THE GOSPEL OF THE BICYCLE PILE

By Mark Morgan

www.markmorganbooks.com

There was a time in Scott County when a kid needed only three things to survive a summer day:

A bicycle.

A payphone dime.

And a church bell.

That was the whole system.

Nowadays, kids carry enough technology in their pockets to locate a lost dog, order a pizza, and tell them how many steps they've taken before breakfast. They've got GPS, smart watches, tracking apps, and enough electronics to launch a small moon mission.

We had handlebars and good intentions.

If you wanted to find your friends, you didn't send a text message.

You looked for the bicycle pile.

Every neighborhood had one.

You'd come around a gravel corner and there it'd be—fifteen or twenty bicycles scattered across somebody's yard like they'd blown in during a thunderstorm. Banana seats. Bent fenders. Baseball cards clipped to spokes. Rusty handlebars.

No locks.

No chains.

No security cameras.

Just bicycles.

That pile was our town square.

It told a traveler everything worth knowing.

The local senate was currently in session somewhere between the creek and the feed store, and they were probably trading baseball cards, catching crawdads, climbing trees, or planning adventures that sounded a lot smarter before somebody actually tried them.

As my grandpa used to say, "Boys are the natural consequence of common sense taking an unauthorized vacation."

Then there was the emergency fund.

When I was young, salvation cost a dime.

Later inflation pushed the price all the way up to a quarter.

That coin wasn't for candy.

It wasn't for comic books.

That was rescue money.

If your bicycle chain broke halfway to nowhere, if you got stranded after dark, or if you wandered so far from town that the birds started singing in a different dialect, that little coin was your ticket home.

We guarded those dimes like pirates protecting buried treasure.

Losing one caused the same panic modern folks experience when they can't find their cell phone.

The only difference was our backup plan cost ten cents.

The third piece of childhood equipment was the church bell.

Long before watches buzzed and phones chirped, church bells handled the job just fine.

Their sound drifted across town, over hay fields, through hollers, and into backyards.

You didn't know if it was exactly 5:02 or 5:09.

You simply knew whether you had time for one more inning or whether you'd better start pedaling home.

Those bells never needed batteries.

Never lost signal.

Never froze up.

Never demanded a software update.

They simply rang.

Looking back, it's amazing how much life could be managed with so little.

A pile of bicycles told us where our friends were.

A dime got us out of trouble.

A church bell told us when the biscuits were hot.

And somehow, despite our complete lack of technology, we nearly always found each other, nearly always found our way home, and almost always made it to supper before somebody's daddy started looking for a switch.

The funny thing is, the bicycles are mostly gone now.

The payphones disappeared years ago.

And many of those old church bells don't seem quite as loud as they once did.

But every now and then, when I'm driving a back road through Scott County on a warm summer evening, I can still see those bicycle piles.

For just a moment, time folds up on itself.

Nobody has moved away.

Nobody has grown old.

Nobody is gone.

They're all still down by the creek, arguing over baseball cards, chasing crawdads, and planning adventures that sounded like excellent ideas right up until somebody got caught.

I can almost hear the laughter.

Almost hear the rattling spokes.

Almost hear a church bell rolling across the valley.

Then the moment passes.

The road stretches out ahead.

And I realize that what felt like an ordinary summer at the time has become one of life's greatest treasures.

Some of the richest days of my life happened when all I owned was a bicycle, a dime, and a pocket full of summer.

Moral of the story:

We thought those bicycles gave us freedom, those dimes gave us security, and those church bells told us the time. What they really gave us were friendships, memories, and a place to belong—and those things are worth more now than they ever were back then.