Ahhh….spring. When a young man’s thoughts turn to …fishing and bike trips!
There is nothing quite like a bike trip, especially when you are a kid. Add in the opportunity to do some fishing and voila! Good to go!
First of all, there is no plan for a bike trip, other than to reach a certain destination, usually so far away that you never make it anyway.
Take, for example, the time my friend Jake and I decided to bike to Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire. We figured if we fished along the way, it would cut down on the food bill and give us something to do if we got tired of pedaling.
Back in those days, bikes had two speeds: fast and slow, both of which were determined by the rider by either A.) putting on the brakes or B.) peddling harder, unlike the rides youngsters enjoy today, which include bikes with 40 gears and shock absorbers.
Since our parents usually rose at some ungodly hour to start on a vacation trip, 5 a.m. seemed an appropriate starting time.
After all even Big Bear sporting goods store stays open all night for the opening of fishing season the next day. It’s good to get an early start.
Arriving at Jake’s house, I simply walked in the back door and headed up to his room to make sure he was awake. On the way I ran into Jake’s mom, a kind of fragile woman who apparently wasn’t expecting a visitor this early in the morning in her house.
After my heart slowed down to 400 beats a minute, I noted that I wasn’t used to seeing her with rollers in her hair and that particular kind of make-up she wore at night which made her look like the bride of Frankenstein, which may have been a poor choice of words at the time.
Having watched Return of the Living Dead the night before, however, I was still a bit on edge.
With that behind us, Jake and I got down to the business of the day, loading our backpacks for the upcoming trip with only the bare essentials such as potato chips, soda, candy bars, cookies, a side of beef, a dozen eggs, several large cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, a cook stove, Spam, a small army tent, and half the contents of Jake’s kitchen cupboards.
Halfway down the driveway, we decided to reconsider our baggage, since the tires were riding on the rims, settling on only enough food to feed a small army and eliminating most anything that weighed more than five pounds or so. With that behind us, we began on the great adventure.
At the end of the driveway, we made our first big decision.
“Which way are we going?” asked Jake.
It was the kind of question one would expect from someone who had never been on a real bike trip before. Directions didn’t matter. One made decisions based on more important criteria, such as which road Cydney Baskins lived on.
Cydney Baskins was the most attractive girl in the fifth grade, a freckle-faced redhead who apparently fancied both Jake and me because of our suave, sophisticated outlook on life.
Even though she pretended to ignore our tokens of affections, such as the frog Jake stuffed into her lunch box one day without her seeing, we knew she secretly was torn between the two of us.
“I can’t decide which of you is worse,” she informed us after discovering the frog. “I’m going to make you eat this frog if you don’t leave me alone.”
Obviously, she was infatuated.
Since our journey was only slightly in the opposite direction of Cydney’s house, we decided it would be appropriate to “stop by for a brief visit.” Though it was 6:30 a.m. when we arrived at her front door, it appeared that no one was up yet.
“Hey,” said Jake. “I’ve got an idea. Remember in that movie when John Wayne throws pebbles against his girlfriend’s window to let her know he’s there? We’ll do that.”
Unfortunately, Cydney’s parents had a tar driveway, making it hard to find appropriate pebbles to throw. Several tries later, the pebble supply seemed to be exhausted. We were getting nowhere.
“Here’s a little stone,” Jake exclaimed after searching the area. “I’ll bounce it off the side of the house instead of the window.”
Jake was never one for great shots. In fact, in the annual hit the telephone pole thingamajig contest, he was usually lucky if he hit the pole, instead of that little thingamajig holding the wire.
This was no exception. Rearing back, Jake let fly a small rocket of a stone which predictably hit dead center in the window, shattering the silence and the glass at once.
We both stood frozen in time, it seemed. And then a face appeared through the broken glass. It was her father, leading us to believe that either Cydney had moved her room or that we had somehow made a bad choice in guessing which room was hers.
I had never realized how red her father’s face could get, or how he could make his veins pop out of his forehead like that, even more than when I informed him one day several years later that I was going to marry his daughter.
After discussing the small matter of a broken window with him and deciding on an appropriate payment plan, which at one point he comically suggested might include a “pound of flesh,” we decided it might be best to extend our trip for at least another day or two before returning home.
After all, there is nothing quite like a bike trip when you’re a kid…
The above is an excerpt from the book Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sanity… by Dick Martin, a Glocester resident, former Burrillville High School teacher and contributor for NRI NOW.
Martin can be contacted at dicmartin@aol.com.
