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I think it was 1990 and I got a yellow and black 18 speed Huffy mountain bike. It was awesome for a teenager. I kept that caliper brake, 40 lbs, made with “hi-tensile steel” pile of junk until I went to college and started seeing guys on real bikes. I tried to add bar ends to look cool, but I still couldn’t climb anything serious, couldn’t keep up on the meager trails we had, and eventually cracked the frame in two places at what should have been a weld where the chainstay attached, but looked more like a braze when we cleaned it up to try and fix it. RIP
In 1994, after downing the better part of a bottle of bourbon in the college dorm, my buddies and I decided to go for a ride. Being a college campus, there were always plenty of bikes to “borrow” to ride around, so that’s what we did. I recall looking down at the front quick release swinging and swaying as I showed off my drunken 1am fitness level. Being toasted, I didn’t have the capacity to equate that quick release with my impending doom, so I launched off of the curb. The front wheel came off, the fork hit the pavement, followed by my face. Not a scratch on my hands, because you need to be sober to use those to break a fall, apparently. I came to with my buddies freaking out, some dude holding a t shirt to my face and a throbbing everywhere. After mystery man drove me to the ER, I also recall the matronly nurse asking if my 19 yo self had been drinking. She took my affirmative answer as meaning that I might not feel anything, and that I probably deserved a lesson, so she proceeded to clean and debride (think small scrub brush) my face so they could stitch around my eye. The best part? The next day, we discovered that the bike I borrowed was my former roommate’s bike. We had a good laugh and he decided that fate had punished me enough by not asking me to replace the badly bent fork. Many lessons learned that weekend.
Going back to mid nineties and even into the early 2000s, if you had something old school and were killing it, your fellow riders would cheer you on. If you were the first person with some new tech, they wanted to know how it worked, what it weighed or maybe just to bask in the anodized (ideally purple) glory of your ride. Today, we spend too much time bitchin at the vintage guys on 26″ hardtails for being retro grumps, or at the $7000 carbon lunacy of the new tech guys, while we build ourselves up by cutting everyone else down. It really reflects our sad society….but for me, my mountain bike was always about being a little better than the rest of the world. I mean, if you rode, you “got it.” You were a part of something bigger and better. We didn’t need to brag, we didn’t need to show off, we rode whatever was available and no one who rode was doing it wrong. Hating on anyone else who rides really needs to be reversed. I don’t understand lots of the modern trends….so I clip in, check the air in my tube tires and ride. None of us are any better or worse than any of the others.
