In fifth grade, my best friend Anne and I started a detective agency. We had read enough Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden and Hardy Boys mysteries to know how to solve a crime, be it kidnapping or embezzlement.
We put together a finger-print dusting kit and created files documenting (made-up) cases and suspects. Jewel thieves, child abductors and arsonists with three or four aliases apiece lurked in every corner of the village of Allouez, committing their heinous crimes.
We carried “cell phones” so we could call Chief McGinnis for back-ups when we tracked down suspects. One of the “phones” was a skinny cardboard box that had once contained a blue, a green, a yellow and a red crayon–the complimentary provision for placemat-doodlers in family restaurants; the other phone was, in fact, a maxi-pad.
We also clothes-pinned baseball cards to the non-drive-sides of our chain stays so that the cardboard flapped against the spokes. Our bikes were our best resource for the pursuit and apprehension of imaginary criminals. We would race up and down the cul-de-sacs and winding streets of Allouez, happily pretending that Claude So-and-so with his mustachioed mug and his briefcase full of counterfeit bills was just around the corner, frantic to escape the clutches of the GUMSHOE DETECTIVE AGENCY.
We named ourselves Clue (me) and Sneak (Anne) and by sixth grade we had enlisted four more sleuths in our high-profile crime-stopping club.
Interest in solving mysteries waned, however, as junior high pressures began their mean creep. Imagination-centered play was a social liability, and tomboys became teenagers overnight. Our top-secret hideaway along the river, once the stage for heroic adventures, became a theatre of transgression. Bicycles rusted in the garage as my peers came to prefer walking in groups, smoking cigarettes, earning cool points for being seen with skater boys.
I dabbled a bit in the rebellious activities favored by my peers but my conformity was largely unsuccessful as I continued to earn good grades, read for pleasure (in public! what was I thinking?) and honor my parents’ strict curfew. Eventually I befriended a group of girls whose hobbies were less self-destructive and whose judgments of my nerdy pasttimes were mild compared to the criticisms I endured from the “cool” kids on the schoolbus.
Although I biked less frequently in adolescence, the bicycle remained my primary mode of transportation. In eighth grade, I took up babysitting and was hired by several families as a regular summertime sitter. My commutes were short, sometimes fewer than five minutes, but I enjoyed the independence of my transportation choice.
I also appreciated this freedom traveling to friends’ houses around Allouez. My newfound friends, the majority of whom lived in Allouez, did not enjoy biking, although they certainly owned and had ridden bikes in childhood. Their disinterest in biking as teenagers might have been fueled in part by their parents’ willingness to drive them everywhere. My parents, on the other hand, were rather unenthusiastic about dropping me off or picking me up from anything. Except for church.
At the end of ninth grade, I gained employment as a cashier at a family-owned grocery a mile from home. In decent weather I biked to all my shifts, on that same old ten-speed Murray I’d had since fourth grade. I would climb the hill that starts at Libal Street, up Longview Avenue and swing a left onto a side street whose name slips my mind, and make a series of right turns into the parking lot of The Original Austins. Austins is reknowned in Allouez for its Clark Gable Roast; it is forever branded in my mind, however, for its DISGUSTING LEAKY RAW CHICKEN that I had to handle at the register. (I had converted to vegetarianism a year earlier, and my transition to veganism came on the heels of that year and a half of being totally grossed out.)
Junior year of high school I sought a job at a nearby retail store. I worked on the sales floor, earning a dollar more per hour at the beginning of my two-year employment there.
This marked the beginning of a two-year hiatus from regular bicycling. I had gotten my driver’s license shortly before beginning my new job, and after my older brother moved to Minnesota for his first year of college, I had uninterrupted access to his car. This was the only period of my life during which I drove regularly, and my memories of driving confirm an idea I recently articulated in my mplsbikelove.com signature: automobiles exacerbate social distance.
I was, initially, a terrible driver. My friends dreaded my jerky, high-speed lane changes, swerving around traffic that honored the speed limit on the way to and from school. I was impatient and reckless in an 88′ Dodge caravan. It’s a miracle I had only two accidents, and both were only fender benders that happened when I was backing the car out.
Driving fosters social distance because it can create for some (for me) a sense of entitlement and uncomfortable restlessness. Because I could go fast, I went fast. Everywhere. When a more cautious, patient driver got in my way, I would pass him or her the first chance I had. I didn’t want to wait, and I didn’t feel like I should have to wait. My errand was the only thing that mattered; I did not acknowledge other drivers on the road as human beings. They were just in my way.
I had a nasty case of road rage. The impatience, the aggression, the disregard for safety and courtesy… I shudder to think of it.
Had I lived closer to my high school, it might have occurred to me to ride my bike there. Had I asked my parents for a new bicycle (or bought one with my own earnings), one that fit my 5’7″ frame better than the little purple 10-speed I had started riding when I was a foot shorter, I might have avoided those stressful commutes to and from the west side of Green Bay. I certainly could have biked to and from work. Were Green Bay a slightly more bike-friendly city, I might have pursued my senior-year dream of commuting to school by bike.
I revived my love of biking soon enough. Senior year of high school, determined to overcome a depression and poor self-esteem, I began an exercise regimen. I walked, biked, and yes, rollerbladed my way to better health. I had gone vegan the year before and made an effort to overcome bad eating habits. When the ailing La Baumba, as my brother had christened the old minivan, was unavailable to drive, I took my bike to work. It was a fun ride: up the hill to Webster Avenue and down the hill toward Riverside Drive. My bike commutes to work were infrequent but many times more memorable than any car trip along the same route.
More enjoyable than the handful of bike trips to DePere were my after-school rides along the East River, on the very same trails I had learned every inch of in my youth. My walks and rides there were meditations. My visits to the river and the thin line of woods there were my retreat into nature, and reminded me of the lessons I was learning in my environmental science class. I became excited about the opportunity to live a car-free (and carefree) existence, a transition that I expected would be easy when I moved away for college.
In 2002 I graduated from high school, and in the fall I started college in Minneapolis. Despite its poor fit, I brought my bike across the state line, named her “Grandma,” and rode like every other country bumpkin in his-her first year of urban cycling: on the sidewalk, without a helmet or a light.
Nonetheless, it was a start. The days of burning fossil fuels to get to work and school were behind me now. What lay ahead was a meandering, gradual discovery of the possibilities, the freedom I had known as a child, and all I had to do was get on my bike and ride.
