Protecting the Right to Pedal

My 3-year-old has announced that next month for her birthday she wants a “real bike.” I greeted this news with a wan smile. I toyed with telling her that she is too young for a bike, but why postpone the inevitable? She’s old enough and, in truth, I’m the one who’s not ready, and it has nothing to do with scraped knees.

Bicycles are important for kids. Bicycles are independence, wings to send them fluttering from the nest. My first bike came when I was 4. We were living in Porterville then, on a street that, as I remember it, looked pretty much like the Pasadena street where I live today. Wood frame houses, leafy trees, sidewalks, quiet. After the training wheels came off, I started a slow, steady expansion of my riding territory. My family moved back to Fresno and the parameters widened.

Bike riding became almost an occupation. It was what kids did. We rode to school, to the bookmobile, to swimming lessons and Little League games. We rode out to orchards and down through sandy creek beds. We rode days and, in the summertime, long into the night. There were dangers--brushes with dogs, tight spots on busy roads--but I don’t recall feeling anything like fear, and I doubt my parents did, either. The freedom to pedal where we pleased was a birthright, a fundamental piece of the fabled California lifestyle.

Thirty years later, it’s surprising to see little kids roaming alone on bikes. It seems risky, even reckless. There are too many motorists that either drive too fast or, prowling, drive too slow. We’ve absorbed too many stories of stray bullets and drunk drivers, seen too many pictures on milk cartons, heard too many sirens.

The other day, I watched a little boy pedal down the sidewalk. An old car idled down the street, stereo booming, and stopped a short distance ahead of the boy. He got off his bike, clearly nervous, fidgety. He walked a few steps in one direction and then another, and finally moved to the closest front porch and waited for the car to leave. When it did, he remounted and rode back quickly the way he had come.

The boy had been headed toward a nearby park where children can play in relative safety. It was at this park that I once watched a youngster pedal up to his playmates and show off a pistol, the real McCoy. I figure the kid was about 12 years old. The moment stuck with me, a scene to revisit as I consider my daughter’s birthday wish.

It’s important, of course, to distinguish between natural parenthood fears and extraordinary danger. I worry about overkill, about becoming one of those fuddy-duddies who insist things were better in the old days. I also wonder if this is not just a phenomenon of Los Angeles, which other Californians always have considered bad news for kids. So I called an old friend in Fresno and asked if children there ranged about on bikes as we had. Yes, she said, in a few neighborhoods they do. But in many others, they do not. She keeps her own children on a firm schedule and a short leash.

“Even with that,” she said, “when you let them go it’s always in the back of your mind: ‘Should I be doing this?’ ”

I called another friend, a native of the San Fernando Valley who lives there still. She could remember as a little girl riding half a mile to the Sportsmen’s Lodge to look at the trout, a trip her own daughter--now turning 4--won’t be allowed to make on her own.

“I wouldn’t feel safe,” she said.

There’s plenty of talk these days about what California has lost--residents, jobs, political leadership, economic vitality--and much of it can be dismissed as just that: talk. To me, the more significant slippage has occurred in small, uncharted ways. My grandmother left her door unlocked day or night, my mother never did. We roamed free and wide on bikes, but my children never will. The only consolation is that they’ll never know what they missed.

We could, of course, flee to the newest suburb at the end of the farthest freeway, but the super-commuter lifestyle seems to take away as much as it gives back. We could become mother hens, joining the 10% of Los Angeles County parents who, in a Times Poll, stated they refuse to allow their children to play outdoors.

But it doesn’t do to surrender. Instead, you take precautions and you hope. My daughter will get her bike. But she will also get a set of rules, and a helmet, and a watch, and anything else to ease our fears.

Last night, I asked her where she would ride this bike she so badly wants. She thought a bit and then smiled brightly. “In the back yard,” she said. She seemed happy enough with that, and for a year or two it will hold her. Then what?