The gendered aspects of bike maintenance

"I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can't get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood."

--Susan B. Anthony, 1896

Last night, in one last effort to unpack our belongings before we fell into bed in a mangled heap, Chuan and I put together our bikes. Or, rather, he put the bikes together and I watched, to learn how it is done, so that I can stop relying on him, in typical gendered fashion, to keep our bikes in repair and the toolbox in order.

I have always enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together again, for those simple acts of destruction and creation teach us so much about the origin of common things. This must be part of what motivates my cooking and knitting: a desire to understand how things are made, their forms and purposes. Yet lately I am conscious that these activities, in our small household, are occurring in stereotypical fashion: while I engross myself in cookbooks and knitting magazines, my husband researches the latest model computer and plans new ways to put our bookshelves together. Before we were married, before I left home, and with no brothers in the way, I also did these things. But marriage has brought with it the convenience of specialization, and despite our best efforts at equal partnership, we too often follow the patterns set out for us: I nurture, he solves; I create, he fixes.

I know what is going on here. There are simply too many external and internal motivators (social learning theory, anyone?) that push me to be domestic and him to be analytic, so that to deviate from those roles requires a bit of effort on both of our parts, such as last night, when I found myself staring through my bike's carbon fork and trying to determine whether or not the front wheel was on straight. Was this really me? This woman who is learning to not only ride, but repair and maintain, her bike?

Yes, this is me, and I find that, once I get started, there is no limit to the things that I can take pleasure in, whether they fall under a masculine or feminine rubric. I want to ride because I want to go fast, breathe hard, get dirty and get lost. I want to ride because my body feels good when I'm above the wheels, going hard, going fast, and because riding reminds me of a time when athletics were about keeping up with the boys and not looking good for the boys. I want to get out on the loop around Central Park and surprise a few of those old men in tights, show them that I can keep up with the best of them, even if only for half a lap. I want to ride today in this body, feminine and soft and speedy all at once, and just be me.

But first, I have to build my bike.

Forty-four miles to Nyack and back

It was threatened to rain on Sunday, despite the sunny skies, and when I left our apartment at 2:30 that afternoon I crossed my fingers and hoped that it wouldn't rain, because that would spoil my plans to do a long bike ride.

What's long to me probably isn't long to most road cyclists -- like two of our friends who came over for dinner on Friday, and impressed us with their stories of weekend century rides with the New York Cycling Club -- but forty-four miles is the furthest that I've gone on my bike this year, and maybe in my entire life! I'm a recent convert to road cycling, and now that I have a decent bike, I am trying to make up for lost time.

Last spring I rode my old Bianchi hybrid to and from my classes at Columbia, taking the greenway down Riverside Park from Washington Heights to Morningside every day. After spending the winter cooped up in our small apartment, I felt like I was coming home again through my rides, falling back into the rhythm of regular physical exertion against the sweep of the Hudson. This spring has felt somewhat similar, in that I cannot get enough of sweating and breathing and being out of doors as much as possible, but this time around I have the proper equipment to really get to know the roads: a Fuji Roubaix RC road bike, circa 2006.

[I'll tell the story of how I got my bike on another occasion; it's a good story and a happy one -- which is what this blog is supposed to be about (happiness, avid and hungry happiness) -- but it can wait. I'm still too excited about the fact that my legs and little bit of carbon can take me 44 miles in a single afternoon, to want to spend time discussing the techie details of my bike!]

On Sunday I rode from Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan, to the river town of Nyack, New York, taking highways and parkways and neighborhood streets, byways and passways -- a route with just enough variety to keep me interested. In the mornings I usually only have time to do the first part of the route before work, crossing the George Washington Bridge and going down River Road through the Palisades, so whenever I have more time and can go further, it feels like a small adventure. On Sunday it felt like even more of a stretch because I went alone (sans the husband/ride partner), and the roads were almost bare of cyclists by the time I got out of the apartment in the mid-afternoon, so I didn't feel as if I were crossing the same old paths that all the Manhattan cyclists enjoy. The road was mine, and I felt happy just moving and breathing, breathing and moving, settling into the rhythm and speed (yes -- speed!) of my wheels.

What more is there to write about cycling, about my ride on Sunday (or my ride this morning, for that matter)? I've trolled the Interweb for information about road biking, hoping to improve my rides through tricks or training tips, but the minutiae of rpms and "fuel" and power meters leaves me a bit cold, I must say. I've decided that I'd rather ride than read about riding, at least until someone can write about what it means to be free on the bike, what it's like to be a woman out on those roads, sharing space with the cars and the motorcycles, the male cyclists in their trim gear, and the hawks and the thimbleberries. And if no one is writing about these things, then I'll put myself to work.

Any readers?

~Ai Lu

On rising early

I heard once, perhaps in a sermon in the church where I grew up, that the poet Mary Oliver always rose early, almost ridiculously early, in order to dedicate the first two hours of her day to her writing.

I like the idea of making the first hours of the day my own, when the rest of them are so often occupied by work and school, followed by the evening rush of dinner, conversation, and tidying-up. And these spring dawns are so luxuriously long; I feel as if I have hours of daylight before I have to even think about going to the office.

In the last few weeks, as the semester draws to an end and work becomes more unbearable than usual, I have taken Oliver's advice and began waking up early, for myself, to go outside and see the city and the river and all of the green trees and flowering bushes that I waited all winter for. That way, when I go into work at 8:00am, I know that I've already had my day, the day that is full of whimsical beauty and unexpected encounters, like the coyote or lynx or whatever large, bounding animal it was that crossed my path when I was riding my bike down River Road two mornings ago. It leaped up from the river, not twenty feet in front of me, and scurried up into the wooded hillside. I saw a groundhog that morning, too, and can also report that the wild phlox and white dogwoods are in bloom on the Jersey side of the Hudson.

All of this becomes mine, in the slanted light of early morning, and I am grateful.