Kenny and the bike ride

Kenny was a buddy with whom I shared many firsts. When I first went to school, kindergarten at East Elementary, Kenny was my classmate. When I first attended Catholic grade school, 1st through 8th grades, Kenny was my classmate. When we awkwardly tried to play football on the school team, in comically oversized pads and jerseys, Kenny was my teammate. On it went through high school as we tried to impress girls and when we drank beer under the bleachers at the football stadium. It continued in art school when we first left our parent's homes. There, the firsts became more powerful and stranger; in our first apartment where we first took drugs, where we first had sexual experiences, where we questioned and pondered and imagined ourselves artists. Throughout it all, Kenny was my companion. Then, shortly after we parted ways and he left school, Kenny was the first person I loved who died.

Losing him is not the story I'll tell.
That's the last Kenny story and the early tales must be told first.

One precious moment with Kenny was the time that he and I set out on our grandest bicycle ride yet. We left our home town for my family's cottage, around 35 miles away. Our hand-me-down, 70's Schwinns were ghastly heavy. Our legs, though youthful, were accustomed to five mile rides to the swimming hole. We thought our trip was a big deal.

On about half of our route, we rode the shoulder of Highway A, heading north towards the Wolf River and Pickerel, Wisconsin. Here, cars went fast and we had to ride single file and keep our wits about us. The rest of the ride was the opposite. Departing our town, we rode quiet roads that formed huge grids around farm fields like giant city blocks. Nearing the cottage, the roads wound through thick woods with no cars in sight. We rode side by side, shirtless on a gorgeous summer day, young, fit and free in a way that would became harder for both of us in only a few years.

The last leg of the trip was always my favorite. The spot where we'd turn onto what we called the "cottage road." The cottage road was private. It was shared by just three families and included a section that connected to a boy scout camp. It seemed more trail than road to me, with two sand strips, hard-packed by car tires, separated by a grassy hump in the middle. On each side of the cottage road there was dense forest, the tree canopy turning the road into a tunnel. And it was long; about a mile and a half from the blacktop to the river and the cottage.

Kenny and I found ourselves at the beginning of the cottage road in record time. We'd banged out the 35 miles, hardly breaking a sweat, and felt euphoric. We turned our Schwinns onto the cottage road, got up out of our saddles and put sneakers to pedals like our lives depended on it. Teenage-young-man euphoria! If we had cares, I can't remember them, but I can remember like it was yesterday blasting down that crazy road, fast as hell, with my buddy beside me. And I can remember to this day exactly which blind corner, on the cottage road full of blind corners, it happened.

Around the blind corner we came and we ran smack dab into three or four deer filling every inch of the road. Maybe scent on the wind was in our favor. Maybe our bikes were quiet, or sonically odd and non threatening to the deer. Maybe Kenny and I were all-out hauling ass through the woods, even by deer standards. Who knows? This much is sure, with an instinctual twitch of the handle bars and a little leaning, we blasted right through those deer. Both Kenny and I struck and glanced off of a deer or two. Neither of us wiped out, and no deer are harmed in this story. Kenny and I both felt the brush of fur against our half naked bodies. Deer, I'm sure, felt human teenager flesh. Kenny and I whooped like we'd just won a lottery. We looked back in time to see the deer doing their WTF look before bounding in all directions, at incredible speed, and vanishing in the thick woods.

We pulled over, roared with laughter and amazement and Kenny said something classic like, "Duuude, I thought I was gunna rush out!"