When A Chain Breaks

You ever have a chain break?
Remember the sinking feeling when your feet went around the pedals and seemed to pushing against air?
They were pushing against air.
Okay, so it was no big deal.
You took your chain tool, broke 2 links out and re-attached it, right?
But what if you didn’t have a derailleur bike?
What if your bike had a 7-speed internal hub with a single cog that allowed for no chain wrap?

Edie and I were going uphill out of Chagrin Falls when this happened to my trusty (and rusty) winter commuter. Fortunately there are 2 bike shops in Chagrin Falls, so we just turned around and Edie pedaled, while I coasted, back down the hill.

At the first shop I was ushered into the bike section in the basement. It’s a pretty shop and my bike was an oily, greasy mess, so I was cringing when the young mechanic undid the lug nuts holding the rear wheel and tugged on the chain. All he got was grease. The 7-speed internal hub has a special hub brake on one side and a shifting mechanism on the other. And both seemed to be stuck. The mechanic pried and poked, yanked and pulled, but the brake and the shifter seemed to move together rather than independently, and neither would come loose. He called his partner over. They tried to logic it out. With the same result. Something was stuck. Something was wrong. The brake and shifter were not coming loose.

A moment’s inspiration got him on the phone with a second bike shop a mile away. In his truck went the bike and off they sped to the other bike shop, with me, on Edie’s bike not far behind. But at the second bike shop, the same conclusion was reached. Something’s stuck. Something’s jammed. This is not coming loose. Back in the pickup and back to the first shop. Apologies, embarrassment. They couldn’t figure it out, but they were very kind. They charged me only for the new chain and not for the hour they’d spent monkeying with the bike. And let me keep my panniers there while we plotted our next move.

At this point the rear wheel was partly disconnected from the frame and not going back in its dropouts. I had to hold the rear end up as I walked the bike out of the shop. As Edie rode off home to get the truck, the young mechanic poked his head outside to ask how I’d get home.

‘I’ll just walk’, I said.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Oh, in Cleveland Heights’, I replied.
‘Cleveland Heights?!’,
' how far is that?’
‘Oh, about 14 miles away’, I said, ‘not a bad walk except for having to walk the bike back too’.

At this the young mechanic grinned, knowing he’d been had. I locked the bike out by the ice cream place on Main Street and headed down to the river for a snooze. It would be a while until Edie returned. As I lay on the banks of the river it dawned on me I had no need to lock up the bike. In its condition, no one was going to take it anywhere.

A week later I picked the bike up from Ken Schneider’s Bike Shop at Lorain and Denison.

‘Good as new’ was Ken’s greeting.
‘How’dya fix it?’ I asked. ‘Wasn’t it jammed?’
‘Well, actually there’s this little lock ring that was partly broken and it was keeping everything
from moving. Hardly took any work at all to get it free’.

Next time I break a chain, I want to do it on the West Side, somewhere, just uphill from Ken’s shop.

Marty

A Tale of Two Cities

Shediac, New Brunswick, September 2007

It was dark before we arrived at our campsite, tired and hungry and eager to start dinner. We’d been traveling for several days in New Brunswick on our 2-week bicycle trip to circumnavigate the Bay of Fundy and had left a very hilly section by the Fundy National Park that morning. It was reputed to be the most remote and roadless area along the entire Eastern seaboard from Florida north. Much of the rugged, forested coastline was only accessible by approach roads, there being none than ran the length of the shoreline.

Edie was setting up the tent as I pumped the stove, turned the knob to prime the cup with fuel only to find no fuel flowing. I pumped some more, still nothing. We fiddled and played with it and then, looking forlornly at what might have been a nice, hot meal, we pulled some bread and cheese out of our panniers, tomorrow’s lunch it was to have been, and had a cold, sad meal instead.

The next day I inquired of the campground owners where the nearest outdoors shop would be. ‘Nearest OUTDOORS shop? Never heard of one. I don’t think there is one. You know of any OUTDOORS shop, Mike?’ The word ‘outdoors’ was pronounced the way you’d pronounce ‘Nuclear Test Facility’ if someone stopped you in the street and asked the whereabouts of the nearest one. Finally the yellow pages gave us hope. Xtreme Outdoor Adventures, the only listing in the book, showed a shop in Shediac, a French-Canadian enclave along New Brunswick’s sand beach coast, half a day’s cycling away. Most of that cycling would not be in the direction we were headed.

The folks at Xtreme were not altogether encouraging. ‘Your stove conked out, huh, a camping stove, right. Well, might have one, yeah here it is’. ‘Boy you must sell a lot of backpacking stoves to be down to your last one’, I replied. ‘Oh no, he chuckled, ‘we only had this one. No one’s ever asked for a stove before, so we’re selling it ½ price. I’m not sure it’s a backpacking stove. The box is kinda big, but I’m sure the stove inside is a lot smaller. You can see for yourself when you get here. By the way, it burns butane and we don’t have any cartridges but you can get ‘em at the Walmart in Moncton. You have to go through there to get to us’.

And so we did. From the barely traveled roads of coastal New Brunswick we plunged into the Saturday shopping traffic of Moncton, their 2nd biggest city. We got our cartridges as fast as possible, and we had to buy 4 of them. Nearby was a goofy looking stove that looked like someone had hacksawed off a quarter of a kitchen range and packaged it. Thank goodness we weren’t going to have to carry that monstrosity.

At Shediac we thought we’d get to see a different coastline. Beautiful sand beaches, wildlife, birds. What we saw was a strip development of small motels, fast food places and raggedy shops. Our first look at Xtreme was a 10 foot high billboard display of a girl in a bikini. I don’t remember Appalachian Outfitters or the Backpacker Shop having a sign like that. Our first sound was the loud hip-hop music coming from some sports car parked just outside. With trepidation we entered the store. Beach ware was everywhere, all of it on sale. Sandals, T-shirts, sunglasses, lotion, swimsuits. But no tents, backpacks or cookware. At the counter I greeted the fellow who recognized us from the morning phone call. ‘Say, you must be the cyclists who need that stove. I kept it right here by the front desk’. And out came the very same thing we’d seen at Walmart. Our hearts sank. When he opened it, which he’d never done before, we both were surprised to see a big, heavy ¼ kitchen range with a connector for a butane cartridge. Even at $22 it seemed ridiculous. But eating out would have cost us far more. We were still on the first week of our 2 week trip. ‘There’s no OUTDOOR shops anywhere around here’, he assured us. The nearest one’s in St. John’. St. John is the capital of New Brunswick and we’d left it behind 5 days before. Reluctantly we bought the stove, managed to strap it on the bike and pedaled on, past more strip malls, fast food joints and traffic until we found the turnoff to Sackville.

Sackville, New Brunswick

After a pleasant night’s camping at the campground just outside of Sackville, we thought we’d go into town to see the historic town center. At least that was what the sign said. After Shediac ‘New Brunswick’s finest beach resort’, we were leery. But Sackville had an old brick downtown, small, compact and very pretty. Like some rural Ohio towns, except this one was thriving. On a sunny Saturday morning the street was lively with people, many of them students from the nearby college and most of them on foot.

A local café was hosting a farmer’s market and inside were the best breads I had yet seen in the province. It was tough to choose just one amongst the many fine loaves. Edie smelled something delicious with a long line leading up to it and returned some time later with a lunch of fine Indian food cooked right there on the spot. She’d snagged their last batch.

Our best find of the day, however, was an outdoor shop. A real one. Peeking inside I saw names like North Face and Sierra Designs, Mountain Hardware and Arcteryx. In this small shop were the finest in tents, sleeping bags, clothes and…and…stoves. Right there on the shelf was the replacement for the stove that had malfunctioned. And right then and there we bought it. As it turns out, our stove began functioning again, perplexing us. It functioned fine the rest of the trip. But it might, we thought, be a good idea to take the lightweight spare parts just in case.

We chatted with the young woman in charge of the shop. We showed her our kitchen range stove and told her the story. She had a good laugh over it, then said: ‘the fellow at Xtreme knows we’re here. Why didn’t he send you to us?’ Why indeed. Hearing about an upcoming auction to raise money for a charitable cause, we decided to donate our kitchen range stove and cartridges both to perform a good deed and to lighten our weight. The young woman accepted our donation and assured us that someone, probably someone who camps from a camps from a car would be happy to bid on it.

She made a point of showing us the Arcteryx garments, well aware of the normal reaction to seeing a jacket selling for $500. ‘Everyone who looks at the price just backs off in astonishment, but I tell them to try it on just for fun, see how nicely it fits, how well it’s made and what a wonderful garment it is. About a quarter of them actually wind up buying it’. Edie and I, frugal to pennypinching were not among those quarter. But I must admit we did entertain the thought for a good ½ hour’s ride out of town, munching on chunks of that delicious bread and inhaling the aroma of our Indian feast awaiting lunchtime.

Marty
photo of the Fundy National Park, New Brunswick at low tide by Edie

The Snowstorm

Cleveland, Ohio, December 2007

I must say that you all missed a wonderful opportunity to bicycle several Sundays past, instead of spending time shopping for last minute Xmas gifts. We had a magnificent blizzard starting at noon.

Edie, I and Ann and Mary bicycled down to the Cuyahoga Valley to look for the Stone Rd bridge (which, we discovered, had been removed 30 years ago, but not from my old map).

We consoled ourselves with a modest pancake breakfast at Yours Truly in Valley View by Rockside and Canal roads, as people came in, saw our cycling outfits and commented on how brave we were. Having cycled through the slightest of drizzles to get there, we just chuckled and told them it was no big deal. It was not until we went outside again, that we discovered that it was a very big deal indeed and a 30 mph (with gusts to 50 mph) blizzard was raging in our absence.

We cycled up Rockside Rd to Garfield Hts and were probably the most stable vehicles on the road. Most cars, SUVs, etc. were slipping, swerving and wobbling, with a few vehicles having made it half way up and gotten stuck, unable to summon the traction to go further nor the courage to retreat. I can't say I blamed them as visibility was less than 100 feet.

We took refuge in the Marc's at the top of the hill in order to clear one of Ann’s fenders from the snow that was collecting between the fender and the wheel and slowing her to a halt. The 'wagon boys' at Marc's were very kind, letting us inside so the warmth would melt the snow and ice on her bike, directing us to barbeque skewers which we bought to dig out the ice from the small spaces by the fender, and to the last of the mittens, hats, scarves, etc. with which to sustain ourselves on the rest of the ride home.

Eventually we solved the fender problem by removing it entirely and taking it home in one of my panniers, and after thanking everyone in the store, struck out for home. We took the main roads, our only close call occurring when 3 snowplows in tandem blasted their horns to clear the traffic and we had to immediately retire to a nearby snowbank, still mounted on the bikes. When we dug ourselves out we found the road much more manageable and only had to watch for sudden gusts from the west, in open areas, that would send us flying to the curb. It was a true cycling day, and I only regret that you were not here to enjoy it with us. Maybe next time.

Marty

Thanks to the intrepid and camera-carrying JN for her photos of Marty and Ann on Lee Road.

The Illegals

The sun was beginning to set and in these latitudes that meant another 20 minutes of daylight before...before…..well before we’d be groping along the barbed wire looking for a gap. We’d been cycling all day after leaving the Chiricahua National Monument, a gorgeous park in southeast Arizona with the most bizarre rock formations we’d ever seen. We had food and water but no campsite and it was getting late. Our only chance was guerilla camping but the sagebrush ranches were all barbed-wired for miles. And then we saw it, an abandoned ranch with an old metal Quonset hut and a rutted driveway leading behind. This is it! Edie did not look pleased.

Me, I can put up with beautiful scenery, quiet campfires and soft rustling of a breezes as long as I can guerilla camp. Edie prefers legitimacy. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. The world’s filled with little nooks and crannies just begging to be camped on. Better we should throw ourselves on the tender mercies and graveled pads of a brightly lighted all night RV park? We’d done that already.

We’d been traveling for over a week and adjusting to the Arizona way. No more little country roads dropping into quiet streams and climbing winding hills. The roads were mostly wide, the scenery grand. Everything was on a big scale. Mountains in the distance might be a few hours’ ride away…or a few days. A pee break didn’t take place comfortably deep in the nearest forest, but furtively behind a spindley cactus.

Towns were far apart too. This was nearly our downfall our first day out. A half day’s ride from Tucson Edie’s left crank arm fell off and shortly thereafter my front derailleur broke. Now I can live without a front derailleur, but Edie seemed unduly alarmed by the detached crankarm. We had to call our hosts. Our hosts were the most wonderful folks. We’d contacted them by email, listed, as they were, as the touring directors for Tucson’s bike association. We wanted to know about camping. Turns out, they’d never camped. They stayed at motels. But between the emails, we established a very nice relationship. And in no time, they’d offered to pick up our shipped bikes, pick us up at the airport and host us at their house overnight. Sight unseen. And now their hospitality was being taxed as they came to pick us up on a lonely Arizona road and haul us back to the bike shop for repairs and another night’s stay at their house.

Camping in Arizona had its delights. With the low humidity we could leave shoes, clothing and maps out at night with no moisture to affect them. We never listened to the weather forecast. It was always nice and sunny. With all the mountains around we found a mix of cycling with a few days hiking in between to be ideal. But there had always been an RV park at the end of the day.

Very reluctantly, and by the dim light of our headlamps we blundered into the sticker bushes behind the Quonset hut. We’d heard of goat-head thorns. Now we felt them. Trying to keep the bike tires clear we managed to set up camp in a thicket that offered some visual protection. Protection from what, you ask? The nearest ranch house was ½ mile off. But Edie had noticed discarded clothing and day packs along the road. And dozens of border patrol vehicles roaring past, or maybe just one guy roaring past dozens of times. Behind the Quonset hut she noticed more discarded clothing. Illegals!

The folks in Arizona, regardless of social station or political affiliation agree on one thing. They hate illegals. You don’t have to ask; they’ll strike up a conversation about it from out of the blue. Illegals steal, litter, deal in drugs and are a menace to society and a deadly threat to life and property. We tried to make light of such conversations by talking about our own illegals, Canadians sneaking across the border of Lake Erie to take advantage of a cheap U.S. dollar and make off with our merchandise. This did not go over well.

Edie kept a wary eye on the darkness beyond. Every car headlight approaching on the nearby road was followed by her gaze until it passed well by. Every scratch in the ground or scrape on a bush could be a squirrel bedding down for the night… or… illegals. She got a fitful night’s sleep. Had I been a less scrupulous person I would have been tempted to sneak outside the tent at night, bump hard against it and mutter something threatening in Spanish. Truth be told it wasn’t scruples that prevented me. I just don’t speak Spanish. And, a dozen miles from the Mexican border I didn’t think a few phrases in French would have had the same effect.

We had a fine night and a fine trip. We never did meet an illegal. But if you’re traveling down some lonely Arizona highway, and realize you’ve left some gear behind, take a gander on the side of the road. Chances are someone making a run from the border has left an item for you.

Marty Cooperman

Photo by Edie, reluctant guerrilla camper