Ode to a Blue Bike

“Life is like riding a bicycle,” Einstein once wrote to his younger son, Eduard, a brilliant but troubled student who would soon be hospitalized for schizophrenia, “You have to keep moving or you lose your balance.”

As I pedal my blue Motobecane along the bike paths of the Pioneer Valley during the lengthening days of May, I ponder Einstein’s words, which have been much quoted by biographers and bloggers. Not that they helped poor Eduard, nicknamed Tete, by his doting mother, Mileva Maric, from whom the physicist was divorced in 1919. Einstein hated being separated from his two boys and visited them on holidays (he was teaching in Berlin and they lived with their mother in Zurich), but their day-to-day care fell to Mileva, who suffered from depression herself. The older son, Hans Albert, would become an engineer and follow his father to the United States, but Tete would not be so lucky. In 1932, the 22-year-old abandoned his studies—he had hoped to become a psychiatrist—and entered Burgholzi, a fin-de-siecle, palace-like pile on a wooded hill in southeastern Zurich, where some of the most celebrated psychiatrists of the age were gathered, including Carl Jung, who worked briefly as the assistant to Director Eugen Bleuler, who first coined the term schizophrenia. But all these brilliant practitioners were like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men who couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. Eduard Einstein would return to the Zurich sanitarium many times over the next decades, residing there full time after the death of his mother in 1948. He died at Burgholzi at the age of 55, his life over before it had ever really begun.

I can only imagine the singular hell of schizophrenia—the world fractured and distorted as if one were stuck inside a Surrealist painting, voices yelling in the head like a violent rap song one can never turn off. But I know the immobility of depression, and I know it’s almost impossible to feel sad pumping along a bike path, skunk cabbage growing in velvety profusion in the marshes, long-tailed squirrels and the occasional rabbit hurrying into the bushes.

My blue Motobecane is very old, and I have known it longer than either of my two husbands. My first husband, Len, bought it for me in a bike shop on Martha’s Vineyard during one summer we spent there in 1978. We got it at R.W. Cutler’s in Edgartown, and I remember this only because a gold sticker with the shop logo, two silhouetted figures on a tandem bicycle, is still miraculously affixed to a lower corner of the frame near the rear derailleur.

Len loved France and all things French (I can still hear him singing La Marseillaise as he plunged into the cold waters of Menemsha Sound). He convinced me to get the Motobecane, which had Made in France in block letters along the down tube, Mirage in fancy script on both sides of the crossbar, and the red, white and black Motobecane shield beneath the front reflector. Len said that the French were particular about anything mechanical—they were the ones who invented the bicycle and they also developed the first high-speed trains in Europe; I couldn’t go wrong with the Motobecane. I would have been happy with a cheaper Japanese model (I was and am still a thrifty Yankee who hates to pay top dollar for anything), but Len was the archetypal Jewish mensch who wanted only the best for his shiksa. Nothing but this stylish French Mirage with its low slung handlebars, skinny tires, and light-as-a-branch steel frame would do for his Beckala.

I suppose there must have been other colors—silver, red or orange--but I chose the metallic blue because even then I loved all things blue. The paint is now faded and scarred with rust, but three decades ago it was a lovely, cerulean blue with darker blue bands around its down tube, a dark blue brake cable running along the crossbar. The bike with its sparkle and flashes of navy reminded me of a certain vista that you could see from almost anywhere along Menemsha Beach or the Gay Head Cliffs: Vineyard Sound with the darkish shapes of the Elizabeth Islands in the distance, a wrap-around landscape of sea and sky, miles and miles of blue and deeper blue, so dazzling that on a sunny, summer day, you couldn’t look at it without sunglasses or, if you had none, without holding your hand over your forehead, couldn’t look without feeling dizzy with so much blueness.

Martha’s Vineyard is a biker’s paradise—much of the island from Vineyard Haven to Oak Bluffs to Edgartown is flat as a skipping stone with hillier terrain up island towards Chilmark. But once the metallic blue touring bike was mine, I rarely rode it—not at Martha’s Vineyard, not in New York City, not in Westchester County or in Fairfield County, where we lived after we married in 1981. The bike gathered dust in an upstairs back bedroom of our farmhouse in Bedford Hills, in the garage of our cape in Redding, Connecticut, its chain in need of grease, its tires in need of air. If anyone had asked, I would have said that I didn’t want to ride alone (Len couldn’t ride a bike, owing to a mastoid operation he’d had as a child, which caused occasional balance problems), would have said that I was too busy. I wouldn’t have said I didn’t ride because I was depressed, because I didn’t get that there was a connection between the two events: that if I had been less depressed I would have ridden the bike more and if I had ridden the bike more I would have been less depressed.

After Len died, I detached the spring-loaded front wheel of the Motobecane Mirage and boxed it up with the rest of the bike in a Bridgeport, Connecticut warehouse. Meanwhile, I struggled to find my way as a young widow, moving first to the Midwest to try to make a life with a man, and when that didn’t work out, down to Washington, D.C. for a graduate degree. When I married for the second time and moved to Vermont, the bike finally emerged from storage, red stickers dangling from its rusting chrome pedals. But I still didn’t take it out much, this time blaming the steep hills of the Green Mountains. It would be too simplistic to say that there was a one-to-one correspondence between the force field of my depression and the amount of time I spent on the Mirage, but what I did notice was this: whenever I got into a routine of riding the blue bike, in the morning before work or occasionally in the evening after dinner, singing to myself that silly ditty by Arlo Guthrie, “I don’t want a pickle/just want to ride on my motor-cy-cle…I don’t want to die, just want to ride on my motor-cy-cle,” something shifted. My body, perhaps because two perfectly constructed French derailleurs were levitating it, felt lighter, less burdened with the negativity that shuts down most depressives (you’re fat, you’re old, you’re a loser, you’re a nobody).

Three years ago, when my family and I moved to the Pioneer Valley so our son could attend the Hartsbrook School, the Motobecane got wedged into the back of the U-Haul with sofas and suitcases. We rented a duplex just half a mile from the Norwottock Rail Trail, and pretty soon I was taking mini-excursions to Whole Foods, Barnes & Noble, even to the Cineplex, proud to be saving money on gas as well as doing my bit to reduce global warming. Along with other bike riders, I grumbled about the bits of recycled glass that were mixed in with the blacktop when the trail was created in 1993 (you didn’t have to be an Einstein to figure out that this was not a good idea). That first year, I got five flat tires. But then Dorothy at the local bike shop on Railroad Street suggested I invest in heavier tires: I took her advice, and haven’t had a flat since. I’ve also found other ways to make the bike more user-friendly, adding a cup-holder, rear-view mirror and a wire basket attached to an aluminum frame over the rear wheel.

There’s a black-and-white photo of Einstein riding his bicycle that can be found on many blogs and websites: It was taken in 1933 in Pasadena, California, when Einstein was a visiting research associate at Caltech. The world-famous scientist is dressed up in tie, sweater vest, tailored pants, and fresh-shined dress shoes. He looks like he is preparing to deliver a lecture on quantum theory. He has no helmet (people didn’t wear protective headgear back then), and his mane of white hair is windblown. The 54-year-old genius, who once confided that he never really grew up, is grinning like a kindergartener. He’s smiling even though he is worried about many things over which he has no control: his boy, Tete, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia; the Nazis, who have been firing Jews from universities and burning books, screaming that relativity theory is rubbish; his summer home outside of Berlin, to which he will not return.

The force field around Albert Einstein is dark and full of black holes, and yet he himself remains a conduit of shining, cerulean-blue California light. Einstein keeps pedaling because he still can, because he knows that if he stops, even for a second, he will fall.