2025-07-30
29 分钟This is The Guardian. The Guardian Archive Long Read.
Hi, I'm Jody Rosen, the author of Bicycle Graveyards.
Why do so many bikes end up underwater?
which was published in the Guardian Long Read in 2022.
I originally wrote the piece as a chapter for my book,
Two Wheels Good, The History and Mystery of the Bicycle.
One of the things I tried to do in that book is to come at this topic from odd angles.
There's a vast literature on the bicycle, but I wanted to excavate some lesser known episodes,
maybe fill in a few gaps that I saw in bicycle historiography.
Bicycle history is often quite sentimental and even romantic.
We tend to depict the bicycle as a kind of redemptive green machine.
You know, the,
the pokey little 19th century vehicle that could save the world from environmental collapse.
If only all of us would give up motorized four-wheeled transport for the pedal powered two-wheeled kind.
People who write about bikes are generally people who really love bikes.
I love bicycles too,
but I was interested in exploring some darker or more ambivalent aspects of the bicycle story,
past and present.
So I began to research and report on this practice of bicycle drowning and dredging up.
And I quickly realized it was both a global phenomenon and a historical one,