On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 3/1/2022
Dumb and Dumber
“Seemed like a good idea at the time…”
I woke up this morning—swam up out of a dream-fog—recalling a really absurd predicament I got myself into on a bike ride several years ago. I’ll share that story with you in a bit. But let me begin by saying this is about doing dumb things on the bike.
There’s an old joke that says 50% of all emergency room visits begin with this line: “Hey, hold my beer…watch this!” Visit YouTube and type in “Jackass” and you can pull up dozens of videos of guys—it’s almost always guys—doing really dumb stuff which inevitably, predictably leads to them injuring themselves. Or watch America’s Funniest Home Videos for the same lamebrain stunts. Personally, I would rather watch cats or puppies doing silly stuff than watch young dudes mauling themselves by way of some ill-advised pranks. Partly it’s painful to see the injuries but mostly it’s uncomfortable to see these dopes being so irredeemably stupid. Can people really be that dumb? Apparently they can.
Then again, in this column I once described my own riding as jackass (sprinting for a county line sign around a 90° corner). That one cost me a collarbone broken into five pieces. So yeah, I’ve been there a time or two. And so probably have you. But jackass county line sprints are a spur-of-the-moment deal. Not much thinking involved, smart, dumb or whatever. They may be evidence of an overarching mindset that precludes much thinking…a testosterone-suffused hammerheadedness…but one can almost forgive such spontaneous eruptions of stupid.
What I’m thinking about today are the more considered moments of dumbness: when you have time to think about what lies ahead, and the better angel on one shoulder is pleading with you, “Don’t do it! Don’t go there! Nothing good can come of this.” And the badder angel on your other shoulder is saying…well, what is he saying exactly? It’s usually some inchoate, poorly articulated mush of stubborn willfulness and maybe bravado. A determination to not back down or give up or turn back…to push on through to victory! Doh!
Cycling smart people can trot out statistics to support the premise that riding a bike is actually safer than almost any other sport (fewer hospital admissions per hours of activity). Also safer than riding in a car or climbing a ladder to clean out your gutters, etc. Most of the time, we agree with that. But c’mon…hardcore riding, where a lot of envelope-pushing is going on, can be risky, regardless of what the statistics say. No need to itemize all the ways things can suddenly go bad on a bike. Who has not been there and done that?
Some of those bad things are no one’s fault. File them under the heading Shit Happens. Some of them do involve poor decisions or sketchy moves made by the riders…Operator Error. Like the time I was hit by a car. I saw the car. I thought I had plenty of time to cross the road. I did not in fact have as much time as I thought I did. And so…whammo! Or, as an engineering friend told me: “You did not perform an adequate vector analysis.” Too true. My bad.
But again, these are not really dumb stunts. They may involve a lapse of judgment or a split-second wrong choice. But they’re not willful stupidity. They’re not the gaffes you can look back on later and say, “What was I thinking?”
Dumb decisions don’t always lead to injuries or badly busted bikes. I’m going to pass along three anecdotes here to illustrate dumb things done on a bike, but none of them involved me in any sort of real danger and no injuries at all. Nor did any of them involve beer. But they were still dumb, each of which I can still savor with a touch of rueful chagrin.
This first little incident happened during a Wine Country Century some years ago. My friend Emilio and I were banging out the later miles up Alexander Valley when I cut a rear tire badly. It was beyond booting. Shoot…now what? A sag came along and although he had no spare tires, he did have a floor pump. So Emilio offered me his spare tubular. (Anyone who rides tubulars carries a spare tire because if you flat you cannot patch them. You have to swap out the whole tire.) But a sew-up on a clincher rim? I’d never heard of such a thing. Could it be done? It was a simple rim—a Mavic MA-40, I think—and it seemed just barely plausible. The sag driver, an experienced bike wrench, looked askance at the whole idea but Emilio insisted it would work. So we got it on the rim and with that floor pump we jacked it up to about a zillion PSI. Hard as a billiard ball and absolutely locked tight on the rim. What the heck…it looked fine… Let’s go!
A few miles later, nearing the hill on Chalk Hill—about mile 90 of the century—I started feeling a weird lump…lump…lump from the rear wheel. I mentioned it to Emilio, who was drafting behind me, and he said, “Just keep riding!” So I did, but not for long. Halfway up the hill, kablooy! The tire exploded. It had been slowly creeping around the rim and finally the valve stem was pulled too far away from its little hole in the rim and was sheered off, shredding the tire as it gave up the ghost.
So there I was, less than ten miles from the finish, stranded on the site of the road. Emilio—he of the “Just keep riding!”—did just that. He kept riding. See ya later! I think that’s the only Wine Country Century in over 30 years where I took a DNF. This is what I call collaborative or codependent dumbness…the two of us egging each other on to do something we ought to have known was a stupid non-starter. Emilio knew nothing about clinchers and I knew nothing about sew-ups. We pooled our collective ignorance and made a dumb decision. But I wonder…what if we’d switched my front tire to the rear rim and put the tubular on the front, where it would have been less stressed? Would that have been smart or just another kind of dumb?
My second sorry saga also involves exploding tires. My old bike buddy Donn used to be a sales rep for a national distributor of bike stuff. One of the lines he carried was a well-known brand of tires. Donn gave me three brand new tires for my road bike. Such a deal! At least it seemed that way. I don’t know whether the tires were defective—maybe why he gave them away—or whether it was one of those occasional poor match-ups between my rims and those tires. But almost immediately they started blowing off the rims in the most explosive, spectacular ways. One of them blew up as I was descending from Antelope Lake, up above Indian Valley. Fortunately I was with friends and someone had a fold-up I could put on. So no harm done, aside from a rather dramatic, skittering stop from high speed on my rim.
I forget where the next one blew up but it did so, somewhere. At that point I should have wised up to the problem, whatever the problem was…the tires or the tire-rim interface. That’s where this gets dumb. I should have never mounted the third tire. But dammit, they were free! How could I throw away a free tire?
And sure enough, that one blew up too. It did so near the end of one of the most epic tour stages ever: up and over a high Sierra ridge and down, down, down into Kings Canyon. 78 miles, 9800’ of climbing and a ton of descending through some of the most awesome scenery in the world. I suppose I should count myself lucky it didn’t blow on the wild, 17-mile descent into the canyon. It lasted through that and finally blew to pieces about five miles from camp in Cedar Grove.
My buddies said they’d ride on to camp and send the sag wagon back to pick me up. But the sag never came back to find me. So I walked and walked, with my bike rolling on its rim, for five miles to get to camp. The final kicker was that swarms of tiny flies found me and ate me alive. Their favorite thing was landing on my eyeballs. Are we having fun yet?
So that’s cheap-dumb. Too damn cheap to toss some tires that aren’t working. Explode on me once, shame on you. Explode on me twice, shame on me. And finally, three strikes, you’re out! As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Case in point.
My last anecdote is the one I woke up thinking about this morning. It’s the one that really exemplifies dumb and dumber on a bike. This was a solo ride near home, out to the Russian River. It must have been late winter. There had been a whacking great storm a few days before and it had been reported in the local paper that a debris flow of mud had spilled across Old Monte Rio Road. That sounded like something worth seeing so I headed out that way. Sure enough, there it was. (Used to be we called these landslides but ever since that big hot mess down in Montecito we have been instructed that the proper term is debris flow.) It had oozed down from the high ground on the right side of the road, flowed across and slopped over the cliff on the downhill side. It was just as it had been when it was on the move, only nicely settled in now. No county crews had been out to deal with it yet.
It was maybe 50 feet across and…just how deep was it? That was hard to tell. At least it was hard to tell if you were suffering from early-onset dumbness. Because what I wanted to do was to go forward, through it, over it, to the dry road on the other side. This is where common sense says you admire the mud, then turn around and ride back the way you came. But noooo! Not this bubba! Somehow stupidity draped its murky cloak over my head and all sensible thoughts evaporated. Never mind what that better angel is saying…I can do this! Or as Robert Frost said, “…the best way out is always through.” And who would call Frost dumb, eh?
Someone had placed a couple of 8-foot 2 x 10s across the mud…the beginnings of a “bridge”? That suggested maybe the mud had dried out and firmed up enough to be like hard-pack. I convinced myself this must be the case. With my bike on my shoulder, I got to the end of the last board and tentatively tapped the mud in front of me. Seemed firm enough. So I walked the plank: I boldly stepped out onto the supposedly hard surface and promptly sank up to my knees in the most glutinous, gooey quagmire…a quicksand nightmare except it was only two feet deep with the paved road at the bottom.
Now I was really stuck fast. Couldn’t move. Like being in concrete that’s setting up, except it’s chocolate mousse. I was afraid if I pulled a foot out, my shoe would stay down in the grip of the mud. And if I got a foot out, where would I put it down? No way I could twist around and go back. If I could go anywhere, it had to be forward. Meanwhile, my pretty road bike had become my crutch and was buried in the mud up past the chain rings.
What ultimately bailed me out was firewood. A nearby home had a lean-to full of firewood and the debris flow had run through the shed and floated many lengths of cord wood out onto the top of the flow. I grabbed all the ones I could reach and placed them ahead of me as stepping stones…the mud equivalent of snowshoes. Slowly, I pulled one foot out of the sucking mud and placed it on the flat side of a piece of firewood, always leaning for balance on the now totally filthy bike. One by one, I moved on across the flow, bringing the blocks of wood along, picking up the ones behind me and placing them in front. It must have taken an hour to go 30 feet.
I made it eventually. But then I had a mud-covered me and a disgustingly muddy bike to deal with before I could ride the 20 miles home. I found a nearby ditch with about a foot of water in it and set the bike in there, and with the help of a stick and some handfuls of grass and a lot of splashing, I got enough crud off so the chain would work. I didn’t even try to clean myself, except to clear the cleats a little. I was solid mud from the knees down with large splotches everywhere else. I passed some other riders on the way home and they gave me funny looks but no one said anything. Maybe they thought I was some hard-ass animal who rides a road bike in the mud, cyclo-cross style. Yeah…I meant to do that!
The dumb moments we survive end up making good anecdotes…old war stories. (Despite Santayana’s famous quote, we do remember the old stories…and yet still fall into the same stupid booby traps again and again.) If the anecdotes sometimes reflect rather badly on our capacity for rational, reasonable thought, so be it. A little humility is good for us. I’m using the plural pronouns—“our” and “us”—because I imagine most of you will confess to at least the occasional lapse of common sense when some quixotic challenge has presented itself and blotted out your better angel’s better advice. It happens. We keep tilting at windmills, even when we should know better.
So here we are, launched into the fullness of springtime, with all the possible cycling options arrayed ahead of us. What to do? Where to go? I wish you all the best in this best of all possible seasons. I hope you have many grand adventures and only a very few and very small dumb moments.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net