Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance

Thursday morning opened with another bright and sunny day. This was the eleventh day in a row of sunshine. Surfers were out. The air was dry. My toes were in the sand. I sat outside with a capuccino. Vacationers, yogis, hippies, all manner of happy people went by. I resisted every temptation (there were only a few) to move.

Move, however, I eventually did. In spite of Byron's appeal I was keen to reach the Queensland border, only 50 miles away. I planned to stop for the night in Coolangatta, the southernmost point of the Gold Coast and the beginning of a stretch of some of Australia's most famous beaches.

Packing was quick (one of the benefits of going light is that you don't have much), and I clipped in for the ride out of town. I planned to take the Pacific Highway as far as necessary and then turn inland, cycling a now all-but-abandoned backroad running alongside the Tweed Coast, which would take me nearly all the way to Coolangatta.

It hadn't occurred to me to wonder about my luck with the weather so far. Aside from a couple of last minute schedule changes and an unexpected hitch-hiking excursion to fabulous Lawrence, so far my luck with the weather had been fantastic.

Murphy knew this.

After less than an hour of cycling, the inevitable started. The rain was mellow at first, but failed to let up and the traffic on the Pacific Highway grew agitated. I gratefully reached the turnoff to the Tweed Coast in short order after the wet began, and avoided the prospect of challenging drivers to an on-road duel for fair share of shoulder. Shortly after hopping on the turnoff I starting making the descent eastward toward the coast. I hit a long downhill and picked up speed.

As I wheeled through the mist on the empty road, I saw ahead of me a seemingly harmless wooden bridge. No drama, I thought. I'd passed lots of descents in the mountains and just as many bridges. But just as I was freewheeling toward the bridge at the bottom the descent I realized there was something different about this one. For some reason on this bridge the builders had left thimble-sized bolts sticking up from the wooden planks staggered in a crisscross pattern. Inevitable to avoid - car, bicycle, little red wagon, all would have hit. I nailed the first one at probably 35 mph, then the second, then so many more I couldn't count them. The rest happened fast.

While the impact wasn't enough to throw my balance, it was enough to blow both tires with the kind of sudden WHOOSH! that lets you know your luck has run without even bothering to look. I pulled over and surveyed the damage. At least the treads on the tires were still intact but the inner tubes had blown deep holes. Drat. I hopped off and set about changing tires.

Then Murphy's sense of humor really got going.

At first I was optimistic the rain would just an acceleration of the steady stream of droplets already coming down and would pass even before I was back up and riding. As it turned out, the rain came down still harder, drenching a bike and rider already slick and grimy from pulling, pushing, levering, and squeezing out a tolerable service job on two blown tubes. Since I carried a patch kit in addition to spares, I was still OK for supplies but the rain was making a proper mess of my gear. I hopped back on the bike and kept on down the road.

About 5 miles later I heard a low-pitch grumble. It was... you guessed it... another flat. By the sound though, this one hadn't been a puncture. Instead it seemed to be a slow leak. Slow leaks are the worst.

Back on two feet, I scrapped the slow leak tube (a slow leak can't be patched, making the tub totally worthless) for a punctured ones, patching the hole made by the bridge with my kit. With almost an hour of daylight lost to maintenance, I carried on down the highway until...

"Ngaraaaaaaaghhh!"

I looked down again. Unbelievable. I rehearsed the routine yet again. Step down. Lever on. Tire off. Tube out. Pump. Find the hiss. Patch. Tire on. Pump. Go.

The next happened before I even got up on the saddle.

It took about fifteen minutes for me to figure out what as happening now in this most recent exhibition of the wide world of ways to flat a tire. It turned out that the top of the valve in the tube was leaking air where a screw-in section was threaded into it. I applied all the force I could to twist the screw-in section tight. Despite the good half-cup of rain I must have put in the tube doing it, the screw-in job worked. I was rolling agin.

The constant on-and-off however, had taken its toll on my available daylight. The rain had lessened but I was still pretty well drenched, and the sun was now setting. I clipped on my night-riding lights, prepared to ride out the last 40 miles in relative dark.

Traffic, at least, had nearly disappeared and the rain had all but ceased by the time twilight turned to dark. With the moon obscured by clouds, the night was almost black. The road was earily silent, haunting almost. I was all alone in total darkness with just the sound of waves crashing only a few hundred feet away.

I rode on in the relative calm and solitude. Frustrations faded. For the first time in almost two weeks I was totally without cars. Without foreign lights. Without intersections or breaks in my rhythm of any kind. After the day so far, the experience was zen-like. Over an hour passed. Two lights appeared ahead in the road, so far off on the arrow-straight road I couldn't tell how far away. Approaching them I felt like a ghost returning to the world of the living. They turned out to be marking another wooden bridge. I passed it (without flats), and plunged into darkness once more.

When the lights of Coolangatta finally appeared, I felt a sense of tranquility that not even the remote roadways in the mountains could inspire. Neither noise nor traffic nor flourescent city lighting disturbed me. I checked in, going about the mechanics of setting up a bunk for the night with robot-like ease. I fell asleep, the sense of acquired peace taking me to Nod almost instantly.