Backing Your Bike: The Portage

For the wild cyclist, opportunity abounds. Nothing can stop the wild animal from crossing a landscape no matter how high their fences and barriers. This is because the wild cyclist is wild and does not conform to the dangerous domesticity and obedience that most people are embroiled in. The wild cyclist moreover, such is his depth of local territorial knowledge, knows of portals and portages which can propel him into another realm. Every watery landscape has portages. In Gaelic this portage is called a 'tarbert' and all around Scotland there are several places that refer to this directly. This means that in the past Vikings had lifted their longboats, Fitzcarraldo-like, over the dry land that lay between two bodies of water. With the wild cyclist as opposed to the wild Viking, the  boat is the bike and the bodies of water are paths and cyclable terrain. This is part of the reason why the wild cyclist (and Viking) is wild: because no barrier can stop him, not waterlessness for a boat nor landlessness for a bike. To be sure, I have carried my bike across and through rivers and streams, but I have also backed my bike across boggy moorland and spongy terrains. Here, I am not just carrying my bike but backing it as in, literally, throwing it on my back, but also as in reciprocating the generosity of said bike: it carries me, so surely I should return the favour once in a while by carrying it. This is one of the defining characteristics of the wild cyclist: that he is not compelled to always cycle but to employ a wide variety of movements (that, together, constitute the 'opera'). In a healthy universe where opposites no longer oppose but conjoin, the not cycling is all part of the cycling, is it not?


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