Tim's wreck was the second of the three that would occur on our circa 70 mile ride from the North Side to Lake Bluff and back. Earlier, Gabe fell at a stop sign when he failed to unclip from the pedals fast enough. A car full of teenage girls laughed as he got up and dusted himself off. The wrecks didn't cause injury or diminish the pleasures of biking on a temperate day in June.
After Tim worked the tire over the new tube, aired up the tube, and reattached the wheel, we continued pushing north on the Robert McClory Path, which runs parallel to the North Shore rail line and is free of motor vehicles for several miles between Highland Park and Lake Bluff. We pushed our speed over 20 miles per hour, with Tim drafting a few inches behind me.
An aptly named suburb, Lake Bluff sits on a bluff overlooking a private beach on Lake Michigan. The teenager who seemed to be responsible for keeping non-residents off the beach allowed us onto the road that descends to the lake. During the ride down, we realized the beach was private and decided to turn around. I attempted a u-turn, but the road was narrow and steep. My Bianchi Volpe fell on its side, which bent the rear fender into the wheel and bent one link of my chain.
Tim bikes with a toolbox worth of tools mounted to his bike. He used an 8 mm ratcheting spanner to adjust the fender so that it did not contact the wheel. The bent chain link was irreparable though. As we biked back to Highland Park, the drive train changed gears each time the bent link passed over the rear cassette. It was annoying and I had no power. In Highland Park, a bike shop replaced the chain while the three of us had pizza and beer. Refreshments were necessary because we had hardly eaten, but premature because we had 25 miles left to ride.
Instead of returning to Chicago via the Cook County Forest Preserve District, which was our outbound route, we decided to head southeast through Wilmette and Evanston. I felt a sense of homecoming as we crossed Howard Street and entered Chicago's far North Side.
A month later, in mid-July, Tim and I cranked out a century bike ride. We extended the route we had taken to Lake Bluff 15 miles to the north. We turned around a few hundred feet north of the state line in Kenosha County, Wisconsin. On the last few miles before the state line, the Green Bay Trail was bisected by roads a half dozen times. It was frustrating to slow down for traffic, but I appreciate the mere existence of a trail that allows you to bike several hundred miles, all the way from Chicago to Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Tim, Gabe, and I decided to do another long bike ride before Chicago's winter set in. On Saturday, November 8, four days after Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, we biked from the North Side to the president elect's neighborhood in Hyde Park, on the South Side. We got fairly raw conditions instead of the hoped-for temperature in the 50s. We fought headwinds on both legs of the ride. The temperature started in the low 40s and had fallen to the mid-30s by the turnaround point. The cloud cover was dense and grey.
Because of a long motion I was writing, I had been unable to work out during the week before the ride. So I set a brisk pace on the southbound jaunt along Chicago's lakefront. The last I had biked there was Labor Day weekend, when the crowds were thick. The grey weather the day of our ride kept people indoors. The wide open path was an invitation to push our speed as much as we wanted.
We turned off the lakefront at 51st Street and crossed Lake Shore Drive on a pedestrian bridge, where I took the only good photo that came out of the 27-exposure disposable camera that Gabe had procured at Walgreens at the start of the Lake Bluff ride five months earlier.
We planned to head west to the Obamas' block and then ride past their mansion. The Chicago Police Department and the Secret Service thwarted this plan. They had barricaded the Obamas' block at 50th and 51st Streets. I asked a police officer at 50th Street if we could ride down the block. "No," he replied without a trace of a smile.
We embarked on a fruitless quest to find a decent pub or cafe. We biked through and around University of Chicago's campus but found nothing. In terms of the architecture of the houses and apartment buildings, Hyde Park suits me more than any other neighborhood of Chicago. But the bars and cafes are far and few between, and I am at core a Northsider, so I could never live down there.
The search for a watering hole led us back to the lakefront and 55th Street. On the way, we stopped to take in Loredo Taft's massive sculpture, the Fountain of Time, in the Midway Plaisance. A man in a delivery pick-up truck stopped and asked for directions to an address on Woodlawn. We had no idea where it was. Gabe speculated that he was an undercover Secret Service agent sent to check us out because we had asked the CPD about biking down the Obamas' block. Later a man driving an SUV honked at us while we headed west on a boulevard. He was black and had Illinois plates and a fuzzy toy hanging from the rear view mirror. Tim suspected that this man was also from the Secret Service. I thought Tim and Gabe's paranoia was unfounded, but it was infectious and made me uneasy. We stopped outside a cafe full of white hipsters. There were no open tables, since it was the only source of good coffee in Hyde Park other than Starbucks. We didn't venture in, but I commented to Tim that everyone inside was Secret Service.
We decided to bike back to downtown on the streets of the South Side, rather than returning via the lakefront. Taking the streets meant dealing with motorists who at best would be indifferent to white bike nerds. In the actual event, the ride north on Cottage Grove, then Martin Luther King Drive, and finally Michigan Avenue was devoid of a single dangerous encounter with a car.
We ended the 40 mile ride at Aaron's place in Logan Square. My two year old nephew, Byron, was revved up to have three yahoos on bikes visiting him. I felt a powerful sense of physical wellbeing. The cold weather marked the beginning of Chicago's winter. The return of winter causes dread and unhappiness for many people. By biking outside for six hours, we had embraced the change of season and immersed ourselves in the powerful beauty of winter's grey skies.
My refrigerator is decorated with magnets arranged to resemble the Einstuerzende Neubauten logo, a stick figure whose arms and legs point down. Recently I amputated Neubauten man's legs and gave him articulated arms that reach for the sky. After the bike ride, I detected in this crude likeness a hint of joy I hadn't recognized before. I thought Tim had tweaked my design, but he doubted it.
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