Faster than the speediest pedestrian

MADISON, Wis.—My worst bicycle crash happened when I was in sixth grade, coming down the hill from St. Mary’s School. The hill, pretty much the only one in town, was steep, wide and paved for speed. I wasn’t astride my bike, just perched on the left-side pedal, coasting toward Ninneman’s Funeral Home. My path was unobstructed ’til another kid, pedaling fast and barely under control, zipped past, veered to his right and clipped my front tire.

As they say in the funny papers, ka-blam.

I didn’t skid to a full stop for about twenty yards. The kid who sent me flying kept right on flying. My pants were ripped and frayed—a familiar condition even without a road accident. My hand, raw and red from roadburn, was seeping blood. If I was in pain, I didn’t feel it because my only concern was my bike. I crawled on the pavement to its resting place. I clambered to my feet and lifted it gently onto its wheels. While a few kids stopped to gape impassively at my plight, I examined my invaluable conveyance.

She was evidently unscathed and unscratched. Her handlebars were still perpendicular to her frame, her chain true to its sprockets and no spokes sprung. The reflector on her rear fender was even intact. I breathed a heavy sigh and looked up gratefully toward Jesus. My bike, after all, was my lifeline, my economic engine, my freedom. Those were days when a boy’s boon companion, his most fundamental necessity—like Robin Hood’s bow, Davy Crockett’s Old Betsy, Roy Rogers’ Trigger—was his one-speed two-wheeler. When I had to go bikeless, usually because of a flat tire I couldn’t afford to replace ’til I’d saved up, I sank back into pedestrian solitude, unable to keep up with my brother, my cousins Danny and Bobby, my frequent sidekick Koscal. They were on the move. I was kicked to the curb.

I got my first bike when I was about nine, a brandless model (neither a storied Schwinn nor a J.C. Higgins) bought at Montgomery Ward’s for my birthday. My dad presented it but I suspect my grandfather, Papa, had paid for it. Papa was definitely the one who helped me climb on, followed my wobbling efforts to balance it and dusted me off after each of my six or seven dozen falls. But then, finally, once I’d figured out how to balance on two wheels, I was liberated.

Before the advent of my bike, I could walk just about anywhere in Tomah, all the way downtown, up and down Superior Avenue as far as the Erwin Theater and Gillett Park across the street. No grownup objected to my wanderings. I could go the other way all the way to Lake Tomah. There was just one ironclad rule, applied to the busiest route in that part of town: “Never cross Jackson Street.” Jackson was the border of my world. It was the stigma of my status as a little kid.

Mounted, however, on my bike, I was free not only to cross Jackson. I could take Jackson Street! Ride it, faster than the speediest pedestrian, westward bound, across Superior, across the Milwaukee Road tracks, out Glendale to the Lemonweir River bridge, all the way out to the V.A. Hospital—once the Tomah Indian School where red savages were browbeaten and starch-collared into sullen tradesmen, mechanics, gardeners and seamstresses. Beyond was County ET, gateway to the universe.

The bikes kids rode then were “one-speeds.” They posed a technology that depended more on fresh young legs than dumb young brains. We had no gears to shift. There was nothing to adjust. You just pumped and steered. Once I’d figured out how to keep from tipping over and denting every parked car on Pearl Street, I was as free as the purple martins that swooped around Tillie Fredericks’ back yard in the summer dusk.

One of my favorite expeditions, with Bobby, Danny and kid brother Bill, was out County ET, past a farm full of barn dogs who chased us, nipping our jeans for a half-mile before we could outpedal their snarling pursuit and flip the mongrels the finger. Our objective was a fork of the Lemonweir, where we found a silt-brown swimming hole eight feet deep, its mucky bottom lumpy with freshwater clams and its approach, through timothy, burdock, goldenrods and scrubby birch crawling with wood ticks. While we swam and splashed, they would creep into our clothes and wait for us, honing their jaws.

We rode as far out of town as our legs would carry us, to the town dump beyond the lake, to my uncle Claude’s farm, to the mysterious hills east of town where we camped out sleeplessly and came home speckled with mosquito bites.

We went everywhere. all summer, on our bikes, with one exception. During the county fair, some kids rode their bikes to the fairgrounds and hid them in one of livestock barns. If you did this, you were tempting heartbreak because every year—seemingly out of nowhere but as regular as the calendar—there was a vandal, or vandals, who ferreted out the hidden bikes, punctured the tires and slashed the seats to ribbons. This happened to me, it happened to most kids, once. After that, I walked to the fair.

As long as I was in Tomah I knew who the bike-raping bastard was. Every kid knew. It had to be him. He was the scariest kid—or youth (no one knew if he was fifteen or twenty-five, or some sort of ageless, shape-shifting fiend)—named Dave. He was a full-blooded Ho-Chunk (we called them Winnebago in those days), tall and wiltingly stoic. You didn’t want to look Dave in the eye. But I did more often than most kids, because when Mom moved us into an upstairs apartment on Tomah’s main drag, Dave turned out to be my neighbor. He lived with his mother in the front apartment, which happened to house the only fusebox on the second floor. So, every time we blew a fuse, I had to knock on Dave’s door. He would let me in, silently. I would apologize for intruding. He might utter a reluctantly consoling word. He might not. His mother, a thousand years old, sat sphinxlike, ignoring me. I changed the fuse and fled like a gerbil from a snake.

It took me years to reconsider the universal kid consensus that Dave—the most dignified young man, whatever his age, I ever met in Tomah—was the creep who vandalized bicycles at the county fair. Our suspicion, and fear, was entirely a function of the prejudice that had been instilled by our parents, by an entire community of grownups who warned us about handling toys in the dime store because “an Indian might have touched them.”

Beyond its capacity for adventure, my bike was my living. With it, I could ride out to the Fiedler farm during strawberry season and pick berries for a nickel a quart, or out to another farm, where I could make a dollar or two plucking the suckers off tobacco plants, out to one of the beekeepers in “the country” where I could spend the summer blowing smoke and getting stung, or out to Uncle Claude’s, who would pay for kids to “muck out” (shovel cowshit from) his stables.

Best of all, for a lucky few kids, there were papers to deliver. I was Freddy Poss’ summer substitute for his massive La Cross Tribune route, for which I had t equip my bike with a huge wire basket. Once, a kid named Tommy recruited me to deliver about a thousand flyers for the Coast-to-Coast hardware store. It took me about ten hours, ranging from the creamery to the V.A., after which I tracked down Tommy to get paid. He laughed in my face and threatened to pound me.

Because of the bike culture that prevailed then. I was never driven anywhere for any purpose—nor was any kid I knew. Parents gave kids bikes to get the noisy brats out from underfoot. Kids were glad to go.

Of course, I did get driven—often—to a lot of places, by Papa. But he wasn’t taking me there for any purpose of mine. I was tagging along. Following Papa on his rounds was pure entertainment. I tagged along to all four of his usual grocery stores—Woodliff’s, where he chatted with Mose Woodliff across the meat counter, or Burnstad’s or Cram’s (the “supermarket”) or Shutter’s, where he shmoozed with Bob Meinecke across the meat counter. I tagged along to my uncle Bob Benjamin’s cobbler shop, a grotto that smelled luxuriously of polished cowhide, shoe polish and saddle soap. Now and then, Papa would drive out the barber shop, by the truck stop, on Highway 12, where Papa paid a quarter for me to “get my ears lowered,” during which Papa, the barber and a few other customers whiled away a half-hour or more in conversation that was idle to them but richly instructive to an absorptive ten-year-old.

Once, I tagged along to the rectory of St. Mary’s. Papa, who had long since ceased to worship anything but The Saturday Evening Post, needed for some reason a copy of his baptismal certificate. This mission occasioned the coming together of Papa and Father Mulligan. I bore witness, never uttering a word, to two genial and garrulous alterkockers lounging on the sun porch, dipping into the sacramental wine, looking back together into the mists of their time on God’s earth, understanding implicitly each other’s experience and feelings, as history flowed from them and puddled at their feet, right next to Father Mulligan’s dog.