It was in 2001 that, among the people I knew, bikes went from being a possession of consequence, from one that was saved and built up for, to one that was simply a tool, a machine, that of which we plied our trade.
Prior to 2001, I enjoyed shooting the breeze with friends, speaking directly about that to which we rode, why, and how we broke down each element of that machine with personal choice, its selection a mix of opinion, performance, and ultimately, price.
Then, performance bicycles were not yet ubiquitous, but to us we were the early-adopters of riding the best that money seemed to afford, just prior to the stage that pro-level only machines became poised to go geometric. Since 2001, when each season came around, I poo-pooed it – the influx of machines future, faced the outgoing mass of last year’s unwanted and dated; the hyperactivity of product development seemed like a bad match for the aging experience of owning a singular bicycle. The other day while watching my eighteen-month-old son knock around a pile of newly arrived bike equipment, I knew suddenly and viscerally that I was right. The svelte objects he was playing with made the outgoing seemed like relics, yet, when the day before they were gloriously functional and pleasing to the eye.
One of the most prominent losses in this regard stands to be the loss of old bikes in garages. Particularly, my own garage.
A chief virtue of turning over one’s bike inventory is that once sold, they take up no space at all. Each year, last season’s bikes seem bulky compared to what now arrives. But what better than an old bicycle to serve as a vessel of precision, simplicity, and economy, all the facets of your life during that machine’s reign are represented by its presence.
That you rode in red dust, commuted to work in the rain, fetishized white bar tape once, aspired to push big gears, coped with less, and still tote around a saddle bag as a totem of your thrifty years and once preparedness. And what by contrast can a new and freshly modern bike tell you about yourself or say to those who visit your house? All it offers is blithe reassurance that there is progress in the world, and that you are a part of it.
Of the garages I’ve inspected in my life, two stand out as particularly consequential. The first was my Grandfather’s, which was built into the cellar of where my father grew up. When I would visit my grandparents in the summer I would spend hours exploring that garage. The bikes down there were dusty, rusted, and jammed together amongst other sundries one stores in a basement. The bicycles, stored as though they knew their time was up when the tires went flat, waited as glimpses into their era to be discovered. A townie bike from 1960s. A classic Viner road racer from sometime when my father was at University, and a BMX bike before there were BMX bikes, fossilized, there in the dark. It was from these that I got the clearest glimpse I ever had of my father as a person who existed before me and apart from me, and whose inner life I imagined to be as bottomless as I knew my own to be.
And then there was my wife, whose parents’ garage I first inspected on a humid Minneapolis summer afternoon while we packed her for a move cross country. The shelves were stuffed full boxes, dusty, unmoved for years – each an arc of discovery in their own right, and then, we found 2 old bicycles. The bicycles brought back to her more stories of discovery and journey than anything we saw or rummaged through in those boxes. At the time we met, those machines had no signs of recent use nor radiated any traces of the adolescent wonder they’d prompted. But the stories instantly resumed as though the bikes were still warm from the vibration of use.
It remains to be seen how many generations of bicycles I will continue to roll out the garage door just as quickly as the new ones arrive. Will my son have the adventure of getting to know me by imagining where the old ones had taken me? I should keep at least one for sure, and maybe two, but not much beyond that I wouldn’t think. But I hope at some point to save something, a special machine only in its path that we shared, rather than its design, such that it sits there waiting for the day my son will be old enough to spend his own afternoons puzzling out a picture of his father was through those bikes he let grow dusty in the garage.
