Bicycles: Part II
Sep. 5th, 2007 12:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tobu_ishiDon't bother looking for a Bicycles: Part I in this journal just yet, if you're strange enough to have the inclination. I haven't written it, though I've been planning to for about a year and a half now. The over ten-year saga of my struggle with that mysterious breed of transportation, culminating in Tsurugashima, Japan, with my final triumph and a lasting mutual peace, is an epic worth telling. However, at the moment the heel of my right hand is covered in a giant bandage and it sort of hurts to type.
So, like the once-great George Lucas, I am telling a bit of the later saga first. Since it explains that injury, hopefully you won't mind.
I love riding my bicycle home from work. It's a straight shot down a country lane--well, technically it's Highway 295, but it's a very quiet and idyllic highway, except for the occasional roaring semi-truck. Even those are smaller here, with blocky, cute proportions that make them look a bit like toys out of a sandbox that had an unfortunate runin with Rick Moranis in the Honey! films.
Highway 295 runs between Uryu Middle School and the town proper, generously sidewalked, bordered with grassy ditches strewn richly with wildflowers, and affording the stroller or cyclist a wide-stretching vista of rice fields and farm cottages, all the way to the horizon of rippling, smoky blue mountains that surrounds Uryu on nearly every side. On a rainy day, it's swathed in gray mist and has a soft otherworldliness to it. On a sunny day, it's a pastoralist's dream. When I'm not dodging small children or the occasional giant moth in its death throes on the pavement, I can throw my head back, bask in the wind of my passage and the sun if there is any, and enjoy the fresh air and the startled gazes of people driving by. (Some people complain bitterly about this phenomenon, but I think it's kind of delicious to be a one-woman walking freak show. There's a Halloweenish appeal to making small children shriek just by looking at them and I haven't gotten sick of it yet.)
On my ride home today, I was taking the time to appreciate the wildflowers growing riotously in the ditch whizzing past to my right. We've had some rainy weather lately, and the greenery is starting to seriously take over. Across the road to my left, two small boys were battling furiously back and forth across the sidewalk with their umbrellas gripped swordstyle, like a pair of tiny samurai in galoshes, but this has become a fairly normal sight for me and I was ignoring it in favor of the bright spots of floral color on my right.
Fate intervened when I spotted a particularly fantastic head of clover. Any native of Washington with an iota of field knowledge knows that clover are the candy of the weed patch. You can pull the little tubular petals out and suck the nectar from the tender white ends, and it is delicious, better in my opinion than the heavier sweetness of honeysuckle. With that in mind, I braked hard, intending to go back and indulge in my childhood habits.
My bike doesn't brake very well--for whatever reason, it skids along unheedingly for at least three lengths no matter how hard I clamp on the hand brake levers. I've learned to take this into account when stopping at intersections and things, but this took me by surprise. Climbing off, I gripped both handles and began to walk my bicycle backwards towards the clover.
At this point, something went terribly wrong. I'm not sure what the ultimate catalyst was--bad hand-eye coordination, an overloaded bike basket affecting the trajectory of my machine, bad luck, whatever--but after a few steps, I noticed that the back wheel of the bike had angled in towards me and was shoving against my legs, and the front wheel was jackknifing and pulling my arms away from my center of gravity with it. There was a brief confused moment where I felt myself losing my balance, with that unhappy sense of Oh, for pete's sake, I can't be this uncoordinated! that distracts you from doing anything about the problem until that crucial second has passed, and then the bike flopped over, spilling my belongings out of its basket into the grassy ditch and yanking me down on top of it.
This was not the childhood habit I'd intended to reenact. It took me a stunned second to realize that I'd managed to have a bicycle accident while not actually riding a bicycle, and another to realize that my right hand and leg were stinging like crazy. Never one to cry about a small hurt (unless it's a bee sting, those things are poison), I bellowed "OW!" a few times, in the kind of loud, irritated tone you might take shooing a strange dog off your property, and began thrashing around trying to get up.
I'd landed on my outstretched right hand, which had landed on the concrete, with the result that I'd made mincemeat of the heel of it and was having some serious difficulty putting my weight on it. Also, I could feel a lovely bruise forming already where my shin had struck the spokes of the back wheel. Handicapped thusly, I had some trouble getting up, and offered the two boys across the road some free entertainment in the process. Not every day in Japan do you get to watch a tall, gangly American woman in a very sharp suit inexplicably stop her bike and push it backwards, suddenly lose her balance and pitch over on top of it, and then lie there making loud angry noises and kicking her legs wildly like a frog with its head stuck in a hole.
Eventually I did get back to my feet, and then--determined to make the best of a bad business--I left my bike where it was for the time being, and went and had my clover. It was delicious. For a few pleasant minutes, I stood gazing out over the spectacular view of the sunlit rice paddies, awkwardly pulling the petals out with one hand oozing blood (the nectar is just as good in Japan), occasionally giving a jaunty wave to an elderly passersby. It's a tribute to the Japanese sense of tact that I received less stares for standing in a ditch, eating a flower and bleeding, with my bicycle still overturned on the sidewalk and my purse and bento box winking at me from the bottom of the ditch, then I usually get for being an ordinary, uninjured, apparently sane foreigner.
Finally I got around to righting my bike, slithered down into the ditch to retrieve my things, which thanks to a thick layer of fresh green grass were not even dirty, and pedaled off again. Halfway to the BoE, I witnessed a woman braking her own bike hard to avoid a truck and having the exact same accident I'd just had, complete with groceries scattering across the road. Of course I pulled up short to ask if she was all right; of course, being Japanese, she assured me she was fine; and I decided today was obviously a bad day for Uryu cyclists in general and felt a bit less idiotic about my own bike skills. I dropped into the BoE to ask about my water bill and regale them with the tale of my mishap (after Kakizaki-san noticed my battered hand, still bleeding merrily), then finally got home and performed first aid, and finally sat down to aggravate the injury by typing this overlong blather.
For my first bike accident this year, it was about par for the course--bicycles and I have a checkered past, and although we're on pretty good terms now, I think they like to occasionally remind me where I stand. At the moment, I stand as the most entertaining attraction in Uryu, other than the ice cream stand. Oh, these Americans, they're a laugh a minute!
I just hope my hand heals up quickly. I've got kyudo on Monday.
So, like the once-great George Lucas, I am telling a bit of the later saga first. Since it explains that injury, hopefully you won't mind.
I love riding my bicycle home from work. It's a straight shot down a country lane--well, technically it's Highway 295, but it's a very quiet and idyllic highway, except for the occasional roaring semi-truck. Even those are smaller here, with blocky, cute proportions that make them look a bit like toys out of a sandbox that had an unfortunate runin with Rick Moranis in the Honey! films.
Highway 295 runs between Uryu Middle School and the town proper, generously sidewalked, bordered with grassy ditches strewn richly with wildflowers, and affording the stroller or cyclist a wide-stretching vista of rice fields and farm cottages, all the way to the horizon of rippling, smoky blue mountains that surrounds Uryu on nearly every side. On a rainy day, it's swathed in gray mist and has a soft otherworldliness to it. On a sunny day, it's a pastoralist's dream. When I'm not dodging small children or the occasional giant moth in its death throes on the pavement, I can throw my head back, bask in the wind of my passage and the sun if there is any, and enjoy the fresh air and the startled gazes of people driving by. (Some people complain bitterly about this phenomenon, but I think it's kind of delicious to be a one-woman walking freak show. There's a Halloweenish appeal to making small children shriek just by looking at them and I haven't gotten sick of it yet.)
On my ride home today, I was taking the time to appreciate the wildflowers growing riotously in the ditch whizzing past to my right. We've had some rainy weather lately, and the greenery is starting to seriously take over. Across the road to my left, two small boys were battling furiously back and forth across the sidewalk with their umbrellas gripped swordstyle, like a pair of tiny samurai in galoshes, but this has become a fairly normal sight for me and I was ignoring it in favor of the bright spots of floral color on my right.
Fate intervened when I spotted a particularly fantastic head of clover. Any native of Washington with an iota of field knowledge knows that clover are the candy of the weed patch. You can pull the little tubular petals out and suck the nectar from the tender white ends, and it is delicious, better in my opinion than the heavier sweetness of honeysuckle. With that in mind, I braked hard, intending to go back and indulge in my childhood habits.
My bike doesn't brake very well--for whatever reason, it skids along unheedingly for at least three lengths no matter how hard I clamp on the hand brake levers. I've learned to take this into account when stopping at intersections and things, but this took me by surprise. Climbing off, I gripped both handles and began to walk my bicycle backwards towards the clover.
At this point, something went terribly wrong. I'm not sure what the ultimate catalyst was--bad hand-eye coordination, an overloaded bike basket affecting the trajectory of my machine, bad luck, whatever--but after a few steps, I noticed that the back wheel of the bike had angled in towards me and was shoving against my legs, and the front wheel was jackknifing and pulling my arms away from my center of gravity with it. There was a brief confused moment where I felt myself losing my balance, with that unhappy sense of Oh, for pete's sake, I can't be this uncoordinated! that distracts you from doing anything about the problem until that crucial second has passed, and then the bike flopped over, spilling my belongings out of its basket into the grassy ditch and yanking me down on top of it.
This was not the childhood habit I'd intended to reenact. It took me a stunned second to realize that I'd managed to have a bicycle accident while not actually riding a bicycle, and another to realize that my right hand and leg were stinging like crazy. Never one to cry about a small hurt (unless it's a bee sting, those things are poison), I bellowed "OW!" a few times, in the kind of loud, irritated tone you might take shooing a strange dog off your property, and began thrashing around trying to get up.
I'd landed on my outstretched right hand, which had landed on the concrete, with the result that I'd made mincemeat of the heel of it and was having some serious difficulty putting my weight on it. Also, I could feel a lovely bruise forming already where my shin had struck the spokes of the back wheel. Handicapped thusly, I had some trouble getting up, and offered the two boys across the road some free entertainment in the process. Not every day in Japan do you get to watch a tall, gangly American woman in a very sharp suit inexplicably stop her bike and push it backwards, suddenly lose her balance and pitch over on top of it, and then lie there making loud angry noises and kicking her legs wildly like a frog with its head stuck in a hole.
Eventually I did get back to my feet, and then--determined to make the best of a bad business--I left my bike where it was for the time being, and went and had my clover. It was delicious. For a few pleasant minutes, I stood gazing out over the spectacular view of the sunlit rice paddies, awkwardly pulling the petals out with one hand oozing blood (the nectar is just as good in Japan), occasionally giving a jaunty wave to an elderly passersby. It's a tribute to the Japanese sense of tact that I received less stares for standing in a ditch, eating a flower and bleeding, with my bicycle still overturned on the sidewalk and my purse and bento box winking at me from the bottom of the ditch, then I usually get for being an ordinary, uninjured, apparently sane foreigner.
Finally I got around to righting my bike, slithered down into the ditch to retrieve my things, which thanks to a thick layer of fresh green grass were not even dirty, and pedaled off again. Halfway to the BoE, I witnessed a woman braking her own bike hard to avoid a truck and having the exact same accident I'd just had, complete with groceries scattering across the road. Of course I pulled up short to ask if she was all right; of course, being Japanese, she assured me she was fine; and I decided today was obviously a bad day for Uryu cyclists in general and felt a bit less idiotic about my own bike skills. I dropped into the BoE to ask about my water bill and regale them with the tale of my mishap (after Kakizaki-san noticed my battered hand, still bleeding merrily), then finally got home and performed first aid, and finally sat down to aggravate the injury by typing this overlong blather.
For my first bike accident this year, it was about par for the course--bicycles and I have a checkered past, and although we're on pretty good terms now, I think they like to occasionally remind me where I stand. At the moment, I stand as the most entertaining attraction in Uryu, other than the ice cream stand. Oh, these Americans, they're a laugh a minute!
I just hope my hand heals up quickly. I've got kyudo on Monday.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-05 11:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-05 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-05 10:11 pm (UTC)Not every day in Japan do you get to watch a tall, gangly American woman in a very sharp suit inexplicably stop her bike and push it backwards, suddenly lose her balance and pitch over on top of it, and then lie there making loud angry noises and kicking her legs wildly like a frog with its head stuck in a hole.
that had me cracking up aloud. i wish i could have been there. XDDD
no subject
Date: 2007-09-06 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-08 06:12 pm (UTC)Your humor-writing skills had me laughing out loud. I'm glad my host family's in bed so they don't think I'm insane. Yet.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-12 11:59 pm (UTC)I miss you too!!