Bicycle Stories, by Gillian

Apart from many tales of many many happy days being my Beautiful Betsy's athletic supporter as she rides hither and thither and yon around the country, most of my bike stories are not particularly positive.

My very first 'bike ride' was, as with many of us, on a tricycle. It was the summer before I turned five and started school, and being an only child I had led a pretty solitary, sheltered, life up to that point. I never owned a tricycle myself; this was an old one which my cousin Peter had outgrown. Peter was four years older than me, and it was he who led me off on this adventure. 

Peter & Gillian just before starting on the adventure.

We started off sedately enough down a paved lane which became a muddy cattle trail which in turn became a steep, narrow path hurtling down from the pasture to the river. Peter, also an only child and not averse to having someone, especially a soppy little girl, to show off to, shot off down the path on his boys' two-wheeler, pedaling as fast as his legs would turn, and letting out some pseudo-macho, pseudo-cowboy, yell. I, oblivious to lurking dangers, rushed to keep up. Had I had anything beyond zero experience on a trike, I would, of course, have known that three wheels on a path like that were, at very best, going to get hopelessly stuck. But I headed off in blissful ignorance, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes! 

Well, long before I could get stuck in the mud, the front wheel hit an exposed tree root and I ended up, or rather, down, face first onto a lump of granite, which seriously loosened by two front baby-teeth. Meanwhile, Peter, arriving safely but too swiftly at the end of the path, was unable to stop his bike and ended up in the river. There had been recent thunderstorms in the hills and the river was an angry brown torrent. Luckily for Peter, he and his little bike tangled up together and jammed between two rocks, where he hung on for dear life and yelled for yelp. This story might have had an unhappy ending, but my aunt, casting a suspicious eye on her son as do most mothers of nine-year-olds, observed us heading off across the pasture on the bluff above the river, where he was, I later learned, forbidden to take his bike, and gave full chase. So, other than, later that day, my uncle pulled out both of my battered front baby teeth, we were little the worse for wear.

I never went bicycling with Peter again, though we both rode bikes. I rode mine for purely practical reasons; it was a way to get around. Peter rode to get around, but also rode just for the fun of it. Then he went on long rides as a member of a bicycle club, and did a little competitive racing. His daughter eventually married a serious cyclist, though she never cared for bike-riding herself. Her husband was in France training for the Tour de France when he died, on his bike, of a heart attack. It turned out that he had some abnormal, and relatively rare, heart condition, about which the details were never very clear and I forget if I ever knew the correct term. He was only in his twenties when he died.

Twenty-five years later, my cousin Peter, in his sixties, was riding his bike home from a nearby harbor where he had been fishing. He died, on his bike, of a heart attack. As if two men in the family dying of heart attacks while riding bikes was not coincidence enough, the autopsy showed him to have the exact same heart condition as his erstwhile son-in-law. And some like to say there is no such thing as coincidence!

It seems that the bike-riding at the time of the heart attacks was also coincidental. Both men could as easily have succumbed to their heart conditions anywhere, anytime; as likely to die reading the paper on the couch as to die on a bike.

Yes, but ........ I must admit that when I got news of Peter's death, and the circumstances, it scared me. Two members of my family dead on the very seat of a bicycle, and I was deeply in love with, and committed to, an avid bicycler. You must admit, it would give you pause! And shortly after that, Betsy decided to go on her ride from Pacific to Atlantic, an endeavor which of course I wholeheartedly supported even while it rather gave me chills. I just had to get over it, which in the event was not so very difficult. My anxiety level decreased rapidly as I tried to consider it rationally. I decided it was actually good. I was what Robin Williams refers to in his Garp persona, as 'pre-disastered'. To have such a thing happen twice in one family is extraordinary; a third time is surely out of reach of reality. I even began to be amused, thinking of Sherlock Holmes's musings,

'To lose one wife may be considered unfortunate, but to lose three?'

No. It was ridiculous. I shook it off. Now I never think of it. We are already too old to die young, and if, by some horrible chance, Betsy should be stricken by a lethal heart attack while riding her bike, hey, thank you kind fate. To die suddenly and swiftly in the midst of an activity you love. Who could ask for anything more?

.................................................

And, although it has nothing to do with my story other than the topic, I have to include a simply delicious quote I stumbled upon.

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.

Emo Philip

© 30 May 2016 

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.