11.23.2005 | 4:20 pm
Five years ago — by which I mean “between three and seven years ago” — Utah was in the middle of a serious water shortage. This crisis deeply affected me in several ways, including (but not limited to):
- I watered my lawn only once per day, instead of the normal twice.
- I stopped going to Lake Powell, because it had dried up completely. Just kidding; it was easily still 15-20 feet deep in some places.
- My favorite mountain bike trails became incredibly loose and dusty.
These problems, however, suddenly seemed trivial when my favorite bike trail in the world — Frank — got caught up in the path of a fire that chewed up and spat out mountain after mountain near my home.
Perspective
Just so you understand how important Frank (yes, everyone I rode with spoke of this trail as if it were a person named “Frank”) was to me, I should also point out that this same fire also threatened my house. But while I was concerned about my potential property loss, my indignation — my hate-filled rage — was reserved for the likelihood that I was about to lose my trail.
And then the day came: Fire trucks and firefighters were stationed at the trailhead. Helicopters were slurry-bombing burning trees just a few hundred yards away from the ride I had done hundreds (no exaggeration, for once) of times.
There was no question about it. Frank would burn.
I Was a Bland Youth
I’m now going to shift focus, both for a break in the story’s incredible dramatic tension and to give you a little bit of my personal backstory.
I think we can agree that most teenagers express their individuation via some sort of rebellion. Here are the things I did to rebel:
- I grew my hair so far down it very nearly touched my collar.
- I listened to Oingo-Boingo and DEVO, occasionally at volumes of which my father did not approve. I also wore out (literally) a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
I bring this list up by way of demonstrating that in general, I am a law-abiding type, one who does not cause waves.
Doing What Must Be Done
Knowing that Frank would never be the same, and knowing that access was both blocked and forbidden, I did the obvious thing: I got on my bike and got on the trail anyway, using a lesser-known trailhead that had three essential benefits:
- It was not blocked by firefighters.
- It was not on fire.
- It was easily accessible, if you happen to know the trail so well that you can close your eyes and imagine the whole thing in perfect detail.
I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I was breaking the law or putting myself in danger or about anything else, really; I just wanted to ride my favorite trail one more time before the fire took it.
The Ride
I expected the smoke to be a problem, but it wasn’t. In fact, Frank seemed perfectly normal during the climb. Two switchbacks, both of which I had mastered. A hard scrabble up a loose, rocky section: I cleaned this maybe half the time (I can’t remember whether I cleaned it this day). Then, a nice, steady singletrack climb through scrub oak. Then I got to the top of Frank, a rock cairn where the fastest guy gets to sit and wait for everyone else to regroup. As such, it’s more of a throne than a simple pile of rocks.
This time, though, I was riding alone, so didn’t care about the rocks. Also, I didn’t care about the rocks because there was a fire coming down the mountain, about 300 yards (I’m guessing so wildly that I may as well be picking a number at random here) away. I couldn’t see beyond the fire to what it had done, because the smoke was so thick.
Better keep going.
Before the fire, the first part of the descent down Frank was a group favorite. How could it not be? You’re blasting through a tunnel of brambly trees. The trail, which had been nothing more than a deer track before we started riding it, was smooth and fast. There were embedded boulders and trees to dodge, but you could really open it up and fly.
And that is the real reason why this last pre-fire Frank ride is one of my favorite memories. Because after the fire, the tunnel would be gone. And then, a little while later, several days of rain would come, and without the thick brush and grass on the mountain to slow it down, the water would briefly form a running stream along this part of the trail, turning it from a hang-on-let’s-fly section of downhill to a rocky riverbed: a bumpy, rattle-your-teeth-out section. It’s still good trail, but it’s totally different.
For some reason, I get tremendous satisfaction that I was the last person to ride this trail as it was, before it got turned to a charred, stark, naked-looking thing that smelled of smoke for years afterward.
Finishing my ride, I dropped off the trail near the water tower. There were several firefighters and vehicles there, getting ready. I didn’t look at them, employing the “I don’t acknowledge you, therefore I don’t exist” technique. Amazingly, it worked. I just rode by them.
There were a couple kids straddling bikes on the side of the road, looking at me as I came off the trail. “Are you that guy?” one of them yelled at me as I approached.
“What guy?”
“The firefighters were talking on the radio a little while about some stupid mountain biker, riding up into the fire, about half an hour ago. Dude, they said you’re an idiot.”
A fair point.
And yet, this stands out as maybe the only very stupid thing I have ever done that I do not regret at all.
PS: You have one week left to enter the raffle to fight cancer and win a Superfly SingleSpeed. Click here for details on how!
PPS: My sister Jodi at Pistols and Popcorn and I are both finalists for the 2009 Bloggies awards. She’s in the “Best-Kept Secret” category; I’m in the “Sports” category. Click here to go vote for us.
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11.15.2005 | 12:32 pm
The Phone Call of Shame
I was really looking forward to my ride last Saturday. It was the first time in several weeks I’d be able to ditch my fenderized, light-laden, geared bike —in favor of my fixie, my current favorite bike.
When all your riding has been your commute, you start to forget how free a bike can feel. You forget that bike rides don’t have to go anywhere. You forget what it’s like to just carry what you need for the ride, instead of having to pack clothes and food for the day. You forget what it feels like to go riding without a messenger bag slung over your shoulder. You forget what it’s like to ride in daylight, if you live far enough north.
Foreshadowing
So, around 10:00a.m., I checked my air pressure, stuffed a Clif bar into my left jersey pocket (the one I can get into most easily), a phone into the right (I have a tough time getting into that pocket; I’ve separated my shoulder so many times it’s ruined my range of motion), and a water bottle in the middle pocket. I loaded up the new seat bag I got for this bike (thanks, Banjo Brothers) with a tube and a 16g CO2 cartridge and a twist-on valve. I had everything I needed for my ride.
Or so I thought.
Raise your hand if you already know what I was missing.
OK, put it down. I was just kidding. You look silly with your hand in the air like that.
That said, you for sure don’t look as silly as I was about to feel.
The Joy of Riding in Solitude
Not everyone likes riding alone. I do. Riding’s when good ideas come to me, or, when I’m lucky, when I stop having ideas at all. I don’t have an MP3 player; for me riding and music don’t mix.
So after a quick couple miles of descending from the Sammamish plateau, I was in farmland, riding the quiet country roads of Sammamish, Carnation, Fall City and Snoqualmie. It’s perfect terrain for fixies: fairly flat, with occasional climbs and descents to keep things interesting. The requirement of keeping a smooth cadence occupies you just enough that you start spinning smoothly, and soon you stop having the cranks reminding you that coasting is strictly against the rules.
Bliss, Interrupted
I was enjoying the independence of riding alone — exploring the area, picking turns at random, going where I wanted to go at the pace that felt right for the moment — when the rear wheel went flat.
“I need to change out these tires for Armadillos,” I thought, as I rolled to a stop. There’s so much debris on the road this time of year. I unzipped my bag and got out the tube, air cartridge, and valve.
I wasn’t upset; changing out a tube on a road bike is a quick, easy task.
Except there was one slight problem: I didn’t have a wrench.
As a rider who has never had anything but quick release skewers, making a wrench a part of my tube-change kit hadn’t even occurred to me.
In short, I had a flat, in the middle of nowhere, without any way to fix the flat.
To the Rescue
I just stood there for a minute, unable to believe my stupidity. Here I was in a beautiful place to go ride, at a beautiful time to ride, with a beautiful bike for riding. And I could not ride my bike.
That just seemed wrong.
And also, I hated myself.
Not having a MacGuyver gene, though, I couldn’t see a way around it. My ride was done, just as it was getting good. I got out my phone and called my wife.
Now, I should say that I normally really enjoy talking to my wife on the phone. We have plenty to say to each other. But whenever I’ve had to call to say I need rescuing, she knows the conversation is not going to contain lots of cheerful banter, because I am simultaneously doing the following:
- Admitting I have not prepared adequately
- Confessing I am a poor mechanic
- Showing that I am not the self-sufficient, independent soul I like to imagine myself being while I am on the bike
- Losing brownie points by the truckload, because not only am I not contributing to the care and feeding of the children at that moment, I am being yet another needy child who needs her help.
Suffice it to say: making the call for help is not my favorite thing to do.
Imagine my joy, then, when as I was talking with my wife — trying to explain the complex series of turns I had made to get onto this particular farm road — another cyclist rolled to a stop beside me and asked if I needed any help.
“Do you have a wrench?” I asked doubtfully, pointing toward my rear wheel’s axle.
He did. He did!
“I’ll call you back in a minute,” I told my wife.
Thanks, Alex
The helpful cyclist’s name is Alex, from the Netherlands. As we both worked on my first fixie tube change — which went smoothly, to my relief — he told me he’s getting ready to do an IronMan in New Zealand this March. It’ll be his first non-sprint-length tri. Good luck, Alex, and thanks for use of the wrench.
Once the tire was on, I inflated it in 2.2 seconds — I really, really love CO2 — and he took off in the other direction. I called my wife and told her that my ride had been salvaged.
$@#%!!!
It was starting to rain, but not hard: more like a humidifier set on super-duper-high. The nice thing about the flat I just had was that it happened at the highest point of the ride; I was able to get up to speed and into a biking groove fairly quickly. I cruised through farmland, spun through the town of Carnation and then through Carnation Marsh, looking for the bald eagle I sometimes see there. Not today.
Finally, I got back to Highway 202. I could turn left and head toward Snoqualmie Falls; that’s a beautiful ride. Or I could go straight and ride along Issaquah/Fall City Road. That’s steep, but another great ride. Or I could turn right and head home. I turned left; I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that much climbing in a fixie today.
And that’s when I got my second flat.
With no wrench, no CO2 cartridge, and no tube, this time my ride was over.
I could see no way out of it. It was time to make The Phone Call of Shame. I called my wife and told her I was stranded. She told me she was out shopping with the kids, but would cut it short and come get me. Which means that in addition to the other things I hate about making this call, I now got to deal with the fact that I was actually making her rejigger her schedule stop doing something productive (well, technically it was more consumptive than productive, but it needed doing) to come and rescue my sorry, helpless self.
The Theory
It would be about 45 minutes ‘til my wife would get from where she was to where I was, during which I had time to think: I haven’t always had a mobile phone. What would I have done with this situation if I didn’t have the mobile phone crutch? Walk all the way home? Maybe. Knock on a door and call my wife from there? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have done any good — in the pre-mobile phone scenario, my wife would have still been out shopping.
Or would I, perhaps, maybe been better prepared? I mean, it’s not like this was some crazy, impossible-to-anticipate emergency. A double flat on scree-rich roads is not unheard of.
Yeah, that’s probably the answer. I’ve replaced bike tools with a phone, and now I was dealing with the consequences: instead of riding, I was taking my bike for a walk. It’s not a dignified picture: a middle-aged guy in tights, walking beside his bike awkwardly because of his stiff-soled shoes and monster-sized cleats (I use Speedplays on my road bike, which are great when you’re riding and terrible when you’re walking).
The Resolution and Questions
Today, I’m buying a toolkit (including a wrench) and Armadillos for the track bike. I don’t want to have to make The Phone Call of Shame again anytime soon.
I’m sure, of course, that I’m the only one who’s had to make The Phone Call of Shame, and doubly certain that I’m the only one who’s had to make it for such a lame reason. And I’m absolutely sure that I’m the only one who has seriously mixed feelings about having a phone along for the ride at all.
Right?
PS: OK, now go vote for me.
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