Do you remember your first bicycle? I do.In fact, I thought about mine just today when I pulled into Rockin Rudy’s on a mission to find a belated graduation card. You see, that store now occupies the building that was Eddie’s Bakery in my childhood. I lived just across the alley in the parsonage that then stood next to St. Paul Lutheran Church where my dad was the minister.
That parsonage and the rest of the houses and the butcher shop that once comprised the rest of that block have long since disappeared to give way to the blacktop parking lot that now serves the church. But it is that alley, which always smelled like fresh bread in those days, that figures into those first memories of having my own bicycle.
Remember?
I was 5 years old, and my memory is less than acute on the subject, but I don’t think there were things like training wheels back then. There were certainly no bike helmets, and there sure weren’t any of those obnoxiously loud plastic tricycles with big wheels that became part of the vehicular scenery in recent years. Until I hopped on that one-speed, blue jalopy of a Schwinn bike, I had cruised the neighborhood on a clunky old rust-covered tricycle.
When that real bike came my way, it must have been sink or swim from the outset.
My memory again fails me when it comes to the details of the necessary period of trial and error that must have occurred before I was able to attempt my first solo circumnavigation of the block. I’m sure that one or both of my parents were involved.
I can imagine a scene on a spring evening on Brooks Street with my mother standing with hands on hips at the front door calling out various warnings and cautionary instructions while my father huffed along at my side, holding the wobbly bike up by the back of the seat while I churned away at the pedals. My big brothers are in there, too, sitting astride their shiny bikes, shaking their heads and sagely providing a stream of technical advice and largely unconstructive criticism.
“You don’t have a chance. Give it up!” my brother Sandy might have shouted.
“Try it without hands,” older brother Val might have chimed in.
My dad, on the other hand, would have tried the reassuring route.
“Don’t listen to them, Bucko. You’ve just about got it,” I can imagine him saying, trying to reassure me.
Whatever the case, I mastered the basic business of staying more or less upright soon enough. And before long I was self-sufficient enough on my bicycle to be able to get myself into a bit of trouble. And in that process, I learned my first safety lesson. It was the basic lesson titled: “Look Where You Are Going.”
There was a game among the lower echelon kids of the neighborhood that we called “Pony Express.” It involved jumping on our bikes somewhere in the alley and pedaling as fast as we could the length of the block, then out onto the sidewalk and all the way back around the block to the place in the alley where we had begun, jumping grandly off our bikes at the end while the next rider took off to do the same thing.
Of course, it was important to go really fast, and when pumping away on those pedals as hard as possible, it was easier to go fast if you kept your head down. Or so I thought.
Well, I was blazing down that alley lickety split, eyes on the ground directly in front of my wheel when I looked up to find out how close I was to the end of the alley where I would have to make a sharp right-hand turn to gain the sidewalk. To my amazement, what appeared in my line of sight was not the end of the block, but a big Eddy’s Bread truck just turning into the alley heading for the loading dock behind the bakery.
I have a memory, one that may be the simple product of having heard and repeated the story so numerous times, perhaps even right here in this column, of the driver of the truck with a look of horror on his face. I think I may have heard the brakes on that truck screech. That’s all I remember.
I woke up in my own bed with what seemed like a crowd of people milling about. There was a doctor there, I think, because I heard things like ...“nothing broken”... “just a concussion”... and “keep an eye on him for a few days.”
Among the other Pony Express riders, I was a bit of a hero after that. After all, I had met that bread truck head on and survived. I know that afterwards we were forbidden from riding in that alley on our bikes. I believe the order came from both our worried parents and the concerned folks at the bakery.
It was several weeks before my dad got somebody to make a new fork for the bike. The new fork wasn’t blue like the rest of the bike. It was the unfinished rusty steel color of something that had been fashioned in a shop somewhere out on East Broadway. Now my bike was even clunkier than before. But that new fork added another four or five years to the lifespan of my bike.
Things are different these days. Training wheels, bike helmets, and smaller and smaller two-wheelers have brought the driving age for bicycles down precipitously. My son Sander was riding pell-mell around the University area when he was less than 4 years old.
He started out on a bike that had 11-inch wheels and was less than a yard long from stem to stern. With wheels that size, it took him approximately one million revolutions of the pedals to get all the way around the block, but that didn’t seem to bother him.
Later he went through a succession of bikes, including a Ninja Turtles bike, several different styles of trick bikes, and finally mountain bikes of ever increasing sophistication, sturdiness and cost. And over the 17 years since his first solo circumnavigation, he, too, has managed some emergency room time.
I particularly recall the third jump he made from the ramp we constructed during his “trick bike” phase. It took us several days to complete the take-off and landing ramps. They were both taller, at the high end, than he was. I probably should have been run in for child neglect for having acquiesced to his badgering that his life would be incomplete until he was fully-ramped. The landings on the first two jumps were perfect. The third one was somewhat off target. Thankfully, he was wearing a helmet.
The jump was retired, but I can still point to the exact spot on the sidewalk where his exposed face came in contact with the pavement on his ill-fated landing. And I remember the exact spot where I collided with that bread truck 55 years ago.
When I pedaled by there today, I thought for a moment that I could smell fresh bread.
Greg Tollefson is a freelance Missoula writer whose column appears each week in Outdoors. He can be reached at gtollefson@bresnan.net.
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