Two Wheels Good, Jody Rosen



There can’t be too many books celebrating the bicycle, though one always has to wonder what prompted the latest and what qualified the author to address the subject.  “Two Wheels Good” may have been inspired by the so-called bike boom during the pandemic, which the author of the book, Jody Rosen,  called “without question the largest in history.”  This surge of interest no doubt led him and Crown Publishing to think there would be an audience interested in reading another book passing itself off as a history of the bike. If nothing else he came up with a catchy title.

Rosen has written bicycle-related stories for the New York Times magazine and the New Yorker and claims to ride his bike every day around New York City, qualifications enough to write such a book.  He is an avid enough cyclist to proclaim “cycling is the essence of a New York existence…to live in New York without a bike is to only half-experience the city.”  

He doesn’t reveal his deep passion for the bike until the third to the last of the book’s sixteen chapters when he breaks from his reportorial mode and turns personal detailing his close relationship to the bike, which included a stint as a bicycle messenger in Boston one summer when he was nineteen.  As with many messengers, myself included, it was the best job he ever had, though he wasn’t particularly good at it. He rode so dreamily his dispatcher asked him, “Don’t you want to make money,” as one is paid by the delivery.  The job did confirm to him that he “didn’t want to be off a bicycle.”

The book might have had been more engaging if he had personalized it from the start rather than making it a series of what could be stand-alone magazine articles—venturing to Bangladesh to profile a rickshaw driver, to Scotland to profile the stunt rider Danny MacAskill, to Montana to profile a couple who met on the 1976 Bikecentennial coast-to-coast mass migration of cyclists and married, to an island in the Norwegian arctic in the dead of winter that is a bicycle haven, to Bhutan to document the unlikely bicycle scene in the Himalayas.  

He passes on the cliche of going to Copenhagen and Amsterdam and describing those bicycle idylls that all cities should aspire to, but does go to Beijing, a former bicycling stronghold, where the bicycle is being choked out by everyone now wanting to drive around in a car.  The bicycle is now regarded “as embarrassing, old-fashioned, ‘for losers,’ ‘for the poor.’”  Bike-share is trying to get people back on bikes, but it almost seems that as many bike-share bikes get thrown in rivers as are ridden.  

One chapter is sixteen pages of odd stories about the bicycle from newspaper clippings from the 1890s.  A story from the Nebraska State Journal quoted the president of the Women’s Rescue League that bicycle riding by women is “leading them headlong to the devil.”  She was seeking an act of Congress to forbid women to ride bikes.  If Amy Goodman had been around at the time she would have gladly given this dissenter a voice on Democracy Now if only to pose her favorite question, “What are you demanding?”

Rosen inserts a wide breadth of bicycling anecdotes, including Frank Zappa strumming a bicycle wheel on the Steve Allen show, speculating about the whereabouts of two exercycles on the Titanic, Annie Oakley blasting clay pigeons while riding a bicycle.  Though he pointedly warns early on that his  book will have nothing about bike racing, he manages to insert Maurice Garin, the winner of the first Tour de France.  

The book starts with an array of creation theories as to the origin of the bicycle, most of which he debunks, including the myth of Leonardo da Vinci having drawn one up.  There are way more claimants to being the inventor of the bicycle than one could imagine.  Even the Russians and Chinese join the fray, pointing to obscure countrymen as the first to create a bicycle despite all evidence pointing to a German, Karl Friedrich Drais, who concocted a two-wheeled device in 1817 that one could sit upon after propelling one’s self by foot.  Pedals came later added by a Frenchman in the 1860s.  So many books have been written about these early years, each seeking a fresh angle, I just wanted to skim over it all, wondering what Rosen would find to write about in the coming pages.

He devotes thirty-four pages, ten per cent of the book, to Barb Brushe and Bill Samsoe, letting them tell in their own words the story of their riding across the country in 1976 as part of an entourage of over four thousand cyclists in multiple small groups celebrating the Bicentennial.  Bill was a group leader and Barb was in a group just ahead of Bill’s.  They repeatedly crossed paths, making a connection that led to marriage.  Forty years later they repeated their crossing, though with a sag wagon and staying in hotels rather than camping.  In describing their first crossing Rosen says riders were continually “catching” flats, an unorthodox description of riders “suffering” flats.  Another red flag to his bicycling acumen is his acknowledgement in his “Personal History” chapter that “to this day I can barely patch an inner tube.”

He makes several passing references to the Critical Mass phenomenon that originated in San Francisco in 1992 and swept the world, but it’s not until his last chapter that he describes it in detail, though only giving it two pages, and never seemingly engaging in one himself.    After the first mention on page ten I checked the index to see if there would be more and was disappointed to see it wasn’t listed in the twelve page index.  Thus it came as a pleasant surprise when he did give it more than a nod.  It could have been one of those subjects, like racing, that he didn’t care to write about since it had been written about so thoroughly elsewhere.  It may have been overlooked in the index, but “corking” was not, a feature of Critical Masses, of cyclists blocking intersections holding bikes overhead so the critical mass of riders can continue flowing through.  The index also had other obscure references such as ball bearings and rain riding and ghost bikes.  

Curiously the book doesn’t include a bibliography though plenty of books are mentioned in his forty-three pages of footnotes.  Two of the footnotes are included with his email address if one would like him to send a copy of an article he had found.  I’m still awaiting a response. 

There is no mention of his fellow New York bicycle devotee David Byrne nor reference to his book “Bicycle Diaries” or his recent show on Broadway that included bicycling.  Simone Beauvoir merits a mention and Steve Jobs and Hitler and Henry Miller and Mark Twain and, of course, H. G. Welles.

He doesn’t harp on the bicycle as being a savior for the environment as much as he could.  He veers off on several tangents that the bicycle hasn’t always been good for the environment since producing bicycles causes environmental damage and exploitation of workers, rather irrelevant issues in a book titled “Two Wheels Good.”  But it is his bent to embrace all, as he does when he chooses “she” rather than the standard “he” for a generalization of all humans.  

One senses at times he ventures off topic to fill up his quota of pages, such as two pages on a relative of the stunt rider MacAskill who was a giant—seven feet nine inches tall.  He also includes several paragraphs on Drais not relevant to the bicycle story, but interesting, fleeing Germany for Brasil in 1822 because his father a judge made an unpopular decision.  One often can’t help but to think, “That’s interesting, but what does it have to do with this book?”

It’s all made up though with his occasional rapturous endorsements of riding the bike.  It can be dangerous he acknowledges, especially in New York City traffic, “but to trudge through your days without biking—that’s no way to live.”

 

“1001 Voices on Climate Change,” by Devi Lockwood

Devi Lockwood set out to bicycle around the world in 2014 at the age of twenty-two shortly after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard with the goal of collecting stories on climate change.  She endured for nearly two years until an amoeba turned up in her intestines in Cambodia at about the same time she began to suffer panic attacks following a harrowing van ride. She regretfully curtailed her travels, feeling like a “failure,” and returned home to New Hampshire to regain herself.

She had already gathered plenty of material for a book, largely thanks to a sign she carried that read “Tell me a story about climate change“ on one side and “Tell me a story about water“ on the other.  But she sought more material, resuming her travels for another couple of years, but unfortunately not by bicycle. 

Although the first half of the book is laced with almost enough incidents of cycle touring and endorsements of the bicycle as an ideal means to connect with people to qualify the book as a travel book, there is no indication on the cover of the book in words or in design that this is a book that would appeal to cyclists. Rather than inserting a bicycle anywhere on the cover to lure those with a bent for the bicycle, the cover is entirely blotted with an array of water drops, including one that forms the “O” in “Voices,” emphasizing the book’s theme of water.

She is a strong advocate of the bike, paying tribute to it in many ways, including saving her final thanks in her two pages of acknowledgements at the end of the book to her grandfather for teaching her to ride a bike.  It is well-nigh inexplicable that she would abandon the bike after it being her featured means of transport in New Zealand, Australia and Southeast Asia for nearly two years. Not even when she resumes her travels in China, a former stronghold of the bicycle, does she take advantage of it to get around, nor in Denmark either, where the bicycle is a dominant feature.  

After writing so much about how the bicycle drew people to her and how she loved being outside all day with “no windshield, just immersion,” the no-bike second half of the book came as a disappointment.  It was hard to fathom that she could lose her loyalty to the bike after expressing such devotion to it,  and didn’t at least rent or borrow a bike in her further travels.  The bike as a means to combat climate change could have been a prominent theme of the book.  She shouldn’t have let a page pass without demonstrating the utility and wisdom of riding a bike, not only for the good of the planet, but for one’s personal well-being.

She gives no reason for abandoning the bike as a means of immersing herself into the many countries she later travels including Morocco and Turkey and Peru and Scandinavia.  It wasn’t because of any frights she had while cycling.  Those only occurred when she was off the bike, the worst when monsoon rains in Laos forced her to take a fourteen-hour van ride to cross into Cambodia.  She was crammed in the back seat next to an American who she accused of “mansplaining” for a condescending remark he made.  He responded by calling her a “feminazi cunt” and tried to strangle her when the trip ended in Phnom Penh.  The driver was no help, as he had earlier thrown a can of coke at her head irritated that she checked on her bike at every stop when more cargo was placed on top of it.

She had another unpleasant, but more benign, experience earlier when traveling by cargo ship.  While in New Zealand she met Chris Watson,  the author of the book “Beyond Flying,” a collection of essays discouraging travel by air, who tells her that “flying is by far the worst thing that many of us do for the planet.”  That convinces her to cover the 1,200 miles across the Tasman Sea to Australia by boat and to try to avoid flying for the rest of her trip.  She launches a kickstarter campaign to pay for her expensive passage on a cargo ship and raises the funds in “a day and one hour.”  She’s the lone female, which was unsettling at times.  

She manages a couple more legs on sailboats but after four months of trying to find passage to Thailand by sea gives up and flies. The ease of flight is hard to avoid, even for someone committed to doing as little harm to the planet as possible.  Later in the book she admits to flying from New York to San Francisco without any explanation for not taking advantage of Amtrak.  It may not be as egregious as flying, but she also reveals that she went to a Starbucks in Instanbul forgoing the countless local coffee establishments.

The book was published by Tiller Press, an off-shoot of Simon and Schuster, that specializes in non-fiction on “real-world problems.”  She and her agent spent quite a spell trying to find a publisher, commenting that it felt like they suffered “1,001 rejections,” mostly on the grounds that books about climate change don’t sell.

She does make her book readable, not bogged down by statistics, but rather anecdotal evidence that the climate is changing from the “1,001” people she meets during her travels who respond to her sign.  Most of the stories are about how much hotter it has become and how water is becoming scarce or in the case of the island republic of Tuvalu, raising the ocean level threatening its survival.  

She begins the book in Tuvalu at the suggestion of “my then girl-friend,” the first of several mentions of her sexuality.  She does no biking on these nine coral atolls that comprise ten square miles and receives just 150 visitors a year, some who merely stop in to add to their list of countries visited. It’s highest point is thirteen feet above sea level, which is gradually becoming less elevated as the ocean inches upward. The stories of water there are not only of the sea rising but the loss of well water that used to supply the islanders their drinking and bathing needs. The only non-salt water now available to the islanders is from rain, which everyone assiduously collects. She stayed with a family, as she often does, sometimes through the cycling “Warmshowers” community.  To shower she snuck into a Telecom building at night along with one of the family members who worked there.

Rain was another of her water stories from a woman who’d arrived in Sydney in 2002 during a severe drought.  A torrential downfall brought everyone out, even office workers in suits and dresses, to dance with hands up to the sky so thrilled to have water.  A couple people respond to the water question with stories of tears.  A 70-year old woman told her, “My biggest water story at the moment is shedding tears when I heard my grandson play the piano as part of a symphony.”  Another woman recalls giving birth, breaking water and ending the birth with tears, “my fourth water.”

The sign Lockwood wears around her neck became such a part of her at times she’d forget about its presence.  Once as she was sitting under a tree reading she was startled by a woman asking “what is that all about” referring to her sign.  She tells her a story of gently washing her just-deceased mother.  Her water question struck a non-climate change chord with many.   Another was about a guy’s younger brother who died from a pot of boiling water falling on him, the water having to be boiled to purify to make it drinkable.

She is told multiple times that it’s not advisable for a woman to travel alone. She knows that plenty do and that she does it not only for herself but for “all the women who are unable to do so.”  She bikes for several weeks in Australia with a Belgian woman she met through Facebook who is less leery of stealth camping than she is.  Their time together gives her greater confidence to stealth camp on her own, coming to prefer it to staying in Australian caravan parks, as she found them to be “hostile places for a solo female.”  

If this had been a true travel book she would have devoted more than two paragraphs to her time with the Belgian.  She didn’t even credit her with a water or climate story. Her many descriptions of sunsets and sunrises in the first half of the book were however symptomatic of a travel book.  There were thirty-one in the first 159 pages, but only four in the second half when she didn’t travel so much as fly to environmental conferences.  She had been so attentive to the sun’s comings and goings, as one is who is outdoors all day, she used the sunset as a metaphor for her reaction to the abundant use of vowels in the Tuvalu language.  She wrote, “The vowels in this language taste as delicious in my mouth as sunsets are bright.”  One sunset was so stunning she wanted to throw herself into it.

How much of a difference this book will make is hard to say, maybe no more than the messages she wrote on telephone poles and highway guardrails as she cycled—“Just play” / “Slow is beautiful” / “Read more poetry”.  She was just happy to give voice to so many, hoping it could inspire others to think about the issues they raised.  Only one library in the Chicago system has acquired it—the Chinatown branch.  But like every pedal stroke it is a motion forward.