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Taming The Bicycle

In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the
old high-wheel bicycles of that period. He wrote an account of
his experience, but did not offer it for publication. The form
of bicycle he rode long ago became antiquated, but in the humor
of his pleasantry is a quality which does not grow old.


A. B. P.


I

I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it. So
I went down a bought a barrel of Pond's Extract and a bicycle.
The Expert came home with me to instruct me. We chose the
back yard, for the sake of privacy, and went to work.

Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt--a
fifty-inch, with the pedals shortened up to forty-eight--and
skittish, like any other colt. The Expert explained the thing's
points briefly, then he got on its back and rode around a little,
to show me how easy it was to do. He said that the dismounting
was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave
that to the last. But he was in error there. He found, to his
surprise and joy, that all that he needed to do was to get me on
to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself.
Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best
time on record. He was on that side, shoving up the machine;
we all came down with a crash, he at the bottom, I next,
and the machine on top.

We examined the machine, but it was not in the least
injured. This was hardly believable. Yet the Expert assured me
that it was true; in fact, the examination proved it. I was
partly to realize, then, how admirably these things are
constructed. We applied some Pond's Extract, and resumed. The
Expert got on the OTHER side to shove up this time, but I
dismounted on that side; so the result was as before.

The machine was not hurt. We oiled ourselves again, and resumed.
This time the Expert took up a sheltered position behind,
but somehow or other we landed on him again.

He was full of admiration; said it was abnormal. She was
all right, not a scratch on her, not a timber started anywhere.
I said it was wonderful, while we were greasing up, but he said
that when I came to know these steel spider-webs I would realize
that nothing but dynamite could cripple them. Then he limped out
to position, and we resumed once more. This time the Expert took
up the position of short-stop, and got a man to shove up behind.
We got up a handsome speed, and presently traversed a brick, and
I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on
the instructor's back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air
between me and the sun. It was well it came down on us, for that
broke the fall, and it was not injured.

Five days later I got out and was carried down to the
hospital, and found the Expert doing pretty fairly. In a few
more days I was quite sound. I attribute this to my prudence in
always dismounting on something soft. Some recommend a feather
bed, but I think an Expert is better.

The Expert got out at last, brought four assistants with
him. It was a good idea. These four held the graceful cobweb
upright while I climbed into the saddle; then they formed in
column and marched on either side of me while the Expert pushed
behind; all hands assisted at the dismount.

The bicycle had what is called the "wabbles," and had them
very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things
were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was
against nature. That is to say, that whatever the needed thing
might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it
in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected law of physics
required that it be done in just the other way. I perceived by
this how radically and grotesquely wrong had been the life-long
education of my body and members. They were steeped in
ignorance; they knew nothing--nothing which it could profit them
to know. For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I
put the tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural
impulse, and so violated a law, and kept on going down. The law
required the opposite thing--the big wheel must be turned in the
direction in which you are falling. It is hard to believe this,
when you are told it. And not merely hard to believe it, but
impossible; it is opposed to all your notions. And it is just as
hard to do it, after you do come to believe it. Believing it,
and knowing by the most convincing proof that it is true, does
not help it: you can't any more DO it than you could before; you
can neither force nor persuade yourself to do it at first. The
intellect has to come to the front, now. It has to teach the
limbs to discard their old education and adopt the new.

The steps of one's progress are distinctly marked. At the
end of each lesson he knows he has acquired something, and he
also knows what that something is, and likewise that it will stay
with him. It is not like studying German, where you mull along,
in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just
as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you,
and there you are. No--and I see now, plainly enough, that the
great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off
it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make
you attend strictly to business. But I also see, by what I have
learned of bicycling, that the right and only sure way to learn
German is by the bicycling method. That is to say, take a grip
on one villainy of it at a time, leaving that one half learned.

When you have reached the point in bicycling where you can
balance the machine tolerably fairly and propel it and steer it,
then comes your next task--how to mount it. You do it in this
way: you hop along behind it on your right foot, resting the
other on the mounting-peg, and grasping the tiller with your
hands. At the word, you rise on the peg, stiffen your left leg,
hang your other one around in the air in a general in indefinite
way, lean your stomach against the rear of the saddle, and then
fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other; but you fall off.
You get up and do it again; and once more; and then several times.

By this time you have learned to keep your balance; and also
to steer without wrenching the tiller out by the roots (I say
tiller because it IS a tiller; "handle-bar" is a lamely
descriptive phrase). So you steer along, straight ahead, a little
while, then you rise forward, with a steady strain, bringing your
right leg, and then your body, into the saddle, catch your
breath, fetch a violent hitch this way and then that, and down
you go again.

But you have ceased to mind the going down by this time; you
are getting to light on one foot or the other with considerable
certainty. Six more attempts and six more falls make you
perfect. You land in the saddle comfortably, next time, and stay
there--that is, if you can be content to let your legs dangle,
and leave the pedals alone a while; but if you grab at once for
the pedals, you are gone again. You soon learn to wait a little
and perfect your balance before reaching for the pedals; then the
mounting-art is acquired, is complete, and a little practice will
make it simple and easy to you, though spectators ought to keep
off a rod or two to one side, along at first, if you have nothing
against them.

And now you come to the voluntary dismount; you learned the
other kind first of all. It is quite easy to tell one how to do
the voluntary dismount; the words are few, the requirement
simple, and apparently undifficult; let your left pedal go down
till your left leg is nearly straight, turn your wheel to the
left, and get off as you would from a horse. It certainly does
sound exceedingly easy; but it isn't. I don't know why it isn't
but it isn't. Try as you may, you don't get down as you would
from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire. You
make a spectacle of yourself every time.

[=]
II

During the eight days I took a daily lesson an hour and a
half. At the end of this twelve working-hours' appreticeship I
was graduated--in the rough. I was pronounced competent to
paddle my own bicycle without outside help. It seems incredible,
this celerity of acquirement. It takes considerably longer than
that to learn horseback-riding in the rough.

Now it is true that I could have learned without a teacher,
but it would have been risky for me, because of my natural
clumsiness. The self-taught man seldom knows anything
accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have
known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags,
and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going
and doing as he himself has done. There are those who imagine
that the unlucky accidents of life--life's "experiences"--are in
some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never
knew one of them to happen twice. They always change off and
swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side. If
personal experience can be worth anything as an education, it
wouldn't seem likely that you could trip Methuselah; and yet if
that old person could come back here it is more that likely that
one of the first things he would do would be to take hold of one
of these electric wires and tie himself all up in a knot. Now
the surer thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask
somebody whether it was a good thing to take hold of. But that
would not suit him; he would be one of the self-taught kind that
go by experience; he would want to examine for himself. And he
would find, for his instruction, that the coiled patriarch shuns
the electric wire; and it would be useful to him, too, and would
leave his education in quite a complete and rounded-out
condition, till he should come again, some day, and go to
bouncing a dynamite-can around to find out what was in it.

But we wander from the point. However, get a teacher; it
saves much time and Pond's Extract.

Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired
concerning my physical strength, and I was able to inform him
that I hadn't any. He said that that was a defect which would
make up-hill wheeling pretty difficult for me at first; but he
also said the bicycle would soon remove it. The contrast between
his muscles and mine was quite marked. He wanted to test mine,
so I offered my biceps--which was my best. It almost made him
smile. He said, "It is pulpy, and soft, and yielding, and
rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers;
in the dark a body might think it was an oyster in a rag."
Perhaps this made me look grieved, for he added, briskly: "Oh,
that's all right, you needn't worry about that; in a little while
you can't tell it from a petrified kidney. Just go right along
with your practice; you're all right."

Then he left me, and I started out alone to seek adventures.
You don't really have to seek them--that is nothing but a phrase
--they come to you.

I chose a reposeful Sabbath-day sort of a back street which
was about thirty yards wide between the curbstones. I knew it
was not wide enough; still, I thought that by keeping strict
watch and wasting no space unnecessarily I could crowd through.

Of course I had trouble mounting the machine, entirely on my
own responsibility, with no encouraging moral support from the
outside, no sympathetic instructor to say, "Good! now you're
doing well--good again--don't hurry--there, now, you're all right
--brace up, go ahead." In place of this I had some other
support. This was a boy, who was perched on a gate-post munching
a hunk of maple sugar.

He was full of interest and comment. The first time I
failed and went down he said that if he was me he would dress up
in pillows, that's what he would do. The next time I went down
he advised me to go and learn to ride a tricycle first. The
third time I collapsed he said he didn't believe I could stay on
a horse-car. But the next time I succeeded, and got clumsily
under way in a weaving, tottering, uncertain fashion, and
occupying pretty much all of the street. My slow and lumbering
gait filled the boy to the chin with scorn, and he sung out, "My,
but don't he rip along!" Then he got down from his post and
loafed along the sidewalk, still observing and occasionally
commenting. Presently he dropped into my wake and followed along
behind. A little girl passed by, balancing a wash-board on her
head, and giggled, and seemed about to make a remark, but the boy
said, rebukingly, "Let him alone, he's going to a funeral."

I have been familiar with that street for years, and had
always supposed it was a dead level; but it was not, as the
bicycle now informed me, to my surprise. The bicycle, in the
hands of a novice, is as alert and acute as a spirit-level in the
detecting the delicate and vanishing shades of difference in
these matters. It notices a rise where your untrained eye would
not observe that one existed; it notices any decline which water
will run down. I was toiling up a slight rise, but was not aware
of it. It made me tug and pant and perspire; and still, labor as
I might, the machine came almost to a standstill every little while.
At such times the boy would say: "That's it! take a rest--
there ain't no hurry. They can't hold the funeral without YOU."

Stones were a bother to me. Even the smallest ones gave me a
panic when I went over them. I could hit any kind of a stone,
no matter how small, if I tried to miss it; and of course at
first I couldn't help trying to do that. It is but natural.
It is part of the ass that is put in us all, for some
inscrutable reason.

It was at the end of my course, at last, and it was necessary
for me to round to. This is not a pleasant thing, when you
undertake it for the first time on your own responsibility,
and neither is it likely to succeed. Your confidence oozes away,
you fill steadily up with nameless apprehensions, every fiber of
you is tense with a watchful strain, you start a cautious and
gradual curve, but your squirmy nerves are all full of electric
anxieties, so the curve is quickly demoralized into a jerky and
perilous zigzag; then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the
bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, defying all
prayers and all your powers to change its mind--your heart stands
still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight
on you go, and there are but a couple of feet between you and the
curb now. And now is the desperate moment, the last chance to
save yourself; of course all your instructions fly out of your
head, and you whirl your wheel AWAY from the curb instead of
TOWARD it, and so you go sprawling on that granite-bound
inhospitable shore. That was my luck; that was my experience. I
dragged myself out from under the indestructible bicycle and sat
down on the curb to examine.

I started on the return trip. It was now that I saw a
farmer's wagon poking along down toward me, loaded with cabbages.
If I needed anything to perfect the precariousness of my steering,
it was just that. The farmer was occupying the middle of the road
with his wagon, leaving barely fourteen or fifteen yards of space
on either side. I couldn't shout at him--a beginner can't shout;
if he opens his mouth he is gone; he must keep all his attention
on his business. But in this grisly emergency, the boy came
to the rescue, and for once I had to be grateful to him.
He kept a sharp lookout on the swiftly varying impulses and
inspirations of my bicycle, and shouted to the man accordingly:

"To the left! Turn to the left, or this jackass 'll run over you!"
The man started to do it. "No, to the right, to the right!
Hold on! THAT won't do!--to the left!--to the right!--to the
LEFT--right! left--ri-- Stay where you ARE, or you're a goner!"

And just then I caught the off horse in the starboard and went
down in a pile. I said, "Hang it! Couldn't you SEE I was coming?"

"Yes, I see you was coming, but I couldn't tell which WAY you
was coming. Nobody could--now, COULD they? You couldn't
yourself--now, COULD you? So what could _I_ do?"

There was something in that, and so I had the magnanimity to
say so. I said I was no doubt as much to blame as he was.

Within the next five days I achieved so much progress that
the boy couldn't keep up with me. He had to go back to his gate-
post, and content himself with watching me fall at long range.

There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the
street, a measured yard apart. Even after I got so I could steer
pretty fairly I was so afraid of those stones that I always hit
them. They gave me the worst falls I ever got in that street,
except those which I got from dogs. I have seen it stated that
no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always
able to skip out of his way. I think that that may be true: but
I think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog was because
he was trying to. I did not try to run over any dog. But I ran
over every dog that came along. I think it makes a great deal of
difference. If you try to run over the dog he knows how to
calculate, but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how
to calculate, and is liable to jump the wrong way every time. It
was always so in my experience. Even when I could not hit a
wagon I could hit a dog that came to see me practice. They all
liked to see me practice, and they all came, for there was very
little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a dog. It took
time to learn to miss a dog, but I achieved even that.

I can steer as well as I want to, now, and I will catch that
boy one of these days and run over HIM if he doesn't reform.

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.

Mark Twain