Introduction
From a dark closet in Saint Paul, Minnesota, this is “Don’t Remember Me Like This.” I’m Nathaniel Barber. Don’t Remember Me Like This is a homemade, nonfiction podcast and diary thing. This week I’m reading part one of another two-part story about a very long bicycle ride told in sixteen chapters titled, Allez, Américain. Enjoy.
Leaving
In a misguided attempt to avoid the airline’s prohibitive fees for bike boxes, I decided against packing my bike the normal way.
To compensate for the robust protection a standard and more sensible container would have afforded—and also because Barbers (the males in particular) are prone to over-engineering unnecessary solutions to imaginary problems—I went overboard on wrapping the bike and its wheels in scaffolding constructed of many layers of foam tubing and heavy duty plastic.
It had taken an entire night and four beers to create what appeared to be a bike that had fallen prey to a giant spider and spat out as a tightly wound cocoon. Meanwhile, arguably the most important articles such as clothes, toiletries, and travel documents—I was rushing to slap together in a fevered afterthought. I was still packing just as Jaclyn arrived to drive me to the airport.
At this point, Jaclyn and I had only been dating a short while. We’d already broken up and gotten back together several times. In spite of getting off to a rocky start, our relationship was currently in another on-again phase and we were just beginning to enjoy some semblance of stability.
Although now, after clapping eyes on this chaotic scene Jaclyn's expression betrayed more than a hint of subdued trepidation.
Admittedly, it was not my most elegant hour. In what had been a frenzied, sleepless night of wrapping and re-wrapping my bicycle, I transformed what used to be my living room into a gamey dungeon, heavy with hot breath, strewn about with shreds of packing plastic and the panicked scatter of a rapidly approaching international flight. There were chickens and a couple goats. Papers and feathers were flying everywhere.
Later, Jaclyn would admit this sad spectacle was a huge red flag.
As I rushed to finish packing, I could sense the aura of alarm radiating from Jaclyn. Perhaps sensibly she was realizing she'd thrown-in her lot with an insane person. Rather than attempt an explanation and risk exacerbating the situation, I said nothing and finished packing.
Lucky for me she drove me to the airport as scheduled. At the airport I apologized again and we exchanged cautious pleasantries before parting. I imagine once she completed her task of depositing me at departures, Jaclyn would drive herself home and commit herself to constructively use our time apart to give the practicality of our relationship a good hard think.
The clerk who checked me in for my flight was vocally skeptical the weight and dimensions of my weird cocoon was within the limits of a checked bag. They said, with swagger even, that most certainly it would have to be checked as a bicycle for an extra $100. I assured the clerk I'd measured and weighed the blob several times, and invited them to do the same.
"He ain't pretty," I assured the clerk. "But he'll fit."
As if they were trying to save me from a huge embarrassment by calling my bluff, reluctantly, the clerk took out their measuring tape. They held it up as if to say, "Last chance to change your mind."
I urged them, "Go on. It's just shy of 100 linear inches and well below 50 pounds."
Shaking their head and scoffing, the clerk dramatically stretched the measuring tape over the longest, widest and thickest dimensions of the package. They slowly typed the measurements into a calculator. Then they measured again, adding the numbers again, slowly.
The clerk was puzzled, like the numbers weren’t adding up correctly. They seemed poised to measure the package again, certain they could find a dimension that'd put the overall length over the 100 inch threshold.
Impatiently I assured them, "It fits!"
The clerk seemed shocked at my impatience. They shot back, correcting me, "Barely. It barely fits." And they picked up my bike and ungently dumped it on the conveyor belt behind them. With a heavy heart, I observed as my beloved bicycle vanished around the corner and headed toward unknown horrors beyond the check-in counters.
Arriving
Apparently, the airline workers who encountered the mummy-cycle must have seen its bloated wrappings as commentary on their inability to properly handle fragile luggage. At the very least the package seemed to have presented them with a challenge they seemed happy to accept. I can only speculate about the motives of the cruel brigade between Portland and Amsterdam. But they’d given my poor bike one hell of a ride.
The bike with which I was reunited at the Schiphol baggage claim was not the same bike I’d sent off. This bike had seen things.
The plastic was scraped and torn in several places. Mysteriously, one side was caked with mud and dotted with puncture wounds. On the other side of the package were corresponding exit wounds. Various limbs and appendages of the bike jutted out from the wrapping. The paint on those limbs had been scraped down to deeply scored steel.
The only rational explanation: the bike never saw the inside of the plane. Likely, it had been tethered to the tail of the plane. Then, as it was dragged across the friendly skies, used for target practice.
I'd flown to Amsterdam with two friends. We took the train from Schiphol airport to our hostel. On the train, I attempted to act like a normal person, cradling the smoldering wreckage of my bike.
I opened the package at our hostel and discovered the rear dropouts (the semi-horizontal ruts where the axles of the rear wheel would nestle) had been crushed shut. In Portland, I’d mounted dummy axles to the dropouts to protect them from this very thing. But whatever crushed the bike did so with enough force the dropouts chomped right through the hard plastic axles and shattered them to bits.
Thankfully, the bike (a 2001 Lemond Buenos Aires) was steel. Had it been aluminum or carbon fiber it would have been a goner. But steel could be repaired with a bench-mount vice, any simple doo-dad or lever, and a bit of elbow grease. While I was not excited about the damage my bike had suffered, I was thankful it could be repaired so easily. It just added what I assumed would be "a quick errand" to the one free day I’d planned to be a relaxing day of walking around Amsterdam sightseeing with friends.
Afterall, this was Amsterdam: city of bikes. The place is literally lousy with bikes, bicyclists, and the bike shops that serve them.
I remember thinking—This will be a cinch!
Repairs
I left early the next morning, with my bike frame slung top-tube over my shoulder, in search of a bike shop that would repair my rear dropouts. My friend Scott agreed to join me for the walk—a decision he is possibly still regretting to this day.
In the first shop, the mechanic took one look at the Lemond and said flatly "No."
I was a little stunned, "Wait.” I said. “What? Why?"
He said, in his regal Dutch accent, "No racebikes here. Only city bikes."
He pointed to the rows of the giant, sluggish bikes ubiquitous to Amsterdam: stadsfietsen, or "city bikes." More accurately, they are referred to as "omafiets" and "opafiets,” or grandma bikes and grandpa bikes. Back home, these were called BSOs—bicycle shaped objects—a goddamned slow brontosaurus notorious for plugging a bike lane as efficiently as a zamboni would clog an interstate highway.
We must have visited every bike shop in the city. Our experience was pretty much the same across the board. All the Dutch mechanics we visited that day were so friendly and informed me so politely I could take my little racebike and go to a kind of hell.
I'd never heard my road bike referred to as a "race bike." Surely they were confused. It seemed implausible either my bike or I could be confused for "racey."
Scott and I spent the whole day looking for help from the bicycle shops of Amsterdam, and we found nothing. During our visit with the last mechanic of the day, I was desperate. Again, the mechanic said, "no."
I decided to push back.
I was not unaware, as an American, I was preceded by an infamous American stereotype: that of pushy loudmouths and mannerless, entitled brutes who insist on paying with American dollars and who believe the key to overcoming any language barrier is to speak louder. So I tempered my response to the mechanic with humility.
I conceded the obvious differences between my bicycle and the stadsfietsens in his shop. I also urged him, in so many words, to consider a wrencher’s passion for massaging mangled steel back into shape as an international passion that transcends borders and industry snobbery and should be celebrated and shared between all the people of the world—like in the Coke commercials.
To my surprise, the mechanic happily agreed. He assured me, not only was he adept at repairing bicycles, he was passionate about his work. On this, we shared a brief moment of camaraderie. It was only brief, however. Before he circled back around and, with just as much enthusiasm, doubled-down on his singular medium which, again, was a very specific kind of bicycle: not mine.
To hear him compare my rinky dink road bike to a behemoth stadsfietsen, you would think I’d brought him a helicopter for an overhaul.
Leverage
After a humbling, unfruitful slog crisscrossing Amsterdam with my bike on my bruised shoulders, Scott and I returned to our hostel. At our hostel, there was a man standing behind the front desk clicking away at a computer. I asked him, “Hello! Do you by chance have a standard screwdriver, or tools?”
He politely corrected me, “I am not a concierge.”
“I see,” I said. “Do you work here?”
The man said, “Yes.”
“Right,” I said. “So do you guys have any tools?”
I temporarily exchanged my passport as collateral for a standard screwdriver with a long-handle, which seemed like a severe trade, but I didn’t argue. (Everyone in the hospitality industry deserves the benefit of the doubt.)
The screwdriver would make a fine lever. I just needed a fulcrum.
Out back, behind the hostel was a small courtyard. In the courtyard was a group of internationals smoking and drinking tallboys. I suppose I offered quite the spectacle since they all stopped talking and decided to intently observe whatever I was cooking up with my bike and the screwdriver.
I offered a polite greeting that was not returned. I offered humor. I said, “It’s probably better if you don’t watch this next part.”
Silence. I concluded they must be Russians.
They continued to watch, rapt as I set my bicycle aside and used the screwdriver to exhume a large rock from the overgrown courtyard. With the crude arrangement of the screwdriver and the rock and all my weight to brace the bicycle, I managed to pry open and realign the dropouts myself.
The small group was, I thought, excessively fascinated by this little scene that’d derailed their little party. Eyeballing the dropouts, I announced triumphantly “SUCCESS!” The men just stood there, holding scowls like a rock band posing for a promo shot. My little performance seemed to have confirmed some sinister prejudice about American travelers. Though, whatever preconception I may have verified is anyone’s guess.
Optimism
In spite of this fiasco, I was determined not to allow it to dash my hopefulness for the coming bike trip—the journey ahead was daunting enough.
The remaining plan was this: Early in the morning, I would temporarily part ways with my friends Scott and Elizabeth. We were all ultimately headed for Zurich, Switzerland where our return flight was scheduled to depart in ten days. While I’d chosen to ride my bike, Scott and Elizabeth would take a much more sensible route to Switzerland by train, stopping in various cities and sightseeing along the way. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, we’d planned to hopscotch from town to town, meeting up in cities along the main route.
At least, that was the plan.
Problem is, while I love bicycling—I’ve never been a very good bicyclist. I’ve never been an exceptional navigator beyond picking a direction and following my nose. The frenzied, sleepless night before my flight was a testament to my talents for preparations. And years of cycling on a modest budget made me over-reliant on retrofitted, but more often jury-rigged equipment.
I was counting on plenty of good luck. In the absence of luck, I was counting on my ability to weather miserable conditions. And in the absence of heartiness I could always rely on my distaste for complainers to at least keep my stupid mouth shut and avoid driving myself nuts.
Armed thusly, I would play it by ear and follow my intuition, sleeping in ditches or fields, or anywhere else I could avoid detection since I hadn’t reserved much less researched any accommodations along a haphazardly planned route. I had no tent or sleeping bag, since both would have been overly cumbersome for a lean tour. For sleeping I’d brought only a bivouac—a paper-thin body-size nylon slip. On the upside, the bivouac was water resistant and could fit into a coffee mug. On the downside, it offered as much comfort and protection as lingerie.
For all the weight and bulk I saved foregoing practical accoutrements, such as food and a proper sleeping apparatus, I happily replaced with a thick and heavy collection of French and German vocabulary and phrase books, a collection of rocks, a thesaurus, a Cuisinart bread mixer and a variety of Michelin maps which, when deployed in the field, could capture even a limp breeze like a majestic sail.
The short run from Amsterdam to Brussels was supposed to be short. By Google’s estimations, it would take just over 11 hours. As a heads-down cyclist, I was secretly hoping to knock an hour or two off that estimate. In Brussels, I’d planned ahead to catch up with my friends in a hotel where I could rest, and regroup. I’d also planned to rendezvous with my dear friend Jerome who’d agreed to drive from Paris to meet me.
I snuck out of the hostel early in the morning, creaking my way downstairs and in the crispy fog of pre-dawn Amsterdam. I pointed my bike south and threw a leg over the saddle. I only made it a block or so before my first mechanical breakdown.
Setbacks
Some technical specifications about my bicycle: There were no eyelets for racks or even fenders on either the front fork or the rear seat stays. This lack of carrying capacity was, I thought, not a dealbreaker. Lack of mounts was easily solved with a lightweight commuter rack that mounted to the bike at three points: two through the quick-release axle of the rear wheel and one mount on the seat stay bridge for the rear caliper brake.
The quick-release axle mount was convenient except in the event of a flat tire in which case the whole arrangement would need to be dismantled to remove and repair the rear wheel. While fixing a rear flat created was a hot mess of a roadside yard sale, at least it was workable. But the third mount at the top of the cargo rack, attached at the center brake bolt, had a crucial design flaw.
The brake bolt was a small hoobajoob designed to clamp only a rear caliper brake to the bridge between the seat stays, just below the seat. For a rack, only one upper mount was useful as long as there was not too much side-to-side thrashing about or mounted with anything heavier than a handkerchief, or a cupcake. Anything heavier and mounted to one side—such as the aforementioned useless books and other nicknacks—would throw the weight with every bump in the road, pulling the rack askew into the rear wheel.
Believe it or not, I’d tested this arrangement on the terrible streets of downtown Portland. I thought I’d worked out all the kinks.
Several malfunctions with the rack led to a roadside redesign of my rear load. First, I created a makeshift bag slung over the other side of the rack to center the weight. That lasted for a while. Eventually, however, I got overly confident and jumped a curb, throwing the rack again into the rear wheel, hard this time and burning the tire from friction. And so it was, on the very first leg of my route, I purged almost all the weight in my rear pannier—abandoning the many books I’d brought at a bus stop for some passerby who may want to bone up on their French or German or read about four year old restaurant recommendations from Rick Steves.
The rear rack was now loaded with a quarter of its previous weight, which was also top loaded and more stable. The reduced weight was immediately exhilarating even if I’d lost precious daylight hours fiddling with multiple breakdowns, but I was soon making much better time skimming across the friendly, smooth paths of the Dutch lowlands and canals in the balmy afternoon air that smelled of cut grass, pulverized gravel, and marsh.
As I bicycled into the evening, the warm autumn light rapidly turned heavy and thick in a gray and frosty fog. Far off in the distance, I could hear a thrumming beat, huge and steady and getting closer, filling the night air. As I rode the beat grew louder still, shaking my guts and rattling my teeth as I followed the bike path past fields packed in with hundreds of neatly parked cars. Around a bend the source of the music was eventually revealed: a long complex like a massive barn or warehouse shaking itself to pieces.
Suddenly, at the end of the warehouse closest to me, a corrugated metal door flung open. A man wearing only a mask and a thong stumbled out, he rushed to the bushes just yards from where I was standing and took a long, heaving barf. Two women fell outside the door after him. They were laughing hysterically and calling for the man as he stumbled from the bushes. He was marvelously backlit by an explosion of light and lasers escaping from the warehouse. In the cool night air, steam licked off his wet body in great curling plumes.
He held up his hand and burped, “Je suis là!”
I knew I was heading south, or so I thought. Late at night I was not as good at orienting myself. South became a flimsy idea, a hunch. The miles were passing quickly but came with the cringy feeling I was progressively heading east and, at times, even north. Often I had no choice but to follow the direction of the road I was taking which always seemed to curve in a direction I didn’t want to go. I’d change course when another road or path presented itself. And I’d follow that route until it too inevitably wound itself off course in another direction.
At one point, the road I was riding for miles turned into a street, which narrowed steadily into a path, and then a gravel path, and then a foot trail that came to a dead end in the middle of farmland. Just beyond one of the fields, I could see a busy road, heading in the direction I thought I wanted to go. The idea of going back the way I’d come for several miles and search for another route seemed untenable. So I picked up my bike and marched across a half mile of farmland in the dead of night.
When I finally reached the highway, I stopped to look at my map in the windy darkness. As I opened the map the gushing wind poofed it open like a parachute. The map tore loose and floated gracefully across the freeway, skittering across the muddy field from which I’d just emerged.
I must have been a sight for the passing traffic—a jackass in the night—hurdling furrows in bike shoes after a map. Finally, I caught the map and stuffed the muddied and crumpled wad back into my bag.
There’s just no way to properly re-fold a map that’s had a taste of freedom.
I was finally back on course, but there was something familiar about this road. I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then I passed a sign welcoming me to Breda, Netherlands, for the second time. I’d passed that same sign hours earlier and apparently, biked in a long loop back to the sign.
I rarely ride with other cyclists, which can be lonely at times. But it was moments like this I was especially grateful to be alone, to have an ugly, childish, full-blown hysterical meltdown on the side of the road without anyone an audience, aside from the passing motorists who slowed some to catch a hysterical American kicking rocks in the dark.
Here I’d managed to squander an unforgivable amount of time, on the brink of complete exhaustion, in the middle of the night, in a foreign land with no wifi. As a final insult, the check-in time at my hotel in Brussels had long since passed. So I’d managed to squander the money I spent on my room as well.
To be certain, I had made many mistakes in my life. But at the time, nothing seemed to come close to this. Eventually though, under the sign welcoming me to Breda (again) I wore myself down, clicking around my roadside conniption fit in bike shoes. (There just isn’t any good way to be angry when you’re wearing bike shoes.) Eventually there was nothing left to do but put my shirt back on and get back on my bike.
Food
Around three in the morning, in the northernmost suburbs of Brussels, I passed a restaurant which was open, amazingly, in spite of the hour. I was beyond starving.
I leaned my bike outside, and tentatively opened the door to what seemed like an infinite palace of glittering lights. The floor was made of mirrors. The ceiling was also made of panels of mirrors. The mirrored walls were fashioned with neon signs and lights flashing from every direction. Oddly, there was no music, only the hum of heaters and the flickering buzz from the lights.
I asked, “êtes-vous ouvert?”
The surly man behind the counter put down his newspaper and said, “Bien sûr!”
They served only french fries. But what their menu lacked in diversity, they made up for with every condiment imaginable. They had mayonnaise, curry mayo, ketchup, tex-mex sauce (whatever that was), mustard, mustard mayo, curried mustard mayo, Korean sauce, jerk sauce, hot sauce and on and on.
I ordered a large french fry with curried mayonnaise and, what the hell, extra hot sauce.
Moments later, the man delivered a large cone of fresh hot french fries wrapped in a sheet of the very newspaper he’d just been reading. Atop the cone was a steaming lake of sauce, possibly inches thick. I took a seat and, as the man at the counter and a group of kids in a corner of the shop watched closely, I plunged my fingers into the sauce searching for french fries below the surface.
Finally, I made contact, and rescued a clutch of fries from the lake of spicy mayonnaise. The fries were blessedly crunchy, salty, and faintly sweet, bursting with the intoxicating tang of coriander, turmeric, cumin, and chili powder balanced in a smooth, creamy mayonnaise.
I am not a religious man, but the experience that night, cradling an infant-sized cone of french fries came pretty close. Again, I seemed to be making a spectacle of myself. Even though the early morning was bitter cold, I stepped outside to continue my messy conversation with God until every last fry, every last drop of that heavenly sauce was wiped clean from yesterday’s news.
Sleep
The manner in which I arrived in Brussels after nineteen dreary hours on the road was similar to how one might fall to earth from the stratosphere and come to a skidding stop. 4am is no time to arrive in any city. And that is especially true for European cities that fastidiously maintain old world hours. That early, the hotel at which I’d reserved a bed was still closed, as was the entire capital of the European Union. Brussels was a ghost town with only stray dogs and soccer hooligans hungrily roaming the streets.
Frozen stiff and half-crazy with exhaustion, I biked around the downtown killing time in search of anyone who would sell me food or cyanide chewables.
Spinning around the empty city after so many hours without sleep, my mind began to wander into unhelpful territory: what if life was just people cutting a swath of destruction through the world and racking up compounding offenses? What if the only point in life would be having enough sense to, before we die, circle back and apologize to everyone and anything who’d been caught up in our sorry wake? Is time even real?
When it was finally a reasonable hour, I sent a message to Jerome. As agreed, he was waiting for me at the hotel. He’d arrived the night before expecting I’d be there to meet him and was probably wondering if I was going to show up at all. Thankfully, he’d parked just out front the hotel and was sleeping in his van. I knocked on the van door. There was a rumbling inside. Jerome, who was likely hoping to sleep for at least a few more hours, opened the back door, blinking into the morning light.
He said, “Nate?”
I said, "I’m sorry it’s so early."
Jerome said, "What? Why?"
"I need to sleep. Now."
Jerome nodded knowingly. He said, "Yes, me too. Here, come."
I locked my bike to a peg outside, crawled in the back of the van with Jerome and slept deeply until late in the morning.
Scott, Elizabeth, Jerome and I spent a lovely day wandering around Brussels without an itinerary. Over several beers I tried to unwind the wonderful, horrible odyssey from the night before. And as I recalled the delirious journey, I couldn’t help but notice a strikingly similar anecdote from a couple summers earlier when I was riding my bike from Seattle to Portland in an organized group ride called the STP.
I was standing in the line for refreshments at one of the rest stops when I noticed the man standing next to me was looking at me. He was looking at me and waiting, the way you do when you’re begging someone to initiate a conversation.
I told Scott, Elizabeth and Jerome how I offered the man a polite “Hello.”
I tried to summarize his smug reply. Bragging he said, “Yeah. I’m doing this ride fixed.”
Jerome seemed puzzled, “Fixed? What is this, fixed?”
As I knew it, fixed meant fixed gear, like a track bicycle. No brakes. No freewheel. Always pedaling. I also enjoyed riding a single-speed as well. But it was much more strenuous on my legs—a setup I’d only ride for short local distances, not for over two hundred miles in one day during the height of summer.
I was supposed to be impressed that the man was doing the STP fixed. Instead, I was embarrassed for him. He’d chosen to make an already incredibly difficult ride even more arduous by selecting a bike with a geometry and gear ratio that was designed for very different conditions. But it wasn’t just about the extra challenge. From what I could tell, I was probably one of several people to whom he delivered his overly practiced line, “Yeah, I’m riding fixed.”
The parallel seemed conspicuous and embarrassing: that I’d chosen to ride a bicycle nearly a thousand kilometers when my friends made the much more sensible decision to travel by train.
Thankfully, Scott broke the awkward silence. He raised his beer and said, “Here’s to finishing alive, however you choose to get there.”
As we clinked our pints together, I offered a joke: “Hey,” I said. “Out of a lineup of bicyclists, how can you tell which ones ride fixed?” They took sips of beer, shrugging. I said, “Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.”
Early the next morning, reeling with a hangover, I tiptoed around our hotel room gathering my clothes and bags. I woke up Scott and Elizabeth to apologize for waking them up. We shook hands and briefly discussed the logistics for our next meeting in Luxembourg—a rendezvous which everyone but me seemed to know I was not going to make.
Outro
Thank you for joining me for this episode of “Don’t Remember Me Like This.” Again, this is part one of a story told in two parts. Tune in two Sundays from now for the exciting conclusion of Allez, Américain in which I get hopelessly lost, found, and spat out the other end of this bicycling odyssey a little wiser, hungrier, and gamier.
All episodes of Don’t Remember Me Like This are penned, performed, produced, and published by me (for better or worse). Thanks again to Jaclyn Barber for proofing the content before recording, and checking the recording before publication.
If you’d like to learn more about me and my work visit me at nathanielbarber.com where you can enjoy more stories and essays, peruse my galleries of photography, or pick up a copy of my book, Luck Favors the Prepared. I highly recommend supporting this podcast, which can be as easy as telling a friend or an enemy about Don’t Remember Me Like This, and giving it the thumbs up wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to support the podcast further, you can join as an exclusive member at Patreon where you can find me by searching Nathaniel Barber. In addition to your generous support, your membership comes with an assortment of hot gifts and cool prizes. Thank you for listening. Until next time remember, please, don’t remember me like this.
