If it wasn’t for my father I may have never been to Hawaii or Huntington Beach, let alone the planet Earth.  He was the one who found the teaching job in Hawaii in the 1960s and the budget beach cottage in Huntington Beach twenty-five years ago, in what has now become a million-dollar neighborhood.  I just tagged along.  Although we had our differences, and his confrontational attitude and unstable ministry left me largely rootless by the time I was a teenager, I can’t deny I owe a lot to the man.

In addition to the ukulele, I also have one of his bikes, an Electra three speed that he only rode once.  The design, black numbers on a white frame, give it a cow-like appearance, and it was my main ride for years.  After returning from Vietnam, it had been destroyed by rust, however, the chain brittle and orange, and the brake calipers clamped down like vise grips on the tires.  The bike shops were taking months to do repairs and there were no affordable bikes anywhere.

Around this time, my mother spotted a bike locked to a street sign that was for sale.  The Blue Bike wasn’t worth what they were asking, but I was desperate for a ride and made do with it for a few months.  It went on to get a flat tire every other week, which didn’t seem possible, and led me to believe that it was cursed. 

It did buy me time to get father’s old bike into JAX for a tune-up, however, and after picking that up and mounting a surf rack on it, I dubbed it the Holstein Charger. It was a valiant ride, and we did about eight months of hardcore surf patrol together before the same problems began to set in.  Any bike with handbrakes doesn’t stand a chance at the beach.

Needing a backup, I came across a Huffy at Walmart, which finally had some bikes in stock.  It was a bike with no pretense, unlike the other bikes, with their knobby tires, fake shock absorbers and shiny reflectors.  I dubbed it the Mule, or Muley, and when the Holstein Charger reached the point where it could no longer be resuscitated, I yanked the surf rack off it and commissioned Muley for surf patrol.  Now Muley is failing, stuck in seventh gear, the front brake completely disengaged.  To get going on it I almost have to push it down a hill.

Thank God for my latest acquisition, the Cruiser.  My survival depends upon having a working bike.

After leaving Betsy and Roy, I made my daily run down to Balboa.  From the Huntington Pier to the Balboa Pier and back is roughly twenty miles.  If you leave early enough in the day, you may be able to escape the wind.  By afternoon, however, it is usually blowing so strongly in one direction, sometimes both, that the trip becomes a parody, a pantomime of someone trying to ride a bike through an electric fence.   Going the other way, to Bolsa Chica, or Blowsa Chica, can be twice as bad. 

There are days when the only thing worse than making the ride is not making the ride.  I would be eaten alive by my demons if I didn’t.  Either I find a way to beat them down or they are going to beat me down.  It’s as simple as that.  It may not be a permanent solution to anything, but in the wake of the pandemic, and the purgatory I wake up to every morning, riding a bike, even if it is straight into the wind, is usually the best thing I can do.