Sprung At Last

Two months after my magnificent universal bike rack discovery, it has still not stopped raining – except for the days on which it snowed. Oh Seattle, you are such a cliche.

The child, meanwhile, has not stopped pestering me about bike riding. We need to inflate the tires, I tell her.

I can do that, she says.

It’s raining, I tell her.

Sometimes, when it isn’t raining, she asks about biking, and I point out that either I’m busy or it’s dark or it’s about to rain, what with this being Seattle and all.

Finally, one Sunday, we are sitting in the living room, having accomplished exactly nothing all weekend (and feeling pretty good about that, too) – and the child informs me that we are going for a bike ride.

It’s raining, I say.

I’m not asking you, I’m telling you, she replies. I wonder where she heard that.

You want to go biking in the rain? I ask. This might not be a bad plan: I can do this once, and then we won’t have to have this conversation again.

Yes, she says.

Fine, I reply.

It takes us about an hour to inflate the tires, because I am too embarrassed to go look up step-by-step instructions on the internet and decide I am going to do this myself. The child stands by, holding the bike and offering helpful instructions. I mount the universal bike rack. I load my bike and she loads hers.

It starts to rain harder.

We arrive at Marymoor, set our bikes on the trail, and off we go. Which way? Any way!

With the exception of a few very dedicated and obviously serious cyclists, we have the trail to ourselves. We pace ourselves. We ride through puddles. We go really fast, just to see how fast we can go. We stop to check out some ducks. We go really slow to see what other sorts of birds we might see. We discover a tree whose trunk is wrapped in yarn. We ride with our mouths open to catch the raindrops.

We ride for a good hour and realize we are nowhere near our car, and thus we have to go back the way we came and hopefully not collapse on the trail along the way.

We talk about what sort of rain gear we should probably have the next time we do this.

We get back to the car and to the bike rack and decide to keep going to Starbucks, because being exhausted and soaked to the skin clearly calls for hot chocolate and a comfy chair. Everyone else has had the same idea, it seems – although they are oddly much drier than we are, probably from sitting in those comfy chairs for so long. They are clearly impressed by our determination, and unperturbed by the massive puddles we are creating where we stand, drinking our hot cocoa. Not impressed enough to offer us their seats, but then again, we’d end up sitting in puddles, so it’s just as well we stand.

We talk about what other trails we will find, next time we go biking – rain or shine.

Quote: A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

I have no idea who said that. All I know is, I have a bicycle that I haven’t ridden on for about three years.

I love my bicycle, and biking in general: Growing up, I often rode my bike around the streets of Manhattan, listening to my Walkman … with no pesky helmet to muss my hair or come into conflict with my headphones. My daughter is about the same: being half Dutch, she’s genetically predisposed to ride a bike well, and often. Also, she doesn’t really understand the concept of hills, but we’re working on that. Specifically, specifically, she doesn’t grasp why braking when going downhill is a good idea*.

Yet we’ve been grounded for three years. Maybe four. Hard to say – but I could probably come up with an exact date if I dug about in my drawer.

We stopped riding our bikes right at the time The Departed got his new car.

His old car was an icky, manual shift SUV with, in retrospect, one redeeming quality: The Departed had bought a universal bike rack that you could strap to the back of it. You could then drive over to nearby Marymoor Park and bliss out in bike trail heaven.

I liked the new car – an automatic shift BMW with a decent sound system** and heated seats – but it had one failing. The universal bike rack did not fit on the back of it, he said; it would not work on a sedan.

He priced out several options, which seemed to be inordinately expensive, and we ended up getting some sort of Thule system with one set of rails for one bike: his. We never got around to getting anything for my bike because, of course, there was no way I would ever be able to lift it onto the top of a car, assuming the car was even in the garage when I wanted to go for a ride.

Last year, I got a new car myself – a large SUV with many redeeming qualities including, I thought, the ability to load bikes onto the back the way we had in the past, using the universal bike rack we already owned. But when we brought the car home, The Departed inspected it and pronounced it impossible: there was a rear spoiler that would rip right off if you tried to hook the rack to it. All the other options were prohibitively expensive: the dealer wanted to charge me something like $1000 to install a hitch mounted rack. And the simple ones I seemed to see everywhere on the road? Well, I was told, you need someone who understands wrenches and drills because you have to undertake a complicated attaching-and-removing of said mount every time you want to ride your bike, because the car won’t fit into the garage with the rack on it and …

No, I don’t really know anything about mechanical things. I got tired just thinking about the complexities of the situation. Easier just to not ride my bike, I thought. Less fun, of course – but less hard, too.

And then he left, and about a week later, in November, I drove into my garage and there was the universal bike rack hanging on the wall. Taunting me.  I looked at my bike, also hanging from the wall. I looked back at the bike rack. Universal, eh?

Now, anyone who knows me will tell you I am about the least handy person you will ever meet – sure, I can do things around the house, but only if you give me a book like Making Simple Repairs for Dummies, and it includes simple step-by-step instructions accompanied by pictures of each step.

This universal bike rack, as it happens, has a website URL printed right on the side of it.

I can do that.

The website contains instructions for safely attaching the universal rack to any car, like, for example, a BMW sedan with crappy music playing on a really good sound system. Also for an SUV. The instructions seem to have an awareness that you might not be able to attach the rack to the immediately obvious place because there might be something – a spoiler, say – in the way. They go on to suggest that the rack can be hooked to the roof rails. Helpful step-by-step photos for the mechanically stupid are included.

I can do that.

Not only that, it is incredibly easy. I mount the rack on my car. I put bikes on it. I remove the bikes and the rack, and repeat the procedure.

I call my daughter out of the house, and make her watch me do this whole thing again. She thinks I’m brilliant, and can we please go for a bike ride now?

No, I say: This is Seattle, child. It’s raining. But when the sun shines, we’re ready.

 

 

* the reason: Mommy won’t have a heart attack.

**even if he did insist on playing his crappy music on it. Klaatu, really?