Coming home to Minneapoolis this Wednesday. Here's another off-topic take on what's happening here.
Jim
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This time, returning to Paris, I retrieved the black Dutch bicycle from the “cave”. This bike, originally bought in Strasbourg, has been across the ocean twice. Once when we shipped it home after our stay in Strasbourg in 1994, and another time last year when I brought it back to Paris.
I’m no stranger to bicycles. You might say that I grew up on one. When I received a bike for my birthday at age eight, I was liberated from the house, from the rule of my mother and free to terrorize that part of our Nebraska town that lay within a half hour’s ride, which is to say just about all of it. The pent up energy from being a pedestrian was instantly unleashed. I was a cyclone on two wheels, giddy with the freedom, laughing, and singing.
Now in Paris, in my 50’s, the bicycle has been a gift again. I was instantly at home with the machine and its “tick, tick, tick” sound when it rolled with the pedals in place. The release of energy has not been so sudden, so exuberant, as when I was a child, but I can feel it growing each day. By next week when I’m getting ready to return to Minnesota, I expect to be singing opera as I head down the hill, wind in my face, from Port Royal to pay a visit to Luxembourg Garden.
The experience has changed Paris. Paris is smaller on a bicycle than it is on foot or in a car. You can start on one side of the central city and be on the other side in about twelve minutes.
It’s bigger in scale, too. As you zoom down the streets, there are architecture movies flying by on both sides and a sea of clouds above you, all stitched into one smooth, rolling canvas.
The view is animated. The speed of your travel merges the individual sensations and views you would have on foot into one smooth stream of experience.
The stream can also be abruptly broken at unpredictable intervals if a car flies into an intersection or turns left in front of you at night with the driver looking the other direction. Drivers with cell phones are everywhere.
Buses, the vehicles I feared most, are oddly the most gracious in their travel and generous in sharing space. These stately buses, with their refined drivers will pause to let you pass, or delay their passing until you are safely in position. Unlike buses in other cities, they seem patient and kind.
Bicycles share a lane with the buses, so they must be accustomed to the orchestration necessary for cohabitation. Taxis, on the other hand, also permitted to use this lane, are not nice. They will use every inch of their space and some of yours to pass, at no risk to themselves and great risk to you.
These lanes have white stenciled bicycle images painted on the pavement to mark the lanes, but some drivers must believe these images are there to mark previously fallen bicycles, like a cross beside the road is sometimes used to mark a traffic fatality.
I don’t know whether they are permitted in this lane, but motor scooters use it routinely, so you find yourself being passed by them as they weave in and out of the car traffic. Motorcycles, on the other hand, seem disdainful of the lane. They must see it as a beginners’ track, for those who still need training wheels. They choose, instead, to rocket down the narrow space between the next two lanes of traffic, even when this traffic is moving at forty miles an hour or more. I am grateful for their contempt. I much prefer the company of bus drivers.
On the plus side, the bicycle is the most agile in stop-and-go traffic. It is almost always possible to cruise along one curb or the other, passing the fuming drivers, and often making better overall time. If a car blocks your way, you cut between cars to the other side of the street. If the light turns red where you need to turn left, you can step off the bicycle, merge left with the pedestrian traffic and pedal down the sidewalk far enough to re-enter the street. At rush hour, a bicycle is certainly faster than a car for movement in central Paris.
Often when the traffic has passed and you are riding again in silence, a pedestrian will step casually into the street without looking, just using the sound as a guide. In this case, the bell is essential. A slight touch of the rattling dinger will change their direction as if they were a leaf in the wind.
At twenty miles an hour, two feet from the curb, the condition of the road surface is more apparent, and sometimes it is hazardous. Small cracks and dips in the surface that would be unnoticed in a car must be watched carefully on a bike, for they can change the direction of the bicycle quickly, and there is a strong sense that you would probably not continue with it.
Paris is not so flat on a bicycle as it is in a car. The Boulevard Montparnasse has a peak at the beautiful Victorian-style RER Port Royal rail station entrance. The ascent of this peak was slow my first day, requiring several stops to peer in shop windows. Each day, the peak has been reduced a little and the window shopping has eased. The experienced bike rider never shifts out of high gear for this ascent, and this now seems possible to me, though the burning sensation in my legs when I’m trying this tells me I have some time to go before it’s true for me.
One of the hazards of riding up a hill like this is that you will be passed by young school girls, gaily laughing, or by pensioners hauling groceries or a grand-child home by bike. The embarrassment is soon gone and determination sets in.
Another source of embarrassment is the locking and unlocking of the vehicle. The expert cyclist can do it in seconds while looking around and making conversation. The first time I had to lock the bike, it took ten minutes just to discover how to remove the new lock from the carrier attached to the bicycle. I had to use glasses to see where the parts separated. Now I can lock or unlock in about 30 seconds, but the pros do it in about 10.
The choice of where to lock is important, and it must be found without appearing to search. Just dismount and lock. I’m not there yet. I still have to carefully size up each post, each iron fence.
Riding at night on busy streets doubles both the risks and the rewards. Lower visibility, higher blood alcohol levels, and impatience to get home sometimes lead to close encounters with other drivers. But the lights on the buildings and the lights of the cars create a different kind of visual beauty, something reminiscent of the dignity and grace seen in Toulouse Lautrec drawing. It is a big moving light show and you are part of it.
Now, at the end of my first week on two wheels again, the old thrill is back. I am free again on my bicycle. I feel the weightless joy of childhood running through me. I am hoping, really hoping that I won’t hear my mother calling me to dinner. I will just go on riding a while, laughing with myself.
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Topic: Post Card from Paris -- Two Wheels (Read 598 times)