dumpster dove

Among the long list of bicycles I have owned, only two of them were purchased new, as complete bikes. The rest were cobbled together from different parts, some new and some old, in a series of constantly-evolving chimeras. The first was literally rescued from the trash.

When I was between fifth and sixth grade (this places our story in 1993), my family moved a short distance from northern Illinois to southern Wisconsin. I spent the summer visiting an empty, rural lot we had purchased and watching a house spring out of the ground as a crew of friendly carpenters built the thing. That summer, we were between permanent residences, so I lived in a rented house, and, for a short time, a hotel that had free donuts every morning.

The rental house' owners cleared out the garage before we moved in and among the "trash" left by the curb during the purge were three bicycles -- a crummy mountain bike and two BMX bikes. I was probably had outgrown the Huffy coaster brake-equipped BMX bike that we had purchased from Toys 'R' Us years earlier, so I rescued the bikes and combined the parts that I thought looked cool into one functional bicycle.

I had no idea what I was doing. I remember distinctly that the final bike had black Skyway Tuff II mag wheels (the plastic ones with five spokes), and components with esoteric brands like ODI, Sugino, Sakae, and Dominator. The handlebar crossbar was shaped with a downward brend and had horizontal ribs around it, evidence that I could stand on them at some point to do some sort of stunt. It was all black with silver and chrome components, and no brakes.

The frame had no markings on it but I later discovered that is was a late-model Schwinn Predator, a small, entry-level BMX race bike. We had to take it to a bike shop to have some generic brakes installed and have the hubs adjusted and that was that. It rolled, it stopped, what else could a kid possibly want from a bicycle?

Everything, it turns out. Over the next four years, that bike was "upgraded" with every dollar I could squeeze out of my parents by doing chores or waiting for a few birthday checks to roll in. It ended up getting an Gyro, Hollow Bullet pegs, and Pitbull brakes from Odyssey, Peregrine Silver handlebar (Peregrine stuff was gorgeous, by the way), and some DK aluminum wheels (biggest improvement ever). Every time I scraped together enough cash from my first job at Culver's or mowed the lawn a dozen times to buy one of these items, my mom would mail a check to Dan's Competition in Indiana. The anticipation of waiting for the brown box on the doorstep was brutal. I never knew what to do with the XL sized white Dan's t-shirt they sent me with the order, though.

Upgrading and maintaining an early-'90s dumpster-dove BMX bike taught me many valuable lessons:

• Improvising with tools: an Ashtabula bottom bracket can be adjusted using a flat screwdriver and a slip-joint plier. Hub cone nuts can be tuned without a cone wrench if you're really determined. A 1/4 inch allen key is NOT a substitute for a 6 mm.
• Skyway rims don't hold a tire at pressure much above 40 psi. In fact, the tire will slip off the rim and explode violently, usually after you have ridden several miles from home.
• You can legally work in Wisconsin at the age of 14. The only reason I got a job at that age was to buy bike parts that sucked less than the ones I had.
• Riding a bike with a bent handlebar, axles, pedals, and cranks is not that bad once you get used to it.
• A heavy bike is only as heavy as you perception of weight allows based on comparable experience. It's best not to ride other kids' bikes, lest you learn what a tank yours is.
• Making brakes work at all, much less well, on a BMX bike with a Gryo and Skyway mags is next-level bike mechanic kung-fu. Doing that with flimsy steel side-pull brakes is something else. My brakes always sucked.
• Blaming your lack of skill on your equipment is a time-honored tradition but never gets in the way of fun.

The final lesson I learned is related to the defeat of the DIY spirit and succumbing to consumer mentality. Wisconsin winters are quite cold, but living in a house with a full-sized basement with concrete floors provided a year-round riding option for me.

I was practicing an advanced (ha!) move called an "endo," in which you apply the front brake, force the front wheel to stop, thrust your weight forward and lift your rear wheel, pausing for a moment on just your front wheel, then pivot back down to two wheels and ride away. Or something. This is not that hard of a trick is you have fully-operational brakes, but the condition of my brakes required a fistful of brake lever and every ounce of my scrawny body to be thrust forward violently if I was to have any chance of getting the bike to stop. Most of the time, the brake failed to have much effect on the front wheel and I just slowed down.

At one point, my bike decided it had had enough of this nonsense and my front dropout (the thin plate where the front axle is bolted on) snapped clean off my fork. I felt a crunch and my bike stopped moving. The bike was suddenly and completely unrideable as there was no longer a way to secure the front wheel onto it.

This was quite mortifying to me because forks are expensive for a 13 year-olds budget (Craigslist wouldn't exist for another decade at least). My dad talked about having it welding back on, but the cost of doing so and the risk of it just breaking again left us shopping for a new fork.

For the first time in my life, I committed to buying something really nice- a Kore Flatland fork. I had probably seen images of this fork Ride BMX Magazine's infamous Chase Gouin interview, along with his Morales frame and Graveyard components, things after which I also pined and eventually purchased. It was heavy, it was cool-looking, and it would very likely outlast everything else on the bike.

This was another blow to my notion that everything should be fixed rather than replaced, but the first in a series of revelations that new stuff is better than old stuff, most of the time. I think it cost about $75 and totally out-classed everything else I had and for the first time, I felt good about buying something new.

Just like everything, this fork was built to outlast its usefulness as the march of technology would make 1" threaded forks literally worthless. Standards changed and this fork would become of no practical use. I sold it for almost nothing around 2004 (had it lying in a box all those years) and just found it listed for close to $200 on eBay for its "vintage" appeal. This also cemented in my mind the ephemeral nature of every purchase I would make, and the implicit compromise made when I buy into some new idea. That will be the topic of another day.

the age of disappointment

One of my earliest childhood memories involves a bicycle. I am pretty sure it was a tricycle, in fact, but no one who was around for the event (my parents) can verify this. This event, as it turns out, had a profound effect on my life that resonates today as I navigate the adult world. It's a tale of a changing world from my parents' generation to mine, a clash of worldviews, and a sense of injustice I have not been able to shake, not that I care to.

I must have been younger than five, when I distinctly recall my dad bringing me the bad news- someone (could have been a parent or a visiting friend), had run over my tricycle with a car. It was made apparent that this was my fault for leaving it in the driveway, although the lesson was probably not driven home too harshly. Little kids do stuff like that and don't need to be harangued about it to make it sink in.

I don't remember much about the tricycle other than it has yellow plastic wheels and a chrome-plated frame. The rear horizontal bar that housed the axle had grip tape on it so you could stand and push it like a scooter, which was way more fun than pedaling it as soon as the rider is big enough to do so. Standing and pushing the tricycle was a major accomplishment, a "big kid" moment for me. My memory of it might not be objectively accurate, but the subjective experience is what made me who I am, so the inaccuracies stand as the only truth that counts.

I think the rear axle had been mangled and one of the wheels flattened out, rendering it unrideable. Like most Americans raised in the '60s, my dad expected that any manufactured item could be repaired at a local hardware store or the retailer with readily available spare parts. Try as he might, the parts were not available. The best course of action was to throw the tricycle away and buy another one. True, someone with access to tools and materials might have been able to fabricate something to repair it, but that was not a realistic option for us at the moment. The tricycle was totaled because of one damaged component.

We didn't have a lot of money, and even if we did, the sense of impropriety for throwing away something and buying a new one seemed improper, savage even. The reality of the modern age was a shock to my dad, and was cemented as the unalterable trajectory of the future for me at the tender age of five.

It turns out that I am not alone in my sense of injustice at this. Many people resist, or pretend to, the throw-away culture that produces disposable goods at too-good-to-resist prices. There are often durable options (Rolls Royce makes car that last virtually forever, Chris King makes bicycle hubs with similar qualities) but those options are often cost-prohibitive to the average consumer. While many acknowledge the truth of "buy once, cry once" (meaning that, if you buy something expensive but durable, you only fret over that cost once because you won't have to replace it), we often resolve to buy the cheap option that we know we'll have to replace when it wears out in short order.

I feel like I need to "earn" the privilege of simply replacing something that is broken. I feel a drive to make a good-faith effort to repair, modify, even kludge something that is not working optimally, as if trying to fix something is an indulgence that I must endure before proceeding to enjoy the carnal pleasure of enjoying a functioning car, television, or bicycle. I'm not Catholic, by the way, but somehow that theological sense of appeasing the universe in exchange for my enjoyment of life has been ever present.

The pervasive presence of planned obsolescence has forced to us accept this, at great cost to the environment, our savings, and our sanity. Some resign themselves to not fight it, while others merely grumble about it. Very few move into the woods and isolate themselves in a suspended animation of technological progress. Most of us just accept it, despite that fact that that is the most cumulatively irrational but individually rational choice one can make. Arguing about it makes buffoons out of anyone who engages the topic as the stakes create in a zero-sum game over the meaning of civilization.

While most of us resolve ourselves to replacing broken things, giving up before we begin to think about fixing it, there's a sense of "hell yeah" when we see someone succeed in bucking that trend. When you see a bicycle with a reinforced tube that was cracked and re-welded, a modified multi-tool that has house keys instead of a bottle opener, or a car that plays everyone's favorite song instead of a dull ping, there's a sense of triumph. Some of us have stolen fire from the gods and created something new in our own image.