TOGETHER AGAIN
Brothers’ boyhoods re-emerge on trikes By Dennis Lopez
If you never have seen or ridden a recumbent trike, I suggest you look into it. For those of us who want and need exercise and have balance problems or simply don’t want to deal with a two-by-four on-end seat of a regular bike, they are terrific. You simply drop into the low-slung seat, put your feet on the pedals and go at any pace that works for you. It’s that simple and a heck of a lot of fun. A few years back, I bought a WizWheelz recumbent trike. Low, yellow, 27-speeds with a seat just a few inches off the ground, it was fast and fun but the needs of a new business venture meant selling stuff to buy equipment. So goodbye trike and riding altogether. Fast forward to last spring. My brother called and told me he had received a trike from the Veteran’s Administration as part of his therapy for Parkinson’s disease. “Still got yours?” “Nope. Sold it. Remember?” “You otta get one. We could ride together.” Ten minutes later he was on the phone again. “I think I found one for you.” And just like that and a thousand dollars later, I was back
8 JAN/FEB 2021 | Idaho Family Magazine
into recumbent triking. Well, not exactly just like that. There was the matter of a helmet, gloves and shoes…and a trailer to haul the thing around. Then later it required snappy “riding pants,” a jersey so colorful that it makes a jockey’s colors look pale, a special highvisibility I-look-like-a-highway-project-flag person jacket and of course rain gear. Throw in a bunch of other odds and ends and my $1,000 trike became one of “those projects” that seem simple at first but the ancillary stuff adds up. But I don’t care. What I really care about is the amazing transformation that takes place today while riding with my brother. In a way I find it very hard to explain but riding together takes us back to our boyhood, back to the uncomplicated times of riding our beat up Schwinn’s on the ditch banks and backroads around our ancestral home in Fruitland. Riding together now on trikes that singularly cost more than all of our cars in high school did collectively, we go back to the easy times before we were beaten down by jobs or family tragedies or failed marriages. Back to a time when we had not yet been to war or college or even much beyond our geographic niche on the Idaho-Oregon border.
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