Editor Note: This is our second winning entry in our March- May My Ride Writing Contest. We want an autobiographical story about your experience riding a bike in Austin where previously you might have done so by car. Each week, Austin on Two Wheels will select a winning entry with a $50 cash prize (and bonus for established bloggers who re-post a teaser of their story on their blog.) In June, we’ll select a grand prize winner who will receive a contract to write 5 more stories for our site. Submit your story.

Me and the Bike and the World

By Amy Dolejs

It feels like being alive.

On the days I’m lucky enough to have no after-work appointments, no meetings for which I have to look spiffier than I can manage with baby wipes, I get on my bike at 5:30 a.m. and ride the 9.5 miles to work.

The view from the bridge.

As I leave the house, my husband mumbles from bed that he wishes I wouldn’t ride in the dark; he worries. I don’t blame him. It certainly is dark out there. It’s empty. It’s quiet. It’s a little bit creepy, if you want to think that way (and thinking that way speeds up the turnover, for sure).

But it is also joy. The ride from my house toward downtown Austin trends downhill, and I get out in the middle of the empty back streets I travel, and I fly. My extra-bright front light wakes up a rooster on my route, and I hear his crow behind me. I pass boot campers in the park, jogging backward up a hill, and I say hi as I blow by, sailing down toward the river.

This is the start of what's probably the biggest of the several big hills on my way home. It curves and keeeeeps going.

The afternoon ride is not such a joy. It’s hot. It’s uphill. Cars everywhere. But I do it. I almost said that I do that penance to pay for the beautiful, brilliant morning ride. But it’s not penance. It’s not paying for anything. The ride home is a reward, too.

The ride to work is something beautiful. It’s about me and the bike and the quiet world. It’s about being strong enough to get my own butt to work, and brave enough to go out into the empty dark to do it. It’s the closest I—with my impatient and chattering brain—will ever come to meditating.

Look at that sweat mark across my chest from my bag strap. And how my face glistens!

The ride home, that’s more about me and everybody else. In the afternoon, I pass kids walking from school, wave to crossing guards, communicate with drivers using just my hands or (sometimes) a cold stare or (better) a smile and a “thanks.” I talk to other cyclists for a few seconds as they pass me on those hills or as we’re stopped at a light. I feel part of the world in a completely different way than I felt part of it that morning.

When I hit my neighborhood, still a mile and a deceptively long hill from my house, I always think about the first time I rode up that hill nine years ago on a brand new bike I didn’t know how to operate, flinching and swerving wildly every time I heard a car coming up behind me. That’s the same bike that gets me to and from work now—it’s my ride.