photo credit: Ian Pattenson | Flickr Creative Commons

One bike was a Raleigh mountain bike. Knobby tires, those handlebar extensions that look like bull horns. It never saw any mountains, or even any dirt for that matter. It was the turn of the century and mountain bikes were all the rage, as were SUVs. For about a decade, every male in America pretended he was mad for off-roading. We all wanted to seem more rugged than we were. Why? I blame Big Wheels. I can’t answer for anyone else, but I can say that my mountain bike coincided with the birth of my children, and maybe it was my way of convincing myself that I was tough enough for the rocky terrain of fatherhood.

 

We had two boys about seventeen months apart, and for a couple of years the only surefire way to get them down for a nap was to load them into the bike trailer. They’d start off bickering and flogging each other with stuffed animals, but soon enough the sun would heat up the plastic covering, the rocking motion of the slightly off-true wheels of the trailer would soothe them, and they’d be propped against each other like tiny drunks, drooling cutely.

 

It was my own version of the movie Speed: As long as I kept moving, they stayed asleep, but if I stopped, those two little bombs would go off.

 

In the trailer, my boys slept. At home, my exhausted wife slept. I spun the backroads of Brownsburg, Clermont, Attica, Zionsville, like I was powering a generator, recharging my family.  

photo credit: WFIU Public Radio | The racer has just gotten an exchange from her teammate and is leaping onto the bike.

A single-speed bike with coaster brakes, the Schwinn Roadmaster was the official bike of the Little 500. Based on its weight, I’m going to guess it was made of pig iron. During the winter months, my team trained indoors on something called “rollers,” a set of rolling drums mounted in a frame on the floor. Once you got going, your tires turned the drums and you stayed upright, like a lumberjack in a log-rolling contest.

 

photo credit: Alejandro Lavin Jr. | Flickr Creative Commons | Note: these are not my legs.

We liked to set up  rollers side by side in the basement of my fraternity in front of a big-screen television. No one wanted to be next to me because I had awful balance. Whenever an object swept across the screen, I would unconsciously track it and crash into the rider unlucky enough to be next to me. Nothing is so embarassing as causing a bike accident indoors.

 

Eventually they made me set up my rollers behind them, in a row by myself. I couldn’t see the TV anymore. All I could see was a line of asses, which turned out to be good practice for a bike race.   

 

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Once, riding on the road with a teammate, we came upon a giant valley. The good news was that we could fly downhill first. The bad news took the form of the uphill on the far side. The best course of action, I decided, was to go as fast as possible on the downslope and try to carry that speed into the climb. In those days I had a bad habit of dropping my head whenever I was really digging for speed. That’s why I never saw the car parked at the bottom of the valley.

 

I must have been going thirty when I hit that sedan. The impact folded my wheel and destroyed my fork. When I speared the back windshield, my helmet split like a walnut. Sliding down the trunk, I saw my friend fall off his bike, laughing his ass off.

 

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The track for the Little 500 is made of packed cinders. The turns are mushy, and crashes are frequent. Once I crashed during track practice and got road rash all down one leg. The scrape hurt, but not as much as getting out the cinders. The trainer took a wire brush and whisked inside the wound until she was satisfied she had “gotten all the little buggers out.”

The pain of the whisking was phenomenal, almost revelatory. I saw bright flashes. I experienced pain as a taste. For hours afterward I couldn’t stop blinking and blinking.    

 

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One year my fraternity got busted for some drinking-related infraction (In a nod to Orwell, IU proclaims itself a “dry campus”). As a penalty, we couldn’t compete in Little 5. The irony was that no one in the house gave a shit about the race except for the guys on the team, all of whom had given up drinking for the training season.

 

We couldn’t let all our training go to waste, so naturally we decided to hold our own race. Down Third Street. At midnight. Naked.

 

Reader, I won that race.

 

It was neck-and-neck right up to the finish line in front of our house, but I made a final standing sprint past the screaming crowd, and it was only when I shot my fist up in victory that I realized the rest of my team had actually slowed down at the finish so they could turn into the parking lot of the house. I was the only one who’d actually thought of it as a race. Now I was alone, naked, in the middle of traffic on a one-way street.

 

I had to go two more blocks before I could make a left and head back toward the house.

 

Here is what I learned that night: Four naked guys on bikes is a harmless bit of hilarity, an odd and defiant celebration of life. One naked guy on a bike is just pathetic.  

 

photo credit: Dan Pupius | Flickr Creative Commons

In college, I got a Giant road bike. I don’t remember the model, but it had clipless pedals and the seat was about a foot higher than the handlebars, so you knew it was Serious.

 

I was training for the Little 500, the semi-famous bike race held every spring at Indiana University. I got a great deal on the bike from my neighbor who worked for a bike shop. The bike had good components, but the frame was a little small for me. Actually, a lot small. Getting on the bike made me feel like a bear trying to hump a snail. Though it’s possible I just resented the bike because I wasn’t very fast: easier to blame the bike than the rider.

 

How slow was I? Slowest on my team, and my team was pretty bad. Even Mark Z____, a sweet guy who was built like a cuddly bear, was way faster than me. He would zip along, talking to me casually over his shoulder, though I didn’t have the breath to reply because I was struggling so hard to stay in his slipstream. The hard little saddle killed my taint, so I got a puffy seat made for old women. My teammates made fun of it, but I didn’t care. Fuck it: if I was going to be the worst anyway, I might as well be comfortable. It was the first time I discovered the freedom that comes with being terrible.

 

photo credit: Andria | Flickr Creative Commons

My first ten-speed was a Schwinn Traveler. It weighed more than I did, which tells you as much about me as it does about that bike. I wore mesh bike gloves, even if I was just riding down to the park. I thought they made me look tough. I did not wear a helmet, though. The only person in our town who wore a helmet was Rusty, the mentally handicapped kid from down the block. His bike had a giant orange safety flag swaying from a pole on the back. From a block away, you could see that flag and hear Rusty guffawing. That kid loved to bike.

 

I rode the Traveler to the sand volleyball court at Redar Park. I rode it to the DQ on the Lincoln Highway, and to the pool at the Sherwood Country Club. I rode to my friend Dave’s house. His basement had pornography and a weight bench and giant stereo speakers. It was a caricature of manliness. I rode home, where I indulged my habit of hopping off my bike while it was still rolling and catching it by the seat, which I thought looked as cool as me in bike gloves. One day I missed the seat and the bike careened into my father’s car and smashed the brake light.

 

As punishment, I had to replace the brake light with him. He was good like this—spotting opportunities for learning and togetherness—but I have always hated intricate manual labor. We spent an hour going to the auto parts store, and another hour installing the brake light, and another hour going back to the store for a tool we needed to finish the job, and the whole time I was thinking: this is a waste of my life. I am wasting my life right now.

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I rode the Traveler in my first Apple Cider Century, a bike tour in Michigan. You could ride 25 miles, 50 miles, or 100 miles. After deciding on the fifty-miler, my father suggested we camp out the night before. I realize now that the camping was supposed to be a bonding experience—my father was good like that, too—but at the time, he just said it would give us an early start, and I believed him.

We weren’t big campers. Especially me. I was a fan of pillow-top mattresses and air conditioning. As I packed my duffel, I threw in a notepad and a handful of pencils, in case I had some downtime and felt like writing.

 

“You’re not going to need those,” my father said.

I said it was better to have something and not need it, than need it and not have it. It was a philosophy I’d picked up from my grandparents, who’d lived through the Depression and now had a basement that could support a small village through a nuclear winter.  

 

“Don’t bring the pencils,” he said, and gave me a meaningful look.

 

I brought the pencils. But, to be considerate, I hid them.

My father was right: I didn’t need them. We spent the day driving and setting up the tent in a schoolyard and eating in the cafeteria and watching some reindeer movie that had been filmed in this little town. In the dark, we found our way back to the tent, tossed our bags inside, and settled into our sleeping bags. I heard squinching noises as my father got comfortable on his air mattress. Then I heard a soft pop, followed by a long hiss. It was dark in the tent, but not so dark that I couldn’t see my father sinking to the ground.  

 

“When I turn on the light,” he said in a queer voice like he was trying to hold his breath and talk at the same time, “I better not see any goddamn pencils.”  

photo credit: Nels Olsen | Flickr Creative Commons

It was the ‘80s. We lived in the middle of America. So of course we were a Schwinn family.

 

My favorite Schwinn was a glitterblue Sting-Ray with swept-back handlebars. The banana seat was sparkly grey with a black stripe that would get hot in the sun. Not so hot that it burned me; just pleasantly hot in a way I knew I should keep to myself.

 

I decked it out with gadgets. A bell. A speedometer/odometer. A light that was powered by a tiny generator strapped to the wheel: the faster I went, the brighter the light burned. With this bike, I could make energy change forms, from speed into light. This fascinated me. That was the kind of nerd I was.

 

Every year on the Fourth of July, my neighborhood had a kids’ parade. We decorated our bikes with crepe paper and streamers and whatnot, then followed a fire truck around the town. I loved this parade until the year I turned twelve.

 

That year, I wrapped my bike in crepe paper until it was a serious fire hazard. At the parade, I led the pack of riders, swooping back and forth behind the fire truck, slaloming all over the street. The bike had these fat tires that made a satisfying noise when they torqued a hard turn. I was probably making siren noises with my mouth. I was into it, man.

 

Then I saw two boys from my school, up at the corner, straddling ten-speeds. One pointed at me and said something to his friend. The other boy nodded. They didn’t say anything as I passed. They didn’t have to. I could see myself through their eyes.

 

I dropped to the middle of the pack and rode straight down the street until I was done with the parade. For my birthday that year I asked for a ten-speed.  

photo credit: jing jie | flickr creative commons

My first bike was actually a tricycle made of plastic. It was a Big Wheel. The genius of Big Wheel was in transforming a thing that should have been baby-ish—a trike—and making it seem tough and manly by virtue of handlebars that recall a Harley’s.

 

It looked better than it performed, though. As anyone who has ever piloted a Big Wheel knows, the slightest incline could cause the plastic wheels to lose traction and spin uselessly as you slid back down the hill (is that a metaphor for life? God, I hope not). And you had to be careful not to jerk the handlebars while turning, or you’d dreidel right out into the street.

 

But it did make a tremendous rumble going along the pavement, and made a skinny five-year old feel like a badass.   

photo credit: planetgordon.com | flickr creative commons

I was a baby when my father strapped me into a plastic seat bolted behind his saddle. I don’t have a memory of this ride, but I can construct a composite mental image from pictures of my childhood in the late ‘70s. There we are, squinting into the sun. My father has a perm, and his shorts are very short. His front basket is loaded with library books. No one’s wearing a helmet. If he wipes out, it’s books and brains all over the road.  

 

But he never wiped out with me in the bucket. My father kept our family safe through a combination of wariness and grit. My mother was highly allergic to bee stings, so whenever a bee came near, my father would grab it out of the air and crush it in his hand, grunting softly as it stung his palm.

 

Growing up, I had a feeling that nothing bad could happen to me as long as my father was around. A lot of kids have this feeling, I know, but most can’t point to the evidence of a swollen palm.