Taming The Bicycle / Mark Twain

In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the

old high-wheel bicycles of that period. He wrote an account of

his experience, but did not offer it for publication. The form

of bicycle he rode long ago became antiquated, but in the humor

of his pleasantry is a quality which does not grow old.

A. B. P.

I

I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it. So

I went down a 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 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 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. 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 life-long

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 than 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, 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 in 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.

[=]

II

During the eight days I took a daily lesson an hour and a

half. At the end of this twelve working-hours' appreticeship 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 has 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 that 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 the 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 have 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 the 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.

It 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 practice. They all

liked to see me practice, 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 one of these days and run over HIM if he doesn't reform.

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.