Wheeling

Learning to ride a bicycle at age five on a friend's bike which had no training wheels, the thrill of it stuck and I've been biking ever since. The first bicycle our family had was a hand-me-down gift from relatives and it was a good bike, but it was a girl's model which I tried not to be seen riding around the neighborhood too much. A couple of years later we got a proper boy's bike with the ball-racking top tube which brought a lot of pain, but I rode it a lot until it was stolen. We got it back but it had been stripped of its handlebar grips and chain guard, making it even more dangerous and uncomfortable to ride any great distance, but it was still fun to get it going on a winding. hilly road out by the water tower at a fast clip.

The next bike I had was a used black Schwinn Speedster whose gears were jinky. Dad helped me regrease the gearcase the day he brought it home, which kept it going a few more years. I rode it out of town limits every day I could, exploring the countryside of the Oklahoma Hills.

A couple of years later we moved to a large city where I rode that bicycle through the suburbs surrounding our neighborhood, and fearlessly down some busy city thoroughfares.

The old speedster lasted long enough to keep me roaming far and wide outside town after we moved to live in bayou country of Louisiana, where its gears finally gave up the ghost.

The next bike, a new Schwinn Apple Krate purchased with lawnmowing earnings, carried me along streets of a West Texas city while participating in a children's theater group called the Pickwick Players. Smaller and more nimble than the heavy Speedster, it was more fun to ride.

A move to a pig farm near the southern end of Lake Michigan had me riding the long, monotonous roads between vast corn and soybean fields surrounding our new home.

Not much excitement doing that, but then we moved to a strange, far away land where mysterious intrigue could be encountered almost anyplace I biked in the city of Tehran.

Returning to the States as I became old enough to do so, I bought a used motorcycle and began roaming around the Breaks of southwestern Oklahoma every free moment I had.

I wrecked that ride less than a year after buying it, deciding motorized bikes weren't my bag. By then I was attending first year in college and rode my bike around the campus and town.

After graduating from university, I bought a mountain bike and began riding it in the Rockies whenever I was able to get up into them long enough to do a little biking in high country. The Rocky Mountains were a favorite place to ride for several years while getting my professional career started and on a path which would someday allow me to move out there.

About a decade later I bought a parcel surrounded by wilderness in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and began building the off-grid homestead of my dreams there while working on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains as a software engineer in the shadow of Pikes Peak.

A year later I moved to New Mexico and six years after that I moved into my homestead where I could bike the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to my heart's content.

And other parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Utah and Nevada whenever possible.

After the USFS burned my homestead to ash and ruin, I decided to get an eBike to ride around on the new homestead parcel, where I expect I will live out the years of this life.