The Coyote's Bicycle (36 page)

Orville and Wilbur Wright owned a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. There they invented a self-oiling hub and left-handed threads to prevent pedals from coming unscrewed en route. Profits from the Wright Cycle Co. funded their work on what was known as the “flight problem,” and the brothers used bikes and bike-building techniques in aspects of their gliders and wind tunnel experiments. The Wright Flyer, the first human-piloted airplane, was built in their final bike shop at 1127 West Third Street, the craft's spare lines, cables, sprockets, and chain drive leaving no doubt as to the machine that gave it lift.

Another bike shop owner and mechanic, Glenn Curtiss, is said to be the founder of the commercial aviation industry. He created the seaplane and the first American combat aircraft to enter World War I. He worked with Graham Bell on ever lighter and stronger combustion engines.

Still another bike mechanic, Henry Ford, adopted the down-the-line mass-production techniques used in cycle factories in the manufacture of another revolutionary vehicle, the Model T. Mr. Ford also borrowed from the bike components such as pneumatic tires, chain drives, ball bearings, and wire wheels. This technology, along with bike industry innovations such as steel tubing and metal stamping, enabled the United States to quickly retool for World War II.

Today's 54-million-member-strong
AAA
(formerly the American Automobile Association) was directly inspired by the League of American Wheelmen, a group of cyclists, clubs, manufacturers, and mechanics that actively instigated the Good Roads Movement, a grassroots campaign advocating a novel idea: to involve the federal government in the building and maintenance of uniform highway systems. Their advocacy led President Woodrow Wilson—himself a cyclist—to sign the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, a program that lasted into the 1920s and shaped the landscape of American road travel as we know it today.

Requiring no electricity or chemical fuel, bicycles have lifted economies, facilitated industrial revolutions, and circumnavigated the globe. Their inventors and technicians gave us the motorcycle, the short skirt, the unchaperoned date, and an audacious faith in our own forward progress.

Following my visit to El Negro's ship, I was desperate to see the swamp bikes again. As a group, the bikes had become something like molecules of air or water—identical, interchangeable, and nearly invisible. I was aware of mass and movement, but I could no longer see individual bikes. My mind was just swimming with interchangeable objects I could only identify by knowing where they'd come from or where they were going.

To complicate this, the character who'd put them in the valley proved mysterious and exceedingly elusive. The various authorities who scooped bikes up offered little comment. And the vast majority of cycles fled the valley in such disparate and unforeseen ways, I felt as if the foundation of the little world I'd been circling in had steadily eroded out from underneath me. This dislocation spawned a powerful suspicion that I'd wasted profitable man-hours chasing down a funny little dream I'd had—something cute, impractical, and, in the end, unreal. So when the trail went cold like this, I found myself stretching beyond my normally reclusive nature just to be
around
bikes that
might be
the bikes I'd followed, or had crossed paths with in the street; or that might share lineages or decals or might have been manufactured in the same facility half a world away.

A friend texted a photo he'd taken of a stake-bed truck brimming with used bicycles in Los Angeles. I could see in the photo that the truck was about to enter a large metal-recycling facility. When my friend confirmed the destination, my heart made orbital loops around a hard little nucleus of anxiety. At first I thought: now this is tragedy; to melt bicycles guilty only of being abandoned. Then I
wondered, could these be my swamp bikes? By 2011, America's largest export to China, by value, was scrap and waste metal. The largest market for recycled plastic and metal was also the world's largest bicycle manufacturer. Was it possible that these bikes could be crushed, shredded, melted, and then reconfigured as brake cables, handlebars, bells, and frames? How could I follow them then?

While feeling disjointed from the bike trail, one of the more logical things I did was hang around a group of punker kids who'd inherited a bicycle co-op from a lesbian organization. Their big idea was to teach basic repair skills to the public in order to get the people back into the saddles of their old beaters. It is surprising how often a flat tire can relegate a bike to oxidation and rust—which is terrible, because both are very slow-acting relatives of burning. The women who had been running it had had a good thing going with the co-op, but their base just wasn't big enough to sustain an ongoing effort of bicycle repair. So the punkers took it over. And these kids had no boundaries; they would help fix anyone's bike for free. I got the sense that it was a political gesture in the same way that they Dumpster-dived, aggressively recycled, and grew vegetables on the front lawns of their rented apartments. The bike wrenching was done at a weekly farmers' market in one of San Diego's poorest neighborhoods. This particular burg happened to be a melting pot of immigrant communities that, coincidentally, mirrored the United States' overseas interventions—there were Vietnamese, Laotians, Central Americans, Somalis, and Iraqis. These were the places my contacts at Stu Segall Productions studied in order to create facsimile training grounds.

Although tolerant of almost everybody and anything, the punkers frowned on beach cruisers as, well, simply pedestrian. Meat eating was so last century. And me, a grown man riding a 1984 ladies' Free Spirit with slim to no vintage potential—uh, well, they found me peculiar in the way that only the most generous and
openhearted people can. I hung around out of some vague hope that I could learn something about the way ordinary bikes moved through the world once their commercial value had plummeted into the low two digits. At that cost, in City Heights at least, bikes beat bus fare every time. I also learned how to use a crank puller, that spit really is the best adhesive for handle grips, and that one could build a whole new society with WD-40 and duct tape. What I really discovered, however, was the exact expression on the face of a ten-year-old whose single mother worked fourteen hours, seven days a week, after you'd fixed his flat tire and he became exponentially more mobile and independent again. The look wasn't cute; it was triumphant.

On an early morning not long afterward, I was standing in my kitchen watching a new rainstorm that had set the palms outside to flapping. I switched the radio on in the event that the river valley might be mentioned. Instead, a reporter delivered a short piece about a bicycle giveaway. Christmas was just around the corner, and events like this had become popular with police and fire departments. So I listened with only a minimum of attention until I heard the radio voice mention the name of a local Salvation Army center and, importantly, that these particular refurbished bicycles were being supplied by the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.

As reported by Janine Zúñiga in her 2009
Union-Tribune
article, bikes discovered abandoned by the Border Patrol's Imperial Beach staff were taken to the station on Saturn Road, checked for drugs or reports of theft, and then stored until a batch of them could be shipped to the prison. For a quarter of a century, the inmate mechanics at Donovan had been repairing and restoring bikes and then donating them to charities and school programs. I was well aware that a portion of the swamp bikes had disappeared behind the prison gates; I just didn't think I'd ever see them again. I did, however,
imagine the bicycle mechanics behind those high fences and walls, plying a craft—truing wheels, adjusting neck sets—that tied them to the greatest engineers and inventors of the twentieth century.

Soon, I found myself navigating a landscape of freeways and strip malls. The sky above was the color of cement. The pavement below had become a black lake district of interconnected potholes. The weather and traffic caused me to run late to the giveaway. The feeling of missing the bicycles by a slim margin was becoming familiar.

The pitiful gray tones of the atmosphere seemed a permanent condition until I found the Salvation Army's Kroc Center. I parked and, under a gale, scurried toward its arched entry. There I saw a splintering, kaleidoscopic explosion of color. A lanky Salvation Army major wore a pert uniform of navy felt with crimson trim. Sheriff's deputies wore their dark greens and khaki with sparkling badges of brass. One hundred and twenty-five children, six to eleven years old, writhed in their new helmets like a fleet of helium balloons—buoyant, kinetic, and waiting for liftoff. A pair of Donovan's inmate bike mechanics, with shaved heads and dressed in light blue scrubs-like uniforms, had arranged the dozens of vivid bicycles by size and style and positioned them upside down in rows. When a bike was presented to one of the children, it was ceremoniously reverted. In the turning over I could see that the swamp bikes now gleamed with new chains and freshly polished hubs and chain rings. Some frames had been completely repainted too, in a rainbow of color—all the bells and whistles had been added, literally. Scents of fresh lubricant and rubber tires almost overpowered the fast-food catering. Both inmates and corrections officers laughed. Bikes rolled. The children glowed. The hushed quality of low clouds only amplified the shrill, chittering sounds of children on squeaky new tires.

And then it began to rain again; the ceremony was cut short. Children wheeled away, padding their feet to either side while guardians walked uneasily behind as if blowing wet leaves along. The
inmates were escorted into the corrections vans. I didn't like to see bicycle mechanics subjugated in this manner. Many of my new colleagues and interview subjects, including El Negro and several of Stu Segall's employees, had done time. On the border, it seemed merely a station between here and there. When existence is unlawful, a sentence isn't so much the result of poor decisions and character flaws as it is a harsh reality of life—like the flu. The fact that the inmates showed interest and skill in rehabilitating dirty, abandoned bicycles when they could be lifting weights, trading cigarettes, and watching TV helped me to see beyond the jailbird denim with the bright yellow Donovan insignia. The uniforms were temporary; the love of a bike was forever.

I left with a feeling that, for the first and only instance, seemed opposite to that of searching. It wasn't bated breath so much as deflating relief. I didn't need to follow these particular bicycles anymore. They'd found their rightful place. They'd descended through the seven rings of fire—of importation, sale, impoundment, auction, contraband, confiscation, and donation—and here they were again in the hands of fresh new cyclists. It was as if the bikes had graduated from weird times on the traveling freak show, having filled the roles of the reptile man, the fire-eater, the sword-swallower, and now in retirement they'd become staid, calm, dutiful, and serviceable again—like postal workers, customs clerks, and crosswalk guards with colorful, secret pasts.

27

“When we hear a whistle,” Apolo told the men who huddled among the riverside brambles, “that means the ride is close, and we're going to run like crazy to meet El Indio.”

To hurry up and wait was the hardest part. El Indio had gone to meet the
levantón
, which may have seemed a convincing next step to the
pollos
but did not always seem that way to the remaining guide. Their position could be stumbled on by a rancher or recreational horse rider. The whine of the Border Patrol quad motorbikes was sometimes within earshot, and if civilians caught a glimpse of the crossers, it was easy to assume they'd tip off the agents. During the day, that sense of apprehension was amplified by the thumping of naval helicopters running maneuvers out of Ream Field. Then, before dusk, nature took over—buzzing mosquitoes that left dime-sized welts on the skin rose out of the swamp. Worst of all was the fear that no one was coming for them. Though Apolo was new, there were rumors of migrants having to jump aboard a city bus with only the few gringo dollars their guides had given them.

But the whistle came high and clear through the reeds. The
pollos
left the bikes there on the ground and ran along a path toward Hollister Street. This time, there was a minivan—light blue with its
rear window peopled by those stick-figure decals indicating family members. The bumper was plastered with sports logos. Indio had opened the sliding door and he waved the migrants forward from the bush trail. The men dashed and climbed into the cabin. Indio entered from the passenger-side door. “Okay, let's go,” he said.

Apolo knew the driver to be Martín, El Indio's eldest brother. That Indio was said to have worked out a deal with his siblings, and that even his sisters had made runs, was welcome news. But the brother displayed an austere bearing. There was talk of trouble at home.

They traveled a similar route to the one Indio and Martín had negotiated that first time. They passed the community gardens the earlier group had taken for a shantytown. They passed the old cowboy bunk house that now held a county parks office. Martín slowed to a halt at the last stop sign before the bridge. After they'd crossed, he accelerated onto the wider pavement. As they approached the first, outlying tract homes of Imperial Beach, one of the passengers noticed the wail of a siren. “
Trucha
,” he said—watch out.

The siren belonged to a white-and-green Border Patrol truck that now appeared in the van's rearview mirror. It was coming on hot behind them.

“
La migra
,” a migrant whispered.

“Everybody relax,” Martín said.

The truck soon blew through the stop sign they'd passed. It crossed the bridge and then its headlights flashed.

“Pull over,” Indio said. Martín edged the van to the roadside. It was lined by a thicket of wild bamboo. Apolo noticed their clients eyeing the growth, and he soon considered the option of disappearing into the bamboo as well. The instinct to flee ricocheted through the cabin. “Everybody stays in the van,” Indio said.