THE BIKE

THE FAMILY ABOUT BIKING AGE

JACK AND CLIFF BEFORE "THUMBING" TO PRACTICE

(My mother was good at chopping off heads in photos)

OUR BIKE LOOKED SOMETHING LIKE THIS

A spring day in the desert has a softness about it. The sagebrush, normally muted, looks almost fluorescent. The gray hills take on a purple hue. The new fields and wild grasses are a fresh pale green. My mother loved the desert. She would raise her face to the warm sun, sigh contentedly and say, “I love this beautiful place.” I would look around and wonder what she was talking about. It looked shabby to me. I had seen mountain meadows and still water lakes in the Uintas and I thought that was beauty. How is desolation beautiful, I wondered?

My mother read Zane Gray and when I got old enough she passed on a couple of his books for me to read. His descriptions of the desert made me look at barrenness differently. Besides, I wanted to hold my face to the sun and see like my mother.

I began to notice the subtle colors in the rocks and hills, the mildly pungent aroma of sage, and cedar trees, the beauty of shaggy Tamaracks with spiked pink blooms growing along the alkaline creek. Oh Yes, I am beginning to see.

Our Wellington house was 3 miles east of town—the last outpost before the long expanse of desert that stretched out toward Moab. There is a turn off Highway 50-6 that takes you down a lane in front of our old house—the house my dad built on six acres of alkali desert. If you continued down the lane it would take you to the community Rodeo grounds. (We called it “grounds”, nothing so exotic as “Arena”) The half-mile down this lane passed alf alfa fields, sprightly green in the spring and then purple with blooms at harvest time, then covered with rows and rows of rectangular bales—bales that my brothers would heft onto a hay wagon working for the farmers who owned the land.

My parents got a bike for the 4 children to share one year when I was about 11. It would have been nice for my brothers to have bikes to ride to baseball games and practice. But, maybe that big highway was too dangerous for a boy on a bike--was it more dangerous than hitching a ride with strangers? My frugal dad wouldn’t let my mother drive them. They had to “thumb” a ride. We could see the boys from our living room window across the wash, standing on the highway, in their freshly washed uniforms, clutching their mitts in one hand and a thumb in the air. My mother watched until they got a ride—they always did. I suppose times were different then. I would never have let my boys do that.

No one enjoyed that bike as I did. It was a delight for me to ride down the lane back and forth to the rodeo grounds, with the wind blowing my hair and my eyes learning to appreciate the desert surroundings like my mother. Sometimes after a rodeo I would search under the bleachers for lost pocket change. It was nothing for me to make the round trip a dozen times. Being the only girl in my family I learned to cherish the solitude of dreaming and that bike ride was the perfect get-away diversion from the stresses of home. There were Meadowlarks in the fields singing “Wellington is a pretty little town.” My mother translated that song for me. But even today when I take my bike on a 10-mile meditative run along the fields of West Farmington the Larks sing, “Farmington is a pretty little town.” I now can say I see with my mother’s eyes and hear with her ears.