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Sabotage! "Everything is funny as long as it
is happening to someone else." I was cotton-pickin' sabotaged in Cotton! Leaving our bikes out front at a gas station without a second thought, we went in to buy some energy food (that's what I call junk food while on tour). Back outside, we spotted lounge chairs on a lawn across the way. Relaxing in back-supported comfort, we savoured our calorie-laden purchases. The only problem: an ice machine blocked my line of sight to our bikes. But no worries - I imagined Cotton to be a typical crime-free small place. I believed I could have left my bike for a week and found it right where I had left it. Finished our snacks, we traipsed across the sunburnt grass and collected our bikes from the exact spot we had leaned them an hour prior. Back on the road, we hadn't gone more than a hundred metres when I clacked over a gaping frost crack in the road surface. A disturbing clank emanated from my rear rim. "Flat!" I yelled, and pulled on my brakes. Sharon stopped beside me. "Yep," she acknowledged, frowning. "Both of them." Huh? Dang! She was right. Both tires were flatter than month-old roadkill. How had that happened? My tires had been holding air just fine before we stopped. I suspected foul play. Had someone at the gas station played a mean trick on me? With that hulking ice machine blocking our view, was it possible some wily character had surreptitiously liberated the air from my tires? I grabbed my Zefal pump and flailed away, jacking the plunger up and down like some delirious one-armed wanker with a new issue of Hustler. But air was releasing faster than I could pump it in. Conceding defeat, I ripped out the inner tubes. Two holes, side-by-side, looking like a rattler's fang strike, accentuated both lifeless bulges - even the "flat-proof" tube in my rear tire sported a matching pair of snake bites. "Well, I guess that's a wake-up call," I mused, fingering the holes. "If someone had enough time to let the air out of both of my tires, they could just as easily have stolen my bike. From now on, no matter how small the place, I'm going to lock them." "Good idea," Sharon said. She had been trying to persuade me to lock our bikes for the past month. Fresh tubes installed, we lit off down the highway as if we were a couple of rabbits being chased by hunting dogs. In a few kilometres, my rear tire suffered another inexplicable debilitating lack of confidence. Bumping to a halt on the road's edge for the second time in less than an hour, I fumed, "Rear flats are the worse!" "Yep," Sharon agreed. "And, because most of your weight is on the rear, that's where you're most likely to get them. Look at the bright side, though," she said, "at least it's not raining." The sun's naked glare reflected off my spokes as I laid my bike over in the gravel. I removed everything from my rack, including my panniers, then fiddled with the rear derailleur to slide the chain past the gear cluster and extricate the wheel. Only slightly greasy, I repaired the tube, reinstalled the wheel, reassembled my load, wiped my hands, and jumped back on my bike, still steamed from my bout of bad luck. Hoping to burn off some frustration I cranked up our touring speed a couple of notches. Our effort paid off. We reeled off a hundred kilometres in just over three hours. Sharon calculated the average. "Pretty good for fully loaded touring," she said, smiling widely. "The roses were really whipping by there for a while!" To celebrate lessons learned about not leaving our rides unattended, we locked the bikes to a chain-link fence and loped into a pizza joint in the middle of nowhere. Inside the deserted diner I requested a window booth so I could keep an eye on our bikes. "Never can be too careful," I smiled. By the time our bellies were full, darkness had descended. Unlocking our bikes, we pedalled down the road until we came to a rest stop. Behind a dense copse of alder and hickory we set up our tent. I hoped we didn't have any of the other type of cops as nighttime visitors. My worry, as usual, was for naught; our only disturbance was a nursery of fat ring-eyed raccoons. The sow and her cubs showed up around eleven, and helped themselves to our leftover deep dish pizza. Awakened by the raccoons' atrocious table manners, Sharon mumbled, "Some things are nearly impossible to defend against." |
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