Kids, Bikes, and a Good Mystery

When I was a kid, a bike was a total ticket to freedom in a way I can't imagine it being for A or any of her friends today.

We used to take off on our bikes and go to friends' houses, friends of friends houses, to the store to buy junk food, change our minds and go anywhere else we felt.  If something ever happened, I know for a fact that my parents wouldn't have the slightest idea what "route" I had taken.  I didn't even know myself until I was on it!

Seemed pretty normal "back in the day" but I know I wouldn't be able to breathe if I'd just sent A out into the wild suburbia for hours on end without any idea at all where she was.  And I seriously doubt any of her friends' moms would either.

Partly, I know suburbia is less "watched" than it was in the 1970's when parents and "empty nest" housewives were all over and keeping an eye on things.  But I also suspect it's partly also just a bigger awareness of what could happen that makes parents from 1980-ish onward a lot more careful/fearful.   Sarah Pryor would have been 35 this year--that thought alone is enough to make me want to tail A everywhere she goes from now right through to adulthood, possibly beyond.

Many of my favorite childhood books featured bike-riding heroines who got into adventures that made for good plots precisely because they were unwatched and free into the world on their bikes.

fenders? check! chainguard? check! basket? you bet!

Just wouldn't be such a good story if Trixie Belden suspected someone was the thief but her Mommy wouldn't let her near the crime scene, would it?


And it's not just our side of the Atlantic, either.  When I was in England in 1990, the kids I was in school with all regularly joked about the Famous Five book series, which, as I understand it, involved 4 kids and a dog getting into and out of scrapes often while dashing across the countryside on their bikes--refreshed afterward, of course, by "lashings of ginger beer."

I should probably try to Inter-library Loan those--I bet A would get a kick out of them.

The bike = freedom + adventure is obviously not just an American thing.  Wonder if Jamie Oliver would be working with such purpose on school lunches and school dinners if we still lived that way?

Nancy Drew was older, more sophisticated, and had her roadster, of course, but most other mystery series of this kind had some kind of bike adventure going on.

The Boxcar Children did (after they stopped being orphans alone in the world, of course)

The Bobbsey Twins did, too.

Encyclopedia Brown?  Yep.

Trixie has been republished and A loves the stories, but I suspect they feel a lot less possible, less reality based (given the right criminals lurking around, at least) to her than they did me at her age.

Books set in "olden times" still feature bikes, Molly (1940's) and Julie (1970's--cringe) from American Girl ride bikes and Samantha (1900's) learn to ride a bike as a metaphor for gaining some independence in a parallel for the changing rights of women in her time.

Right now, it seems like most popular new children's books (for kids 9-13, not talking picture books) are science fiction/fantasy.  Harry Potter's popularity obviously had a lot to do with that, but I wonder how much Harry Potter and the others gained popularity because for today's kids a real adventure requires a made-up setting?