My Red Bike

SOMERVILLE, MA

July 2007

I never forgot how to ride a bike, but I went long enough between rides to raise the question. I hadn’t ridden since I was about fifteen years old or so; not since I learned to drive. One day Tim and I decided that I needed a bike and, as with most things, Craigslist was the place to get one. Tim took care of it, while I nervously waited at home, on the sofa, with our cat, Peanut.

Peanut and I both slouched there, gazing into the middle distance, wondering what I’d gotten myself into this time. Bikes hurt my ass. And there are way too many cars here. This bike is probably going to hurt my ass, I’m going to get distracted, and then I’m going to fall off or something and die. Better to stay here and watch Peanut take a bath.

We heard Tim’s heavy footsteps on the stairs and Peanut hopped down from the sofa to greet him.

Tim stuck his head through the half-opened door. “Come take a look!” he said, and bounded back down the stairs.

I bid Peanut adieu and followed Tim down the back steps to our entirely blacktopped “back yard.” There it was, leaning jauntily against the chainlink: a bright red Columbia Tourist with a wide leather saddle, cruiser-style upright handlebars, and chrome fenders. This was the vintage bicycle of my dreams, and I never even knew it till this moment. Tim was grinning, vibrating with excitement, almost hopping up and down. High fives and hugs, we hopped on our bikes.

The day Tim brought home my red bike coincided with Somerville Open Studios. Open Studios gave us this big bike idea in the first place. First, get me a bike. Then ride all over town, bask in its Somervilleness, look at art, and generally avoid slouching on the sofa gazing into the middle distance with Peanut.

This all went as planned, and I felt pretty damned good throughout. We were riding and running around, popping into little studios, ogling beads and glass and pretty pictures. I was totally comfortable. I rode straight, joining the flow of traffic, coexisting peacefully with the many, many cars. I sighed with relief as the breeze tousled my hair. This is living! This bike is amazing!

We rode over to Highland Street via Porter to look at a jewelry studio. Porter Street surprised me by suddenly turning into a very steep hill. My red bike went faster and faster. The wind that whipped through my hair no longer made me feel happy and free, but rather like a doomed jet plane coming in too fast.

I pumped the back brakes, recalling a story my mother once told me about slamming on her front brakes, flying over her handlebars, and smashing her face into the gravel. This cautionary tale, told to me when I was perhaps seven years old, kept me from ever using my front brakes throughout all of my bike-riding years. But now, as the back brakes squeaked and squealed, my red bike continued to gain momentum. Oh no. I quickly tapped the front breaks, and the bike jerked a bit, but continued to speed up. If you’re careful, I said to myself, you won’t fly over. Just tap them.

I alternated, back brakes, front brakes, back brakes, front brakes. Squeak, Jerk, Squawk, Jerk. “Oh…God! Oh…God!” I was slowing down, but not enough, and at the bottom of the hill was a lot of city traffic. I pumped and held each brake longer and longer, until I had them both gripped flat — Squeal, Jerk, Squeal…Squeeeal…Screeeeeeech… I was screaming right along with the screeching brakes, tears running down my face. The bike was slowing down, but my body didn’t seem to be. My hands were burning from gripping so hard. I am going to fly over these goddamned adorable cruiser-style upright handlebars. There is the bottom of the hill, there are all the many many cars. This will hurt.

But it didn’t. Both the bicycle and I came to a shrieking halt at the bottom of the hill. Tim pulled up next to me, smiling, laughing. He reached out and patted me on the back. I slowly unclenched my teeth, my shoulders, my entire body.

“I never want to do that again,” I whispered. The only thing I wanted was Peanut and the sofa.

As you might imagine, the shrieking brakes were a real red flag. Once off the road, Tim flipped the bike over and we took a closer look. The lines were totally rusted and the brakes themselves liked to stick in place. Later, we took it to the shop, and we got the news: my red bike is both unrideable and unfixable. We determined that neither Tim nor I were savvy enough to make a smart Craigslist bicycle purchase, and we bought a nice new blue-green Raleigh Venture from Park Sales and Service, near Somerville’s  Union Square (they sell bikes and sharpen ice skates, too.) This new bike came with a nice wide, cushy saddle. I have ridden it ever since.

But we still have that red bike. At the moment, it leans against the back of our house in Medford. We lock Tim’s Jamis and my Raleigh to it, and hide all three under a big green tarp. We figure for now it makes our working bikes harder to steal, should anyone ever sneak behind our house looking to steal some bikes (two years and counting, this has yet to happen.) And we have DIY bicycle dreams. It’s so damned cute, and it cost fifty bucks. We have to be able to use it for something.

Me with a bike that works–though the seat is totally wrecked. Arlington, MA, Minuteman Bike Trail

Tim’s Hubway Adventure

MEDFORD, SOMERVILLE, CAMBRIDGE, BOSTON

and back again

Hubway bike sharing

Tim’s bicycle has a broken axle. He bought it when he was 23, when he was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey back in the spring of 2000. The bicycle before that was purchased the previous summer, in Delaware. It traveled with him–first to Richmond, Virginia, where he stayed for one month in late summer ’99, then to New Brunswick, where he stayed a bit longer, for basically the whole ’99-2000 school year. Somewhere in there, Tim left that bicycle under a tree in the side yard of the blue split-level colonial where he lived with five other twenty-somethings. The bike got stolen. He replaced it with a black Jamis, which he has ridden ever since — until the day he crossed the railroad tracks near Kendall Square in Cambridge and busted the axle.

Though Tim is a freelance editor today, he used to be a math teacher, and before that he worked raising money for environmental causes. After graduating from college, Tim took a job as canvas director for the Fund for Public Interest Research. He would travel from town to town setting up canvas offices and deploying teams of college students to knock on doors, raising money for things like Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and Human Rights Campaign. He worked for the Massachusetts bottle bill his first summer (a new version of which just failed…again). He had a big win the year his bike was stolen: he helped protect about 90 million acres of national forests from the logging industry.

Tim is tall and thin with light, wavy brown hair, big blue eyes, and a smile that digs deep into both cheeks. Though he looked younger than most of the college students on his team, for as long as he was in town he was an effective manager, running things with an air of good humored sincerity.

His work involved a lot of hustle and bustle, but he also spent a lot of time alone. When the kids were canvasing, Tim would canvas too, walking miles all alone, knocking on doors, sometimes getting donations, sometimes not. On these jobs, there was plenty of time to think — he would, for example, theorize the correlation between the outward appearance of a house, the likelihood of donation, and if they gave, how much. He once told me about how on his rare nights off in West Hartford, he’d stop at a nearby used bookstore, buy a paperback and read the whole thing in a night. This reminded me of the time he fell asleep under a tree near Spy Pond (Arlington, MA) while reading Kafka’s short stories. A solitary but contented man.

On our second date, in the spring of 2005, I saw him crumple his water bottle up into a little ball and stick it in his pocket to recycle at home. I thought that was so weird, I fell in love a little. I soon learned, Tim does not just throw things away. His bike is a prime example. A couple of years ago, when we brought our bikes in for their annual April checkup, Tim and the bike guy shared a little moment, laughing at how long the old Jamis had been hanging on. A few years before that, Tim noticed with chagrin that someone had stolen his bike seat and replaced it with a lesser model. This seat tips up and down and is generally a pain in the ass. I have suggested that he go buy himself a proper seat at least once a year for the last eight years. “Eh…it’s fine,” he says. “Now it’s rusted in place!”

But, this past August, the axle broke. The Jamis is currently unrideable. Fortunately, Hubway exists, and it is right in line with Tim’s sensibilities. It’s a bike-sharing program with bike stations all over the greater Boston area. There are annual and monthly memberships, or you can get a 24 or 72 hour pass — you swipe your credit card at the Hubway kiosk and you can ride as many times as you want within the time-frame you select. You just can’t go over 30 minutes a ride.

The day before I wrote Smoot Bridge, I got the urge to ride my bike over there. I used to ride across the bridge every day, but it had been years and I wanted to recapture the feeling. For a tense moment, we thought I would have to do this alone…the Jamis’s axle is broken, after all. But then we remembered Hubway. Tim decided to do the 24 hour pass. If he could switch bikes in under 30 minutes, he could get away with paying only $6. Challenge accepted.

We walked from our house to the Tufts Hubway station and grabbed the first bike. Being the first one, this transaction took the longest. We rode from Tufts, down to Mass Ave, and through Harvard Square. We heard the noontime bells ringing, and Tim realized he only had 7 minutes to return his first bicycle. I was totally oblivious to this. He charged up Mount Auburn and Mass Ave, on the lookout for any sign of Hubway. He found a station at the Central Square Post Office, with only a couple minutes to spare.

He had a little trouble with this one, because the original 30 minutes wasn’t up yet. For a second, he thought he’d misread the website and he’d be stuck bikeless in Central Square. Once the 30th minute arrived, he tried again and was immediately given his next bike. He figures either the time was an issue, or the kiosk needs a couple of minutes to recognize that the bike is back. (here’s a word from Hubway about what happened.)

We kept riding down Mass Ave, across the Smoot Bridge, where I stopped to take some pictures for the blog. Tim didn’t say anything, but he knew the pictures were going to make it difficult to get to another Hubway station in time. He thought he could make it once we got going across the bridge, but, as he rode out to the patch of Esplanade across from the Lagoon, he realized that I had disappeared.

In fact, I had stopped as soon as I got down to the Esplanade from the bridge. The sailboats were looking perfect and I wanted a picture. I tried to call after him, but he was way out of earshot. Once we met back up, everything was swell until, on the foot bridge at Mass General, Tim realized he had 2 minutes to find a Hubway station. I was in mid-sentence when he realized this. “Time’s almost up! Gotta go! Gotta go!”

Tim’s Hubway Adventure was truly excellent. He may try it again some time, but he wishes we had a station closer to our house. We both feel lucky to live somewhere with a service like this, but we both love our own bikes. I asked him what he wanted to to do about his, fully expecting that at long last he would agree to replace it with a new bike. I don’t know what I was thinking. The Jamis isn’t going anywhere.

–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Hubway Adventure Route!

Tim on a bike path in Wales, holding bikes that look exactly like ours…yet which are not.