Goodness & Art
A bicycle is happiness on two wheels, simple as that.
Chicago days are finally turning languid and long, with months of early evening lakeside rides to come. During the summer, “Sprocket,” a one-speed folding bike with Monty Python silly walks style, takes up residence in the trunk of my car so I can make the most of every opportunity. Indeed, Sprocket is why I have car with a trunk.
Sprocket and I don’t go far and with 20" wheels we don’t go all that fast, but Sprocket has a magical ability to instantly take me places far beyond the trail…
I am five years old, determined, despite two skinned knees from barreling straight into the 4" pole of neighbor’s street lamp, to give a bike-without-training-wheels another go. Floods of tears and a heart-to-heart with my grandmother about why being able to ride a bicycle really, truly is notnotnot an essential skill aside, clearly it is an essential skill. I get on my big brother’s somewhat scuffed up orange bike once more. I am peddling and my dad is pushing until suddenly he isn’t and I find my inner balance and fly.
A few years later, I now have a big girl bike which, among other things, actually is a girl’s bike. She’s a beautiful blue Schwinn and I name her “Shyanne” because I am besotted with horses and cannot spell. Between rides, she lives in a “stall,” an angled parking space marked by chalk lines in a one-car garage from which the family car has been banished for the season. Shyanne and I ride the suburban range everywhere together. I even take her to college.
Post-college, things get a bit more serious with a 10-speed English racer, a minimalist line-drawing of a bicycle with a thin black frame and curved handlebars covered in blue tape. It is far too serious to be named, with a seat so anatomically hostile that even padded racing shorts don’t really make a difference. My look—special shoes, fingerless gloves, spandex shorts and helmet—is matching fierce. Eventually, though, I find myself riding less and less. Hunching over handlebars to minimize drag puts pressure on wrists, which doesn’t really work for a writer.
Enter Sprocket. Now I sit upright on a seat raised so high I can stretch out my legs and see whatever there is to see.
Life is good.
For many, though, bicycles make life better in much more basic and practical ways. In fact, the bicycle — currently celebrating its 200th anniversary—was born of necessity after a massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia, even more devastating than Krakatoa, lowered global temperatures by about a half degree Celsius. Crop and livestock losses led to higher food prices. Horses, then so critical for transportation, starved and died. The bicycle was invented to provide an alternative.
Nearly two centuries later another natural disaster—a tsunami in Sri Lanka—provided the impetus for what would become World Bicycle Relief (WBR), a nonprofit that distributes sturdy bicycles specifically designed to withstand the rigors of the developing world. Over the last dozen years, 360,000 Buffalo Bicycles have helped make lives better in countries throughout Africa, Asia and South America; and 1,600 mechanics have been trained to maintain them.
Transportation is an amplifying technology. Bicycles make it easier and safer for girls to get to school. They allow community health workers to travel further to help more patients. They make it easier and cheaper to haul all manner of things, including milk and chickens to market.
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I first came across WBR last fall as part of a tour of SRAM, a high-end global bicycle gear design company headquartered in Chicago’s booming West Loop neighborhood. SRAM, which shares a building with Google, has made its mark pushing the boundaries of tech with innovations such as wireless gear-shifting popular among the international racing crowd.
WBR, founded by F.K. Day, one of SRAM’s co-founders, challenges designers to push a whole different set of boundaries, streamlining manufacturing logistics, improving durability and lowering costs.
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Racing bike. Mountain bike. Buffalo bike. Sprocket bike. There is a universal understanding among the pedaling set about the joys of the journey and about freedom and the drive to explore. It turns out that getting there is at least half the fun, which is something an artist named Charles based in Lusaka, Zambia has captured brilliantly in a series of small, intricate papier (nshima) mâché sculptures.
I flitted from table to table at a recent WBR party taking pictures of colorful “Bicycle Charles” cyclists, marveling that a mere two wheels could connect me to so much. The day my father pushed his tear-stained and somewhat banged-up young daughter down the sidewalk one last time — “Pedal! Balance! Steer!—he sent her off into a new world full of adventures and discovery.
It never gets old.
