Bikes rule Amsterdam. If a car hits you, it’s the driver’s fault. Period. Down these crowded streets, walkers fight through designated traffic lanes — one for bikes, and one each for taxis, regular cars, and the tram. But nothing is perfect. When I tell Paul, our bed and breakfast host, about the supercilious, hissing woman and numerous speed-automaton men — like our slick cab driver from the airport — he says, “Yes, here in Amsterdam we have our cycle paths, and we have our psychopaths.” The system, no matter how ingeniously regulated, is bursting at the seams. Car congestion has given way to a different anxiety: moving through public space that is on the verge of becoming a bike dystopia. I wonder if bikes here have become the new cars; if they are two-wheeled insects, they’re sizable ones, like dragonflies. So what does that make walkers — mosquitoes? Maybe there is something in wheeled motion itself that induces aggressive behaviour.
scarlet letter
Down at Central Station, buzzing car and bike traffic rattles Justine, my ten-year-old daughter. She scrapes her hand on my wife’s left brake handle — her second minor bike accident in two days. It’s intense out here for a young girl. The congestion can offer the worst of both worlds: scooter drivers and cyclists whiz by on bicycle highways, with little regard for pedestrians; meanwhile, car traffic is no less dense. Pedestrians are wary, too, and reserve their ire for tourists on bikes who don’t know where they’re going. Teenagers snicker and quack “MacBike! MacBike!” as we parade by on a canal street. We’re fat targets for derision. The MacBike rental company, which has three locations in central Amsterdam, bolts onto its bikes a round metal plate that says “MacBike” in large lettering — mainly to alert pedestrians that you’re an idiot tourist. Around here, “MacBike” is a scarlet letter.
We flee this hornet’s nest of traffic and find refuge in Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s large, leafy inner-city sanctuary. In the days before the classifications yuppie and boomer were coined, hippies used to camp out here and protest the value systems of their parents. We lock up and meander about the park. It’s blissful, but even here the tension winds up. Laura wanders onto the quiet roadway. Suddenly, a middle-aged woman, seated primly, her back straight on her practical machine, heads straight for her. Twenty metres. Should Laura get out of the way? Eighteen metres. What if she moves and the rider veers the same way? Fifteen metres. Better stay put and let the rider go around. Ten metres. This is not happening. Eight metres. It is the rider’s road. Six metres. Rider is determined. Five metres. Rider better break. Four metres. Rider sputters, hisses — three metres — clucks like Mother Goose. Two metres. Guttural noises. One metre. Rider comes to full stop. A look of certain doom is etched on my wife’s face. The rider says, imperiously, “Thank you!” as Laura moves. The rider resumes top cruising speed. Laura heads for the edge of the pond to calm down.
Paul, our B&B owner, says some riders “try to find the absolute shortest way between two points and go as fast as they can. The only thing they respect is the tram, because it is heavy and takes time to stop.” In 1987, the American satirist P. J. O’Rourke theorized that his nation was “afflicted with a plague of bicycles.” Right theory, wrong country, perhaps? Then again, after two weeks any new rider will graduate from naiad to dragonfly and thrive in this cycling ecosystem. Amsterdam’s good councillors organize their chaos with fine attention to detail. They have little space, and less choice. They don’t have the luxury of the Danes in Copenhagen — where bike tracks are gloriously wide and neatly separated from vehicle roadways by shallow brick barriers or marked off with blue paint — but they have succeeded in making their town a bike town.
We head back to North America, to Canada and Toronto, with its enfeebled version of safety for cyclists.
I’m reading participant diaries from web archives of the 2003 inaugural Tour d’Afrique, a four-month-long, 11,900-kilometre course from Cairo to Cape Town. It was completed by thirty-two of thirty-three riders, over half of whom came from Canada. I notice a newspaper clipping on the long table in the middle of my workspace. The Toronto Star article is dated April 21, 2006. “Two cyclists die in separate accidents,” reads the headline. Both riders were on the receiving end of the right hook, inadvertently delivered by large trucks. One was a sixteen-year-old kid, “a jolly little girl,” a neighbour told the reporter. My eyes water; I get up and reel around the room. I taught Justine how to ride, and now can’t avoid the thought: it’s only a matter of time.
a command
“How’s your head?”
Start assessing the damage. Got seven minutes to meet Deanna at Peter Pan. Left knee’s bruised and bleeding. Hey, what’s that, a pain vector out of my left shoulder. Blood trickling down my leg. Face scraped. Ouch. The cop is halfway through writing up his report.
“Where is the driver of the vehicle? ”
“I don’t know. He’s probably gone.
“The skateboarder offers his cell again, in case I want to phone Peter Pan. I don’t know the number. He helps me lock the bike to a metal signpost. It looks better than I feel — salvageable.
The Good Samaritan bus driver shoves off. He protected the site, and me, until the cop arrived. Suddenly, the officer notices an older man across the street, half a block west. He’s coming toward us. Now he’s leaning the other way, thinking, I suspect, “Hey, did I hit something? Better go back and check. Uh-oh, you know what, maybe I’ll just get back in my van…”
“Just a minute,” the officer says, striding toward the man. “Sir, are you the driver of the vehicle involved in the collision?”
A conversation ensues. The white van is parked one block west. The driver is in his late fifties, with grey, matted hair and jagged yellow teeth. He doesn’t have his driver’s licence with him, or his vehicle registration or car insurance. He’s written up. Four violations, with failure to negotiate a left turn the most critical. Later, when I appear in court to testify against him, he doesn’t show. Failure to appear means the charges will stand and he’ll be fined several hundred dollars. I sue his insurance company, settling two years later for an amount my lawyer tells me is too low.
That fateful evening, though, I scrape myself off the curb, get into a cab, and make my Peter Pan dinner date. May 27, 2002, is immediately filed in my memory bank as the day I almost bought the farm. I order risotto — no need to cut anything, right? — and drink a martini. Deanne looks at me looking at the waiter. “Bill, you have to go to the hospital,” she says. A command.
man-machine transcendence
At St. Michael’s, X-rays show a nasty spiral fracture of the ulna. The emergency doctor places a cast on my broken right arm. Six weeks later, it’s still there and I’m in my GP’s office. No break was discovered in my left hand, but an acute pain persists. The doctor feels my left hand for a minute, digging around, pinpointing the ache. She orders me across the street and calls radiology, requesting a specific shot. At last, magnified X-rays show the shattered, kidney- shaped scaphoid. This peanut-sized marvel just above the thumb and ahead of the wrist has a notorious ability to break and evade detection. The stealth fracture only shows itself through time and further damage. The doctor phones from her office. “William, you have to get a cast on that left hand. Now.”
I walk out of St. Mike’s after five hours with a fresh plaster cast on my left arm and hand, to complement the scuffed fibreglass model on my right. They want the old cast to stay on for eight weeks instead of six, just to be sure. This means two weeks of double casting. I tell the emergency doctor I’m going to the cottage. “Okay,” he says, “I know your type.” Moulding a beautiful plaster cast around not only my left arm, not only my left hand, but also my left thumb, he tells me to position my left hand as if I’m holding a bottle of beer. “That’s the only thing you’re going to be doing next week,” he says. Great, a humorist, I think.
Now comes the big dilemma: do I leave the hospital in a cab or on a bike? I’d ridden down to the doctor’s office with my damaged left hand and right cast. Truth is, I’ve been back on the bike for a couple of weeks already. The first time, I experienced involuntary tremors in both hands and couldn’t grip the handlebars. The thought — “Maybe I can’t ride again” — shot like a flaming arrow through my mind. My heart pumped madly with the negative energy of failure, but the shakes eventually subsided.
After staring into the brilliant azure of the early-evening sky, I straddle and push off. Sidewalks only. Slow. Victoria and Shuter to Logan and Dundas... what, three klicks? I worry that I could become the target of a Toronto Star slice-of-life photo takeout: “Man with two casts rides bike — what an idiot!” But I carry on. Two blocks short of home, I dismount gingerly — don’t want the neighbours to see me riding with two casts.
I start to see myself in a different light and search for evidence of compulsive behaviour. In his novel The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien writes: “The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.” Is that it?
But Flann, it’s not just the rocky roadsteads — you forgot the rocky road falls. Not long after the casts came off, I wiped out. I went flying over the handlebars at 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning, surging down empty Gerrard Street to my university office. The road was empty except for a student driver, who managed to swing widely left to make a hard right turn, and nearly took me out. To avoid impact, I slammed on the brakes and landed exactly as I had nine weeks before — right hand outstretched, then left. This time, there was no damage. Miraculous.
The following winter, I received my first-ever door prize. I’d just delivered a guest lecture for a friend at night school, and luckily was too tired to ride fast. Still, the driver’s-side door nearly cleaved me in two and cracked a rib. I didn’t pursue legal action — I had no front light. Then, this summer, as my daughter and I charged up a steep bike and pedestrian path, Justine in the lead, she faltered. I hit the brakes, flew over the handlebars, and crashed my left shoulder onto asphalt to avoid landing on top of her. Maybe that white van had sideswiped my ability to avoid crashing; maybe I’m a menace; maybe I shouldn’t be on the road at all, I thought.
