The Surf Bike

Marlinspike’s blog entry “The Worst” is a good read, and calls to mind some lessons learned while I was earning my degree at UCSB.

On the UCSB campus, everyone bikes…and I mean everyone. I would guess there is around 20,000 bikes on campus, to the point where biking anywhere means navigating a ton of traffic. While I spent my time there, I had 5 different bikes.

The first two were bikes from childhood that I used during my Freshman year. I put so many miles on them, that eventually even after repairing parts that broke, they were pretty well worn out to the point that I needed a new bike.

So I bought my third bike, a Raleigh something or other. It was a pretty sharp looking bike. Nothing overly expensive, but nice enough that it was stolen about a year after I bought it. Having it stolen broke my heart, because I made sure to always lock it with one of those U-locks, and it was taken from the bike racks just outside my dorm room.

I decided from then on out to never trust bike locks. My fourth bike was a Trek, and it was the first bike I had that let me really get into mountain biking (which I still enjoy as a hobby today). It was more expensive than any of my other bikes, and for that reason, I never locked it up anywhere. I stored it in my dorm room (and later inside my apartment) when I was at home. On campus, I worked in the Engineering building, so I was able to bike to work and park the bike in my office there, just walking to the rest of my classes. It worked out pretty well, but as Marlinspike would say, the bike owned me.

Then about halfway into my Junior year a bike showed up on the back patio of our apartment. It was at least 20-30 years old, and half rusted out. It was the ugliest damn bike I have ever seen. To this day, we have no idea where it came from. We left it there for a couple of weeks, to see if anyone would find it and reclaim their property. Nobody did, so I moved the bike around to the front of our apartment and parked it in the bike rack. No lock, nothing.

The bike became our apartment’s “surf bike”, because it was perfect for when we wanted to go out surfing. There weren’t bike racks to use at our local surf spots, so usually we had to spend a lot of time walking to the ocean. With the surf bike, we didn’t need to lock it up, so we just took it to the beach and left it there while we were out, and rode it back when we were done. It was liberating.

I really started to enjoy the care-free attitude of the surf bike, so a few months later I started to use it as my daily ride too. For over a year, I rode it to campus and back every day, never locking it anywhere, and nobody ever took it. There were a few squeaks in the gearing, but it never broke down on me. It really was the perfect college bike.

I used the bike all the way through the end of senior year. When it was time to move home for the summer, it didn’t feel right to take it with. So we left it there, for the next fortunate person to discover and love.

Photo by Ryon Edwards