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Swapping four wheels for two

At the beginning of the summer, I bought a bike. I didn’t exactly decide that I should buy a bike; instead, I contemplated the idea occasionally for a week or two before wandering into a neighbourhood bike store, immediately gravitating towards a shiny red single-speed bike with vintage French-inspired styling and a giant basket, and then walking out of the store an hour later with the bike by my side. Because this is the way I make my purchases: Small, rather insignificant items are excessively deliberated over and subject to far too much consideration, while the big-ticket items in my life – my car, plane tickets, the apartment – have been acquired with an almost reckless impulsiveness and often on the basis of an idea rather than a concrete list of pros and cons.

When I bought the bike, it was with visions of myself cruising down a charming street with a basket full of flowers and a silky sundress billowing out behind me. The reality of bicycling in Victoria is slightly less romantic though – for starters, nobody ever looks quite as charming and carefree as they hope to with a legally-mandated helmet squashing their hair, and the city (which seems so flat when navigated by car) is suddenly blanketed with a continuous series of rolling hills designed specifically to punish me over and over again for choosing a single-speed bike. I’ve yet to ride around with a basket full of flowers, and the one time that I rode to work in a sundress, the entire street outside the office was subjected to a quick but thoroughly embarrassing view of my underwear as I ungracefully screeched to a stop and hopped off the bike.

When my office was in Fernwood, the bike allowed me to take a quick three-minute cruise (weather-permitting, obviously, because I am the polar opposite of a hard-core biker) through a series of leafy residential streets flanked with heritage homes before I was pulling up in front of the building and tugging the bike inside. Then we packed up the office and relocated to a substantially swankier space on the top floor of a refurbished heritage building directly downtown, complete with a sweeping ocean view, glossy blonde hardwood floor and a strict “no bikes inside” policy in order to preserve that glossy floor. My new daily commute – while still short, as it now takes me seven minutes to zip into downtown and eleven minutes to haul the bike back up the hill on the way home – suddenly involved choices: Do I take the direct, less scenic route that’s more or less a straight line (helmet definitely necessary), or do I meander slightly through one of the more picturesque neighbourhoods (helmet… not so necessary)? Or do I give up on biking and hop into the car?

I wouldn’t go as far as to label myself a “cyclist” (there is not, and never will be, any cycling spandex in my wardrobe, and I have been known to ride my bike while wearing high heels), or to say that my actions were particularly motivated by an overwhelming concern for the environment, but the result of my beginning-of-summer impulse buy is that I’m foregoing four wheels in favour of two, savouring the lower levels of road rage that I experience when I’m free to weave around cars and bypass traffic jams, and enjoying the new opportunities to coordinate my clothing to my bike.

Last week, my car wouldn’t start. In the end, the problem turned out to be simple: One of the battery terminals had come loose, and a few simple twists of a wrench were all that it took to fix it. But before this was discovered, I found myself standing sheepishly in my building’s driveway while a tow truck driver produced a set of jumper cables and a know-it-all expression.

“How often do you drive this car?” He clamped the cables onto the battery while I gawked at my car’s innards (I didn’t know how to open the hood; this was my first look at the mechanical mysteries within). “Not very much anymore”, I confessed, now hovering somewhere between sheepish and sanctimonious. “Just to get groceries, to pick stuff up… That sort of thing. I bought a bike this summer”, I added hastily, as though that explained everything.

He slid into the car and twisted the key in the ignition; the engine immediately sprang to life. “Well, there we go. That’s your problem. You’re just not driving it enough anymore, you know. Your car is jealous of your bike.”