Pedal Power

Stopping off at Portlaoise library recently I headed down Railway Street on my way back to the car. There is an old shopfront there, which despite being closed many years, is well maintained, the sign, moss-free, the paint good, the print crystal clear. Looking through the window there is little to say what type of shop it was. But I remember and simply staring though the window brought to mind garage smells; nothing fancy, no hint of three-wicked candle scents here, merely the lingering odour of tyre rubber and ingrained grease spilt servicing generations of old bicycles. Peering through the glass, I saw it not as it is now, an empty shell, but as it was way-back-when it was a chock-a-bloc wonderland, full of all things cycling. For many years this shop played a huge part in my life, it was where my first bicycle was born, a uniquely misbegotten wonder of the cycling world, but more of that later.   

I can’t say with any certainty when I got my first bike, or what levels of nagging were required on my part to get one; but get one I did. No one can have been firing on all cylinders when the decision was made to allow a one-armed ten (possibly eleven-year-old) loose on the streets of Portlaoise at the helm of a two-wheeler. However, in my mind, I was a big boy, pedal mad and as determined to get a bike as a sex crazed salmon taking on a weir to make is it to the swinging party upstream. To me, the decision was a no brainer, and judging what happened next, the same could be said of my parents. Their thinking on the subject was not so much befuddled as non-existent.  

Getting a bicycle, for us kids, was like getting a pair of long trousers. It was a rite of passage, a shot at freedom and, for a boy like me, an absolute necessity. According to family myth I was reluctant to walk. It took bribery and corruption before I took my first tentative steps. Seemingly, I was propped against a wall and food was dangled just out of reach. Whatever the process, it worked. Hopefully, I was rewarded for my effort with a mouthful of goodies. Another family myth involves me and pedal power. No bribery was required when I first sat into a pedal car. Once in, I was gone, there are pictures of me to prove my love of that car. There are also pictures of me on a tricycle. My first memories of speed involve a trike, fast turns and back wheels lifting off the ground. Ah, the adrenaline rush, who needs drugs when we have speed.

My eldest sister’s first bike was gold, a first-hand, engineering marvel. She couldn’t even ride a bike when it arrived. There was envy on my part, but if she had a bike, whispered a voice in my head, my turn having one would eventually come. So, I quietly watched my sister learn to ride and soon she was cycling under her own steam, no need for a helping hand on the saddle. Meanwhile, I still had to flat foot it around town for a year or so, as trips on my tricycle were limited to the end of the lane. No self-respecting boy ever took to the highways on a tric, especially a three-wheeler which was way too small for him.

By now, friends and classmates were graduating to two wheeled forms of transport. There were very few new bicycles in the bike shed at school, and practically no age-appropriate ones. There were many High Nellies though, black monstrosities from bygone eras, invariably a lady’s bike, often inherited from a fragile granny or an elderly aunt. They, we were told, were made of great stuff; possibly stone, they dated back so far. No matter, their new owners, often farmers’ sons, were chest-out proud of these machines. They were so heavy though, and their owners’ legs so underdeveloped, that most had to dismount and push their bikes uphill, but once remounted on the brough of a steep incline they went like the clappers downhill.

My first bike was a birthday present. Traditionally they arrive on your birthday, but not this one.

To understand what follows, you must understand my father. While intelligence oozed from every pore of his being, not one braincell in that vast head of his was designed to cope with technology. He was to technology what Homer Simpson was to exercise. The very thought of it brought on signs of an impending nervous breakdown. At one time he spent weeks washing his feet by candlelight because he couldn’t change the light bulb. However, get him onto poetry, drama, history or English and he would entertain you for hours. What I’m getting at, is that he was not the kind of man one sent out to buy a bicycle.    

The deal was done on a barstool, sealed no doubt by a pint of plain. My father believed he had done right by me, after all, what could go wrong? Weren’t all bikes the same? Although even he probably suspected that bikes came in different shapes and sizes, he would have been hazy about the details.

Oddly enough, the bike shop proprietor was hazy about bikes too. Outside of the notion of the two-wheel requirement, his technical grasp of what constitutes a working bicycle were tenuous at best. But before we get to the bike itself, you must understand that if getting a bicycle was a rite of passage, the ordeal of collecting my present from the shop became a sort of Grimms’ Fairy Tale. It was a story involving a reluctant hero, one who faced all sorts of challenges before reaching his goal. There would be no bike for me until I had faced down the Bike-Shop Ogre (my father’s drinking buddy), until many full moons had passed, rivers been forded the evil spirits outwitted, or broken in the face of my childish determination to win the prize. I did not understand that a request made on a bar stool counted for nothing in the real world, or that any promise to fulfill the request were automatically rendered null and void at a certain stage in the evening. These were underworld events; I did not understand that back then. For me, a deal had been made; it must be honoured. But everybody knows that any interaction between humans in the spirit realm comes to naught in the real world; any deal made in the witching hours is made to be broken. It is a point of honour to wriggle out of any contract entered into on a bar stool. And so it was that my bike became a hostage to some unwritten code; bar fumes and the fairy dust were intent on keeping me a pedestrian. To retrieve my bicycle, I had to venture into another realm. But that was later. Things started out innocently enough.

My birthday came. I made my first visit to the bicycle shop and received my first promise of a delivery pending, tomorrow the due date. I was old enough to know that tomorrow was only a day away, not some far-off, over the horizon, event in a distant future where I would wear long trousers. So, I returned, and I kept on returning, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. Everybody, it seemed was invested in my promised bike. Despite the persistence, March came and went, as did April and we were well into May before the great reveal. The evil Ogre’s resistance was finally worn down and a bicycle was exchanged, though not the promised one. With that bike came treachery, a pot of gold was promised, freshly painted rust delivered. How many souls were traded in this lobsided deal I cannot say, perhaps none, the bike deserved no reward of a spiritual kind, coppers would have sufficed. Once I describe the extraordinary bicycle I collected, one which filled my life with pride and purpose, you will realise that it was certainly not worth eternal damnation.   

The bicycle was to bikes what the car from the Johnny Cash song, One Piece at a Time, was to the automobile. That car was built from a mismatch of parts so extremely different that it was a wonder the car ever ran. My bicycle was the same, it was unique. There was nothing quite like it anywhere. When it rolled from the shop, the fresh coat of paint was still wet. What others saw I can only guess. I had bike blindness, so what I saw was not the girl’s bicycle frame, the mismatching wheels, the faulty front brakes, the wrong cotter pins, or hidden under the back tyre, the super-sized tube. I did not even mind the dead fly stuck to the wet pain work, for me that bike represented escape velocity. With it at my disposal, I found the freedom to explore universes beyond my ken. For me, there was no longer a final frontier.

The next day began my mechanical apprenticeship, my informal training by neighbours and friends. I awoke to discover a puncture in the back wheel. As my father was technology illiterate, it fell to others to bring me up to speed. A neighbour, a man down the lane, revealed the workings of a puncture repair kit for the first time and pointed out that my problem stemmed from a super large tube compressed into a much smaller tyre. He also pointed out the reason why the front brakes did not work was because the front wheel was too small to reach the brake blokes, these floated mid-air well above the front tyre. Armed with this one lesson in bicycle maintenance, a screwdriver with a broken head, a bicycle wrench which cut into my hand when used, and spoons borrowed from the cutlery drawer, I was ready for road.     

When not cycling, I was repairing that bike. Our drive became cluttered with friends’ bikes too, as we found ways of keeping our machines rolling. Wheels and tyres came off, as we fixed punctures. Fingers became bloody and dirty as we searched for the usual culprits, nails and glass embedded in the tyres. But mainly we cycled. Every place is a place of mystery to a boy, one worthy of investigation. Whether that meant a four-mile trip to have an uninterpreted tour of a ruined castle, or heading in opposite direction to find an old graveyard, in search of bones abandoned in an ancient, empty crypt. Naturally, this was where it seemed appropriate to share our darkest ghost stories and scare ourselves senseless. There were too many near death experiences to recount here. Farmers with shotguns ran us off their lands. Bogs were visited, turf turned, tea drunk. Fish refused to be hooked in local lakes. Drivers were brake-tested by swarms of young cyclists. A bull took offense at us picking mushrooms in his field. The wonder of it all is that we made it to adulthood. Standing outside the old bike shop, it reminded me of the lifeless corpse of an old friend. He’s the same as you remember him, but different somehow. The vitality is gone. The spark of life. However, the memories are as colourful as they ever were. And as for the ogre who owned the shop, he was in reality a kindly man who tolerated me practically taking up residence as I quizzed him about bikes and looked for parts to keep his little monstrosity on the road. I quickly outgrew that bike, wore out my sisters’ bikes too and graduated to my first adult bicycle. But for that I went elsewhere.