READING

You Are Your Bike

MARY ROACH

Mary Roach is a New York Times best-selling author of several books of popular science, including Stiff (2003), Spook (2005), Bonk (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), and Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013). This essay appeared in the October 2005 issue of Bicycling magazine. As you read, highlight the details that help you visualize her beloved Schwinn Sting-Ray I. Then, after reading the essay, study the graphic organizer for it (Figure 13.2).

A stingray is a flat, gray marine creature with little about it to capture one’s fancy. Bottomfeeder. Sits on its mouth. You could name a rubber bathtub mat after the stingray, and I wouldn’t question your logic. But not a bike. Not a bike with a four-foot chrome sissy bar and a chopper handlebar and a glitter-gold banana seat. There is no fish as cool as the Schwinn Sting-Ray I got in sixth grade.

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In my neighborhood, circa 1972, there was serious bike culture going down. Every day after school, around 4, the phone would ring. It would be one of the Balch kids, my neighbors: “Wanna come out and ride around?” That’s what we did in those days. We watched tv and we rode around. There were six of us. We had a route: over the dirt path between our houses, down the Balch’s rock-studded, rain-gullied driveway, through the pinewoods across the street (Did we invent mountain biking?), up onto the road, and back over to my driveway. The summer my parents repaved the blacktop, we’d linger at the top of the driveway where it widened out and turn laps for a while, savoring the velvet glide and leaning into the turns like the racers we’d seen on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. No one spoke during these moments. There was a religious quality to our concentration, an absurd intensity that even now I can’t bring to bear on my athletic pursuits.

2

As all Sting-Ray owners must, I mastered the wheelie. I was coming off a four-year horse fixation, and the wheelie held a secret thrill for me: The bike became my horse, rearing up onto its back legs, mane streaming, nostrils flared. I kept this to myself.

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Becky Balch had a Sting-Ray too, but hers was girlie. The sissy-bar was only four inches high, and her basket had plastic flowers sewn into the fake white wicker. She earned my tomboy scorn. As tough and as cool as my Sting-Ray was, it wasn’t what the Balch boys were riding. Bernie and Jeff Balch blew out so many tires on the trails that they started riding on their rims. They called their tireless, gearless junk jobs “Peelers” and took to launching them off the banks of a cattail-fringed pond at the end of our road. They’d build up speed, leap off at the last possible second, and watch the bike sink into the muck. The littlest Balch, Johnny, would wade in waist-deep and drag their Peelers out — the price he paid to hang with the big boys.

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One day Jeff Balch convinced me to cast the Sting-Ray into the muck. I loved my Sting-Ray, but I loved Jeff Balch more. It was an unrequited love, not all that different from the love I’d felt for horses. I can recall to this day the site of the glitter-gold seat sinking from view and the sick feeling inside me. Jeff Balch continued to ignore me and soon started going out with a glossy-haired cheerleader three houses down from us. Though she surely owned a bicycle, she did not ride around.

5

Shortly after the pond debacle, I wiped out in a sand patch going no-hands down a hill about a half-mile down the road. This was a hill so steep and treacherous that it was known by name: Connie Elder’s Hill. It was Connie Elder, a kind, quiet spinster, who pressed a wad of gauze to my chin and drove me home, leaving behind the Sting-Ray and a persistent rumor that “a piece of Mary Roach’s chin” had been spotted on the pavement. I wound up with six stitches and a scar that to this day brings to mind the little gold Sting-Ray and my reckless need to impress. This had been another ill-guided effort to capture Jeff’s heart. It was around then that it began to dawn on me that boys weren’t interested in girls that acted like boys. They wanted girls that giggled and brushed their hair a lot and kept their bicycles out of the mud. The Sting-Ray never felt quite right after the accident, and only partly because the fork was crooked.

6

My tomboy years were coasting to a stop, and the Sting-Ray would eventually be replaced by a 10-speed. More than most objects, the bikes we own in certain periods of our lives define who we are and what we’re about. They are more like lovers or pets than things we simply own. I’ve long held the fantasy that I’ll come across a gold, glitter-seat Sting-Ray at a local flea market. I won’t go so far as to buy it, but I’ll give the guy who’s selling it five bucks to let me go off to the empty fringes of the parking lot and ride around.

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