Snow in Wisconsin falls early and heavy and clings to the ground like a remora with lockjaw. As with everything, I learned this lesson the hard way. During the first big storm our first winter, I pulled back the living room curtains at ten o’clock at night only to discover a panorama of merry shovelers. Not so unlike the caroling Whos around their crooked Christmas tree, my neighbors worked to clear their walks and driveway, clad in parkas and boots and wool caps or furry ushanka hats, calling out to one another, laughing and generally enjoying themselves despite the single-digit temps, the arctic wind, and the ultimate futility of their work. As soon as a patch of asphalt was scraped clean, the snow began to pile up again. Inside my living room, the furnace vents exhaling a steady breath of heated air across the floor and Katherine lying curled on the couch in my college swim team sweatshirt, taking to the streets seemed absurd.
The next morning, I had to put my shoulder into the storm door to move it back far enough to squeeze out. The snow on the driveway was at least a foot deep, and my shoes disappeared inside a white crevasse with every step. I was running late for work, so I threw the car (we’d traded in Katherine’s Jeep for a Korean SUV with more room) into four-wheel drive and barreled through the fresh powder. My octogenarian neighbor, Don, who’d been outside when I went to bed last night, stood with his elbow propped on the handle of his shovel. His sidewalks were arrow-straight and snow-free, as though cut with a scalpel rather than a shovel. He shook his head at me. “Bad idea, driving over the snow like that,” he said when I rolled down my window. “It’ll be there come spring yet.”
“I’ll clear it later,” I said, looking at my watch. My morning class started in thirty minutes. “After work.”
“Too late. Your driveway will be last to melt. I guarantee it.”
Don and his wife, Joan, had lived on the street for more than fifty years. The teenagers who came over to inflate their ten-foot Packers lawn ornament and clean out the roof gutters were their great-grandchildren. His prognosis was time-tested and ironclad. After a few more passes with the car, the snow would no longer accept the shovel. A slight elevation in temperature allowed the top layer to liquefy and then freeze solid, sheeting our driveway in ice so thick a hockey team could scrimmage on it. Deep into April, when Don and Joan were sipping iced tea in lawn chairs on their driveway, I was still chipping ice away from mine. The next winter, I set my boots and parka by the back door and kept the curtains parted. When the front porch lights began to flicker on, I knew it was time to head out. In the spring, when I saw Joan on her knees in the garden, I knew it was safe to plant. When Don and Joan blew out their spigots in September, I went ahead and blew out mine, too, knowing that we’d drop below freezing soon enough. A good front window is sometimes a better source of information than an almanac.
As Galen’s kindergarten year wound down, I noticed the metal racks outside his school were crowded with bicycles. Ours was a school surrounded on all sides by houses, and no student lived more than a mile away: an easy distance to ride, apparently even for pregnant moms towing baby trailers. Classmates of Galen’s who’d attached themselves to their mother’s thighs with python death grips on the first day of school now, eight short months later, leapt down the stairs, extracted their two-wheelers from the tangled heaps of rubber and metal, and glided down the street.
I told Galen it was time he learned to ride a bike. He’d pedaled with training wheels for the last year, often with one of the plastic stabilizers bent several inches off the ground. Taking them off seemed like a mere formality. “Get ready,” I said. “You’ll be a big boy soon.”
Some lives can be divided into Befores and Afters, and the schism between the two can warp time and memory. I can recall key life moments as far back as three years old—the tropical storm, for example, that turned the Houston sky midnight black and sent my mother and me scurrying for the laundry room in case the pines came through the windows. But when it came to recalling my dad before he and my mother divorced, my memories had largely become concentrated around a handful of flashbulb moments that in their stark prominence felt prophetic. Any moment, no matter how ordinary, can become a rite of passage if you never get the chance to repeat it. Thirty years on, I could conjure in its entirety, as if it were a movie I just watched: the day my dad taught me to ride a bicycle the summer I turned five. I could picture his hand cupped beneath the back of my seat, the gold initials suspended from a belcher chain bouncing against his shirtless neck, his voice in my ear telling me to pedal, pedal, hold the handlebars straight, keep pedaling. It was July, and the sultry air rippled above the lawns, the sky cotton-ball white. The bike was a metallic blue Huffy with knobby handgrips. It had been a birthday present, the first one I cared about.
A few years later, I taught my sister to ride her bike on our driveway. I was bored, I wanted someone to ride with, and Devin was the only one available. She was five, as I had been when I learned. I unscrewed her training wheels with a pair of vise-grips and told her she could expect to wipe out. No one wore helmets in 1985, or padding of any sort; learning to ride a bike was a form of aversion therapy: the pain of falling taught us not to fall. I’d scythed the skin off both knees and scraped the paint from the handlebars down to the raw metal. In one spectacular tumble, I’d bent my pedal so badly it had to be welded back into place. Even after four years of daily practice I’d sometimes fall for no good reason, inexplicably toppling to the asphalt as though I’d been hit by a sniper. I accepted that falling was part of the deal.
“When you crash, don’t cry,” I told her. “I don’t want Mom to hear.”
For some reason, Devin went along with this. She set her feet on the pedals, and I ran behind her, as my father had run behind me. I had the fleeting sensation that maybe my dad ought to teach her because teaching a kid to ride a bike was something dads did. He and my mom were still two years away from separating and three from divorcing, but the cracks were beginning to show. Dad spent more time on the phone with work and Mom more time cleaning the house when she wasn’t working herself. I knew that both money and time had grown scarce, and I honestly believed I was saving my parents the chore of having to teach Devin how to ride. Also, the chance to see my sister injured in a manner for which I could not be blamed was a tremendous draw.
I pushed Devin down the driveway exactly twice. The third time, she batted my hand away. She didn’t fall once. I took her quick success as evidence that I was a good teacher.
The first Saturday in May, the oaks fuzzed with early leaves, I led Galen to the driveway and made a big to-do of removing his training wheels. I opened my socket set and asked him to help me find the right bit. He tried every one in the box, starting with the largest and the smallest until he Goldilocksed onto the perfect fit. I showed him how to turn the torque wrench, and felt a little like Roy Hobbs helping Bobby mill the Savoy Special in The Natural. This was fatherhood at its finest. Together we carried the training wheels to the back of the garage and stored them away.
“Don’t forget his helmet,” Katherine called from the window. I didn’t know how long she’d been watching us, but her amused smirk suggested it had been a while. When she said helmet, she didn’t mean just a helmet. She meant knee and elbow pads, high-top sneakers, long sleeves and pants. Her first job as a social worker, before we moved to Wisconsin, had been in the emergency room of the big children’s hospital in Salt Lake, a job that had given her ringside seats to every conceivable way a child could kill or maim himself. In addition to all the weird shit—kids who obstructed their bowels by swallowing magnets that sealed their intestines shut or mistook bags of laundry detergent pods for candy—she’d seen a lot of bike accidents. Her hospital had given helmets away for free to make sure kids had them. One time she brought home, as a souvenir, a helmet smashed to smithereens, a dent in the cranial dome cavernous enough to hold a bowl of cereal. “Imagine,” she’d said, eyes narrowed, “this is your son’s head.” Galen was nine months old then, only starting to pull himself to his feet.
I buckled Galen’s helmet beneath his chin and rapped my knuckles against his elbow pads. He could pedal his bike off the roof of the house and hardly feel it. “Are you ready?”
“Ready,” he said.
Katherine came outside to watch, Hayden on her hip.
“Don’t let go,” Galen said.
“Here we go,” I said, and we set off down the sidewalk. We jogged past our house and the neighbor’s until we had some speed built up. “Keep pedaling,” I called, and let go.
I stopped running and watched him roll beyond my reach. I recalled my sister’s Strawberry Shortcake bike, the ribbon my mother had tied around her ponytail flapping in the breeze. Time had folded over on itself; I was here and there at once. “You’re doing great,” I called.
Galen sensed something had changed. “No!” he screamed, and dove for the grass.
“You almost had it,” I said, running up to him. He was on his hands and knees on the neighbor’s lawn, afraid to stand up. “Why’d you stop pedaling?”
“You let go.”
I hauled him up by his armpits and set the bike back on its wheels. “Let’s try again.”
Galen wiggled his red helmet and looked me in the eye. “This time, do not let go.” He squinted in the sunlight and pointed his finger at my chin. “Do not.”
“Keep pedaling,” I said. “Focus on that.”
“Promise,” he said.
“If you’re going to learn how to ride, I’ll have to let go eventually.”
“Not today,” he said. “Promise.”
“Okay, I promise,” I said, believing my lie would soon prove itself moot. Once he saw he could do it, he’d forget he’d ever been afraid.
We turned the bike around and prepared to start again. I noticed Don and Joan sitting in their plastic chairs in the driveway, their wrists touching across the narrow gap between them. How many children, in their fifty years of occupancy, had they watched learn to ride a bike, as well as parallel park and throw a spiral and preen in front of the hydrangeas in rhinestone dresses before heading off to prom? Don tipped his ball cap at me. I swelled with parental magnanimity. “Here we go!”
Galen pedaled, and I ran past Katherine and Hayden at the bottom of our driveway, past the house on the other side. Galen picked up speed, and I had to run faster to keep pace. I was holding on with three fingers, then two. He had this. When the bike seat slipped off my index finger, I let it. For a few glorious seconds, Galen kept riding. Don and Joan raised their arms above their heads like football refs watching a ball sail through the uprights. It’s good! I clapped and called out, “You got it! You’re doing it!”
Galen hazarded a quick glance over his shoulder, and when he realized I wasn’t there, he let go of the handlebars. He went down like he’d been hit by a rock. He landed on the sidewalk, catching himself with his hands, the one surface we’d neglected to pad. He saw the blood on his palms and began to wail.
Katherine came running over. She set Hayden on the ground and bent to cradle Galen’s hands in her own. She kissed his bloody palms. I thought, Oh, come on. I wanted to say that falling was a part of learning how to ride. You can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs. Besides, the spill couldn’t have hurt that bad, not with all the cushioning. I flashed on another ER memory, from before we moved to Wisconsin: Katherine was working swing shift, three P.M. to three A.M., and I’d gone up to take her some dinner. I was in the waiting room, a polystyrene clamshell in my lap, when I noticed a little boy sitting in a chair with his arm wrapped in a towel, bawling his ever-loving head off. I assumed the man beside him, bouncing one foot like a heavy-metal drummer, was the boy’s father. Katherine had already come out to tell me that a trauma was coming in, so I knew it would be a bit before she could break to eat, and I knew that broken bones, neither life-threatening nor contagious, were triaged as low priorities. The kid had no choice but to sit until the ER cleared. At a certain point, the dad grew impatient with the endless waiting and his kid’s inconsolable crying and hissed to the little guy, “Suck it up and be a man.” The boy opened the towel, and even from twenty feet away I could see the broken end of his radius protruding like a knob beneath the skin. If I’d had a break like that, I wouldn’t have been crying. I’d have been screaming bloody murder. The dad scanned the room. Our eyes met briefly before his flicked back to the basketball game going on the corner television. All I could think was, You asshole. Katherine, when I told her about the exchange, just rolled her eyes. She saw such triumphs in parenting all the time. And a great deal worse.
“Let’s try again,” I said to Galen. “This time I think you’ll get it for sure.”
Galen draped his arm around his mom’s shoulder. Not wanting to be left out, Hayden toddled over and took his place at Katherine’s left side. Galen looked up at me. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a bad teacher.”
I’d met Katherine while I was teaching swimming lessons to kids at the city pool. Parents routinely told me their son or daughter had been afraid of the water before they started in my class. By the end of the session, I had them breathing to the side. Teaching was my profession, my labor of love. If I was anything, I was a good teacher.
“I just want to ride my bike,” Galen said.
“That’s the idea.”
“No,” he said. “The old way. Put the training wheels back on.”
“You can’t give up so easily.”
“Wheels back on.”
“Maybe he’s not ready,” Katherine said. She slid her hand beneath Hayden’s rear and moved to her feet. His orange sneakers levitated off the ground.
“No way,” I said, resolved. “Once the training wheels are off, they’re off.” It had worked for me and for my sister. Surely it would work for my son as well.
“Fine,” Galen said. He crossed his arms and frowned. “I won’t ride then. Ever.” His eyes were glassy, injured. He’d expected more from me.
“Suit yourself,” I said. I walked toward the house. Katherine held out a hand for Galen. The bike stayed where it had fallen, on the sidewalk in front of the neighbor’s house. From his perch across the street, Don sat shaking his head. An hour later I went back for the bike and wheeled it into the garage.
There it lay, on its side, collecting dust for the next two months, unridden throughout the prime weeks of summer while kids and adults wheeled past our house with towels around their necks or baskets full of tomatoes from the farmer’s market. In the mornings, Galen watched through the living room window as I took my own bike out of the garage to ride to my office. “This could be you,” I said, leaning on my handlebars. “You want to try riding again?”
“No,” he said, parroting his mother. “I’m not ready.”
By late August, I’d more or less given up. No amount of coaxing or incentivizing would jar Galen from his stubborn resolve to never, ever ride a bicycle. I began to come to terms with the undeniable reality that my firstborn would be one of those kids. He’d grow overweight and socially awkward, afraid of girls and sunlight, and would spend his free time forum-trolling in the basement. Eventually he’d end up in federal prison for hacking into a government mainframe.
Katherine said to look on the bright side. If all that came to pass, he could probably hook us up with free cable.
A week before Labor Day and the return to school, Galen wheeled his bike from the garage to the driveway. He wore the helmet but not the pads, and instead of riding the bike he flipped it upside down so the handlebars and seat were on the pavement. He cranked the pedals with his hand, singing out, “Ice cream! Ice cream! Who wants some ice cream?”
“You know,” I said. “If you learned to ride, we could go get ice cream.”
Unimpressed by my offer, he called again, looking past me. “Who else wants some ice cream?”
Katherine waved me inside. “Leave him be,” she said. “Maybe if you ignore him, he’ll keep playing with it.”
Ignoring him, though, was easier said than done. On some level I’d been waiting to teach my kid to ride a bike all my life. Teaching him to ride was a link to my past and an atavistic vision of fatherhood vectored through my life as a son. It wasn’t enough for Galen to learn how to ride; I wanted him to learn how to ride from me. I wanted to transplant my memory of my dad running behind my bike into Galen, who would therefore learn to ride not only from me but also by proxy from my dad, thereby resulting in an unbroken chain of connectedness that ran from my father through me to my son.
There was a slight chance I was overthinking the whole thing.
I pulled the cap off a beer and moved my chair into the shade. I watched Hayden play with the hose, allowing him to spray my feet and, once I finished the beer, fill my empty bottle and pretend to chug it. Galen stood with his back to the yard, making pretend ice cream as fast as his arms could crank.
Throughout the afternoon, cars arrived at Don and Joan’s. Their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren carried foil-wrapped casserole dishes up the driveway. I could smell their grill and hear their music, the amplifying din of the party as more family continued to arrive. Some of the smaller children rode bicycles, circling the block and turning in loops on the driveway. At one point Galen stopped turning the pedals and stood watching a little girl ride a pink two-wheeler. The girl saw him and waved and for a moment lost control of the bike. The handlebars twisted and her knee plunged toward the pavement before she somehow, miraculously, got her hand on the grip and swooped back to vertical. An inadvertently beautiful close call. Galen stood entranced.
The girl rode up to the garage and turned out of sight. Galen turned over his bike and straddled it. He stood with his feet on the ground and the crossbar between his legs. He waddled in circles with the seat poking against his butt. He moved to the garage wall where he leaned against the clapboard siding and eased onto the seat. He pushed off, pedaled once, and tipped sideways into the grass. I sipped beery hose water and tried to make myself invisible.
Galen got up, refusing to look at me, and walked the bike back to the wall. “Okay, dammit,” he said, baring his teeth. “This is it. This is the ride of Angry Galen.” He clenched his fist and looked down at it, as if his knuckles were a source of power. He shoved himself away from the garage, teeth clenched tight, and this time managed to make it from the grass to the pavement. He was slow and wobbly, but he didn’t fall. I listened for the sound of metal scraping over concrete, but twenty seconds later he came up the neighbor’s driveway and emerged around the back of the house. He glided across the grass and back to his starting point where he hopped off the bike, turned around to face the driveway, and remounted.
“This is the ride of Angry Galen,” he said again, and shoved off once more.
Angry Galen circled the house more than twenty times that afternoon, enough to wear a trail in the lawn. I went inside for another beer and a towel for Hayden and returned to my Adirondack chair in the shade. It wasn’t a bad way to pass a summer afternoon, truth be told: the late sun broken by the maple leaves, Katherine’s music coming through the kitchen window, the distant echo of a party across the street, both boys in sight but not needing anything from me. Hayden was absorbed in a box of raisins, Galen in the Newtonian mechanics of balance and motion. Learning to ride a bicycle is one of our first lessons in autodidactism, and perhaps the most enduring. Someone gives us a push at the beginning, but the riding itself is something everyone does alone. We are ultimately our best and only teachers.
Toward dinnertime, our next-door neighbor, whose driveway adjoins ours, wheeled her grill out of her garage. I gathered up my empty bottles and told Galen it was time to put his bike away. “We can ride more tomorrow,” I said.
Galen put his foot on the ground and turned to me with a look that said, Where in the world did you come from? He’d been so absorbed in his task that he’d disappeared inside of it. The rest of the world, including his dad sitting yards away, had ceased to exist. Bicycling was about more than physics, it was also an imaginative act. You have to see yourself doing it before you actually do it. You have to trust the air more than the hand at your seat. Everything we learn, from riding a bike to resecting a tumor at the base of the cerebellum, we learn this way. The primary difference between the acquisition of this skill and all the others was that, thanks to a sunny afternoon and a few bottles of Spotted Cow ale, I got to see the process from start to finish. All that was left was the grand ta-da.
Galen wheeled his bike back to the garage wall. He leaned his shoulder against the clapboards while he arranged himself on the seat. “Dad,” he said. “You want to see something?”
“Go for it,” I said. “I’m watching.”