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An Accidental Question

I love to ride my bicycle. It is an old mountain bike, but the two of us have been through a lot so it is more of a war buddy. I was riding on a long bike path that wound through the student area of Ohio State University. It is not uncommon for me to ride to exhaustion, which, to save us all time, is foolish.

Those driving cars often treat all bikers like wobbly six-year-olds learning to ride. They see you and freak out. They either pass you, almost rubbing against you, even if you are madly peddling over the speed limit, or they ride you like they intend to bump your back tire.

I had been riding like I was trying to break the sound barrier on the bike path. Drained, there was some terrible decision making going on.

The path joined the main road for a few hundred feet and to continue on; I needed to cross the road. A car was coming towards me. They slowed up, and I slowed down even more. I was using toe cages that hold your feet tips to the pedal to allow you to lift up for power when the other foot is pushing down.

I was on the road with the raised curb to my left. The driver saw I was slowing down to almost stop, so they freaked and slowed down. At a stalling point, I found my front wheel pinned against the curb, toes locked in, and not enough forward motion to stay upright. In a comical, slow-motion fall, I crashed on my right side in the middle of the bike lane.

There I am, toes caged, legs intertwined with my bike, laying on my shoulder with my helmet brushing the asphalt. Embarrassed and depleted.

I am trying to sus out if I am hurt, when an older guy steps up to stare down at me.

He says, “Is that your boot?”

Not, “are you hurt?” Not asking if he can help. No. None of that.

Dazed, I say, “What?” Surely, I didn’t hear him correctly.

“Is that your boot?”

I am sure I stared at him with a dull look.

He points to a knee-high firefighter’s style, black boot with the gray stripe that is sitting in the road about ten feet away.

“No.”

He nods and stares for a few moments at the boot and walks away.

Why would a cyclist be carrying one very large and tall firefighter’s boot?

Slowly, I extricated myself from my bike. I stand up and see that my bike seat is broken. The top padded part has popped off the wire prongs that make up the mounting bracket. I now have four rigid wires pointing straight up. Think riding a rectangular pitchfork.

The seat will not go back on. I think it would need an industrial press to reunite them. I have a rear bike rack and an elastic strap, so I pulled on the elastic strap to make it hold on to the seat. I hear crackling, and there is no stretch. Age has made it into a slick, dodgy nylon string.

Bike seats are slippery. This one was larger than some, it has gel pads to make it more comfortable for long rides. It is heavy, and it has no holes or connection points. The brackets that normally hold it on the bike are on the bike. I try to wrap it, tie it, wedge it. Nope.

There is a bike shop on the next block. It is closed. No reason, just a plastic closed sign on the door. I don’t recall, but I don’t think I had my credit card or cash on this ride. This is pre-cell phones for most people, so no calling for help.

So, I turned around and headed six very long miles home. I am holding a triangular, slippery bike seat against my handlebars, while standing on the pedals, trying not to sit back down and get stabbed by four angry spikes. My legs were like jelly, and every time my legs faded, I got a quad nip in my butt.

After dropping the seat a few times and awkwardly skidding to a painful stop, I got home. Later, I tried to make the wires go back into the holes, but this system was part of the shock absorption, and it was a contest of who was the most stubborn. It won.

Adding insult, I took the seat apart. The expensive gel seat had a quarter inch gel pad on top and just regular foam. They put another gel pad on the bottom that you could see and touch it through breathing hold to make us think it was all the way through the seat. All the bottom gel pad did was add weight. I paid about $30 dollars more for that high performance gel.

My thirty-one-year-old mountain bike is a relic from the first days of the sport. It needs a good tune up. I have a feeling that it needs lots of repairs. I have bent the pedals pushing too hard, and it takes some patience to get it into some of the front gears.

There is some weird bond that we can get with some machines. If my drill had issues, I would buy a new one. Even cars hit a point where we dump them, even if we love them.

For me, that bike is like an old friend. Sure, one that drove my face into a wooded berm wall on a gravel road during a raging storm along Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin. I got up and checked my bike for damage first.

Not all love stories are Hallmark Romances. This is a story for another time.

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Read excerpts from Trolls and other Trouble - Book One
Read excerpts from Prophecies and other Problems - Book Two