If I close my eyes I can still be six years old, riding my yellow bicycle at dusk,
my family somewhere nearby but unable to keep up with me as I swooped around the
long, gently sloping parking lot of a grocery store. The night hung overhead with
weight pressing down in halos around the streetlights and I remember that I had unbuttoned
my little boy's shirt and was enjoying the way my open shirttails flapped around
my body the way the wings of bats fluttered overhead. I became immortal that night,
forever changed by my understanding of the world, in love with the swooping dive
balance of two wheels. At 32, I’m rediscovering the steel coaster-brake bicycle,
the dawn of all my experiences on the way of two wheels, and again I am smiling and
open to the sky, my heart filled with the simple joy of the love of motion.
A motorcycle is deadly serious adult stuff to me, and I envy those who got to enjoy
them as toys. If I had my childhood to do over again, how dearly I wish that I had
a minibike, a dirtbike, that I would have learned to wheelie and slide and ride the
way a kid rode a Schwinn Stingray when it was just a tool to him, long before mountain
bicycles and at the dawn of the age of BMX, when it was understood that a bicycle
was an implement that had to withstand savage abuse and bounce.
Right when most kids were turning on to BMX bikes, I had reached the age where I
had a paper route and needed a workhorse bike for my rounds. This was an upright
beast with big baskets, 5 speeds, fenders- a total granny of a bike. I pined for
a BMX bike while I pounded my paper route day after day- in retrospect when I think
about that bike, and what it likely weighed, and the hills I took it up in rain ,
snow and gloom of night. I rode that bike constantly and hard and don't remember
ever having to do anything to it except learn to fix flats.
It was on this paperboy bike that I learned what its like to cover ground on your
own- to rule many square miles of terrain with your enhanced mobility. Decide on
a whim to ride to the store or to school or just to the bridge over the small creek
where I once found a Playboy magazine cast (surely) from God's moving car for me
to find. Mobility- this is a powerful thing, the fortunate young man reflects. There
is, of course, another step to go up the ladder of mobility for the young man- the
world of internal combustion.
So imagine then, the gawky lad on his gawky steel bicycle, his tube socks pulled
up and his hair cut in the shape of an overturned bowl, pausing by the side of the
road to tuck a newspaper between the door and screen door of a home, and the sound
of a motor is suddenly different than the cars passing by, and my eyes turn up to
catch the passing vehicle- its rider wears a full face helmet, and the rider's arms
reach straight down to either side of a single bright headlight with a rounded windshield
over it- he looks tucked in, folded up, in command, and as the bike rolls past I
see that it is painted a burnt metallic orange which fades to different shades. This
was the moment that something tripped deep inside my brain- a bridge was made between
the thinking part of the brain and the lizard-controlled areas where there had been
none before- a neuron that fused smokily in place at that instant, and I was changed.
I suppose with the wisdom of adulthood that it must have been a BMW R90S, apparently
quite a machine in its time, but I didn’t know that . I just know that I looked up
that day and said an "oh yeah" inside that I'm saying to this day. That's
how you get around, that is. Yeah. |
