In order to get free points, you must write a short story about a bicycle and its owner. The best story will be declared the brainiest.

The story of how the bike came to be in the tree is told by a retired King County deputy sheriff, Don Puz, who now lives in Kennewick. The only bike he rides now is a stationary one. He grew up on the island and lived here until 1992. Puz tells how, in 1954, his dad died in a house fire, leaving his mom with five children.

The island came together and donated various items to get the family going again.

Among those items was a bicycle for young Don. “I never liked the bike. It was like a tricycle, but with two wheels. It had hard rubber tires and skinny little handlebars,” he says. Puz says eventually the family moved to a home near what became Sound Food, but which then was a swampy area. “We liked playing there, catching polliwogs. We’d get into ponds and mud. It was a good place,” he says.Sometime in the mid-1950s, says Puz, he forgot the bike in that swampy acreage and never bothered to get it back. Good riddance.

Then, in 1995, when visiting a sister still living on the island, she took Puz to see the local landmark. “The first words out of my mouth were, ‘That’s my bike!’ ” he says. “There was no doubt in my mind.” He still holds no love for the bike or its current decrepit state. Says Puz, “A bike itself doesn’t have any feelings.”

“I don’t think I own it anymore,” Don Puz says a little wistfully, a little bit in awe, perhaps, of how time makes up its own stories. “I threw it away a long time ago. I think the tree owns it now.”