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Two-Wheeled Getaway Car
- University of Nevada Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
: : 18 : : A bicycle had been my getaway car ever since I was a five-year-old in southern Nevada. I’ll never forget the morning my father said to come outside, he had a surprise for me. His eyes and the glass on his rimless eyeglasses sparkled as if they were party lights. He opened the front door, took my hand, and walked with me down the front concrete stairs painted red. There it was, leaning against the palm tree my father had planted a few weeks before. The low bar in the middle meant it was a girl’s bike to make straddling easy. It was painted black in a futile but tender attempt to disguise its age and infirmities. Its two battered fenders capped two large balloon tires. Whatever its condition, however, it shimmered with sheer beauty in my eyes. “Oh, Daddy!” I couldn’t stop dancing around his legs. Out in the street, he lifted me onto the pedals. “Let go,” I told him. “I can do this.” “Are you sure?” he asked. He still held on to make sure I wouldn’t fall. Freeze-frame: the bulky black bicycle, my handsome, lovable father holding the handlebars, me ready to ride away on the wide pavement of Fifth Street in front of our red-shuttered house—that moment like a commemorative stamp in the story of my life. He steadied me on the first few rounds of pedaling, then I burst out of his arms. I took off—thin, shy me, pumping pedals down Fifth Street in Boulder City, off into the :: The Two-Wheeled Getaway Car :: The Two-Wheeled Getaway Car : : 19 sunshine, into the possibility of turning wheels forever until I reached infinity—something that fascinated me even then. (I doodled the figure eight symbol on the margins of our phone book and on the back of Mother ’s recipe cards.) While my feet turned those wheels on my new/old black and dented bicycle, I sensed I could ride down the street into something much more exciting than ordinary life. The pedals would spin around and around until they became something more than pedals with a chain. My bike was Pegasus headed for the summit of Olympus, though Daddy had read to me about Zeus getting angry at Bellerophon for trying to ride Pegasus to such great heights. I knew better than to go too far. Still, on my new bike I wasn’t human anymore. I wanted to be bigger than everything around me. I wanted to be everywhere I wasn’t. Something in me had thought I could arrive at infinity. It was only natural, therefore, that forty-eight years later in 1996, I succumbed to the temptation of Pegasus again and riding off to salvation. A student of mine in the Vermont College low-residency creative writing program where I taught, a young woman I’ll call C. J., had bet another student five dollars that I’d say yes if she asked me to ride bicycles with her from Colorado to Vermont. “We’d start early enough,” she assured me, “to arrive in time for the summer residency.” When I answered, “Why not?” she seemed genuinely surprised. Her friend who proposed the wager was surprised. Even I was surprised, knowing I was so casually turning a deaf ear to a more prudent internal voice: What in heaven’s name have you just said you’d do? Are you an idiot? All internal and external warnings ignored, C. J. and I decided to ride our bikes from Fort Collins, Colorado, to Montpelier, Vermont, starting on the last day of April in 1996. Why not believe we could ride across the United States of America to feel alive again and find clarity in the smokegets -in-your-eyes of love? I was definitely disenchanted with infinity at this point. Thirty years of marriage had been burned to a crisp despite David’s and my nonblink- [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:31 GMT) 20 : : r a w e d g e s ing vow of “forever.” We’d promised in the Mormon temple that our marriage would last for time and all eternity, not just “til death do we part.” But we’d removed our wedding bands inscribed, “United We Stand,” and left our broken promises flat in the road where a semi could finish them off. On top of that, separation from both David and my boys...