Cambridge

I thought our two days in Cambridge had almost reached their end at St Peter’s. Instead, the real ending was waiting in an unremarkable wooden hut behind the town hall. We had planned to walk the Te Awa River Ride. I had checked the route beforehand: it follows the Waikato River, longer than our usual walks and better suited to a bicycle. But I had already removed cycling from the plan. Katherine had not ridden for years. With moving wheels, passing people and balance to hold, it felt unsafe to her. Beside Cambridge Town Hall stands a group of horse sculptures. Katherine looked at them for a while, wandered behind the building, then came back. “Let me show you something,” she said. A few bicycles and helmets stood outside a small hut. She remained hesitant beside them. I was surprised. The person putting cycling back into the plan was Katherine. The young man at the rental shop did not hurry her. He brought out a bike, adjusted the saddle and showed her the brakes and gears. His voice was light, as if none of this were a great matter. Katherine held the handlebars and sat down. The bicycle wobbled. She laughed instinctively, with nerves and a little embarrassment. She had not properly ridden a bicycle for more than thirty years. Things learnt young are not always things we still trust in middle age. The body may remember before the mind is willing to believe it. She pushed one pedal and moved half a metre. Then again. Her body began to find its balance. What had remained inside it for three decades had not vanished. It had only been asleep. A clear afternoon, a bicycle and a patient stranger woke it gently. We hired the bikes for two hours. For Katherine, newly returned to a saddle, that already felt bold. The most beautiful stretch of Te Awa runs from Cambridge towards Karāpiro. We agreed to ride only a short distance and turn back at the first moment she felt unsafe. Once we set off, nothing followed the plan. We took a wrong turn almost immediately and found ourselves on another route towards the Waikato River. By the time we realised, we had ridden a long way. After finding the right direction, the sun was higher and our legs had begun to feel the work. At first Katherine held the bars with both hands, shoulders tight, eyes fixed ahead. Trees lined the road, hills rose in the distance and clouds moved slowly overhead. Sunlight crossed the grass, then disappeared. In the rhythm of cycling, the town fell away until there was only wind at our ears and tyres moving over the path. Some riders came towards us in full cycling kit and passed quickly. A family moved more slowly. Others closer to our age nodded and smiled as they went by. Katherine was still tense whenever someone passed. Then one rider called, “You’re doing great!” Someone else gave her a thumbs-up. She laughed. It was not the same laugh as before. At the start, embarrassment had sat inside her nerves. Now her body was remembering, and she had begun to believe it. At first she kept asking, “Is this all right?” “Am I too slow?” “Should I get off and push here?” Later, she stopped asking. She read the surface herself, changed gears and feathered the brakes before a descent. For one stretch she rode ahead. I followed, watching her back as the wind lifted her shirt and the wheels turned in the sun. Eventually we reached Karāpiro. The lake that had disappeared into morning fog was entirely different in the afternoon. Water shone and the distant dam emerged. We stopped above the river valley rather than chasing the route any farther. Katherine stood there in her green helmet, the Waikato River turning behind her in sunlight. Her body looked easy now—not braced as it had been at the start, and not posed as though she had completed a task. She was simply standing there.

She rode more steadily on the return. Her body remained honest: her legs ached and the saddle had become painfully hard. But she kept smiling, sometimes lifting her eyes towards the distant clouds. Back at the rental hut, the young man asked how it had gone. “Not bad,” Katherine said, smiling. My tracker read 22.20 kilometres and 3 hours, 52 minutes, 56 seconds. A two-hour experiment had become almost four hours. The young man looked at her, then at the bicycle. “Katherine might buy a bike of her own one day,” he said. She heard him and smiled. No one asked when.