I'm going to ride my bike to New York City! I am to set off first thing in the morning. It'll be a two-day trek. That's a given, an understanding born of experience. The calculations whirl past me madly, unregistered, barely making any indentation--400 miles each day, wow!

I am through with the store and out by the street. I've finished with my purchases though I don't remember buying a thing. Indeed I hold no bag, but apparently I am ready. I stand across the vast parking lot, on the sidewalk. Curiously, my steed is beside me, upright and held steady by my hands. Where did it come from? I wonder. I bought a bicycle once, and had several good years of usage from it before it was stolen. But that was ages ago. More recently I had another entrusted to my care, but I abandoned it in a garage hundreds of miles away the last time I moved. I look at the awkward, distinctive saddle. Why, bless its heart, it must have followed me! Just like lost pets of lore. I pat the seat, nearly weeping in the presence of such unearned loyalty.

I'm casting a foot over the bar in exhilaration. I don't so much ride it as walk it along between my legs like a hobbyhorse. The back tire is still as worn, indeed flat, as I remember. Which I never got around to replacing because of the chain and all those bothersome gears: the wheel didn't--snap--unclip and roll off like the front one. Because it was always easier to just visit the Free Air hose (with built in gauge) at the corner pumps if I was in the larkish mood for an hour or two's ride.

The day has descended to that satisfying hour when the sun has dropped but the light is still bright, the world incrementally shading through the purples and blues to black. I decide, the roundness of the rim be damned! Placing feet on pedals I push off and ride slowly, waveringly along the sidewalk. Just then a friend who knows of my plans approaches. I apply the brakes, which squeal me gently to a jaunty stance. I keep a foot on the upraised pedal, the other standing me on the pavement, that leg locked stiff as any kickstand.

"You'll be wanting to replace those brake shoes before you leave," he intones, "and get them tightened up. Not to mention the tire," he says, fingering the top of the flaccid black circle.

I'm in luck! There's a bicycle shop just down the street. And I know they keep evening hours. Despite my impoverishment, I'm certain my account will cover the amount of the check. With a little understanding. The brakes really are necessary, I realize, though as I recall I can't recall; the slope down to the coast perhaps transpires in some sort of vast elevator.

I am mulling that over when I panic at the thought that I made that earlier trip dozens of years ago. I was so much younger then, and fitter, for back then was when I covered vast tracts as a matter of daily fact on my original bicycle. I recover, laughing in valiant bluff: I did it before--I can do it again!

I'm thinking, odiously, of all the twisting, twining, creeping grades on the western side. That, I think distinctly, is where you wear through brake pads like pencil erasers correcting a badly done drawing executed on stucco. And that's when it hits me.

I am suddenly remembering in full. The steep sweep off the mountains to the central plains. My stomach plummets. The other time I rode that route, I was riding the other way, inland. And it was all mostly downhill!