Passing of the Torch
Passing of the Torch
At seven years old, I was too old for training wheels yet not old enough for the BMX style bike I had been salivating over. I was without any two-wheeled experience thus far, discounting the times I would ride my cousins banana bike buck-ass-naked as a fat toddler with a strawberry-blonde bowl cut. The only respite from the harsh Seattle summer sun being a Rainier Beer visor to shade my paper white skin.
Side note: This was parenting in the early Eighties.
Around this time, my friends were out riding bikes on weekends and holidays, I was busy disappearing from normal life. While others my age had scores of friends, birthday parties, and sports to choose from, I passed the time going between parents homes with the diverse activities and schedules that surrounded those contrasty different environments. It wasn’t until Little League baseball came around that I ever had a stitch of consistency.
Not to Down Debbie, but this was also parenting in the Eighties. And the Nineties. In fact, living at a different home every two weeks out of the month continued until I stopped it at the ripe age of eighteen.
For whatever reason at seven, I was to get a new bike, a FIRST bike. Maybe it was my mom’s new boyfriend who had been egging her on to get a bike and join him for rides. It probably occurred to him at some point to include that odd kid of hers. The boyfriend rode a lot around Seattle, and possessed the largest legs I had ever seen. Though these pipes held up a modest platform of 5’4” on a good day, but when put to work on a road-cycle, there were few who could drop him in a race, regardless of height. Short man’s revenge.
Why it was my first bike, is still a mystery. Mom says it was because my father, the real one, had purchased a motorcycle the same year, and had chosen its inaugural unveiling to coincide with the birthday party that she painstakingly cultivated, at her house no less.
With the arrival of Mr. Cool on the ultimate two-wheeled death-trap, it was only time until I wanted the seven-year-old version of chrome and steel.
Of the very few times that I can recall my parents in the same room together, one of the starkest memories was at Gregg’s Greenlake Cycle in Seattle. It was an early evening, but the sun had retreated fast. It was the days when it would be dark by the time your parents had driven you home from school in their single-lap-belt automobile. Sliding along the bench seat on a left turn after depressing the GM button on the seatbelt just in time to go shooting from Mom’s elbow, sliding across the ribbed vinyl and crashing into the door, avoiding the window knob.
The whole while giving your Mom a massive heart-attack.
Those, my friends, were the days.
When we arrived, I could tell two things right away. One, we were the only people there and they wanted to close up. Two, my Dad had already gotten into the ear of the salesman.
Whatever plan my Mom had most assuredly had my father agree to on a conservative, age appropriate bicycle that would be safe and affordable was now out the window. Hell, we never even made it into the room. There before me was a Peugeot BMX style bike, the kind you saw all the kids doing tricks on. Knobby tires, a hard seat that used to abuse the absolute fuck out of my tailbone, ribbed grips on the handlebars that would show two colors when you would rub a finger down it like piano keys, and all of this in a heavy shiny metal frame.
I’ll give this one to Dad, and to many Dad’s out there. Besides all of his faults, he truly lived as a big kid and for those first few years when he was around much of the time, (after he had disappeared for a number of years) he did his best to show me the magic and wonder that his own childhood was filled with. He knew that bike would blow me away, and it did. It gave me not only acceptance from my friends and peers as one of them, overall it made me a cool dude like my dad.
What more could a kid want?
Side Note: This moniker, Mr. Cool, was bestowed upon him for decades to come, and I in turn sadly gave myself a misguided and misunderstood mandate for how I was to be as a man. This unbeknownst-to-me pursuit, would drive much of how I guided my life, for much of my life.
My ironic reality of having an intimidating road warrior like the Peugeot, and having no idea how to ride it, was a quagmire I was ill prepared for. As much as my dad loved to spark joy and excitement, actual engagement was few and far between. The illustrious bike would end up sitting in a cellar for over a year until we moved, its inaugural ride waiting for a neighbor boy, not my dad, to finally teach me how to ride on two-wheels.
That sentiment, not unlike that of a Boy named Sue, who’s Daddy knew he wouldn’t be around there to put the grit in his blood and the spit in his eye; was ‘learn-ed’ to me the old fashioned way. The idea that he would disappear mid-sentence was ever-present. Although my life was very full with my Mom, Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles and the rest, Dad held me in constant suspense. Another unfortunate attribute I would eventually embody.
I loved the Peugeot. It would ride it for hours and hours, alone and with friends. We would find all types of mysterious, hidden spots near watersheds and construction sites. The single gear of our bikes keeping us from long open rides, but instead we would tear through alleys and side streets around and through our neighborhood, terrorizing those with strollers or dogs. Dumping the bikes in the gravel en unison when approaching ice cream trucks or the sporting goods store.
In the days when innocence was free and easy, finding escape on a bike was absolutely bliss. Feeling the unencumbered sense of flying while young muscles find their purchase and purpose. That escape from reality, however brief, was as intoxicating to me as a third generation alike’s last drink of the night.
I now ride a road cycle for fitness, and occasional fun. I leave all of my dirt digging and exploring to my true, two-wheeled passion… Adventure Riding. While I cant give my old man full credit for my love for bikes or motorcycles it indeed was he who gave me the undeniable, incredible, and overwhelming feeling of wanting, needing and fulfilling of, The Escape.
Unironic was the daily dose of shit I would take from Dad for choosing such a ridiculous path in life. A path he laid regardless, I was meant to be the responsible one, not the renegade. Not Mr. Cool. I was never supposed to be him. Anything, but that.
We battled over this for all of my adolescence, as so many fathers and sons do. We battled throughout my teens. Changes in income, responsibilities and experience rarely changed the fight. We continued going toe to toe throughout my twenties and thirties. This battle we would engage in under different titles and reasons, but it was the same battle nonetheless.
Today, my life is without battle. The argument is over. While my brain still argues at times, the opposing voice is all but muted.
My Father, stubborn in his stubbornness, all the way up until the stubborn end, completed his battle on August 6, 2025. He was only 71 years old.
With my mandate not fulfilled, and without further examples or instructions on what to do next, I am faced at 45 with learning to ride a bike again for the very first time. I can choose to continue on the path my Dad laid before me. I can choose to take my own wobbly steps in a new direction. I can step forward honoring his free-spirited sense of adventure and wonder, yet take firmer and more committed advancements towards a happy life. One filled with the feeling to Escape that I’ll always yearn for. Not the negative connotation of running away from ones own fears that the word sometimes embodies, but one of Breaking Away and Breaking Through to new worlds. New plateaus. Evolving.
The torch that my Pop passed to me so many years ago was the passion of Escape. Its impossible to think of him without the it, or vice versa. I carry him with me now on the adventure of life without fear of the journey or the destinations, but only the roads not taken.
I choose now to take what little I have learned about the hard transitions and paths in life, and to show others what good can be done to the lives of those open and willing to Escape, Explore, and Evolve.
Escape with Us. Ride with Us. Camp with Us. Experience with Us. Evolve with Us.
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