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| My former mountain bike, picture taken in 2010 |
Of course I now know this simply isn't true, and I've even grown a slight grudge against Cannondale for their excessive use of proprietary parts and sizes. But at the time I formed the idea in my head that my dad spent a few thousand bucks on this brand new Cannondale. The truth is that it retailed for $600, a generous Christmas no doubt, but far less than the number I created in my head. I was very grateful and appreciated the gift and rode it a few times in the coming spring but the sad truth is that a mountain bike is just not a terribly useful thing to have in Richmond Indiana. There are no mountains to mountain bike on. There are a handful of single-track trails for the enthusiast to ride, but they are few and far between and absolutely not an option for a car-less teenager. So the bike sat under my dad's lean-to for a few years with very little use, save for the very, very occasional bike ride with friends.
A few brief anecdotes concerning my mountain bike from this time in my life revolve around women. Being the lovesick and very confused adolescent that I was, I felt it was a good idea late one summer to ride my bike from my dad's house to the house of girl I was pining after. The girl had no idea I was coming--in my mind, she would be outside tending to her horses and I would just so happen to be riding by--and she lived rather far away for someone whose idea of exercise at the time was walking from class to class. Google Earth now tells me my ride was five and a half miles one way. It certainly was a long and painful ride on my mountain bike, with it's fat, knobby tires and low gearing. But I made the trip and discovered the girl was indeed not outside tending to her horses. Not having the guts to knock on her door I turned around and pedaled home, defeated. Luckily for me, the girl turned out to not be worth any further bike rides.
A few years later I found myself riding my bike to see another girl, this one much closer--she lived less than a mile from my dad. Parking my bike next to her house, we commenced to talk the night away. I had lied to my dad and told him I was at a friend's house who lived very close to where I was. As the twilight faded to a deeper darkness, I grew afraid and called my friend's house. When his mom answered the phone, I asked that if my dad called asking where I was, that she say I was playing video games and would be home shortly. She reluctantly agreed, or at least pretended to agree, and I continued to pursue this fine young lady. Finally, when it truly got too late for me to stick around, I fearfully rode home and completed the lie saying I was indeed playing video games. Nearly five years later, that girl I visited would become my loving girlfriend and partner, and that first brave visit to her house was only possible because of my beloved bike.
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| Keri and I, on the night of my deceitful bike ride |
Honestly this time in my life is when I used my mountain bike the most. I remember one time, very early in my stay at Earlham College, when I was riding in the night with an acquaintance and my then-girlfriend. My acquaintance, a roady from the East Coast, was annoyed with the slow pace maintained by the two mountain bikes following him. In an energetic mood, I challenged him to a race. The funny thing is that up until that point I had no idea that road bikes had a higher gearing than mountain bikes, and that it was virtually impossible for a mountain bike to keep up with a road bike on payment. As my acquaintance zipped away from me, I learned then and there that maybe mountain bikes were not the only kind of bike to have.
Another memorable moment from that year of dedicated bike commuting happened over the winter. I rode my bike to school even through the snow, most days, but one afternoon it began to sleet rather nastily while I was at school. Ever persistent, I saddled my blue friend and slowly made my way towards the road via the grass. This was smart, because the moment I touched the sidewalk, both tires flew out from under me and I landed on my side. Hearing the ear-piercing "awww" of two girls behind me, I jumped to my feet with burning cheeks and got back on my bike. The same thing happened just seconds later. Defeated, I solemnly walked my bike home.
It was during the winter that year that I learned a very useful and fun trick on my mountain bike. I learned to ride with no hands. Now, I had received some jeering from friends for not being able to brandish this skill usually earned early in childhood. In my defense, I grew up in a mountain biking world. You simply don't remove your hands from the handlebars while mountain biking. Also, my overly protective parents probably had a hand in that. But, I learned to ride with no hands in a somewhat interesting way: it was simply too cold to ride with my hands. Not having gloves, I had taken to wearing wool socks over my hands. This did an alright job of not absolutely freezing my fingers in the early wintery mornings, but I found it was hard to grip the handlebars and ride with socks on my hands. So, I slowly began to take my hands off of the handlebars for longer and longer periods of time. After about a week of experimenting with this, I finally got it down and by January I was riding most of the way to school with my socked hands in the pockets of my leather coat.
The most catastrophic thing to happen with my bike--excepting its ruinous theft--happened that year. While riding on campus one day, I heard a very loud pop and clang, and looked down to see my largest chainring had horrifically bent itself out from the rest of the crank. Completely confused as to what I had done, I called up my dad and he took the bike in to fix it. Getting a new chainring from the local bike shop--which I would be employed by just two years later--he fixed it and his diagnosis was that one of the chainring bolts was not securely tightened. My torque while pedaling then caused the chainring to pull out and mangle itself. While working at this bike shop later in life, I would discover a small collection of similarly damaged chainrings. It always amused me to see these.
At the end of that year I finally got my first car, my hand-me-down green Saturn. Driving to my summer job, my precious mountain bike found a new occupation: it bore me on the several nights of what me and my friends would come to call "rollerbikein."
"Rollerbikein", or more sensibly "roller biking" was the night time recreation me and my friends found ourselves doing nearly every night the summer after our first year out of high school. Usually starting sometime between midnight and 2am, we would meet in the town of Centerville--where we went to school--and simply ride aimlessly around the town discussing everything from the ravings of Henry David Thoreau to events that transpired while we walked the halls of Centerville High School. We went until we couldn't bear it any longer, sometimes heading home as late as 7am. I was most definitely late to work more than once that summer. It was a good time in my life, and those memories all happened on my mountain bike. Rollerbikein, by the way, got its name from the fact that one of my friends would often roller blade instead of bike. The German twist thrown on the end--say the word out loud with a gross German accent--came about from a typo one night while instant-messaging a group of girls we wished to join us. They did not.
When college started back up my bike saw less and less use. I rode to school rarely, usually driving my newly obtained car. One particular little adventure which stemmed from a bike ride that year caused me to wind up in an abandoned gravel pit. A friend--the friend who often roller bladed while rollerbikein--discovered the abandoned gravel pit near his house. We decided bikes would be the most sensible means of an approach, as it was illegal for us to be trespassing, and we could hide the bikes in the brush next to the road. We dubbed this discovery "Utah", for its rocky terrain seemed very foreign to us and our agriculturally-tuned minds. We only visited "Utah" a few times, as fear got the better of us. "Utah"'s interesting qualities also waned rather quickly.
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| The alien world of "Utah", which was really just a gravel pit. |
At the end of that year I decided to take a leave of absence from college. Over the course of that summer I saved almost all of the money I made from my summer job and put it towards one of my most ambitious undertakings: a self-imposed period of vagrancy in which I would travel westward across the country with no real aim other than to see what the land had to offer. A decision I made early in this endeavor was to bring a bike with me: half for fun, the other and more important half as insurance in the event my car would break down. And it did. But, that will come later.
Despite just getting my hands on a 1985 Cannondale road bike from my dad, I decided to take my mountain bike as I could also ride it on trails and it would still serve its purpose of being an alternate means of transportation in the event my car died. With my bike perched on my bike rack, and my cable lock tethering it to the chassis of my car--the same cable lock which the thief cut to get to my bike just a week ago--I headed out across the country.
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| Taken on the grasslands of South Dakota. |
Only a few days into the trek I removed the wheels from my bike and stowed them inside my car. I was worried a thief would take them. For most of my journey, my frame sat strapped to my rack, the chain dangling in the interstate's wind.
My mountain bike finally got to see some mountains, for the first time in its life, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. One morning I awoke, inside my car, and decided I was going to mountain bike. So, I climbed onto the saddle and set forth on what I can only assume was the Old Baldy Trail. It was a very difficult ride for me. I hadn't really been mountain biking since I was probably nine or ten years old, and you can bet I wasn't riding anything that technical or grueling then. Truth be told, I believe the trail wasn't that bad of a trail, I was simply out of shape to a gross degree and had very little experience. Despite this, I powered on, and eventually reached the final steep climb. There was no way I could pedal up that, so I pushed my bike to the top. Enjoying the view, I was still very proud. On the ride back, I nearly ran into two much more serious cyclists. I'm sure they thought little of me, as I was huffing and puffing up a very slight incline. Still, I was mountain biking.
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| My success shot. Note the very small water bottle. |
My bike wouldn't see much action until I reached Oregon. Wyoming was met with hiking and camping, and I only drove through Idaho. By the time I reached the other side of Oregon, almost to the coast, I noticed the oil light on my car glaring up at me. Panic struck as I pulled off on the next rest area. Checking my oil, I discovered I had burned almost all of it away. My negligence had finally caught up with me. It was in that moment that my insurance came through for me. Replacing the wheels to my trusty mountain bike, I set off in search of oil for my dry car.
I of course did not ride on the interstate directly, but took to the wide stretch of roughly cut grass running alongside the pavement. What I soon found, however, was that briers and thorns laced this deceiving grass, and I frantically stopped riding for fear of getting a flat--the last thing I needed. Luckily, I spied a road on the other side of a fence next to me, so tossing my bike over I made my way safely towards town on pavement. I soon found a small gas station, where I bought as much oil as I could from a Chinese man who coyly asked if the oil was for my bike. In no mood for fun, I returned to my bike with four quarts of oil, a whole gallon. It was then I realized I may have gotten myself into another pickle. I set off anyways, juggling the four quarts of oil as they shifted frustratingly inside of the plastic bag. I was happy I could ride with no hands. I ended up getting back to my car, and with some kind strangers help we got my car running. My mountain bike really saved me then. Otherwise, I would have been stuck on the other side of the country with nothing to help me but the soles of my shoes.
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| Its hard to see, but my bike is safely resting on the back of my car, next to a truly majestic life-form. |
My trip concluded with no other interesting bike stories. When I finally returned home, I found myself chasing down my friends in Centerville on my mountain bike to let them know I was back.
My road bike understandably took over as my dominant bike, for as I said earlier, a mountain bike has little use in Richmond, Indiana. During this time in my life, it was mostly ridden by one of my bike-lacking friends, who occasionally joined us in one of our bouts of rollerbikein. I took it trail riding a few times in nearby places where one could pretend to mountain bike, but these places were too far away for me to do it often. After a painful winter I found myself employed at the local bike shop and thus began my education in bicycles.
During my time at the bike shop, my friends and I ventured one evening to create a new sport: a form of bicycle soccer which we called "boccer." We didn't know it already existed, and in a much more extreme form, but we were still content with our idea. Setting up a field in our old high school parking lot, we established a team of two bicycles versus two roller bladers. Kicking and shoving a soccer ball with whatever we could, we had a ton of fun playing our crude game. I manned my beloved mountain bike, for it was slower and easier to maneuver than my road bike. My favorite memory of this game was when I slammed onto my front brakes--a no-no in the bike world--and went over the handlebars. Or, at least, that is kind of what happened. It all happened in a splendidly slowed state of time, as the back wheel arced up and I felt myself rise. I swear I hopped very briefly on my front wheel as I tried to shove the back wheel down. However, I did not have the dexterity to accomplish this, and went down as my bike crashed below me. I came out with nothing more than a few scratches on my hand, and all my bike got was a scuff on its new saddle. We quickly resumed playing.
A few years later I would be leaving Richmond, Indiana for Bullhead City, Arizona. My bikes of course followed me, and I was anxious to ride my mountain bike in the desert. However, when we came to the barren spit-stain that is Bullhead City, I discovered that the dirt floor of the Mohave Desert is far too loose and soft for aimless roaming, and there were no mountain biking trails I could discover in my vicinity. And so my mountain bike sadly sat longer, until I quickly moved to Tucson, Arizona, where I am now. At first I reluctantly decided to try and sell it. It needed a lot of work to be the mountain bike I wanted, and I was frustrated with what I would have to do to get it running the way I wanted. I posted it on Craiglist for $300 and got a hit, but he was slow to follow-up and in that time I decided I did not want to sell it. The bike simply meant too much to me. I figured if it was so hard for me to force myself to let it go, I shouldn't be getting rid of it. So I kept it and began to happily plan for what I was going to do with it.
I wished to take it into the mountains, but put it off as my girlfriend Keri--yes, the girl I rode to woo earlier in my tale--does not have a mountain bike and I wanted to share that experience. Already having my two road bikes and Keri's bike in our apartment, with little room for much else, I reluctantly locked it to the wooden railing in front of our third-floor apartment. You couldn't see the bike from the ground. It was locked with the same cable lock that secured it throughout college and across the country, and although I knew it was the least secure option, it was my only option due to the spacing in the wooden railing. It stayed safe for a few months, but it was finally taken from me.
I wished to take it into the mountains, but put it off as my girlfriend Keri--yes, the girl I rode to woo earlier in my tale--does not have a mountain bike and I wanted to share that experience. Already having my two road bikes and Keri's bike in our apartment, with little room for much else, I reluctantly locked it to the wooden railing in front of our third-floor apartment. You couldn't see the bike from the ground. It was locked with the same cable lock that secured it throughout college and across the country, and although I knew it was the least secure option, it was my only option due to the spacing in the wooden railing. It stayed safe for a few months, but it was finally taken from me.
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| Goodbye, Yamamaru |
The recalling of these memories, which don't even fulfill the whole spectrum of what I've experienced with this bike, have made me miss it even more. I loved the bike. I lovingly called it "Yamamaru" later in my time with it, giving it a Japanese name which could be translated to an affectionate name for a mountain. It pains me to know that it was more than likely sold for drug money, and will probably never have a good home again. It will likely never see the Arizona mountains I so wanted to take it to. It may even be in pieces now, maliciously stripped apart and strewn about the world. Evil men take bicycles. A good bike can free our souls, and only the very cruel can take that from someone.
