The Jump

I feel a great deal of pride when I watch my son riding his bicycle down our street with his normally jolly face tense with determination.  Zach pedals with purpose and will, weaving in between bumps and stray rocks, careful not to go too fast.  Careening along in his shark-finned helmet with the feeling of freedom that short range transportation can provide, I can’t help but think one more thing about his riding.  He really sucks.

Don’t get me wrong, this is only by comparison of what I remember of kid’s biking skills and my own from my youth, and my son’s sucking is by design.  We’ve worked hard as his parents to terrify him of taking too many chances on the bike and watch him with every pump of his pedals.  At seven, he’s riding well, steady, with good stops and starts.  There’s really not much more I can teach him… No, that isn’t true, there is much more I could teach him, but it’s all stuff I don’t want him to know.

When Zach shows me a trick of taking his feet off the pedals for almost an entire second, I act as though he just did it on a tightrope over a swimming pool filled with rattlesnakes to show him how impressed with the trick I am and how dangerous I thought it was so he won’t do it again, or up the stakes with something more thrilling.  But the kid that lives in the back of MY mind is asking the parent part why I didn’t tell him the next step of the trick, which is to place both hands on the front of his seat to push his body up and off to let the bicycle glide until it crashes.

Things are just different now.  Every kid wears a helmet to ride a bike now, but if any of us from the old neighborhood would have ridden through the streets of Kittitas wearing a bicycle helmet it would have been greeted with confusion, then laughter and finally scorn, in that order.  As in: “What’s that on your head?” then while laughing, “you know you aren’t riding a motorbike right?” and before any riding with the rest of the kids would take place, “take that stupid thing off and don’t put it on again.”  This would be from the adults.

I didn’t know one kid that owned a helmet for riding a bike, in fact I didn’t even think there was a bicycle helmet in the Kittitas Valley apart from those for the bicycle motocross team in Ellensburg.  Those helmets were required by rules, rules we were sure were written by the manufacturers of bicycle helmets.  We felt sorry for those kids.  We’d say things like, “I’d join that BMX team in a second if I didn’t have to wear one of those dorky helmets.”

It is a wonder that none of us from the neighborhood ended up in a brain trauma center, drooling on half of an ice cream sandwich as we watched the People’s Court for the rest of our lives.  However, donning safety gear to protect the most important organ in your body wasn’t just a silly idea, it was just not done.  But now, in Seattle, I would imagine that Child Protective Services has been called about a child repeated riding a bicycle without a helmet.

(I just looked it up.  I didn’t find a story about helmetless kids and CPS in Seattle, but I did find one in Tennessee.  If there’s a news story about CPS picking up a kid for riding without a helmet in Tennessee, then it means it happens in pretty conservative areas of the country.  So it may be safe to say that in the so called “Nanny State” of Washington, I won’t find a news story about it because it is too common.  Just like you wouldn’t find a story about swearing in public in New York.)

I have often joined my son on a bicycle in our cul de sac without a helmet and my son looks at me as if I had started smoking.  “DAD! You don’t have a helmet on!” he’ll yell.  “What would happen if you hit your head?”

“Well, then I guess I’d still be dumber than your mother,” I’d say and then I would chase him around on the bike.  I usually don’t go into all the talk about how “in my day, we didn’t need helmets” talk because we did.  We needed a whole lot more than helmets some times.  What we really could have used was a giant pit filled with foam like you see gymnasts practice landing in.  Actually, my neighborhood could have used three of those pits.

Summer days were extra-long in Kittitas when I was growing up.  Today’s summer days are about a third as long as the days back then, because of inflation and probably climate change.  You get less of everything now.  If you don’t believe me, the next time you’re in a grocery store, check out a half-gallon of ice cream.  That half-gallon is now 1.78 quarts, if you’re lucky, it might be 1.5 quarts now.  Everything is getting smaller, and that includes the summer days.

Back then, the days stretched out and may have included two lunches, but we were able to fill them with all kinds of amazing activities, many of which included the use of our bikes.

Behind my parent’s house was my good friend Scott’s place.  He lived there with his mom June, his older brother Russ and Scott’s twin sister Sherry.  There was a dirt single-lane alley between our two properties that bisected the entire block and continued across 5^th Street and beyond the main highway that ran through the town, which was Patrick Avenue.  The alleyways in Kittitas were generally empty and often used by kids to cross the town relatively unnoticed.

We raced all over town with our bicycles of varying sizes and shapes.  Nobody really judged you for the bike that you had.  You only needed to be able to catch up.  I had sported a green banana seat job for years, with a set of what Harley enthusiasts would refer to as “ape hangers”.  These are long handlebars that gave the illusion of better control but mostly just ended up impaling your stomach more thoroughly if you crashed on them.

But, in a town like Kittitas, a kid is going to wear every part of a bike down in just a couple years, and by the time I was ten, my bike situation was due for an upgrade.  My birthday always fell on a day about a week after school let out for the summer and although I never thanked my parents for conceiving me in late September, I really should have.  What better way to kick off the summer than with a celebration of your birthday?

For this birthday, I received a midnight-blue Univega BMX bike.  It was beautiful, had all the safety pads, which back then was all the safety a kid needed (not true), and I loved it.  It didn’t have mag wheels, which I preferred, but it was unique and a solid bike.  I loved it.  I washed it more than I washed my last car (eight times).

One afternoon, many neighborhood kids were out in the alley, constructing ramps for us to launch our bicycles off.  The engineering of these ramps had been painstakingly done through trial and error.  After a piece of my father’s good plywood was hauled from our garage, it was place against an un-split round of firewood, creating an inclined plane with which, if we applied ourselves enough speed, we could sail several feet through the air before landing triumphantly into all the glory your own mind could think up.  However, every ramp needed to be tested.

The way to properly test a ramp or “jump” as we called it, was that one of the older kids would lay the plywood on the big round of firewood and then enthusiastically look to the youngest and most naïve riders around, clap hands and ask, “Which one of you kids wants to try this awesome ramp first?”

A sucker volunteers and is selected and gleefully pilots his bike a good distance away, before being counted down by the older kids who have varying points of observation around the ramp.  The unsuspecting test pilot then rockets toward the ramp, hits the plywood and one, possibly two things go horribly wrong.

The board would break for one reason or another or it would buckle enough that the rider’s front tire would stop and all of the mass times speed business would need to be conducted at a different end of the bike, which meant the surprised rider would fly over the handlebars and onto the unforgiving gravel alley—if they were lucky!  And they usually weren’t.  There were several crashes involving the “chicken” effect as it’s called in kid circles, or what we adults know as “logical reasoning”.  That was when the kid’s brain matures just enough in the split second before hitting the ramp and sends a message to the rest of the body:

.9 seconds

“What the hell are you doing?” asks the brain.

“Being awesome!”  says the kid.

.6 seconds

“Listen, you gotta stop this… are you on a bike?  Is that a… Is that some kind of ramp?!?” the brain asks.

“I’m going to fly!” says the kid.

.4 seconds

“I don’t have the pathways in here for the type of complex mathematical equations needed to tell me if that ramp is going to hold or to calculate the odds of you actually coming out of this situation okay, I mean, I literally just activated in your head from all this adrenaline but this looks like a bad idea,” says the brain.

“GOOD IDEA!” says the kid.

.2 seconds

“I’ve got some pretty developed DNA in here with thousands of years of evolutionary data claiming that a situation like this is not going to end in your favor.  Also, selfishly, I would prefer to continue sending you new information and learning new things.  I just don’t see that happening if you go through with this jump.  You’re not even listening are you?  The ramp is getting closer and you aren’t stopping.  I gotta find some way to stop you from…  HEY DUMBASS!  LOOK OVER THERE AT THAT REALLY SHINY THING!”

“What?” says the kid missing the ramp with their tire and thus living to fly another day, like after THEY talk some poor bastard into testing a ramp.

But after the crash test dummy hits the ramp and inevitably wipes out, the older kids solve the ramps issues with reinforcements or a few simple tweaks.  Then it is generally deemed safe enough for all to use.  After all, who’s going to be stupid enough to test it after the first kid?

This particular day was no different.  The older kids included Russ, who was about four-to-five years older than my ten and another boy Russ’ age, Jeff, who was the son of the mayor of Kittitas, but we didn’t hold it against him.  They were definitely the leaders of the activities in the alley that day as we set up to do some serious jumpin’.

We had set up multiple ramps in the alley, so you could hit one after another and not have to turn around and keep hitting the same ramp.  None were nearly as big as the main ramp though.  At its zenith, the main ramp was probably twenty inches off the ground and we were measuring flights of 6 to 8 feet.  I think it was Scott that asked if I wanted to take the next logical step and lay my body down at the end of the ramp so that he could jump over me.  Well, of course I would.  Nobody was landing anywhere near that close to the ramp.

I watched Scott sail over me, and soon after I was sailing over Scott.  Then Scott was lying next to me, and soon his sister Sherry joined us.  There would be four of us lying side by side, tight against each other and as close to the ramp as we could get.

Someone had jumped 5 of us at one time and everyone was really impressed, until Russ verbalized what we thought was crazy.  “I want to jump everybody,” he said.  Meaning that he wanted to take to the air over as many neighborhood kids as he could and hopefully, land without crashing or rupturing anyone’s spleen with the descending wheel of a bicycle.

All eyes were on Russ as the stunt started to take shape in his head.  He held counsel with Jeff and then spoke aloud to the group.

“I’m going to make the greatest jump you’ve ever seen and I’m going to do it right here and right now in this alley,” Russ explained with great confidence. “I want to and can jump ten people and we are about 4 people short.  I need you guys to go find 4 more bodies.”

“Should we ask Mo—“ Sherry asked, before being cut-off by Russ.

“NO!” said Russ, “NO MOMS, I mean, DUH.”

I was back in five minutes with my unsuspecting eight-year-old sister Somer, who was friendly with Sherry, so she didn’t need much coaxing.  I got her a relatively safe slot after the ramp as well, from the ramp it would be Scott, myself, Somer, Sherry, and then the rest of the group.  Jeff, would spot at 5^th Street, in case one of the seven cars that would use the street that day would do so at the same instant Russ crossed it picking up the necessary speed he would need to clear 10 kids lying side-by-side.

Before taking our places behind the ramp, there was a last minute safety concern.  Russ had made the judgement call that in order to pick up enough speed to clear all ten kids, he would need the fasted bike to do the jump.  That meant he needed the nicest bike, or at least the newest.  Everyone had a good bike, but my Univega was the newest, had its safety padding and would be able to handle a jump that far.  However, I had only owned that bike for two weeks and I was certain that my folks saved up for that bike.  It would be a shame for my beautiful bike to suffer any consequences, and then for me to suffer similar consequences when I explained it to my parents.

Ultimately I think my bike was only chosen because it had new hand grips with no exposed sharp handlebar tubing to impale Russ.

I held out for several minutes but finally I agreed to let my Univega be a part of this exciting piece of history.  I just held my breath and took my place among the other nine.  So much could go wrong but only one thing could go right.

It was decided that it was probably safer to just cross 5^th street one time because of the freak chance of an automobile driving through, so there would be no trial run of this jump.  We would hear “GO!” from Jeff, and then hear the mad pumping of desperate teenager on a gravel alley, then the low “thump-thump” of the wheels hitting the plywood.

Everything slowed down as I saw my bike appear off of the ramp.  Russ was moving extremely fast and one could easily calculate that he was going to clear all 10 kids.  All of our heads moved to get a view of Russ’ landing, but he just kept flying.  None of us could have imagined he could have jumped as far as he did.  If we had imagined that distance, surely one of us would have moved the second ramp, which Russ was not planning to take, let alone land on, but unfortunately it was looking like the ramp was going to play into the last part of the jump somehow.

He landed hard about a foot from the next jump, the wheel of my bike, barely in control as the incline for the next ramp immediately began.  Did I say “barely in control?”  I meant to say out of control.  That second ramp wasn’t built to be snuck up on and when hit at the speed Russ was traveling at, fell apart.  Russ had landed the first jump, but the second ramp was too much for him and the cheering was quickly sucked back up and held tightly in our lungs until the outcome of what was surely to be an epic bike wreck unfolded.

Russ appeared to be thrown clear.  No ragdoll limbs heading in directions they weren’t supposed to and not much blood.  I liked to think that it was my bike that kept him safe through all of it.  It didn’t, but I still like to think that.

My bike took a nasty spill and flipped end over end before skidding to a stop on its handlebars, where it sustained the bulk of the damage.  The bike was fine.  It had some deep scratches but I was proud that my bike had made the jump.

That was the last jump of the day.  Jeff wheeled my bike back to me as would an excited official present a trophy.  Scott and Sherry led Russ through the congratulatory hands and praise into their house to dress his scrapes and road rash with Bactine and bandages.

We had days and days of these types of activities growing up on the pleasant streets of Kittitas, and I cherish most of those days with fond memories.  Thinking about the innovation and imagination we had creating those deathtraps and danger zones, I sometimes wonder if I’m constricting the life and possibilities out of my son’s young experiences.  But then I think of all the stuff I DIDN’T know back in my youth and I tell my son to grab his helmet, and I strap one on now too, and that’s the Damm truth.