by Jaymie Heilman
For the first four decades of my life, bikes meant nothing but trouble.
My very first bicycle was a bubblegum pink number with chopper handlebars, a glittering red banana seat, and foil streamers. (It was the early 1980s, when sparkles made everything better.) Inherited from my much older, much cooler cousin, this was my very first two-wheeled bike. It was also the reason I got grounded. When my slightly older, slightly cooler cousin Jodi visited me in Sherwood Park, she assured me that her presence meant I was allowed to break Mom’s rules about riding double and never riding beyond the weirdly pruned monstrosity we called the Upside Down Tree. When Mom found out, she forbade me from riding again for a solid two years.
(Mom insists it was probably more like two days. I’m skeptical.)
By the middle of elementary school, I graduated to a hip blue ten speed. The curving handlebars were the definition of cool. I didn’t ride the bike that often, but I rode it regularly enough until that summer day before Grade Five when my Dad stumbled home from his quick bike trip to Prudham’s hardware store. He’d hit a patch of gravel when taking a turn on his own ten speed and his face was a bloody mess of cuts and road rash. Mom and Dad sold their bikes at a garage sale a few weeks later. It was my Dad, not me, that was hurt, but the sight of his injuries was terrifying enough that I didn’t ride again for a decade.
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I moved to bike-obsessed Madison, Wisconsin when I was twenty-one to begin graduate school and I quickly crashed down into the worst year of my life. I was all by myself in a new country, studying like a maniac because I was terrified of failure, and trying to figure out how to live on my own for the very first time. M&Ms from the vending machine at the library were dinner more often than not, I regularly wore a swimsuit under my clothes because I’d run out of clean underwear, and I made my parents crazy with worry with my regular sobbing phone calls home.
Ugh.
I knew something had to change, so I got a prescription for antidepressants, and I bought a way-too expensive bike. A Trek Mountain Bike and a heavy-duty helmet: this was how I was going to cure the loneliness that was destroying me. If I had a bike, I’d go to parties (even though I hated parties). If I had a bike, I’d meet up with friends for coffee (even though I had no friends). And if I had a bike, I’d definitely fit in with all those outdoorsy, athletic types who filled my graduate classes.
There was just one problem: I hated riding the thing. I am notoriously klutzy and my fancy mountain bike only exaggerated the problem. I would ride for a few meters and then crash, falling when a gray squirrel, obese from the pizza and beer strewn across frat house lawns, wandered onto the sidewalk where I rode, too nervous to risk riding on the street. I crashed when mosquitoes flew up my nostrils, when I tried to make way for sorority girl pedestrians, and when my center of gravity decided that it had been vertical for long enough.
Ride, crash. Ride, crash. Ride, crash.
I somehow managed to escape serious injury: no broken bones, just lots of cuts, scrapes, and bruises. After one particularly rough day of crashes, grueling seminars, and stale M&Ms, I just didn’t have it in me to ride back to my apartment. I left the bike locked up on campus, vowing to ride the bike home the next day. Eight days later, I finally mustered up the nerve to ride my bike home. I unlocked my bike, strapped on my helmet, and threw my leg over the frame. I’m still not sure what made me do it, but for some reason I turned around and looked when my butt was just one inch from my seat. Or, rather, the spot where my seat was supposed to be. The seat was gone and divine intervention or dumb luck saved me from being impaled by the seatless tube.
I walked my mangled bike home, grumbling about thieves and avoiding eye contact with all the laughing college students I passed. The skies opened and the rain crashed down, and by the time I got home, I had zero energy left to haul my seatless bike up the three flights of stairs to my crappy studio apartment.
When I came downstairs the next morning to retrieve my bike from the rack out back, my bike’s weird angle tipped me off: another thief had stolen the back wheel. All I felt was relief.
Life eventually got better. The antidepressants kicked in, I started eating properly, and I made new friends. There was Gladys, who was even less coordinated than me. Solsi, who had a car. And Ileana, who sat beside me on the stationary bikes at the gym. Now that was the kind of bike I could embrace: no need to contend with cars, drunken squirrels, or sorority girls, and no risk of debilitating head injury.
“You know,” Ileana said after I recounted my bike woes as we peddled in place, “I think my husband wants to get a bike.”
“He can have mine for free,” I said quickly. “Or I can replace the seat and back wheel and he can buy it for $100.”
She chose the latter. Replacing the seat and the back wheel ended up costing me $120, but I was more than happy to lose $20 to get that bike out of my life for good.
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I probably would have stayed away from bicycles forever, but I just had to go and fall in love with a cyclist. At thirty-one, a year into my first university teaching job in Halifax, I met the guy I’d go on to marry – a guy who regularly rides the same bicycle his parents gave him as a graduation present in the early 1990s.
“You know what machine really fights climate change?” Ken asked, fighting to keep from smiling. He’s an electrical engineer and has patiently explained everything from solar panels to heat pumps to carbon capture to me, as I panic about the liveability of our planet.
“A bicycle,” I sighed. He was right. Because he’s always right.
I went to Canadian Tire and bought a bike that I thought was well-suited to my skill level and temperament. It was a funky retro granny bike, complete with coaster brakes, a big old seat, and a wicker basket.
It was cute. It was vintage. It was safe.
It was also IMPOSSIBLE to use in hilly Halifax because it weighed roughly 18,000 pounds.
“You know that thing has no gears, right?” Ken asked as we biked around the city. “You know it’s really hard to cycle around here without gears, right?”
I would have given a snarky come-back, but I was too busy hyperventilating.
I sold that bike when we moved to Edmonton, even though the flatness of this prairie city is more suited to gearless bikes than Halifax. I didn’t really think about getting another bike until I looked out our kitchen window one day and saw the most miraculous thing.
Our elderly neighbor, the one with the burgundy hair and the fuchsia lipstick, was cycling. “Ken!” I shouted. “Come quick!” I pointed out the window. “If you can find me something like that, I will definitely ride it.”
Ken called me at the office a few days later. “I got it.” It wouldn’t fit on our car’s bike rack, so Ken bought a cheap helmet, left his car in the store parking lot, and rode it home for me.
This bike was my style. It still is. I ride the thing everywhere. And the best part is that when I ride, I bring joy to those who see me. Especially kids.
“Mommy,” a toddler shouted the other day, “It’s a grown up! Riding a TRICYCLE!” That’s right. I ride a mean three-wheeler, so sturdy I can’t crash. So slow that I have no reason to fear losing control. I can ride in Edmonton’s snowy winter, getting from point A to point B at the dizzying speed of roughly one kilometer an hour. When Ken and I had a baby, I had no problem putting our little guy in a bike seat and cycling, knowing that he was safe on the back of my ultra-sturdy ride. Our boy later nicknamed that bike Trike-ee-o, waving from his bike seat to the stunned pedestrians we passed.
All that trike riding eventually gave me the confidence to graduate to a tiny-wheeled folding bike. There’s something about the small wheels, my butt’s proximity to the ground, and the cycle’s resemblance to a clown bike that leaves me feeling safer than I do on a normal adult bike. I have crashed a few times – certainly more than I have on the trike – but the fact that this mini-bike is roughly ¼ the weight of the trike has made it my go-to bike when there is no snow on the ground. But despite the crashes, I always get back up, thrilled by how quickly I can get to the library, happy that my commute now includes exercise, and pleased by how cycling on a bike path calms me while driving often leaves me stressed and annoyed.
(I’ve started to look longingly at on-line ads for studded tires and expensive fat-wheeled winter bikes, but Ken’s worried grimaces remind me that I’m not quite there. Yet.)
This summer, my city councillor – a vocal proponent of active transportation – put out a call for Bike Mayors for each of the neighborhoods he represented. These Bike Mayors would help him advocate for government support for cyclists and encourage more Edmontonians to ride. In my self-nomination email, I wrote, “Malmo doesn’t need a fearless, talented cyclist for Bike Mayor. Malmo needs me: a middle-aged mom terrified of speeding trucks and texting drivers, haunted by my dad’s 1986 faceplant into gravel, and ridiculously uncoordinated.” I spoke about my ideas about getting reluctant cyclists to ride, outlining what works (mixed-use sidewalks), what doesn’t (painting pictures of bicycles on a busy street and calling that a bike path), and what my particular neighborhood most needed (a bike path from my house directly to the Italian Center bakery). Within a few days, the councillor had proclaimed me Bike Mayor of Malmo. There would be videos! There would be interviews! There would be social media profiles! All to promote bike riding in our car-centric city.
Nothing ever came of my Bike Mayor honor. The initiative fizzled under the pressures of more urgent city business. But I still wear the title proudly. Maybe I’ll even get Bike Mayor of Malmo printed on a t-shirt. After all, if people know that an anxious klutz like me can cycle daily, they surely can, too. More importantly, the title of Bike Mayor reminds me that I can grow and change, even if I need training wheels along the way.
Jaymie Heilman is a daily swimmer and ocean geek with a PhD in history. She has written two books about the history of Peru and her first Young Adult novel is under contract for publication. When she’s not reading or writing books for kids, she’s usually gardening, biking to the library, or dreaming about the ocean. She lives in Edmonton with her husband, son, and a ridiculous number of books.
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