Journey of The White Bear #7: A new hobby learned in an old trailer park

Old School BMX freestylers know the name "2-Hip" well, but many forget it started with a two man trick team in San Francisco.  Ron Wilkerson and Rich Avella, in a TV clip from 1984, the year BMX freestyle became its own sport.

 Life Lesson: Everybody needs an outlet

As my family moved from town to town as I grew up, when things got tough at home, I headed to the woods to get away.  In New Mexico, I headed to the edge of the desert.  Then in Boise, Idaho, in high school, we moved to a trailer park outside of town.  Technically, the area around Boise isn't true desert, it's steppe, but we called it desert.  Waste high sagebrush stretched for miles.  I started wandering and exploring on foot, and then on my BMX bike.  It was a Sentinal Exploder GX, basically a "Kmart special" bike I bought from a friend in New Mexico for $5 right before we moved.

All the young guys in Blue Valley Mobile Home Park had crappy BMX bikes.  Every summer evening, as it cooled down outside, we gathered to play whiffle ball, basketball, football, or to ride our BMX bikes on the little jumps some motorcycle rider had built.  As the summer passed, we got more and more into BMX.  It was simple, we all tried to out ride and out jump each other.  We began to push each other day after day.  As our cheap bike parts broke, we mowed lawns or babysat to earn money to buy better bike parts.  Or we stole them.  It was the summer of 1982, and BMX became our thing. 

In addition to hitting our little 18" high jumps to flat and carving through berms in the evenings, I rode for miles on the Jeep trails, exploring the desert.  In the beginning it wasn't about being a great rider, it was just about getting away from drama and frustration at home, and burning off the energy of a teenager. 

But it quickly became something else.  We started buying BMX magazines and reading about the pro riders, far off in California.  We found the Boise BMX track and started racing.  BMX became our thing.  We practiced racing each other and we built our jumps bigger.  We also started to learn simple tricks from the magazines.  BMX trick riding and skatepark riding was in the magazines.  Then, the next summer, my parents bought a house in town.  By that time, BMX had become my thing.

In the spring of 1984, I heard about a show of an actual freestyle team in Boise.  I went to the show, met local freestylers Jay Bickel and Wayne Moore, and soon forgot all about racing.  I was graduating from high school, getting a summer job, and planning to go to college to become a wildlife biologist.  But I spent most of my free time practicing tricks on my BMX bike.  At that time, EVERYONE thought that was stupid.  That little bike wasn't going to take me anywhere.  But it felt right to me, so I kept riding and improving.  By the summer of 1984, I took Wayne's place on Idaho's first BMX trick team.  That changed the course of my entire life, and set the stage for all kinds of adventures to come. 

What started as an outlet for frustration turned into the thing that set the course for many years of my adult life.  I followed my dreams... and that has made all the difference.