Happy New Year

“Happy New Year!” I gasped, as a trickle of sweat ran down my cheek.

The man took a long, incredulous look as his car strained up the hill alongside me. I was an unusual sight: a skinny white guy riding a cumbersome five-speed bike up the steepest hill on the island of Barbados in hundred-degree heat on New Year’s Day.

He shook his head and laughed. “All d’bes’ to you!” he said, then pressed the accelerator and left me utterly alone.

Tour companies offered ‘scenic bicycle tours’ of the tiny Caribbean island, but they were a mere 12 kilometers long, and mostly downhill. I wanted a challenge. Barbados is 34 kilometers long and 22 kilometers wide; my goal was to ride through each of the island’s 11 different parishes, each named for a saint, about 100 kilometers in all. It seemed the perfect way to start the year: to circumnavigate an unfamiliar island, with no clue as to how long it might take or what I might find.

I set off along Maxwell Main Road through the first parish, Christ Church. The shoulder offered debris of coconut shells, sugar cane husks, squashed paw-paw fruit and seed pods. Traditionally, it was believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall, dark-haired man. The first person I saw on New Year’s Day was indeed a dark-haired man, sprawled and snoring gently under a Poinciana tree.

I circled the Tom Adams roundabout, and soon crossed into the parish of St. Philip. Stopping at a crossroads, I peered at the map, checking my bearings. A man languishing on a front porch, dressed only in tattered shorts, called out.

“Where you wan’ get to?”

“Is this Six Roads?”

“This is Four Roads.”

“Where’s Six Roads?”

“Up the road.”

When I finally found Six Roads, I turned east. Suddenly, the headwind gusted at 30 kilometers an hour. The road surface had been patched, and the patches had been patched. Many intersections lacked signposts, and I soon found myself going in a long, futile circle through the same towns twice over: Greens, Fair View, Woodland, Greens, Fair View, Woodland. It was 9 AM and I felt I’d hardly made any progress at all.

The waves thundered in as I rode along East Coast Road, the temperature at 93 degrees. I was now at the easternmost part of the easternmost island in the Caribbean. “Go, boy!” one elderly woman shouted as I cycled past her. I turned inland and began my ascent to the middle of the island. That’s when I finally faced The Hill.

Now, when a hill is simply referred to as The Hill, every cyclist knows that’s a bad sign. That means it’s legendarily nasty. It doesn’t need a name, because everyone knows it by reputation. The Hill actually turned out to be a series of seven climbs in succession, each revealed only as I topped the previous one. The ascent went on and on as the temperature rose to 101 degrees. The sweat ran down my face and soaked the front of my shirt. My heart banged in my chest. I was twelve hours into the new year.

The years accumulate, one on another, the most persistent reminder of time’s unrelenting passage. Minutes and hours can be squandered, but we recognize the passage of a full year, because each seems a little shorter. Every year, we make resolutions, because every year we fail to keep them. Only children have no need for resolutions, because they don’t concern themselves with the future or the past.

At the stroke of midnight, we count down from ten and cheer. And what are we cheering? The arrival of another chance? A fresh opportunity? Whatever it is, we take it. Given the choice between an old ghoul with a scythe and a happy baby with a sash around his belly, the choice is easy.

It was a glorious ride down to the Caribbean Sea, where I started. The roads on the west side of the island were so much smoother and straighter that I covered the second half of the ride in only two and a half hours.

I dropped the bike off at the rental shack and went to a bar next door for a Carib beer. A Bajan across the street called out.

“You buy me a beer, man?”

I bought him a beer. “Happy New Year” I said, as I handed it to him. I felt the subtle, intangible presence of good luck.

“All d’ bes’” he called back, as he walked off down the street, into the first day of a brand new year.