6. A trucking disposition

I recently bought a well-used pickup, a real work truck: 8' bed, no extended cab, 4x4. I want to be able to haul shit, literally (manure for the garden) and metaphorically, and this is the beast for it. One of the first things I hauled was a load of four bicycles I'd stored at my mom's, carefully arranged in the bed so they wouldn't slide around or scratch each other. These are now in my new garage, two hanging from hooks, one on the ground, and the last hanging from the professional Park bike repair stand I splurged on, having craved one for a home workshop ever since I left off working in bike shops 25+ years ago. Bikes are, of course, darlings among the sustainability set. Trucks not so much, especially bigguns like mine. But used judiciously, a truck is an appropriate tool. That's why my dad always had one, until finally something rusted through, fell off, and knocked out a brake line, and he realized his plywood hauling days were behind him anyway so there was no point in replacing it. In my case, with the prospect of needing to haul a variety of things over the coming months and years, buying one made more sense than the alternatives (and it's always about choices between alternatives – the economists are at least right about that). Plus it's fucking cool. There's just no getting around it.

Trucked though I now find myself, my attachment to bikes remains, as the repair stand purchase shows. My first bike was an embarrassment, a used, long padded-seated, heavy thing that probably somebody in Portland would now pay as much for as I paid for my truck. From it I graduated to a new entry-level Schwinn BMX bike, silver and nearly as heavy as its predecessor. It came from the Ambridge Bike Shop, a place I would come to know very well as both customer and, eventually, employee. I don't remember the timeline exactly, but I must have gotten the Schwinn around second grade, having learned from what other kids had that BMX was where it's at. This was the bike that provided my initial years of transportation up and down the road in our semi-rural valley neighborhood. There were only a few other kids in it, mostly boys, mostly 2-3 years older, but they all had BMX bikes, and nicer ones than mine (so, between that and age, my place in the social hierarchy was pretty well locked in). They had created some trails with jumps, and the fun of riding those is probably what hooked me. Around age 11 or 12 I upgraded to a Torker, a pretty decent mid-level ride that had a cool twin top tube, didn't weigh a ton thanks to its chromoly construction, and was designed for some actual BMX activity. It wasn't as nice as my neighbor friend's Kuwajara, but at least it wasn't embarrassing. I was not especially adept as a BMX rider, never quite getting the lift others could off the jumps and always coming down a little too heavily, but there were few things I enjoyed more than feeling knobby tires gripping hard-packed dirt then suddenly letting go completely.

Somewhere in all of this I started learning to work on bikes and liking that at least as much as actually riding them. This wasn't all that surprising, as my dad had encouraged tool-using activities from an early age. My kindergarten had an outdoor play area which included a spot for digging holes with kid-sized shovels. I got yelled for carrying mine the way I knew one was supposed to: like my dad carried his, sticking out behind me over my shoulder parallel to the ground. Apparently the teachers didn't want to have to clean scalp tissue off of it. Or maybe they were concerned about whoever the tissue might have come from. Whatever their motivation, I felt like I already had a know-how with shovels that the other kids lacked. Same with the hammers, wood, and nails we had available to play with inside. Those poor jerks thought the point was to pound a few nails into the wood so they just stood there like little metal trees stripped of limbs and leaves. But I knew the nails were supposed to go all the way in so you could attach one piece of wood to another below it. I still feel superior. To be fair, this was a private school and these were pretty rich kids who were being asked to play with laborer's tools they had little familiarity with. Not that my dad was a laborer. He was a teacher at the same school (high school math) and I was a faculty brat let in for free as part of an otherwise modest compensation package. He worked hard at his job, was good at it, and loved it, but a big part of its appeal was the uncompensated time off in the summer which let him work with all sorts of tools in the garden and in the never-ending project of rebuilding the inside of our house. So, to be fair, I didn't learn tool-use at the feet of someone who had to use his tools to make a living, but I did learn it from someone whose life was unthinkable without them.

In any case, by the time I was biking about, my dad was pretty busy with his own projects, so it was mostly up to me and my friends to figure out a lot of what was required to work on our bikes. Probably we got shown how to change a flat tire and lube a chain, but things like adjusting brakes and changing their cables and regreasing hubs and bottom brackets were mostly up to us to learn on our own. My dad had a couple of books about bike maintenance (Everybody's Bike Book is one I remember) that helped, living as we were in the pre-YouTube era. And the friend with the Kuwajara had a dad who was probably the most mechanically inclined person I've ever met (though the friend not especially so), knowing seemingly instinctively how to work on cars and boats, dig swimming pools and pour cement, build cabinets and do wiring, and he must have helped us out from time to time. So, gradually over a few years, I learned enough to keep things running relatively smoothly. One nice thing about BMX bikes was that you could flip them upside down and they'd be pretty stable resting on their wide handlebars and plastic seat, so getting wheels on and off was a breeze. But once I got into some more advanced work, the lack of the right sort of stand and specialized tools became an issue. This I learned most directly when over the space of the year I turned 12 (or maybe 13?) I acquired a frame-and-fork set for a Dyno freestyle bike and all the components necessary to build it out into a rideable machine. Bottom brackets and headsets had cups that had to be pressed into the frame. You can, I discovered, do this with a hammer and a piece of wood that distributed the force of the hammer more-or-less evenly around the circumference of the cup, but when I later was introduced to special presses designed for the job, it was like the difference between looking through a dirty window and a clean one.

The trips to the bike shop for various parts for my Dyno brought me to the attention of the owner, who my dad knew a little from the days before I existed, when he'd bought a very nice Raleigh road racing bike – Reynolds 531 frame, Campy components, Brooks saddle – from him. This sat corroding in our damp, dark garage until I got interested in that genre of cycling, at which point I did my best to rehab it so I could ride it. This taught me skills like how to wrap handlebar tape and build a wheel – the originals being made for glue-on, sew-up tires rather than the more practical beaded and tubed ones I could manage – but it also instilled in me an appreciation for how important frame fit is. For this Raleigh was made for someone a good eight inches taller than I was, a fact which was very painfully driven home one day when I was riding with a friend and an unavoidable quick dismount made clear exactly how much difference there was between the distance of the top tube from the ground and the length of my inseam. Anyway, apparently from my repeated visits I showed enough promise for the bike shop owner to think I was worth hiring, as he brought me on board in the middle of the summer around my 15th birthday. (He also liked cheap labor, and I and the other 2 kids my age he hired that year were definitely that.) The ensuing several summers of work did as much or more than anything else I've experienced to teach me about the world and how to live in it, in addition to really teaching me how to work on bikes. (Eventually I'll write more about that.)

Some might have recognized the title of this post as a phrase from Adam Smith, who posited a basic human inclination to engage in trade of all sorts (including of words, as here exemplified) as a driving factor in shaping who we are and how we shape our world. Only for some of us does this disposition result in the acquisition of actual trucks. But the main function of trucks is to haul, and we are all haulage vehicles, carrying all sorts of things with us in memory and in our memory-saturated bodies, our childhoods and fathers and love of tools and bicycles and the ability to ride and work on then, and while it's tempting to think this is a metaphorical extension of the idea of carrying, I actually think it's no less a literal one. In my case at least, I think part of the appeal of owning a truck is because it externalizes this feeling of attachment to the world that comes from carrying my own route through it with me, a route I revisit every time I step into the cab and feel the elevation over the world around me and am instantly connected to all the trips I took in my dad's truck when I was a kid.