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Fraternity on wheels

By Katharine Niles

Found in: | Biking | Mountain Biking | Road Biking |

"With the sun low, I turned the corner into a series of middle-school-aged boys plying the streets on bicycles. What is this? I thought. Some kind of young man's witching hour?"

My son has discovered the joys of wheeled transport. It began not with a bike, but a skateboard, which he, by the end of first grade, had discovered was the cool tool of choice. I bought him a cheap one at Wal-Mart, and a more expensive helmet from a bonafide sporting goods store, and took him to the local skate park a couple of times before they shut it down to begin an expansion project. He wasn't very good, of course, but here's the thing: teenaged boys and girls - replete with baggy pants, tattoos and nose piercings - delighted in teaching him. His initiation had begun.

The bike just happened recently. I realize there are gonzo five-year-olds out there ripping up BMX tracks every weekend, but my son was never one of those. We took him out biking a couple of times, but he stumbled and got mad at us and generally, in that way of his, decided if he couldn't do it perfectly he wasn't going to do it at all. He was also, I suspect, a little scared.

So I bided my time. I figured he'd get old enough and coordinated enough that biking would come easier. We live on a tilted street, so getting the oomph to go uphill, or the fearlessness to go down, has always been a bit tricky. Enter, however, a 12-year-old New Friend. In two minutes this friend had Chris up and riding in ways neither his dad nor I ever could. Pretty soon, Chris was zooming up and down the street, and rather than begging for cartoons after school each day (sigh . . .) he was out riding his bike.

The curious initiations and teachings I first saw with the teenagers at the skate park have since flowered. He bikes with his new friend every weekend. Another neighborhood boy, who is but a year or two older than the friend and has been known to baby-sit Chris upon occasion, set up a ramp at the end of the cul-de-sac and started to teach him how to jump. And, now and then, I discover Chris has traded the bike for the skateboard, and lo and behold, a high school kid is teaching him how to use it more effectively.

These teachings happen at dusk, so that the flip of a skateboard echoing on pavement has a certain poignancy, and I feel for the first time in my life as if there might just be some satisfaction to the sort of quasi-suburban experience I've spent my life eyeing with deep suspicion. I mean, I get to call him into dinner and he gets to feel part of a larger, mostly male, camaraderie I hardly knew existed. For example, while Chris spun around on his bike one evening, I took the dog out for a jaunt. I usually go in the morning, but had missed my chance earlier in the day. With the sun low, I turned the corner into a series of middle-school-aged boys plying the streets on bicycles. What is this? I thought. Some kind of young man's witching hour?

But I didn't care. My feelings toward the bicyclists were totally different than they had been before. I was happy that there were so many of them, and that my son had found some semblance of his people. I was even happier to find that in their willingness to teach an eight-year-old, these older kids completely undid my stereotypes of self-centered, risk-taking youth. That I, a college instructor, still carry these stereotypes is disgusting, and the kids' behavior toward my son verified one of the tenets I teach by (otherwise, why bother) - that the human heart and brain, whatever the age, wants to feel useful.

This weekend Chris came home with his first case of road rash. His 12-year-old friend had bandaged him up in an act of maternal compassion and competence I didn't think 12-year-old boys possessed. So I view the road rash as perfectly emblematic of this new phase of his boyhood: He needs me less and less, and I find myself turning him over - sweetly if sometimes sorrowfully, and with an eye still out - to the neighborhood boys, his teachers, initiators and worthy companions in the wheeled world.

Katharine Niles, a teacher at Fort Lewis College, lives in Durango with a dog, husband and son, Chris. Her novel, The Basket Maker, won the Editor's Choice Prize:Fiction at the 2005 Book of the Year Awards at BookExpo America.