If you’re thinking that using environmental legislation to stop bike lanes sounds kind of wacky, well, you’re not the only one. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, naturally, is upset, as is the SFWeekly’s Matt Smith, who wrote a column last week calling Anderson “mean” and “spiteful.”

On his own blog, Anderson, who happens to be the brother of Bruce Anderson, the notorious gadfly founder of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, appears to be enjoying the attention. Most of his recent posts are devoted to poking at his critics and elaborating on his opinion that biking is inherently dangerous and will never be a suitable transportation option for the masses in San Francisco.

Of course, one of the reasons why biking is dangerous in the city is because the city is not designed to accommodate cyclists. Which is what the Bicycle Plan is attempting to address.

News flash for Rob Anderson: The price of crude oil spiked to a record high today. Smart cities should be looking for ways to enhance public transportation and make it easier for people to get around on non-fossil-fuel-consuming vehicles, like bikes. Getting in the way isn’t mean, or spiteful. It’s just dumb.

You head toward the smoke and the dust and the bodies if your son goes to school in the City of London. If your son rides the subway early every morning with City workers — dealers, brokers, analysts — into London’s financial district. If his destination, in short, would be a terrorist’s bulls-eye. I had imagined dozens of times the day of the long-anticipated strike against London — most likely in the morning rush hour, most likely centered on the Square Mile of the City, most likely underground. Only a crude calculation of risk quelled my shudders.

My cellphone network was down. Land-line attempts to reach the school met with a heart-stopping busy tone. No news. Finger now trembling over the panic button. Best hope: The strikes were an hour later than I had believed with near certainty they would be whenever they came. If you intended a symbolic second strike at the Western Capitalist Hegemony you would set your timer to 7:45 — City guys arrive at their desks early. Louis also arrives at school early — only so that he can kick a ball around the yard before he is reluctantly obliged to ingest Latin grammar, the history of the English Civil War and algebra. Different causes, same risk. So these strikes were strangely timed, just after 8:50 a.m.  after the gold-rush but before the 9:30 a.m. watershed when cheaper tickets start selling on London’s hopelessly overcrowded public transport system. Who were the intended targets? Shop and office workers? Tourists?

From the first I never believed the white lie. I still believe it was just that, the early reports that cautiously invoked a “power surge” as a likely cause of three separate explosions on the tube network. Three?! Was anyone fooled? I doubt it. Certainly not after pictures of the red London double-decker bus appeared on the live TV news broadcasts, its roof ripped off like a tin lid. A white lie to stem panic. But after the bus the game was up. We all knew. This is our Ground (sub?) Zero. And its number shall be 7/7.

No narrative conceit, no convenient evasion of the drama-quenching truth here. I did — finally — get through to my son’s school before I left home. “Name?” demanded a voice at the end of the line. I told her. “Class?” 2E. “In!” snapped the voice. “We’re keeping all the boys here for now.” Can I come to collect him? “I won’t stop you.”

It had been a bizarre 24 hours. Only the day before I had returned from Beirut, where I’d been filming in Hezbollah strongholds and Palestinian refugee camps and with Al Manar, Hezbollah’s own Iranian-funded TV station, for a BBC documentary I am currently making about terrorism and TV. The BBC had made a terrific fuss about security, insisting on daily check-in calls from the city where once Western hostages were shackled to radiators or moved between underground car parks for years — their well-being and circumstances a big black hole — no video appeals, no cages, no beheadings, no news of any kind. Now I am back home in London to find that terror has come to town.

At the sight of St. Paul’s dome (smoky symbol of London’s spirit of resistance during the wartime Blitz) I allowed myself to wonder if I was overreacting. I knew Louis was safe. But what about a second wave of attacks? What if another bomb were even now ticking under the Millennium Bridge, right next to the school? No time to lose.

In the school foyer several teachers directed a fleet of schoolboy monitors to retrieve students from classrooms and reunite them with anxious parents. Louis appeared quickly, having, he said, immediately spotted my bicycle manacled to a sightseeing bench overlooking the Thames. Several other North London boys, and another parent, Mark, appeared and our small posse began the long walk home, navigating through side streets (“Away from tube stations and landmark buildings, don’t you think?” said Mark) and toward our zip code, NW3. The streets were crowded but quiet — the slightly muffled sound of shoe leather on sidewalk as thousands of people padded home without the usual accompaniment of roaring car, truck and bus engines. The sun was shining by the time we reached the Regent’s Park. It was (almost) a pleasant walk past the magnificent neoclassical Nash facades topped by magnolia-and-blue friezes. At Camden Town, by mid-afternoon, shop and office workers were seizing the opportunity for a short day and dropping into bars for a collective snifter on the way home.

Today the death toll has climbed to more than 50; everyone knows it could have been so much higher. An ironic (kind of) blessing? A cloud with a silver lining? The newspaper columnists have all opined: “A radical mood swing” (after the Olympic euphoria of Wednesday and the Live 8 spectacular of the weekend), Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian calls it; “Islam does not sanction such murder,” says a spokesman from one of the moderate Islamic organizations; “normality is the only civilized response to terror,” says a seasoned commentator in the Daily Telegraph — reflecting the “carry-on-regardless” spirit of defiance that our political leaders tell us will send the terrorists a clear message: We’re still here. You cannot win.

So far only one article has raised my temperature — from a Brit writing for the Nation magazine. “It’s not yet clear whether we’ll hate Blair less or hate him more for putting us at greater risk by following Bush to Iraq,” writes Maria Margaronis. Wrong, Maria. It is already quite clear. Tony Blair’s performance yesterday was faultless. As before (Princess Diana’s death, 9/11 itself), Blair has an unerring ability to meet defeat (and triumph, for that matter) with perfect pitch. His words and his mood reflect something genuinely national and shared at such moments, despite (or because of) Britain’s — and especially London’s — now well-understood and largely accepted ethnic and cultural diversity. Tony Blair will gain from this — a very unwelcome boost no doubt, but a boost nonetheless. It is true that Britain, like the U.S., is deeply divided about the war on Iraq. But at this time, those divisions are largely suspended. The noisy but numerically irrelevant caucus that will, no doubt, seek to blame Britain’s presence in Iraq, Tony Blair, George Bush, indeed almost anyone except the bombers themselves for this horror — those who inhabit this topsy-turvey moral maze will be largely ignored and, if silently, scorned by most of us.

I am reminded of the words of an old American friend of mine, a TV cameraman — a Vietnam-era shooter now living in Hong Kong with his third wife. Marvin would always say: “You know, you can break the Brits, but you can’t bend them!” Too right, Marvin.

There was also that part where I wrote that cycle racing was an obscure sport with a skill set that could be described thusly: “pedaling fast and not falling over.” That chapped a few heinies.

I love the interplay with my readers, but I couldn’t respond personally to each of the dozens of people who wrote, so I compiled a sort of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the piece in question. It might also be called a Frequently Launched Attacks, although that doesn’t have quite the same ring, and anyway the abbreviation FLA is already taken.

There’s more to bike racing, you idiot, than “pedaling fast and not falling over.” You idiot!

Yes, of course. I exaggerated a bit for humorous effect. Obviously, any sport, or any activity, can be comically reduced like that: All Michael Jordan does is throw a ball through a hoop, and all Louis Armstrong ever did was blow through a metal tube.

My point here is that the athletic skill set in bicycle racing is extremely limited. Just to take Serena Williams and tennis as an example, since that’s the comparison at hand: Williams must move with speed and quickness in every direction. She must judge the speed and spin of her opponent’s shot and chase it down accurately. She must hit the ball with power, accuracy and touch, in various combinations. And on those rare occasions when her opponent keeps the match close, she must have endurance, though obviously not the same kind of endurance necessary to win the Tour de France.

So, that’s reflexes, quickness, speed in a 360-degree field, power, hand-eye coordination, endurance and shot-making skill vs. Armstrong’s speed — in one direction — power and endurance. And I think that tennis is a fairly limited sport in terms of the athletic skills needed. The skill set needed for basketball, for example, is much greater.

OK, even if we leave that aside, you’re missing the point about cycle racing. It’s a complicated tactical sport. You just don’t appreciate it because you’re so ignorant. There’s an incredible amount of teamwork and strategy going on.

Every sport has strategy and tactics. There’s lots of strategy in baseball too, but that doesn’t get Barry Bonds any closer to this year’s award. If strategy were a factor, chess players would be in the running. And there’s plenty of teamwork in bridge.

Lance doesn’t deserve to be Sports Person of the Year, eh? Why don’t you try riding 100 miles a day, up and down mountains, every day for three weeks. Why don’t you come riding with my cycling club someday, huh, fat boy? Get a bike. Get off your couch for once, put down that brew. Then maybe you’ll understand something about sports.

This is a really, really frequent comment. Do cycling people really divide the world into two groups, cycling people and fat, lazy, beer-swilling slobs who never get off their couch? And what difference would getting on a bike make? I don’t play tennis, but I didn’t notice a lot of tennis fans impeaching my tennis knowledge or demanding that I learn to play before I write about their sport.

I can’t compete with any well-known athlete, male or female, in any sport. There, I said it. But that means nothing in determining who’s the Sports Person of the Year, any more than my being a better writer than Lance Armstrong or Serena Williams, if true, would qualify me for the Nobel Prize in literature.

I just don’t get what your criteria for Sports Person of the Year are. Reading your article, it seems like they are: 1) Winner should come from a popular sport that reflects the interest of the majority of Americans; 2) Winner should, obviously, have a great year; 3) Winner should be flashy and exciting enough to elicit a lot of discussion (i.e. Serena’s knee-high socks and Oprah appearances); or 1) Bike racing is not popular in the U.S. 2) Armstrong isn’t a recognizable figure; 3) Bike racing consists of simply pedaling and more pedaling.

Actually, for a fat, lazy, beer-swilling slob of a writer, I think I did a nice job clearly spelling out the criteria. To wit: “Around here we look for someone who dominates his or her sport, and sports that Americans watch carry more weight than those we ignore. Table tennis juggernaut Timo Boll has little chance of ever winning. If that dominant performer also separates from the pack, becomes a hot topic around the water cooler, so much the better.”

So the winner doesn’t have to be flashy and exciting enough to elicit a lot of discussion, but it helps. Though probably not a lot — if Williams were as boring as Steffi Graf, she’d probably still win because of her dominant year. If I’m unique in considering charisma and flash, which I don’t think I am, I’m only unique for being honest about it.

So you would remove from consideration other sports that are similarly one-dimensional or unpopular in America, among them track and field, swimming and ski racing (alpine and cross country)?

I wouldn’t say I’d eliminate them from consideration, but I would say it would take a lot for someone from one of those sports to win. I can see Jesse Owens, Jackie Joyner-Kersee or Mark Spitz winning in their big years.

Serena Williams has no competition. Sure, she blows everyone away, but who’s she playing? Aside from her sister and maybe Jennifer Capriati, what other great players are there?

Well, what’s she supposed to do? The only people she can beat are the ones who line up across from her. And how many great players does she have to beat? Venus Williams and Jennifer Capriati are pretty damn good, not to mention Martina Hingis, who was hurt most of the last year. Muhammad Ali never had more than two or three really good opponents at the same time, and people seem to think highly of his athletic achievements.

Why did you bring up the race thing and then dismiss it? That’s irresponsible journalism.

I brought it up because I thought it was an issue. I didn’t quite dismiss it. I said I didn’t think the editors of Sports Illustrated chose Armstrong over Williams because Armstrong’s white and Williams is black. Let me be more clear: I’m certain of that. But I think it’s naive to think that race is not a factor in how any of us thinks about a white athlete and a black athlete in relation to each other. It’s in there somewhere. It’s in there in my piece. It’s in this paragraph. I’m not sure how, but it’s in there. I’m no expert on race in America, but I know this much: It’s always there.

I enjoyed reading your article about as much as I enjoy watching obese French men reeking of week-old body odor with a glass of red wine in one hand, a skinny cigarette in the other, screaming absurdities (dopa!) at Lance.

This isn’t a frequently made comment, but one person actually wrote it. Here’s the funny part, though: From the rest of his letter, it’s clear that this fellow actually doesn’t enjoy watching obese French men reeking of week-old body odor with a glass of red wine in one hand, a skinny cigarette in the other, screaming absurdities (dopa!) at Lance. Well, to each his own.

Americans don’t get cycling, much in the same way that they don’t get soccer, because their attention-deficient brains can’t grasp the subtlety and nuances of bicycle races any more than the beauties of a 0-0 tie in a soccer.

This is probably true. And I’m perfectly OK with that. I’m an American. I write for an American publication. Something like 90 percent of my readers are American. We Americans like certain sports better than we like certain other sports. I don’t agree that the preference for one sport over another is something on which we can base moral judgments. I love baseball, for example, and yet I have many friends who can’t stand it, and they’re fine people. I even married one of them.

On the other hand, I can’t stand soccer, and yes, part of that is because I don’t think there’s enough scoring. So maybe I have that national attention-deficit problem. But I can be fascinated by a 1-0 baseball game or a 0-0 hockey game, not to mention a ponderous, arty French film, which I wouldn’t dream of calling a movie. So what gives? Maybe some people just like some sports and dislike others, independent of their native intelligence. You think?

As I said, sports popular in America carry more weight for the prestigious Salon Sports Person of the Year award than sports that aren’t popular in America do. That doesn’t mean I don’t like all sports that aren’t popular in America, or that those sports, cycle racing included, are somehow bad. Americans are almost completely ignorant of hurling, the Irish national sport, which I find endlessly entertaining. I wish it were more popular here, but it’s not. I’ve just never felt the need to whine about that, or to take it as indicative of something lacking in the American character.

Your discounting Armstrong because his sport isn’t popular in America is a typical example of American arrogance and ignorance of all things outside its borders.

I wonder how many Sportsman of the Year honors Barry Bonds has won from publications in India. Is that indicative of Indian arrogance? Like I said, I’m an American writing for Americans in an American publication. The Sports Person of the Year is probably going to be someone who’s excelled in a sport that’s popular in America. Cricket players need not apply. Sorry, but there’s always the Hindustan Times.

Lance Armstrong races in lots of events. He didn’t win Sportsman of the Year just for winning the Tour de France.

Yeah, he did. He could win every bike race in the world except the Tour de France, and he wouldn’t sniff a year-end award, except in his own sport. Any other races he enters serve as training runs for his Tour de France bid.

Armstrong deserves the award not because he is a good bike racer, but because he does things outside the sport, like his cancer foundation.

No, he deserves some other award for that stuff. Lots of athletes do lots of admirable charity work. The Salon Sports Person of the Year award rewards athletic excellence.

Not only did Lance win the Tour de France, he’s a cancer survivor. How can you run down his achievements?

I didn’t run down his achievements. I just said he’s not the Sports Person of the Year, and I don’t really think he’s close — hence the admittedly inflammatory word “outrageous.” That he’s a world-class champion, a great athlete and an inspiration to millions goes without saying. I didn’t run down Shaquille O’Neal’s achievements by saying he doesn’t deserve the award either. The world is not divided into Serena Williams and a bunch of chumps.

And anyway, you can’t have it both ways. If you’re saying Armstrong deserves to win the award because he’s a cancer survivor, you’re admitting that he doesn’t deserve it on his athletic merits, which is my argument. If you believe he deserves it on his athletic merits, how is his cancer survival relevant? Saku Koivu of the Montreal Canadiens survived cancer too.

You’re an idiot.

Thanks for writing.

Dr. Ferdinand Frauscher, author of the study, told reporters that the results indicate that mountain bikers can definitely develop fertility problems. Aside from twisted veins, another potential cause of impotence is the pressure from a bike seat, which can damage blood vessels and nerves. During mountain biking in particular, Frauscher stressed, the rough-and-tumble terrain jostles the scrota even more.

Frauscher and his colleagues encourage bicycling men to reduce the risk of scrotal injury by taking frequent rests. Another helpful hint is to add layers of padding in bike shorts and to the bike seat itself. And bikers are advised to properly adjust the height and angle of the bike seat.

But the doctor said all this doesn’t mean you have to give up biking. “We think biking is a healthy sport,” Frauscher said.

“Not for you,” I said.

We bought a Holland guidebook, with many photographs of Rembrandt paintings and elaborately gabled canal-front brick houses, but the Bicycles section was only two pages long and commenced with a photograph of a bike helmet. Ha! (We’ll get to that in a moment.) We found what seemed to be a suitable Holland Tourist Board Web site, animated on-screen by a little mustached man who pedaled along as you plotted out various rural cycling routes, but every time I tried to download the maps my computer snarled at me and dumped the site.

So we gave up on the advance details, arranged for an Amsterdam apartment that came equipped with the owners’ bicycles and landed on a breezy July morning at Schiphol Airport, which is grand and clean and extremely efficient; by lunch time, our bags piled up at the top of the apartment’s staircase landing, we were bicycling. Before sundown the next day, we had grasped the essentials.

The essentials were — startling.

By that second day, I had began composing my own introductory bicycling brochure, to be handed at the border to uninitiated Americans with tulips in their heads.

“Bicycling in Holland: The Essentials”

1. The Bicycles. The bicycles are hardy. Black, mostly, or faded gray. No gearshifts. Rust on the fenders. High handlebars. Smooth fat tires. Coaster brakes. When you hit the cobblestones, things rattle; the bell dings of its own accord; small parts fall off and have to be jammed back into place. The bicycle you learned to ride on felt like this. At the central Amsterdam train station the outside walls are ringed by vast thickets of rusting dark metal, bicycle after bicycle locked in tight succession along the long metal parking racks, and at the fringes of the racks, scores of spillover bicycles are locked to fence posts, lampposts, grillwork, tree trunks, drainpipes and each other. Some of these bicycles are lying at peculiar angles and appear to have been stripped of seats, fenders, pedals or front wheels. There are locked bicycles rusting together in front of every restaurant, storefront, apartment house and playground; any fixed outdoor metal tubing, regardless of its intended purpose, is likely to have a bicycle locked to it. Fietsenstalling means bicycle parking. Fietsenstalling with a red line slashed through it means: For God’s sake, give me a break, just put the damn thing somewhere else.

2. The Terrain. In Holland the intersections have three sets of traffic signals: lighted spheres for the automobiles, lighted walking men for the pedestrians and lighted bicycles for you — red two-wheeler for stop, green two-wheeler for go. On many streets you get your own lane, too, with its own yellow line center divider. This would make your inaugural bicycle ride, which will almost certainly take place in Amsterdam, quite charming and tranquil except for the motorcycles and the buses and the delivery trucks and the map-reading tourists and the honking Minis and Fiats (which look like those tiny cars from the Richard Scarry children’s books and drive very rapidly down brick-paved streets, with three centimeters of clearance on either side) and the horse-drawn calliope wagons and the ambulances going beeee-booop-beeee-booop and the lollipop-colored streetcars bearing down on you broadside.

There are windmills, by the way. Also farmers and cows, and drowsy sheep, and dawn mist off the still canals, and thick green meadows out to the flat horizon. But you have to bicycle through Amsterdam to get to them.

3. The Road Company. The population of Holland is 16 million; the total number of bicycles, according to official counts, is slightly over 16 million. More than one bicycle per citizen, that is, including the newborn and the infirm. While you are on your bicycle you will be overtaken by the following persons, all of whom will pedal more aggressively than you and will clang their handlebar bells impatiently to shoo you over to the right: leggy blond women in miniskirts and four-inch platform shoes; businessmen in pressed white shirts and ties; teenage boys with girlfriends balancing sidesaddle on the back; teenage girls with boyfriends balancing splayed-legged over the handlebars; pale Turkish grocers carrying full crates of bottled beer; coffee-colored Indonesian women carrying full sacks of market vegetables; black boys in soccer jerseys arguing furiously in Dutch; elderly white-haired men with their wool trousers tucked into their socks; elderly white-haired women with long-stemmed gladioluses pinioned under one arm; Orthodox Jewish boys in yarmulkes; Islamic ladies in chadors; and a 300-pound tattooed man, bare-chested under his denim overalls, with one child on his handlebars and another clinging to him from behind.

Note: None of these people will be wearing a helmet.

I didn’t mention rain yet, did I? When it rains people pull on hooded slickers or unfurl umbrellas and go right on bicycling. I watched one matronly looking lady, in her wool blazer and sensible shoes, pedaling briskly along an Amsterdam street while balancing a purse, a full sack of groceries, a bouquet of flowers, an opened umbrella and a live puppy peering out from inside the handlebar basket. I never did figure out how she managed it. I felt quite at my limit just trying to negotiate the rain-slicked cobblestones in the voluminous plastic poncho I bought in a tourist office for six guilders — that’s $3, so actually it was more of a cellophane poncho. My husband and children had the rain jackets we had packed with us, but I chugged along inside the flaps of my cellophane Dutch tent; for my birthday, a week after we arrived, my 12-year-old daughter drew me a Batmom card with an illustration of a determined caped crusader on wheels (quick as a flash, the ponchoed bicycle appears out of the mists, to battle the storm in her billowing dark green armor).

Fortunately, the rain came only on days three, five and 12. For the rest of our two weeks the sun shone, or at least the gray sky held off for most of the day, and every morning we made our way from our apartment down three flights of narrow, twisting Dutch steps — apparently this is a nationally cherished architectural detail, the ankle-killer staircase composed of steps so squashed that your toes stick out over the edge — and unlocked our bicycles from the long metal rack on the street. We never walked anywhere. Why would you want to walk when you have to dodge all those manic people on bicycles? We pedaled Amsterdam, which became somewhat less harrowing as we grew more adept at working our way through town on the gorgeous narrow canal streets laid out in concentric rings around the city center. On the canal streets there were no streetcar tracks, only the vrooming little Richard Scarry cars, and in all directions the side-street glories of a city laid out 300 years ago to display its merchant wealth: the arched stone bridges, the flowerpot-decorated wooden canal boats and the high, narrow buildings of red and ochre brick, each topped with a different flourish of showy cornices and gables.

I don’t think we ever covered the length of one of these city streets without slowing to admire the view or peer up at the rooftops. Except for the briefly aerobic rush of terror as the streetcars lurch by, seeing Amsterdam on two wheels feels more like strolling than bicycling, and for convenience it’s unbeatable: While the other tourists walked, or waited for streetcars, or shelled out their guilders for the Mercedes taxicabs, we glided along on our black clunkers and engaged in creative fietsenstalling whenever we wanted to visit indoor sights. Outside the Rijksmuseum, the massive 19th century neo-Gothic palace housing the national art collection, we used an ornate iron fence. Outside Kantjil & de Tijger, the sleek and crowded restaurant where we ate ourselves into a stupor on Indonesian food, we used some random outdoor plumbing affixed to the building next door.

And once we got into the countryside — which began, as it turned out, about eight minutes’ ride from our apartment — we barely locked the bikes at all. We pedaled along at our same indolent pace; we dumped the bicycles on the grass while we pulled cheese and oranges out of the backpack; we sat on village curbs, the bicycles on their kickstands beside us, while the kids ate from paper cones full of patates frites (which sounds grander than french fries, even if the Dutch do have a mysterious penchant for eating their patates with a large lump of mayonnaise on top). The countryside looked exactly the way it was supposed to, except for the tulips: wrong season — no tulips in July. But the black and white cows, as my daughter observed, shone as though someone went out and waxed them each morning. The pastures spread around impeccably tended farmhouses, with vegetable gardens and flower beds out in front, where you could inspect them from the bicycle path. Often the farmhouse front room was left curtains-open and perfectly arranged, which we were told is a long-standing Dutch custom, the display of order and prosperity to impress all passers-by. The farmers didn’t wave, exactly, but from time to time they pedaled their own clunkers out to join us on the fietspad, the bicycle path; once we pulled off to the side while a cycling farmer herded his whole flock of sheep out of one pasture, down the fietspad a few hundred yards and back into the next pasture over.

These fietspaden, by the way, really are a bicyclist’s dream — bicycle-only roads, paved, some of them wholly separate from the road for the cars and trucks. A web of fietspaden spreads out from Amsterdam through the surrounding villages, and the Dutch train system is designed to encourage ambitious cycling trips; you can either put your bicycle on the train, which is the more expensive option because you essentially have to buy the bike a ticket too, or for about $5 a day you can rent a bicycle at your destination train station, as long as you call in advance to make sure they haven’t run out. We were briefed on the mechanics of this process by a solicitous Amsterdam train station clerk, who like almost everyone else we met spoke courteous and nearly accent-free English, and with the clerk’s help we reserved four bikes one morning at the station up in the northwestern town of Den Helder, which is the takeoff point for a popular Dutch vacation area called the West Frisian islands.

Until we began examining maps of Holland in some detail, we had never heard of the West Frisian islands; they curve out along the North Sea in a long narrow arc, accessible only by boat — which in our case turned out to be the giant car and bicycle ferry that made the crossing to Texel, the closest and largest of the islands, in just enough time for us to stash the rental bikes (fietsenstalling: a momentarily unoccupied horizontal metal pipe) and climb upstairs to the open decks to watch seagulls and breathe in salt air. The ferry docked at a long sweep of sand and farm fields and we pedaled straight out into the open country of Texel. We had in mind an all-afternoon loop up to the seaside village of De Koog, which is where the Dutch people go to set out their beach umbrellas, and both De Koog and the villages en route turned out to be charming little places, with wrought iron fences and pointy-roofed brick and wood cottages. But it was the pastoral fietspaden up to De Koog and back — some of them curving deep into the woods, with no automobile road anywhere in sight, and then back out along the inland slope of deserted grass-topped sand dunes — that were the real glory of the trip.

We put in some terrific excursions over our weeks in Holland — there was a train-and-bike arrangement that wound us through thickly wooded countryside into Gouda, with its grand Gothic red-shuttered town hall; there was a serene two-windmill ride (the old ones don’t rotate any more, but they’re splendid to look at, especially from a distance) that started 10 blocks from our apartment and ran south along the banks of the Amstel River. But that ride around Texel turned into one of those afternoons when you keep grabbing each other and pointing at things that look too flawless to be credible. Thatched-roof farmhouses, I remember those, and the birch and dogwood trees, and the smell of hay, and the single church steeple rising from the expanse of pastures gone to wildflower. We watched a baby goat suckle its mother. Farmers leaned against a tractor and talked seriously to each other. The light was smoky and golden and made me understand why Breughel paintings look the way they do, and when the kids clanged their handlebar bells at each other it was just a noise of pure joy.

Some day that was — and it wound on, long into the late-night hours, in what we came to think of as peculiarly Dutch fashion. A valiant final sprint to the dock got us onto the last ferry back to Den Helder, at 9 o’clock and in the midst of a deep midsummer sunset; we returned our rental bikes to the Den Helder train station as night came up, and for the hour’s train ride back to Amsterdam the four of us slumped contentedly in our train seats and passed around our now-familiar supper of bakery rolls and Edam cheese.

We got back late to our neighborhood train station in Amsterdam, wondering what the urban bike paths would be like in the middle of the night, and there we experienced our first and only encounter with Holland bicycle mischief: We had all parked very responsibly, in the station’s outdoor fietsenstalling, but as we were unlocking the bikes to go home, a fellow cyclist who was examining her own bike exclaimed something to us in agitated Dutch. It was not until we tried to ride home that we saw what she had been trying to tell us: Someone, evidently for no purpose other than general bad behavior, had flattened every rear tire in the Amstel Station bicycle lot.

As acts of vandalism go, this one turned out to have been so contained as to be almost charming: Where I live the tires would have been slashed, if not stolen outright, requiring a high-priced replacement. But the Dutch bad guy, perhaps bowing to certain regional standards of civility, had let the air out by removing every rear screw-on valve in the fietsenstalling, which left each tire intact and must have taken quite a long time. All we would need for our repairs was an air pump and four new valves, and walking the bikes home at midnight, with the city streets quiet and the moonlight shining up off the river, it was not so hard to forgive him