Ewa Szypula mourns the best friend she accidentally consigned to a watery grave
Browsing the internet the other day, I spotted the following headline on a website called Dutch Amsterdam: ‘How many bicycles and cars end up in the canals?’
Apparently Amsterdam has a problem with bikes getting dumped in the canal. It seems it happens frequently enough that they have a special grabby machine for fishing the bikes out. (You need the grabby machine; you can’t fish them out otherwise.)
I read the bit about all the bikes getting ‘dumped’ in the canal and I was a bit like, huh. Just a tad judgmental there. Hold your horses before you judge the cyclists, people. Because maybe some of them quite LIKED HAVING their bikes. Maybe some of them, given the opportunity, would have preferred their bikes to stay on dry land. Maybe some of them would have liked their bikes NOT TO FALL IN THE CANAL.
Goodbye, my friend
It happened so suddenly, it’s almost like nothing happened at all. It happened on the way home from a football game on a cold day in January. (Again, I can hear the judgemental cries: aha, football fans, hooligans probably, getting into fights on their way home, or worse, probably drunk, no wonder you fell in the canal.)
The easiest way to get home was to cycle along a stretch of towpath for part of the way. To reach the canal from the road you had to stop, carry your bike down some steps, and get back on. And off you go.
The tow path immediately past the steps was a little bumpy. My boyfriend, who was up ahead of me, told me later that he thought it was all his fault; he’d tried getting on his bike on the uneven bit of ground, wobbled, had the good sense to move it forward a few inches, and got on safely. And then he thought he’d better turn around and warn me not to get on my bike on that uneven bit of ground. I was just behind him. With nowhere to move except that dodgy bit of towpath that he’d just vacated for me. And I was just getting on my bike.
And as I got on my bike, it wobbled – lurched to the right – and kept going. And then it was too late. My boyfriend reported looking back and seeing my bike slide gracefully towards the water – and land, bike and girl, in the canal with a big splash.
Many times I’d ridden alongside that canal, negotiating the narrow towpath with other users, with nothing between me and the edge of the water, and many times I’ve wondered, does anyone ever, like, fall in? And then what happens?…
I bobbed up to the surface what felt like five hundred years later, spluttering, and swam my way back to the edge. In no time at all the Boy was reaching down to grab my hands and I was clambering out, wet and a bit shellshocked, but perfectly fine, water cascading off my winter coat and splashing about in my shoes. The whole thing must have taken less than two minutes. It’s like nothing happened at all – except two minutes before I’d had a bike with me, and now I suddenly didn’t.
We both stared into the dark canal, where, just beneath the surface, a red bike light was plaintively flashing up at us, like my bike was trying to send a distress signal. We poked around carefully with a stick, my boyfriend leaning out dangerously, brazenly far, me shrieking ‘Be careful! Don’t fall in the canal!’ – only to find that the bike light had detached itself and floated loose, marking the spot where my bike lay. I didn’t know how deep the canal was, but I figured it was deep; my feet hadn’t even touched the ground when I fell in. And one thing I knew for sure was that I was not, under any circumstances, going to get back in there.
There was nothing for it but to squelch my way home, in my sodden clothes and shoes, laughing and being silly, my plans to go chill out in a pub for a post-game analysis temporarily shelved. Back home, I took off my clothes and laid them out on the kitchen floor; they looked like artefacts recovered from a crime scene, or a missing person’s enquiry. I had about fifty showers and downed several shots of whisky, mostly to warm up and also to kill any germs swallowed in the form of canal water. I had a date with a friend for dinner later that night. I turned up in clean clothes, hair freshly washed and gleaming, looking – by a surprising consequence – somewhat sleeker and more groomed on a night out than I usually care to do.
‘Your hair looks really lovely today!’, my friend commented.
‘Thanks!’ I said. ‘I fell in the canal today.’
All in all, it’s a good story. It made for an entertaining evening’s conversation. After we got over all the silliness, my friend insisted on trying to help me find my bike; she discussed plans to fish it out (‘My dad has a big pole!’), and so on. I was dubious, but I went along with it. And this is how I came to be Googling ‘how to get a bike out of the canal’, and how I found the judgmental Amsterdam story.
So. This post is about loss, the suddenness of it, how suddenly you can have the rug (or the bike) pulled out from under you. This post is about appreciating your things while you have them, and being keenly aware that we are just on this Earth for a little while… that we are only just renting this stuff, and that the hand of fate can push you over the edge (of the canal) at any moment.
But mostly, this post is a tribute to my long-suffering bike. Goodbye, my friend. I know you were getting old, and it would have soon been time for us to part ways, and I would have preferred to recycle you, rather than drown you, obviously, but … Maybe this was the Universe’s way of disposing of my old bike ‘safely’, rather than have it break spectacularly in the middle of a busy road. Eek! If this was the ‘safe’ option, though, then clearly I have been spared a much worse fate.
