A Boy and His Bicycle

I’m off for the London Book Fairs and then a while in Ireland, and I don’t know if I’ll be blogging while on vacation unless the spirit moves me. So here are 7500 words to keep you busy. It’s the Anual Report for the Galen Fund, which is published each year as a booklet, with annual report and then a story of some kind or other to reward you for reading the report. This year it was about a boy and his bicycle. But first you have to read the Annual Report.

Galen Fund ANNUAL REPORT for 2025

Dear Friends:

After 33 years we’ve retired from gun violence prevention advocacy, but the Galen Fund, our 501(c)(3) nonprofit fund for the support of survivors of gun violence, keeps chugging along. In 2025 we made donations to Rockport High theater programs, the Mass Coalition, the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, Lanes Coven, True Vine Church, MARS, Live for Liv, Rocky Neck Cultural Center, Legacy Lives On, Stop Handgun Violence, Grassroots4GVP, Sandy Hook Promise, Gloucester Education Fund, Sawyer Free Library, and the Roxbury Presbyterian Church Social Impact Center, with whom we’ve established a program for providing individual grants to survivors of gun violence in financial need.

As we do every year, we’re asking for your help in continuing to provide the services we’ve been providing for three decades now. Healthy communities are like antibodies to gun violence. That’s why we support cultural institutions as well as GVP advocacy groups and individual survivors. We hope you’ll join us in making 2026 a banner year for all concerned.

Now pull up a chair, pour yourself a cuppa, and enjoy this essay on the vagaries of growing old.

Love, Anne Marie and Gregor

(Tax deductible donations may be made to The Galen Gibson Scholarship Trust, 77 Langsford St. Gloucester, MA 01930. For digital donation go to goneboy.com)

And now… As promised…

THE BIRTHDAY RIDE

I

In the days of Covid, when people were dying all around me, I saw, finally, an opportunity to establish my superiority as a human being. All I had to do was not die. This scheme involved an intense round of physical activity centering on the bicycle a friend had given me. It was a beautiful thing, built of carbon fiber, black and sleek, that seemed to be moving forward even when standing still. That bike changed my life, but it didn’t happen all at once.

For years prior to my first experience on that fine machine, I’d enjoyed riding a regular old bicycle, of the sort normal people use. It was made of steel, sturdy and durable, and it weighed about 30 pounds. On sunny weekends in the summer I’d don flip-flops, cutoff shorts, and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt and go for a ride on the old pedal pusher, palm trees, parrots, and cocoanuts flapping behind me. Cycling brought a sense of freedom I hadn’t felt since I was twelve-years old, on my English bike as we called them then, winging down St. Charles Avenue in Lombard, Illinois, farther than I’d ever been on my own, out of the house and into my head. The world was mine. Decades later, cruising roads increasingly far from my home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, sun bright, air soft, I encountered that original, innocent joy.

Sometimes, during these weekend pedal-pushing excursions I’d see people I knew, zipping past on their high-tech road bikes. They’d recognize me and shout a quick hello, taking note of my enjoyment, which was not hard to miss. Occasionally they’d slow long enough to tell me how much more fun I’d have on a real bike, advice I invariably rejected with disdain. Even if I could have afforded such an extravagance, I was steadfast in my belief that an upgrade would ruin the fun of feeling like a kid again. Nor could I imagine myself in the fruity costumes those guys wore – tight black shorts and brightly colored shirts of miracle fabric, covered with advertising or wannabe team logos.

Although I had no interest in riding a road bike, I had been, since the late 1990s, a follower of the Tour de France, the biggest bicycle race in the world. Not because of my interest in the sport, but because we lived in an old clapboard house that required a lot of maintenance. Every summer during the month of July I’d take mornings off from my book business and work on painting the old girl. I never had sufficient time or energy to do the whole thing in one go, so I confined my efforts to a single side each year. I’d work away for half an hour after breakfast, then go back inside and cool off in air-conditioned comfort while watching 5 or 10 minutes of bicycle madness. Why the Tour de France? I dunno. I had no idea what I was looking at; I just knew that it reminded me vaguely of my own cycling activities, that I could watch it in an air-conditioned room, that it featured a race each day for three weeks, and that each race lasted the entire morning. Initially, it seemed a humorous event, a kid’s game contested by skinny men perched like mantises on skinnier bicycles. They had exotic, not-American names like Wout Poels, Vladimir Karpets, Christian Knees, Ion and Gorka Izagirre (a Basque brother act). And how about Djamolidine Abdoujaparov? Or the Russian team Katousha – God Bless you! Refreshed after a few minutes in front of the television, I’d go back out in the summer heat for another round of scraping and painting, then nip back in to see how Ludo Dierckxsens was doing, and so on until lunchtime, after which I’d shower and go back to my day job as a book dealer.

One afternoon in the autumn of 2017, my wife and I returned from our annual Canadian vacation to discover, in our living room, propped against a chair that could just as easily have been a Christmas tree, a real, honest-to-goodness carbon fiber road bike. Taped to the handlebar was a note from Mac, a buddy of more than 50 years, presenting me with this gorgeous thing as a gift from one dear friend to another. A gift, I understood immediately, rejection of which would be a mortal insult. Whereupon I took it out to the street and hopped aboard. The seat was too low, and my shoes kept slipping off those strange metal knobs where pedals should have been. I did not understand how to shift the gears and the lightness of the thing, half the weight of my old bike, confused me. But I could not deny the exhilarating, almost-flying feeling that first short ride produced.

Down to the bike shop next morning for a fitting, seat height being of critical importance. The helpful bike guy showed me how to work the brakes and gears. He decked me out in helmet, shoes, and sunglasses, and he added front and rear lights, and a teeny pack that fit behind the seat for spare inner tube, tire jacks, and emergency CO2 inflator. Lycra shorts and colorful all-weather jerseys were also on offer. I declined. As I was paying my bill he asked if there was any kind of grassy field near me? I told him yes, as a matter of fact, there was. Why do you ask? Because you’ll fall down a lot, he said, and it’s better to have something soft to land on.

Predictably, I spent much of the rest of the fall of 2017 falling down. My childhood bike handling skills, such as they were, gradually returned, but new ones were required, and they came slowly. The road bike rider wears special shoes that have metal nubs screwed into the bottoms of them. These clip into receiving slots mounted at the end of the crank, where the pedal on a regular bicycle would be. This male/female coupling insures the integrity of the link between foot and pedal crank, so that no energy in the pedaling stroke will be lost. A sharp twist of the foot releases the shoe, allowing the rider to dismount, or to momentarily stabilize the bike when, for whatever reason, a stop is required. I was feeling pretty good about my progress until one day, climbing a hill near my house, I ran out of power. The bike and I slowed and, the moment before we stopped, I unclipped my right foot and stuck it out to stabilize the situation. However, my center of gravity had by that time shifted to the left and my left foot was still stupidly, immovably clipped in. Oh, shit… What fun!

New England winter shut me down, but I was on the road again in the spring of 2018, pushing a little harder and going a little farther each month, rehearsing basic skills, such as clipping and unclipping either foot at intersections, safely (if not comfortably) navigating urban traffic, conquering local hills, even negotiating a gravel stretch along the aptly-named Pebble Beach. The road bike went faster – a lot faster in some places – than my old pedal pusher, and the potential for injury seemed correspondingly greater. So, no more drugs on my weekend Hawaiian shirt rides. I didn’t miss them a bit.

By the end of that first full season, the cumulative effect of my exertions began to show. My weight dropped from the 190s to the 180s. Rides of 15 miles were achievable; 20 or even 30 miles seemed within the realm of possibility. Encouraged, I went back to the bike shop and purchased a device that would allow me to ride indoors during winter months. This consisted of a stand that secured the bike on a roller connected to a computer that sent signals via Bluetooth to my cellphone, informing me of my heartrate, pedaling cadence, and power output. It could access pre-programmed workouts or allow me to create my own. I could even go on “rides” Bluetoothed by this gismo’s computer onto my home television screen. Gorgeous landscapes in exotic locations rolling past on video, while that very same computer controlled the resistance of the roller on which my bike’s rear wheel rested, thereby providing a simulation of hills being climbed. The guy at the bike shop, who explained all this to me, referred to the machine as a “smart trainer” and he was right about that, at least to the extent that it proved to be smarter than I was. After I got it home, I couldn’t figure out how to make the damned thing perform any of the tricks the bike guy had told me about. As a result of my unsmartness, I spent the winter pedaling away with no computer enhancement. No programmed workouts, no scenic simulated rides in foreign countries, just Netflix documentaries on the old flatscreen TV that I set up in front of my smart trainer, because sitting for hours on a bike on rollers in a basement in February can get pretty boring.

At this point it is necessary to introduce the theme that anchored the ecstatic symphony of my cycling activities. After that first visit to the bike shop, I called my friend Mac, told him what I’d done, and thanked him from the bottom of my heart for his gift of love. Then, as delicately as I could, I asked how he’d come by this prohibitively expensive, by my standards at least, bicycle? He told me it had been the property of a man in a nearby town who had tricked it out to his satisfaction but then, after only a few rides, had died suddenly. The grieving family took his bike back to the shop, wishing only that the bike guy find it a good home. Mac, always a man for a deal, happened by the shop shortly thereafter and was able to purchase it for what he assured me was a most reasonable price.

This provenance had a profound effect on me. I didn’t know the deceased former owner, but I knew more or less where he lived, and I could imagine him dreaming, researching, and finally realizing his dream, wheeling this lovely, streamlined machine – it was deep black with red slashes – out his front door and down the road, just as I had done. This was the bike on which I learned to ride, and not a single ride passed that I did not think of the man who had ridden it before me. I was riding for two of us now.

Similar routine in the summer of 2019. Serious solo rides of 20 or 30 miles, and jolly weekend coffee and donut excursions with James and Kathryn, or Mac, or John. Weight in the 170s. Then Covid struck and the world shut down. During those first, terrible months, I heard a report on National Public Radio about a new study proving that cycling strengthened the immune system. Regular bicycle riding produced an abundance of antibodies, I think it was, that fought disease. Dedicated cyclists lived longer, stayed healthier. Science said so!

That was when I conceived the idea of not dying, and I pursued it in earnest. The basement became my refuge, cycling was my shield. Between January and May 2020, I was on my smart trainer 4 days a week,  minimum. I still hadn’t figured out how to access those pre-programed workouts, but by God, I was gonna produce me some antibodies. That winter the bike’s former owner and I pedaled through the entirety of World War II, remastered in technicolor on Netflix.

Covid subsided. Hitler died. I survived, untouched by the pestilence and 40 pounds lighter, mostly around the middle. Unfortunately, my cataracts had grown so dense that night driving was becoming hazardous. I underwent cataract surgery and, while the technicians were in there, they installed silicon lenses correcting, in one miraculous stroke, both focus and astigmatism. The eyeglasses I’d worn all my life were no longer needed. I say, “worn all my life,” though in fact I could never get more than two years out of a pair before the habit of  constant, nervous lens maintenance on tee shirt hems and dish towels rendered them as translucent as wax paper. Thirty sets of peepers, over the years, at $600 a pop in today’s money. Never again.

Like many men my age, I joked about avoiding my image in mirrors. But this was a lie. I analyzed my reflection constantly, as if I might will it into something other than the image of a bearded, chubby geezer with thick glasses and a ponytail. Now, thanks to the bike and advanced ophthalmology, the mirror suggested other possibilities. The ponytail went, replaced by a half-inch brush cut. Steve McQueen in for David Carradine. I remember walking the streets of my hometown in those first, skinny, post-haircut, glassesless months, unrecognized by people I’d known for decades. It was as if I’d become a new man. A fresh, vainer version of my former self.

Once cycling colonized my psyche, I left WW II behind and began paying closer attention to professional bicycle races, mining You Tube for information no books could provide about how these slender, godly creatures did what they did. I came to admire them with all the ardor that my pubescent self might have brought to the worship of, say, first baseman Ted Kluszewski, he of the cutoff shirtsleeves, brawny shoulders, and bulging biceps, who powered the 1959 Chicago White Sox to a World Series against the Dodgers which, sadly, the Sox lost 4-2, despite Big Klu’s magnificent performance. My feelings now were the same for cyclists (to name only a few) Mark Cavendish, aka the Manx Missile, Big George Hincapie (“big” in cycling being a relative term, maxing out at about 185 pounds), and even Lance Armstrong, whom I forgave for his doping if not his shitty treatment of teammates and colleagues, because he provided such unforgettable entertainment. And look at all he did for those cancer patients!

In due course my juvenile hero worship subsided. It dawned on me that these wheelie gladiators were no more than kids themselves. At first, I’d wanted to climb hills like the tragic genius Marco Pantani, who had too many nicknames to list here, or be a disruptive puncheur like Peter Sagan. Gradually, though, I came to admire the old hands. Alejandro Valverde and Geraint Thomas, still riding strong at the end of their careers, or super domestiques like Sepp Kuss. All seasoned veterans who rode into their thirties. Few made it past forty. I was one of them.

I beat Contador on Alpe d’Huez, outsprinted Cipollini (aka The Lion King) at the Tour de France, and worked as domestique for the tireless Sean Kelly in both his wins at Paris-Roubaix, a one-day race known as “the Hell of the North.” But fantasy could only take me so far. Without some real-world grounding my career in the timeless dream league of cycling greats would simply have floated away. When you’re a Master you don’t even need a bicycle. I needed a bicycle.

Mostly I rode alone. Occasionally, as I’ve suggested, I went out with other riders, men and women for whom cycling was a healthy and enjoyable pastime. These rides often involved stops for coffee and pastries, or better yet, lunch at a wayside bar (one beer only). However, my jovial accomplices didn’t share my nutty passion for the sport. The few occasions when it broke through were almost embarrassing. (No, Greg, you are not Jonas Vingegaard, and those guys are Mac Bell and John Rosenthal, not Tadej Pogachar and Primos Roglich, and this is Route 133, and you are cycling Cape Ann with the boys, not ascending Mont Ventoux.)

I’m sure, in the great ride called Life, that there is much to recommend the social side of cycling. All things considered, friendship and stress relief are probably as important to good health as antibodies and cardiovascular fitness. Still, as I acquired more facility on the bike, I began to wonder if I shouldn’t be racing it rather than simply inhabiting my own fantasies and banging around with my buddies? In grade school I’d learned, to my considerable distress, that I was the slowest runner among the boys. On the other hand,  I could keep running long after everyone else had pooped out. I matured into a fair-to-middling distance runner and had little trouble in those days finding a marathon, or half marathon, or even a local 10K in which to compete.

Back then, I’d begin months ahead of the event, slowly upping my distance and tempo, toward the Boston Marathon in April, or Philly in November, or the Labor Day race around Cape Ann, which was more or less a half marathon. The race was always my goal, but gradually the race became an excuse for the training, which ordered and anchored my life. Internet searches turned up a few age-group cycling events, but they involved expensive travel and complicated bicycle transport logistics. In any event, the bicycle-race search was interrupted by an unexpected recurrence of my cycling leitmotif.

For twenty summers, give or take, we’d enjoyed the company of Dan and Melissa, friends of my sister-in-law’s, who would come up to our seaside town to vacation for a week or so. Melissa was an academician, a professor of art history at Kenyon College in Ohio. Dan was a photographer who managed the art gallery there. He was also a collector of children’s books who fantasized about being an antiquarian book dealer the way I fantasized about being a professional bike racer. Oh, and he owned a bike. It was an older carbon fiber machine dating from the early 2000s and he’d rigged it out with a third front chain ring (most road bikes in those days only had two) known as a “granny,” geared low enough to allow him to climb steep hills with ease. Well, with relative ease. He’d bring his bike with him on those annual vacations and we’d take pleasant, touristy rambles through the beauty spots of Cape Ann. Then Dan died. As unexpectedly as the man who’d owned the bike that Mac had given me.

It was a terrible shock. We all did what we could to ease the burden of Melissa’s grief, or our burden of imagining that grief. I advised her on how best to dispose of Dan’s book collection and then I received an email from her. She’d forgotten about Dan’s bike! She knew of my interest in cycling, and of my rides with her late husband, and she was hoping that I might help her pass his bike on to someone who would enjoy it as much as he had. She didn’t want any money for it – shades, again, of the vast, generous impulse that sometimes accompanies extreme grief – she just wanted it to go to a deserving person. I thought immediately of Mac, and the bicycle he’d given me, and how it had changed my life. I assured Melissa that I’d find someone in Gloucester who would give Dan’s bike a loving home.

It arrived a few weeks later, disassembled in a padded packing crate. I took it down to my bike guy, who put it back together for me. While he was at it, he told me about this bicycle’s rather extraordinary DNA. It had been manufactured by a big bike company called TREK, and it was the retail consumer version of the model designed for the U.S. Postal teams of the late 1990s and early 2000s to ride in the Tour de France. “That was Lance Armstrong’s team, you know. All his guys rode them. For a few years they were unbeatable.” I fully intended to solicit Mac’s advice about worthy bike recipients, but I thought I’d better try the bike out before giving it away, just to be sure everything was in working order. You can probably guess the rest.

The U.S. Postal bike wasn’t as sexy looking as my Black Beauty. The frame tubes were round rather than streamlined, and were colored a modest blue and white. However, it was lighter, even with the extra granny gear, than my black bike, and God, it flew! I called Mac and told him what had happened. He assured me he felt nothing but brotherly pride in launching me on my cycling career, and that his generous gift could easily be re-gifted. The black bike went back to Mac, who passed it on to his girlfriend. Thus it was that, throughout the aforementioned long winter of 2020, it was U.S. Postal, Dan, and I, propped up on the still-dysfunctional smart trainer, who beat Hitler and out-antibodied Covid.

Along with its granny gear, Dan’s bike sported a CatEye. This primitive digital device consisted of a small display mounted on the handlebar. It was connected by wire to a reader affixed to the front fork, which registered the passage of a small magnet mounted on one of the front wheel spokes. By this means the CatEye could track and display speed, time, and distance. I think there were other readings available as well, but we’ve already discussed my technological limitations. For training purposes, distance, speed, and time were all I needed to know.

Or so I thought until I had a chat with my pal Mohammed. He’d been a cycling enthusiast just long enough to have purchased a number of expensive accessories, none of which he was using now that he’d realized cycling wasn’t for him. In fairness, Mohammed lives in a heavily populated section of Oakland, California, not exactly a cycling paradise. We were on his front porch one evening, smoking a joint and talking about life when he said, “Hold on! I just remembered something.” and disappeared into the house. He returned a few minutes later with a Garmin “head unit” – a sophisticated bike computer that provided as much information as an indoor smart trainer. Back in my running days, I had relied on “perceived exertion” to regulate the duration and intensity of my daily workouts. Mohammed’s gift rendered all that obsolete. Everything was numbers now, precise and quantifiable, a technological leap that propelled me into realms of bicycle training geekdom previously unimaginable. This was the point at which my cycling career departed from the norm of human activity.

In the summer of 2021 I conceived the project of training for and accomplishing an annual birthday bicycle ride in which the number of miles pedaled equaled the number of years I’d spent on the planet. I plotted a course on the roads near my hideout in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and later that summer U.S. Postal, Dan, and I completed our first birthday ride, as exhilarating as it was exhausting.

 

II

That’s right, Nova Scotia.

The summer after I graduated from college a friend invited me to go deep-sea fishing with him. I was still in the Hemingway phase of my journey toward manhood, and deep-sea fishing sounded appropriately Hemingwayesque. Neither of us had ever been to Gloucester, Massachusetts, our port of departure, and we were unaware that the highway from Boston ran straight into town. So, when we saw the road sign directing travelers down a side road to Gloucester Harbor, we followed it onto Route 133, an ancient thoroughfare, twisty and hilly, with granite outcroppings and wooden houses tucked in among stands of oak, white pine, and mountain laurel.

It was 5:30 or 6:00 am, and perhaps I was still in some sort of dream state. We hadn’t driven a mile down the road when, inexplicably, I found myself confronting the revelation that Gloucester – a town I hadn’t even seen yet and whose outskirts I’d been traversing for no more than two minutes – was the place in which I was going to spend the rest of my life. This bit of news came upon me in a most dramatic manner – not as a question or a possibility, but as a numinous fait accompli. I don’t consider myself a religious person in the traditional sense, but I’ve always thought that what happened to me on that road must be what people have in mind when they talk about a “religious experience.” I remember distinctly that, as the cosmic information dump filled my being, the words “make my stand” came forth. As in, Holy shit. This is where I’m going to make my stand! I turned to my fishing buddy to see if he’d been struck by anything similar. But he was busy driving, attending to the road in an entirely different manner.

I don’t remember anything about the fishing trip, but I recall returning later and renting a two-room squat on the edge of Gloucester harbor, where I passed a luminous seaside autumn, taking long walks and writing bad poetry. I was preparing myself physically and spiritually for four years of service in the US Navy, in which I had enlisted upon being sent a draft notice by the US Army. Back in those Vietnam days everybody knew that college boys had even higher mortality rates than black kids from the ghetto. Smart young fellahs led platoons, and platoon leaders got shot first. Spending four years “in a jail, with the chance of being drowned,” (Samuel Johnson on the life of a sailor) seemed like a better option to me.

I did my four years, exited the Navy unshot and undrowned and, as directed by the remnants of my religious experience on Route 133, moved back to Gloucester. That was when I met Mac, the friend who would become my cycling mentor, and who had just opened a health food store on a side street in the downtown shopping district. His first employee was a young woman named Anne Marie, who I found agreeable enough until it happened to me again, and I was struck as blind as love is blind, as Saul on the road to Damascus, which is to say, as I exclaimed to myself several times a day after we began living together, Oh my God. This is the person with whom I’m going to spend the rest of my life!

And so she is.

Referring to our vacation place in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia as “my hideout” is symptomatic of a boyish predisposition to imagine my life as a grand adventure. This jejune affectation has dogged me throughout that adventure, though I must admit there have been moments, such as falling in with Mac and Anne Marie or my first ride down Route 133, which might accurately be described as having been “grand.” Most of the rest were, well, not so much.

The so-called “hideout” is a modest 16 x 20-foot wooden shack, framed up by our son Brooks, and finished out by a local carpenter. It features recycled fiberglass insulation and windows, a door, a roof, and a wood stove. It lacks running water, electricity, and internet connectivity, which somehow adds to the perceived adventure of spending time there. I never cared much for Thoreau’s Walden; both he and it were too preachy for my taste. But I very much approve of shacks, woods, and solitude. I’m not hiding from anything, but I suppose if I needed to go to ground it would be difficult to find me there.

The land on which the shack sits originally belonged to Barry, a college chum who’d moved up to Cape Breton in the early 1970s, when many of us were convinced that the American empire would soon collapse into anarchy. In those days, Canada welcomed new arrivals, and the path to landed migrancy was clean and simple. Barry worked diligently down in the States, odd-jobbing until he accumulated $6500, the price of the 100-acre farm he and his wife Donna had found in Middle River, a community of small farms south of the Cape Breton Highlands. Barry’s long, rectangular plot began at the far bank of the eponymous Middle River – a handsome, willful stream that flows where it pleases from year to year, roiling with salmon and trout, eagles circling above. From the river his land ran up through an overgrown field, then across a two-lane road, up a larger field and a greater hill, to a wall of spruce trees – his woods – that extended another kilometer or so up Gairloch Mountain. The property came complete with a farmhouse, a barn, a smaller outbuilding and, most importantly, a good spring. The house was weathered and rackety and the barn had a pronounced lean. In all, a perfect place for a young ex-pat and his woman to live off the land in a wholesome, honest, unamerican manner.

At that time Anne Marie and I were attempting something similar in our tenement in Gloucester, growing lettuce and parsley in window boxes, storing tubs of miso and sacks of wheat, rye, and other nutritious grains against what seemed the impending collapse of… I’m not certain, at this remove, exactly what we thought was going to collapse, or where we imagined our meagre supply of survival provisions would get us in the event of such a collapse, but I clearly recall the sense of impending ruin, shared with our friends in Canada. Vietnam and Nixon and Johnson were bad. Black Power and organic food were good. Gloucester and Middle River were sympatico.

In due course, Anne Marie and I married and became parents, though not in that order. I put food on the table by odd-jobbing, much as Barry had done. Life was lean, vigorous, improvisational. We had no money for proper vacations, so we resorted each summer to our friend’s Canadian farm. It was beautiful up there, unsullied, welcoming, and cheap. The roads from Gloucester to Cape Breton were bad in places and the trip took two days. Gasoline, at 50 cents a gallon, was our major vacation expense.

Eventful years passed in this manner, and life wove those events into a compelling tapestry, description of which would be the proverbial long story – which I will shorten by telling you simply that Barry and Donna divorced after moving to Cape Breton. Barry, who was an artist, built a new living space and studio for himself at the top of his upper field, with a splendid view of the land sloping down to the river, the shelf of massive, majestic highlands as a backstop. But life was too lonely there, the winters too cold. He moved to New York and remarried, successfully this time, to a woman named Randy. They had a son named Tasso. Then, perhaps frustrated by the refusal of the American regime to collapse in a timely manner, Barry, Randy, and Tasso moved to Greece, where regime collapses were understood to be more common. I remained in Gloucester, making my stand and sharing my life, etc. The old farmhouse collapsed and eventually became nothing more than a brush-covered mound, generations of memories buried beneath. No one lived on Barry’s farm anymore.

In 2003 Barry sold me a small piece of that farm, consisting of about seven acres, running from the two-lane road down to the far side of the river. In the 1950s, this plot had been dedicated to hay and potatoes, but by the time I got to it the field had grown into a forest of spruce and wild apple. Three times a summer I’d essay the 12-hour drive to Middle River and set up shop in Barry’s former living space/painting studio which, by this time, was known simply as the Studio. I’d rise early each morning to read and write. Then, when the sun had burned the dew away, I’d traipse down to my field for a day of limbing, felling, trimming and burning. This was long before I began cycling, so I had plenty of energy for the task, rain or shine. Early on, I discovered something magical in the relentless, repetitive nature of this work. The roaring chainsaw demanded constant physical attention, rendering my usual, jittery, monkey-brain habit of thought impossible. There was nothing to do but make the cut and repeat. At the end of each thought-free day in the field I’d return to the Studio, utterly exhausted and thoroughly refreshedWhen I began cycling my land in Middle River was clear, my shack was in place, and new grand adventures awaited. Gloucester and the surrounding communities of Cape Ann abound in scenic oceanfront rides. However, traffic, especially during tourist season, is a concern. The roads of Cape Breton, with the exception of the Cabot Trail and the Trans-Canada Highway, are relatively empty of traffic and feature woods, streams, mountains, lakes, and lakes in front of mountains reflecting them, and sere, rolling hay fields, picturesque farm houses, and ancient agricultural machinery, all in endless variety and combination. The bulk of my training and buddy rides still take place around home. The birthday ride, my quixotic contest against time, was conceived in Gloucester, Massachusetts, but would be played out in Middle River, Nova Scotia.

 

III

I’m sorry, I’ve got to stop here. This isn’t working out the way I thought it would.

I had planned to write a piece that began as a light-hearted May-December essay about an old man’s bicycle journey away from the Valley of the Shadow of Death. In that plan, the third movement of the piece would turn, in a most remarkable manner, to confront that very Shadow. However, I am embarrassed to discover that my pean to the cycling life has taken a wrong turn and now threatens to become a braggy attempt at establishing myself as the superior being called forth in the opening paragraph. Altogether an unseemly assumption.

I thought I might rescue it by introducing Barry and Donna and the America they were fleeing in the 1970s. In those years dozens of couples and young families emigrated to the area, just as my friends had. Their origins and circumstances varied but they all sought a more genuine life, ordered by the rhythms of nature rather than by American exceptionalism and Nixon’s paranoia. Cape Breton attracted them because of the beauty and fertility of the land, and the fact that it came cheap. The Celtic tradition runs deep in those parts. It finds expression in music and dance, in literature and speech, and in the profusion of people whose surnames begin with “Mac.” The summers are gorgeous, short, and intense. October, when the highlands are ablaze with autumnal foliage, is its own splendid tourist season. What those kids could not have known, until they learned it from bitter experience, was how cruel Cape Breton winters were, and how heartbreaking the endless mud season could be. Ask Donna, stuck inside a drafty, unimproved farmhouse for two winters with an infant and a toddler, while Barry was out in the woods with the rest of the men, collecting the make-work paychecks that kept their families from starving. By the time of my first Canadian Birthday ride, only the most resilient of those original back-to-the-landers survived. Mental and physical illness, alcoholism, depression, suicide, marital discord, and sheer boredom had taken their toll.

A moving story, but it wasn’t going to fit in this piece, the culmination of which was to be presented as if you were cycling through my mind on the current birthday ride. You’d read me pedaling up the Cabot Trail from Middle River to Margaree Forks, then west to Lake Ainslee, down through Wycocomagh, eastward on the Trans-Canada highway, and over Hunter’s Mountain back to my hideout, partaking with me in whatever fleeting thought or bit of history presented itself. Each turn in the road would summon another memory or image or emotion. A true tour de… Oh, never mind.

It didn’t work. When I tried paying attention to what was going on upstairs during a long practice ride, I encountered a slithery welter of images and emotions darting forth from the core of me then subsiding into gloom in an endless stream. They were truth. I could “see” them. But I wasn’t nimble enough to grab them. A language with no words.

Then, as if my birthday ride essay hadn’t gone sufficiently off course, someone gave me another carbon fiber road bike. And this time the donor wasn’t even dead.

His name is Jody, and he’s been my movie agent since the 1990s. I’ve had a few books published over the years, and he sells options on them to people who think they can turn them into movies. None of our option deals ever made it to the big screen but we’ve got a few still going, so there’s hope. And in the process Jody and I have become friends. He’s an enthusiastic cyclist, and he’s almost as old as I am, so there’s plenty to talk about. Last winter he told me he was getting a new bike, and he asked if I wanted his old one. I said I was interested but it would depend on the price. “No money,” he told me. “I’m just trying to learn to pay things forward.” Pay things forward. I’d heard of the concept before, but this was the first time I’d been its beneficiary. Another one of those kinds of gifts. How could I say no? I was helping Jody in his quest to become a better person (not that I saw much need for improvement).

Anyway, my most recent birthday ride didn’t even take place in Cape Breton. It happened accidentally on one of my longer training sessions back home in Gloucester – up Route 133 to Route 1A to Plum Island, a long, windblown barrier beach just below the mouth of the Merrimac River. The route features watery views much of the way, of “hallucinogenic beauty” as my old friend Terry used to say, leading to a joint on the mainland side of Plum Island called The Beach Coma, where it is possible to order and consume a light beer and a plate of nachos while sitting in the sun, before saddling up for a leisurely return ride. It’s a very pretty route, and there aren’t too many hills.

That was my plan on a soft and welcoming morning this past July – bike ride out, Beach Coma lunch, bike ride back. However, once I got on the bike (I’d been using Jody’s machine for the past couple of months) I discovered that I was feeling better than I’d felt in quite a while. These things sometimes happen in the course of a training season. One day, for no reason you can determine, you have fresh legs. You have wind. You have enthusiasm, and you know you are in the zone, baby! The body is funny that way. You could almost say it has a mind of its own.

I added extra miles onto the Plum Island end of the ride to make certain it was of the prescribed length and then knocked the entire thing off in one go, without even stopping for my nachos break. I felt terrific when it was over. My system was flooded with endorphins and the knowledge that, once again, I’d done it. I’d cheated time! It wasn’t until dinner that I realized how badly I’d upset my plans for this essay. There would be no third movement of consciousness streaming forth from Cape Breton, and no Canadian scenery with which to decorate it.

Coincidentally, Jody’s machine was a later model TREK, a Madone 5.5, the bike, believe it or not, that had been used by Lance Armstrong and his team in the Tour de France subsequent to his U.S. Postal days. It was as light as you’d expect, and it came with a high-end Dura-Ace gear set, designed for racing. This meant, not to go too far down any rabbit holes, that it was faster, but that you had to exert more force on the pedals to make it go fast. It performed wonderfully on the way to Plum Island and back, but later in the summer I took a ride with Jody, whose conditioning was well in advance of donut ride level, and discovered that I wasn’t quite strong enough to operate the Madone with maximum efficiency. It was fine on the flat, but I needed more power to fly up hills the way I had with Dan and US Postal.

That marked the end of the fantasy phase of my cycling career. Mohammed’s Garmin bike computer began telling me that my power numbers were levelling off. My immediate reaction was to blame the new bike, but as I looked back over my training records, I saw that the developing trend included numbers from U.S. Postal as well. I was fit for my age, but what had happened to me was typical for a geezer rounding himself into shape. After a few seasons of relative improvement, I’d hit a ceiling from which the only way down was down. So much for “establishing my superiority as a human being.”

The sudden change in my perceived situation interested me, and it didn’t take too much AI-enhanced interweb research to discover that this entire grand cycling adventure had taken place at a time in my life known as “the marginal decade.” Go ahead and google it. You’ll be in for an unpleasant read. The “marginal” period refers to the final years of a person’s life when, according to such experts as longevity guru Dr. Peter Attia, bad things begin to happen. “At 75,” he says, “both men and women fall off a cliff… At the population level, it’s unmistakable… if you don’t do anything about it, you will fall to a level of about 50% of your total capacity – cognitively, physically.” I understood then, or perhaps I always knew, that my cycling adventure had been nothing more than a subconscious reaction, spurred on by Covid hysteria, to the inevitable dark alley, the long, unavoidable journey toward the Valley of the Shadow.

I have no complaints. I’m happy to be released from my fantasies, though I thoroughly enjoyed them. These days, instead of obsessively watching old cycling videos on You Tube, I’ve been re-reading books from my past, just to see how they hold up. I mention this because I recently came across something in Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery that resonated with me. I first read his compact and powerful study in my post-Navy, pre-Anne Marie days (clearly, I was looking for something), and it has held up very well, especially now that life has given me more with which to understand it.

Herrigel writes, “…archery is still a matter of life and death to the extent that it is a contest of the archer with himself; and this kind of contest is not a paltry substitute, but the foundation of all contests outwardly directed…” I’m not referring to the Zen aspect of archery, which would require another several lifetimes to begin to understand, but to self-competition, with which I have become familiar in the past few years. Replace “archery” with “cycling” and you’ve got the picture.

What I appreciate most is the way all the parts seem to fit, despite the failure of my attempts to make them do so. This entire adventure, which has afforded me such pleasure and physical benefit, has literally been given to me. By friends, obviously, but also by… what could I call it? Coincidence? Fate? Luck? There are no words. This world is not my enemy.

I intend to honor my excellent friends and the treaties I have made with life by riding for as long as I am able, adjusting my training now to the realities of marginality. This winter, for example, I’m looking forward to spending more time in the gym, in hopes of getting strong enough to use Jody’s Madone to its full potential. Dan’s bike lives permanently on the smart trainer (which I’ve finally learned to operate – sort of), except when Dan and I go riding in the mountains. Then granny earns her keep. Mohammed’s Garmin, as you might expect, never misses a workout. And I’ll continue my buddy rides, probably the sanest and most beneficial form of exercise. Inevitably, I now realize, the birthday ride stunt – which is all it ever was – will require modification.

One of these years I’ll be doing it in kilometers rather than miles.