I learned how to bike when I was 11. Before then, during Saturday morning trips to the nearest park, I would bring along a book and eat pan de sal while my cousins biked on wide, paved roads.

Not knowing how to ride a bike didn’t bother me until a family trip to Baguio, and everyone wanted to bike at Burnham Park. It had just stopped raining and the roads were slicked wet. It smelled of the earth and pine trees. That time I didn’t have a book with me, nothing to shield me from the nagging question: “Why aren’t you biking with your cousins?”

My cousins made biking look easy. I gave it a go, but no matter how much I tried to balance on the bike, I just couldn’t seem to make the bike stand long enough for me to pedal at least 5 times. Meanwhile, everyone was racing each other and pretending to go to school on bikes, just like what we’d see on morning anime shows. 

When we went home I had the training wheels on my bike taken out. I was never a patient kid. I compensated for being a slow learner by biking every night, making circles in our small garage. And when I finally balanced my bike long enough to be aware that I was moving without my feet on the floor, my heart swelled both from exhilaration and relief.

There was nothing to dread about going to Baguio anymore. I could finally look forward to that happy summer place without the anxiety. Of course, years later, I found out they were not renting out bikes anymore, but go-karts.

After that I rarely touched the bike again, except during morning trips to the park, made rare because everybody was growing up and migrating abroad to find the greener pastures. The pan de sal was not even that hot anymore. I had switched from Rowling to Austen and Le Guin, in an attempt to see the outlines of the world beyond the disappointments of adolescence.

Several years passed when I tried biking again, during that time when I was trying to capture that quaint, elusive feeling through the pains of climbing mountains and traveling.

When I asked Daddyo to find me a second-hand bike, I was thinking Japanese surplus bikes, the kind you rode during afternoons wearing a pretty dress. Daddyo was a sexagenarian bike, Beatles, and beer junkie whom I met one weekend on a mountain trip to Batangas. 

In just a few weeks, he said he found me a bike. He sent a picture: a red mountain bike with a saddle I found too high for my skills (if I had any).

The surplus bike was out. I had never ridden a mountain bike before, pero sorry, ang pogi niya tingnan. 

“Basta kapag pataas, lakihan mo gear mo sa likod. Pag pababa ka, liitan mo lang,” Daddyo tried to explain how to shift gears. But the only bike I’d tried was a BMX. How was I supposed to know that you could shift gears in bikes, just like with cars?

The only place my bike ever went to was UP Diliman, because the roads there were relatively safe. And for fear of passing cars, I always walked my bike crossing CP Garcia from Hardin ng Rosas to the campus gate. When it was stolen and retrieved in less than a month, (here, I count my blessings), I decided to leave it in our house in Rizal for safekeeping. When I started working in Makati, I had forgotten about it.

But when the pandemic hit there was no other option than to bike commute.

With the world reeling under lockdown, life was measured in cups and tablespoons, the endless dishes in the sink, and the very few trips outside home to buy food and alcohol. Under lockdown, I learned to bake, plant vegetables (I attempted), and read books again – all done in the same impatient manner as when I was a kid, but mellowed and slowed down a bit by the grief and uncertainty of the times. 

The first time I went to the supermarket by bike felt like freedom. It was the same exhilaration I felt years before when I finally learned how to balance on my bike. Going places now meant relying on my physical effort and sense of direction. The best part: I didn’t have to deal with frustrating public transportation. 

This exhilaration was sustained as the lockdown stretched on: I wanted to learn how to cross the highway without carrying my bike across the footbridge. I wanted to go on longer rides. I wanted to know how to squeeze through crazy traffic and ride uphill. 

On the road, I’ve learned to spot different bikers: the tito riding a road bike that probably costs 10 times more than my monthly salary, the hippie on a gravel bike, the throng of youth in basketball shorts and mountain bikes, the laborers in BMXes pedaling their way to work, the frontliners going to hospitals. 

I remember the first time I went down EDSA. I was biking from my home to Manila when Metro Manila was still under modified general community quarantine. It was an unusual sight, and I must have been in an alternate universe: EDSA with no vehicles, no heavy traffic. I was biking through the pop-up bike lane without worry of rushing taxis and buses. 

Traveling was stripped down to the basics, and on two wheels. How wonderful it was then to weave through two towns and cross cities, to climb the winding road to Sierra Madre, stopping at a carinderia to drink soda, while overlooking the lush green of the mountain range and the cities sprawled beyond.

Under the special circumstances that turned the world upside down, I wanted to pat that impatient little girl’s back and tell her she shouldn’t worry too much about not knowing certain things.

That it is just a toy. It is just a weekend trip. It is just a bike in the park. It is just a vehicle to take you places (if you dare to face the metro’s unforgiving traffic and this country’s sweltering heat and incessant rains). That the oh-so-serious matters of consequence during childhood and adult life in this sick world are, sometimes, exactly what you make of them. That Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was right: the bike only takes on a life of its own when it’s needed, because, as he wrote, “only moving / does it have a soul.” 

And that it’s as simple as two wheels turning round and round and round and round and round. Don’t sweat it too much. – Rappler.com