There was a May Day gathering at Civic Plaza yesterday but we gave it a miss. Instead I formed a rolling rally of one, equipped and clad to suit the occasion (in red) and the weather (brisk).
A quarter inch of rain is a whole lot better than none at all.
A quarter inch of rain fell overnight, and at high speed, too. The wind and water blew us out of a sound sleep shortly after 2 a.m., and while the rain stopped the wind was still with us at 11:30 when I took the red Steelman off its hook and rolled out to spend 90 minutes trying to find shelter from it.
We did honor the general strike. We bought nothing and did no paid work; I’ve gotten pretty good at that since retiring in 2022. To feed the starving masses I made three meals out of fridge and pantry: toast, tea, oatmeal, and fruit for breakfast; grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch; and pasta with a sauce of tomatoes, onions, jalapeño, garlic, black olives, red pepper flakes (there’s that red again) and chicken sausage for dinner.
This morning as I arose at 5 a.m. the furnace ticked on, which really lets you know it’s May. Forty-two, said the weather widget. We get summer in March and winter in May and if we’re lucky a little rain sneaks in there somewhere.
Today I will have to re-engage with capitalism in a fairly significant fashion. The pantry is bare, and the People’s Army, like any other, marches on its stomach.
Purple Haze, all in my brain … lately things just don’t seem the same. …
Ridin’ the storm out, waitin’ for the thaw-out On a full-moon night in the Rocky Mountain winter My wine bottle’s low, watching for the snow I’ve been thinking lately of what I’m missing in the city — Gary Richrath, REO Speedwagon
Rolling out of bed this morning after dreaming of bicycles I fell right into the old spin cycle, rolling down Memory Lane.
While inhaling my first cuppa I browsed over to Rivendell where Grant Petersen was musing about a well-used Centurion Accordo he saw recently, parked at a BART station. He made it for a 1985 model, priced in the low-$300s, which set me to recalling my own Centurion, the bike that put me back in the game in 1984.
Mine was a $320 Le Mans 12, red and silver, at 60cm just a skosh too tall for me. Didn’t care. I was an old Schwinn guy trying to quit smoking cigarettes and snorting cocaine, dial back my gargling of the tonsil polish, and in the process maybe shed a few elbees. I weighed 184 at the time, and sometimes — depending upon how many bumps and beers I’d had the night(s) before — it felt more like kilos than pounds.
I was already swimming laps in the overwarm pool at the Pueblo YMCA, and lifting weights. But the scenery never changes in the pool or the gym. So getting back on the bike seemed just the ticket.
And it was! It just took more than one bike, and more than a few years.
• • •
Moving on from Centurions (and their resemblance to his own A. Homer Hilsens) Grant went on to extol the virtues of SunTour components, in particular the Cyclone group, which did battle with the more expensive Shimano 600 group. He writes:
Shimano’s derailers were fine, too, but [in terms of] purely beauty and strength and value, nothing could beat SunTour’s Cyclone derailers. SunTour’s Cyclone went head to head against Shimano 600 (later, Ultegra) and I remember Bridgestone engineers explaining to me in great detail how much better it was … metallurgically, polish, design, and value (it sold for about 20 percent less than Shimano 600). That was SunTour’s strategy to fight Shimano’s better indexing, but partly because the Cyclone stuff was cheaper, people thought it was worse.
Well, wouldn’t you know it? My next bike, a 1985 Trek 560, was equipped with SunTour New Cyclone-S, and I certainly didn’t think it was worse than whatever was on that old Centurion. Sleek and smooth, or so it seemed to me. As for the frameset, its main triangle was double-butted Reynolds 501, the stays True Temper cro-mo, and the fork Tange Mangalloy CCL. This was the bike that got me riding centuries and, eventually, racing.
Racing was good. I wasn’t, but trying to be helped me keep my nose clean (har de har har). And instead of pissing away money on expensive and illegal drugs, I pissed it away on equally expensive but completely legal bicycles and related gear, apparel, and aftermarket “upgrades.”
Like everyone else I left steel, SunTour, and friction shifting behind for aluminum, carbon, and Shimano STI. The old Trek was demoted to a bad-weather/wind-trainer bike, and eventually went away altogether, drifting off the back as technology drove relentlessly forward, Your Humble Narrator clinging to the wheel.
But the Great Wheel also spins, and I eventually found my way back to the idea of that bike.
• • •
We got a bit of winter this week that kept me off the saddle and in something of a mood. Trying to fill the frosty void I spent a little time swapping handlebars on my red Steelman Eurocross. I’d been muttering about getting rid of its deep-drop, long-reach Deda 215 road bar for a while, and with an assist from Old Man Winter I finally got ’er done, swapping it out for a Soma Hwy One bar just like the one on my other Eurocross.
Big Red with its new bar (Cinelli cork bar tape not included).
The red Steelman, like my old Trek, is a blend of Reynolds and True Temper. No classy SunTour jewelry, alas; just clunky, scuffed Shimano ST-R500 Flight Deck brifters running Shimano 600/Ultegra derailleurs and Spooky cantis. I thought, briefly, about going to bar-end shifters, maybe nine-speed; new cassette with more teefers on the fat side, new rear derailleur, new chain, new brake levers and … and maybe not.
Frankly, it felt just a little bit too much like work. Skill set and personal preference dictate that I ride these things rather than wrench on them. Maybe some other time, on some other bleakly cold snow day.
And I couldn’t have gone back to downtube shifters even if I wanted to. There’s a set in the garage, awaiting the callup, but the Eurocross routes its cables along the top tube. No shifter bosses on the downtube. Maybe some bridges are better off burned.
I was thrice blessed as I prepared to leave Bibleburg last Wednesday, an hour earlier than I had planned.
First, I had slept in a bed, in a room, not in my car parked in front of the hotel. I gave a thumbs-up to the stealth camper I spotted as I left to get coffee, for hiding in plain sight in the rain-drenched parking lot. But s/he got two thumbs down for being so obvious about it: a towel tucked into the top of a cracked rear window; clothing, water jugs, and other “not a guest here” hints strewn all over the front seats; and so on. Respect your adversary, dude.
Could’ve been a hotel employee, times being what they are. But still, style counts.
Second, the Starbucks across the road had that very morning begun opening at 5 a.m. instead of 6. Ordinarily I brew my own coffee on the road, but lately the hotels inflict these Keurig monstrosities upon us instead of mini-coffeemakers whose carafes can be repurposed for an AeroPress brew.
Pity that the smoke detectors dislike my little MSR IsoPro camp stove. “Outside use only,” kids. Just ask the guest in the Honda Hilton.
And finally, third: I was leaving Bibleburg an hour earlier than I had planned.
I always like leaving the B-burg, and leaving early is even better than not going there at all. I find myself in sympathy with my mom, who when we were transferred there in 1967 looked at downtown through a prism of memory from the 1940s and recoiled.
Yes, they let this work at the Gazette. I guess they really were libertarians.
Ten years later a colleague at the Gazette would say that anything east of Hancock Avenue wasn’t Colorado Springs, and mom would’ve agreed. I certainly did.
In my Gazette years I was living in an old Victorian carved into apartments at Cascade and San Miguel, right next door to The Colorado College, just north of what was still called “downtown.”
But when the O’Gradys first arrived we set up housekeeping east of Academy Boulevard, 3.5 miles into the prairie from my colleague’s Hancock border. Nearly six decades later, South Loring Circle feels almost urban.
The town goes ever on and on, to paraphrase Bilbo Baggins. In this instance toward Kansas, not Mordor, though the differences between the two may be undetectable to political scientists. (Hint: Mordor had mountains.)
I’ve left the place more times than anywhere else, which probably says more about me than it does about B-burg. And this trip I was ready to skedaddle again after just four days. The rain, the postapocalyptic state of the roads, the endless high-speed conga line of traffic — two final tallboys of Starbucks and I was on my way.
• • •
It was hairy from jump. Pitch black and still raining, with fog to boot, and despite mopping all my windows and mirrors with a towel before leaving I was flying blind for a few scary minutes until the a/c defogged the glass. Not optimal when you’re merging onto I-25 from Briargate Parkway at 75 mph with a few thousand of your closest — and I mean closest, as in halfway into the hatchback — friends.
Paging Graham Watson. …
The weather remained gloomy. I didn’t bother putting on sunglasses until I was past Raton. Creeks had become rivers and rivers were inland seas. Ponds appeared magically like Brigadoon. Folks who parked their trailers in low-lying areas found themselves with rudderless houseboats.
There were enough sunflowers at roadside for a regiment of Graham Watsons, guarded by ravens perched on fenceposts. Lots of fat black cattle living large in the tall salad. I fought the urge to stop at McDonald’s and instead yelled “Go home!” at vehicles with Texas plates.
Skidmarks demarking various unscheduled off-ramps to left and right with “Damaged Guardrail Ahead” signs for headstones. A giant shitbox bearing a plate reading “IH8UALL.” Making America great again, one vanity plate at a time.
My Steelman puddle-jumper, sans puddles.
In six hours flat, with one stop for gas, I was back at the ranch. My training-log entry for the day reads, simply, “Nothing.”
But the next day I was on the old Steelman I’d hauled with me to Bibleburg, tooling around the sun-splashed Elena Gallegos Open Space, a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.
Home again, home again, jiggity-jog; the desert’s the place for this salty ol’ dog.
Thor is teasing us again, twirling his hammer like a drum major’s baton.
Will Mjölnir finally deliver the goods today? The Monday Geezer Ride is scheduled for 10:30, but I’d gladly trade 20 miles of asphalt for .20 inch of rain. What the hell, I got a nice 20-miler in yesterday on my No. 2 Steelman Eurocross, jumping from road to trail and back again as the spirit moved.
Gaming out a new bar setup.
If it does rain, it would be a perfect opportunity for me to revise that bike’s cockpit. I’ve never really liked the chunky aftermarket Flight Deck STI levers, and the old Deda bar has more drop and reach than I prefer in my Golden Years.
Happily, I have a new Soma Hwy One bar awaiting its callup and the original STI levers from my No. 1 Eurocross, long ago transformed to standard brake levers and indexed bar-end shifters.
I’d go to indexed bar-cons on No. 2, too, but I’m fresh out of the eight-speed versions — nine I got (from the now-dismantled Voodoo Nakisi), and seven (still on the Steelman time-trial bike,. But not eight.
While I’m at it maybe I could replace No. 2’s old Shimano 600 rear derailleur with a “new” 105 or a “slightly used” Ultegra? I even have a never-used Altus from Rivendell. Said to be Grant the P’s favorite rear d., it will accommodate a 34T (!) cog. That’d be a nice change from the 28T cog on there now. My No. 1 Eurocross uses a derailleur-tab extender and a 32T cog for the steep bits.
If I were smart I’d swipe the seven-speed bar-cons from the TT bike, put them and my last set of Shimano 600 brake levers on No. 2, and call it good.
“What time does the Super Bowl start?” Herself asked.
“Beats me,” I replied.
Can you tell we’re not fans? Of the Chiefs, the Eagles, or football in general?
I used to fake an interest, same way I faked an interest in editing newspaper copy for a dozen years. My people followed the various ball sports, and occasionally rented a motel room for The Big Game, because that way someone else would have to tidy up afterward.
But the Big Game was usually more about acting the fool than it was about football. Just ask the motel housekeepers who had to do the tidying up.
These days I don’t even have to pretend I give a shit. I just decide which bike I want to ride and hope all the fans are already glued to the pregame show(s) before I sally forth.
Today it’s my No. 2 Steelman Eurocross. I rode No. 1 the past few days and hate to show favoritism. But I gotta have some knobbies in case I need to flee the mean streets for the trails. Dog only knows the state of the drivers on Game Day, running low on bean dip and strong drink, weaving off at 20 mph over the limit to the grocery store.
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