bike trip: 4

We packed up our bikes to leave the pond. The sun was by no means low, but safely out of the realm known as beating down on us. After a few pedals on my bike, I called the group to hold up. Something was making it hard to pedal. I laid the bike on its side and spun the back wheel. It made almost one revolution and then the metal of the wheel frame cozied up to the rubber brake pad and came to rest. I spun it again. Same result. It seemed a slight bit out of alignment but there wasn’t much I could do. I hoped it would right itself. I’d already had trouble with my tires yesterday.
Yesterday afternoon, I noticed my tire was very low on air. I borrowed Paris’s handy six-inch long air pump to refill it. I pinched the tire. It felt solid as rock. We drove on. In ten minutes, my wheel was soft again. I pumped it up again. Five minutes later, it was flat. I pumped it up again. It went flat. Stopping our progress every thirty seconds to pump up my tire was not the solution. We were in the relatively large town of Compiègne. We asked directions to two bicycle shops. They were both closed. We were finally directed three kilometers out of town to the commercial zone where we were to go to a Carrefour—a major mega merchandiser selling everything from frozen peas and carrots to bicycles. I found a new inner tube for my bike tire. Paris found a police siren that he attached to his handlebar. It made four sounds:
Woo-ooo woo-ooo woo-ooo woo-ooo.
Reeeeeeeee-urrrrrrrrrrrr.
Reeoo-reeoo-reeoo-reeoo.
And an ascending Woooooooooooooooooooo-oooop.
With less acumen that would be expected, the manager of the sporting goods department struggled to detach the tire from the wheel and remove the inner tube. He struggled to put in the new inner tube, which, when we attempted to inflate it, turned out to be defective. He permitted me to exchange it at no charge for another inner tube that worked. We managed to get it on the wheel, get the tired over the inner tube and pump it full and strong.
We were successfully gliding down a new highway when suddenly:
Reeoo-reeoo-reeoo-reeoo. The cops! No, just Paris, making sure his police siren works.
Woo-ooo woo-ooo woo-ooo woo-ooo. That one works, too.
Ten minutes on, I could feel that my back wheel was grinding against the road without any cushion of air. I could feel myself getting impatient with myself for slowing the progress yet again today.
“It’s the back wheel this time,” I said. “Paris, give me those tools.” I got the tire off quickly, with my ear to the inner tube, I squeezed out air to find whence came the hissing through a hole in the rubber. I found three little holes next to each other and Paris had two tire patches by which I sealed the tube. I reassembled the tire and we were on our way.
Not even twenty-four hours later, I was having another problem with the back tire. How’s it gonna be after thirty more days of travel? When I got on my bike again, my back tire was none the better for having been laid on the ground. The back tire pulled almost to a halt each time I pedalled forward. There was resistance, but I could move forward. So we went forward.

As we soldiered on through the fields of northern France, we were passed by a flock of professional cyclists, all in yellow jerseys. The Tour de France was in progress. Paris sought to entertain us by insisting these cyclists were part of the Tour de France. I managed to pick up some speed. It was around this part of the trip that Paris began to employ the phrase, “Oh, Garthy!” The “oh” was pronounced in a faux-southern dialect so that it was enunciated with double the usual number of syllables. The “Garthy” was pronounced to express something like scandalous shock to Paris’s system. A caricature of moral outrage. But the word “Garthy” was never followed by another word. So that as I rode ahead and heard Paris exclaim, “Oh, Garthy!” I always expected another thought to follow, but no thought ever did, nor precede.
Paris rang all four police sirens to let us know he needed a quick water break. It was a good idea for all of us as it was a very hot day. After a bit of water, I took another look at my tire, still leaning into the brake pad. I tried to bend the wheel in my hands to conform to the straight, centered idea I had in my mind. I stepped on one end and bent the other up. I rotated the wheel 90° and did it again.
We rode on, but now I could feel the back tire swaying left and right. It was hard to move forward and hard to stay straight.
“Finnagain, your wheel is totally wobbly,” said Paris. I spent another half-hour trying to straighten it out, but it got no better. We were thirty-five kilometres from the next town. It was Sunday evening, besides, and nothing would be open. I thought of any possible remedy, but there was nothing else to be done. Nowhere to go, but to try and go forward.
So we did and Paris stayed right behind me for concern that the wheel would collapse. Now it was bending almost like a letter ‘C’. If I pedalled hard and went as fast as I could, it minimized the effect of the wobbly back wheel. Garth rode ahead. She said she couldn’t be behind my wheel because it was so strange-looking the way it wobbled back and forth like a ‘C’ and then a backwards ‘C’ that she could not take her eyes off it. She said it was distracting. Over time, I got better at it. We rode twenty more kilometres. Eventually Paris let go of his surveillance of my back tire because I seemed to be doing fine with it. I was pedalling twice as hard as I had any time in the trip and I couldn’t catch up to Paris and Garth.
We stopped again briefly for water. Upon departure my wobbly back tire proved to be an unrelenting foe. No amount of steadiness on my part could keep it fro wobbling so low it threatened to overturn the whole bicycle. One foot forward and two feet sideways. I couldn’t correct it.
I laid the bike down to give it one more essay. I stood on the back tire. I jumped up and slammed all my weight down onto it. I rotated the tire 180° and jumped on it again. The gear mechanism began to fall out of order. I jumped on it to get it back into place. Paris and Garth stood back and said not a word. This was a private affair. Between me and my bicycle. I set my backpack aside. I picked the whole bike up over my head and slammed it down on the back tire to see if that would set things back how they used to be. I noticed I was by a field of sugar beets. I felt hungry. I tore one out of the ground and beat it onto the gears. I raised it again like a great hacking axe and stuck it down again on the gears. And I beat the bike again and again and again. I ate a fragment of the beet and offered some to Garth.
Without a word, I picked up the twisted mess of my bicycle and carried it across the road. I heaved it high and the metal crashed into the metal of a telephone pole. The bike tumbled into a ditch on the edge of a cornfield. I chased after it and heaved it into the pole again. Crash. I heaved it into the pole again. Crash. I heaved it into the pole again. Crash. Garth came to the road above the ditch with her disposable camera.
“I’m gonna count to three then throw it,” I said. “One, two, three and then throw, so click the picture on four-and-a-half to get the bike in the air.”
“Four-and-a-half.”
I grabbed the bike by the handles like a schoolmaster yanks a schoolboy by both ears. “One two three.” I heaved it into the pole again. Flash. Crash. I heaved it into the pole again. Crash. I started up the hill then changed my mind. I heaved it into the pole again. Crash!

We were fifteen kilometres from the next town. It was time to find a place to sleep. I spied a sign for an abbey. Paris and Garth walked with their bikes and I walked with my backpack, the sleeping bag banging against my butt each step I walked. Friar David and his fellow monks were most hospitable every time I stayed at the monastery and I hoped that here we might find the same welcome. The abbey was somewhere down a road that curved low around the edge of a hill. Paris and Garth went ahead on bike. I was to walk down the hill and either meet up with them at the abbey or they would find me on the way back if it turned out we were to have no luck.
I walked alone under the late setting sky. On another hill, sheep grazed along the slant that led up to an enormous silo. I pondered what more difficulties we might encounter in the next month. There is a certain helplessness you must admit when you are miles and miles away from home. The weeks ahead might have many troubles, but I would take them each in the moment they came. And every moment without trouble, there was something to appreciate. Beyond the fact that you’re not in trouble, not starving or bleeding or lost in a dark forest, you must look upon the cows, slow and patient, see the great amount of work the wheat is doing to feed you in the fall, love the season that come back every year—summer that waits behind every January, cool Octobers and Novembers that follow the summer.
I met Garth and Paris at the bottom of the hill. The abbey was a historical tourist site. There were no monks praying inside it, or charitably granting strangers a roof through the night. We pitched Paris’s tent on the bank of a canal that passed through the village. The three of us would sleep in there. In the morning, I would hitchhike to the next town and get a bicycle.

There was a payphone nearby, so I called my family back home. Everybody’s fine. The trip is wonderful. My bike broke down. I’ll get a good one tomorrow that will last more than three days.
I came back to the tent. Garth and Paris asked me why they had heard me laughing so maniacally loud on the phone.
“I talked to my brother. He said he accidentally shit his pants at work the other day.”