My Super-Sport
My first "adult" bicycle was a lemon-yellow ten-speed Schwinn Super-Sport, complete with splash-guard fenders and a friction-generated front light, bought around 1974, when my cousin Larry and I, roommates at the time, had decided we would buy into the bicycling fad. We had pondered over a few maps and decided we'd do a quick little jaunt from Omaha to the Great Lakes. Seemed doable, considering all the literature about how simple and easy bicycle touring could be, since multi-speed machines made hills nothing more than minor obstacles. We did little if any research about the bikes themselves, and went to the Schwinn store based on hope and general reputation.
The illusion of luxurious ease quickly dissipated on our ride home from the bike shop, when we tried to ride up the steep incline from Saddle Creek Road east to Military Avenue. Low gear was simply not low enough for unconditioned legs, no matter what the glossy brochure and the cheery bike shop guy had said. It was a long and somber walk up that hill.
It was the first of many lessons that bike would teach me over the next dozen or so years. Larry and I quickly abandoned the Canada trip when we realized the difference between dream and reality, and the bike and I limited ourselves mainly to around town trips, and it spent long days, weeks even, leaning against a wall in my parents' basement.
Until Mark and I became friends and he introduced me to the idea of longer rides. At his incessant urging we gradually extended our rides to the nearby towns of Elkhorn, Fort Calhoun and Fremont, distances that had seemed unrealistic to me after the loss of my Canada dream. We made many of those rides on hot summer afternoons, without water bottles or helmets, often in blue jeans. Many times we stopped into a local tavern at the destination tiown, played shuffle board or pool in air conditioned dimness, and drank a few beers. Then it would be out again into the blazing sun, a bit wobbly, and the long grind back to Omaha.
It was a wonderful, enlightening mix of sensations, the giddiness of beer and friendship, the sounds and smells of rural Nebraska, the whip of wind in one's face on a downhill, often enhanced by a joint or two, and then the drawn-out suffering on the those long final miles to home. And the subtle pleasure of young muscles grown stronger, and the satisfaction of accomplishment.
The Schwinn -- by then stripped of those clunky useless fenders and that stupid ineffective light -- had never had a name. But it came to me one afternoon that as the vehicle making these myriad experiences possible, it was, if not a muse in itself, it was the source of inspiration, and the doorway to the muses, as in Greek mythology. It was, in essence, my personal Parnassus, after the mountain home of those muses. Ironic, of course, that I who have also hated uphill rides, should be inspired by a mountain, but so it was.
Mt. Parnassus
Of course, it was more than that, being mobile it was a "Parnassus on Wheels." And such became its name. Though that name was not original with me. I'd often seen it on my father's bookshelves, on the spine of a narrow book that I had never pulled down. When I finally read it, I found the name more apt than ever. That original Parnassus on Wheels, in the book by Christopher Morley, was a 19th century bookmobile, originally owned by an eccentric man who spent his life wandering Britain with his dog and his wagon, dispensing literature and ideas to the countryside. What a perfect metaphor for this bicycle which, in company with Mark, led me through the countryside and into experiences and feelings I could not otherwise have found.
Such is the tale of Parnassus in his glory. We'll not speak of his inglorious end, worn out and ultimately replaced by a new, shinier and better machine. Instead, Parnassus has always had a special place in my memory; not a ride goes by that I don't think of him, and of those glorious, young and wonderful, days and rides.
The Original Parnassus on Wheels.
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