Snakes Alive

One of my earliest and fondest memories would have to be going out to choose my first bike. No more would I be cruising on the tricycle I had become accustomed to riding. Instead, I was about to get a brand new two-wheeled beast that I could ride on like all the older kids. I'm pretty sure it must have been a late night shopping night that my parents got my sister Jenny and myself out of bed for. We were woken up and told we were going to get our Christmas presents. The local hypermarket was a good hour away from where we lived. Stopping at the line of bikes and being told I could choose my own one felt like I was in heaven. Such a great surprise! I went for a silver "Colt" with 10" wheels. My sister Jenny got a larger girls bike - a maroon single speed bike that stopped by back-peddling, a feature particularly handy for doing huge skids and coming to a screaming halt after racing around the yard.

At the time I must have around two years old because my younger brother Martin was not present. My mother to this day swears however that I learned to ride my bike before I could walk - so who knows, if the legend is true it may even have been earlier. My dad boasts about me taking the training wheels off myself about an hour after trying out my bike. I was like a pig in the slop trough, and easy rider, born to ride, and my bike could now take me places I never dreamed of hiking to on my stubby legs alone!

Naturally when you get a new toy you must maintain it. As a budding young apprentice mechanic, I was into everything. One of the scariest moments with that bike happened while I was performing routine maintenance as only the best bike mechanic could. This involved a very complicated routine of turning my bike upside down and turning the pedals and crank to make sure everything was moving smoothly. I had a particular spot in the back yard where I liked to do this - close to where my dad parked the farm bike he used to ride around on. On this particular day while I was rigorously performing all maintenance checks - I failed to spot a snake that was lying quite close to me. When I did eventually notice it I literally jumped and ran the fastest 100m sprint humanly possible in the "Under 3" category back to the house. I was crying and yelling. My mother came out of the house to see what the commotion was about. My parents had religiously instilled a fear of snakes into us. This was probably to our good fortune, as the farm we lived on actually had dangerous snake species roaming. There was a healthy population of Rinkhals (Spitting Cobra) that I would imagine my parents were particularly worried about. What I had in my mind running that distance, was this Rinkhals chasing me down, about to spit its poisonous venom into my eyes. As it turned out, the snake was actually dead and harmless (brown mole snake). My father had accidentally ridden over it on his motorbike in the farm lands and had brought it back to the house. He conveniently laid it down to rest in my bike maintenance zone!



I rapidly outgrew my mighty Colt and it got passed on first to my brother, and then down to our younger cousins. Now going on thirty, I wish I still had that bike - one of my proudest possessions that ingrained the two wheeled lifestyle into my DNA.