NOTE: In this account, Twain is learning to ride the high-wheel bicycle. In every
day speech it was called the Ordinary (that is not one of the thousands of experimental
versions, one of which became our bicycle today), which was clipped to "Ornery."
"Ornery" now means having an ugly disposition, stubborn, vile, or low, and I
sometimes wonder if the bike didn't have something to do with that, as we will learn in
this story by Twain.
I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it. So I went down and 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 up 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 surprised 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. Against nature, but not against the laws of 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 lifelong 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 that 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,
and learn it -- not ease up and shirk to the next, 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 and
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.
During eight days I took a daily lesson of an hour and a half. At the end of this
twelve working-hours' apprenticeship 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 had 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 than 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 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 had 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 of 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.
I 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 practise. They all liked to
see me practise, 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 out one of these days
and run over him if he doesn't reform.
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.
Taming The Bicycle
