1745twobikes /1500 words
Two bicycles and love
by
Harley L. Sachs
When I first saw Ursel Mathilde Hintz she was a South Schleswig girl of Danish extraction with a
German passport. She spoke no English and was working as a shop assistant in a
Konsum grocery store on the ground floor on Rindogatan in Stockholm . She was a lapsed Lutheran.
I was an American expatriate with a master’s degree who
eked out a sort of living teaching English as a second language, two three
month terms and two paychecks a year. My GI Bill had run out. I was also
working under cover for the CIA. I was a secular Jew.
The only thing Ursel, known as Ulla, and I had in common
was we loved to bicycle. At Indiana University I rode one of only three
bicycles on the campus. Ulla had used a borrowed old fashioned bicycle to ride
from her job in Sonderborg , Denmark to her home town in Germany .
In Stockholm neither of us had a bike.
After three years in Sweden , starting at the International Graduate School , I spoke Swedish. Ulla, having
gone to Danish school after the war, spoke Danish and soon learned Swedish, but
had not lost her accent.
When my number came up to be served at the Konsum
store Ulla asked, in the formal Swedish
used in those days, “What does the gentleman wish?”
Struck by her accent I asked in the same formal way, “Is
the young lady Danish?”
She blushed and I was hooked. In the land of free love
and open marriages, Swedish girls did not blush. She struck me like a rose bud
soon to flower in amazing ways. I wanted to be part of that. She was smart and
adventurous. Wow!
It took a lot of persistence and the promise of American
apple pie, home baked by this ex-GI, before she would go out on a date. She was
independent and always insisted on paying her own way. For a guy who was paid
only twice a year that was a good thing.
Our common languages were Swedish and German. Besides the
movies, theater, and walks we soon talked about our bicycle days. I had learned
that to keep your under cover informants happy in the spy business, you never
forget a birthday and always remembered gifts. I bought Ulla a pair of figure
skates that winter and got her a student discount on a radio. We had become a
couple.
I bought two used
wheels with pretty bad tires. The OK needed a generator and light. The women’s
Crescent had a generator but no light. Both were, of course, one speeds with a
coaster brake.
I could not have afforded a new bicycle, or even a used
one, but with two cobbled together bikes, we were in business. When I gave Ulla
her bicycle, she was delighted. I knew then that she would marry me.
Ulla’s father was a boat builder and I had always wanted
a sail boat. Every weekend we would ride those old bicycles to another of Stockholm ’s many harbors and boat yards in
search of a boat. I hoped that the money I had earned working under cover would
be enough. It wasn’t but in the meantime we had fun looking. We even tented one
night at Drottningholm on Lake Malaren , taking along a couple of toy
sail boats.
Having lived through the war, Ulla was not spoiled by
prosperity. Bicycling, tenting and sleeping rough wherever we could pitch the
tent were just fine.
So we fell in love in Swedish and were married in German
because her father came to the synagogue wedding and that was his language. Most
of our Swedish friends in attendance hadn’t a clue as the service was in Hebrew
and German.
The bicycles were integral to our lives and our
relationship. When we got married in May, 1960, it was the most natural thing
for us to get on those old bicycles and head out, destination uncertain. Naturally,
being a wannabe author, I brought along my Underwood portable typewriter on a
special cargo rack over the front wheel. It was a heavy load.
We were quite a sight. Laden with everything we needed:
tent, cooking gear, sleeping bag, road maps, and food, camera, and the
typewriter, we peddled from Copenhagen through Germany and Holland to the Belgian Channel ferry to England .
Fearful of the traffic on the London-Dover road, we sent
the bikes by rail to London and hitchhiked to the city. Once
there and with the bikes retrieved, thanks to a good map of England we discovered the Old Foss Way , a Roman road, straight to Nottingham where I had relatives.
My OK bike was not that OK, for the kid who had abandoned
it had messed up the rear wheel spokes. It turned out that the number of spoke
holes in the hub was not the same as the wheel rim. The spokes were not in the proper
order, so were stressed, sometimes to the breaking point. I grew accustomed to
replacing broken spokes. I soon ran out of spares and had some made at a shop
in Uxbridge.
The rear wheel was also not perfectly round, so had a
hump. This wasn’t noticeable until coasting downhill you got a bump-bump ride.
The chain guard rubbed against the crank, so it was scrape-scrape with every
push.
Ulla’s bike, however, ran like a Swiss watch.
The two bikes were painted the usual black with a bit of
white on the rear fender. By today’s standards, they were heavy but nearly
indestructible.
We spent the honeymoon winter of 1960 at Borthwick Castle where we used the old Swedish
bikes to get from the gatehouse up to the Galashiels road and the bus to Edinburgh .
In the winter we lived there Ulla, always brilliant and
determined, taught herself English while I struggled with a bad novel in what
had been a cannon port in the basement. By the time she had our first baby her
English was fluent.
When I got a contract for a year in Denmark , we had to first store our
belongings. Our possessions which had
been in storage in Stockholm , came to Borthwick in an
enormous crate. What about the bicycles? They were part of our life. I didn’t
want to abandon them. By careful measuring, I managed to disassemble them and
fit them inside the crate with boxes of books, footlockers with clothes, etc.
When we later arrived in Denmark for a year we were reunited with
the bikes. They were our transportation in that city of bicycles. I rode eleven
kilometers from Hvidovre to the university where I learned Danish. So now we
had four languages in common.
By the time we were leaving Denmark , we had an old VW kombi to ship
back to the United States . The freight company allowed us
to pack the bicycles inside the car.
Unwilling to part with them, we carried them on the roof
of the VW all summer in 1964. By then we had two daughters. The youngest,
Belinda, fit into the bicycle basket on Ulla’s handle bar while Anna-Lena, our
three year old, rode on the kiddy seat bolted to the frame.
The bicycles were part of the family, integral to our
history and our romance. When we acquired water front property for camping not
far from a beach, the bikes were our transportation.
We kept them even when Ulla, who fell in Florida , stopped bicycling, and my legs
at age seventy were giving out.
After our fiftieth-fourth anniversary when it came time
to move to Oregon , we sold all our Michigan property. What about the bikes?
By now they were genuine antiques. So
were we.
I was afraid, when we sold our camp site, the bikes would
end up in a ditch beside the road to be taken to the junk yard. I gave our
mouse infested Shasta trailer to a young man who, it turned out, collected
bicycles. He wanted them.
Those two rebuilt junk Swedish bicycles had carried us
across Europe , through our honeymoon in Scotland , our sojourn in Denmark , and back to the United States . Parting with them was poignant,
but I know they found a good home.
Nothing lasts. I miss the joy of bicycling, the singing
sound of the Swedish knobby tires on wet pavement, the wheee of coasting
downhill. Ah, but at 86 my legs have given out. The bikes lasted longer than my
legs, but the memories linger on. Ah,
those memories.