I Need a Hero, Part 1

One of the great things about riding a bike is the way it leaves you open to communication with the people around you. Once in a while, as I experienced last week, that openness and ability to see and hear the distress of those you encounter creates the opportunity to become a cell phone hero.

Before we left for camping on Thursday, I rode out to the Community Cycling Center to have them check out a funny clinking noise/derailleur catch/occasional gear slippage that started up on my new bike after an unfortunate shifting incident on the Broadway Bridge. The bike wasn’t unrideable, but the noise was worrisome; I suspected, based on the regularity of the sound, that I had a slightly deformed link on the chain that was catching the rear derailleur. I’d have taken the bike in sooner, but it took me a few days to find my warrantee paperwork (turns out I stuck it inside a book for safekeeping– if you’ve seen my house, you know that’s like storing your will in a shoebox at Payless).

At the CCC, the same cute mechanic who sold me the bike a few weeks ago (Benjamin!) quickly diagnosed the problem: I was right about the chain defect, plus I needed a new front derailleur, which is what caused the shifting problem that fucked the chain up in the first place. They fixed the whole thing for free while I ate Thai food and watched the tall-bikers from the Clown House ride up and down Alberta (I’m glad I got a chance to see that once before those Portland icons leave the neighborhood).

Since I was already that far east, and still riding high from my Berkeley elevation revelation, I decided to take my (now even sweeter) bike out to Rocky Butte, an abrupt volcanic protuberance in the NE 90’s. After consulting my Bike There! map (the best $6 a Portlander can spend), I cut south to Skidmore, which looked like the NE east-west bike highway.

I’d like to take a moment here to bitch about Skidmore: this street is clearly marked, both on the map and through some excellent signage and road markings, as a designated bike route. Yet, especially in the residential areas through the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s, it seems like there’s a stop sign at every single intersection, even at cross-streets that don’t look any wider or busier than Skidmore itself. It is much more difficult to stop and start again on a bike than it is in a car, and not being able to keep momentum on an otherwise flat road for more than a block or two is extremely frustrating. If the city is going to make a street a bike route, part of that plan ought to include minimizing the number of stop signs that cyclists face. Otherwise, in quiet residential neighborhoods like the Alberta Arts area and Roseway, the temptation to just slow slightly while blowing through the signs is irresistible.

Anyhow, I rode out to Rocky Butte, biked up the spiralling road past a mega-church/bible college complex whose unifying architectural theme seemed to be “Concrete Igloo,” and loitered around for a while at the funny fort-like park on the hilltop (the park is a memorial to a man named, coincidentally, J. W. Hill, who founded a military academy in the area in the late nineteenth century). Rocky Butte offers a commanding view of the I-205 bridge, the new Ikea store out by the airport, and the eastern suburbs. On this particular day, it also offered a commanding view of a couple of Russian girls in impractical shoes vamping along the stone walls for the camera.

The roads are tricky and not particularly well-marked at the base of the hill, and on the way back down I managed to miss my turn, and had to muck around in some dead ends before I got my bearings and figured out what I needed to do to get back to my route home along Siskiyou. I was headed west on NE Russell, heading toward 82nd, when two boys on BMX bikes came tearing down a dirt hill on my right. One of them darted right out in front of me and across the path of an oncoming SUV, forcing both me and the other vehicle to hit the brakes; he gave me an expressionless glance before cutting left down Russell back toward the Butte.

I turned onto 82nd, and was downshifting to crank up a steep block-long hill, when I saw a heavyset kid running down the sidewalk. At first I only noticed him as a pedestrian to watch out for, but as he got closer, I saw that his face was flushed, and he was crying, issuing the kind of high-pitched keening sounds that kids make when they’re panicking.

“Help!” he yelped in a cracking voice as soon as he was close enough. “Help me! Some kids just stole my bike!” The kid was sweating and slobbering and looked like he might hyperventilate.

I stopped and pulled out my phone. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll call the police.”

“They stole my bike!” he kept saying, over and over.

I dialed 911, explained the situation and our location to the operator, then handed the phone over to the kid so he could give his personal information. He told the officer his name and said he was 11, and gave a description of his bike and the kids who took it. Then he closed the phone.

“Are the police coming?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. His breathing was slower and he seemed to be calming down. “Is it okay if I call my mom?”

I said that sounded like a good idea. When his mom picked up on the other end, he began speaking in Russian, with some English words thrown in here and there. From his tone it sounded to me like they were arguing. After he’d hung up, I asked, “Is she angry?”

“No,” he said, “She’s just worried.” We stood on the sidewalk, waiting for the cops. The sun was hot.

As he pulled himself together, the kid started telling me pieces of the story: he’d been at the bus stop near the skate park up the street with his friend, and two boys (only one of whom had a bicycle) came up and asked if they could try out his bike. He told them no, and then, when the kid let go of his bike for a moment to help the friend load his own onto the front of the bus, one of the boys grabbed it and the two took off. From the kid’s description, they sounded like the two boys I’d encountered on Russell.

After maybe ten minutes, a cop car pulled into a nearby parking lot in front of a bowling alley. The policeman took the same information about the bike at the 911 operator (a dark blue Haro F3 series) and physical descriptions of the boys who took it. Then he got another call; he told us that another car would be along shortly, and he peeled out. I decided I’d better wait around until I was sure the kid was going to make it home.

“If the police don’t get my bike back, will they give me a new one?” the kid asked me.

I smiled, sad. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way,” I said.

“That bike cost $300,” he said. “My dad bought it for me at Bike Gallery. He said it cost what he makes working three nights, overtime.”

“Are your folks from Russia?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

After a while, the kid said he was thirsty. I was out of water, so I told him I’d stay in the parking lot and watch for the police if he wanted to go into the bowling alley and look for a fountain. He came back out with a whole cup of water they’d given him.

As he regained his composure, the kid turned out to be almost comically adultlike and personable. At one point, he exclaimed, “Oh! You know, I don’t think we ever actually introduced ourselves!” We exchanged names and shook hands. He must have said, “I don’t even know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along” three times. After we’d been standing there for a while, I got him to call his mother again to update her on the situation.

It took 45 minutes for the second police car to arrive, and when they finally did pull in, it seemed pretty clear that they considered this case neither hopeful nor particularly important. I hung back while the lead cop took down the exact same information about the bike and the bicycle thieves that the 911 operator and the first cop had already recorded. It seemed like he was mostly humoring the kid by going through the motions. Once he’d finished questioning him, the police officer turned to me, eyebrows raised, and I explained that I was just the lucky owner of the cell phone, but that I’d seen the kids fleeing the scene. I guess that made me a witness, because the cop took down my contact information, as well.

“It was nice of you to stay with him,” the cop said, gesturing toward the kid with his pen. “Most people wouldn’t have.” That seemed very sad to me, and I hoped it wasn’t true that most people would leave a freaked out kid in a bowling alley parking lot next to a busy road in 90-degree heat.

Then the cop started asking me all kinds of questions about whether I did a lot of biking and what kind of riding I liked to do, because he was a pretty avid cyclist himself. It seemed awfully chatty when the business at hand was time-sensitive, and the kid was standing right there waiting for the grown-ups to fix the situation. I tried to steer the conversation back to the bike, saying that I would post a description of the Haro F3 on BikePortland.org’s stolen bike listings.

“Oh, hey,” the cop said, excited now.  “Did you ever read about a guy who was going over the I-5 bridge on his bike, and someone had strung a wire across the walkway?”

I shook my head.

“That was me! I was coming down the walkway on the bridge, and the wire got me right across the face. I landed in a southbound lane on I-5!”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s terrible.”

“Yeah!” he said, grinning. “Got me right across the cheeks and nose.” He pointed to the lingering scars. “If it had hit my throat, I’d be dead! It was on BikePortland.”

“Wow,” I said again. “I’m glad you’re alright.” Only in Portland, I thought, do you encounter people who consider themselves bike accident celebrities.

“Excuse me,” the kid finally piped up. “Excuse me, but f you guys don’t find my bike, can the police, like, give me a new one, or some money for a new one?” Apparently, he wasn’t going to take my word for it. I could feel his struggling kid sense of justice rejecting the idea that the bike could just be gone for good, with no compensation.  I remember similarly conflating law enforcement and property insurance when I was that age.

“Sorry, kid,” the policeman said. “I wish it worked that way.”

The kid looked disappointed, but asked, pragmatically, “Well, can you guys give me a ride home?”

“Yeah,” the cop said. “Yeah, we can do that.”

Once I saw to it that they were actually going to load him into the back of the car, I shook the kid’s hand again, and wished him luck. He thanked me, and then I climbed back on my bike, heading north to Siskiyou just as the police car turned south on 82nd.

I hope that kid got his bike back.