The Schwinn

I saved all summer for it.

I was 16, landscaping in the Indiana heat, and every dollar went toward one thing: a 1987 Schwinn in Winter Mint. When I finally brought it home I stood in the driveway and just looked at it for a while. I had never owned anything that beautiful in my life.

Laura's brothers rode. Serious riders, the kind who drove to find actual hills on weekends because northern Indiana doesn't offer much in that department. When they saw I was committed they gave me my first kit, a Greg LeMond kit, the year before he won the Tour de France. I didn't fully understand what I was wearing. I just knew it felt like something.

The brothers took me in. Weekday mornings I rode from Nappanee to Plymouth, thirty miles each way, to see Laura. I didn't think of it as training. I thought of it as the fastest way to get somewhere I wanted to be. Turns out those are the best training rides of all.

I got strong. I got fast. Faster than I knew.

The Little 500

In the spring of 1987 the brothers entered the Little 500 at Indiana University in Bloomington. The Little 500 is a 4-man team relay race: real racing, a real track, a real crowd. Thousands of people. The kind of event that feels bigger than anything a kid from Nappanee has any business being part of.

I had just turned 17. I wasn't supposed to be there.

They put me on the first leg. The strategy was simple: go as hard as you can for as long as you can and use yourself up completely. Leave everything on the track. I didn't know enough to be scared so I just did exactly that.

I was ahead by nearly a full half-lap when my leg ended.

I remember coming off the track and not being able to breathe properly and feeling like I was ten feet tall. In reality I was a scrawny kid from Nappanee in a borrowed LeMond kit who had just raced in front of more people than he had ever seen in one place. Cutters won that year. I can't for the life of me remember the name of our team.

I'm not sure it matters. I remember the feeling.

California

A few years later I left Indiana. A different girl, the one who would become my first wife and the mother of my children. A 1987 Jeep Wrangler pulling a UHaul trailer. The Schwinn wrapped in moving blankets and lashed to the top.

We drove west.

Somewhere in Arizona we pulled off at the Grand Canyon overlook after dark. Back then if you arrived late enough you could just drive in, no fee, no ranger, just darkness and silence and whatever was beyond the rim that you couldn't see. We slept in the Jeep.

I woke before dawn needing to go. I stepped outside and it stopped me cold.

The light coming up over the canyon was something I had no framework for. I had grown up in Indiana. I went back to the trailer, unwrapped the Schwinn from its moving blankets, and rode about ten miles along the south rim in the early morning light while she slept and the canyon opened up beside me.

I have thought about that ride many times since.

We landed in Long Beach. I had come to California with a head full of mountains. Instead I got miles and miles of flat city in every direction, more concrete than I had ever seen, and a sky that apparently never learned how to rain. It was surreal. Beautiful in its own way, but surreal.

I found my rides where I could. Along the San Gabriel River once, all the way into LA proper another time. My favorite was riding down to the harbor, past the Queen Mary sitting enormous and improbable in the water. Indiana had prepared me for a lot of things. Not that.

The apartment had a garage. We kept the Jeep inside because soft tops got broken into constantly in that neighborhood. Someone broke into the garage anyway. Stole the stereo out of the Jeep and took the Schwinn.

A couple of the guys from Sublime lived across the alley. They saw it happen and couldn't get there in time. They woke us up to tell us.

I stood in the empty garage looking at the space where the bike had been. Three weeks in California. The Grand Canyon ride still fresh in my legs. I was devastated.

And without the bike, without the hills, without anyone to ride with, I just never replaced it.