the duckling drop.

It didn’t go well. There was, of course, the embarrassing fact that Mike had asked me out when I was still married, oblivious to the ring I kept waving in his face as if swatting blackflies; there was also the total lack of chemistry. It was like a conversation between a nun and a priest, only less sexy. There were silences you could have driven a Mac truck through.

This would have been bad enough had not my phone rung in the middle of the ordeal. My grandmother was alone for the week, my entire family having gone to the Grand Canyon, and I was hesitant to leave calls unanswered. I could not use the screen on the back of my phone to identify the caller, of course, because on a bike ride earlier in the summer, I’d stuck my phone in my bra—when you’re built like me, this is really the main purpose of a bra: carrying stuff—and sweated all over it, ruining the screen. Lovely, no? The mysterious caller was not, however, my grandmother. It was Gloria, a junior girl in whom I had spent the previous school year futilely trying to instill the idea—ironically, given the death of my phone— that one’s self-esteem should not be a result of the one’s breast size. Hell, if Gladys could get my number, if a gaggle of drunken former students could get my number, why not Gloria? “I saw you sitting on the porch of the coffee shop with Mike Shepherd,” Gloria chirped. “So I was wondering how your date went?” I ground my phone as hard into my ear as I could, praying that Mike could not hear her.

“Actually,” I murmured, “It’s still going on, Gloria. I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up, offered as urbane a smile as I could muster, and realized that coffee was clearly over. As we made our way up the sidewalk, Mike veered away across the street without a word, and that was the last I saw of him for months. Anne, the guidance secretary, the curriculum coordinator, and, of course, Tito, were wrong. But it didn’t matter, because I had ducklings to get.

Gladys, however, was out to dinner. And she didn’t have a car. Which explains why I was driving around Quaint Coastal Village at ten o’clock at night, with Gladys, wanting nothing more than to chuck my ducklings into my cardboard box and take them home. But first I had to meet Gladys’ mother. Gladys’ mother was extraordinarily pleasant about a stranger showing up to her house after dark, especially given her apparent surprise upon discovery of Gladys’ plan to acquire ducks, said discovery being their arrival at her home. I suppressed a scream at this news, and told her that I would wait outside. I was waiting because Gladys’ boyfriend had the duck food, and Gladys’ boyfriend needed to drive to Gladys’ house to bring me the duck food. I stood on their well-landscaped lawn in the dark for maybe fifteen minutes, then Marlon showed up and helpfully carried the fifty pounds of duck food to my trunk. I strapped in my cardboard box of four peeping ducklings, and we hit the road. I tried to say things to soothe their panicked musical notes, as the sound of my voice seemed to quiet them, but I couldn’t think of much for conversation. I recited them Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice, which they seemed to appreciate. Well, who wouldn’t?

My dogs were extremely interested in the ducklings, whom I put in the shed for the night. The shed was big, but all the openings were off the ground and covered by two-inch square fencing. It seemed fine.

It was not fine. In the morning, I was one duckling down. One of the suckers had apparently hopped up onto the ledge, squeezed through the fence, and promptly been eaten by something. I searched, but neither saw him nor heard his peeping. I then set up the remaining three in a plastic under-bed storage container with food, water, and a screened top, and left them to go to work.

We did this for days and days. I decided to name them Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, silently mourning fallen D’Artagnan, but the names didn’t do much good as the ducklings were identical, black and celery-colored, with a shock of fuzz and tiny serrated beaks. Despite my total lack of time for them, I enjoyed giving them fresh newspaper and dry food, watching them splash about and completely ruin the fresh newspaper and dry food, and holding all three at once in my hands. They were nice ducks.

Before I go any further, we have to clarify one thing. What do ducks do?

Well, they quack. They poo everywhere. They… grow feathers.

They also swim. Ducks swim, okay? Mike Shepherd, whom I ran into months later—later enough for the horror of coffee to be an amusing memory—confirmed this, telling me that he’d read that ducks can swim from something like a week old. Ducks swim.

So my ducklings were getting bigger. Their dish of water was too small. So I upgraded them to a medium-sized Tupperware. I gave them a little ramp up the side, a couple of bricks to wade out onto, and filled the new pool a few inches. “Have fun,” I told them as I left that morning.

When I came home, I knew right away that something was wrong. The silence was unbearable; there was no cheery peeping, no splashing sounds. All three were floating, three dead ducks, in a couple inches of water.

After the chickens, this seemed a little much.

I took care of the tiny corpses, and spent the rest of the summer avoiding Gladys. I couldn’t even comfort myself that I’d given them a good home. Granted, it was an upgrade from the mailing crate they arrived in at the post office, but they’d never even gotten to see the pond. I was haunted by these ducks; everywhere went, I heard their ghostly peeping, little Mallard Jacob Marleys, rattling their chains whenever I walked through town. A week later, I discovered that another girl in town had adopted ducklings, and was carrying them around in her purse. So the peeping was not, in fact, ghostly. It was difficult to be perturbed by a Vera Bradley bag, but still, I felt terrible. But I also felt slightly annoyed. Ducks swim.

Perhaps I was living a perverse version of The Ugly Duckling, in which my ducks were actually baby ostriches, or iguanas, or possums, or some heretofore unknown species made of newspaper, or something else that implodes when moistened. All I know is, I’m done with fowl. Nothing could induce me to provide a home for any feathered creature; to paraphrase Benedick in Much Ado, I was not born under an avian planet. My pond welcomes ducks of the self-sufficient variety, and I am happy to welcome the neighborhood heron, who is tall enough to keep his head above water. Otherwise, until I can learn to keep inanimate objects like my phone from drowning, anything feathered is on its own.