Any story about me and bicycling has to begin with me and driving. Or not driving. Since I became eligible to drive sixteen years ago I have spent about 20 hours behind the wheel, roughly half of which were logged while playing “Grand Theft Auto.” There are a variety of reasons I never really caught on to driving. My adolescent commitment to chilly gothic perfection made me shun anything as potentially humiliating as behind-the-wheel lessons, and as I got older and vehicles got larger and the population of Denver exploded, full-on fear set in. I finally secured my driver’s license at the age of 27. I have not driven once since then, although the license itself has been usefully employed when boarding aircraft and in the procurement of alcoholic beverages. I’ll stick to GTA, thank you very much, where driving on the sidewalk and an inveterate inability to parallel-park are signs of finesse and git-’er-done ingenuity. And for transportation, I’ll stick to walking.

Ellen K. Graham

Until last summer, when I got a bike. I had never owned a bike. The last bike I had ridden with any regularity was my sister’s, circa 1980, which featured a wicker basket decorated with plastic daisies and a glittery purple banana seat. I approached my new bike with trepidation, like the monkeys circling the obelisk in 2001. I know they say that once you learn how to ride a bike you never forget but over those first few weeks I had a few panicky episodes where I realized that I was balanced on a wheel no wider than a granola bar and almost lost it. Gradually, I warmed to cycling. I got used to riding in traffic. I got used to rolling up my pant leg. After a lot of struggling with my bike lock I got to where I could lock the bike up in less than 2 minutes. More than anything, I got used to the speed.

Yes, speed. Most bicycle converts I know are refugees from the driving lifestyle who have the zeal of recovering addicts. I, coming from the pedestrian lifestyle, am more like my father’s elderly Baptist relatives who tasted champagne for the first time at my parents’ wedding. Many of the obstacles drivers face when switching over to cycling are things I simply take for granted as part of daily life. As a pedestrian, I already had an increased awareness of weather; a predilection for comfortable footwear and bags large enough to accommodate extra clothes, library books, groceries, etc; and a scientific approach to planning errands and appointments to maximize efficiency (i.e., “While I am in southeast Denver, I’ll visit my parents, go to the fabric store and eat at Damascus”). But on a bike, I can get there FAST. This has revolutionized my life. I feel how I imagine normal kids feel on their 16th birthday, or how our ancestors felt when someone came up with the whole wheel idea.

I’m still learning. New trips still require careful perusal of the bike path map to determine the route. I don’t ride after dark and do everything in my power to avoid Colorado Boulevard. My inner adolescent chafes at wearing a helmet. And I do hope to get my driving skills up to snuff someday, if only to spell my spouse on long car trips. Until then my driving experiences will be purely virtual, and frankly, no driving experience in the real world could match driving a hijacked fire truck with engine damage headlong off a pier into the Atlantic Ocean while fleeing from the police and/or Cuban gangsters. But to get my real velocity fix I don’t need a car or an Xbox. All I need is my bike and a destination. There’s nothing quite like powering down the path in the cool and quiet of the early morning, that anything-but-pedestrian feeling as I get where I need to go.

by Ellen K. Graham, BikeDenver Volunteer

Subscribe to the BikeDenver RSS feed