Cyclocomputers are nice, but

Cyclocomputers are nice, but the total freedom of two wheels is all I need

ROY MacGREGOR

Five bikes, 10 cars.

   That hardly makes sense. I had my first bicycle at age 8 (a hand-me-down from my older brother that was so high it's a miracle that today there are children in this house), and was 25 before I bought my first car.

 

How is it that something cheap with two wheels seems to go on forever, while for vehi­cles with four wheels, only the bank loan goes on forever?

 

I have a new bike. My old bike still runs fine, apart from worn tires (which have already been replaced countless times) and a funny click in the pedals that no one can figure out. The bike before that, a 10-speed racing bike that looked ridiculous with a yellow plastic child-carrier on the back, was still running fine when I carefully set it out with the trash at the end of the drive. As expected, it had vanished the next morning long before the garbage truck came around.

 

I have not seen it again. I like to think, how­ever, that it carries on somewhere, although -surely without child seat that, today, would be grounds for arrest if it carried bare-headed children about, as it once did.

 

The first bike cost nothing; the second bike, second-hand, $5; the third bike, the 10-speed, $55; the fourth, $175; and the fifth roughly half the price of the first of the 10 cars, a green 1970 Datsun, very used, that still stands as the cheapest and most-reliable vehicle I have ever owned.

 

Even so, this latest marvel, complete with cushioned front-fork suspension shocks and more gears than there are hills around here, costs nothing compared to what one can spend on cycling these days.

 

The latest issue of Explore, Canada's outdoor magazine, includes a special feature titled, The Best Gear 2004.

 

The section on hiking, which claims to "guarantee a sweet ride," features a Norco 6 mountain bike at $2,850, a Louis Gar neau Ozzy helmet ("honeycombed with 22 air-flow vents") at $150, a Sugoi TecniFino Jersey with "stretchy wicking fabric" at $85, SixSixOne Du­ally shoes at $150, Crank Brothers Triple Ti Egg Beater Pedals, excellent at shedding mud, for $690, a Park Roll-Up Workshop containing "18 bike-specific tools" at $200, a Bike Guard Lock Jaw 1200 at $30 and a Filter 4LW Wireless Cy-clocomputer at $25 to feed you all the necessary data required for a satisfactory ride.

 

There is also a Source Spinner backpack at $80 that will keep you hydrated as you cycle and claims that “inside the main compartment sits one of the best bladders around."

 

If it needs filling there is a plastic bottle at­tached to the frame, and if it needs emptying there is a good cedar cover back of the beaver pond. I calculate all this fancy equipment adds up to S4.260 — and this, some of you need to know, is not even close to top-end.

 

I cannot lie. I would love the entire bike page of the latest issue of Explore, but even my per­sonally state-of-the-art, perfect new bike was barely half the cost of the Egg Beater pedals.

 

I wear runners, shorts and whatever T-shirt is at the top of the pile in the third drawer down. I have no use for data, believing a good bike ride is precisely about not knowing where you are going, or how far you have traveled, or, for that matter, how long you are gone.

 

Heaven forbid they ever start outfitting bikes with built-in Global Positioning Systems, as is the case of those ATVs being advertised be­tween the beer ads and Don Cherry these days, for the real purpose of a bike is just that: to get lost.

 

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The distance between Leonardo and the Egg Beater pedals is not nearly so vast as that between the wheel and today's SUVs, between the abacus and the computer calculator I used to tally up the costs of the bike page, between the laptop I am typing this column on and the typewriter.

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Still, they can put GPSs and cyclocomputers in, they can have hydraulic suspension and jel­lied seats and make you wear clothes that your neighbours giggle at, but there remains some­thing oddly and charmingly timeless about two wheels, handlebars and two pedals.

If I stare at this new bike from the right an­gle, it is not all that far from the doodle Leon­ardo da Vinci made at the bottom of a page back in 1490. Leonardo never moved beyond a bit of sketching, of course — he apparently had other pressing inventions — but the drawings he left behind would be instantly recognizable today to any child.

The distance between Leonardo and the Egg Beater pedals is not nearly so vast as that between the wheel and today's SUVs, between the abacus and the computer calculator I used to tally up the costs of the bike page, between the laptop I am typing this column on and the typewriter.

Perhaps that is the true value of the bicycle. Not the $5 for that second-hand model, or the Norco 6 at $2,850, but the sense of being totally free as you head out, destinations unknown.

 

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