Do you remember how you felt when you got your first bicycle? I do. I was only four years old when I found a bright red bike waiting for me under the tree on Christmas morning. I was overjoyed. The bike had training wheels and balloon tires, and there were multicolored streamers trailing from the ends of the white handlebar grips. It didn’t sport a showpiece marque, however. It was a Hawthorn, the house brand of the then retailing giant Montgomery Ward. But I hadn’t yet learned to be brand conscious. I only knew my new bike was beautiful and that my world had suddenly gotten larger. That was all that mattered.

It still is. I was reminded of this only last month, when I found myself in the local Walmart. As I made my way from pharmacy to food I passed by the bicycle department, and I was surprised by the array of bikes and accessories on display. There were even commuter bikes with fitted racks and all-weather tires. I was also impressed by the care that had been taken in assembling the bikes being offered for sale. Wheels were true, brakes worked smoothly, tires were properly inflated, saddles were level… Everything, in short, was in apple-pie order. Yet the bikes were priced low, low enough to be within the reach of families of very modest means.

Were these top-of-the-line wheels? Of course not. But the quality looked good, at least as good as the name-brand bike I’ve ridden for eight years, putting some 20,000 miles on a succession of cyclometers in the process. Of course, the bicycle blogs are full of disparaging references to “bike-shaped objects,” with Walmart bearing the brunt of much of the sniping. That’s unfortunate. While I’ve no love for big-box stores—and I’d be the first to patronize a good bike shop, were there any within reasonable distance of my home—it makes no sense to condemn good-quality bikes out of hand, particularly when those bikes may be the only ones many families can afford.

This point was driven home again, even before I’d left the store. Only a few minutes after I’d moved on from bicycles to electronics (I was looking for batteries for my camera), I saw a family coming down the aisle behind me. Dad was pushing the cart, with Mom walking beside him, and in the cart was—you guessed it—a bicycle. It had a garish metal-flake purple finish that only a kid could love, and sure enough, a boy was skipping along beside the cart, holding tight to the bike’s front wheel. The kid can’t have been much older than I was when I got my first bike, and he was grinning from ear to ear. So were Mom and Dad.

Now I was grinning, too. It’s rare to see a kid on a bike in the northern Adirondack foothills these days. Most boys seem to move right from diapers onto the seat of a battery-powered, child-sized ATV, while girls get dolls and diminutive strollers. (By the time they’re sixteen, the boys will have real ATVs; the girls, real babies.) But here was a happy exception. I could see my own remembered joy reflected in the boy’s dancing eyes. And I wished I could have compelled the Web’s legions of naysayers to see it, too.

Mind, you I’ve nothing against quality. I ride the best bike I can afford. But sometimes the best is the enemy of the good. This is one of those times. And as winter ebbs and spring advances, I’ll be keeping my eyes open for a boy on a metal-flake purple bike, riding up and down a driveway, somewhere on the northern fringes of the Adirondacks. If I see him, I’ll be sure to give him a big wave. He can’t know it—and he never will—but we share something important.

 
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