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We’re, inevitably and consistently, consumed by no matter we flip our consideration to.
Generally it’s the sunshine—the brightness of solar reflecting off the yellow beams of the thirty first Road Bridge as you pound your pedals to beat site visitors gliding over the Allegheny River or the headlights of oncoming automobiles as your tires thrum throughout the black iron grates of the Scorching Steel Bridge over the Monongahela River at 1 a.m. in your means again from some home half on the South Facet.
Generally it’s the snow that blankets a metropolis you barely know and are seeing for the primary time after having met a child named Oliver who found out the best way to get onto the very best balcony of the Cathedral of Studying 40 flooring up by crawling out a window in a forgotten stairwell. That night time the smoke we exhaled melted snow and we leaned out from the ledge and appeared down on the sidewalks glittered in lamplight and traced automobile lights blinking within the blizzard making an attempt to map a metropolis neither of us knew, making an attempt to determine a approach to navigate this new life clustered amongst folks and concrete.
Generally it’s the unknown, the falling feeling of trusting in gravity and topography.
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Town confused me. I knew the best way to stroll the sidewalks and look each methods earlier than crossing Forbes Ave. and to observe the skyline at sundown to search out calm within the sprawl, however I noticed town solely as somebody merely visiting it, not dwelling it. I couldn’t work out its rhythm so I smoked cigarettes hoping they’d educate me the best way to breathe in that metropolis air. I walked to class with headphones on, listening to Wilco’s “Yankee Lodge Foxtrot” pondering that the road provided solely noise, not music. I smoked weed relentlessly, foggy and indifferent, muddled in my fixed inside dialogue circling a self so insecure that it was satisfied passing a joint was the one approach to make pals. The whole lot was a blur and when it wasn’t, I made certain to smear one thing throughout it. Within the winter, I didn’t have to do a lot of that for the reason that metropolis smears itself in a perpetual briny grey combination of snow, salt, and darkish rivers. I felt safer and hotter throughout these months in that uninteresting contentment of simply present.
Till someday within the spring once I remembered I had introduced my bike with me—an outdated Trek mountain bike—and took it out to experience round campus only for one thing to do this didn’t contain smoking or making an attempt to impress somebody once I noticed an indication for Crucial Mass taped to a phone pole. Each final Thursday of the month, meet in entrance of Hillman Library, 7:30. That was tomorrow.
The following day I rode over to the car parking zone in direction of the group of bikers and stopped close to the sting, not realizing the best way to enter areas with so many individuals. There have been the crust punk youngsters that rode bikes constructed from a hodgepodge of components, the bike messengers with their fixies and sling packs, just a few of us faculty youngsters from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon driving not-so-dirty bikes, and twenty-something working faculty graduates driving decked out commuter rigs with fenders and racks. The concept was easy: we experience collectively in a pack down the streets to make the drivers conscious of us, to make our presence plain, and to hopefully construct consciousness for bikers and the necessity for bike lanes. There have been two “leaders” that rode barely forward, positioning themselves in the midst of intersections to cease site visitors. I rode safely within the center, cushioned by different bikers from the honking automobiles and center fingers as we made our means downtown and throughout the Andy Warhol Bridge, up by way of the aviary and whipping across the stadiums again throughout the Clemente Bridge in direction of Smithfield Bridge and into the Southside, and by this level I had fallen in direction of the again of the group and as we rolled throughout the Scorching Steel Bridge with the Monongahela under us I appeared upstream and there was Justin and we simply laughed as a result of driving bikes throughout bridges that hum below your tires is simply so joyful. It was the primary pleasure I felt in months, a pleasure that got here out of nowhere and all over the place, that grounded me in a second with different folks, that opened me as much as the place I used to be in utterly, with out reservations, as I flew throughout these grates. I wished to chase that pleasure, to really feel it once more and be consumed by it, so I stored driving my bike, principally with Justin.
We’d meet up after class and experience across the metropolis, most frequently with no vacation spot in thoughts. It was the primary time I found what number of mysteries town had. Each bridge ran over rivers that we at all times discovered our means all the way down to so we might experience alongside them, and ravines we at all times descended into to search out the misplaced components of Pittsburgh that felt like little swaths of city wilderness. Our bikes took us the place we would have liked to go with out us ever actually realizing how we received there. The bicycle is a good looking factor. Purposeful and sensible, easy in its design and function. All you want is a little bit of stability and you may pedal wherever you need. It additionally builds group simply. Once you experience with somebody, you shortly fall into one another’s rhythms and actions. We discovered the best way to weave out and in of site visitors and which alleys have been the steepest and which bars had good locations to lock our bikes up outdoors of. We turned consumed by the cadence of our pedal strokes and the enjoyment in climbing steep inclines and resting on the prime with a brand new view of the skyline.
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By our senior 12 months we shared a home on Juliet Road, deep in South Oakland throughout the Boulevard of the Allies—a pink brick row house with 4 rooms. By that time I had constructed up a single pace out of an outdated Fuji metal bike at Kraynick’s bike store the place you can go and work in your bike and Jerry would assist troubleshoot issues and also you’d spend a few bucks on brake cables and pads. I rode that factor all throughout town—to class and to concert events, on night time rides with Justin, the place we’d discover free gravel alongside railroad tracks that’d take us alongside one of many rivers and its liminal gentle. We’d sit and drink low cost beer and I’d smoke my hand-rolled Bali Shag cigarettes and typically we talked, however principally we’d simply lean in opposition to our bikes watching the city panorama unfold round us within the assuredness that at any second we might simply get on our bikes and experience someplace new and discover one thing we’d by no means seen earlier than.
After we have been feeling discovered and eager to get misplaced, we’d experience by way of Schenley Park and Squirrel Hill into Frick Park and activate lights we had strapped to our handlebars that solely confirmed us what was precisely, instantly, in entrance of us. That little halo of sunshine turned our world. The filth singletrack our tires rolled throughout turned our focus and we lastly have been simply, merely, within the second, the wildness of the fast. The extra we rode the extra we realized that pleasure was discovered proper in entrance of us and the extra you discovered it, the extra you have been consumed by it. My insecurity became marvel in these moments of feral laughter once I might really feel town in me as our wheels and our bodies arced alongside its terrain and we turned its topography, not aside from however a part of.
We’d make our means all the way down to Fern Hole Creek with our cadence matching the rhythm of water over rock and pound our pedals again uphill to the slag heaps throughout the ridge alongside 9 Mile Run the place we’d cease on the prime for the ultimate descent. Blackness. Glints of sunshine on the Monongahela. Culm piles of outdated metal beams and concrete. My first style of post-industrial wilderness. There was a second when slag ended and river started, an edge, a crumble proper earlier than wheels took the ledge and rolled you over the slick slag and Oh! God! These blurring lights and your physique bracing and you’re falling and gravity consumes you and you can’t simply exist right here, no, you need to stability and bury the bike between your legs and contact the brake whenever you really feel your self lurching over your middle and the entrance wheel turning relentlessly in direction of the horizontal aircraft turns into a mantra that leads you to wherever this terrain is taking you and by some means you easily make the angle the place vertical meets flat and also you’re parallel to the bottom once more, born right into a slowing momentum, after which there’s a beer on the lips, a cigarette between fingers, and a lot night time, a lot edge, a lot pleasure, and you’re consumed by the second and consumed by the camaraderie and consumed by this lovely place.
Cowl Picture: Picture courtesy of Wiki Commons
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