Art by @snarshall
I lost a dear friend last week. Thirty-six years of companionship, gone in an instant.
I lost my bike. Or rather, I killed her.
Perhaps that’s too harsh. Maybe I didn’t kill her outright, but I certainly contributed to her untimely death.
In the summer of 1989, my wife Lisa and I bought matching Schwinn Cruisers. It was a watershed moment for me. I’d grown up a BMX kid, always yearning for a cruiser, and Schwinn was the gold standard. She was black and beautiful, sleek and strong. She imprinted on me.
For 36 years, that bike went everywhere a bike could go. She came along on vacations, camping trips, and for most the last 15 years, our annual pilgrimage to San Onofre. She was a faithful, reliable constant, a timeless, elegant, single-speed monument to simplicity.
Until last week.
We were headed down the highway, car packed for our San Onofre trip, when it happened. I caught a flash in my left side mirror: my Schwinn, airborne, flying ten feet above the asphalt, her front wheel spinning like a turbine. The last whole image I have of her is that moment, suspended in the mirror, my own terrified eyes staring back as I watched her descend.
She landed hard, bounced once, and then, boom. A four-wheel drive monster of a truck behind us finished the job.
My bike was gone.
It sounds absurd, I know, tragic and laughable at the same time. But the image, burned into my mind, plays like a slow-motion Zapruder film: my glance down and left across the steering wheel, the mirror reflecting both my fear and her fate, and then the helplessness of watching her devoured by the road.
My first fear wasn’t for the bike, it was for the people in the monster truck, and for the cars trailing behind it. I pictured chaos: a chain of collisions, glass and steel exploding across lanes, bodies flung into motion they didn’t choose and were powerless to stop.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel as we exited the highway and circled back, heart beating fast, my rational mind pushing back on a tsunami of blinding panic.
When we reached the crash site, the nightmare I’d conjured wasn’t there. Instead, the road was strangely calm, indifferent. And there she was, my bike, crumpled on the shoulder like a fallen animal, the frame and wheels bent at unnatural angles. I stood for a moment beside the roar of passing cars, pulled out my phone, took a few pictures (I’m not sure why), and then lifted what was left of her corpse over the guardrail.
And then, with the traffic rushing past and the sky impossibly blue, I said goodbye.
I didn’t realize how attached I was until that moment. It wasn’t just steel, rubber, and handle bars I’d lost – it felt like losing a loved one.
Since then, I’ve tried to look ahead. I’ve researched new bikes, sleek machines with machine-printed carbon frames, digital displays, more gears than I’d ever know what to do with. But none of it feels right. Too fancy. Too modern. Who really needs more than one gear, anyway?
I’ve browsed the relics from her era, 1970s and ’80s cruisers. But they’re rare, and the prices are steep.
So I wait, unsure what my biking future holds.
What I do know is this. If there is an afterlife, I’ll find her there. She’ll be waiting for me on a long, winding bike path, a cool breeze at my back and meadows stretching out on both sides. Lisa will join us there someday too, and we’ll ride together again, heading somewhere, anywhere, everywhere.
Farewell, old friend.
baldwinhere 