On September 11, 2001 a Washington Post reporter named Sally Jenkins was trying desperately to reach the still-smoldering ruins of the twin towers, in the heart of New York City. All civilian vehicles were blocked, save for the "noblest invention," the bicycle. Jenkins found a bike shop, but all the rentals were taken. Recognizing, perhaps, both the urgency felt by the reporter and the historical moment, the shop owner wheeled out a bright yellow ten speed Schwinn. (Although the reporter never identifies the model, in my imagination it has to be the ubiquitous Schwinn Varsity). Jenkins would ride the yellow Schwinn to the epicenter of the greatest tragedy in modern American history many times, reporting on the fallen, the first responders, the ghostly forms of dazed New Yorkers covered in gray ash.
On the 20th anniversary Jenkins recalled her experience of 9/11 through the lens of a cyclist on a mission. Her article in the Washington Post is entitled "Beneath 9/11's Terrible Smoke, a Flash of Gold." It begins: "After the shroud rolled over the day, I remember just one dash of color in the pall, a smear of bright yellow. It was an old Schwinn steel-frame racing bicycle, and it moved like a canary in the smoke. The bike, like all bikes, was an escape, the ability to get somewhere under your own power, fast, to carve turns and pick your own lane through obstacles. But it represented something else too, that bike, as indefinably sweet as a wildflower growing in the sidewalk."
I urge you to read Sally Jenkins' brilliant essay in its entirety online. Suffice it to say I was so touched by Jenkins' "Flash of Gold" essay I decided then and there to add to the collection the 9/11 Yellow Schwinn tribute bike you see here. The tribute Varsity is all original, save for the alloy "Continental" stem, an upgrade available from any Schwinn jobber of the time. Thanks to Bill Smith, James Allen, and Charlie Dixon for helping bring the bike home in this condition.
What does a common, outdated yellow bicycle "mean," if anything? For Sally Jenkins the American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Jay Gould says it as well as the unsayable may be said: "Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus. in what I'd like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness...Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one."
In her conclusion Jenkins says "So I honor the man in the bike shop who provided free-handedly a yellow Schwinn with creeeeeking brakes, gave respite to a footsore witness of the worst day ever and helped her get from the malevolent smoke into the clearer air."
After reading Jenkins' Washington Post article, thanks to the power of the word, it is almost as though I too rode a bicycle through the smoke of 9/11--and I will never look upon a common yellow Schwinn bicycle in the same way again.
On the 20th anniversary Jenkins recalled her experience of 9/11 through the lens of a cyclist on a mission. Her article in the Washington Post is entitled "Beneath 9/11's Terrible Smoke, a Flash of Gold." It begins: "After the shroud rolled over the day, I remember just one dash of color in the pall, a smear of bright yellow. It was an old Schwinn steel-frame racing bicycle, and it moved like a canary in the smoke. The bike, like all bikes, was an escape, the ability to get somewhere under your own power, fast, to carve turns and pick your own lane through obstacles. But it represented something else too, that bike, as indefinably sweet as a wildflower growing in the sidewalk."
I urge you to read Sally Jenkins' brilliant essay in its entirety online. Suffice it to say I was so touched by Jenkins' "Flash of Gold" essay I decided then and there to add to the collection the 9/11 Yellow Schwinn tribute bike you see here. The tribute Varsity is all original, save for the alloy "Continental" stem, an upgrade available from any Schwinn jobber of the time. Thanks to Bill Smith, James Allen, and Charlie Dixon for helping bring the bike home in this condition.
What does a common, outdated yellow bicycle "mean," if anything? For Sally Jenkins the American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Jay Gould says it as well as the unsayable may be said: "Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus. in what I'd like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness...Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one."
In her conclusion Jenkins says "So I honor the man in the bike shop who provided free-handedly a yellow Schwinn with creeeeeking brakes, gave respite to a footsore witness of the worst day ever and helped her get from the malevolent smoke into the clearer air."
After reading Jenkins' Washington Post article, thanks to the power of the word, it is almost as though I too rode a bicycle through the smoke of 9/11--and I will never look upon a common yellow Schwinn bicycle in the same way again.
The 9/11 Yellow Schwinn Tribute Bike ©Daniel Dahlquist