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I can ride my bike with no handlebars

| April 1, 2010 11:00 PM

K.J. Hascall / Hungry Horse News

What joy I found as a child in riding a bike.

A friend taught me how to ride my bicycle — a turquoise affair with sparkles and streamers that whipped from the handlebars — by luring me to the top of a hill in our neighborhood and giving me a great push. It was pedal as hard as I could or hit the pavement.

And hit the pavement I did throughout childhood. I've got the scars on my knees to prove it. But that wasn't enough to keep me from my bike.

For my 10th birthday my father gave me a larger white mountain bike. Though too big at first, I rode that bicycle ragged. I was blessed to grow up in a neighborhood overlooking a flood plain filled with trails and creeks to explore. In Denver, a wonderful trail called the Highline loops through the city for more than 50 miles.

A friend of mine and I would ride around our neighborhoods for hours, pretending to be international spies or tribal princesses or soldiers in some future space navy. We had very active imaginations having grown up reading voraciously and without game consoles (our parents believed that playing video games excessively rots one's brain, and I agree with that assessment).

I trashed a bike in middle school when I fell off a makeshift wooden bridge crossing a creek. Thank goodness I was wearing a helmet because even with it I blacked out when I hit the creek bed. Smarting from enormous bruises covering my legs, I rode several miles home on my mutilated bike.

At the beginning of high school I bought the bike I still ride today. It's silver, red and black, with thick tires to grip gravel (though it felt clunky riding it around the paved University of Nebraska campus while others zipped by on their streamlined "road bikes"). A few years ago I nursed my poor bike back to health with an expensive tuneup. Like people, even bikes need tender loving care sometimes.

This past week I had the wonderful experience of watching children receive bikes for reading and the aforementioned memories flooded back. Twenty-six children at Canyon, Ruder and Glacier Gateway elementary schools received bikes from the local Masons chapter. Every time the children read a book, they entered their names in a drawing for a new bicycle. The more books those kids read, the more likely their chances.

And the new bikes gleamed beautifully last week in the gymnasiums. More beautifully, the kids gleamed. Their eyes lit up with excitement as the Masons wheeled in those sparkly, brand-spanking-new bicycles.

Learning to ride a bike is a key developmental moment in childhood, for it is at that moment the child is granted some autonomy. At age six or 16 or 60, we love our wheels.

The Bikes for Books program has also encouraged increased reading. During the 2009-2010 school year, the children at the three elementary schools read more than 7,500 books. Imagine that!

I know those kids will spend many happy hours atop their new bicycles. I hope the children will continue reading and learn to love it.

If nothing else, the memories the kids will make as international spies, warrior princesses and astronauts while speeding around town will be cherished forever.

K.J. Hascall is the managing editor of the Hungry Horse News.