I Need a Hero, Part 2

Sorry for the lag in posting– I’ve been out camping in Eastern Washington with the outlaws for the last five days. Ben and I barely made it back last night, after the little Tercel threw a rod 60 miles north of Portland. Fortunately, his folks have 100-mile towing on their AAA, so they came and saved us: one phone call and a miserable drive through Chehalis road construction to sign the requisite paperwork in person, and they were able to get us a free ride home on a towtruck.

I had brought my bike along for the trip on a rack on the back of the Tercel, in the (unfounded) hope of maybe getting a little riding in. When they loaded the ailing car up onto the flatbed of the towtruck, I asked whether the bike would be secure there, and the driver assured me it would. The whole setup worked fine for at 70 mph on I-5, but five miles from home, we hit some rough roads in industrial NoPo. The rack, leveraging off of the car’s suspension, on top of the truck’s suspension, functioned like a catapault– only Ben’s sailor knots kept the bike from being flung right off the back of the truck. Instead, the rack itself bounced loose of its moorings, and the whole apparatus landed in a precarious tangle on the very edge of the flatbed. I’d been keeping an eye on my bike in the rearview mirror the whole drive home, and the first time the rack came loose, I yelped, jumped out and clambored up the back of the truck to reattach the rack to the car. We fumbled with the straps and tried to secure the bike as best we could. “Look,” I told the driver. “I care more about this bike than I do about the car.”

We were only a few miles from home at that point, so we tried to just take it slow, but when I saw the bike jounce violently again, and land so that it was dangling even further off the edge of the bed, I yelled, “Shit!” and lept out of the truck. This time, I insisted on riding the rest of the way home: at midnight, in the dark, wearing a dark gray fleece and flipflops, with no lights or helmet. Thankfully, the bike rode fast and smooth, none the worse for wear, and the full moon lit the whole the way down industrial Lombard, back to St Johns.

The whole experience made me glad, once again, that I do not rely on a car for my day-to-day transportation. If you’re not rich enough to afford something in decent shape (and if, like me, you have no idea how to fix such a complicated machine when it breaks), it’s a constant source of anxiety and a good way in make sure you never have much money saved for long. For the cost of a total piece-of-shit car, you can buy a top-of-the-line bike that will last you for decades.  Three cheers for urban density.

P.S. We finally located Ben’s digital camera. It was under the seat in his family’s Vanagon, where he left it during a climbing trip last month. So, contrary to widespread rumor, I was not the one who lost it, afterall. The point being that I will resume posting original photos soon.