Eulogy for a Red Bike, 2007 - 2014
First published in the first edition of 3rd Gear zine.
Starting a new job across the city, I needed a bike up to the task.
I remember my optimistic estimates of 250ks a week, standing in the store. The Borsari salesman politely didn't inquire about my estimation methods. Three models differed by $200 each, but let’s be real -- I was always going to choose the red one.
Only once I rode home from Sandringham to Coburg. But many times later we gently whirred along the St Kilda foreshore, backgrounded by a pastel sky.
Its shining sleek frame was immediately disfigured (by me) with square-cut reflective tape. The Red Bike was always about function over form.
A battered pannier bag was stolen as it waited for me against a Chapel Street fence one Grand Final Day. But the Red Bike was heavy and sturdy like its worthy D-lock, and withstood all street thieves.
We went “fully loaded” from the Murray to mountains, from Lilydale to Warburton, and up a wretched muddy hill cursing all the way. Through my first triathlon, in the face of laughter at its unfashionable rack. (My unfashionable bod powered past many flightier frames in the cycling leg.) But mostly round the streets of Melbourne: Sydney, Swanston, St Georges and Smith. Lennox, Lygon, Langridge and La Trobe. There was the time I misjudged the gap edging through traffic and tapped a taxi’s side mirror, to the driver’s great displeasure. The heart-stopping times someone turned without looking, flung open a door without looking, when I almost joined that inevitable statistic. But not yet, not yet.
Mostly when I remember my time with the Red Bike, I remember the joy of owning my journey. When a traffic light becomes a welcome break between intervals, and the journey planner is always leaving from my front door in one minute.
To come home after three weeks away and find it gone was like a bad dream. Did I leave it at work? Lend it to a friend? Did my slowly forming secret thought (I was thinking about upgrading) manifest itself in my absence? How did it survive being exposed at all manner of dodgy stations only to disappear from my back shed?
I have a new commuting/touring bike these days. I’m working out the tweaks and twitches, the tasks of a new bike owner that I haven’t had for so many years. It only takes the stray eBay alert mail, the flash of a red Norco, to remind me what a good run we had. I hope wherever you are out there, Red Bike, you’re being pedalled with love.
