Michiana Chronicles

Momentum

Who among us doesn’t remember our first bicycle?  It may have been a hand-me-down with gravel-chinked paint and handlebar streamers already thinning and frayed.  Or maybe it was a gleaming electric-blue Schwinn with a vinyl banana seat and a woven basket or metallic bell.

Whatever the style of the bike, I’ll bet you recall exactly the feeling when you first learned to ride – when a steadying grown-up hand let you go and you “found your center,” as hip people like to say, and you took off, independently sailing through space, transformed by this new momentum.  There’s a reason we say that unforgettable skills are “like riding a bicycle”; cycling gets under our skin, for good.  Regardless of what you think of the treacly movie E.T., you’ve got to admit that Spielberg gets it right in the scene when the scruffy kids on ordinary bicycles outrun the cops, the police cars spinning stupidly into one another while the kids race down secret back alleys until they shoot right across the moon.  Cycling is as close to magical flight as most of us will ever get, and it’s not a bad second prize.

These are useful memories to linger over as we see how well we all scored during national Bike to Work Week.  I confess that I’m mostly a fair weather cyclist, so the rain dampened my resolve a bit.  I also prefer to cycle toward a snack, which is why it was nice on Monday to be rewarded by a coalition of cyclists in downtown South Bend who, despite the drizzle, presided over morning coffee and pastries and offered bicycle tune-ups and conversation to those of us who don’t yet have the momentum going for daily biking.

I felt very much the novice among these forward-thinking bike-to-workers.  After all, it wasn’t long ago that I accidentally strapped on my bike helmet backwards, not figuring out until the end of my ride that bystanders had been staring NOT in admiration of my cycling prowess, but instead at the vented air spoilers on my helmet spiking from my forehead like a Star Trek Klingon.  And once, when a cycling friend passed along some chi-chi bike shorts to me, I just couldn’t stop giggling at the sheepskin crotch. Nevertheless, these real cyclists were kind to me, and their declarations of freedom from the poisonous politics of oil, as well as the real pleasures of strengthening one’s body, spurred me to think more about bicycles and power.

Ever since their popularization, bicycles have been mixed up in politics—for women in particular.  In the context of nineteenth century feminism, bicycles were the revered—and reviled—symbol of women’s desire for independence.  This was an age, remember, when any woman out walking in the streets could be taken for a...well, for a “streetwalker,” and bicycles allowed women to circulate in the public sphere with their reputations intact.  Susan B. Anthony touted bicycles as “freedom machines,” and said that bicycling “did more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” In 1895, another feminist, Frances Willard, who was also the tightly-laced president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, wrote a book called How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, in which she praised the bicycle she learned to ride late in life, and which she named “Gladys,” for its “gladdening effect” on her health and political optimism.  Willard used a cycling metaphor to urge other suffragists to action, proclaiming, “I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.”

That same year, a bicycling proponent fittingly named Ann Strong claimed in the Minneapolis Tribune that bicycles were “just as good company as most husbands”—inspiring the following bit of editorial doggerel:

I clasped the waist of fair Lenore,
I praised her matchless worth,
And asked her if she loved me more
Than all else on earth.
She nestled closer to my side,
I thrilled from head to heel
As she in whispered words replied
“Yes, dear—except for my wheel.”

Tellingly, in 1897, when the undergraduate men of Cambridge protested the proposed admission of women to the university, the effigy the crowd hung was not just of a woman, but a woman on a bicycle.  Of course, the bicycling women won that battle, like so many others.  It’s not so much that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” but that women seem to have needed bicycles to help them discover their own power and fuel their political momentum.

Regardless of our gender, though, who among us isn’t wasting some of our energy in friction, when we could turn it into momentum? Like the Hoosier hero in the film Breaking Away, who transforms himself from a “cutter” into a champion by out-cycling the Italians, we might use the month of May, National Bicycle Month, to consider how mounting a “freedom machine” might strengthen both our bodies and our body politic.