The Bike

The Bike

I was desperate. It was Friday of the last week before eighth grade, and I needed something to do.

My options were limited that week: I was home alone--I’m an only child, and my parents were at work all day--with no way to get around other than my own two feet. I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I wasn’t inclined to initiate plans with the friends I did have. If my memory serves me well, I went to the park with my friend Luis one of those days and we kicked a soccer ball around for a while. But that was it.

The days followed a similar routine--get up in the morning (I’ve never liked to sleep in), eat breakfast, surf the Internet for a while, eat lunch, shoot on the neighbors’ basketball hoop (they didn’t mind), surf the Internet some more, shoot some more hoops, eat dinner, fall asleep on the couch with the TV on. Other than my trip to the orthodontist to have my braces put on, I made it to Friday without going more than three blocks from my house.

When going to the orthodontist is a way to break up the monotony, you know you’re having a pretty boring week. But truth be told, I was pretty happy. I enjoyed the sweat on my forehead as I shot hoops in the heat, the sound of the ball swishing through the net (which happened pretty often--I had a jump shot back in the day). I enjoyed reading the same article on ESPN three or four times in the same day. I enjoyed sitting at the table eating Easy Mac and reading the sports section of the Chicago Tribune. I enjoyed being alone--talking to other people wasn’t my thing back then. (I used to get annoyed when my dad said “Good morning” to me, because it obligated me to say something back.)

But on Friday I woke up with a sinking feeling in my stomach: The summer was slipping away. It was going to be gone by Monday, and then I was going to have to spend the next nine months in school. School had sucked in seventh grade, so I was not looking forward to going back. And with that kind of urgency, there was no way I wanted to spend the next three days the way I had spent the previous four. Like I said, surfing the Internet and hooping isn’t the worst way to spend your day when you’re thirteen years old, but after a while you say to yourself (or at least I said to myself), Surely there’s more to life than this.

I was desperate, like I said. And something--I don’t know what--made me take my bike out of the garage.

For most other thirteen-year-old boys, that wouldn’t have been a big deal. But I hadn’t been on that bike in three years, which is an eternity when you’re a kid. I was surprised I remembered how to ride it. I know they say that you never forget how to ride a bike, but I figured if anyone could disprove the saying, it would be me. I’ve always been clumsy: couldn’t hold a pencil in kindergarten, couldn’t ride a bike without training wheels until I was eight, couldn’t tie my shoes until fourth (!) grade. I expected to fall off the bike multiple times that day.

But I didn’t fall off. I didn’t dare go outside my neighborhood, and I rode in the middle of the street because I was afraid I would swerve and hit a parked car (which I had done a couple times when I was younger). A couple cars honked at me. But I didn’t fall off, and that was the important thing. If I had fallen off, I probably would have put the bike back in the garage and never taken it out again. But since the first experience was okay and not terribly embarrassing, I was willing to try it again.

Two days later, on the last day of summer, I took the bike out again. I didn’t have any plans, but before I knew it I was all the way on the Northwestern campus, where I had ridden with my dad when I was a little kid--he had this contraption he could attach to his bike that allowed me to pedal too. It was sunny and warm--a beautiful last day of summer--and lots of people were out, flying kites, throwing Frisbees, sitting on the rocks, lying in the sun. But none of them bothered me. I enjoyed their company, but I was happy to be just passing through them. I felt the lake breeze on my right cheek and looked at the blue water and watched the people.

I made it all the way to the other end of campus and came out in north Evanston, just a few blocks from Wilmette. It was a neighborhood I had been through a few times before, but it might as well have been a different town. I didn’t know any kids who lived up there. I was in uncharted territory. And I had reached this forbidden wilderness, this faraway land, by myself, without so much as telling anyone that I was going (or wearing a bike helmet, to my mom’s chagrin--the thought didn’t even cross my mind). I had never done anything like that before.

Now I just had to get back home. I headed back south on Sherman Avenue, a street that ran through my neighborhood, which to my surprise ran through this neighborhood too. It was a semi-busy street up here--it had yellow lines on it!--so I had no choice but to ride next to the parked cars. I felt a gust of wind from time to time as a car passed me to the left. I worried that one would hit me, but my fear didn’t make me get off the road. I had to get home somehow.

After what felt like an hour but couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, I found myself in downtown Evanston, in a place I at least recognized. On a whim, I pulled my bike onto a sidewalk, hopped off, locked it up, and found a few dollar bills in the little red string backpack that I carried everywhere. I went into Andy’s Frozen Custard, which at the time had just opened up, and walked out a couple minutes later with a milkshake. I walked back over to my bike and stood next to it, sipping the milkshake and watching people walk by. The sidewalk was crowded, but I didn’t see anyone I knew.

I pulled out my phone and saw that Luis had invited me to play soccer again, this time with a couple other friends. I considered it for a minute, then texted him back that I would but I was busy and I wasn’t at home. Which wasn’t a lie.

Truth was, I didn’t really want to see him or anyone that day anyway. I would see them every day for the next nine months. What I wanted was one last day to be alone.

I finished my milkshake, threw the cup away, and unlocked my bike. I could have gone straight home, but something made me head back toward the lake. I biked past the beaches, the breeze on my left cheek now. The sky was bright blue except for a few puffy white clouds, and sailboats dotted the horizon. The sun was just starting to hide behind the hundred-year-old trees and stately houses to my right. I picked up the scent of barbecue, the scent of summer.

I was surrounded by people, but I was anonymous. They might have seen the kid on the bike riding past them, but they didn’t think anything of him. I watched them, peered into their lives, alone as I moved through the crowd.

In the distance, I spotted a blond, tanned figure walking on the path and hoped dimly that he would get out of the way before I got there. As I got closer, he turned around, and I recognized one of my friends from school. I braked the bike and got off.

We exchanged whatever greetings you exchange with each other at that age, made small talk for a couple minutes. He pointed to the beach, where another of our classmates was playing volleyball with his siblings. Neither of us felt like saying hello to him--we would see him soon enough anyway--so we just pretended he wasn’t there.

“See you tomorrow,” we said when it was time to part, and I rode the rest of the way home.

I had been gone for almost two hours. As I walked up the back steps, it occurred to me that my mom might be worried. I hadn’t even thought of her for the last two hours.

She was in the kitchen. She said she had started to wonder where I was, although she wasn’t too concerned yet. She figured I was with friends or something--I had ways of hiding from her the fact that I didn’t have very many.

“Wow,” she said when I told her how far I’d gone. “When you get into something, you really get into it.”

Truth was, I was only beginning to get into it. I thought the other side of Evanston was far away, but I would soon go much further. I had discovered a brand new power: the power to get places by myself. I was free, more free than I had ever been.

Fast forward for a moment: I haven’t ridden my bike that much lately. Winter lasted a long time this year, and my mom has been letting me have the car a lot. But when I look back on the last four (nearly five) years, I can’t imagine what they would have been like if I hadn’t rediscovered the bike. I went everywhere on it. I rode it to school even on cold, rainy days (although not in the snow--I drew the line there). There was a period of my life when I rode it for hours on the weekends, with no particular destination in mind, guided only by my twin needs to escape and explore.

In eighth grade, on a half day of school, I rode up the Green Bay Trail, all the way to Highland Park. I wasn’t really planning to do that when I got on the bike--it just sort of happened. I was so proud of myself that I told my mom when she got home from work. Let’s just say that was a mistake.

So I just stopped telling her. She said I could ride around the suburbs as much as I wanted, but she didn’t want me to ever enter Chicago. I broke that rule many times. She never found out the places I went, except for once.

It was a few weeks before the start of high school. I went out along the North Shore Channel, made my way into the city, and saw a sign pointing the way to Wrigley Field. Why not? I thought. So I made my way to Wrigley Field, and then kept going all the way to the lake and south along the shore. I stopped before I got downtown, but it was still almost a 30-mile ride by the time I got back home. I know how far it was because I put it in Google Maps. I remembered all the turns I had made--I have a good memory--so I could use the directions to figure out the distance I’d traveled. I kept track on a piece of paper: From point A to point B was 2.3 miles, from point B to point C was 0.4 miles, et cetera. And I added it all up at the end.

Well, I made the mistake of leaving that piece of paper on my desk, which was in the same room as her desk. At some point, she looked at my desk--that was a little nosy of her, don’t you think?--saw that piece of paper, and read the words “To Wrigley Field.” She was not happy. She didn’t ground me--she’s never grounded me--and she couldn’t take the bike away, because then she or my dad would have to drive me everywhere. My punishment was a stern warning to be careful, although the tone betrayed her understanding that she couldn’t really stop me. I did stay out of the city for a while after that, but of course I made my way back eventually.

Going where my mom didn’t want me to go satisfied my need to rebel, a need as basic to human existence as food and water. I think that’s the biggest reason I’ve gone this whole time without touching drugs or alcohol. Sure, I’m responsible and all that, but I’ve never even been curious. I don’t know anyone else like that.

Truth be told, I came to need those bike rides the way an addict needs a fix. I craved the feeling of freedom, the clarity of thought, that came from riding, and if I didn’t get out on the weekend to ride, I felt like someone had taken the oxygen away from me. Little things stressed me out, and I felt tired and cranky and lost. It was a struggle to make it through the next week.

And to think that all that happened because I happened to decide to take the bike out of the garage one late-summer day when I was thirteen years old, and because I happened not to fall off the bike or hit any parked cars that day. Two roads diverged at the end of that summer, and I didn’t decide which one to take so much as fate, or chance, or whatever you want to call it, steered me there. I’ll never know what the other one--the one where I don’t rediscover the bike--would have been like. I can’t help but wonder where the next fork in the road will be, and if I’ll even recognize it when I get there.