Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  Huh? Why was she upset? She was the one riding carelessly on the sidewalk. I was the injured party here!

  I was still mulling over this unjust welcome to Amsterdam when I heard the frantic ringing of another bike bell: “Brringg! Brringg! Brringg!!”

  This time, I turned around. A sneering cyclist was barreling right towards me. Ack! My body clenched; I braced for a second collision. Fortunately, this time, no bike crashed into me. The sneerer had managed to expertly swerve around me. As I watched him pedal on, I thought, This sidewalk isn’t a safe place to walk! Then it dawned on me, this was no simple pedestrian sidewalk; it was a separated-from-the-street bike path. I’d had no idea such a thing even existed. A smile came over my face. This was brilliant! How civilized!

  Seconds before a third cyclist could target me, I stepped off the asphalt path onto the brick-lined sidewalk and watched one bike after another zoom by. A window washer cycled by with a fifteen-foot ladder dangling over his shoulder as casually as if it were a purse. Another cyclist passed with a dining room table somehow perched behind him. Several young couples rode by on single bikes; the men pedaling and the women—sidesaddle on the rear racks—lounging languidly as if kicking back on recliners.

  ##

  The year was 2002 and at the age of 35, I was already a bike nut who had lived and cycled in cities all over America. Just two years before, I’d convinced Amy Joy (then my girlfriend, now my wife) to move with me to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, telling her it was the place I wanted to live for the rest of my life. While lured by cheap housing prices and funky old neighborhoods, one aspect of Pittsburgh living I hadn’t considered was the prospect of winter cycling.

  When I started working a café dishwashing job in the autumn, I regularly saw other people on bikes battling car traffic. There weren’t many, but there were just enough to encourage me to think I could settle forever comfortably in Pittsburgh. But as winter dawned, my daily thirty-minute commutes to work grew chillier, more challenging and increasingly lonely. I saw fewer and fewer fellow cyclists until, finally, I went several days without seeing a single other one.

  I grew despondent and every day, I surveyed the streets in vain for signs of other cycling life forms.

  Then, early one morning, while riding to work, I saw them. In the snow, weaving back and forth across each other were two distinct bicycle-tire tracks! My heart raced. Somewhere up ahead, just out of view, someone else was cycling. I wasn’t alone after all!

  As I sped up to catch them, my hope for Pittsburgh surged. For minutes, I raced in the mystery cyclist’s tracks. Remarkably, this other rider also cut across the shuttered Nabisco factory parking lot and also wound through alleyways. He or she was following my same route! Who could it be? A co-worker? If so, then we could commute together. Maybe we could even. . .

  Suddenly, mid-fantasy, I stopped pedaling.

  My bike cruised to a halt.

  My chin dropped.

  Ugh.

  Could I have been any stupider? These weren’t the tracks of someone ahead of me. They were my tracks—the ones I’d made while riding home from work the night before.

  How could I possibly spend the rest of my life in a place so inhospitable to cyclists? All hope for Pittsburgh ebbed.

  Months later, we left Pittsburgh for good and arrived back in Portland, Oregon—the place where Amy Joy and I had first met and the city widely praised as America’s cycling capital. On my first morning back in town, while sitting on the front steps of our apartment building at NE 20th and Couch, I watched a cyclist ride past. A minute later, another whizzed by. Soon, they were zipping by from all directions. Within half an hour, I counted nineteen people on bikes. Nineteen! I couldn’t believe it.

  After having strained for so long for evidence of fellow cycling life in Pittsburgh, I was so elated that I rushed inside and woke up Amy Joy.

  “Nineteen cyclists!” I said, shaking her so she could absorb the incredible news.

  “Huh?” was her response.

  “I just counted nineteen cyclists in the past half hour!”

  “Oh,” she managed to utter before resuming her sleep.

  Now, as I stood in the middle of Amsterdam, I laughed to myself as I recalled that incident from just the year before. Portland? Nineteen in thirty minutes? Ha! I was now seeing nineteen cyclists just about every thirtyseconds!

  ##

  As I trudged along the streets of Amsterdam buzzing with bike traffic, I was spellbound; I couldn’t take my eyes off the bikers. Later, I would find a passage from a 1933 guidebook to Amsterdam that perfectly described the type of captivation a newcomer like me was experiencing:

  [T]he odd gaps between going from one place to the next may be profitably filled in by making first-hand studies of the noble art of trick bicycle-riding. Those who are not absolutely perfect, get killed off very young. The survivors thereupon develop a perfection in the difficult technique of balancing which will fill your soul with deep envy. Sit you down on the Leidse Plein or on the Rembrandt Plein and let the show pass by you while you are supposed to be writing postal cards to the dear family in Ithaca, NY. You won’t write many, for you will be forever clutching your companion’s hand and shouting, “Look at that girl carrying a potted palm on her shoulders!” or again, “Look at that family with five kids tucked away between the frame!” All very harmless and pleasant and the cost, again, is negligible.

  That’s exactly how I felt, except, I had no companion with me whose hand I could clutch to share my amazement. Amy Joy and I were married only weeks earlier, but she wouldn’t be joining me in Amsterdam until a month and a half later.

  What I really wanted her to see was the impressive number of kids riding as passengers. Many of them rode in rear seats behind their parents, the kind I’d seen used in the U.S. Other kids rode in large wooden boxes on elongated cargo bikes, contraptions that I’d never seen in the U.S. before. Some infants rode in little seats between their parents and the handlebars, complete with little windshields. Babies rode in slings strapped to their parents’ chests. One girl stood on the rear rack while holding onto her mother’s shoulders—like a little trick rodeo rider preening atop her horse. This was all new to me.

  Despite all these crowds, I found the city to be amazingly quiet. The narrow streets and the roadways along the canals carried far less motorized traffic than their congested counterparts in American city centers. This tranquility, though, was compromised by an ever-present clamor created by the army of creaky bikes. Scraping fenders clunk-clunk-clunked. Loose chain guards continually kerchunked. And countless rusty chains—apparently last oiled when they’d exited the bike factory decades earlier—shrieked desperate pleas for grease.

  These bikes were nothing like the sleek and polished mountain bikes and racing bikes and cruisers I was accustomed to seeing on the streets of America. In the U.S., I’d always felt like an outcast on my beloved fifth-hand clunkers. More than once, I’d been rudely dismissed by a bike shop mechanic who’d deemed an old two-wheeler of mine unworthy of repair. But now I found myself in a city overflowing with kindred spirits on beat-up old bikes held together in many cases by string, twine, yarn, wires, rubber bands, inner tubes, shoelaces, masking tape and duct tape to keep them roadworthy. The cyclists appeared utterly unconcerned with the status of their rides. Suit-and-tie-clad businessmen rode unabashedly on broken-down workhorses—women’s models, no less. In fact, with so many well-dressed Amsterdammers riding crappy wheels, it seemed that the chicer the threads, the shabbier—and noisier—the bike.

  Yet, no matter the condition of their bikes, every cyclist looked happy and satisfied. They moved with fluidity and grace. They stepped on and off their moving bikes with the elegance of ballet dancers. At busy intersections, bikers threaded past one another effortlessly. Such universal comfort and elegance on the most basic and crappiest of bikes: it seemed the basis of an egalitarian society.

  ##

  For several hours, as I wandered aimlessly, I scrutinized
the bikers with a nervous longing. I walked the length of Vondelpark; beyond the far end of it, I stumbled upon a teeny bike shop. I took this as a sign and stepped inside. A row of ratty-looking, secondhand bikes, each sporting a handwritten price tag, stood along one wall. Straight away, I located the cheapest bike: a brown, single-speed Union-brand men’s model. It cost eighty Euros—roughly a hundred dollars at the time, which was double the most I’d ever previously spent on a bike before. Over the years, bikes had usually come into my possession as hand-me-downs or throwaways or as little unwanted street orphans in need of a home. But by nowI’d grown desperate to get in on the action. I needed a bike and this one appeared roadworthy; that was enough for me.

  The only other person in the shop was a mechanic who was busy replacing the brake pads on a ten-speed. “I’ll take this one,” I told him.

  The mechanic wiped his greasy hands on a rag, walked over and asked, “You don’t want to try it out first?”

  Too impatient to hit the streets, I answered, “No.”

  I quickly counted out the cash and handed it over.

  “Do you want a lock, too?” the mechanic asked.

  I patted my duffel bag and said, “I already have one.”

  “Just one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re going to lock it outside at night?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “In Amsterdam, you’re going to need more than one.”

  He went on to impress upon me the need to not only have both wheels locked but the frame should be locked to a fixed object. I took his advice and bought a second lock.

  Before leaving the shop, I mentioned to the mechanic that someone had slammed into me that morning and did my best to repeat the woman’s utterance. “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “You were walking in the bike lane?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He laughed and said, “She called you an asshole.”

  I walked the bike outside. The consensus color of the frame—drawing from the paint, rust and dirt—was brown so I wasted no time christening it “Brownie.” I threw one leg over the bike’s top tube; plopped my butt on the seat; placed my right foot on the right pedal. A couple of cyclists rode past. Then another rode past. Yet I didn’t move. My heart, I realized, was racing.

  I found myself too nervous to embark. I’d presumed that riding a bike in Amsterdam would come effortlessly. After all,I’d cycled in Los Angeles, New York and dozens of other cities in between, always riding as a second-class road-user on streets dominated by cars. But now, looking at these streets where bicycles ruled, I couldn’t help but be intimidated. The Dutch cyclists rode with such poise and confidence, I doubted I could fit in or avoid causing havoc.I didn’t really know where I was or even what some of the traffic signs meant. To help explain it all to me, I wished I’d had a guide—a person or a book.

  Travel guides to Amsterdam and Holland—particularly those published in the last half of the 1940s and through the 1950s—warned tourists of Dutch cyclists. “The visitor must [. . .] be careful of the countless cyclists whose agility and speed are stupefying,” cautioned one guidebook. Another counseled: “You’ll think the Lord has unloosed a plague of cycles upon Holland for some national sin.”

  For the tourist driving in Holland, a 1945 guide advised, “Don’t be frightened of [. . .] reckless cyclists.” A 1955 guidebook suggested, “You will need discipline in traffic, adroitness and a certain amount of courage [. . .] to thread your way through a host of bicyclists.” But more direct was a 1949 travel book’s recommendation for how motorists should handle biking Amsterdammers: “If you feel like cursing them, we hope you will manage to keep your temper.”

  Even taxi passengers received tips in a 1950 guide titled All the Best in Holland:

  Taxi drivers seem always able to weave an intricate pattern in and through the mad needling of bicycles. They plunge into seemingly impenetrable masses of them and, like the Red Sea before the wand of Moses, the cycles open up a miraculous path. Close your eyes. Don’t look. You’ll reach your destination safely, without leaving a trail of casualties.

  This same author also strongly advised pedestrians to “steer a straight course” at traffic intersections in order to cope with the cyclists. He explained:

  When walking on or across streets in Holland never halt or change your pace abruptly! This caution is of utmost importance, since disregard of it may cause a severe bump with some cyclist. Holland’s bike-pushers plot their swift and silent courses on the assumption that the pedestrian will keep going where he seems to be going, that he will not strike off at a sudden, whimsical tangent, that he will not stop in the middle of the street to see if he left his traveler’s checks back in the room.

  In 1959, one visitor to Amsterdam noted, “It is the daring ‘foreigner’ who would board a bicycle and attempt to keep pace with these Hollanders who weave in and out of traffic at ‘breaking-the-sound-barrier’ speeds.”

  Seated on my new bike, I went ahead and dared myself—and then took off.

  ##

  Brownie was lumbering and sluggish, a reluctant mule in need of prodding. (I wouldn’t discover all the oily sand packed into the enclosed chain guard until weeks later.) But after a hundred feet or so, he proved manageable. When I pedaled, his wheels turned; when I braked, he slowed. Since that was more than could be said of some bikes I’d owned, I was more than satisfied.

  Having no destination, Brownie and I simply started following the guy who happened to riding ahead of us in the bike lane. When he turned left, we also turned left. When he turned right, we did, too. And when absentminded tourists wandered onto the bike path, I followed my leader’s example by aggressively ringing my bell at them and muttered at them the first word in my Dutch biking vocabulary: “Klootzak.”

  All afternoon, Brownie and I rode in the summer sunshine. My confidence gradually grew, especially when I realized Brownie must have already logged thousands of hours on these streets. Along canals, over bridges, though alleys and parks, we obediently pursued one cyclist after another. That is, when we could keep up. When three ten-year-old boys left us in their dust, I blamed the weight of my duffel bag. When an elderly woman left us for dead, I blamed jet lag. Ultimately, though, I was forced to suppress any machismo and just admit that the tempo of many of the town’s cyclists was simply faster than my own pedaling lollygag. My pace never hindered my progress though, for each time one person pulled away, some other nearby laggard was on hand for me to trail instead.

  Slowly but surely, with each turn of the crank and with each new guide followed, I got into the groove of the city’s cycling rhythm.

  For some reason, many of these unwitting guides were women. And there were so many women—gorgeous beauties made even more beautiful because they were on bikes. Unlike bike riders in America—who so often ride hunched over their handlebars in a posture reminiscent of someone taking a dump—an English tourist noted in 1954: “The Amsterdammer sits upright on his bicycle as if he’s sitting in an uncomfortable chair at home. In a busy street filled with traffic, it’s as if all the cyclists are paying each other a visit, yet they’re riding.” These Amsterdam women were riding so tall in the saddle, regally atop their thrones, that the tips of their toes were barely able to graze the ground.

  Without a doubt, on this lone July afternoon in Amsterdam, I saw more stunning women on bicycles than I had in my entire 35 years in the United States. Some women were riding in long skirts hiked up to their knees. Others were riding in short skirts hiked up on their thighs. And a few rode in miniskirts hiked up so unbelievably far, one couldn’t justify calling them skirts.

  Dutifully, I gaped at them while not knowing my reaction was actually rather customary among American males. Almost a century earlier, in 1911, an American visitor to Amsterdam had noted: “Perhaps it will be thought that I am going too far in my investigation, but the Dutch ladies ride bicycles so generally that even a man from America can see a few thin
gs, no matter how hard he tries to look the other way and comes near getting run over.” A Yank in Amsterdam in 1929 noted: “There seem to be as many of the fair sex riding as there are men, and they wear short skirts—as short as they wear them anywhere—so it is a real sight to watch the bicycle parade.”

  In 1965, a 50-year-old American marriage counselor, after spending time in the Netherlands, noted, “Nowhere else in the world have I seen so many women and girls with such shapely, truly feminine legs as in Holland. And the Dutch know that. They like to show their legs. It’s due to the bikes. Massage can do a lot, but cycling makes the leg just perfect.”

  A New Yorker wrote in 1972 of his experience visiting Amsterdam: “At first you cannot refrain from looking out of the corners of your eyes at the rounded knees and shapely legs of those blond goddesses who quickly pedal past you, as though galloping on a winged Pegasus. Soon, however, the superabundance of thighs exposed by the breeze immunizes you to their effect.”

  But here in my first hours in the city, I wasn’t yet immunized. One American who might have been, though, was Walter H. Waggoner, the 39-year-old Holland bureau chief for The New York Times, who, in 1957, wrote:

  The foreigner [. . .] mayhave a picture of rain-soaked, frost-bitten squinting faces under a tangle of wind-whipped hair. This contributes to a notion abroad that Dutch girls are what one American resident has described as “not very appetizing.”

  The description is untrue. They just do not look appetizing, because they always are fighting the weather on their bicycles in a way that produces, on the most comely, the leathery, the buffeted look of a veteran sea captain.

  If these were sea captains I was seeing, then I was ready to sign up and ship out.

  The sight of all these beauties on bikes made me eager to see among them my own belle, Amy Joy. Now I was already picturing her in Amsterdam riding in her flowery orange dress or in her flowery green dress or in her black polka dot dress. Really, though, it wouldn’t matter what she wore. In America, she’d always been ravishing on a bike. In Amsterdam, she’d be nothing less than a goddess.