My Experience at The Bike Opera

I recently took The Boy to a bike auction in Minneapolis because I'm apparently stupid.

The Boy is growing, which is an apparent side effect of youth. We got him his first bike, with training wheels, and he used it for about five days before his knees kept hitting his forehead when he rode around. So we got him a bigger bike. That's the one he learned to use sans-training wheels. It also lasted about a week. Fortunately, those two weeks took up about two summers here in Minnesota.

So when he took his second bike for a spin during a freakishly warm, 55-degree April day and looked like one of those trick bicyclists you see riding teeny bikes at circuses, The Wife and I conferred and came to the conclusion that he may be in need of Bike No. 3.

But, instead of buying at a local bike shop or going to a Target or a Walmart for a new one, I decided to take him to a bike auction held by the local police department. The cops were holding their first one of the season, and I figured that my son deserved nothing more than a bike that had been abandoned, or stolen and abandoned, or thrown away, taken by some random dude, and then abandoned, and then stored in a warehouse bunched up against a bunch of other abandoned bikes.

I'll admit it: I was using The Boy's need for a bike as an excuse to go to the auction. I have a perfectly good bike, but was curious about how such auctions work. And, despite my previous paragraph, a few of the bikes on the auction's web site didn't look like they'd been cobbled together from parts found at garage sales. Some of them actually looked good.

And I had heard, over and over again, that auctions were good sources for good deals on bikes.

"Besides," I thought, "it'd be a good learning experience for The Boy."

So we went. I rushed there after work. It was cold and rainy, and I figured that most people would stay away. I was wrong. Cars were parked everywhere. A few of them were armed with bike racks. And there was a line out the door to the warehouse.

But The Boy was excited about the whole idea. Of course he was -- kid was getting a new bike. Sure, it would be used, would probably have a rusty chain and a bent wheel and smell like stale cigarettes and dirt. But it would be big, and it would be his.

The line moved fast. We got our number and inspected the bikes. The Boy picked out a couple he liked, and I looked at some I thought were nice enough to bid on. We picked our spot in the crowd. I provided The Boy with one of my Child Pacification Devices, in this case my iPod, and waited for the auction to begin.

(Incidentally, what on Earth did parents do before smartphones and iPods? I don't know if Steve Jobs has children or not and I'm way to lazy to look it up, but between the iPod and Pixar that guy has done more for parenting than the guy who invented disposable diapers.)

I had been to silent auctions, which are nice because they're silent. I hadn't been to a live auction since my childhood. All I remembered is that some dude in a cowboy hat stood in front of a bunch of other people wearing cowboy hats. He talked fast and funny, and people now and then raised their hands. In the end the hatted guy up front yelled "SOLD!" And then they moved onto something else.

But those auctions were in open areas. This was a crowded, enclosed warehouse, making it warm and amplifying the noise. And so the moment she started talking the auctioneer's voice pierced through my brain and practically knocked it off of its stem. The Boy, smartly, covered his ears. I could do no such thing, because it would be my luck that by raising my hand to cover my ears I'd accidentally end up buying a 1982 Huffy with one tire and half a rusted handle bar and no pedals.

I have no idea what language she was actually speaking, I only noticed number amounts every now and then. I wanted to pay money just to get her to stop.

I wanted to leave the moment it started. But I couldn't bring myself to do so. I might ... just ... get ... a deal.

And yet, it became clear that the auctioneer had no intent of letting people leave with a bike that was actually cheaper than it was worth. She knew exactly what she was doing. She started high -- say, $100. All of us smart people waited until it got lower. When the bidding got to $20, someone bit, and then in a split second the bidding had run up to $50 or higher. And then, usually, it kept going, almost always blowing past that high, opening amount.

Junky bikes went cheap, but anything decent fetched good money. One mountain bike went for well over $300. "I wouldn't pay $300 for any two bikes here," one guy behind me said. A few road bikes neared that amount. Schwinn mountain bikes, some of them a few years old, went for roughly the amount that you could buy the same, exact model brand new at Target. It was all I could do to keep from turning around and yelling something along the lines of, "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE???!!!???"

In reality, I was the idiot. I keep forgetting this little fact: I live in the Twin Cities. We get roughly five hours of decent weather here every year, and as such people are intent on making that five hours count. So we have lots of parks and trails and paths. We invented Rollerblades and water skiing and boat like crazy. And in Minneapolis people ride bikes. A lot. This creates an insane demand for used bikes that drives up prices. Even at a bike auction. It makes no sense buying an adult bike used.

But, of course, I wasn't there for me, I was there for The Boy, and kids bikes are always cheap, because most parents want to get them the heck out of their garage. And when the first bike he wanted was brought up front, I did my duty and waited until the auctioneer brought the price down to a reasonable level, and then I bid. Then some other loser bid a higher amount. And then I bid again. And then he bid. And then I bid. And I realized I was doing exactly what I didn't want to do -- get into a bidding war.

(Indeed, I found it really easy to get into a bidding war and end up bidding higher than you want; the auctioneer just kept looking at me, giving me that, "Cmon, it's for your KID" look.)

But I held my ground. The bidding had reached my personal limit, $55, the amount I could get that same bike off of Craigslist. And I stopped. My opponent got his bike. The Boy was disappointed, but not too much. There were other bikes, after all.

And about a half-hour later, one of those other bikes came up, a black bike that had been in almost-new condition. This time, my bidding opponent lasted one bid, and my $20 bid won the day. WOOHOO! VICTORY!

We went and paid for the bike. He got on it immediately and rode it outside, thrilled at the purchase. And as I watched him ride away, I noticed this: the back tire looked like it belonged on a clown bike. It was totally warped, something I hadn't noticed on inspection. So that's why it never got claimed. It would need a wheel that would cost more than I paid for the bike.

But The Boy liked the bike. Best of all, he kept calling the auction "The Bike Opera," which on this day seemed an appropriate title.

This Post Really Stinks

Ah, Spring in Minnesota. Thick outerwear can be shed in favor of thinner outerwear. Birds return from their southern migration. The first buds of life appear on hibernating trees. And snow melts to reveal a thick blanket of hardened road salt, discarded tube socks and defrosted dog poop.

Walking down the street around here in early April is like touring a male dormitory, only with less alcohol. Actually, it's like touring a male dormitory, if you combine it with a soggy field recently trod upon by a herd of cows with digestive problems. Only it smells worse. Apparently, nobody in this state picks up after their dogs when the weather falls below freezing in the hopes that snow will cover up their dog's mess.

This winter certainly obliged. Snow first arrived in November, and then it stuck with us for several months, refusing to go away, much like a bad chest cold or annoying in-laws. And then, last month, just when we thought the snow was gone for good, it returned for one last, irritating punch in the gut (see previous comparison to in-laws, above).

The beauty of snow is that it hides all sorts of ugliness. The worst winters are those without much snow cover, because it's not like those winters are warm. They're still limbs-falling-off freezing, but instead of a blanket of white you have to look out at a world that's brown and dead and ugly. At least the snow covers all that up and you can do things with it like make snowmen and hurtle down steep hills on cheap plastic and throw snowballs at passing cars driven by gun-toting Midwest rednecks.

Yet, when that snow goes away, all those months of ugliness return in one concentrated, smelly bunch.

All of these dog piles make walking dangerous, because all of that dog crap congregates on sidewalks and usually moves directly into my path during those few moments when my attention isn't fully paid to the few feet of ground directly in front of me. And there are few fates worse than stepping in a pile of dung--death of course, or taxes, or standing in line at the DMV, or being the victim of a terrible disease, or being locked in a room and forced to listen to "Life Is A Highway" by Tom Cochrane or Rascal Flatts (take your pick). But there are not many.

The Wife provides any walking companion of hers a 15-feet dog crap warning radius, which, while annoying, is a valuable service. She warns you, and then you do the "I'm-about-to-step-on-dog-crap" dance, only to find that the offending feces is several feet in front of you. You're relieved to avoid the dog pile, but annoyed that you looked like an idiot out in public. Looking like an idiot > having a shoe soiled by dog waste.

And you do know exactly when you do step in a dog pile, because it feels like nothing else--just slimy.

I may not like it, but I understand where all this dog crap comes from. Here's what I don't understand: What are all of these socks doing here?

The Wife and I recently took a crap-defying walk in our neighborhood and saw so many wet, dirty, discarded socks littering the ground that we could have kept an entire village from going barefoot for a month. Perhaps people get so disgusted stepping on the dog piles that they remove all of their footwear, but I see no shoes, and it's the shoes that get marked with the offensive canine waste. Maybe our town's sock-thieving gnomes get sloppy in the winter. Or maybe old socks just come home to mate every April to make baby socks.

Whatever the reason, if you're cheap and in need of socks and have a good washing machine and a tolerance for dog feces, take a walk around here every April. It's like an old sock gold mine around here. Just watch where you're stepping.