Bikes are cheap, and easy to fix when they break, especially if you can keep track of your Allen keys and your tire levers.
In many places, there isn’t any other choice. People all over the world, and especially outside Western Europe and North America, get to school and work, transport goods, cart passengers, and even plow fields with bicycles. More people get places by bicycle than by any other means, unless you count walking, which is also good for you, and for the planet, but you can travel four times faster on a bicycle than on foot, using only a fifth the exertion. Old Woman.īicycles are the workhorses of the world’s transportation system. I steered around potholes, ever so slowly, so as not to jolt them awake. Babies, not to say bad boys, would fall asleep back there, their nodding heads tipped over by the great weight of baby helmets covered in the spikes of a stegosaurus, poking into my back. For a long time, I had a baby seat strapped onto a rack in the back, molded gray plastic with a blue foam cushion seat and a nylon seat belt. I bolted a radio to the handlebars and listened to the news on my ride to work every day-I heard the war on terror unfold on that bicycle-until my friend Bruce told me I’d be exactly seventy-four per cent happier if I listened to music instead. But, the minute I got it home, I started hacking it, girling it out. I paid an embarrassing amount of money for it in 2001, to celebrate getting tenure and maybe with the idea that I was finally going to be a badass, that all I needed was this James Dean mean-streets city bike. The Bad Boy is the only bike I’ve ever bought new.
Easy rider bikes drivers#
I once knew an old Polish man who called all drivers one of three things-“Cowboy!” “Old Woman!” “Teen-ager!”-which he’d shout out, raging, behind the steering wheel of his station wagon, in a heavily accented growl. My current bicycle, the Cannondale Bad Boy, is said to be cloaked in “urban armor,” looks as though it could fight in a regime-changing war, and is built for “traffic-slaying performance.” I like the idea of being redoubtable on a roundabout, Mad Max on a mews, but, in truth, I have never slain any traffic. Jack and Jill went up the hill, everyone would call out, as we wheeled past. Jack, a speed demon and a danger mouse, but above all a gentleman, would wait for me at every telephone pole. Far from being a jet-setter, I have always been an unhurried bicyclist, something between deliberate and fretful.
I tucked a stuffed bear into my red wagon, tied its rope to my seat post, and scooted down the sidewalk, dragging the wagon behind me, my first bike hack. I didn’t mind about the missing handlebar grips. Bernard, a Christmas-present puppy whose name was Jingles and who was eventually run over by a car, like so many dogs on our street, which is another reason more people should ride bikes. By the time I got the Tyke Bike, the paint was scuffed, the leopard spots had worn off, and the white plastic handlebar grips had been yanked off and lost, most likely buried in the back yard by the slobber-jawed neighborhood St. flight bound for Zurich.īefore being handed down to me, my Tyke Bike, like most of the bicycles in my life, had belonged to my brother, Jack, and to both of my sisters, and, earlier still, to cousins or neighbors or some other family from Our Lady of Good Counsel, whose annual parish sale was where we always got our best stuff, bless the Virgin Mary. According to the box, Playskool’s scooter-red and blue and white, with a yellow, leopard-spotted wooden seat, chrome handlebars, and black, white-walled wheels-offered “smart high style” for the “preschool jet set,” as if a little girl in a diaper and a romper were about to scoot along the jetway to board a T.W.A. But Playskool called it a Tyke Bike, so I say it qualifies, and aside from the matte-black, aluminum-alloy number that I’ve got now, which is called (by the manufacturer dead seriously, and by me aspirationally) the Bad Boy, the Tyke Bike may be the swankiest bicycle I’ve ever ridden. It had four wheels, not two, and no pedals: strictly speaking, it was a scooter. I rode it in 1968, when I was two years old and as tubby as a bear cub.
My first bicycle was not, in fact, a bicycle. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.