Commentary: This former cyclist recalls riding adventures
As I plod my way up the forest road from the Angeles National Forest fire station a couple of miles from Foothill Boulevard, the overwhelming silence is sometimes shattered as a cyclist hurtles round a blind corner, scattering the birds and outraging the stately beetles crossing the road.
Before I’m attacked for intolerance, let me offer an olive branch — or, if that’s not available, a yucca — by laying out my credentials as a former hurtler and scatterer. I remember the magic moment as if it were yesterday — and not 76 years ago (!) — when I came downstairs on my 11th birthday and saw a gleaming new bicycle — undreamt of — in the kitchen. I think it was one of my mother’s happiest moments too. It cost $3, a day’s pay at my first job.
From then on, I went virtually everywhere on it and I mean virtually everywhere — school, of course, whatever the weather, movie theaters, libraries, pubs as I grew older. I put a simple lock on it if I remembered and my only worry was losing the key. Now cyclists chain their bikes to lampposts like suffragettes and soon, I imagine, our enterprising youth will figure out a way to steal the lampposts.
As I became a journalist, and my fellow scribblers jumped into taxis and immediately got stuck in London’s dense traffic, I pedaled my way around these man-made problems, like a good deed in a naughty world, to interview the prime minister, striking dockworkers, Louis Armstrong or whoever else happened to be in the news.
At that time, when everyone came to work in a suit and one or two of the higher-ups at the Times still wore pin-striped suits, cycling was considered irredeemably low class. In those days we wore metal clips on our baggy trousers to keep them from touching the oily chain so we were instantly recognizable.
However, I was invariably cheered as I drove by the rest of humanity waiting at bus stops or crowding into the subway stations. One day when the bus drivers went on strike and the traffic speed in Central London dropped from walking pace to zero, I was the only reporter to show up for a press conference and became very popular for a day with fellow hacks who wanted to know what news they had missed. I can’t remember but it was almost certainly something not worth knowing.
More normally, when I was interviewing someone at, say, the Dorchester Hotel, notable for luxury and the view over Hyde Park, I made a point of handing my bicycle clips in at the coat check desk to be stowed away until I was ready to leave. Nestled among the fur coats and admirals’ caps, they added a refreshing touch of Old English earthiness.
One evening at a reception given at the imposing Lancaster House, best known to the world as the interior of Buckingham Palace in an episode of Downton Abbey, the organizers had issued to everyone invited a large square of glossy paper with six-inch high letters LH.
Along the Mall, the broad thoroughfare leading to the palace, an unending stream of elegant cars and taxis poured in, with the card on their windscreens, and were stopped outside Lancaster House by an archetypal London bobby, calm but commanding, so that the rich and famous could get out and walk the rest of the way. Even for that regal street, the display of wealth was glittering.
I joined the line on my battered bike and drove under the gleaming Admiralty Arch without incident. But when I stuck out my arm to make a right turn into the mansion’s grounds, the policeman, stunned by the effrontery, took a step forward to bar the way but, seeing the LH sign on my handlebars, broke into a broad grin and waved me through majestically and I glided past the trudging plutocracy. I didn’t know Downton Abbey’s Earl of Grantham then. But I knew just how he felt.
So, yes, when I see mountain bikes on the trail ahead coming down at top speed, skidding around corners and jumping ditches, I get the old thrill. Nevertheless I can’t suppress the thought: “That’s fun but it’s upward, not downward, mobility I’m interested in.”
REG GREEN’S website is www.nicholasgreen.org