Pedaling Into the Wind
By S.D. Wright

"Where the tree of Knowledge stands is always Paradise ":
thus speaks the oldest and youngest serpents.
-Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil

On the lap of Lake Erie 's shy sibling Ontario , there sits a forlorn town known as Olcott. Some say that once, in the days of Silent Cal and ole Herbert Hoover, when Mae West enticed and beguiled the nation's men, Olcott was all the rage. I can remember one of my grandmother's antiques depicting an enormous hotel which attracted thousands to what is a quiet and bashful lake. And I knew that my grandmother could let loose a dozen enthralling stories about life in the heady twenties, the somber thirties, and the exciting fourties. She did often, in fact. Such was the early nourishment of a young man's mind.

I grew up, you see, in that town which is called Olcott. It was there, if anywhere, that any epiphany I've ever had took place. It was there, really, that I started to come of age. In its silent rememberings of its profligate past, Olcott itself is truly representative of the great arc that is man's life. Olcott taught me, I believe, my earliest lesson.

My mother would insist on bicycling to my grandmother's house, a great and gorgeous edifice with and appearance that belies our family's middle-class status. Unfortunately, the wind would roar down the shoreline of Ontario in precisely the opposite direction we were pedaling. As an often times irascible ten-year-old, I would express my frustration with this situation frequently along the way. My mother would ignore me, of course. I would fight to keep going, becoming angrier and angrier. But I cycled on. Retrospectively I realized the benefit of this exercise in determination.

When another, more justified fury would swell up within my chest later on in life, I knew then what I had learned. When my fellow high school students mocked Catholics and blithely condemned gays to fiery perdition, I grew to value anger, or more specifically, anger that is sustained by and targeted towards injustice of any kind. There is no shame, as they say, in standing alone, not even when the arrogant winds of majority opinion blow against you. These people never really thought about what they were saying, after all. Many of us never do.

I can remember one instance when a student - whose sexuality, idiotically enough, was the stuff of jokes at my school- was defending himself from a teacher who was heaping accusations upon accusations upon gay people in America . The whole high school student body was there, arguing vehemently against this one student. And then, from the back of the room, a voice rose to aid him, to help fight off the predators. Students whirled around to see who would dare to challenge popular opinion in such an egregious manner. It would seem that the lessons learned pedaling against the wind in Olcott had not been ignored, I'm humbled to say.

It is unpopular to be right at times. The seat of knowledge is no Paradise, as I have come to realize. But, above all, one must remember to resist conformity and to keep pedaling.

S.D. Wright was born in the South but raised in the Western New York region. He is a freshman at Daemen College . His interests include reading, hiking, and American politics.