One Bike, Two Bikes, No Bikes, New Bike

One Bike, Two Bikes, No Bikes, New Bike

Stepping out into the spring sunshine from Au Coquelet café in Berkeley, holding my helmet and gloves, I mentally replayed my answers during the meeting. At this second interview for a position with the Bicycle Friendly Berkeley Coalition, I’d faced a panel of three, and although I probably convinced them of my passion for cycling, I wasn’t sure if I showed enough passion for the job.

Thus distracted, when I didn’t see my bicycle, I figured I’d simply checked the wrong post. Surely this was where I’d left it? I looked again, up and down the street, around the block. The denial was short lived, as I knew it was true: My red Raleigh mountain bike that I’d bought a few years ago in Fort Collins, Colorado, was gone. Not only gone. Someone else now rode it. A stranger had taken my possession from me. I began to cry. Defeated, I walked to a bus stop and waited, digging out some change from my backpack.

If you’ve ever got your bike stolen, you’ve experienced that kick-in-the-stomach reaction, and know how I felt. Sort of. Because really I had no right to my self-pity.

Nearly two decades previous, I lived in London, a college student frittering away a semester abroad. I loved walking the streets of the city. I walked and walked, eating nothing but buttered toast in the morning, Twix chocolate bars by day, and pints of ale at night.

Near the end of my stint, my legs craved to pedal a bike. When I found a place to rent one, I paid for exactly a day: 24 hours to tear through the streets. The next morning, I checked the post where I’d locked the bike. The bike was gone. I didn’t cry. It wasn’t mine. Knowing I was screwed, I returned to the shop empty-handed.

The clerk took the news as expected. “You left the bicycle overnight in Russell Square?” he exclaimed, without bothering to finish his opinion, which my mind finished quite easily: “How could you be so stupid?”

He continued, “I don’t know where you come from in the States, but in this city, you can’t leave a bike out overnight within blocks of the University.”

I dodged a direct answer, letting him imagine I came from a rural town in Kansas with a population of 180 honest neighbors. It wouldn’t help my cause to mention that my most recent residence was within Washington, D.C.—at the time known as the murder capital of the country.

Instead I replied, “Well, I assumed that the lock you provided was proportional to the amount of crime here.” This was my whopping defense.

After months in London, while I had spent my time walking, writing copious letters, and sucking ale with the locals, one of my classmates had lined up an internship with a barrister, partaking in real college studies. When he asked if I might want some legal advice, I said sure, why not. He scheduled an appointment with his mentor, and the next day, I sank into an armchair upholstered in conservative burgundy, peering at this very busy lady through mounds of paper balanced on her desk. She took the rental contract and scanned it, confirming the clause that held me responsible for the cost of the bike if it happened to disappear. The shop demanded 200 pounds sterling.

“Hmmm … It does appear that you’re liable. But you know what you could do …”

And then, as if waiting for this opportunity to achieve something fun in her day, she leaned forward. And plotted a scheme.

She confided that here in Britain, a driver’s license was regarded with equal importance as a passport, which the shopkeeper held hostage. Why not tell the shop proprietor that I needed my passport to pick up the money wired from my parents, and in the meantime, I would trade him my driver’s license as collateral?

That way, she concluded, “At least you’d have your passport to travel with, and you could easily replace your driver’s license when you get home.”

I looked at her. She looked back. This was not the advice I was expecting from the British barrister. She had an interesting way of thinking.

When I remained speechless, she added, “That’s what I would do.”

So I did. At the end of the semester, my classmates voted me: “Most Likely to See the Inside of a British Jail.”

Almost 20 years later, there I sat on the 51 bus, heading home down College Avenue to Oakland. Looking to the window at my tear-stained reflection, it occurred to me that I had locked up my bicycle in downtown Berkeley, blocks from the University, with the same slim cable that kept the bike safe for years in Fort Collins—a wholesome town that inspired Disneyland’s Main Street, USA.

The following week I was turned down for the job with the bike coalition. And a week after that, I picked up a used blue Trek at Bent Spoke on Telegraph. It cost me about $200. During my London stay in the mid-1980s, with the British pound weak and the U.S. dollar strong, the price represented roughly what the bicycle shop asked me to pay for the bike I stole.

————
Kathy Hrastar is a curious person who lives and works and plays in Oakland.

Faces of the East Bay