Forty years ago, in 1970, little Lisa Brown was riding her totally rad banana-seat bike through the woods of Cape Cod. She approached the Herring River, but the only way to cross it was a rickety plank board bridge. When Brown started out on the bridge it was two feet wide, but halfway across it narrowed to 12 inches, and she had to turn just a little bit to stay on track.
In a split second, she was in the river.
“I went in with the bike, I floated to the surface, I kicked away from the bike, and I must have pushed it down way into the mud,” she told Cape Cod Times.
Brown came out “smelling like a snapping turtle,” and her bike was nowhere to be found. Until one recent day, when her wife Deirdre spotted a glint of metal off a nearby path.
The vinyl banana seat, you’ll note, is still intact. Deirdre laughs that the vinyl is “the toxic waste of the world.” But in this one case, at least, its indestructibility has led to a reunion of woman and (definitely no longer rideable) bike.
“It was like finding a long lost friend,” Brown said.
