"There was a whole world in front of my eyes I did not see"

Look, I put on a nice shirt for this occasion. WAH-LA! Have you noticed me writing, videoing, and photographing my bicycle rides more? Well, I have been and its been the full flowering of me returning back to the times before the pandemic. I cannot tell you how healing it is to get on my Rivendell Atlantis and just ride, a reference to Grant Peterson’s Just Ride book that changed the way I looked at cycling. It was about riding practical steel bikes that will last you 30 or more years that are classically beautiful and engineered for comfortable all day riding. Well, Dagnabbit, I got myself one of those sweet Rivendell Bikes with a leather saddle and reclaimed alley leather handstitched on my handbars and chainstays. The Atlantis was fillet brazed by Waterford Bicycles (RIP)1 in the old Schwinn Performance Cycling Shop. I sold my car, used the bus, and lived centrally in Denver to get that bike. I used a little bit of the money I had left from my mom’s life insurance policy after paying off my student loans to buy that bike. I basically changed my life to get that bike, and I haven’t regretted it a minute since.

I literally just got back from riding 50 miles on that bike in a linen shirt that Lily made for me. I stopped to get a shitty push button espresso stop along the trail and this woman said to me: “Don’t you get hot in those long sleeves?

I immediately retorted: “No, because linen is incredibly breathable. It’s like a desert shirt.”

“Well, I haven’t been to the desert in a while,” She replied. Her co-worker laughed in the back ground.

“Well, we live in a high desert plain, so actually you have,” I retorted.

I walked away with my shitty coffee and gulped it down with a side of annoyance at having to deal with people’s idiocy. We aren’t in Denver anymore, toto. This is always the risk of riding longer miles and wearing normal clothes here. Everyone expects you to put some plastic clothes on with bright colors, so they get a little weird when you roll in with something different. It’s all a bit much for me sometimes. That’s the risk of leaving the basement hermitage. Gorgeous Views and lackluster people sometimes.

My recent Lughnasadh ride this past week made up for it though. I decided to ride a route that was a rough infinity symbol in honor of the Lugh, the god of many talents. In typical monsoon season fashion, I found myself dancing with storm clouds and brief showers the entire time. It felt quite apropos to dance with the elements on this sabbat. My legs felt incredibly strong and I just kept cycling this little cycles around town. The liminality of this Lughnasadh season became quite apparent to me as well. I could feel the deathly vibes of this harvest season creeping in, even with it being so apparently summer outside. I reflected on the loss of the life of Darrius Davis, who “was a light that made everyone happy.” He passed due to mental health complications during a forced eviction “in the closet of a house he could not afford.” I reflected on the loss of the life Magnus White, a 17 year old bicyclist who was hit by a motorist and died. I almost started crying thinking about their strong spirits leaving this realm. I had goose bumps all over my body. “I would ride for them,” I thought to myself. “I would live for them,” I assured myself and rode as fast as I could, feeling a bit dizzy with the effort. This is the sort of societal death work that is essential to our emerging collective consciousness of death positivity. A tragic death is an opportunity for a whole community to grieve and collectively find ways to assure no one loses their life in that way. Don’t let them be forgotten.

II.

”I didn’t feel like I belonged to their bike clubs , or to them, or to anyone. I rode mostly alone….I rode to be without anyone else’s madness in my body—I rode it to be with just my own — to breath with so many things that my body was born to become.”

Molly A. Blumhoefer “Sad Bodies Stolen Bikes” in Cylista Zine, Issue 8: “Every Body”

I read feminist bike zines, because I am a feminist. More white cis-gendered men who support WFTNB folx should explicitly state that they are feminists. This story that Molly Blumhoefer wrote was beautiful and this line really resonated with me. I also don’t feel like I belong, so I ride alone, unsupported to just watch myself becoming in real time.

III.

The follow is an article I will submit for consideration to Calling In Sick Magazine, an extreme alternative cycling magazine

The man seemed to zero in on me from the other side of the grouping of three Oak trees that I commonly visit on my rides. It’s a quiet spot tucked into the back of City Park in the heart of Denver. On this day, I stopped to have a moment with a mischief of magpies, who were just playing around my little grove of Oak trees. As I settled in, I noticed this older, skinny white man with sort dark hair, wearing dark shorts and a white generic outdoorsy graphic t-shirt on the other side of the trees lock his tractor beams onto me. In spite of his break of public park etiquette, I maintained the perfect air of blasé, a term sociologist Georg Simmel used to describe the level of detachment we have to maintain to cope with the noise and busyness of urban life, hoping to dissuade him from approaching me. I was there to commune with my damn magpie buddies and this dude was not gonna distract me. I returned to enjoying watching the mischief joyfully jump around, cackle at one another, and drink out of puddles. I took a furtive glance in the guy’s direction. “Damn,” I thought to myself, “this guy is coming right toward me.” I felt that tiny twinge of panic when my personal space heliosphere is about to be punctured. I am a devout hermit out on a wander. All I want is solitude, after all.

The man approached me with his phone out. “They are magpies, you know.”

I nodded in understanding. “Yes, they like it around this part of the park,” I replied.

“I found it on this Merlin app,” He said, referencing The Cornell University Ornithology Lab’s Merlin Bird ID app. He turned the phone in my direction and showed me the screen.

“Yes, that app is great,” I said as I continued to watch the magpies and end the conversation by only offering terse one line statements. Then he said something that literally stopped me dead in my tracks and flipped the whole conversation on its head.

“I just started doing this(Bird Watching) last week. There was a whole world in front of my eyes that I did not see,” He said to me. I stopped being a jerk, looked at him, and smiled.

“Yes, watching birds is pretty great,” I replied.

In that moment, omen bike questing was born. I put all pretense and blasé bullshit to the side and allowed myself to see a little bit of myself in him. It wasn’t too long ago that I was him, discovering the world with those same fresh eyes after reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. Taking the advice in Odell’s book, I started pay attention to the birds and plants all around me, using the Merlin and iNaturalist apps as a guide. It was the exact sort of antidote I needed to root myself in place and push back against being crushed into oblivion by capitalism, bureaucracy, and techno-libertarians. I realized in that special little moment that there is more to biking than exercise, personal bests, or even the comradery of riding in groups. Bicycling can be a conduit to bring pure, unadulterated magic and surprise into our lives. The sort of magic that makes us realize that we are the main characters in our own stories with the power to change the world around us.

An omen bike quest is a ride taken explicitly with the purpose to read the moving landscape or the human or non-human kin we may encounter along the way for messages that one may use to orient their behavior for the coming days, weeks or year. It’s an explicit approach to riding where you think of a bicycle as a divination tool, a tool used discover messages from some other spiritual force. It employs the a similar observation-centric approach that Russ from Path Less Pedaled discussed in his “How the Bicycle Saved my Life” video:

“What I love about biking is the act of observing…Observing is far more active than just looking…It’s also more contemplative than just seeing….It’s about going fast enough to move through a landscape, but slow enough to take it all in and maybe learn something from it all.”

Making observation the point of cycling is the bedrock of an omen bike quest. What is a little different with my omen bike questing is I nest it within my own animist hedge druid spirituality that recognizes my inherent interconnection my plant, animal, insect, and other living kin around me. Viewed through this lens, a bike ride is no longer just a means of getting from point A to Point B. It is an opportunity to commune with the universe, make friends with human and non-human kin, and pick up little tidbits of received wisdom that I may glean along the way.

In the Rivendell-o-verse, Omen bike quests are what you get if you dropped your copy of Grant Peterson’s “Just Ride” into an unspecified primordial ooze at the edge of a gravel road in a decommissioned army base—the exact roads we ride on the east side of Denver. These rides are an explicitly pagan, animist form of cycling that is akin to the sort of spiritual riding that Deacon Patrick popularized in his ride reports on the Rivendell Owners Bunch. Yes, it’s a form of unracer riding for the mutants who shirk the beautiful visitas just to our west to find the teeming world of life that is thriving right in the foothills amidst the trouble of all the military industrial pollution. That’s the world we ride on the east side. It’s a world that encourages mutant weirdos like me to stop and learn with the chamisa, pika, sorrel, milkweed, and snowy egrets—oddkin that refuse to die despite so many attempts to eradicate them. It’s a world that begs you to weave yourself into it one ride at a time. 

This sort of weirdo mutant riding is no stranger to the august lore of this erstwhile extreme alternative cycling publication. Remember “Ugly Rides” from Issue 6 when Adam told us to go on rides in industrial areas where you won’t be distracted by “pesky scenery” so that you may find beauty in “unexpected places.” That’s pure OBQ’ing, Hoss. Remember Issue 7 when we had a beautiful ode to plant identification while riding in Golden Gate Park. Dagnabbit, little buddy, that’s some prime OBQ’ing. Then take two of my favorite Calling in Sick articles from Issue 8 by Charles Berls and Brian Doll. Charles extols the pure virtue of “riding your bike but not riding your bike” up through a trash hill to get to THEE sammich spot. Doll advises us to go out on a strategy session where “once you trust your intuition and pedal wherever you feel like, once you stop when you need to, your there…you’ll find what you’re looking for. It’s right out there.” Yes, it really is all out there if we think there are answers and wisdom to be found out their on our omen bike quests.

If I still have your generous ear, dear reader, consider taking an omen bike quest in whatever way that sounds good to you. On your next ride, you could just be ready to stop the minute you see a slug, a flower you do not know, or a bird song you have never heard before.  Take their photo or just hang out with them. Consider pulling a tarot card or a card from another oracle deck and let it guide where you will go and what you will do on a ride. Find a grove of trees you like to hang out with and make it your “Trash Hill Banh Mi spot” or cafe ride spot. Bring your grove, animal, plant, or Bird kin presents, food, and water.  Invite all your friends or go alone. Everyone is included in omen bike questing. No one gets dropped. There are no registration fees. There is no special equipment you need, just your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hands. Its cycling egalitarianism at its finest, because everyone gets to be the master of their perception of what jumps out to be experienced on the ride. 

Remember you are the main character in your story and get to help craft your community’s bike story. No company gets to define that for you. Be the most cringe, mutant, wierdo bike rider that you want to see in the world. Find other weirdos and build your own culture. It’s the omen bike quest way.

I hope all is well, dear reader.

James

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