There was a time—Christ, it feels like a thousand years ago now—when summer meant something. Real summer. The kind that stretched out before you like an empty highway at dawn, all possibility and no speed limits. I’m talking about the summers of the ’70s and early ’80s, when childhood was still a country you could visit without a passport, a permission slip, or a GPS tracker.

We were feral creatures, turned loose at dawn with nothing but a beat-up Schwinn and the promise to be home when the streetlights came on.

Zen and the art of ‘bicycle’ maintenance

Your bicycle wasn’t just transportation—it was your passport to freedom, your ticket to anywhere worth going. A rusty chain, squeaky brakes, and maybe a playing card in the spokes for that motorcycle sound. That was all you needed to rule the world.

You’d wake up at nine, wolf down a bowl of Lucky Charms while Saturday morning cartoons flickered on the wood-paneled Zenith, and then vanish into the suburban wilderness until dinnertime. No cell phone. No GPS. No “check in every hour”. Your parents had a rough idea of your general neighborhood—somewhere between the corner store and the park—and that was close enough for government work.

We were like a pack of wolves, roaming the streets in shifting alliances. Tommy from around the corner, Big Anthony, Little Anthony (medium-sized Anthony). We’d meet up at the corner store, pool our quarters, and suddenly we were oil barons planning our next acquisition.

The Economics of Pure Joy

Two dollars made you J.P. Morgan in short pants. A slice of pizza at Original Pizza (the original Original, not the other new Original)— grease soaking through the paper plate—would set you back seventy-five cents. A rainbow Italian ice, another twenty-five cents of pure frozen paradise that turned your tongue purple. And if you were smart with your money, if you didn’t blow it all on Bazooka Joe and Pixie Stix, you had a quarter left over for the arcade.

Pac-Man. Defender. Asteroids. Those beautiful, primitive machines that ate quarters like hungry gods and gave you exactly what you paid for: pure, undiluted joy. No subscription fees. No parental controls. Just you, the joystick, and the kind of hand-eye coordination that could only be earned through hours of dedicated practice.

We were kings of our own small kingdoms, emperors of empty lots and abandoned construction sites. We built forts out of refrigerator boxes and declared war on the kids from the next street over. We caught fireflies in mason jars and pretended they were magical. We rode our bikes to the beach or the pier and threw rocks in the water.

The Great Domestication

But something happened. Somewhere between then and now, we decided that childhood was too dangerous to leave to children. We took that beautiful, chaotic mess of unsupervised summer days and turned it into a corporate retreat.

Today’s kids don’t have summers—they have “summer programming.” Camps with names like “Future Leaders Academy” and “STEM Adventures.” Playdates scheduled with the precision of a military operation. Drop-off at nine, pickup at three, with every minute accounted for and every activity vetted by committees of anxious parents who’ve convinced themselves that boredom is child abuse.

Walk through any suburban neighborhood on a summer afternoon and what do you see? Nothing. Empty streets. Silent playgrounds. The occasional minivan rushing some kid from violin lessons to soccer practice, the back seat loaded with enough safety equipment to survive a nuclear winter.

The kids are inside, glued to screens, living their adventures in digital worlds that somebody else designed. They’re safer, sure. Fed better, probably. More educated, definitely. But wiser? More experienced?

The Climate of Fear

Maybe it’s global warming that killed the endless summer. These days, being outside in July feels like standing on the surface of Venus. The sun doesn’t warm you—it punishes you. The air doesn’t move—it suffocates you. Who wants to ride bikes when the asphalt is hot enough to fry an egg and the humidity makes breathing feel like drowning?

Or maybe it’s the technology. Why go outside and deal with mosquitoes and scraped knees when you can explore entire universes from the comfort of your air-conditioned bedroom? Why risk the uncertainty of real adventure when virtual reality offers all the thrills with none of the consequences?

But I think the real killer was fear. Fear dressed up as responsibility. Fear packaged as progress. Fear sold to us as love.

We decided that our parents were negligent for letting us roam free. We convinced ourselves that every stranger was a predator, every empty lot a crime scene waiting to happen. We took statistical anomalies—the kidnappings, the accidents, the tragedies that make the evening news precisely because they’re so rare—and turned them into universal truths about the dangers of childhood.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Parent

So now we have a generation of kids who’ve never been truly alone, never been genuinely lost, never had to figure out how to get home using nothing but their wits and the position of the sun. They’ve never known the particular brand of terror and exhilaration that comes from realizing you’ve ridden your bike farther from home than you’ve ever been before.

They’ll never know what it feels like to find a dollar on the sidewalk and suddenly feel like the richest person in the world. They’ll never experience the democracy of the neighborhood pack, where your age, your parents’ income, your grades in school—none of it mattered as much as whether you could keep up on your bike and whether you were willing to explore that weird path through the woods that everyone said led to the old crazy lady’s house.

We’ve given them safety and structure and educational opportunities their grandparents couldn’t have imagined. But in return, we’ve taken away their summers. Their real summers. The kind that felt like they would never end, and maybe that was the whole point.

The Ghost of Summer Past

Sometimes, when the heat shimmers off the empty streets and the air conditioners hum their mechanical lullabies, I swear I can still see them: the ghost children of summers past, riding their phantom bikes down phantom streets toward phantom adventures. They’re still out there somewhere, in the space between memory and regret, living the endless summer that we all thought would last forever.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe it has to be. Because once you’ve tasted that kind of freedom—that pure, undiluted, unsupervised joy—it never really leaves you. It just goes underground, like a river running beneath the careful, scheduled, climate-controlled surface of modern life.

The endless summers are gone, swallowed by progress and fear and the relentless need to optimize every moment of every day. But for those of us who lived them, who breathed them, who rode our bikes straight through the heart of them—we carry them with us like a secret, like a scar, like a prayer for what childhood used to be. I’m not sure it was better. But it seemed to last forever and offer endless opportunities.