I once read a story about a mother in the Pacific Northwest who reconfigured her entire life so that she could bike her children everywhere. No car. Just a giant cargo bike and an iron will.
Through the wonders of the internet, I found the story! How many women are there out there biking a large number of children around? My memory was fairly accurate.
After reconnecting with her estranged father for the first time as an adult, Emily Finch reconsidered her suburban house and Suburban vehicle. On astonishing impulse, she purchased an expensive and cumbersome bike she wasn’t able to ride at first and uprooted the family on the certainty that she would love living in Portland. Wow.
Back in 2012, Finch became a minor phenomenon when her story was covered by Bike Portland. I’m tempted to quote the entire article in full. But here are a couple choice lines:
“Finch, 34, is a powerhouse. Watching her pedal her bakfiets cargo bike with four kids in the front, another one in a child seat behind her, and another one on a bike attached to hers via the rear rack, is a sight that not only inspires — it forces you to re-think what’s possible.”
How many people do you bump into in your life who truly cause you to “re-think what’s possible.” Elsewhere, Finch is seemingly apologetic about her many children, their existence seeming to be at odds with the environmental radicalism of going without a car in the United States. However, Finch is clear that she is not “saving the planet” through her mode of transportation and is not trying to. She does it because, she says, it makes her happy. How interesting!
Another quote:
“For someone who looks so comfortable commandeering this large, wheeled contraption, it’s hard to believe Emily never really biked at all in her adult life until a few years ago. How she ended up here — both in Portland and as captain of a human-powered mini-van — is a story worth sharing.”
And this gem about the physics in action captured by the journalist riding along:
“The bike attached to the rear of the bakfiets is a key part of the motor. ‘I rotate kids into pumping position to keep them fresh,’ Emily tells me. As we ride up a slight incline, Emily barks orders to her rear, ‘Pump Mary, pump!’”
At the time, Finch worried that she was depriving her children of too much by committing to such an alternative lifestyle. Though Portland is located less than 100 miles from the Pacific Coast, that distance exceeds the 20 miles per day maximum distance that the kids can handle tooling around in the family bike. Interestingly there is no mention of how Finch’s husband travels with the family. It mentions only that he has a small car he drives to work every day. What a wimp.
Anyway, the inability to jump in the car and cruise to the coast gave Finch pause. Were her children missing out? It seems the children were not aware of what they did not get to do at that time.
“They’ve lost that sense of driving,” Emily told Bike Portland, “My kids have forgotten what it’s like to even be in a car.”
I would imagine the world is more on a comprehensible human scale when riding on a bike versus a car. That said, the kids get drenched in the rain, tantruming children get bungeed to the bike, and it does seem unnecessarily hardline. Why not do most of the family trips biking and some trips with a car? Well, of course the whole point is to do without the car, and Finch had the insight that it was the total absence of a car to fit everyone that would push her through the discomfort of figuring how to get around town and perform tasks like loading up on groceries (when hauling groceries and kids, Finch estimated she was biking with a load of around 550 pounds).
In the years since that interesting article, someone stole Finch’s bike, which is hard to believe. Though she once tweeted from the account @1lessgmsuburban, she seems to have gone quiet, leaving few traces on the world wide web.
There is a reason this strange story stayed with me. Being a mother can push you to a burning desire to do something radical. The “system” is not set up to value persons, daily rituals are so complicated and disembodied, young children have such demanding and incessant needs. There can be a surge of all-but-overwhelming feeling that something must change. I much prefer Finch’s brand of radical to the mom who stayed in the ‘burbs and did recreational ‘shrooms.
That said, incorporating a daily quiet time and evening walk might be enough to make a real difference in a mother’s life. Most of us can rediscover joy in simple and straightforward ways, even if we still drive a van.
