I’ve got a new story in the fall issue of Bicycling Magazine. It’s about Mike Pavlik, who recovers stolen bikes for people. You can find hard copies at Barnes & Noble, or in Airport magazine shops. I’ll link here when it comes online. For now, here’s the intro:

It was a sunny day in the summer of 2022. There were some things I had to move into the house, so I left the garage door open. I was gone less than 15 minutes.

When I came back outside, two of our family’s bikes were gone. One was an old Specialized mountain bike we’d gotten for free. But the other was a Felt Verza Speed that was my daughter’s first real bike. She’d had it barely a year.

After a brief, frantic search around the neighborhood, which only turned up one of our discarded helmets, I knew that her bike was gone, and would likely never be seen again.

I shut the garage door, went inside, and tried to remember all the things I was supposed to do. I’d already registered the Felt on bikeindex.org. So I went to the site and marked it as “stolen.” Next, I called the police and filed a report.

Then I visited the Twin Cities Stolen Bikes Facebook page and posted whatever pictures I could find of the bikes, along with the required information: model, make, color, serial number, and police report number.

For a week, I scanned Craigslist and other places online for the bikes. Nothing came up.

By then, I knew who I had to call.

I’D SEEN A STORY ABOUT MIKE PAVLIK IN OUR LOCAL PAPER, UNDER the headline, “Minneapolis Police Recognize Work of Bike Sleuths.” Pavlik, now 51, was receiving the “Chief’s Award” from the Minneapolis Police Department for his work in getting people’s stolen bikes back to them. At that point, he’d reunited 130 owners with their bikes.

The article piqued my interest because I’d had my share of bikes stolen. The most memorable was a red and white Huffy Pro Thunder that was taken from our garage in the early 1980s. It was my first bike, and I loved it more than anything I owned. Having your bike stolen is a particular sense of loss; it’s personal in a way other thefts aren’t. A bike is an intimate thing, an extension of your body. You know it in a way you’ll never know a car. Even now, 40-odd years later, I can still feel the mix of sadness and rage I experienced when that Huffy was stolen.

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