The Bicycle Ride Incident

Last year, shortly after the book-throwing incident, we visited a friend at Cape Cod and camped in his backyard for several days. On one of those days, we rode around the neighborhood and discovered a cluster of tiny cottages off the main road, on a circular gravel drive. We started to ride the bikes around the circle, and at one point I stopped to write down the phone number posted on a sign in front of one the cottages, while my wife rode on ahead. When I got back on my bike, I couldn’t see her anywhere.

I panicked for a moment, trying to rack my memory for something she had might have said about where she was going, but I couldn’t come up with anything. So I rode out to the point where the circular drive met up with the driveway leading in from the main road. I couldn’t see her anywhere, so I rode out to the main road, but I couldn’t see her there, either. I thought maybe she had gotten impatient with me and had kept on riding, and perhaps was waiting for me at the next intersection. I rode to that point, but didn’t see her there, so I rode in an ever-increasing panic back to the cottage circle, worried that she would be terribly angry with me.

Back at the cottages, I still didn’t see her, so I thought I must have missed her out at the main road. I rode back there, then down to the next intersection, and decided to wait there for her, since my attempts to find her so far had failed.

In a minute she rode up from the direction of the cottages, and started laying into me with one of her angry, critical, curse-word-filled rants. I had been “asinine”, “inconsiderate”, “fucking stupid”, and much more, for not waiting for her back at the cottages. (She had gone around the circle again after leaving me, which is why I had not seen her.)

I tried to explain my panic, and how I thought she had gone ahead to the main road. But as usual when I foolishly try to explain myself, this brought on a new volley of anger. She claimed she had told me many times in the past that she would never leave an area without telling me where she was going. At this point I realized it would be useless to respond that:

1. Just a couple of minutes ago, she had indeed left me without telling me where she was going.
2. In the past, she had often walked or ridden on ahead of me on hikes or bike rides when she didn’t want to wait for me.

The angry blast finally settled down after I, as usual, abjectly apologized. The remainder of the mini-vacation was poisoned by this incident, and the anger and hyper-critical mode continued unabated. Later I’ll write about another similar incident that happened a day later.