Walden Ponderings: Mark Cramer’s “If Thoreau Had a Bicycle” Pedals Toward Personal and Planetary Health
Roger LeBlanc, author of Five Against the Vig
What’s tougher: using multiple gears to pedal up a long, steep hill or shifting storyteller roles from athlete to travel guide to philosopher? Mark Cramer’s fascinating new book, If Thoreau Had a Bicycle: The Art of the Ride, makes both challenges seem easy and desirable.
Using Henry David Thoreau’s book Walking as inspiration, Cramer sets off on a bicycle adventure unique in its destination and perspective. His book is the rare travel guide that recommends avoiding tourist attractions, boycotting comfy transportation and resisting prolific spending. But like Thoreau’s work, the “art of the ride” transcends ascetism. Cramer engages the reader sensually, expanding rather than narrowing our awareness and appreciation of time and place.
The time for 77-year-old Cramer is a 39-day period after recovering from surgery. The place is Paris and its suburbs. The ride is a multispoked exploration from his home in Clichy to pockets of nature that have escaped or reclaimed commercial and residential sprawl.
With Cramer as guide, each day trip becomes a sweet or savory slice of local culture and a mental centering on the experiences at hand. Sometimes the focus is on appreciating a hard-earned ice cream. Sometimes it’s examining the effect history had in shaping a town’s atmosphere (literally and figuratively).
Repeatedly, Cramer wheels us off prescribed pathways, occasionally into no-go zones and almost always to a wilder place. I’m reminded of a line from Robert Frost’s poem “Directive”:
…if you’ll let a guide direct you/Who only has at heart your getting lost…”
Cramer, like any guide hired to assist with discovery, also takes us places we might not want to go. Toward changing destructive habits.
As I write this review, Las Vegas, Nevada suffers its sixth consecutive day of temperatures above 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Death Valley in California just saw one of the highest temperatures ever recorded on Earth (134 degrees). Wall Street reported that China massively increased its burning of coal to power its economy.
In light of such devastating weather-related facts, Cramer works some harsh realities into his daily ruminations. Electric vehicles and greener power grids are insufficient remedies for the injuries we’ve inflicted on nature.
But Cramer is no fatalist. Better solutions exist, and he sees the bicycle as both a tool for change and a symbol of hope.
On his loosely mapped forays, Cramer captures moments that fill the senses, spark the imagination and stimulate the intellect. These moments are monuments with the potential to transform portions of each day into vacations from the stress and clamor of our routines. Even more than that, they are Cramer’s how-to guide for turning every ride into a journey worth taking, for ourselves and for others with whom we share this planet.
