Imagination Unleashed: Children on Bikes

bikes

Sports Saturday

I bicycle virtually everyday to the college where I work, about a mile and a quarter from home.  Unless it’s raining or snowing, motorists can see me pumping along, my pants tucked into my socks, my necktie blowing in the wind, my backpack weighed down with laptop, lunch, and the Longman Anthology of British Literature. Sometimes I’m even wearing a blazer. I must strike the drivers as very collegiate.

When my children were small, there were two basic rules I held them to: (1) respect other people and (2) don’t ride your bike on Mattapany Road.  Mattapany (the stress is on the last syllable) is the oldest road in Maryland, dating back to the 17th century, and while undoubtedly wider now than it was then, it still has no shoulder. Looking back on that advice, I realize that the instruction was really a coded way of saying, “and don’t do anything that will get you killed.”  Darien and Toby remind me of that advice to this day.

Teaching children how to ride bicycles, like teaching them how to drive a car, is one of those initiation rituals that are integral to American family life.  Each of my sons learned in his own way. Toby, it seemed, would never learn until, one day, he just started riding on his own.

In honor of all those parents who are ushering their kids into the new stage of independence that bicycling makes possible, I post a poem on the subject by Wyatt Prunty, director of the Creative Writing program at Sewanee, where I grew up. Describing his efforts to teach his daughter how to ride, Prunty masterfully concludes with a paradox that gets at the fundamental nature of all good instruction: “to teach her I had to follow/ 
And when she learned I had to let her go.”

The poem appears in a collection called The Art of Bicycling: A Treasury of Poems, edited by Justin Daniel Belmont (Breakaway Books 2005). Here it is:


Learning the Bicycle

for Heather

The older children pedal past
Stable as little gyros, spinning hard
To supper, bath, and bed, until at last
We also quit, silent and tired
Beside the darkening yard where trees
Now shadow up instead of down.
Their predictable lengths can only tease
Her as, head lowered, she walks her bike alone
Somewhere between her wanting to ride
And her certainty she will always fall.
Tomorrow, though I will run behind,
Arms out to catch her, she’ll tilt then balance wide
Of my reach, till distance makes her small,
Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know
That to teach her I had to follow
And when she learned I had to let her go.

Talking about Sewanee and bicycle riding takes me back to my own childhood cycling. Sewanee was small and safe enough that scores of children bicycled to school every morning, and I remember going up and down Sewanee hills on my old Schwinn.  Those memories give me an insight into the conclusion of It, my favorite Stephen King novel where, by riding on his childhood bicycle, the protagonist saves the world.

Without going into details of the plot, the novel is about an evil force which erupts every few years or so. A gang of children defeat it and make a pact that, if ever it reappears, they will reassemble to fight it again. This they do as adults and, to be effective, they must imagine themselves once again as children. In the final moments, when the force is threatening to swallow the town by means of an earthquake, the main character once again rides his childhood bicycle with the freedom and recklessness of his younger days. He thought he was flying then and, for a moment, he imagines himself flying now.  This reconnection with his childhood stops the evil.

King’s thematic point, consciously borrowed from Wordsworth (see my post on that here), is that only if we become as children can we defeat the soul-sucking descent into modern technocratic and bureaucratic life, with its mind-numbing work demands and its mass entertainment escapism. (“Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy,” writes Wordsworth.) For King, riding a bicycle turns back time and rekindles the fantasy imagination of a young boy.

And so, as I disregard my advice to my sons and sail down Mattapany Road (which happens to be the fastest way to my office), I imagine myself as nine again. The world feels fresh.

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