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Bill  On The Road

 by: Bill Oetinger  5/1/2021

Bike Stuff

Spring Cleaning…or not…

Bill Bryson is one of my favorite authors. I’ve never picked up one of his books that I didn’t enjoy. Wikipedia describes him as “an American–British author of books on travel, the English language, science, and other non-fiction topics.” If you’re familiar with his books, he needs no introduction; if not—and if you like reading—I recommend him.

I was recently reading one of his travel books about England wherein he was strolling through a quaint seaside resort, marveling at all the gift shops selling precious, mostly useless souvenirs to the visiting tourists. This prompted some reflection on his part about buying more and more stuff. “One of the great pleasures of dotage is the realization that you have pretty much everything you will ever need.”  He goes on at some length about having enough stuff or possibly too much stuff and includes a long list of examples, ending with this: “…paper clips, rubber bands, spare cans of paint, dried out paintbrushes, miscellaneous lengths of electrical wire, or any kind of metal objects that might one day theoretically come in handy for some as yet unimagined purpose.”

The key to any successful humor is being able to see ourselves in the witticism, and when I read that I said to myself, “Brother Bill, we are kindred spirits! We have walked the same mile in the same shoes!” And we have collected the same stuff. As this is a bike column, I will eventually steer this topic around to bikes. But first, allow me to prattle on about the acquiring and having of stuff…of material possessions.

I like to think I’m a simple sort, not prone to ostentation or conspicuous consumption. For one thing, I’ve never had enough money to indulge in wretchedly excessive purchases and vulgar displays of wealth. When I feel the need for something, I don’t go shopping…tossing around money in exchange for fancy new stuff. I go to a different kind of shop: my workshop, where I make or fix things myself. I derive much more satisfaction from repairing than I do from replacing. However…

There’s an old maxim that the stuff expands to fill the available space. When the wife and I and our two kids moved from San Francisco to Sebastopol in 1983, we moved from a little Victorian cottage of less than a thousand square feet (on a plot about the size of a postage stamp) to a home—on an acre-plus—that would eventually grow to three thousand feet, plus another thousand feet of decks and courtyards and the aforementioned detached workshop. All of a sudden we needed, at the very least, more furniture. We haunted the local flea market and antique stores and braked for garage sales. I recall that time as our nest-building years.

The nest building did not just include the furnishings. We also mostly built the nest itself: added on a big two-story wing and so thoroughly remodeled the original house that its former owners would barely recognize it today. We did 90% of that construction and remodeling ourselves and that means tools and materials…more stuff.

Eventually though, once most of the construction is done and most of the rooms are comfortably furnished, you get to that point where you don’t really need anything more. Sure, as your wallet allows, you might upgrade a few things…which sooner or later leads to having your own garage sale or perhaps to putting some chair or side table out at the street with a FREE sign on it.

SetI most emphatically deny that I’m a hoarder. Real, dysfunctional hoarding is creepy and borderline disgusting. I’ve visited in the homes of real hoarders and it’s not pleasant. I think of myself more as a collector. I’m an artist and I have a magpie’s eye for bright trinkets and goofy odds and ends. But I keep the tchotchkes in check: when they start overwhelming me, I herd them together into “collections.”

Out in my shop I have what I call my “you-just-never-know” bins. As in, you just never know when you might need this (see Bryson’s metal objects above). These can be carefully organized bigger bins of scrap wood or they can be little bins of nuts and bolts and screws and washers…cup hooks, nails, S-hooks, door knobs, hinges. I’ve had two such sets of bins myself for years and then I inherited more from my dad and my father-in-law. And this is where we bring it back around to bikes…to bike stuff.

When it comes to bike stuff, I am also not a hoarder, at least not a hardcore hoarder. I only have three bikes and two of them hang on hooks most of the time. I could probably dump them but…you just never know! I wrote one of these columns some years ago about my alpha bike having to go back to the factory for repairs and taking one of those other bikes off the hook and putting it back in service. It could happen. It does happen. 

Some of my friends have many bikes. Their workshops are crammed with them. They could make a good start on a bike museum, with Schwinn Black Phantoms and Murray Pacemakers…Columbia and Hercules and amazing old French rando-bikes. This can be a noble, worthy hobby (or obsession). We all agree that bikes are wonderful and magical and beautiful and that the best ones are works of art, well worth preserving and restoring and cherishing. And it’s a lot cheaper and less complicated to restore or maintain an old bike than it is to attempt the same thing with an old Jaguar or Alfa Romeo. So that’s all good.

I’m not a top-notch bike mechanic. I know I said I like to repair things myself and I do that, but I also know the limits of my competence and I am willing to pay the pro wrenches now and then for the most finicky fine-tuning. That said, I still do a lot of tinkering and, one way or another, I end up with a lot of spare bike parts and tools.

So, amidst my you-just-never-know bins are some dedicated to bike stuff. From bar-end caps to bike locks, from cogs to stems. Frame pumps, floor pumps, mini-pumps, handlebars, aero bars, forks, racks, saddles, rims, spokes, hubs, lights, patch kits, crank sets, head sets, pedals, skewers, brakes, brake pads, tires, tubes, etc, etc…I probably have enough parts out there to build an entire bike, minus the essential frame. 

Wind ChimeWhy keep all those parts? What am I saving them for? Will any of those old parts ever find their way back onto a working bike? A few might but most won’t. I should do a spring cleaning and toss a lot of them…or not! One option, short of sending them to the landfill, is to repurpose them in new ways. For instance, I gathered together—okay, hoarded—a big stack of old chainrings and turned them into a wind chime in the garden, all hanging off an old Mavic rim. You probably can’t tell from the photo but some of those chainrings aren’t round. Remember the brief fad for “Bio-pace” elliptical chainrings? A mechanic in a bike shop handed me a bunch of them once. They were a failed experiment cast aside on the march to a better bike but they look good and make a nice, tinkly tune when blowing in the wind.

We all love our bikes and I suspect most of us have a sort of fondness for the little fiddly bits that hold a bike together and help it to do what it does so well. All of those components have assisted us on our way to so many grand adventures and triumphs and outright epiphanies. Most of the parts in the bins and boxes in the shop are well past their useful life…but after all they’ve done for us, it seems almost callous and disloyal to simply toss them on the scrap heap. They’re like old bike-event t-shirts or number bibs. They speak to us. They remind us of what we’ve done, where we’ve been.

And every so often, when you need a certain part right now and the bike shop is closed, you might rummage around in the bin and find just what you’re looking for. It could happen…you just never know!

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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