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If you would like to know about the roads in Long Beach, ask the bikers – we have them memorized. We can tell you about potholes, bike lanes, which stop signs to bomb through, and the most spacious streets. We can speak of broken bones, stolen bikes, careless drivers, cracked helmets, and getting hit by cars. If you would like to know what it feels like to speed between the lanes of rush-hour ridden vehicular cages at 25 mph, we can tell you of its incomparable exhilaration. Our awareness of automobile and pedestrian movements has increased to a degree unnecessary on alternative transportation.

Last year, I went on an 11,000 mile road trip around America. When I came back, I was winsome, unfettered, tempestuous; it is another story. I also began biking. By myself. At night. It worried my mother.

I loved my thirty minute bike ride home – in the dark, at one, maybe two in the morning- on the streets of Long Beach, my cadence rhythmic, my quads and calves strong, my mind racing with prayers, apologies, always pondering the Meaning of Things. My route is memorized – down 7^th St., merge into the left lane onto Ximeno (watch out for the bump), right on Anaheim, up the hill, left on Clark, swerve to miss the pothole, then a palliative 5 mile straightaway towards home.

There was talk amongst my girlfriends of “A Death Wish” and “Crazy” and “Taunting Fate.” The proverbial question “is that safe?”, to which I have no answer, still lingers in my guilt-ridden mind when I realize that its 1:30am and dark, and that I am, still, mortal. “Aren’t you scared of getting raped?” was asked on one-too-many occasions – a question rich with racial, cultural, and sociological narratives, and mostly rooted in fear.

It is this fear of other humans that I find to be most debilitating. When did communities of people turn inward? When did we start locking our doors? When did we become distrustful of the people around us? When did we begin to see the general public not as fellow mothers and brothers and neighbors but as potential muggers, thieves, or rapists? What is the difference between courage and recklessness? And so, with, or in spite of these thoughts, I bike, because I feel truly free. Like Kerouac wrote, “the only ones for me are the mad ones”, within me is this insatiable appetite for adventure, for independence from the expand-at-all-costs capitalism and the reckless and corpulent consumerism. And not only is biking good for the planet, your wallet, and your body, but you become acutely aware of people who you would normally ignore.

If there ever was an age or place where it was more possible for a woman to bike around a city I do not know. All I know is that there are women around the world that do not have the choices I have – whom to marry, and when, access to clean drinking water, birth control, an education, health care. I bike because I love it and, well, I can.