Night Ride

AT THE TOP OF THE RISE he waits for the signal from the bottom, and when he hears GO! he lets off the brake and pushes the pedals. It’s not a big chainwheel he’s got, so his feet are spinning at top speed in about three seconds—but by then he’s already flying.

Last weekend he flashed past the dip at the bottom and got twenty feet up the other side before he had to stand out of the saddle. You had to stand when you climbed because it gave your legs more power.

This time he’s going to hit the uphill with great strength, pump right up it, even the steep part, and then take the curve at the top without stopping, all the way behind the trees where no one can see him.

GO GO GO GO the words whip past his ear and make him grin, sun and shadows strobing in his eyes, and then he’s ten feet up the shallow grade, twenty, thirty, the bike slowing so soon on the steep part and he’s up out of the saddle, fists clamped around the rubberized grips, King of the Mountains, polka-dot jersey. He chants:

I-must-con-cen-trate.

I-must-con-cen-trate.

I-must-con-cen-trate.

GO GO GO GO! behind him. YOU CAN DO IT YOU CAN DO IT CLIMB LITTLE MAN CLIMB CLIMB CLIMB CLIMB!

Bobby is six.

His daddy’s cheering for him. He climbs, climbs, climbs, conquers the little part where it’s steepest and you have to push your legs hard instead of just riding your bike, and then he’s out of sight where Daddy can’t see him, which is a great joke.

Walking up the paved pathway toward him is an old man.

“Hey, Bobby,” the old man says. “Remember me?”

Bobby’s still looking at him when he hears his daddy’s bike come rolling up behind him.

“Dad,” his daddy says.

“Bob-by!” says his grandpa to his daddy.

Why

THE TWEET WAS aimed at another writer/cyclist and me:

It was sent by a third writer (and former cyclist), and was meant affectionately. And it didn’t bother me—but what did bother me is that I’ve never been able to put my finger on why. Why? Why brevets? Why distance? It’s been two years since my SR series (a 200K, 300K, 400K, and 600K in one calendar year), but why was that so meaningful—and why is it still?

Because you think you can outrace death. No, that’s not it. That’s dumb. That’s a line I heard on HOUSE.

On a bike podcast recently, Grant Peterson was discussing the appeal of gritty, Rapha-advertising-type “epic rides” to middle-aged men, and he hypothesized that it had something to do with regaining a feeling of athleticism lost since youth.

I had no athleticism in youth.

By my standards, I still have none. I’m not trim at this moment, I’m not ripped. I’m of decent build for a man who designs books, tall, with better-than-okay legs and butt, but essentially usual above the belt. I’m not someone you look at covertly because of how beautiful I am. At this writing, I weigh 210. I should weigh 195. That means I should weigh 190. And while I do technically have abs, they do nothing besides facilitate the movement of my torso between pelvis and ribcage, and are entirely subcutaneous.

When I said recently, to a 1200K veteran I was about to ride a 200K with, that a 200K isn’t that impressive, he corrected me, pointing out that “Most of the population thinks we’re crazy for what we do.”

This is true. But, I said, “That’s because they don’t know a 200K is mostly just about being smart, and managing your nutrition and hydration.”

I could also have said, “And because there’s really no reason anyone should do this stuff in the first place.”

ALL THIS TIME randonneuring—my first brevet was April 11, 2009—I haven’t understood why. During that time, I’ve also heard, “A bike racer is chasing something. An endurance athlete is running away from something.”

I tried that one on. It was cut wrong too.

Tonight I was thinking about Grant Peterson’s take on it, his theory about regained power, when I understood:

I haven’t regained my power. I’ve found it.

It’s going to leave me when I die. It’s going to diminish as middle age tightens its chokehold, or evaporate with my next MS exacerbation. But I found it.

It’s mine.

NOT ALL OF it—no one gets to find all of their power. It’s all potential. We were all children, and children have nothing but. And then large chunks of what the world doesn’t ruin, we ruin ourselves. I’m blogging right now instead of writing a page. I’m on Twitter instead of knocking out my paying work faster and using the resulting 20 minutes to create another few notes of music. The short films stopped when the recession hit, the Wall Street investors for the feature vanished, and I had infant twins and debt and was tired. (God, was I tired.) There may be half an inch of scotch later, for bliss and anesthetic.

So—partly I do it. Partly the world does it. Nobody gets to transform potential into kinetic without loss, and sometimes the cost is greater than the result, or the result is not viable, or the work that doesn’t even get you to where you can do more work is just too, too, too effing hard.

So it slips away. The power, the potential, all of it, as liquid as time.

This one’s mine, this riding a bike far and getting there by a certain time, and doing the hill that gets you to the next hill that gets you to the next hill. In some ways it’s an easier power to capture than those others, and real hills are less abusive than allegorical ones; in some ways it’s harder. It’s certainly simpler. But I am this, now, and when I reach in to see what I am, my knuckles hit something solid.

RANDONNEUR IS A lifetime title. You do it once, finish a single 200K, and you can keep calling yourself that for as long as your self-respect lets you. Novelist is like that, too. You did it. They didn’t.

No point running from death. When that window closes, it’s all a matter of how you filled the frame.

 

 

 

 

My bicycle confession

1. I’D LIKE TO formally apologize to people I’ve scared inadvertently on the bike path. I saw you for quite a while before you saw me, and adjusted my line to swing wide around you, but I could tell it startled you.



2. I’D ALSO LIKE to apologize to the two I scared intentionally. One was on the bike path in Venice, California about fifteen years ago. You were walking next to your girlfriend and I thought you were aggressively taking up the entire lane, plus part of the opposing lane, so I blew past you close enough to lightly clip the edge of your arm with mine. I take full responsibility.

    

   The other was on the West Side Greenway in New York City, about four years ago. You meandered straight across the path from the street without even glancing to look at oncoming traffic. I zipped by close enough that you probably felt some wind, and I heard you shriek behind me. My thought was to keep you from doing that again, because the greenway is chockablock with people on bikes who aren’t skilled or alert enough to save you from your lunkishness, and I don’t want you hurt.

    

   I concede that I was also annoyed with you.



3. I CONFESS THAT Monday evenings have become my favorite time of the week, because first I walk from SoHo to Chinatown for banh mi and Vietnamese coffee, which I think is just iced Cafe du Monde with condensed milk, and then I walk back to SoHo for a bike repair class. Walking through the dark and neon of Chinatown has always made me feel like I’m in Blade Runner, even back before I had children and stopped remembering what it’s like to be out in a big city at night. This is as close to giddiness as I get.



4. I ADMIT WITHOUT the basic human decency of guilt that I have spent money on bike tools and a repair stand, including both sizes of Park Tool torque wrench, two tubs of Phil Wood Hand Cleaner, and a honking 32-oz jug of ProLink chain lube. It grieves me that I feel no regret for this, and if paroled, will do it again. Further, I admit to a glow of satisfaction upon taking a bike off the stand in better shape than when I put it up there, and to liking the image of myself with a spoke wrench and a beer.



5. IT IS TRUE that I only noticed the wide-open quick-releases on both brakes once I was descending Henshaw St. at considerable speed, and I aver that I may not have effected as decisive a Flintstone stop if my children hadn’t been watching from the bottom. I additionally stipulate that I have stood on a bank of the St. Lawrence River in the sub-freezing dark, straddling the frame of a hybrid bicycle, eating the best apple of my life, and that the bridges upon which you hop little islands back into Montréal, to catch your train home, are sometimes locked when you didn’t expect it.



6. I CONFESS THAT I do not know why even though my boys have identical bikes, one keeps dropping its chain.



7. I VERY MUCH regret that my actions have caused smudges on the walls in the bike area; that I have betrayed the goodwill of rugs that trusted me; that I will, at some point, kick a snapping dog; and that I hope it’s a solid kick.



8. I SWEAR THAT I have never felt as exhilarated as on two downhills, both mountain descents, both firsts. Exhilaration one: on a practice brevet before my first 200K, a single downhill spanning a longer distance than could fit into the boxy little dresser drawer of Manhattan. Exhilaration two: 49MPH on what I’d find out, a year or two later, is the same road the boys and I now take to our second-favorite campsite in the summer.



9. I SHAMEFULLY CONFIRM an excited “Boys! C’mere! C’mere!” when I saw a Calfee leaning against the wall at Darling Coffee, but plead nolo contendre to the charge that I have received a cheap frame and build kit for my first home bike assembly. I furthermore refuse to respond to any and all questions regarding dining room and repair stand, relative sizes of.



10. I ADMIT TO thinking poorly of:
    • Pathetic slugs slower than me
    • Arrogant showoffs faster than me



11. BUT ALSO TO thinking well of:
    • Kids faking out traffic and practicing BMX tricks under the GW overpass
    • Carcinomic septuagenarian, shirtless on ten-speed
    • Pasty pudgy guy, hybrid, motorcycle helmet
    • Wiry older woman who knew good hills in Edgewater
    • Ethiopian lady on mountain bike in Van Cortlandt Park
    • Local kids with tall bikes
    • Danny McAskill
    • These women
    • Guy who tossed me an inner tube when, for some reason, I didn’t have one, halfway back from Bear Mountain
    • Slender guy with a mullet I followed uptown when I couldn’t see the road because of my messed-up glasses and a bad storm, but could see his blinky



12. I CONFESS THAT I saw the diagonal expansion joint coming before my kid got to it on his 20″, and didn’t yell anything because I thought startling him would be worse than letting his natural reflexes handle it. I was wrong. That was one bad 15MPH wipeout and neck-twisting crash into metal railing. For this, Daddy is truly sorry.

     

    Daddy also thinks not wearing a helmet in urban environments is generally not the brightest choice, having seen where aforementioned child’s head went, and admits both to knowing who that statement will annoy and to thinking their logic is mostly confirmation bias; and moreover regrets both his lack of interest in fighting about it in the comments and the likelihood that he will anyway.



13. I ADMIT TO resolving the dilemma of where to look when an attractive woman zooms by on a nice bike by staring, as though riveted, at absolutely no particular component of the bike whatsoever, with great interest, until the crisis has passed.



14. I CONFIRM THAT I once hung by one arm from the base of a metal post near the very top of the hill above the Little Red Lighthouse, with my bike downhill from my prone body, gripped by my other fist, because I tried to ride up when the path was iced over, and I am honor-bound to tell two additional truths: I saw the neck of the guy in the little kiosk at the bottom swivel 180° as he stared after me on my way up the first rise, and I will probably try again.



15. I HAVE CLIMBED and descended mountains, hit potholes, and lost traction on the metal lips of driveways in downpours. I have pretended to knowledge I did not have, offered advice that turned out to be wrong, and given just the perfect fact at the perfect time. I have ridden the beaches of two coasts and glided alongside pelicans.



16. I HEREBY CONFIRM that the consequences of my actions have brought enhanced harmony to my family; increased productivity and tolerance of bureaucracy to my employers; and exhilaration, reduced heart rate, and damn shapely calves to myself; and I cannot, in good conscience, swear that, given the chance, I would not repeat any and all of them until my final moments on Earth, except for the one with my kid wiping out.



17. AND THAT I love the smell of Proofide, and finally taking off night gear at dawn on a rural road between misty pastures, and that I will always cherish towing my two-year-olds to preschool, riding with my six-year-olds to PS 178, and cheering crazily for my seven-year-olds when they finished 16-mile rides or climbed like champions. FURTHER, DEPONENT SAYETH NOT.

 

 



 

 

Three questions

Cross-posted at the RIDE blog.

IT DIDN’T OCCUR to me, when I decided to use this “Three Questions” game to say what I liked about each story, or why I’d chosen it, that I would eventually come to my own. Instead of telling you how great it is, I’ll tell you something I learned.

The first RIDE anthology (mumble mumble purchase mumble) was my first stab at being an editor and publisher. One of my mistakes was in sending Advance Reading Copies to reviewers when everything was almost perfect—except for my own story, a novelette called “Night Ride.” The cover did say UNCORRECTED PROOFS, after all, which people would know meant there was still some hammering and sawing going on, and I was thinking of the book as a team effort, which implied there was a team for me to take one for. People were trusting me, and if tasks had to fall undone before the ARCs had to go, it was only fair if most of them fell into the bucket with my own name on it. So I sent the ARCs out.

And then I minded.

Not as much, though, as I’d have minded being that guy who sends a string of “Wait, I uploaded a new version!” emails.. So I stuck Don’t ship the ARC before your story is as polished as all the other ones in the “lessons learned for next time” column, along with Don’t publish the ebook and the print book at different times and Don’t miss the holiday sales window.

Those last two…well, RIDE 3, I’ll do better. But “The Rambler, Part 1″ was nice and shiny before the first review copies of RIDE 2 went out. And—yeah, it’s a poem. It rhymes. I was reading Chaucer in the tub on my iPad, and I saw that he was heavy on the plot and light on the closely observed moment, and I went I can do that! I can not observe stuff!

…up through Harlem, onto Broadway; picking
out his silhouette, they weave to follow,
sticking tight past Jimmy Jazz, Apollo,
Duane Reade, Rite Aid, Popeye’s Chicken,
toward the river, tires quicken
toward the bridge that goes to Jersey.
If he’s caught—there’ll be no mercy.

Barb Goffman (“Ulterior Motives”)

asks three questions of

Keith Snyder (“The Rambler, Part 1″)

Barb: In “The Rambler, Part I,” your rider is using his bike as a means of escape, literally. Have you ever raced away from someone on a bike, trying to avoid them?

Keith: I like to do these things called brevets, which are long-distance rides with proscribed routes and time limits. I’m also the CEO and OGH (Only Guy Here) of a book design company that grew from a fledgling business that sucked up all my time in 2011 to a big workload that sucked up all my time in 2012. So my last ride that went all night was in 2010.

Whaddayagonnado—I been busy.

But in 2010, I was severely underemployed and emotionally shredded, so I was riding longer distances. One was a 400K that went through the Pine Barrens at night.

The overnight portion of a brevet can be physically and emotionally difficult; you’re fatigued, it may have been a while since your last real food, you’ve had several imaginary but not entirely silent confrontations with the most obtuse people of your acquaintance, and your metabolic thermostat has sprung its coil. You can’t remember why you thought this was a good idea, your car is fifty miles away, and there’s no train and zero bars on your phone.

Brevet routes tend to be designed to put you on smaller highways and mountain roads as much as possible, both to reduce the number of cars you’ll encounter and because stoplights bleed your average speed more than you’d think. (Well, stopping at them does, anyway.) So depending on route, season, weather, and velocity—I’m slow—you can end up in unlit desolation for long stretches of time, able to see only as far as your headlight beam, utterly blind to the sides and rear. 4am isn’t just the best time for an army to attack, because the other army is at its worst; it’s also when a dirty, discouraged randonneur (or frozen, or drenched; we do this in all weather) can’t see the point of this anymore.

The Pine Barrens are a forest shot through with cranberry bogs. There are no streetlights because there is almost no night traffic, and there are no stars except those directly overhead, because the pine trees snuff them out in all directions. On this night there was no moon, either, and an overcoat of clouds over whatever stars had escaped the pine trees. I could see the highway in front of me well enough to think every stretching shadow was a pothole, but the portion of beam higher than the road didn’t do anything but collude with every reflective highway sign to blow out my vision and hint at an ever-moving wedge of distant black foliage.

But you can hear things in the cranberry bogs.

I don’t know species, so I classify them all by size. That soft crackling and crunching, very soft, everywhere, is the the local insect biomass stumbling over thousands of tiny twigs, falling off leaves, dropping into ponds. Briefer, more directional little snaps and dull creaks are your beefier bugs and possible birds. Next larger: definite birds—woodpeckers, the occasional confused rooster—and continuing up the size scale are your random small mammals, trotting coyote, bored, leaping deer, the isolated shapeless thing skulking across the highway.

And to my left, the deep, leathery flap of something huge in the air, rising off a dirty water surface. There’s a creek, or a bog, or a flooded ditch off the highway there, because the rising thing’s feet drag on liquid as its wings beat. It gains altitude ponderously, amassing momentum, its hot weight coming even with me, then rising above eye level—and my panic has flooded me with so much strength, I can barely get my fumbling fingers on the shifters.

Once identifiable as little rocks, gravel has become dim streaks beneath my pedals. I’m maintaining barely enough self-mastery to not flub a shift and grind my non-precision budget drivetrain. Hair surges on my neck and forearms—the luxurious wingbeat is closer, the dense black body gliding in the humid black air; my butt’s bouncing because I just outran my gearing. The highway floats ahead in a few dozen feet of bulbous gray light. A few inches behind my saddle, the floating glow of a deep red coal—the brightest taillight on the Internet—is beacon and rangefinder for anything that wants to strip my nerves from my meat.

There’s a deep bovine growl three feet from my ear, a hot snort on my cheek. I’ve just whimpered and my legs are spinning faster than the gears can accept, and I don’t know what gear I’m in, so I shove a shift lever in my blind panic, and there’s a cling! and a thrrrrrip!; my pedaling legs flail against nothing, and I understand that the chain has come off.

A single blast of warm air into my face and through my helmet vents, and thick leather wings and a whip tail clip the topmost antumbra of my headlight, as I grab my handlebars and fight to keep from crashing; I stutter-step with one foot a few times because I can’t remember how to unclip the other one and I stand alone shaking, the flashbulb impression of a massive bat ray still fading in my retinas, and up in the depth of night, something smashes the tops of the invisible pines.

Barb: Is there anywhere in the world you would like to explore on a bicycle but haven’t been able to? If so, where and why? And what’s holding you back?

Keith: There aren’t that many places I wouldn’t like to. In some alternate universe, I have no family and one of these. In that same universe, its bushings never fail, and my witty, self-deprecating accounts of adventures through a smorgasbord of terrains and cultures are the most fascinating things that happen near the onion dip at parties of A-list literati; but this never happens. So let’s just keep things as they are.

Barb: What’s your most embarrassing or funny biking story?

Keith: FCO (Failure to Clip Out) in front of Princess Grace of Monaco. She pretended not to see, but we both knew.

LIKE YOU’VE NEVER read Chaucer in the tub on your iPad.

A Saturday 200K Brevet — Part 3½

Part 3½
(half-installment—more to come)

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.

---

 

ANOTHER WORD WE use is randonnée.
It’s basically the same thing as “brevet,”
a self-supported ride over long distance,
which means we can’t get personal assistance
except at checkpoints, which we call controles.
In France, they use the circumflex: contrôles.
Americans delete the e: controls.
I guess in 1337 it would be spelled <0И72Ω135,
which is a forcéd rhyme, but irregardless:

Don’t ever ride away from controles cardless

Announcing the authors of RIDE 2!

…which, unless I think of an even more splendiferous title, will be called

From almost nothing

BECAUSE I BOUGHT a Nook Color a month ago, it was lying on the bed.

Because it was lying on the bed, a child picked it up and pushed some buttons.

Because he pushed some buttons, he saw a single-player chess app.

Because they didn’t get bored taking turns with the single-player chess app, I bought them a chess set and a chess book.

Because they requested it, they now get a section from the chess book and a game every night at bedtime, instead of a story.

WE RIDE BIKES.

Because we ride bikes, we get up to Isham for the Inwood greenmarket most Saturdays. It’s .6 miles. We wouldn’t walk it, and the subway or bus would cost $9.

Because the boys have a new travel chess set I got them so they could play on the bus after swim class, they brought it today and set it up where kids run around.

They explained the game to a new opponent and attracted an audience of kibitzers.

BECAUSE THEY’RE SO fixated on chess, and because we ride bikes to the Inwood greenmarket, and because bikes engage you with your surroundings instead of isolating you from them, they zeroed in on two men playing chess while we were riding past on Seaman.

CHESS! CHESS! CHESS! CAN WE PLAY!?

Because Inwood has an active Twitter population, I knew one of the players by reputation.

“You can’t play,” I said, “but you can watch.”

“They can play!” offered the man I’d recognized.

So we braked and walked our bikes over.

The men welcomed them, talked to them, challenged them, and taught them the game of Pawns.

They, in turn, cracked one of the men up when I said, “Hey guys, tell him our name for en passant,” and the boys yelled in unison, WHACK ’IM WHILE HE’S RUNNING!

(“I’m running, I’m running—WHACK!” the man riffed, chuckling.)

After two games of Pawns, the boys played chess, with much better kibitzing than they’d had at the greenmarket, and I learned that Sundays, they set up multiple tables for whoever wants to play and actively help kids with the game. I also learned the man I was talking to had ditched his cigarette as the boys came up. They don’t want to teach that. Just chess.

Because it was all so cool, I forgot to take pictures.

Then because the whiny hungry crabbies had arrived, we said thank-you and rode home.

We ride bikes.

I got a Nook Color.

Therefore life has gone in a completely unforeseeable way.

Children’s chess, Sundays 10am–3pm, Seaman and 207. All are welcome.

A Saturday bike video

My Father’s Day present was a gift certificate from Tread. I got a GoPro camera.

We tried it out this weekend.

A maturing relationship with Pyrex

WE HAVE THIS lousy Pyrex saucepan.

It has three problems. The two most obvious are the bileous mulberry hue it casts on food and its passive-aggressiveness in pouring. But those are just physical things. If I loved it, I could get past them; no pan is perfect. But there’s something more subtle, which I find much harder to deal with:

It doesn’t show its emotions.

WE ALREADY KNOW how hard it is to know what’s going on inside other people. We have slogans for it: Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides; You never know what someone else is going through; Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. But it’s something we don’t always think of when we relate to cookware. For the most part I’m glad all that heat and conflict stays inside the pot—but I’ve been thinking how impossible it is for a Pyrex saucepan to understand that all anyone else can get a grip on is its handle.

Which, regardless of maelstrom or meltdown in the pan, remains at room temperature at all times.

So is the pot hot, or is it cold?

Hot, says the pot. You just don’t know.

Cold, says anybody who holds the pot. That’s right, I don’t.

ANOTHER THING ABOUT this saucepan is that—violently and with very little warning, as though it suppresses and suppresses and suppresses and saves up and saves up and just can’t anymore! and FOOM!—the seething stuff boils over, unexpectedly, while it’s over a LOW FLAME, if you can believe it, and then if you grab the burner and turn it down, or yank the pot off the stove, it just KEEPS GOING, eructations of oatmeal all over the stove and the floor, which it does not apologize for and does not volunteer to clean up.

See, says the pot? Hot. Passionate, even.

I HOVER WHEN my kids use it, waiting for the moment when it takes a shot at their confidence. You did everything right, I told one of my boys today after I grabbed it off the burner while he was whisking. It’s not you, sweetheart; it’s the lousy pot. You didn’t do anything wrong. This pot—you just shouldn’t trust it. It’s just a bad pot. You can’t tell what’s going on with it until it’s too late.

Yanking it off the burner doesn’t work. Giving it a little more care and attention doesn’t work. Lowering the heat doesn’t work. By the time it gets to the point where you can see what’s about to happen, it’s sucked up so much energy that a second later, it’s already erupting. You can’t stop it. You can’t soothe it. You just have to wait until it’s done spewing.

What did you expect? says the pot.

Well by now, I expect that.

LIFE GETS MUCH simpler when you accept your cookware for what it really is, and let go of what you wish it was. Especially when it keeps showing you. Especially when your kids are getting old enough that they’re starting to learn to judge temperature themselves, and you don’t want to confuse them.

Much simpler, that is, unless you’re the cookware.

In which case your life’s going to get harder as soon as the economy improves a little more.

Unexpectedly is the only way it ever happens

Today, even though I really couldn’t, I said yes when asked if I could spare an hour for the boys, and when they called me out to the dining room, their bikes were ready, they had their helmets on, my bike was by the door with sandwiches in the pannier, and the hour was to be spent riding down to the Little Red Lighthouse, throwing pebbles in the Hudson River, eating our sandwiches, and riding home.

It was their idea, I was told.

The descent from next to the Henry Hudson Parkway down to the Little Red Lighthouse—same descent, if you read it, that I used in my story in RIDE—is really two descents. This is more obvious if you’re climbing them, but it’s a steep little switchback, and then a straight downhill, and then it flattens and there’s a sharp curve through a short tunnel, over a short planked bridge, and down again, which shoots you straight past the tennis courts.

Last year my smaller boy wiped out on the flat, and boy, did he wipe out. I carried him and his bike down to the bottom, with blood running down his fingers and me doing a barely acceptable job of controlling my anger while he shrieked Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! This is bad! This is bad! I’d contributed to his injury by trying to micro-manage his bike handling, so the anger was really shame.

But now it was 70° and maybe a little muggy, but also green and gray and pretty. There weren’t that many other bikes, and he was chattering away as we rolled up the shallow half-mile before the bollard that marks where the switchback drops. We were discussing the complexions of the two descents. He asked if I remembered when he wiped out. I put some energy into not sounding like I was wincing and said it wasn’t the hill that made him wipe out, it was that he was going too fast and not paying attention, and then he got scared and froze up and shimmied the bike, and that’s what put it down. But don’t forget, I said. This year, you have hand brakes. So you can feather your speed, trim your speed, if it’s too fast, you can slow it down. You could do the whole hill like— (I held my hand at an angle and made it descend like a funicular for snails.)

His brother, as usual, was fifty feet ahead. Even with seven-year-olds, I’m having conversations at the back of the pack.

DON’T PASS THE BOLLARD! I yelled.

He stopped immediately and looked back at us. So often, lately, when I’m trying to give him freedom, he thinks I’m reining him in.

***

Every time we get to the switchback, I make them dismount and put their bikes off the path and walk twenty feet down with me, where I point at various things about the personality of the first descent. See this part I’m standing on, right here? This spot is the steepest part. Now look, it hooks right here, but then all the way down to there? That’s straight. See how it’s straight? You can go fast down it, but don’t still be going fast when you get to the bottom, because see it turns there? So if you’re still going fast there, you’ll wipe out on the dirt.

They both chose to walk the first 40′ or so. They remounted while there was still a good kid-strength downhill grade and picked up speed through the short tunnel and over the wooden bridge. The chatterer coasted right past his wipeout spot. I saw the top of his brother’s red helmet disappear down the second descent as we were still traversing the flat.

***

And so the shameful wipeout was erased.

***

We threw pebbles in the river for a while. There’s no sand there, just big slabs of rock that you can walk on.

***

While we were eating sandwiches another hundred yards down the greenway, where we ended up after the bathroom, I said tell you what. The day you climb the first part? From where the lighthouse is, up to the wooden bridge? (And here there was another three minutes of getting their attention and repeating myself, which I’ll spare you.) The day you climb all the way to the wooden bridge, I’ll buy you whatever ice cream you want. If you climb it, you can choose the ice cream. If you do it, you can choose the ice cream. If two boys do it? Two kinds of ice cream.

If we can’t do it, do we still get the ice cream?

Nope.

We ate our sandwiches. They explained their secret trick, their plan for climbing the hill, which was to go really fast and then they’d just be up it. I explained how that wouldn’t work on this hill. It’s too long, too steep, and I really don’t even know if you guys can do it. (And there was another fifteen minutes of dickering over what needed to be eaten, why it was impossible to eat that, and the exact terms of the trade agreement governing the distribution of GoGurt, which I’ll spare you.) Then the wrappers and napkins got packed back in my pannier, and back-of-pack boy got on his bike and pedaled for the lighthouse, and his brother marched up to me, flexed like Hulk Hogan, and shouted MUST—CLIMB—HILL! and grabbed his bike.

***

When, in the course of your parenting adventure, you arrive at a juncture that requires you to either yell your guts out, cheerleading for your kid who’s climbing a hill that grownups—fit ones—consider That point where I turn around and go back downtown, or get your phone out and take pictures? Just remember I said this and you’ll be fine: To hell with the phone. It’s not an option. Cheer for that little human like it’s the first time in his entire life he’ll have achieved anything this big.

Because for two little humans, it was.

***

“DADDY! WHY DIDN’T WE GET ICE CREAM!”

We’d just dismounted after coasting down that half-mile. There were still concrete steps and a block of sidewalk to go.

“Did you see any ice cream stores on our way down the greenway?”

***

“Can I have some more ice cream, please?”

“No, you can’t have…yeah, all right. You earned it.”

***

Tonight was shampoo night during bathtime, one of my favorite things.

I’m very tired. I just wanted to get this all down, before things that matter less pressed in more, and I didn’t.