As a teenager, I don’t ever recall being afraid on my bicycle.
For my friends and me, taking risks seemed like an important part of building our identities. We figured it would give us stories to tell. And, though, as teenage boys, we rarely knew what we were talking about, on this particular point, we were almost prophets. What I didn’t realize at the time—what I suspect none of us really understood—is that this craving, this desire for rapid motion that so simply defined us as not-yet-men, would eventually disappear, replaced by ideals like: moderation, responsibility, maturity, humility. Good words, all of them. But not something any kid wants to think about.
My friends and I raced before the state of Pennsylvania passed mandatory helmet laws. And while my mother and father stressed safety, always reminding me to wear a helmet whenever I went riding, I didn’t always heed their warnings. None of the other boys wore helmets, and so I often as not left mine sitting on the shelf in the garage. It’s a testament to the resiliency of the human body that none of us ended up killing ourselves—perhaps that all boys don’t manage to kill themselves before adulthood. I don’t know how many times one of us flew down my driveway at top speed, only to slam on the brakes mere feet from the bottom, dust rising up behind the locked up rear tire, white streaks staining the asphalt, as a car tore past below. Once, Darrell missed the turn at the bottom of the driveway. We found him twenty feet into the woods, his bike and his body tangled up in a thicket of thorns. Another time, my father had washed the car earlier in the day, and the water had run down our driveway, pooling near the bottom. I hit that wet patch at top speed, and then I was on my side, sliding into the weeds and the wild strawberries along the shoulder of the road. I still have the scar on my chin from where the gravel cut me. Both palms were grated, little tags of flesh peeled away above my wrists, bits of black tar and asphalt chips embedded under the skin. The road rashed my left leg from knee to hip, but I was otherwise unscathed, and by the end of the day, I was back to flying down the driveway.
I’m caught between wanting to envy my younger self and wanting to shake some sense into him, but a part of me understands (just as my parents and my friends’ parents all understood) that you can’t raise kids inside a bubble, can’t hover over their lives like a low-flying police helicopter.
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Young male drivers are twice as likely to get into fatal car accidents than young female drivers (though this statistic may even out a little as we continue to find more gender-neutral ways to kill ourselves on the road, such as texting while driving). The insurance companies have known this for a long time, which is why they charge higher rates for male drivers who are more likely to speed, to take risks. But no one ever stops to ask the question “why?”
Are young males, generally, hardwired to take risks?
I don’t know the answer to that question. I have my theories, but I can only speak for myself, and I have to admit that the older I get, the less in touch with that young me I become. Looking back, I am quietly terrified by the prospect of throwing myself so recklessly to the wind and the pavement. I marvel at the abandon and the stupidity of it. I’m caught between wanting to envy my younger self and wanting to shake some sense into him, but a part of me understands (just as my parents and my friends’ parents all understood) that you can’t raise kids inside a bubble, can’t hover over their lives like a low-flying police helicopter.
Besides, I suspect the younger me wouldn’t have listened anyway.
Last summer, while visiting my parents, I decided to try bike riding again for the first time in nearly fifteen years. The first thing I did was research helmets online. I checked the consumer reports and made a pretty impressive list—it had categories and everything. In the end, I bought the helmet that had scored highest on the safety tests. It was blue and black, sleek and aerodynamic, with vent holes in the top, and heavy padding inside—a far cry from the white plastic and Styrofoam helmets of my youth.
“How hard can it be?” I said to my brother, Moose, as he stood watching me drag my old Huffy up from the basement. “It’s like riding a bike.”
“You’re an idiot,” he said, and I could tell from the shake of his head that he had me pegged as a man with something foolish to prove.
But I was determined to figure out exactly what it was that had captivated me all those years ago, to touch again that bodily desire for speed. I wanted to recapture some of the thrill I had felt racing my friends, or at least to understand it. So I dusted off my bike and oiled the chains. Checked it to make sure that everything was in working order; then I carefully walked it down to the bottom of the driveway and climbed on. I set my goal at three miles—six trips around the circle—and started off at a leisurely pace, determined to work my way up. Even after a half-hour, I still felt apprehensive and shaky. I hadn’t been pedaling very hard, and yet I recognized the familiar sensation of instability. I felt like I might tip over and crash at any second. Given my laboring, I might as well have been ten years old again, pedaling my hardest, racing around the steep, gradual curves of my neighborhood on loose, pebbly gravel. Except that I wasn’t. I felt heavy and uncoordinated. And, worst of all, I was moving damn slow.
What ultimately bested me was a profound lack of desire. Bike riding again wasn’t a wholly bad experience—mildly uncomfortable, but enjoyable in the way that physical activity so often is for me—and yet I felt no rush of adrenaline. I didn’t have the guts to pedal faster, to make my body respond to the electric thrill of risk taking I had so often enjoyed as a boy. I wasn’t a boy anymore. I was a man. And as such, I had the burden of knowledge—I knew what could (and likely would) happen if I straddled that bicycle, staring down that long driveway to the street below before pushing off heedlessly like a child.
Read Part Two—Bodies in Motion: Daytona USA.
Image credit: jesse.millan/Flickr
Many thanks for reading, Andy–I’m glad you enjoyed! There’s no question in my mind that had there been girls there, we would have tried to show off, pedal a little harder, the whole bit. But there weren’t any girls our age living in the small neighborhood where I grew up at the time, so we wouldn’t have really had a female audience on these particular occasions. I think our motivation had more to do with wanting speed itself, the adrenaline rush, and not really considering the potential for danger. I suspect there may also have been an element of “alpha… Read more »
In an experiment in 2010, Professor Bill von Hippel and student Richard Ronay at the University of Queensland examined the links between physical risk-taking in young men and the presence of attractive women. They noted that young male skateboarders took more risks at the skate park when being observed by an attractive female experimenter than when they were observed by a male experimenter. This increased risk taking led to more successes – but also more crash landings – in front of the female observer. There’s your basic motivation for the risk-taking. Apologies if you were going to touch on this… Read more »