There is a hill on Waverly Road that I have hated since 2009. It is not a famous hill. It has no name, no gradient sign, no Strava segment worth bragging about. It is simply four hundred yards of quiet suburban malice between my house and everything else — the hardware store, the good coffee, the office I used to bike to exactly twice a year, arriving both times as a different, damper man who needed twenty minutes and a change of shirt before he could be spoken to.
The hill is why the bicycle in my garage spent fifteen years as a sculpture. Every spring I would air the tires with real intention, ride to the bottom of Waverly, and remember.
Full lycra has opinions
The e-bike test ride took eleven minutes. The salesman pointed me at the steepest street behind the shop and said, “Come back when you’re smiling.” The motor does not carry you — you still pedal, your legs still work — it simply deletes the hill from the map. The grade stays; the argument goes. I crested the test climb breathing like a man reading a newspaper and bought the bike that afternoon, panniers included, the way you buy shoes you have already worn out of the store.
Word got around, as it does. At a barbecue in July, a man in our neighborhood who rides four thousand miles a year — full lycra, shoes that click, forearms like rigging — looked at my bike in the driveway and delivered the verdict of his people: “You know that’s cheating.”
Yes. Obviously. That is the entire product. I said so, and agreed with him so quickly and so completely that the conversation had nowhere to go. He stood there in his sunglasses recalibrating while I explained that I am not training for anything. I am going to the hardware store.
It is cheating. So is the dishwasher.
The errand economy
Here is the arithmetic nobody at the barbecue wanted: nine out of ten trips I make in a car are under three miles. The pharmacy. The library. The bagels. For thirty years I performed these errands inside two tons of climate-controlled steel, circling for parking like a satellite in decaying orbit. The e-bike does all of them faster, door to door, because the parking spot is wherever I stop. Groceries fit in the panniers — two full bags and a baguette lying across the top like a passenger who trusts me.
The revelation is not the speed. It is arriving as yourself. No shower, no damp shirt, no twenty-minute recovery. I ride in the clothes I plan to wear, at a heart rate suitable for a man carrying eggs, and the motor absorbs everything Waverly has to say about it. The battery slides out and charges on the kitchen counter like a loaf of bread. I have looked for the catch for a year now. The catch is that your neighbors will call it cheating, and you will have to bear that with all the dignity of a man who is home already.
What the odometer says
In March we sold the second car. This was not an ideology; it was an audit. The sedan was leaving the driveway four times a week, mostly to travel distances a healthy adult could cover on a skateboard, and it cost us about four thousand dollars a year in insurance, registration, and the slow rot that happens to machines that mostly sit. The e-bike replaced ninety percent of its trips for the price of one quarter’s insurance. For the other ten percent — winter, airports, lumber — we have the remaining car, like normal people.
And here is the part I hold in reserve for the lycra men, though the occasion has not yet presented itself: the odometer. I rode eleven hundred miles last year. Not training miles — bagel miles, library miles, miles with a baguette aboard. Eleven hundred miles I would otherwise have driven. The cheating bicycle has made me, by any honest count, the most consistent cyclist on this street.
The hill on Waverly is still there. It just doesn’t know I am.
