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  • Either Way You’ll Know
  • Jessica Langan-Peck (bio)

He is on a practice run, whizzing under highway overpasses down by the Hudson, standing up on the pedals to save himself from the cobblestones. He wobbles dangerously, narrowly avoids getting nailed by a bus as he turns left on Union Street and stops to adjust his load. He has dusted off an old set of panniers he inherited from his father, and he’s experimenting with the best way to pack them. It is like flying in a small airplane, and he is the steward, asking some passengers to move to the front of the plane, to better distribute their weight. He’s back on the bike, riding inland past women with strollers, bumping up and over the canal and smelling it, swampy in the most unnatural way possible. He finishes on his block, saluting the ghost bike on the corner of Classon, the one with a garland of silk flowers wound around the basket, as he passes.

Bike tripping is what Jake’s preparing for. He is going to cycle across the country, from New York City to Portland, where he has some friends. He says to his brother, to his mother, to himself: after this, I’ll focus on getting into the union. After this, I’ll start a long project of my own. But this is something I always wanted to do. It has been nagging him for years, how bad he wants that feeling of finishing something big. At first he’d been scared to ride in this town. He had a nasty spill early on, a manhole cover slippery from rain that skidded his bike sideways and out from under him so fast. He rolled instinctively out of the street just in time, with pavement burns on his face. It had taken Jake six months to ride again but he did it, sweaty-palmed. He worked hard all fall and winter, traveling around to shoot B-roll for an HBO show, a clothing commercial, a music video. A month ago, after he’d wrapped a spring feature, a low-budget project with lower-budget actors, he spent a few days working the Steadicam kinks out of his shoulders and got to it. He rode. He looked at maps, traced routes, looked for bike-friendly smaller roads, and made X’s where he had friends or family. He’d stay in cheap hotels, otherwise. He chose his favorite bike, an old racer with a slightly heavy frame for stability, and put touring tires on it—wider, but still smooth—because he didn’t want to be changing flats all the time. He put a fresh layer of tape on his handlebars, gripped the lowest part of the curve with fingers close together, then moved his hands up to the flat area on top, where he’d hold on when he was taking it easy.

His older brother Thomas, who is taller, with better facial hair, has a shop on Graham where he builds custom bikes, and Jake spends part of his days off lounging around there, running his hands along the slim steel frames. Thomas wears coveralls and protective glasses, even in the heat. He learned to weld [End Page 137] at their hippie college in Oregon, where they were two years apart, and his precision, his grace, is what made these bikes worth the two grand or so they cost. “Okay,” Jake says. “What tools can I absolutely not live without?”

Thomas wipes sweat on his sleeve. “Tire lever. A pump. I have one you can borrow. A box wrench, a spoke wrench, a large crescent wrench, all three, a chain tool, a screwdriver, and a patch kit, in case you can’t change the tube right away.”

“How many extra tubes, do you think?”

“Hard to say. At least four or five, but you could probably get some on the way, too. Anyway, that’s not tool-related. That can be tomorrow’s question.”

Jake makes a list in a small black notebook he bought for exactly this purpose. Thomas made a rule, one question per day. Otherwise you’re going to make...

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