Liahona

I bought the bike used at a concrete block building called The Bike Hospital on Doctor MLK Jr. Drive, downhill from the Dairy Queen and across the street from Crown Hill Cemetery. Although my younger brother and I had raced road bikes when we were in high school and for years I'd received magazines and catalogs in the mail about them, I wasn’t familiar with the Liahona name on the side. So I looked it up online.

In the Book of Mormon, the Liahona was a mysterious brass ball that gave directions to the prophet Lehi and his band of travelers. It worked as a kind of spiritual mobile device, offering everything from compass directions to more pointed moral guidance. On rare occasions, it even displayed divine communication. God sliding into Mormon DMs, essentially—if that’s not too weird to say.

Liahona (the bike) had a mountain-slash-city design. Sturdy with mid-width tires, not very knobby ones. It had apparently been designed for young Mormons serving their mission calls, with eighteen speeds good for nearly any terrain and a plastic chainring guard to keep grease off missionary socks and dress pants.

I was thirty-seven at the time. Our first-born daughter was three years old. I had been reading a lot of magazine articles about the future of Earth—about unchecked climate change. When I pictured my daughter thirty-seven years into her future, I saw her living under an ash-brown sky, the land scoured down to bedrock by Wyoming-sized cyclones. I pictured her emaciated and despairing, just wanting to die. What had we been thinking, bringing a whole new life into this ruined world?

I was pretty far down the climate catastrophe rabbit hole and knew more than I was comfortable knowing. I thought I might feel better if I did whatever I could to help.

Except for the most inconvenient of errands, I started riding my bicycle everywhere I could, including to work on most days. This was 2008, and we had just moved to midtown Indianapolis, near Butler University. The bookstore I worked in was seven miles away at the edge of a northern suburb, along a stretch of outdoor shopping centers and east of a big Catholic hospital.

The Liahona was rugged enough, but it wasn’t outfitted for all-conditions riding. I got gnarlier tires. Added lights and bike bags. Bought rain and cold weather gear. I rode in sleet and in snow. Whatever the weather, I arrived at work stinking of sweat. I would change into my work clothes in the bookstore’s bathroom, balancing on the tops of my slipped-off shoes to keep the bathroom floor grime off my socks.

After closing the store—most nights around nine-thirty—I rode home. My typical route to work took me over many roads with narrow shoulders, across a bridge strewn with rusted metal bits and broken glass, and up a steep and winding road with no shoulder whatsoever. And that was one of the nicer neighborhoods.

My path home down that very same hill was not lit by any street lamps or security lights but solely by a miniature, flashlight-sized headlight mounted between my handle grips. As I swooped down those switchbacks toward the river, I listened for cars with an ear inclined over one shoulder, prepared if a fast-moving vehicle should suddenly come whipping around the corner to bail out into the snarl of underbrush along the hillside.

I was never struck by a car, but I did get honked at. Yelled at. I had bottles thrown at me. I put in thousands of miles. My quads got big, and my mood improved. My wife and I decided to try for another child. It took a few years.

I had made a sheepish start to fatherhood, seeing myself as a quirky character in a sitcom, basically a teenager at heart, a guy with a go-to oatmeal pancake recipe, a secret cigarette stash, and a fourteen-mile bike commute. And, oh yeah, a kid.

Now it was a different story. Each night, three real people—one of them tiny and barely aware of what it meant to be a person—expected me home. Needed me home. Right from the start, the new child seemed to grow twice as fast as the older one. As if desperate to keep up, the older one seemed to respond by redoubling her efforts.

I was never much of a praying man, but some evenings I did pray: to find my way safely through the darkness, to stay whole and alive, for the world to be so much better than it seemed. I had fallen in love with these kids, and they needed to be fed. They needed to be gotten up, dressed, distracted, put to bed, and gotten to sleep. At bedtime, even more than other times, they needed to be told everything would be okay. Even if it looked like there was absolutely no chance of that happening.

One mid-December morning in 2012, my great friend X was found dead in a hotel parking lot. The night before, in one of the rooms of that hotel, self-exiled from his wife and two kids, X had written each of them a separate letter before taking a great number—I shouldn't say how many—of prescription painkillers containing hydrocodone and Tylenol. I did learn it was probably the Tylenol that killed him, which I found surprising and sad. But I understood. The ingredients of our exit are common and close at hand.

After that the days and months got away from me. I’d learned, at least, to find my way in the dark. What else was new? One night I forgot to set the bike lock, and in the morning the Liahona was gone from our porch.

Some years later, still concerned about the future, I happened to confide some of my pessimistic visions to a group of my book club friends. How, I wondered, could one possibly feel hope in such a world?

One friend said that hope was not a concept she spent much time thinking about. Courage was what she tended, like a garden perennial that, with care, will keep producing its bounty season by difficult season.

Another quoted Lao Tsu: “The world is a sacred vessel, which cannot be directed at one's will.”

Steer if you like, but the road will have its say. I gave up on my futile project, on single-handedly guiding our common future. And I bought a newer car.

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Image by Alextredz, via Wikimedia Commons.