Wind

Since coming home for the holidays, I’ve started riding my mother’s electric bicycle every day it doesn’t rain. It’s December so outside should be cold, but where I am in Florida it’s nearly 80 degrees. I believe I am an uncoordinated person; things like roller blading, ice skating, and skateboarding have never come easily to me so, at first, I approached the bike timidly. There is some sort of disconnect that happens between my brain and body when I am trying to balance on wheels. Also, I hate falling – it is so embarrassing.

My father gifted my mother the bicycle two Christmases ago, but I think he did it more out of his own enthusiasm for the thing than hers because, since having it my mother has rarely used the most fun feature of the bike which is the throttle because, similarly to me, we know my mother to be uncoordinated. We once took a family bike ride at a greenway in Tampa. My mother swerved so wildly across the path that a woman jogging towards us started alerting the people behind her, “She is coming! Watch out, watch out!”

Despite our shortcomings, my mother and I share a love for watching motorcycles, dirt bikes, trucks, and motorboats. The louder, the faster, the more dangerous, the more joy. (She and my father used to ride his motorcycle to Black Bike Week in Myrtle Beach every Memorial Day weekend as college students.) I love watching a sleek backpacked couple slice through an intersection, and the old dude in the lowrider with the bass busting out his boom box, and the kid popping a wheeling down the side street to the beach. I still remember the excitement that flowered in my chest when I was eight and my mother took me to a circus in Kerala where we watched stunt riders speed around a globe of death.

Before I started all this biking, I spent most of the holiday break sweating under the comforters of my childhood twin bed, recovering from having my wisdom teeth yanked out. All the movies I watched and ice cream I ate were nice enough, but my I was getting restless and sore all over so when my father offered to teach me how to use the bike I said yes.

The bike is baby blue and still shiny. In our garage it stays wedged between the car and a tall stack of moving crates that my parents will use to leave this house for another state by the end of the year. When I went to fish out the bike, an iguana fell from the crate tower, its tail thumping the floor, hard, and we looked at each other for a half-second in terror before he scratched his way out of the garage and I ran back into the kitchen screaming for my father.

What I didn’t mention before is that aside from the throttle there is another valuable feature of the bicycle which is the pedal assist. My father rode around the cul-de-sac in circles to show me how to toggle between the settings before letting me try.

The pedal assist feels like a gentle current propelling you forward as you pedal. The throttle is what scared me. The first time I pushed it, the bike accelerated so quickly I thought I was going to fly off the back of it.

I was nervous, but I rode off for the winding bystreet outside the gates of my neighborhood. I used the pedal assist to dip into a neighboring apartment complex and ride in circles around their parking lot. I have hated Florida my entire life. I’ve hated the way it looks, the politics, and how trapped I felt in the southernmost tip of the state – so far away from anything cooler happening elsewhere. But when I left the parking lot, more confident in my riding, to pedal past the drainage pond my father once had to fish me out of after I fell overboard with its swimming ducks and fishing herons and sunning iguanas, thinking of my parents impending move from my childhood home and slightly hopped up on pain meds, I delighted for the first time in the pastoral quaintness of where I lived and wondered how I had never noticed it before.

I started to twist the throttle sparingly, each time clutching the handlebars, so I didn’t fall off. By the second day, I learned how to ground myself into the seat as I pushed it, so I stayed put.

By day three, I started to feel not just fear but another thing: the wind – a thrill.

I rarely get to cut the air this quickly, faster than the pace of my usual slow trot, and it felt like I was breathing a more special, more clean kind of air. When I first felt the wind pick up on my face, through my eyelashes, and all over my skin, I realized I hadn’t noticed wind on my body in a long time. Maybe it is because I moved to North Carolina about three years ago. It is harder to feel a breeze from the sea in a state that is partially landlocked on three sides. These are not the clammy winds of Greensboro but the tropical winds that push in from the West Indies.

Soon I was getting more comfortable with the throttle and I pushed it harder as I ducked through low trees, dashed into neighborhoods, and burst back onto the main road. I pushed into the wind – trying not to smile but finding it hard. By the fifth day, I learned to wear shorts and a tank top to get the wind to touch more places on my skin.

I imagined I was on a blue Vespa speeding across cobblestone in a village in Italy. Or going through a wind tunnel towards pure cartoon yellow sun. Mostly I thought about the kid in the lane next to mine in Wynwood. I was stopped at a traffic light but he rode past standing on the gas tank of a moving motorbike, arms outstretched like a young, benevolent prince as the traffic lights, streetlights, and club lights reflected off of his sweaty brown skin – a face of pure ecstasy to match mine of pure awe.

Sometime this week I wondered if this is how the first women to ride bicycles felt. They must have felt good getting some wind on their faces. I had never felt this kind of wind without it being mediated by the torso of the person in front of me – the person with enough confidence to actually operate the thing. Now I was controlling where I was going and going fast. It was liberating.

I do not live in Florida any longer, but I still feel the constriction all around. I feel the stagnancy of deep winter and the disorientation of a strange job in a strange time. I see the devastation of a decades-long genocide. I think of what a landlock can really be (a state, a kitchen, a winter, a border, a violence) and then I think of how the wind blows its breathe across a land indiscriminately, no matter if it is laden or barren, earthly or apocalyptically flattened and reminds us that movement is inevitable and what is suppressed will eventually be freed.

So, I move. On day seven I ride along, pushing against the wind, this time feeling stable enough to open my legs slightly – hoping that some bit of freedom might get inside me too.