I faced a challenge the other day I haven’t met since I was twelve years old — a flat tire on my bicycle.
Although I hadn’t ridden a bike through most of my adulthood, pretty much every morning for the past couple years I take a ten-ortwelve-mile jaunt into the countryside, where I converse with the corn and cows if they’re in the mood to listen. Whatever trials await me later, I always find a sense of peace peddling the pavement at the start of the day.
But a couple days ago my front tire went flat four miles away from home. And I don’t mean that it was soft and saggy. No, this baby was as flat as a Biden popularity poll. As flat as a Trump attempt at inoffensive “humor.” Flat, flat, flat.
I had an important meeting within the hour and didn’t have time to walk the bike home, so I muscled along peddling as best I could, damage to the rim be damned. After all, the bike had somewhere between two and three thousand miles on it. The rear tread was mostly gone. The brakes had gone soft, were adjusted, and were going soft again. And now this.
Maybe it was time to scrap it and buy a new bike? After all, we live in a disposable society, right?
Then again, I liked this bike, a fine-tuned apparatus made in an exotic far-off land, and it had cost me almost three times what I paid for my first car.
Then yet again, the far-off land of manufacture was China, and my first car cost me fifty bucks. I would spend more to repair all its ills than to replace it with a new one from Walmart, where I had gotten this one.
Then again once more, how hard would it be to fix a flat? I did it countless times when I was young and broke. And it was sort of fun, as I recalled.
Thanks to Mama Amazon, the new inner tube arrived at my front door the next day. As I opened the package and the scent of black rubber wafted into my nostrils, my way-back memory hole echoed with image after image.
There was Dad, listening to me sniffle that my bike had a flat. He took me out into the yard and said, “Here, I’ll help you fix it—once. Then you’re on your own for the rest of your life.”
He showed me how to wrench the wheel off the bike, then pull the tire off the rim and yank out the flat inner tube. Pump the tube up a bit, then dunk it into a bucket of water until a line of tiny bubbles rises to the top. Mark that spot, dry the rubber, and scrub it with the sharp top of the little repair can that holds everything needed to get the job done. Once the rubber has been roughed up, it’s time for the fragrant rubber cement, and then the little red rubber patch.
With the glue dry, it was time to put the tube back in the tire, tire back on the wheel, wheel back on the frame, and Tommy back on the road. Easy peasy. Something even a 12-year-old can do.
But this time I worried, because nothing is as simple as it used to be, right? Just take a look under your car’s hood if you doubt it. Would it be the same with bikes?
To start with, this bike has front brakes, which I didn’t have back then. And when I wrenched the wheel off the frame, even the washer under the axle nut looked different than I remembered it, with a little flange that had to fit into a notch. What else wouldn’t be the same as it used to be?
The tire came off the rim easily enough, and out came the deflated tube. I felt around the inside of the tire and found the culprit—a sharp metal wire as thin as a needle I had picked up along the way. Out it came, and in went the new tube.
As I slid the tire back on the frame between the front brake pads, tightened the nuts, and pumped it full of air, I muttered: “Did I do it? Can it really be this easy?”
When I rolled off down the road on my repaired tire, I grinned with the same satisfaction I felt more than sixty years ago when I got the job done. But why stop therecould I remember how to clip a baseball card to flutter between the spokes to make motorcycle sounds?
I decided not to press my luck. A lot of things that came naturally to me then would confound me today. Can you say hula hoop? Pogo stick? Spitting through the gap between your front teeth?
But not tire-fixing! Still got it! I decided to take the win and call it a day.
Oh, I can hear some of you muttering that I took the easy way out this time, by ordering a new inner tube rather than a tube repair kit. That’s what happens when you’re a corner-cutting 12-year-old more than sixty years down the road with a few extra bucks in your pocket.
So go ahead, sneer if you must. Grouse that it only counts if I do it exactly as I did it way back then, with messy glue and patches and all. Scoff away, but I insist that the important take-away here is this:
Yes, I am as smart as a 12-year-old!*
And if Barry Bonds can live with that cynical asterisk behind all of his accomplishments, I guess I can too.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
