I was 8 when I got my own big bike, and I treasured that machine like a dear friend. I rode it briefly in New York and then it became my transportation in Chula Vista. I could ride with no hands all the way around the block.
Something was done to the frame in the move to Marin County in 1965, but old Fury lost his balance (yes, my bicycle was male, even if it did have a slanted bar) and from then on I had to use a hand to steer. But I continued to ride around Marin, paused for most of Cal, and then resumed after graduation, and after converting Fury to ten speeds by scavenging Campagnolo parts from a totaled machine.
Nick and I rode our bikes a lot at first. We commuted by bicycle from our apartment at 10th & Geary to the financial district each weekday, and we added pleasure jaunts to Lake Merced or Larkspur when we weren’t working. We came up with plans while we rode for pedal-driven small cars (rain protection, luggage, and side-by-side travel), and we fantasized about our own soup kitchen/repair shop somewhere on the coast near Mendocino.
I continued to ride till about 1978. Till Katie grew so big that she could throw my balance off from her seat over the rear wheel.
Since then, although I acquired a new bike with a bigger frame around 1994, I haven’t ridden much. I don’t have friends who are into it, I never got the helmet habit, and life is full without it.
But I kept Fury. Even after I got the new (never named) bike I couldn’t dispose of my old friend. In 2008, I buried most of Fury under the foundation of my Eugene cottage.
I published a few paragraphs about my bike on October 7, 2010. Recently I found a poem on the subject. I started this sonnet in 1993 but polished it for Fury’s funeral.
When I was 8 years old, my parents bought
a bike for me I treated like a horse.
The frame was black – I never had a thought
except to name it Fury, and of course
I understood I took that from a show
I watched on TV every chance I got.
But I still own that bike, and now I know
it’s named as much for how I felt as not.
So Fury was an emblem of my youth,
and fury is the anthem of my soul.
Amassing rust as I matured, the truth
is that for 30 years my Fury’s role
was motionless, and grave its destiny,
while I corralled my angry energy.
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