Free The Push & the Pull by Darryl Whetter

for two major discoveries: mustard gas and synthetic agricultural fertilizers. The Haber-Bosch synthetic production of ammonia for fertilizer changed the planet. For the first time in the history of farming, fertilizer was cooked, was made with fossil fuels. Few people alive have ever eaten bread that doesn’t arrive on a trickle of oil. Terrorists understand sowing and reaping: their bombs are made with agricultural fertilizer. The lawns Andrew has left behind or glimpses infrequently from the highway are sprayed to an artificial, monospecial green with pesticides that cause breast cancer, demanding single breasts, the most valuable of coins, for their toll. The major ingredient used to make the asphalt beneath him is oil.
    Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Hydration is as important a balance as the rolling tires. Blood, muscle and all of theirmessengers are mostly water, and Andrew tugs a steady contrail of perspiration. The push of muscle. The pull of thirst.
    When he was still checking his face in the disc mirror, he was amazed at the pair of white lines crawling nightly into the thickening caramel of his beard. Beneath these scrawls of dried sweat and his curved yellow glasses hangs the plastic toggle for his water bag. Swatting the salty nub into his mouth, he draws a mouthful of warm water. He has read that metal hand pumps await him on Quebec’s converted rail-to-trail Le Petit Témis, that the water, though drinkable, tastes of iron there beneath small cliffs of auburn rock. Again and again he imagines the unseen pump’s curved handle, draws a slosh of water into the plastic hydration sack he’s suspended over his rear pannier rack, pumps a
goût du terroir
into this latest evolutionary advancement for the cyclist.
    Three major mutations fused the body to today’s bike — clipless pedals, shocks and the water bag. Pedals you can snap a shoe into, not set one on, held more of the body’s force, burned the waste, tightened the circle. Shocks eased the slide and returned a little vertical action, gave the mammal back its leap. And long, narrow knapsacks were needed to hold litres of the life juice. The water bag, that tall, slender piece of cycling luggage, has itself migrated onto other bodies, impressing gardeners and park rangers with its roaming efficiency, its freedom from the leash of thirst. Not wanting the weight or heat of the swollen, black hump on his back, Andrew has added enough hose to park it in the rear atop his back panniers, above tent and sleeping bag.
    It’ll easily be another five days in the Maritimes before he rounds Rivière-du-Loup and slips into the busy concrete chute for a straight run at Kingston. Amid the noise and the increasing flak of truck tires, there’ll at least be the
Prochaine Stationette/Next Service Centre
signs to regulate his thirst. That is, if he remains on the increasingly busy Trans-Can. For now, he’s still riding crapshoot. Every time a distant gas station swells into view, he clamps his molars around the dusty toggle and sucks his fill.
    During the coursework of his MA on bicycle culture, he’d read of the multi-century quest to invent a “feedless horse” and eventually came across a description of the horse as the “most naked of animals.”Yes, and surely the bicycle is the most naked of machines, an X-ray of itself. Or a living skeleton, all exposed bones and bared teeth. Teeth. In Kingston, when he’d begun riding trails five or even six days a week with Mark, Mark the quietly proselytizing vegetarian once gave him the dental argument for vegetarianism.
    â€œLook at a dog’s mouth. Those are meat-eating teeth. Every tooth’s designed to rip and shear. What do we have? Grinders.” As they’d finished their break and remounted their bikes, Mark displayed a rare poetic streak as his cleats snapped audibly into the pedals. “On a bike, we’ve just got these two