A Long One

One of the internet sites that I visit has an entire forum about living car free. It’s hard to determine if these people are choosing to live without a car because they are sticking it to The Man or if they have to live without a car because The Man stuck it to them. It seems to be a little of both and you can almost guess by the postings who is who. I tend to think that these people represent one or the other faction because most people who are just poor and don’t have a car are just poor and don’t have a car. Most poor people that I have run into do not consider their carless status as something rebellious, cool or hip and would, given the choice, quite like to have a car. They certainly don’t blog about it on the internet. We didn’t. Oh yes. I have been car-free! Of course I was like five a the time and would have been pretty much car free for years to come any way but our part of the family, the part that wasn’t my dad, were all car free. We walked and took the bus and I rode my bake. Man! Did I ever ride my bike!

I was one of “those kids”. Not on purpose mind you but never the less I was one of them. I would tell my mother that I was going over Mike’s house and, true enough, I would. But then we would go over Keith’s house. We would tell Mike’s mother, of course and if my mother called Mike’s mother she would know exactly where I was. Right? Invariably, on the way to Keith’s house we might stop at the park or swing by the beach or who knows where. And from Keith’s house we would wander even farther afield. We would go from place to place all day long leaving a trail of blissfully uninformed and woefully under-informed mothers in our wake. We had, for the most part, BMK bikes. Little bikes with one gear and the handle bars that came up with a bar across them that was just about the perfect height to catch a boy across the chest and knock the wind out of him if he crashed or fell forward off the seat. I said mostly because one summer when we were about twelve or so years old Mike got a “ten speed”. I remember it well. It was a brown Columbia ten speed with orange, red and yellow striped stickers on the tubes. It was so much larger than any o your other bikes and FAST! Wow. You would think that the rest of us would have “seen the light” right then and there but that was not the case. Most of us were stuck in one of the great catch-22s of childhood: the Item Upgrade Quandary. In this case the items were our bikes and it worked something like this: We all had the standard issue twenty inch BMX bikes that we had hounded our parents for because they were cool and “all the other kids had one”. Except, now, Mike did not. Now, the odds of getting new bikes out of our parents were slim to none as long we had perfectly good bike. On the other hand if something were to happen to those bikes, intentionally or not, we were likely to wind up getting a lecture or worse punishment (these were the days when the Old Man could still legally and morally beat the bag out of you in a Mall on a Sunday and no one would look twice) and have NO bike at all. So we rode and pondered how to solve this problem, and a problem it was! We were all friends but mike found it hard to ride that noble, high-strung thoroughbred at the sedate pace our BMXers demanded and we grew weary huffing and puffing after him as he rode at even a slightly slower than “normal” pace for his bike. Sadly, in the end and as it should be, the force of friendship prevailed over that of mechanical advantage and we, as a group, walked everywhere together. In hind sight that ten speed bike probably did more to constrain and control our activities than any other single thing at the time. I have to wonder now weather those supposedly uniformed moms might have figured out a way to keep us safer and closer to home after all.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about at all……..