Glenn Kubish

My winter bicycle is a lot of things. It's my primary mode of transportation. It's how I get exercise for cheap. It's how I have learned not to drive an automobile everywhere. My winter bike is way to save money and stress. It's a conversation starter. It's nostalgia. A way to notice things. A reliable way to feel alive. My bike is also the needle on a turntable. The way the bicycle moves along groves of ice or lanes of snow, and the way it makes a crackly sound when the tires cut into the snow and ice. That precious, scratchy sound sounds like a needle moving across a vinyl record turning around and around. My bike is a radio dial, too. I’m thinking now of the nights as a boy in the basement of the dark house when I would go from station to station and watch the glowing dial move across the grid on the face of the set. This is what I remember as my bike glides across the shadows of the elm trees on 102 Ave. When I sing a bit. ...

I will not forget the feeling of pedalling up Sunwapta Pass. Feeling was all there was. Pain feeling. And the feeling of being alone and in a test of will against that switchbacked ramp of asphalt and stone between Banff and Jasper. Out of gears now. And now just trying to keep a semblance of cadence. Passing automobiles heaved. I could hear them working from behind and then watched as they moved alongside and out of sight. Don't look up! Look down. The vicious slope is not as obvious looking straight down. Look down, look down. So, I looked at cracks in the pavement and at wooden guardrail posts and shards of shiny glass. I watched tiny pieces of highway gravel inch backward as I pedalled ahead, knees straining, lungs stretching. Wheels turned like second hands. Eternal alpine grandeur surrounded me—and I watched gravel and glass go by. I measured my progress in bits of glass and gravel. My heart pounded. Legs turned. I breathed staccato: in-in-in-out . My Miyata 1000 kept...

The highway sign announcing "Banff 6 km" was not where I expected to come across Mr. William Wordsworth. But there he was, there, that is, his words were, or some kind of idea of his words from Book Sixth of The Prelude, where the young traveller realizes in some anguish that he had, while briefly lost, unknowingly succeeded in his quest to hike across the Alps. The painful news comes from a local peasant: Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear, For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds, We questioned him again, and yet again; But every word that from the peasant's lips Came in reply, translated by our feelings, Ended in this,--'that we had crossed the Alps'. The picture conjured up by those words has for decades lingered in my memory, even though I have never been to the Alps, so I cannot really be seeing anything that I have actually seen. And it's not a televi...

Shelagh and I are just back from a quick trip to Portland where we were blown away by, take your pick, the bicycles, the transit system, the proud people, the beer, the coffee-houses, the nighttime rain, the bridges, the avocados, beer at Velo Cult, the Sprocket Podcast guys, Pok Pok, the kind bus drivers.  Here's a lookback.  We went to Portland to watch films at the Filmed By Bike festival at the Clinton Street Theater. And I had a chance to get up on stage and tell my own bicycle story. Here, along with actual period photos, it is. My first bicycle was a green, CCM Mustang. It was the 1970s, so that bike had everything you needed to turn the heads of the ladies. In second grade. It had a banana seat. Those high-rise handlebars. It had what we called in those days a sissy bar on the back. We would attach baseball cards with clothespins to the back of the frame so the spokes would deliver that motorized sound as we pedalled forward. Chasing sp...

There is a terrifyingly beautiful feeling waiting for me in the Rockies. Quite what it is I have never been able to make stand still. It sometimes feels like merciful obliteration. I mean, the Rocky Mountains take no notice of those passing through, need nothing from those passing through. They are a quiet, powerful other. * By contrast, the urban landscape makes demands of me. It orders me to read this sign, read that billboard, read this digital screen. Read, read, read. And that reading makes noise in my head. And being the reader, I am tricked into believing the messages need me. In the mountains, there is no such fraud in the quiet trees.                                                                  ********                             ...