It's All About the Bike

By Wendy Russell

As a child of the 70s I, of course, had the mandatory Schwinn single speed (purple) purchased at the Schwinn Bicycle Store. It was used to get to and from my best friend's house a mile away and to go down to the Aquilla State Park store for candy. Besides that it languished in the garage.

Bicycles have been an integral part of my life since the late '80s when I first saw a "mountain bike". I was working as a crew member for Alvei, a 100 ft. sailing vessel that was being brought down to Portugal from where it was purchased in Norway. The captain owned a mountain bike that he kept in the hold. It would be pulled out when we arrived at various ports and made available to crew members for the purpose of tooling around town and running errands. It had 15 gears and big knobby tires that were perfect for jumping curbs. When I got back to the states I immediately started saving my money.

My first mountain bike was a used $200 Cycle Pro but I quickly upgraded to a $400 Nishiki Colorado. I was living in a cabin in the woods of New Hampshire and did not own a car so I needed a good bike for going up steep hills and over rough trails.

I vividly remember my first trail ride with my girlfriend and roommate who had recently scored a job at the local bike shop. After poring over the local topo map we discovered a network of trails that would take us into town in a circuitous fashion. Perfect. It had just rained. The trail was extremely slippery and technical. The ride resulted in a spectacular crash that left us both laying mid-trail in a bloody heap laughing our asses off. I was hooked.

Within months I had again upgraded, this time to a $1,150 hand-built Fat Chance. You must click on this link and admire this bike. It was the bomb! It was a work of artistic craftsmanship. Unfortunately Fat City Cycles is no more, having gone the way of too many hand-built, frame makers and small, locally owned bike shops; it gave way to the corporate giants of the industry. That same year I took my first bike tour, riding from Oslo to Trondheim, Norway, a distance of 250 kilometers, by myself and loaded down with enough gear to keep on peddling to the Arctic Circle and perhaps beyond.

Bicycles have figured prominently in my relationship with my husband. In 1991 Tony had just moved to town and showed up for the Wednesday night group ride of the shop at which I was employed. He was impressed with my bike. I was impressed that he had a real job and a brand new Subaru wagon in spite of his almost prepubescent appearance. Our first date was to the Bike Nashbar factory outlet. Our first vacation together was riding our bikes from Ohio to New Hampshire. We got married at Elk River Touring Center, a mountain bike touring center in West Virginia owned by some friends. The post-nuptial ceremony activities included a mountain bike polo match and a three hour group ride through some of the sweetest single track WV has to offer. We were teammates for 11 consecutive years at the 24 Hours of Canaan/Snowshoe in West Virginia until we finally moved too far away to be able to drive to the race. This year we celebrated our 10th anniversary by riding our mountain bikes from Durango, CO to Moab, UT.

Bikes and bicycling have been an important part of our child rearing philosophy. My oldest son was off training wheels at 3 ½ years old, rode his first 20 miler at 5 ½, went to more mountain bike races than I can remember and on his 10th birthday was somewhere in the hills of central Pennsylvania, having agreed to accompany me by bike halfway to New Hampshire from Ohio. He is 18 and no longer rides, but I imagine he will return to the fold someday. My youngest was on his own bike at 4 ½. Our anti-car rhetoric has really taken root in him. He usually prefers to ride places in order to NOT use the car. He has really embraced the party line, as opposed to his brother who thought it was stupid to ride our bikes when we had a perfectly good car sitting in the driveway.

It is only natural that, as we reluctantly settle into the aging process, our recreational passion is evolving into a form of advocacy. I know that someday bicycles will be an important component of the global solution to the mess we have made of our natural environment due to our addiction to the automobile, petroleum and all its byproducts. It will not always be just a fringe group, represented by the likes of our family, friends and relatives, who takes up cycling as a way of life. It will take a seismic shift in what we deem acceptable in the geography of transportation, but I am beginning to feel the tremors of change in the most unlikely of places. My hometown of Idaho Falls, ID, a place where the word "progressive" is never used in the same sentence as the town's name (unless it is preceded by the words "not even remotely"), actually has a nascent organization devoted to promoting non-motorized transportation. WOW. Way cool.


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