Bikeman
By: Thomas F. Flynn / Narrated By: Jim Dale
Length: 1 hr and 8 mins
The “forever September morning” told in heartrending verse
Yup, I’m a boor…
I started listening to Bikeman, heard it was an epic poem, and then immediately glanced down to make sure that I wouldn’t have much more than 1 hour to suffer through poetry. Surely, I thought, the form of poetry would take away from the story and would instead focus on the craft.
Not by a long shot!
Bikeman is more a slug to the gut than it is an homage to the craft. It is emotion that is focused, made laser-like through the most stunning of use of language, and as I listened to four audiobooks this Thursday (9/10) and Friday (9/11) 2020, I must say that it was the one that made me feel the most.
And I’m ALL about feeling! I learned a lot this 2020 as I listened to the plight of first responders post 9/11, and did a study of the Manhattan boat rescues, and did a full-on rehash of the entire thing, and I’ve gotta tell ya, that while I learned a lot? I’d have to say that there was a bit of a remove between them and me, as tho’ time had dulled my senses, made me numb and forgetful.
Then came Bikeman, where journalist Thomas F. Flynn starts off that day pedaling to the Towers to cover the first plane’s crushing blow to the North Tower. It begins as we all did that Tuesday morning, going through the day to day, not noticing just how glorious the mundane is/was, until things forever changed.
But, while Flynn barely glances at the grass and trees, he’s immediately stopped short by the horror of even that first plane. The fire up there in that Tower is like a wild dog, roaring and howling fire, then turning back into itself, licking, then roaring and howling out again. Immediately he notes the people in the most intimate act of their lives, their dying, their falling or jumping to their deaths, noting as the malevolent and mischievous wind laps a plummeting rag doll of a woman, hurling her into the side of the building as though even then, her last act of trying to die, is to be perverted by natural forces laughing and playing with her. Later, when he is but a shell of a “survivor”—one who did not live through that day but merely did not die during it—he walks by posters and photos of people: The Have You Seen Me posters that cried out from walls and fences, and he thinks: Yes, I saw him jumping; Yes, I saw her falling from the sky.
He does not live; he’s but their tombs, inhaled when the South Tower fell, nearly killing him, nearly turning him into a curled up, fetal, pile of dead ash, just as those who were taken in Pompeii curled in on themselves.
This is a very, very, short Listen, made oh so unforgettable by the venerable (AWEsome choice) Jim Dale. Yes, Dale does children’s literature like the dickens; yes, Dale does magical realism like there’s no tomorrow. But here? Where 9/12 has become a tomorrow like no others? Dale brings the gut wrenching to life, the harrowing lives and breathes. As Flynn rolls his bicycle along, hurrying away from debris and swirling, killing ash, even as his journalistic Muse tells him to stop, to look backward, to chronicle it all, Jim Dale carries the voice of the hopeful along with the voice of the damned. When Flynn realizes he will die, then is offered a chance at life again? When a medic asks: “Did Bikeman make it?”, Dale responds with such grateful, grateful words, such pride.
Yes. Here I am, Bikeman is here.
This is a beautiful, beautiful barely 1 hour’s worth that’ll bring an entire day, an entire set of days back to you, with crushing emotion, with imagery and color that stuns the senses, even as one foot plods after the other, making soft tracks in a field of ash and death, as streetlamps come on as day has turned to night: Little cats’ eyes, reflecting but never illuminating.
It is sorrow made extraordinary…
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