Bike Tails
I followed Mike Needs’ Ohio Odyssey bicycle trip with interest. Of course, I’m the better part of a month late commenting on it, just like I’m late with everything, but still. I first took up serious cycling by availing myself of the network of long, flat, lightly travelled rural roads of northwest Ohio as a form of exercise and, because it was the early/mid 70s, to reduce my use of autos and oil. It became more of an obsession when I moved to Bowling Green and ended up working in a bicycle shop.
There I met perhaps the closest male friend I’ll probably ever have. He had my perfectionist’s tendencies in spades, and, since he had been working on bikes since his teen years, had an encyclopedic knowledge of top-end equipment: the sew-up tires, balsa-filled rims, Campagnolo Record running gear, Reynolds 531 double-butted frames, all well before the “bike boom” made bikes with this kind of gear de rigeur for yuppie wall hangings all across the country. We proselytized the 10-speed catechism, pushing Peugeots, Gitanes, the occasional Cinelli, and scoffed at Schwinn and Huffy (although grudgingly allowing that Schwinn put out a high-quality, if misbegotten, product We drove our employer nuts by meticulously assembling even the cheapest Peugeots before delivering them to customers, sometimes regreasing the wheel or crank bearings if we didn’t like the feeling of them. She was enough of a businessperson to quickly switch us to piecework.
M. was an incessant talker, something I’d never been, and his indefatigable patter finally broke down my reticence and preference for one-line zingers, and we gabbed constantly. M. was single and I was mere months away from marrying my high-school sweetheart, so I eagerly soaked up his stories of pursuit and conquest, obscuring with knowing knods and eyerolls my comparative paucity of adventure tales.
We rode my first “century” (100 mile) ride, the Trotwood (Dayton) covered bridge tour, followed later by the Hancock (county) Horizontal Hundred and Hill-less Half Hundred. We grumbled when we had to cross freeway overpasses and actually shift gears. And we did the apotheosis of Ohio riding at the time, TOSRV , the 2-day Tour of Scioto River Valley (which seems to have been the extent of Mike Needs’ training before embarking on his tour).
My marriage in the spring of 1974 didn’t split us up, but my move to Seattle in October of that year did. We corresponded fitfully, didn’t call much owing to our respective pauper’s circumstances. The following spring he wrote and said he and a buddy were embarking on a cross-country ride culminating with their arrival in Seattle. I received a post card the day they left Bowling Green, and heard nothing more for 2 weeks. I began expecting to hear that they were crossing the Rockies and bearing down on the coast, but instead received a post card from Portsmouth, ME saying that they had ridden for 2 days, and had been so discouraged by the prevailing westerly winds that they had turned around, his friend to abandon the tour entirely and M. to head (still by bicycle) for the east coast, where he was waiting for an opportunity to crew on a ship in exchange for passage to Amsterdam.
That began, for him, a multi-year adventure that included bicycling around most of Europe, lighting out with a German paramour across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express to land in Japan, where they secured jobs teaching English. All these adventures he chronicled to me on sheafs of that old, pre-email blue aerogramme paper, and once again it seemed he was my surrogate for worldly adventure. In 1981, he finally arrived in Seattle, broke and possessed of an Australian wife and desperate to get off the road for awhile. They were grateful to camp out in the frigid and rain-washed house we were remodelling. After collecting his wits and a little cash, they headed to Bowling Green, where he finished a degree.
Over the ensuing years, we would exchange cards and occasionally visit, but I had completely lost contact with him the last 4 years, an ironic circumstance considering the relative ease of email compared to that aerogramme correspondence. I had a phone number - I could have called - but I began to fear the worst, and couldn’t bring myself to call and have that foreboding confirmed by a widow or an ex or by a phone company recording. Insomniac curiosity did lead me to Google the papers in his area for obituaries one night. After reading Mike Needs’ tour notes, however, and indulging in a nostalgia for Ohio bike riding, I finally picked up the phone and called. He answered on the first ring, and we burned through my remaining Verizon allocation of minutes for July.
So, I have Mike to thank not only for reuniting me with my friend, but also for a passing good tale in the bargain.
