On a Bicycle
Jesse test-driving one of the bicycles he helped make. Note the front fork - that’s a baby doll inside the car shock absorber.
“On a bicycle, I’m alert, aware of everything. It’s exhilarating, the narrow margin, the exposure to injury, the steadying force of the spinning wheels.” –Eula Biss, Having and Being Had
Bicycles have always been a part of my life. When I was a kid growing up in northeast Ohio, our family of twelve had a small fleet in various stages of functionality. My first bike was a red fixie,[1] otherwise forgettable, but we also had a girl’s Huffy that was indestructible. It had balloon tires and a handlebar that we never could straighten out properly. We learned to steer slightly to the right to go straight.
In the early Sixties, a new bike style was becoming popular. Schwinn’s Sting-Ray was one of the best of these trick bikes: butterfly handlebars, banana seat and sissy bar, twenty-inch back wheel with a slick tread, fourteen-inch front wheel, built for doing wheelies, precursor to the BMX. I never owned one, but I’d join my friends at the Holy Family Grade School parking lot, which offered lots of space to lay patches and do tight figure-eights, to see how far we could ride on our back wheels.
In those days, my bicycle was freedom, the thrill of going as fast as I could, wind ruffling my hair (no helmets back then). It was also transportation. I used it to deliver newspapers, go fishing at Silver Lake, meet up with friends for pickup football games behind Stow Cemetery. One summer weekday, my mom asked me to go to the store to buy a gallon of milk for lunch. I held the glass jug by its plastic handle as I was heading home, coasting down the Park Road hill. The right turn onto Lakeview Boulevard, where we lived, was near the bottom of that hill. I usually made the turn with no problem, using the downhill momentum to help me get up the hill to my house, but that day I failed to account for the gallon of milk weighing down my left hand. I executed half that turn before hitting the curb. I tumbled head over handlebars, landing sprawled on the devil strip,[2] the jug of milk shattered to pieces. I suffered a few bumps and bruises, but my ego was bruised the worst. I had to limp the bike the half block home and explain to Mom why I didn’t have the milk.
Years later, when I started taking classes at the University of Iowa, I lived fifteen blocks from campus. I looked forward to walking to and from school through the charming Goosetown neighborhood, but when I came upon an old fixie with a bent front rim, unlocked and forsaken on a campus bike rack, I rescued it. I replaced the rim but never bought a lock for the bike; I couldn’t imagine anyone considering it worth stealing. But its basic utility did eventually appeal to some bikejacker. By then, getting ready to travel, I was glad to know that hooptie of a bike was in the hands of someone who might appreciate it.
When Pat and I got married in 1981, we moved to the married student housing trailer park on Hawkeye Park Road, over three miles from downtown. We shared a car and a three-speed Raleigh bicycle equipped with a child seat. When Sierra was four and five years old, he and I would take the Raleigh, sometimes for fun, sometimes to get from here to there, pointing out to each other what we saw along the way. Sierra still has a memory of riding on the back of that bike at dusk, rolling through the cooling air as my flannel shirttail flapped around him. I like to think those rides inspired his lifelong love of biking.
Sierra on his bike trip around New Zealand, 2002-03.
He learned to ride when we moved to West Branch, just east of Iowa City. We lived in an apartment where First Street dead-ends into a cornfield. Either Pat or I would run beside him, holding his bike steady until he’d built up enough speed and then letting go without telling him, so he could discover for himself the irrelevance of training wheels. Thus began his biking adventures. By his mid-twenties, he’d spent a summer touring New Zealand on a recumbent. And when he married Tina in 2012, he used the large front cargo rack on one of their bicycles to transport her from their West 138th Street apartment up Riverside Drive to the wedding site in Riverside Park. They pulled that off while still looking elegant.
Emma’s and Jesse’s first bikes. Christmas 1989?
By the time Jesse was born, we had outgrown that West Branch apartment. We moved to a farmhouse three miles southeast of town, and all three kids eventually became bicyclists. The gravel road was not easy to ride on, but we found a good dirt trail shortcut that followed the Wapsinonoc Creek into town. And when we moved back to Iowa City as Jesse was beginning seventh grade, his cycling interest took off. In his junior year at City High, he fell in with a crew of DIY bike mechanics. His friend John had access to an arc welder and some garage space. They started scavenging frames and then cannibalizing them to bring their bizarre brainstorms to life – tall bikes with one frame welded atop another, choppers with ridiculously long front forks and tiny front wheels, a flatbed trailer outfitted with a barbecue grill. They’d fire up that grill, hop on their Franken-bike creations, and ride around town. When the coals were hot, they'd park in front of some popular spot such as the Deadwood Tavern and grill a pack of brats for consumption. Although the Iowa City Police were no fans of their escapades, the boys could have easily stumbled down some path to much worse trouble.
In 2008, my kids pooled their money to buy me a birthday present – my first high-end bicycle, a Trek 7000.[3] Fitted with two panniers, it was perfect for doing errands and commuting to and from work. But it also became a vehicle for long leisurely rides into the country – I’d head down Sand Road to Hills, feeling the rhythm of the miles, greeting wild bergamot, prairie blazing star, partridge pea, black-eyed Susan, oxeye sunflower along the way.
In July 2010, Sierra and Jesse decided to do RAGBRAI[4] with five of their friends, and invited me to join them. Pat was just nine months past her second open-heart surgery, and I wanted to stay close by, but she persuaded me to spend this time with my sons, now young men moving out into their own lives. I traveled a fifty-mile rail trail from Hiawatha to Waterloo (the Cedar Valley Nature Trail), and met up with them at the end of their fifth day. We camped in the backyard of friends in Cedar Falls, and I finished the last two days of the ride with them.
It was a trip, riding with the young’uns. Although each day’s route averaged seventy miles, our group would enjoy a leisurely breakfast, never in a rush to get going. The guys took turns driving the sag wagon,[5] buying groceries for the day and meeting us for a late lunch, and then scouting out a campsite in the overnight host town. Our squad included one tall bike, and someone else pulled the trailer, laden with two coolers packed with beverages, primarily beers. We usually got rolling by 11:00 AM, after nearly all the other bikers were well on their way. Unhindered by crowds, we could move at a brisk pace, but after a spirited fifteen-mile sprint, say, the team would stop to enjoy a beer and the scenery. I balked at the idea of beer that early in the day, but the others tried to persuade me that beer supplied much-needed electrolytes.[6] The crew also observed a ritual of visiting every cemetery we passed to smoke a joint. Again, because I wanted to be sure I lasted till the end of the day, I was the lightweight in the group.
With all that dillydallying, we would hit the pass-thru towns as people were packing up their concession stands, which functioned as fundraising tools for various local organizations. If folks hadn’t already sold out their food items, they were usually happy to give away the remnants. On the last day, we made a long stop at the town park in Epworth, fifteen miles from the Mississippi, and drank beers with Epworthians[7] celebrating the haul they’d made from the 20,000 riders who’d recently passed through. We told stories of our week, let them try their hands at riding the tall bike, and made some new friends.
Two years later, when Emma invited me to ride part of RAGBRAI with her, I happily said yes. Married the previous year, she and her husband would soon be moving to Virginia. Again, I was looking forward to an opportunity to bond with my offspring via cycling. Cedar Rapids was the overnight town on Day 5, so that day we rode a mix of rural roads and bike trails from Iowa City to Van Vechten Park, just east of downtown and near the route the riders would take the next morning. Unlike most bikers, all our gear – tent, sleeping bags, extra clothes, food – was strapped to our bikes’ back cargo racks.
Through the three open-heart surgeries Pat had undergone and recovered from over the previous three years, Emma and I had stood by her side. Of all our kids, she had taken Pat’s health issues most to heart. We talked about an impending decision she was struggling with – to move out into her future or to stay near her mother. But we also stopped thinking for a while, listening instead to our wheels spinning, our gears clicking, our minds unwinding. We shared the joy of biking through the rolling eastern Iowa countryside, and the late July corn standing along the road raised its arms in praise of our efforts. The days would heat up but we’d keep moving at a comfortable pace, creating our own breeze. On the second day, somewhere between Oxford Junction and Lost Nation, we stopped at a creek with a rocky bed to cool our feet and bathe our faces in the knee-deep water. Like the river this creek fed, the Wapsipinicon, we continued to braid our way through the countryside and, by the end of the day, dipped our tires in the Mississippi.
I rode that Trek 7000 for fourteen years. Repairs were becoming more and more frequent, and when I blew a back tire last summer, I decided to hang up that bike. As I procrastinated buying a new one, I dug out a black Giant the kids had bought for Pat. It was too small for me, but sturdy and fun to tool around on. I felt a bit like a circus clown riding a tiny two-wheeler. This past spring, according to the eyewitness account of a neighbor, a young teenage boy ran into my garage, grabbed that Giant, and rode off on it. I presumed he was going for a joyride, but the bike never turned up, so I finally stopped by the Iowa City Bike Library and bought a used Gary Fisher Capitola hybrid, a sweet ride.
When Cile and I went up to Wisconsin’s Door County in August, we took our bikes along. We cycled all over the northern tip of that peninsula, from Gills Rock on the Green Bay side to Newport State Park on the Lake Michigan shore, taking the ferry across the Porte Des Morts to Washington Island and biking to Schoolhouse Beach, a cobblestone shore of polished gray limestone nestled in a deep blue harbor on the north side of the island. As always, I felt the freedom of self-propulsion. We passed well-tended pastures, fields of bee-laden lavender, thick stands of beech, maple, and hemlock. We transported ourselves at a human pace, absorbing the subtle beauty, stopping whenever our hearts asked us to.
Footnotes:
[1] We didn’t call them fixies. Single-speed bicycles with pedal brakes were the norm then.
[2] A vernacular term, particular to the Akron area, for the piece of land between the street and the sidewalk, although the word originally referred to the narrow swath of land between streetcars going in opposite directions.
[3] The same model, I later learned, that President Obama rode.
[4] It was the 38th Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, from the Missouri River to the Mississippi, “an epic eight-day rolling festival of bicycles, music, food, camaraderie, and community” (per the official website). Although registered participants numbered 10,000, at least as many folks rode without paying (as we did), sleeping each night wherever they could pitch a tent or roll out a sleeping bag.
[5] Support-And-Gear transportation. Ours was a pickup fitted with a camper.
[6] Yeah no.
[7] Epworthers? Epworthites?