In defense of the beater bike

September 7, 2023September 7, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments

It’a rough ride for a Hal Walter bike. | Photo: Hal Walter

• Editor’s note: My old pal Hal Walter hasn’t been writing much lately. He’s a busy fellow, with a jackass ranch in Crusty County, a coaching gig in Weirdcliffe, and a kid at college in Shredville. But he dashed off this paean to the humble beater bike the other day and slipped it under my door.

By Hal Walter

Let me just start by saying that writing is just like riding a bike. If you haven’t done it in a while then you might as well embrace the squeaks, rust and scratched paint. Similarly, since I won’t likely be entering the Stone King Rally or even the Leadville Race Series MTB in my final 14 years of average life expectancy, I ride beater bikes.

Or not. My road bike, a 32-year-old Trek 1200, has been hanging in the garage for about 31 years. Because: I live four rugged miles from pavement and Colorado drivers are cray. Aside from the rotted rubber, it’s in mint condition.

My other bikes are off-road contraptions, what I call SUBs (Sport Utility Bikes). They are mostly bikes people have given to me over the years. A vintage Specialized Rockhopper was “gifted,” which certainly is not a verb, by friends when their guide service went belly-up. Also, I have an antique Trek Liquid 30 cross-country deathtrap with deadly brake-lever shifters. The third is a Trek Farley fat bike I actually bought as a demo for $500 — a massive sum for equipment that gets treated like a rock hammer on a college geology field trip.

My bikes ride tailgates on dusty roads (at least on the newer truck, which actually has one) or get tossed into the bed of the beater truck. They get left out in the rain and snow and cosmic rays. When they squeak I hose them down with WD-40. Well, sometimes, anyway. Usually they quit squeaking if you just keep on riding them.

Why do I even have bikes? I use them quite regularly — probably more than most cyclists — for cross-training and recovery exercise. I often ride a bike while coaching high-school cross country athletes or my son who runs college cross and track.

I also use them as transportation in my side hobby of training wild burros for pack-burro racing. I can trailer a burro away from the ranch, run it home. Then I hop on the bike, ride back to my rig, throw it in the bed and drive home. I don’t care how this looks and I often don’t wear a helmet.

A couple weeks ago the fat bike flew out of the bed of the gateless truck on a stretch of washboard. It glanced off the stock trailer I was towing, then cartwheeled into the borrow ditch. I saw this in the rearview mirror and stopped to find that, other than a scuffed handlebar grip, it seemed fine. I rode it at cross-country practice that evening.

I had planned to send that bike to college with my son, so I ended up taking it to a shop to have the frame assessed and for a tune-up: $106 total. Now the thing is like new and standing unlocked in a rack in front of the dorm. Basic transportation for a college kid. I understand they have security cameras in place, and it is at least under a roof.

During my recent travels I stopped at a high-end bike shop to see the wares. I was astounded that these things now cost thousands of dollars. I mean like $4,000 to $10,000. I got the hell out of there at high speed.

I could never own such a bike and it’s not only because I can’t afford the payments. I don’t even want one. Then I would have to take care of it, keep it indoors, worry about people stealing it, etc. This is one borrow ditch I’m steering clear of.

Besides, sooner or later someone will give me a new beater. Somebody has to ride these things.

Labor Day in the rear view

September 5, 2023September 5, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

Your Humble Narrator in the salad days, covering a race in Bibleburg.

“Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.” — Anatole France, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.”

Whenever I think of myself as a “worker” I have to smile.

Oh, sure, I have worked, for short stretches, whenever there was no suitable alternative available. Drug dealer. Janitor. Installer of storm windows and patio covers. Appliance deliveryman. Dishwasher. Schlepper of pizzas and sandwiches.

But I spent the bulk of my worklife scribbling silly-ass pictures and/or arranging words in some particular order with malicious intent, to wit, attempting to convey an idea to an invisible audience.

This is right up there with tagging freeway overpasses and howling at the moon. But it pays slightly better, and mostly you can do it in the shade, sitting down.

There is a game-show quality to journalism. Your team has to collect, confirm, compose, and condense a mind-boggling overabundance of information, then stuff as much of it as possible into a sack that keeps changing size until the buzzer sounds, heralding the start of that night’s press run.

If you beat the clock, you “win” and get to come back tomorrow to play another round.

The word “play” is used deliberately. There were some long hours spent shoveling, to be sure, but they were easy on the lower back and the calluses formed mostly on the mind.

If journalism truly was a game, for me it was the only one in whichever town I was inhabiting at the moment. Composing the first draft of history day in and out in the company of (mostly) like-minded maniacs.

On my third daily and already thinking about jumping ship, arr.

The U.S. Navy used to sell itself by crooning, “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.” Journalism’s pitch was that it wasn’t just a job, or even a game, but a Calling — to preach the Gospel daily in the Church of What’s Happening Now (tip of the stingy-brim to Flip Wilson and the Rev. Leroy).

Now, if you think you are Called to preach, you are easy to exploit. And the gods could be unimpressed and indifferent.

“Fine sermon, Reverend. But that was yesterday. What have you done for Me lately?”

So, yeah. Long hours, and you frequently took the Work home with you. Sometimes it dragged you in early, or on a day off. Often it took you someplace you didn’t want to go, not even for money. Especially when you considered the paucity of coins in your collection plate.

But the Work found me when I was teetering along one of those ragged edges that beckon to oddballs like me. And it kept me in bacon, beans, and beer for nearly 15 years, though I backslid to the edge from time to time.

Finally I decided I liked the edge and set up shop nearby. A small chapel, nothing serious. My sermons were unorthodox, but so was the congregation. Same old gods, but hey, whaddaya gonna do? I dodged their lightning and kept that shtick up for 30 years.

Fortune eluded me, but I got all the low-rent fame I could handle, more than I deserved. God’s honest truth? I got lucky. In the right place at the right time, with friends in high places, and more than once, too.

Could a 20-year-old stoner with zero skills wander into the smaller of two daily papers in a medium-size city today and set his wandering feet upon a path that kept him out of jail for nearly a half-century?

Never fucking happen, to coin a phrase. There are no more two-newspaper towns, and damn few newspapers, period. Most are the journalistic equivalent of dollar stores, all owned by the same two or three outfits, all selling the same two-bit expired horseshit. And magazines are following them down the Highway to Hell, which is no longer paved with good intentions.

In 2023 the 20-year-old me couldn’t even go back to selling weed, because that’s just another job now. And you know how I feel about jobs.

I once was lost, but I was found. Can I get a hallelujah?

Canadian bakin’

June 8, 2023June 8, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Smoke gets in your eyes. And your nose. And your hair, your clothes, and. … | *File photo by Crusty County correspondent Hal Walter*

Huh. The Elitist East Coast Big City Liberal Smartypants Media has finally discovered what us hardy Westerners have knowed for years — huffing a giant forest fire’s secondhand smoke sucks.

We’ve experienced a few lulus over the years in Bibleburg, Weirdcliffe, and The Duck! City. And yeah, they got a little ink despite being largely confined to Flyover Country.

But holy hell. When the Big Apple looks like the Devil’s been feeding his firebox a passel of green wood with a weak draft you gon’ git yoreself some wall-to-wall coverage, son! That’s Scripture!

And even a dyed-in-the-Carhartt mountain man and desert rat like Your Humble Narrator has to admit that a few hundred Canadian wildfires blowing smoke from Maine to Spokane might just be worth a few “Live” headers over to The New York Times.

My old hometown of Ottawa has been taking a hit (and not the kind made famous by Cheech and Chong).

And I expect our Great White North correspondent Ol’ Herb might have a few thoughts on the matter, if he can stop coughing long enough to file a report expanding on the Detroit News coverage. Anyone else out there wearing their N95s again?

Sweet 16?

April 5, 2023April 5, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

I was not expecting to see 16° on the old weather widget when I stumbled into the kitchen this morning.

Six-fuggin’-teen? On April 5? Was Dante right? Hell is cold? Can we crank up the heat a smidgen, please, Beelzebub, you old devil? I know, I know, I’ve been bad, but shit, if I wanted to freeze my huevos off before coffee I’d still be doing my sinning in that hillside hacienda outside Weirdcliffe, where I had a stove, ax, and woodpile.

Still, could be worse. I spoke with Consigliere Pelkey yesterday and he said that I-80 was closed between Laramie and Cheyenne due to vile weather, th’owin’ a hitch inta his gitalong as regards a doctor’s appointment in the capital city.

My old Bicycle Retailer comrade Steve Frothingham checked in from the People’s Republic of Boul-Daire to report that it was “puking snow” in his neck of the Woke Woods.

We passed a few pleasant moments discussing jurisprudence and journalism in Manhattan and agreed that if a courtroom artist were required we wanted Ralph Steadman, since S. Clay Wilson is unavailable, being dead.

Today, meanwhile, rather than skulk around indoors and risk absorbing some news, I decided to motor around and about The Duck! City, scratch a few chores off the to-do list, wait for the desert to assert itself.

By midafternoon, the temperature finally inched into the low 40s, and I finally ventured out for a leisurely 5K on the trails, though asthma and allergies (juniper, poplar, elm, etc.) had me sounding like a secondhand accordion in the mitts of an unruly middle-schooler with a tin ear.

Tonight the wizards are calling for another hard freeze. I didn’t hear them calling yesterday, but I’ve heard them this time and unplugged the two hoses I use to water the trees.

“These temperatures are cold enough to kill most early season vegetation,” says the National Weather Service.

Good. Maybe they’ll croak the junipers, poplars, and elms. A man needs some breathing room.

Let us spray

March 31, 2023March 31, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

However will The Mighty Mega NewsHose 9000® pass the time between now and Tuesday, when ’Is Lardship is to journey from Mar-a-Lago to Manhattan to face some long-overdue music?

By jawing frantically with “people familiar with the matter who, like many in Trump’s orbit, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly share details of private discussions,” as The Washington Post puts it in a piece about how various minions, knaves, and varlets got caught with their pantaloons around their cankles when the indictment was announced.

A shorter item in The New York Times credits “people familiar with his thinking,” which must be a horrific state of consciousness to inhabit, even for traitors, seditionists, and whores.

The anonymous source is the cost of doing business in this shabby neighborhood, where everyone with even a soupçon of inside info is on the lookout for the cops, stoolies, and other potholes on the road to Advancement.

Musn’t abandon this lame candidate for the glue factory in midstream, no sir. Not until a more viable hoss comes clip-clopping along. We see many horse’s asses but very few complete horses.

Meanwhile, the invaluable Charles P. Pierce reminds us that the real game may be afoot in Georgia, where the charges are liable to carry a tad more weight than an indictment alleging someone was cooking the books in New York.

Writes Brother Pierce:

And, even if the former president* were to win in New York, so what? [Fulton County DA Fani] Willis’ charges are far more serious than [Manhattan DA Alvin] Bragg’s are. In Atlanta, the former president* may be indicted for crimes against the republic, for offenses against the idea of popular democracy. That is also Jack Smith’s brief for the DOJ, an investigation that looms like a giant Dust Bowl cloud behind these state prosecutions. Time has come today, in the immortal words of the Chambers Brothers. There are things to … realize.