Suspect Summer Lessons

G has been concerned about the fact that when we get to the park in the evening it gets dark sooner and he can't complete his routine round of adventures before dinner. Lately, it's dark by the time we make it home.

Two years ago we could do a quick lap of the park before dinner in the boat bike. Last year he was wise to the play structures and mastered climbing the ladder, spinning on the tire swing and drinking from the fountain. This year he graduated from tricycle to Scuut bike and discovered the paved path that descends into a gully and the lower part of the park.

The gully has a patch of trees and steep grassy slopes. After descending the paved path at full speed (10mph) wearing Crocks, no socks and no covering over knees, elbows or hands, I decided he needed to learn how to crash a little before he fully ate it and traumatized himself with major road rash his first time fighting gravity.

He dubbed the gully "Thunder-dome" and that's where we went nightly with the ambition of a lightly skinned knee or elbow.He loved coasting down the hills, around the trees and walking up the other side of the ravine a little further each night made for some fast descents on his plywood bike. Until he ate it.

I was so proud of him. He bounced down the hill using his feet to center himself like pontoons as he built up speed. Finally, near the very bottom, at maximum velocity he hit one last bump that shook him enough to want to stop. So he did. He put his feet straight out in front of himself and cartwheeled over the bike, flipped a couple times as the bike landed on top of him and stopped in a haze of dust.

I rolled down the hill and jumped off my bike to pick him up and dust him off. By the time I got there his shock turned to tears. I checked him over to make sure he didn't break anything. He hadn't even scratched himself. We talked about what happened and I convinced him to laugh about his "rad" crash.

A week or two passed and his confidence was restored. Full speed descents into Thunder-dome were a mere warm up. Yet after only a handful of rides through the trees he would stop and look at the purple sky and ask why it was getting dark. His astonishment at my explanation of the sun setting behind the hills summed up the look on his face as crying bullshit to my answer. Explaining the solar system and orbits only furthered his conviction that I was full of it.

He'd stomp back up the hill straddling his bike for one last free-ride descent before I'd carry him home on my shoulders, pushing my bike and his, strapped to mine with our helmets buckled through both bikes. He'd point to the moon and call out stars or airplanes or street lights. Explaining to me that street lights stay on at night because they are not behind hills and that airplanes fly over hills but that we ride our bikes down hills. And stars are just street lights on roads really far away.