00005 · My orange bmx dirtbike
The orange BMX bicycle of my childhood shaped my life probably more than any other object. It was a tool of exploration and freedom and joy and learning and pain. I was forever the smallest kid in my class, but on that orange dirt bike, I swaggered.
My folks got it from the local Coast to Coast hardware store, and in my mind, the leap from my red little tricycle to this orange stunt machine was a sure sign I was a man.
I imagined myself riding a real moto-cross motorbike when I pedaled, and I tricked it out with “official” foam pads across the handlebars and crossbar. I got upgraded to beefy rims after wrecking a dozen of the thin stock versions.
The coolest addition to the bike was what we all called a “nard-gard,” which was another foam pad around the sharply angled stem where the handlebars met the bike frame. A few times it did protect my developing testicles from smashing into the hexagonal bolts when I wiped out, but most often the pad saved my constantly skinned knees from reopening wounds when they brushed the stem doing various tricks or fails.
Day after day, season after season, school year over school year, I was master of my destiny on that bike. In the summers, I rode it to Island Park and the local pool, where I lay it down on the grass next to dozens of other unlocked bikes in my small town. In winters I rode the dark and icy streets to meet my parents at The Left Bank restaurant: we ate there when our family shoe store was open for evening Christmas shoppers.
I crossed our entire town and went up the hill to my cousin Dan’s to jump our dirtbikes in what we called “The Pits,” where we constructed ramps and trails with scraps of nature and refuse. It was a lawless place, particularly absent of adult supervision, full of broken bones and childish booby traps and collapsing sand. Years later I learned the real danger was all the chemicals the local Toro plant dumped there. It’s now a Superfund cleanup site.
We biked the local river when it froze, methodically explored every street and alley I could find, took tentative rides out into the country. I disappeared for the day only to return when my curfew kicked in, which is when the street lights came on.
That bike made the entire world my playground, safe enough to explore, and full of treasures in the most mundane of places. It gave me a set of exploration maxims I honor and refine to this day: the art of going incrementally further and more dangerous; that it’s better to get out the door than stay inside when life sucks; riding solo is just as fun as with the crew. That bike gave truth to the cliché that it’s all about the journey and not the destination.
My orange bike was also a needle delivering shots of challenges that boosted my life response system. I received just enough challenges to build my confidence: learning to fix flat tires and slipped bike chains; poison oak and ivy awareness; an eye to the sky and weather as we dealt with heat stroke, frostbite, rainstorms, lightning, and tornadoes; how to avoid bullies and weirdos and authority figures; fending off attacks from dogs and badgers and mosquitoes and cattle; that every gift of coasting downhill or with the wind must be matched with an uphill battle against the wind in every journey.
That bike spent all if its downtime leaning on the steps to the main formal entrance of our house. No one ever used that entrance, and the bike and door remained unlocked for years. The right side of the bike bleached to peach gradients from all that exposure. I eventually got a 12-speed in middle school, and that orange bike seemed too tied to elementary school to keep riding it much after sixth grade.
I have a vague memory of it rusting out at one of the welds and breaking, and we either gave it or threw it away.
There’s a little fantasy in my head that when I die, I am placed in an aluminum canoe and launched from my childhood backyard down the Des Moines River. I am wearing my orange “do it in the dirt” shirt—it matched that bike so perfectly—and my orange box dirtbike is in that canoe with me, like a Scythian with his chariot, our spirits released to the plains.
