Those Damned Bicyclists

The American Dream on wheels.

by Isaiah Thompson

One sunny summer weekend — much like this past one — when I was 10, I came up with a plan for the day: I'd follow my street as far as I possibly could, and find out where it went. The journey would be arduous, the distance great — and so I'd need my bicycle. It was a cheap junker of a mountain bike, but it had pedals and wheels: that humble, centuries-old recipe for freedom itself.

On I rode, past my known universe, out past the woods of western Chicago, till I reached the airport. There was a tremendous roar, and I looked up to see a commercial airliner landing right over my head like a great metal dragon. Then came another and another. I had reached Xanadu, the Land of Oz, the monster-guarded gateway to the unknown. I clung to the handlebars of my bike, my only flimsy transport home, with horror and awe at this strange world — and a deep, deep itch to go farther.

Freedom: It is the great promise of the bicycle, so swiftly granted that it's no wonder those who don't share it can hate and misunderstand it. We in Philly will undoubtedly spend some portion of the coming year squabbling over bike lanes and red lights again. The grouches and haters will dip their pens in the ever-rancid wells of bitterness and numbskullery and rag on Those Damned Bicyclists. The bad bicyclists, indeed, will make it worse for the rest — but the bad drivers won't make it worse for their ilk, because theirs is the kingdom.

But in these last glowing days of summer, I make a pre-emptive appeal to the very freedom-loving gut of mankind, to see the bicycle for what it is: the stuff of liberty itself, the Great American Dream on wheels. What, after all, could be more democratic than a bicycle? Old? You can bike. Overweight? You can bike. Poor? You can bike. One-legged? No-legged? Oh yes, you can bike.

So assures, for example, local man John Siemiarowski, who will accompany three disabled friends, one with muscular dystrophy and another with cerebral palsy, who power their bikes — legs be damned! — via hand cranks. They'll ride this weekend's Bike Philly ride, benefitting the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia — a group constantly heckled by the likes of the Daily News' Stu Bykofsky for its work on bike lanes through Center City.

And it was that mystical gong "Freedom!," after all, that drew thousands of people this weekend to disrobe and ride naked through the streets for the second annual Philly Naked Bike Ride — not to shock or make a statement, but for the sheer pleasure of doing it. Too bad a few guys posing as interviewers showed up and used footage to assemble a DVD of the event, now being marketed on an "entertainment" website.

Was it not that old itch of the great unknown that inspired a pack of Camden youth on BMX bikes to spontaneously and wordlessly join me and a group of friends, as we biked the final leg of a sun-bathed ride to the shore this weekend? Forming a phalanx around us, we all became a kind of parade, rolling through the sunset toward the Philly skyline, until we came to the Ben Franklin Bridge, the threshold of our world and theirs, where the kids finally stopped, looking slightly dazed — hungry for what lay beyond.

Isaiah Thompson scratched his itch, and is now rehabilitating. Wish him well at isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net