As quickly as my bike was dismantled, it was built again.
Lacquered in worn Street Roots stickers, the red frame of my bike was still locked to the post, but not much else. Just outside our office door, police were talking with a man who might have been the swift bike-parts thief, our street hectic with flashing lights. Scattered in the crevice of the street and the curb were bolts and brakes and brackets and bearings.
Two Street Roots vendors, Scott Mattson and Mykel Garner, jumped into action to help, scooping up the wheels from the sidewalk, and the pedal crankset. Everything was still there except the rack. I unlocked the u-lock and carted the frame inside Street Roots. For about 15 minutes, our worn wood floor could have been that of a Portland bike shop, and Scott and Mykel the mechanics.
They talked to each other with a quick-confident banter, adeptly affixing the wheels, the brakes and the pedals. They tested the gears. Their hands knew what to do, and they had words for all the parts.
“Where did you get these skills?” I asked them. Scott described how, as the youngest of six, he learned a lot of skills. Mykel told me how he began racing 20-inch BMX bikes when he was 11, living in group homes.
“I didn’t have a mechanic,” he said. “If something broke, you just fix it. Because you can’t pay someone else when you’re, like, 11 years old.”
Honestly, this feels a bit like a motto at Street Roots. If something breaks, you just fix it – and keep going. Street Roots is electrified by a can-do spirit in difficult moments. And that’s what we need so much of in this city, isn’t it?
Sometimes destruction and construction are just two sides of the same coin. We describe it as the long game. The long haul. The long arc of a human life. When we encounter someone on their worst day, their lives have a long arc of other days.
I biked to Street Roots the next day, grateful to have a bike to ride thanks to Scott and Mykel’s unhesitatingly kind response. When I arrived, I learned that a note had been tucked into the office door gate from the man who had tried to steal my bike, part by part. I knew the person – not a current Street Roots vendor, but someone not far from our orbit – and he wanted to apologize.
He had left a beautiful drawing of a rose in full bloom, with “Street Roots” curled around it. “I am so sorry. I’m not going to make any stories up or reasons why, but I am going to inpatient as soon as possible,” he wrote, neatly printed. “The drugs I’m strung out on are hazardous to just stop cold turkey so I need the help of a doctor. I hope you can understand and forgive me …”
As I read the note, I thought about how our lives are composed of many days that are less than heroic, but sometimes we strive toward redemption and grace. There is a way that we are all a part of a bigger story as city dwellers, our lives weaving in and out of each other’s.
This is why I am so proud that at Street Roots, we all coalesce around a newspaper. We believe strongly in journalism and the necessity to tell our stories. And the role, too, of journalism to tell and sometimes change the larger stories of the city.
I write this column as we launch our Spring Fund Drive – an envelope is stapled into the May 24-30 issue of Street Roots – and as always, there are so many stories to tell you. Today it is about my bike, broken into pieces that two vendors built anew, and it is about the sorrow of the one who did the breaking.
But there’s always another story at Street Roots – the privilege of witnessing human complexity. When we make a call out for a fund drive, that’s what it’s all about: keeping the whole, beautiful enterprise going and strong. I hope you can send in whatever you can, because that’s how we do this, each person chipping in.
We work hard at Street Roots with the hope that we help make meaningful encounters all around our city, both through the vendors you meet and the words of the newspaper they sell. We keep loving each other in our complex humanity.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.