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| This is exactly the type of thing I imagined I was doing. |
On
any given day the very most common thing we did besides building
forts, was riding bikes. For anyone familiar with BMX bikes knows
there is only one way to ride them, hard and over jumps. I wrote BMX
back there in that last sentence but I was exaggerating, we never
owned actual BMX bikes we owned used knock-off BMX bikes which
probably single handedly accounts for why I never learned how to do a totally sweet front-flip on
a half-pipe. They say it is a poor workman who blames his tools, I
think the adjective 'poor' in that aphorism is supposed to refer to
the skill of the craftsman, but I like to think it is reflective of
the workman's socio-econimic standing. Then it sounds more like a
justification then a dig at the person's character. Getting back to
the matter at hand there is two ways to ride hard; riding fast and
doing tricks. Riding fast is exactly what it sounds like but in a
relativistic sense in that fast to a 8-year-old riding a knock-off
BMX bike around his block is not very fast in an absolute sense. It
felt awesome to go all out wind in the hair and pumping away on a
un-geared set of peddles, and then the pièce
de résistance
, jamming back hard on
the peddles to break and, bike gods willing, skid the tires. A
beautiful thin line of black rubber was admired by all the other kids
and bike riding skill was directly correlated to its length. Next in
glory after skidding came riding with no hands especially if you had
the skill to turn corners and break without having to touch the
handlebars. The move that made a young boy a god among men was
popping a wheelie, and if you wanted Santaquin bike immortality you
rode that wheelie. I could skid and ride mostly strait with no hands
and I could momentarily lift the front wheel of my bike off of the
ground. Shame. After riding hard you did jumps and we spent a lot of
time as children seeking out or building some really sweet jumps. We
would go to an abandoned lot by ourhouse that had a little circuit
trail and would take shovels and dig a pit in the trail and take the
remaindered dirt stack it up and make a little jumping hill in front
of the pit we just dug. The idea being that if all went well you
would ride up the hill get sweet air and clear the pit with no
trouble. That did happen on occasion but mostly the rider would
dribble of the end of the hill well below the necessary velocity for
takeoff and the pit would become for the young dirt bikers what the
La Brea tar pits were to Stegosaurus. At least the dirt was forgiving
other jumps we tried were off a set of steps by the church that went
up three steps parallel to a ramp and then they just dropped off
about two feet. In my mind I would ride up the ramp and launch super
far into the air and land all awesome hopefully while girls were
watching. In practice, and I must be clear I have no photographic
evidence of this, the move looked more like a rather timid kid easing
his bike off of a two-foot tall cement ledge. Girls were never
around. I don't know if I ever did a proper jump where both of my
tires came off the ground and it looked cool and I landed it like a
two-wheeled gymnast but I spent a lot of time trying.
