Spare Tires

Bike Works offered a bicycle maintenance work shop on how to change and repair a flat tire. Riding roads heavily traveled by pedestrians carrying beverages in glass bottles, and vehicles that seem to ooze glass from windshields explains part of the reasons why tires are inflicted with punctures and slashes. Bougainvillea thorns, cactus prickers and dinner forks explain the other causes and then sometimes shit just happens to tires in a volcanic setting. (I’ve never actually punctured a tire with a tinge.)

I’ve changed bike tires ever since I took my first ride down the driveway on a two wheeler at age… I don’t remember. Dad or Mike might have helped the first few times, but I definitely remember wrestling with the nut on the hub and getting a few scrapped knuckles. In those days “quick release” was something you did with a fish.

Nevertheless, I went to the evening class. I rode my bike and knew I’d ride home in the dark, something I haven’t done since coming to Hawaii. I got lights, good ones, but considering I have trouble seeing at night when I drive my jeep….well, I told myself not to ride any faster than my headlight could shine.

I figured I’d learn something and I did. If you slash your tire and make repairs to the tube along the side of the road, there is still the problem of fixing the tire. Once inflated the tube will pop through the tire’s hole and BANG, you’re sitting on the side of the road again. A dollar bill placed between the tire and the tube will solve this problem. I also learned that tires are not randomly mounted on the rim. By placing the tire’s logo near the stem of the inner tube you’ll have a handy reference for locating the spot where that piece of glass or thorn might still be lodged in the tire. I always marked the tube and tire before I removed the tube so I could match the two later.

But what surprised me most was how many women had no clue of how to change a tire. It was painful to listen to some of the questions. “How do you take the rear wheel off?” “How do you to get the air out of tire.” “Oops,” she corrected herself, “it is flat.” I turned around to take a quick peeked at the lady who asked that question. Confirmation, blonde. Not a real one. Thank God the dumb brunettes want to dye their hair blonde. Keeps us brunettes looking better than ever. Especially the silver foxes. Okay, I’m not serious, except about the foxes.

Now of these women didn’t look like they had deprived childhoods. What would they have looked like if they had? Didn’t they ride bikes as kids? Where did these women come from that they had not have the opportunity to ride a bike through a muddy puddle, or listen to the revving of a baseball card in the spokes, or ride no hands down the center of a country road weaving in and out of the dashed center line? Didn’t they make a sling shot out of an old inner tube so shredded it couldn’t be repaired?

Deprived childhoods or was mine so enriched? Yeah, mine was.