ornoth_cycling | The Pace Line

When people effuse about cycling, one of the things they mention quite often is the pace. While drivers careen through towns and view the space between destinations as little more than time spent “in-between”, cyclists have the time and leisure to fully appreciate the landscape they pass through.

While drivers stay safely isolated within their steel and glass cages as they fight one another for space on their main roads, cyclists eschew the automobile’s grey strip mall hell, often finding hidden gems that the rest of the world has passed by.

For the cyclist, the journey is a rare opportunity to spend precious time fully immersed in the natural environment. How many of the drivers who passed me last week registered the lilac-saturated sweetness of the air their sealed contraptions sped through?

One could of course walk, but it’s difficult to cover very much ground at a walking pace, and the scenery doesn’t change very much for the pedestrian. A runner’s pace would be better, but it’s arduous to maintain for any length of time. Yes, the pace of a cyclist seems about right.

Perhaps for me some of that has to do with my hobby as a writer. Whether I’m writing fiction or a travelogue, I try to immerse my reader in the sensory experience of a setting. That requires spending enough time there to not just observe a place, but also to contemplate and ruminate on it, as well, to activate the imagination.

At the same time, too much description and not enough action bogs a story down, so after one has built up an image of a place in the reader’s mind, it’s important to show what happens there and then move on to the next setting. In both fiction and travel writing, there’s a natural rhythm and sense of movement.

I enjoy that same sensation of rhythm and movement on the bike. As I pass any given landmark, I have the time to see its details, hear its sounds, and smell its smells. Enough time to build a vivid, lasting, multidimensional image of it in my mind, then the next scene comes into view. The bicycle permits an ongoing, dynamic collaboration between the world and the appreciative cyclist that would be difficult to achieve in any other way.

It is life unfolding and revealing its splendor, as the road unwinds itself effortlessly mile after mile. It is—if you can excuse the cliche—poetry in motion. Which is a perfect segue for my closing quotation.

He might well have been talking about a bike ride when one wise old man wrote:

Congratulations! Today is your day.
You’re off to great places! You’re off and away!

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

You’re on your own, and you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

You’ll look up and down streets. Look ’em over with care.
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”

With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
You’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And you may not find any you’ll want to go down.
In that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town.

It’s opener there
In the wide open air.

Out there things can happen and frequently do
To people as brainy and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen, don’t worry, don’t stew.
Just go right along. You’ll start happening too.

OH! THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!