WALDPORT, Ore. (AP) - Tourists who visit Waldport this summer will find folks from every walk of life getting around on some of the ugliest bicycles ever put into circulation.
     
The Green Bike Team is scattering bikes all over the city for anyone to ride, anytime, to any destination - no questions asked.
     
"Just park it in a visible place when you're done. That's all we ask," said John Mare, who hatched the free bike idea a year ago.
     
The sickly green color clearly designates to the public which bicycles are free to be used, and it discourages anyone from wanting to make one of these bikes a personal possession.
     
Mare and his corps of volunteers have worked through the winter to have about 100 bikes ready for summer use.
     
"The green bikes are all over the place," said Waldport resident Paul Meznarich. "They get used a ton. I've seen them as far away as Yachats. Their program is a really neat program."
     
Mare, a native of South Africa who first came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar at Iowa State University, first saw such a program in Amsterdam, and later watched one start and die in Tucson, Ariz.
     
"It occurred to me that in a little place like this, small and flat, the bikes might stay more concentrated than in Tucson, where the bikes just sort of got lost," he said.
     
So Mare bought 10 bikes at garage sales and a year ago started putting them out. Since then he's been overwhelmed with donations.
     
"We're now getting bikes every day to the point we have to be a little bit selective," he said.
     
He also realized that he didn't want to assume personal liability for the riders in his fleet.
     
"A couple lawyers told me it was not a problem, but I didn't believe them," Mare said. "Then one day I was sitting next to Senitilia McKenzie at a luncheon, and I was wondering if there might be a nonprofit where - if someone sued - the organization doesn't own anything of note to be sued for, and would take this project under its wing."
     
McKenzie, a Waldport legend, is a native of Tonga who could not speak English when she came to the United States, and subsequently has established and administers the Seashore Family Literacy Center from a former middle school building in Waldport.
     
"The moment Senitilia heard the idea she pounced on it," said Margaret Mare, John's wife. "She saw the possibilities for the kids she works with to become involved, and it's worked out really well. The community just loves the program."
     
The entrepreneurial program at Waldport High School now sends students to the Green Bike Team's shop twice a week, and the students get class credit. Besides volunteers, the program also gets community service hours that have been ordered by local courts.
     
Many of the bikes and repair parts are donated by bicycle shops and now Mare finds, when he goes to garage sales, that he usually can roll home a load of bikes for free.
     
Often the mechanics take apart three bicycles to assemble one good one.
     
"My favorites are the single-speed bikes," Mare said. "Nothing goes wrong with them. The worst are these over here, the road bikes with the skinny tires.
     
"People throw them down and bend the derailleurs, and the wheels are weak and will bend if you hit a bump. The old sturdy bikes are best, and the old three-speeds are good, too."
     
Mare believes the green bikes are ridden mostly by youngsters, but says that people in need of transportation have borrowed them for months at a time, often as a means of getting to work.
     
"There's this guy I always used to see walking - I don't know his name - but he has this bushy beard and always wears sweat pants and now I see him riding everywhere on a green bike," Meznarich said.
     
"This one guy is 80 years old and got a DUI," Mare said. "He couldn't drive, so he checked out a bike and rode it around until he got his license back.
     
"There's also a lot of people around who can't afford transportation, and we'll just check a bike out to them."
     
Meznarich, who helps coach runners on the Waldport High track team, sees the bikes as part of what he considers a missing link in the community.
     
"From a coach's perspective I've never found Waldport to be that active of a town," he said. "So I'm hoping these bikes are instilling a little bit more of an active culture in the kids."
     
Rick Hill, a member of the Yaquina Wheels Cycle Club of Newport, is the lead mechanic for the Green Bike Team. A resident of Salem for 25 years, he moved to Waldport six years ago after retiring as director of the Oregon Youth Authority.
     
"We have no way of knowing who is riding all our bikes," he said. "What we do know is that if we leave 10 bikes out on 10 street corners, then next day they're going to be somewhere other than where we left them.
     
"That tells us they're being used, but we don't necessarily know by whom."
     
Sometimes green bikes are seen in front yards five miles up the Alsea River from Waldport, then a few days later the bike will be back in town.
     
"There is some attrition," Mare said. "We have three bikes that have been seen in Lebanon, one in Corvallis, one in Coos Bay and one in Florence."
     
Mare has numbered the bikes and tracks them, sometimes losing track of a particular bike for six or seven months.
     
"Then all of a sudden it shows up again," Hill said. "We have many stories like that. Just when we've written it off, thinking it's stolen, it shows up in somebody's backyard, behind someone's fence, or in the bushes."
     
And in other strange places.
     
"I run a lot, and when I see a green bike I'll retrieve it," Meznarich said. "I'll run it back to town. I've found them along the seawall, where people have just thrown them in the ocean, and I fish them out and leave them at a bike rack."
     
Mare recalls one bike he'd crossed off his checklist as lost.
     
"Then all of a sudden a crabber called and said he'd pulled it out of the bay," Mare said. "He had this huge crab and pulled it up, and it happened to be a green bike."
     
One thing that green-bike riders don't have to worry about is head protection.
     
"We have a green helmet program, and every single bike we put out has a helmet with it," Mare said.
     
"In addition to that we have a free helmet program for anyone who walks in the door. If they want a helmet, we give it to them."
     
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)