Life Is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist by Bruce Weber

Author:Bruce Weber [Weber, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2014-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Eastern North Dakota isn’t what I expected. Its long stretches of flat plains are interrupted by rolling hills and, partly because of a brutal flood season earlier this summer, decorated by a network of ponds and lakes that adds some striking blues and greens to the scenery spectrum. It’s the kind of terrain that, with a tailwind, makes you feel as if you owned the world and could gobble up miles without strain. The wind has been peculiar this week, however, some variation on southerly and easterly—an unusual condition I blame on the distant disruption of Hurricane Irene on the East Coast—so instead of riding the wind, I’ve been negotiating it. I kept calculating in my head: “If I’m going twelve miles per hour in a crosswind, I’d be going sixteen or seventeen with a tailwind.”

And “If this wind were behind me, I’d be ten miles down the road already” and “If I’d passed through here on another day, I’d be having much more fun.”

The floods unleashed by Irene, by the way, were spoken of with grave sympathy for Northeasterners by every North Dakotan I met. The waters that leveled farmers’ fields here in June and July are still receding, and as I headed north from I-94, through a countryside where small lakes that once were meadows now exist between larger lakes, I waded through a couple of stretches of road that were still underwater. Ducks swam within inches of the pavement and skittered fearfully away from me along the water’s surface as I approached. Frogs hopped out of my path. It was exciting, actually.

And that’s also the point of perseverance. As any cyclist knows, you keep pedaling because you don’t know what’s next. Uncertainty is not a hindrance but a spur, so you pedal toward it. Conditions change often. Things can get worse, yes, but just as often they get better. A pitted road gives way to a newly repaved one. At the top of the seemingly endless hill is a break in the sky and a perfectly articulated rainbow. Unexpectedly, the wind shifts, or the rain stops, or a herd of dark, handsome cattle comes into view grazing amid a field of dandelions, or a flock of geese settles with noisy grace on a flat pond that perhaps didn’t exist a week ago.

There are degrees of risk and reward, of course, but this is how you have adventures.

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