By KIRBY NEUMANN-REA
News Editor
August 8, 2007

Friendship frequently travels on two wheels, as any rider of a bicycle or motorcycle can attest.

On the fly Aug. 4, Lynn Frost saw that fact renewed. Thanks to a friend she had not met, Andrew McElderry.

During the fire Frost, who lives at 30th and Eugene, took her daughter, Elizabeth, 2, to the safety of a friend’s house on May Street, then ran back home to hose down her home and neighbors’. “People were telling me, ‘You can’t go through,’ but I said, ‘I need to go back and water down my house.’

“A man was standing there, on his bike, and he said, ‘Can I do anything to help you?’ I said, ‘Give me your bike,’ and he said, ‘Take it,’” Frost said. She hopped on the mountain bike and called out “30th and Eugene” so McElderry would know where to collect it, and rode off. McElderry lives nearby, on Rocky Road.

“I went barreling down, and threw the bike in my yard, thinking he’d (McElderry) walk down and get it,” but two days later Frost called the Hood River News asking to put out the alert to whoever owned the still-unclaimed bicycle.

“I also feel bad some poor soul is without his bike,” Frost said.

“At that time it was a wall of flames… I couldn’t think straight.”

Monday, McElderry came for his bike. He had tried once on Sunday, but saw no bike, and returned Monday, but he told Frost there had been no need to worry.

“It’s just a bike. She needed a bike. It’s a pretty elemental thing,” said McElderry, who owns Hood River Cinemas and Skylight Theatre and Pub.

“That fire was so scary to me. The Caldwells were in my thoughts; all I could think of was what’s going on with Stonehedge,” he said of the fire-threatened Stonehedge Gardens, owned by Mike and Shawna Caldwell.

“I knew the bike would get back to me but I really didn’t care,” he said.