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I was into God when I was in high school. I was raised Catholic in a devout family that is involved in the church. In high school, I was having trouble finding friends I found interesting. Our church youth group was lead by a long-haired hippy-type named Marcus. Marcus was young and easy going and he made God seem cool. The youth group participants were mostly older than me and they were a wild bunch. To this day I will never know if they were really into God or just going through the motions, but I am pretty sure they were into God. One of them played guitar and was a writer. I thought he was great. Most of them were trying to stay or appear sober. Yeah, sober. High school fuck-ups who made their parents happy by going to youth group, got their parents off their backs and appeared sober. The thing was, they really enjoyed youth group. We sang, "Our God is an Awesome God" and they sang along. We all sang. Marcus belted it out and so did we. It was a killer God song, you know? Together we went to see Petra, my first rock concert, a christian rock band. I helped lead Confirmation retreats. We were into it, the connection to others and building of community.

Somewhere in there I started cutting and pasting together a xerox environmental hand-out. UOES~L : Underground Operation Earth Save ~ Love. Hippy shit was my thing, an extension of caring about the environment, and I just had to get the word love into the title somehow. The second UOES~L was folded into a book. A friend told me it looked like a zine her cousin Grog in Ohio did called Oxymoron. Or was Oxymoron only the name of the band he was in? In any case, this idea of a zine was intriguing and I set about corresponding with Grog and many, many others. I quickly dropped my co-editor who was unmotivated and also dropped UOES~L to start a zine called Jaundice. Before I knew it, I had a connections around the world, mostly US-Based. Mike from Sleepy Foot Zine, also out of Ohio, was older than me. He always assured me he understood, and that it would be alright. He was a really positive force in my high school years. The zine folks all were. I learned a lot from zines, they opened my little eager suburban eyes to new worlds. Though my high school friends and I had some boring nights of something like sporadic moments of fun interlaced (sitting in cheap restaurants drinking swilly coffee and smoking cigarets playing with individual creamer containers), it was in the zine world that I felt things truly come alive. Somewhere in there I stopped believing in God.

I discovered new loves. Mudflap by Greta Shred was incredible. She hand wrote shit and had impeccable penmanship. She was also into bikes. I didn't quite get it, her love of bikes, but it would only be a few years (after a move out of the suburbs of Chicago) until I would realize how utterly right-on she was. Greta wrote about train hopping. She wrote about a friend who train hopped with his bike. He rode up along side of the train car really fast and hurled himself into the car, with his toes in toe clips to pull the bike up behind him. No one believes me when I tell them this story. Greta obviously believed it when the fella told it to her, so I want to believe it too.

Zines lead me to a world of civil disobedience and anarchy. The do it yourself mentality prevails (after all, a zine is done by one's self) and I couldn't imagine living any other way. Coming from a DIY family (lock on the wallet) I was used to making something out of nothing and making something out of found materials. It was a game, it was fun, a challenge and a way of life. I learned of people making something happen for themselves all around the country. I learned about Critical Mass just a year after I discovered how incredible bikes are, which came just 1 month after I truly learned to ride a bike.

I had training wheels until I told my pop to remove them at age 6. Things didn't work out so well, but the deal with dad was that once the wheels were off, they were off for good. No pussy-footing around. I was working at it. After all, Jenny Meeks could ride like the devil and she was only 5. Jenny Meeks had older brothers. I had older sisters. I was convinced it made a difference. I was just starting to be more stable on my bike, riding up and down the three intersecting dead-end streets in our awesome neighborhood, when we moved to Illinois. My new house had a gravel driveway that came out in between two sharp turns on a 40 mph road. The road wasn't too busy, but when cars were there is was deadly to be out in the middle putzing around on a bike. Oh well, the bike went back in the garage and I found many other adventures to fill my time. I rode a few times in high school, and even twice commuted to my summer job as a day camp counselor's assistant. One of those times landed me in the hospital for getting my fast-moving wheel caught in the front of a parked truck. A few stitches sealed my knee up, but an indent remains.

When I moved out of the suburbs of Chicago, I moved to central Illinois, to the joined cities of Champaign and Urbana. I saw bikes everywhere. The bus was always full, or late, and walking was painfully slow. I was a woman on a mission, with so much to see and do and observe. I loved going to downtown Champaign to do my radio show at WEFT, the community radio station. I loved being places that most of my fellow college students never experienced. A bike was key and at some point I fled home to my parents' house to fetch my mom's white three-speed. The brakes were basically shot, and it never occurred to me to take it to a bike shop, but I rode like mad all over the area.

As soon as I read about Critical Mass in a zine in 1994 (and maybe it was in Mudflap), I sent away for a "Start your own CM" info packet. It all made so much sense and sounded like a party on wheels. Patrick was into the idea too, but he didn't want to do any of the organizing. For Patrick, anything that took work was out of the question, but he had a lot of great ideas. Together, somehow, an Earth Day CM ride was planned and 50 people showed up. We had a great leisurely ride filled with interesting conversations. Ken Gadbow, my first bike mechanic acquaintance, rode along and told me about Portland, OR, a town with streets paved of bicyclists' gold. That moment, my mind was made up. I loved Urbana but knew that one day I would leave and when I did, I would be going to Portland.

Monthly CM rides ensued. Number dwindled but we kept riding. One guy loved to ride White Street, a wide one-way next to our meeting spot. He always cried out for us to take all the lanes. We usually laughed but didn't. Though when I left town for a year the rides ended, they're now back in force thanks to some crazy bike enthusiasts who revived C-U CM in 2000.

see also:
Critical Mass Hub | Interview with Greta Shred