"Which button do I push when I'm pedaling fast?"

"You want to shift into a higher gear."

"Okay…but which button do I push?"

"One of them will raise the gear, the other lowers it"

"I see four buttons. Each handle bar has two. One is on top, the other is on the bottom. Which button do I push when I find my pedals are going too fast and I want fewer rpms? Once I know that, I can work the rest out from there"

"Let me ride it around for a second and see."

I just wanted to ride a bike. I hadn't ridden a bike in over 15 years. I used to cruise around the dirt roads of southwest Virginia, near the border of Floyd and Montgomery County, in a three-speed road bike. Eventually lower-back pain and too many other interests kept me off the bike. An occasional recumbent at the health club, but no real bike on a real road.

Hard for me to believe this as I stood on the gravel and dirt of Aliso.

Riding on soft gravel shoulders is hard. We used to do that in Michigan back in the late seventies when I was a kid. Sometimes, when the gravel was fresh and thick, it was more like plowing snow than riding. An orange one-speed with a baseball card stuck in the spokes was my means of escaping the family's 30-acre prison for other neighborhoods. Usually going away from Stockbridge and towards Williamson, all the way to M-36. It seemed miles away. Pretty far for a ten-year old kid living on a corn farm.

Occasional checks behind would let me know if there was a car coming my way. No cars and I'd sneak onto the road - strictly forbidden because of the danger. It was 50 miles per hour for traffic on M-52 that far outside of town. I remember once in winter going to the mailbox and dropping a letter on the road. A car was approaching. It was cold out, and my mittens were preventing me from picking up the letter. The car was coming closer and closer, and I scraped and clawed with that mitten-covered hand. Only after the car came to a dead stop did I think to take the mitten off to grab the letter. So riding on the road was dangerous business for a ten-year old alone on a bike, but I lived a life of danger. At least that's how I like to remember it.

I finally did give up the orange cruiser. Eventually, things like multi-speed bikes - featuring tricky derailers that often jammed, and chains that would slip off - made their way into our lives. I only merited a three-speed - the ten speeds we had in our neighborhood were notoriously high-maintenance. So a three speed it was. It had three different gears, with a well-labeled thumb-dial to change them. I only had that bike in Michigan a little while. Then, like nearly everyone else at that time - we moved away from Michigan, to Virginia.

The difference between riding a bike in Michigan and Virginia was the horizon. In Michigan there was a horizon - a place where the distant landscape disappeared. In Virginia the horizon always seemed to be hidden, either by dense trees or a big hill. But in Virginia I was growing up - a teenager at last. I could ride a lot farther on that three speed.

Virginia roads presented different challenges. We lived on a dirt road - state route 600. It hardly ever saw fresh gravel. Neighbors guessed that it would never be paved because of one steep section on the side of a hill. The road was pretty much on bedrock, so there would need to be expensive blasting to level out the road to a regulation angle. That hill was a tough one on a bike. It was tough going up, and coming down I rode the brakes the whole way just to keep the speed reasonable. But sometimes, when rain followed by heat would turn the dirt road into a washboard - it was just as tough going down. My sister got a some sort of speedometer for her bike and measured a top speed of nearly 40 miles per hour. It was a rough ride on a dirt, but there were hardly any cars on that road, so safety wasn't too much of an issue. Of course, we road without helmets in those days.

This day, when I finally figured out the fancy gears on the mountain bike I tried out, I took off pedaling. No helmet. I resisted putting my credit card in the spokes. It did come back to me quickly, and I even got the tricky gearing to work to my benefit, more or less. The goofy pedals that grabbed my sneakers and the low-slung handle bars also clued me in that it wasn't like any of the bikes I rode as a kid. With the full suspension, that mountain bike was a pretty smooth ride, and I was amazed at how fast I could get with the fancy gearing, with some sort of abstract labeling scheme that I just didn't get, helping me along. But the trail was crowded with people, all of whom had helmets on. I soon felt guilty and insecure about my ride. After all, I'd hate to fall into somebody wearing a helmet and hurt them. After about a half an hour I was back, returning the borrowed bike, secure that riding a bike after 15 years was like, well, do I even have to say it?