Cycling is freedom, cycling is injury, cycling is beauty, cycling is necessary, cycling is...
This is the poetic version of why I am biking from Boston to Montréal. I am excited to be joining 40+ other riders as part of the Boston Cyclist Unions Fundraising Team. I hope you can support me (as you are able) to reach my personal $2,200 goal just a small portion of our collective $90,000 goal. The Boston Cyclists Union works to improve bicycling for everyone in Boston. I believe in their mission, vision, and values, which focus on equity in infrastructure access through people power, dignifying each person, mobility justice, joy and freedom, and sustainability.
I spent the first quarter century of my life relying on pedal power and public transit to get me through my daily life, not because it was my choice, but because it was a necessary reality of my situation growing up in poverty. Today I own a bicycle or two and a 17-year-old car, which I keep alive thanks to my brother who is a mechanic. In this second quarter century of my life, I get the freedom to CHOOSE to ride my bike which I do 90% of the time. When I make that choice I want to know that there is some semblance of safety, some "guardrails" to keep me alive as I glide through the city and the BCU is working to ensure that.
I have experienced what happens when those "guardrails" don't exist! For me, it looked like 5 surgeries over two years, 8 months without walking, $180,000 in medical bills, and an injury I will carry with me for the rest of my life. Despite what cycling has cost me I continue to see the beauty it brings to my life from the freedom I feel when I hop on a bike to the breathtaking landscapes I can access in my backyard along the Minuteman or halfway across the globe in the mountains of a different continent.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my cycling story. If you want to continue on with my "Cycling out of Poverty" journey you can come back each week to find a new paragraph detailing the next piece of my cycling history
Your donation will fund BCU's advocacy campaigns, community events, and learning activities including Bike to Market, which teaches residents in areas underserved by bike shops how to fix their own bikes. They are doing what is necessary to ensure freedom of access to the beauty of cycling without injury!
April 10 Story Addition Pt 1
My cycling journey begins with a donation, actually with the donation of a bicycle. I am the eldest of a set of "Irish triplets" raised in the type of debilitating poverty that prevents one from consistently accessing their most basic needs. The donation, a gift from a neighbor, came at one of the more "stable" periods in my childhood and it was magical.
I still remember that bike today... it was stunning… candy apple red with blue tires and gold rims + pegs. The bike was sized to fit a 5-7-year-old, the only problem was we were all about 9-10 years old. This however did not stop us from clamoring atop the single bicycle, one on the pegs, one on the handlebars, and one steering us to freedom or.... injury. When I envision it now I imagine it looked like what others might think of as a clown car. We never had helmets and thought we were stuntmen, building jump ramps from old tossed bricks and particle board that would have made any health insurance agent cringe.
The bicycle offered us the freedom to explore our community and escape the drama of our home life. One of our favorite places to tromp around was Phillips Landing an abandoned Steel Yard a few short blocks from our house. It had closed about 3 years prior after pollution prevention activists demonstrated its negative impact on the neighborhood's air, water, and land. The plant's closure left many of our neighbors underemployed as cab drivers and newspaper delivery men inching them closer to the poverty I already lived in.
May 1 Story Addition Pt 2
At about 14, I got the first bike I could call just mine. It was a 1980s Blue 10-speed purchased for $25 at a neighbor's garage sale on the more affluent side of town. The price tag, a steal by most standards, was a heavily debated decision because $25 was a significant amount of money for our meager budget. When it was decided that we could take it home with us I hopped astride noticing how my butt slid down one side of the seat only to ride up to the correct position and back down the other side, my legs ever so short of the length needed to complete the full pedal cycle without the bike seat butt waggle Again a bike that didn't fit just quite right.
What made this bike special was... it was mine… all mine. I mean really all mine…I didn't have to share it with anyone. The bike was my lifeline to the places that offered me community at the time school, work, and church, while simultaneously providing me an escape from the rumblings of disaster on the horizon. After a number of eviction court battles my mother eventually lost the fight to keep our family in our apartment *. We were evicted not because we could not pay the rent, but because the house had been sold and the new triple-decker owner was able to prove the apartment (we had lived in for a number of years now) was below living standards. They needed us out to bring it up to code as a habitable living space.
To be honest they weren’t wrong. We lived in a zoo of housing disrepair! Birds flew into the apartment through the ceiling, squirrels crawled into the living room through the holes in our sheetrock walls and cockroaches swarmed the place like it was their palace. All this was the result of a slumlord level of care. On the designated eviction date, a crisp October morning, we packed everything we owned into a 12x12 corrugated tin box on a black flattop drive a block from my high school. My blue bicycle sat amongst all of our prized possessions in that sad outdoor storage unit. Little did I know I would never see her dark blue hue again. What we thought would be a short blip without housing (something we were not unfamiliar with) turned into almost two years of homelessness. Unlike a car which you can live in when homeless (and I did the first weeks of second grade) a bicycle provides no such shelter.
* To learn how eviction cripples people's ability to stay housed read Matt Desmond’s Evicted. It is an honest account of eviction from all sides.
May 22 Story Addition Pt 3
I would go on to college as a member of a homeless family, gaining much-needed stability, and would exit 4 years later as a first gen graduate. I would not cycle while there but navigated the public transit system adeptly something I learned from my poverty class upbringing. Upon graduation, my high school/college sweetheart would give me their grandmother's bike a green early seventies step-through with beach cruiser handlebars and 3 gears that you changed by twisting the yellowed, but formerly white handle, the way you might on a motorcycle. The bike would go as quickly as it was given stolen or taken by the city of Providence at some point I can’t exactly remember but it would have some interesting likenesses to my next bike.
In a similar fashion about 5 years later my next partner would also give me a green bike. This time the previous owner was their landlord and the style would be more akin to a mountain bike. I would ride this bike often from one side of the city to the other ascending and descending the monstrosity that is College Hill upon which Brown and RISD sit atop. Late one evening, after assembling a scholarship application, I descended that same hill for the hundredth time and headed home. At the bottom of the hill, the light turned green and I looked forward peddling ahead toward the Turkshead, a well-known historic building feature in Providence, only to find myself on the ground a few seconds later having an out-of-body experience. I could see myself communicating purposefully with bystanders about my emergency contacts while simultaneously hearing a person screaming at the top of their lungs in the background. I was that person screaming in pain and I had been struck by a car which shattered my tibia into 9 pieces.
When I lead workshops on Social Class I often like to say I literally arrived in the middle class by accident. And it's true it is this accident that provided me with settlement funds allowing me breathing space to focus on things other than how I would pay my bills. It was not my undergraduate degree or even my fancy ivy league master's degree from Brown I would earn a month post-accident that would raise me out of poverty but my Brown University peer's social capital. The Brown Graduate Student Union, led by peers with social capital well beyond my own, knew the benefit of having a lawyer on retainer. That lawyer would connect me to a top lawyer and avid cyclist to advocate on my behalf to multiple insurance companies, medical billers, and 3 party entities, letting me focus on the most important part of the process… healing.
I do recognize my own contributions to entering the middle class - my first gen academic accomplishments of course. The middle-class friends I met along the way factor in too but it really comes to this accident that led me to be a person with no college debt, some savings, and a retirement account who has leisure time to pursue hobbies like art, dancing, climbing, backpacking and now biking. Since the accident I have lived in 4 states and abroad in Palestine, completed a second master’s degree, traveled to and rock climbed in South America, Central America, the Middle East, and South Asia, hiked the NH 48, and overall been working on making this little orb we sit atop a better place. In closing, I would like to say I will never forget how I got here or where I come from. It has been... an arduous, exciting and crazy journey
Thank you for your love, and support along life's journey.
Fair Winds,
-Adj
