Hot night bike rides in the 80s

It’s hot in Seattle. We have a lot of sensational headlines about it. I don’t want to overreact. It’s hard to cope with hot nights without air conditioning, but the house I grew up in in Chicago had no air conditioning either, and it was this hot for more days each summer than it is here. I’ll be uncomfortable, but I’ll be fine. I hope the same is true for everyone.

On hot nights in Chicago, I used to love to go for a bike ride. In college I spent a lot of Saturday nights riding down Lincoln Avenue towards downtown, hanging around the lakefront, and riding home via the lakefront path back to my neighborhood, Rogers Park. Lincoln Avenue traffic was wild on Saturday nights. I sometimes rode bikes with one friend or another, but mostly on my own when nobody was around to do something with. I remember “shooting the gap,” flying along to the right of the lane of cars toward the intersection of Lincoln, Halsted, and Fullerton and speeding through on the yellow light, beating the cars. Today that vector is a bike lane, but in the mid-80s those didn’t exist, at least not in Chicago.

I had a night proofreading job at a law firm downtown on LaSalle, and I bike commuted there, locking my bike to a parking meter on the street (and changing clothes in a bathroom stall). (Employers and buildings didn’t provide facilities for bike commuting because it was such a strange thing to do; hardly anyone commuted by bike.) On warm weeknights, riding home after midnight with no traffic, I felt like all the roads were laid out just for me, and I could smell the fresh lake air all the way from grimy Broadway, and the big trees on the side streets seemed so benevolent, arching out over the street. Being on my bike kept me alert, my entire routes were as familiar as my childhood home. 

The only bad thing that ever happened, bike-wise, was the night my college roommate’s and my bikes were both dismantled and most of the parts stolen. We came out of our proofreading jobs, met up on the corner, and found our bikes half missing.  Middle-aged men, workers in a Com Ed truck parked two car-lengths away, stared at us as we talked about what to do next. When we looked their way, one of them coldly and loudly volunteered that “some black guys” had taken our bikes apart. But based on the guy’s pushy, racist cliché, I was sure he had our bike parts in that work truck. I think he assumed the bikes were left overnight and figured he’d get some free stuff, and then here came two college girls who were now more or less stranded at 12:30 AM.

We called a cab. The driver didn’t want to take us. “There are some things I’m not supposed to transport,” he griped. Whatever that meant. But he gave in. My roommate had, as always, a voucher from her night manager to pay for a cab though she rarely used one.