Wheelies

Painting this image filled my mind and heart with nostalgia for riding my Schwinn bicycle in the 1960s. We didn’t ride for exercise back then. We rode for freedom. Shoes half-tied, baseball card buzzing in the spokes, and the flap-flap of those long handlebar streamers in the wind. 

Those banana seats were thrones. You could slide all the way back, almost over the rear tire, and feel the front end go light as a feather. One tug on those tall handlebars and the wheel would climb, just a little at first, then higher, until the whole world tilted and there you were, floating with the front wheel hanging over nothing. You prayed your balance would hold until you reached the crack in the pavement that marked your personal record (PB).

Summers smelled like hot asphalt and new-cut grass.  Each block was a new challenge: who could ride the longest, who could ride the straightest, and who could do it with no hands (though that last one usually ended with scraped elbows and the smell of Mercurochrome).

The bicycle wheelie is generally credited to the American trick rider Daniel J. Canary and was first reported in 1890.

Canary was a pioneering stunt bicyclist who performed on the new “safety” bicycles of the late 19th century, and a 1890 newspaper account describes him riding “on the rear wheel, with the front wheel elevated,” which matches what we now call a wheelie. 

This painting imagines the joy a young Amish boy might have felt in the freedom of wheelie riding, as we did in our youth.