The Coyote's Bicycle (24 page)

Watching the film again in the 2010s, it seemed a little too familiar—the universals of hope and personal isolation in economic conditions wrought by a mad, wheeling world too big to understand. I pressed pause frequently. I stood. I paced. I saw myself in Ricci. And I returned to the narrative of
The Bicycle Thief
specifically, and only, because right there on its surface was another universal experience, one repeated every two and a half minutes in America alone: missing bicycles.

In England's Selby train station, a man wearing a high-visibility vest like those of other rail staff stepped up to a crowded rack of bikes. He disabled the lock on one, threw a leg over its saddle, and casually pedaled off. Neither the man nor his actions were noticed until police reviewed their security footage. The man in the fluorescent orange vest with bold reflective stripes happened to be the British Transport Police's most-wanted suspect in bicycle thefts across Northern England.

In July of 2012, looking to stanch a rise in cycle thefts, San Francisco police took the extra-normal step of responding to suspicious online ads. They followed leads through layers of informal sales—which eventually brought them knocking on the door of eighteen-year-old Irving Morales-Sanchez. “Officers said they found
eight bikes in his kitchen,” reported the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “A search of two storage lockers he was renting in Oakland turned up 106 more bicycles, 80 tires, and a frame.” Morales-Sanchez's public defender claimed it was the family business—the restoring and reselling of bikes, that is. Family members said they didn't know the bikes were hot. Reporters following the case seemed to enjoy pointing out that San Francisco bike thefts dropped precipitously after Morales-Sanchez's arrest.

In 2006, a North Vancouver man established Bike Rescue, a not-for-profit organization with a mission “to locate and return lost or stolen bicycles.” Founder Gordon Blackwell purchased bikes in shady parts of town at rock-bottom prices. If no legitimate owner claimed the bikes in thirty days, he sold them at near market value “to fund the operation.” In 2009, Canadian Mounties raided the Bike Rescue facilities and seized 153 cycles. Blackwell himself was arrested in January of 2010, after which he pleaded guilty to fencing stolen property. He was out on parole in 2012 when Mounties, operating on tips, again discovered twenty grand worth of high-end bikes and parts in his new residence. Blackwell told media reporting on the case, “You know, you guys are going to undo all the good I do.”

That summer Alyssa Chrisman rode her Giant touring bike 4,179 miles from sea to shining sea—a North Carolina-to-California run. The Central Michigan University student had joined a group of cyclists on a fund-raising ride for an affordable housing organization. The journey was meant to culminate in the sunny beach city of Santa Cruz. But the cyclists stopped briefly in Davis, California, to celebrate the college town's famous bike culture. There, Chrisman locked her bike with two others outside the Bicycling Hall of Fame and stepped in to learn a famous bicycling lesson. When she came out, her Giant was gone.

There is something cosmic about the completion of a bike chain's cycle through gears and sprockets—the full rotation of the tire, the
endless looping and traveling only to return to the point of departure—that makes the bike a fabulous vehicle for irony.

During World War II, the automobile assumed total dominance of American streets, and bicycles were increasingly considered toys. Since then, there have been two major moments in one's trajectory via machine: when your training wheels are taken off, and when you dump your bike altogether in favor of a car. But there is also a rarely acknowledged third universal that occurs between losing the training wheels and gaining the car, and it is the loss of a well-loved bicycle. Death, taxes, and missing bikes.

In various ways, most of us are complicit.

At twenty-four, I attended a party thrown by a popular friend. It was loud and crowded and fun. The crew knew a lot of people from a lot of dodgy places and they were all there having a good time. Late the next day, almost as an afterthought, the host, Derek, called around asking if anybody had ridden his bike home. It was an average black beach cruiser distinguished only by the menacing character of its patina. The flat black spray job and rusted spokes and nicks and wear made the bike look like it belonged to the neighborhood creep. None of Derek's acquaintances admitted to borrowing the bike, and as he was leaving town for a few weeks, he didn't have time to go looking for it.

A couple of days later, I was driving my squeaky '68 Mustang up a residential hill in another part of town when I ran out of gas. I parked the car, popped the trunk, found the familiar red gas can, and started walking. A block down the hill, my eyes happened to peer into a fenced yard, and I saw what looked like Derek's beat-up cruiser—its nicks and wear. I set the gas can on the curb. I gazed right, then left, and jumped the fence. Snatching the unlocked bike by the frame, I hoisted it over. With a pop from the ankles, my feet lifted, following my hips, knees, and shins right on over and onto the
sidewalk. The downhill getaway went as smoothly as the bike's bent rims allowed.

While the cruiser sat in my kitchen waiting for Derek's return, however, I really began to think about the act. In California, there's nothing more common than an old beach cruiser.
Was
this the missing one? Or did I steal someone else's wheels with belligerent ease? If so, the act came to me, well, like riding a bike. I considered returning the hot property to the fenced yard. But I knew that returning to the scene was as dumb as committing a crime. My pretensions of righteous revenge on Derek's behalf were really beginning to deflate.

So when I heard that he was back in town, I gave Derek a call and asked him to come over. Once he was in the living room, I asked Derek—who wore, weirdly, a shimmering blue 1950s-style sharkskin suit—to have a look in the kitchen.

“Oh, you fucker,” he said. “
You
stole my bike.”

“Yeah,” I said, relieved that he recognized the cruiser. “The second time.”

I quickly told the story using my hands and elbows and arms and legs. Yet Derek seemed vaguely, amiably indifferent to the feat—even as he wheeled his cruiser out the front door. “Cool,” he said with a wave. “Thanks.”

It is a nothing story, really. But when I think of the somersaults of identity I'd have endured had Derek not accepted ownership, I pause. I scheme on how I would have returned the bike to its owner. Maybe this would be an even more noble gesture than liberating it. At night. Over the fence. Through the gate. Would it be more honorable to knock on the door and explain the situation? No, I've pictured the owner's face. It's not pleased. I would not knock. In fact, I likely wouldn't have returned the black cruiser at all. Too ashamed to admit guilt and too chicken to ride the bike about town, I'd have let it rust in the side yard.

More painful than imagination, however, is that my friend Derek died unexpectedly within the year. And in thinking about him, and retelling stories about him within our peer group, I've realized that as electric a friend as he was, the energy one felt in his presence came down to the fact that he was also an insanely inventive and chronic liar—a quality I don't begrudge in the slightest. But in memory, I do examine the look Derek shot me before walking out of my apartment with his beach cruiser. The weak smile tells me something different on each recall. I revise this story often—for myself, for others. But in the bedrock of the deed, I think I stole somebody's bike.

Many of the Tijuana River Valley residents I spoke with concerning the bicycles came to the obvious conclusion that the bikes were stolen from someplace, maybe by the individual migrants themselves. David Gomez noticed a sticker on several bikes that indicated they'd originally been sold by a shop in nearby Coronado, a wealthy enclave just to the north. The fact that these bikes had been crossed into Mexico and sent back to the United States with a migrant on top suggested to him that the Coronado bikes, at least, had been pinched for that specific purpose. Cars, trucks, and vans stolen along the border end up in Mexico with such regularity it's taken almost as a migratory pattern. Why would these bikes, or anything on wheels in the Southwest, be any different?

State parks ecologist Greg Abbott was convinced that the bicycles were caught in an eddy of some sort, circling through border defenses and then back again through the commercial lanes into Tijuana—riding in trucks packed with used couches, refrigerators, mattresses, and plush animal toys—in an unbroken cycle. Abbott was an old hand in Mexico, and knew it well enough to feel certain that the bikes were not from there.
Tijuanenses
liked to bike about as much as they liked to swim, which wasn't very much, by the former lifeguard's estimate. In direct observation, however, he saw only the
northbound tracks of the migrant bikes' movement. Where they'd originated from, empirically speaking, he couldn't say.

Terry Tynan claimed that if he came upon a bike that exhibited a licensing sticker of some sort, he'd just “leave the bike in the dirt.” He didn't want to end up with obviously stolen merchandise on the ranch. I think what he meant was, he didn't want to harbor stolen merchandise that was easily traceable. But, even as I listened to him say this—my feet in the dirt and the sun on my face—good sense told me that the statement slipped past his cracked lips as one of those obfuscating gushes interview subjects emit in an almost nervous twitch, like a squid escaping behind its ink cloud. It is human nature to talk; eventually everybody does. Terry loved to talk about his bikes but having done so, it seemed, he wanted some portion of the story back. After searching for bikes with Terry and later talking to his neighbors, I knew it was not in his nature to let a bike lie, any bike.

The sense I got from this obsession struck me as the same as when an unknown dog appears and takes up residence on your property. You've got good food and a nice spot to rest, so the dog stays. She's streetwise and knows a good thing. Months go by, and hey, you didn't steal the dog. It's the animal's own choice. You like her; maybe the old family didn't treat her so well. The fact that you never advertised finding the dog, or even asked around—the fact that you're covetous of the dog and have renamed her—is beside the point.

Yet, in Terry's growing collection, in his increasing abilities to track and scavenge and sniff out bikes, the scenario of the dog was repeated over and over. And of course, after she had hung around long enough, he didn't have a problem selling the dog either.

“To me, it didn't seem like it was that organized,” said
Union-Tribune
reporter Janine Zúñiga. In conversation, she indicated that the Border Patrol didn't appear to feel that way either. In her piece,
Zúñiga quoted Border Patrol spokesman Jerry Conlin as saying, “For [migrants], it's a quicker means of getting from point A to point B on that type of terrain.”

But the sheer numbers suggested something more than convenience. In colloquial shorthand, the Border Patrol calls a group crossing here or there a “onesie” or a “twosie.” No big deal. But if you multiply a group of fifteen, which many observers have seen, times 365 days in the year, you get 5,475 migrants crossing undetected in one five-mile stretch of the border. Multiply this by the two and a half years it had been going before I ever caught wind of it, and you get 13,687. These are outside numbers, of course. But even at half that rate, the volume of bicycles alone presented one hell of a sourcing problem. Were dozens of migrants from southern Mexico and Central America gathering in Tijuana daily and randomly deciding to cross this craggy landscape by bike? And if so, did they then scour the city for reasonably priced wheels? After two-plus years of cycle crossings, could there possibly be any unwanted bikes left in Tijuana? How was it possible, then, that reliable bicycles were made available to the migrants on a daily basis? Could it possibly be true that a central organizing figure, or group, was stealing bikes from the United States and importing them to Tijuana for that specific purpose?

“I do remember talking to the Border Patrol about whether the bikes were stolen or not,” Zúñiga said. She reported that agents inspected bikes for details that might indicate whether the vehicles had been used to smuggle drugs—in the tubing or tires, for example. No drugs were found. Then the Border Patrol researched the serial numbers on all of the bikes the agency took into custody. No evidence of theft was suggested by those checks, either. “But, yeah,” Zúñiga said on recollection—she'd lived in Mexico City and knew the border culture as well—“they were definitely US bikes.”

There is not a lot to learn from the serial numbers that manufacturers stamp onto the frames of bicycles. In code, some will relay the
production year, the model, and the factory in which the bike was built. Each manufacturer uses a different method in formulating a serial number, so there is no set sequence. And some numbers may not relay even the basic information. Serial numbers are there mainly to reunite an owner with a lost bicycle. But law enforcement does not keep a national database of serial numbers, either of the bikes they've impounded or of those reported stolen. A private enterprise called the National Bike Registry (
NBR
) charges owners ten dollars to register their serial numbers online, and if a registered bike turns up after being stolen, law enforcement can access the information attached to that serial number. The
NBR
claims that 48 percent of stolen bikes are recovered by law enforcement, but only 5 percent are returned to an owner. This is because, they say, most owners never register their serial numbers or even write them down. Unless Border Patrol agents at the Imperial Beach station accessed the
NBR
archive and punched in the serial number of a bicycle registered with the
NBR
by an owner—in the past ten years—it is likely that number wouldn't have told the agents more than they could gather by looking at the bike itself.