The Kuna Parade

My Story: The Kuna Parade

 I was a senior at Boise High school in the Spring of 1984, when I went to Bob's Bikes (and Lawn Mower Repair), my local bike shop.  I needed a brake cable or something else I could barely afford.  By that time, Bob knew I was into freestyle, and he pointed a flyer out to me on the display case.  "There's a trick show over in Meridian next weekend," he said.  My mind was blown.  As crazy as it sounds now, I didn't know there were any other BMX freestylers in Boise, then a city of about 100,000 people.  "Trick riding" was morphing into "BMX freestyle," and I'd read about the BMX Action Trick Team, and guys like Bob Haro and others who did trick shows.  But none of those teams had made it anywhere near Boise.  A few BMX racers did some tricks, but I was the only rider really into freestyle that I knew.  I read the flyer, and learned that there was actually a trick team in Boise, and they were doing a show.  Mind blown.  

I borrowed my mom's car that next weekend (which always involved drama), and went to watch the show.  I was so shy then, I was afraid to talk to the two riders, who actually had a "huge," six foot high, 8 foot wide quarterpipe.  I watched the first show, sitting on my bike, my brand new Skyway T/A.  After their first show, in a bike shop parking lot, I started doing some really basic tricks on my bike, maybe 100 feet away.  A short blond woman with lots of energy walked up, and asked if I was a freestyler.  At the time, no one in my high school of 1,200 people knew what BMX freestyle was.  I told her I was, and she was super friendly.  "I'm Jay's mom, Cindy," she said, pointing to the two freestylers sitting near the quarterpipe.  You need to come meet them."  So I sheepishly followed the woman back over to the quarterpipe, and she introduced me to her son, Justin "Jay" Bickel, who was 15, and his friend Wayne Moore, who was 17, like me.  

After about 30 seconds of awkwardness, we all started talking freestyle.  I hung out the rest of the day, and by evening, we were all friends.  From then on, I started driving across town to ride with Jay two or three days a week.  Not long after, Wayne decided to "retire" from freestyle because he got a job.  Jay and I reformed his trick team, dubbing it the Critical Condition Stunt Team.  Jay's parents, the only adults I knew who thought BMX freestyle was a good thing, became my "freestyle family."  Soon I was doing shows and riding in parades with Jay, all set up by his mom, at the time.

Living in Boise, the tiny, nearby town of Kuna was best known for the Kuna Cave.  It was an ancient lava tube where people would go to party, and occasionally crawl back as far as possible.  The cave was maybe 12 feet diameter where you climbed down into it, then turned to a 4 foot tube maybe 30 yards into it.  I went there once with my Fish &Wildlife class when I was in high school.  In those days, the ladder didn't have a safety cage around it, it was just a big, metal ladder going down about 20 feet to the floor of the cave from the opening above.  The inside of the cave looked then about like it looks in today's YouTube videos, except we found a dead black cat that someone had apparently sacrificed, which is really lame.

In those early days of the 1980's, when BMX trick riding was turning into freestyle, nearly every group of riders around the country had their own trick team.  That's just what we did back then.  Of all the shows and parades we did, the one that sticks out in my mind was the parade in Kuna. Like I said above, it was best known for the cave nearby.  Every year Kuna would have a big parade, and about a thousand bikers (the gnarly, old school Harley Davidson kind, not the BMX kind) would show up in Kuna to watch the parade, and party for a couple of days.  That was a time before Yuppies entered the biker scene.  Most of the bikers were burly, blue collar workers who liked to party and occasionally fight.  Those bikers scared the hell out of me.  But that was the scene when we showed up for the Kuna parade.

Jay and I had recruited two or three other riders who knew a few tricks, and we rode down the parade route doing 360 floaters, rock walks, bunnyhops, and a trick I called "chasers."  A chaser is when you jump off the bike, and it goes rolling along in front of you, then you run after it and jump back on.  It sounds stupid, and it was, but crowds loved it.  I got to the point where I would run in front of the bike, so it was chasing me, then fall back and jump on it.  Yes, I actually practiced that trick, just to do it in parades. 

The funny thing about the Kuna parade was that the town was so small, the entire parade would follow the parade route through town, and then turn around and go back through town the opposite direction.  That's what they had to do to make the parade long enough to be worth watching.  Now, like all parades, there were horses in it.  That meant that on the way back through town, we had to not only do tricks, but we had to dodge the horse poop.  So we were all bunnyhopping horse poop on the way back.  

Also, like most parades, there was a judges stand, and that's where all the parade participants could pause and do their best performance to try and win a trophy.  On the way to the parade, Jay told me that if we got second or lower in our class, he'd let me keep the trophy, but if we won, he wanted to keep it, with the other parade trophies his team had won before.  I was cool with that.  For our big trick, we decided I would do a big bunnyhop.  Now, in those days, every rider could do both high and long bunnyhops.  But I wasn't able to bunnyhop his bike seat, the way we R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff did in the magazines.  I was better at long bunnyhops.  So we had two of the other riders lay their bikes down, seat and bars to the inside, wheels out, and I would bunnyhop over the pair of bikes.  I'd never tried that before, so we practiced it a couple of times before the parade started, and I did it no problem.

The parade started, and we took off, doing our thing.  When we got to the judges stand, the guys laid their bikes down, and I bunnyhopped the two lying bikes with ease.  The crowd went nuts.  Most people had never seen a bunnyhop then, they thought you needed a ramp to jump a bike off the ground.  To average people, it looked like magic to make the bike fly so far without a ramp.  That's the same thing I thought when I first saw a BMXer bunnyhop.  We were all stoked, and we continued down the parade route.  On the way back, we passed the judges stand for the second time, and I had the two guys lay their bikes down with a gap of two or three feet in between them.  I had never really bunnyhopped an obstacle that big before, so I got a long running start and hauled ass towards the two bikes.  Jay's mom took a photo of me, and I was pulling up as I cleared the first bike.  I went so fast that I peaked after the second bike, clearing it by about ten feet.  While it wasn't up to Mike Buff standards, it was a good 13-14 foot bunnyhop.  The crowd REALLY went nuts that time.  All of us riders were stoked, and we ended up winning our class in the parade.  Jay kept the trophy, but I didn't care, we had a blast. 

Jay's mom was our main show coordinator then, and she set us up to do two shows on a basketball court near the parade route later in the afternoon.  We set up, like we normally did, and people started to gather around as we warmed up before the show.  By the time the first show started, we had about 500 bikers, virtually all of them in black leather of some kind, watching us.  I was scared shitless, I DID NOT want to piss that crowd off.  But I had nothing to worry about.  

We went through our normal show routine, and the hardcore biker crowd loved it.  They were hootin' and hollerin' and clapping through the whole show.  To close the shows in those days, I would jump off the back of our four foot high wedge ramp... onto the flat.  I usually did what I called a "wobbly,"  where I would wiggle the bike side to side like I was out of control and about to crash, and then drop my back tire and land real smooth.  Again, the crowd went nuts.  Several of the big, burly biker guys, and their wives/girlfriends came up afterward and told us how much they liked our show.  That was so cool.  It was the best show the Critical Condition Stunt Team ever did, in my opinion. 

Then, after the show, something else happened.  A cute girl, a couple of years younger then me, came up and said "Hi."  I was totally shy then, but my bike gave me courage, and I ended up hanging out with her all day.  My first show groupie.  I was so stoked on freestyle then.  We won our class in the parade thanks to my bunnyhops, we had two shows with huge, excited crowds, and I met a cute girl.  Life was good... and I was hooked on BMX freestyle.