You can donate all sorts of dying vehicles to NPR. From decrepit cars to planes to farm tractors, they’ll take it all. But bicycles are an exception, which explains why their spindly corpses are a common sight in the U.S. Even in Amsterdam, a city that moves mostly on two wheels, boats with little claws remove over 10,000 bikes annually from canals. To think that every bicycle started out beloved, new, and shiny yet so many meet such an ignominious end is an apt metaphor for a big slice of humanity, too. (Let’s take a moment of silence for the slice).
Outside of urban areas, a likely spot for bike graveyards is a college campus. Here the temptation must be very great for a student to abandon a bike to the elements. On the campus of Denison University, this ride has been hitched up to the rack outside the Cinema building for maybe eight years, slowly breaking down into its original atoms.
I like to imagine its last owner. What were they thinking when they left it on this bike rack, never to mount it again?
1. Was it raining, their hair and clothes were wrecked right before a presentation, and they went online and bought a used car after class was over?
2. Did they ride to class and then leave with a classmate who drove them to Dick’s to buy a faster bike?
3. Did they find a better but still trashy bike elsewhere on campus and left this one to die?
4. Did they transfer to another college and used the move to ditch this bike?
5. Did a grandparent die and bequeath the cyclist a car?
6. Did they become cooler and buy a motorcycle after watching The Wild One with Marlon Brando in a film class?
7. Did their parent tell them if they rode without a helmet, they would have to start paying for their own tuition? So they decided to walk from now on rather than mess up their hair?
8. Is it not even a Denison student’s bike but rather an adult’s from the town who rode to Denison drunk in search of college women and then was unable to locate his bike after waking up with a hangover in a dorm room?
9. Was it a prank? Did some guys get revenge on an annoying roommate by taking his bike to the other side of the campus? The victim just skateboarded to classes after that?
10. Or did it belong to one of Denison’s wealthier students who didn’t know how to change a flat tire and asked his parents for a new bike that came with inflated tires?
We’ll never know, but the fact that Midwesterners are very polite complicates the disposal effort. For the first five years that the bike sat there, no one wanted to move it thinking that the owner was surely coming back any day for it. For the next three years, no one wanted to move it to the trash because they thought the sanitation workers would think Denison students are spoiled brats for discarding something that’s still usable. In ten more years, this bike may finally sink to the ground, autumn leaves will cover it, a dead tree limb will fall on it, and it will finally give itself a decent burial.
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