Have Bike, Will Travel

Although we moved around a couple times growing up, I consider Kirkwood, MO to be my childhood home. A quiet suburb of St. Louis, Kirkwood offers all of the charms and comforts of small community living with the connectedness to the broader St. Louis area which makes it so desirable. Good schools, parks, shopping, and a rich local history all combine to make Kirkwood a highly sought after place to live. As is typical in such locations, small neighborhood homes occupying spacious lots often find themselves purchased cheaply and then razed to make room for McMansions and other tacky displays of ostentation. If you were to go by our old home at 602 Pamela Lane you’d see this sign of progress in action. The small, blue 1950’s ranch with black shutters and basketball hoop no longer occupies center stage of the large lot framed by twin silver maples, there’s a monstrosity in its place now. I even think the maples are gone.

So with this new suburban trash moving in and devastating the character of the neighborhood to make room for their garage-mahals, I cannot speak to the quality of the community today. I can say that the cul-de-sac community of families, working folks and seniors made for an ideal place to grow up a couple decades ago. One of three long, deadend lanes, Pamela sat on the boarder of Kirkwood and an even more exclusive west county community. Yet for all the wealth and splendor of the blocks surrounding it, the cluster of homes on these three streets were all more or less the same; simple mid-century ranches with spacious lawns and healthy mature trees. The ‘black path’, so named for its crumbling asphalt, spanned the back side of the three streets and led to the elementary school not a mile or so away. Given our proximity to school and the relative safety of our neighborhood we grew up first as walkers. We walked to school each morning at 8:00 and when the bell rang at 3:00 we walked home. I think we walked from 1st grade, shepherded by the 5th grade crossing guards and an occasional parent. The Pott’s kids, Matt Plank, Jimmy Humphreys and several others usually accompanied my brother and I as we made our daily trek home from Westchester Elementary, backpacks and lunchboxes flopping around as we went. On weekends and during the summer though our walking turned to riding. As cliché as it may be to say it, in our small neighborhood a bike was your passport.

I can remember my first bike. It was a red and white Huffy. It had a red foam top tube and handlebar pad. It was a gift from Santa Clause, and probably the best he ever came up with. I can picture myself flailing away on that little bike, trying to keep up with the bigger kids in the neighborhood, Danny Plank and the two Albers boys all three of which were several years older than I. Our street climbed the entire length from Geyer Road at the bottom to the circle at the top. We rode up and down it, perhaps a half mile in length, often racing each way. Sometimes we rode down through everyone’s backyards; few had fences and since most of the homes had kids it seemed ok to race down the hills and over the roots of trees without too much concern for property or privacy. The Albers boys were eventually replaced by the Tomasinos who had two girls, but we rode through their back yard still anyway. You could generally always tell where everyone was on a given afternoon by the pile of bikes at the end of the driveway. It was not uncommon on a good football or baseball day to see a half dozen or so ten speeds and bmx bikes in a pile on someone’s lawn. I think it made us easy to find when we happened to be out later than curfew.

The highlight of growing up had to be 3rd grade when they let you ride your bike to school. Westchester had a bike storage area adjacent to the gym by the ‘big kids‘ playground. Generally filled on a nice autumn or spring day, everyone in the surrounding neighborhoods could access a quiet residential street or back alley path to get to school. Once I got older this interconnected web of paths and streets presented an opportunity to wander even farther from home. I’d love to go back in time and add up the miles of neighborhood streets I traveled. I knew every street and path from our home all the way to Ballas Road easily a couple miles away. I don’t know if my parents even realized how far we went at times. Since we avoided any major streets it seemed safe enough and certainly not worth illustrating in any revealing detail.

My first road bike was a black Murray 10 speed. I got a Domino’s pizza cycling hat from a Cub Scout event and wore it for an entire summer until the brim eventually came off of it. This was the era of Lemond and I’d seen his narrow time trial victory on Wide World of Sports and I thought bike racing was fantastic. I could race my bike too. The surrounding hills became Alps and every ride was a sprint and charge through each turn. Heading home one drizzly afternoon while in middle school I charged through a turn a little too pro-style and ended up in the emergency room with a broken wrist. Certainly not my first bike crash (and definitely not my last) my knees and shins still bare the scars from cycling antics gone awry: going over the handlebars after hitting my brother’s wheel while trying to scare him by riding right at him--he moved, or hitting a manhole in the field by the middle school with Jack Kramer--he got the worst of it when one of his spokes went into his leg. Bike riding in those carefree, helmet-less days certainly was hazardous, but we could have been doing worse things I suppose.

While I can remember several fascinating and rewarding aspects of Boy Scouts, one of the highlights has to be the bicycling merit badge activities. I took a trip with the troop and my dad and we went out to Defiance and rode the Katy trail to St. Charles and back: very ironic that my family would later move out to that picturesque area. It was a 50 mile day and at the time my longest ride to date. We climbed some real hills, and as a scrawny boy saw the true advantage of my lightweight physique. I could never be a linebacker but I could climb a hill on a bike like nobody’s business. We also did a ride from Westchester Elementary down to Forest Park in St. Louis. I can clearly recall the moment where I realized that all the places I’d been in a car could easily be connected up and reached by bike. I’d been to Forest Park dozens of times but as a 12 or 13 year old, never under my own power. We could climb the tree at the Plank’s house and see the skyscrapers around Clayton on a clear fall day. After that bike trip, I’d climb the tree just to see how far I’d ridden.

And today I sit on bench at a campground northwest of Fort Collins, Colorado at the mouth of Poudre Canyon. As I type I look up at the blue Surly Long Haul Trucker resting against a fence across from me. My bike is still my passport. Today it brought me safely north over hills and country roads, more than 75 miles from my home. And tomorrow when I wake up I’ll climb back on the saddle and it will take me somewhere else. I’ve come a long way from the days of red Huffys, but that same excitement still remains; have bike, will travel.