Day 40: String For Spokes

I woke, ate, packed, and went straight across to the auto repair shop with my spare spokes before the morning could get away from me. I found an old guy inside and explained what I needed — a strange enough request, spokes for a bicycle brought to a garage that fixes trucks — but he just took them without comment and led me out back to his workshop. He handed me a pen and let me sketch what I had in mind, and that was about the extent of the conversation; the man barely said a word the whole time, just whistled to himself. He knocked the head clean off, put a blow torch to the metal to soften it, bent it exactly where I’d drawn, and plunged it into cold water to temper it. It looked perfect. Back at the wheel we threaded it through the driveside without touching the cassette — and it would have worked beautifully, except it came up just a hair short of reaching the nipple at the other end. Back we went. He torched and twisted a second spoke, and between the two of us we could only manage one clean bend long enough to do the job. I thanked him. He said nothing, and went back to lying under a truck with his toolbox.

Two torched spokes.

The spokes hooked in and screwed home, and the wheel spun close enough to straight to call it good. We got maybe two miles down the road before I heard one of them let go, though the other held. A shame — with a longer original bend I’m fairly sure those two could have carried me all the way to Oregon. The survivor got us into Eads, riding slow and careful the whole way, which did nothing for our mileage. There we found two Dutch women riding the TransAm and a guy from Virginia, and between the three of them, not one tool for fixing a driveside spoke. Nobody carries them. Nobody ever does.

A few miles out of town we ran into Tom — born in Iowa, which is where he was riding to, though he lived in Hawaii and carried enough spare parts to qualify as a vending machine on two wheels. Every gizmo and gadget you could name, he had one. We tried his special lockring tool on my cassette, and the cassette was cranked on so hard it simply snapped the tool in half. Then two more Englishmen turned up, riding east, and lingered at a careful distance before one of them finally wandered over — no chain whip between them, but another lockring to try. So we tried again. Six of us now, wrenches and lockrings and oily rags scattered across the shoulder, and still nobody could shift the thing. “Somebody’s bloody swung on that thing, is what they’ve done,” said the other one, still straddling his bike across the road, in a broad Cornish accent.

Tense.

In the end I bought two Fiber Fix spokes off Tom — essentially a length of string that hooks round the rim and screws tight to hold everything under tension. The Englishmen looked on, a little sheepish, and suggested I head back into Eads and get it properly fixed. Eads, population twelve. Fixed where — the invisible bike shop? I didn’t say that out loud, but I thought it. They were a different breed of rider entirely, matching monogrammed jerseys, no stories worth telling because they were too busy filling in map panels, and their one real complaint of the whole trip had been the wind in Wyoming. They could turn back to Eads if they liked. I needed the bike shop in Pueblo by tomorrow, so I pushed on toward Haswell instead.

Long Shadow Riders.

However much of it was purely psychological, having something that felt like a full complement of spokes on the back wheel gave me the confidence to make Haswell by dark. Ordway had been the plan, but Haswell was what we got — a bare city park with no store open anywhere nearby. We pitched the tent and finished off the last scraps of tuna and bread we were carrying, breakfast to wait until the store opened in the morning. Ninety miles still stood between us and Pueblo. I thought I could manage it — a proper-sized city, with most of the traffic from here on heading that direction anyway, so if the wheel gave out for good I could always throw the bike in the back of somebody’s pickup and hitch the rest of the way in. Right at the end of the night I caught a jagged silhouette on the horizon and pointed it out to the others: our first look at the Rocky Mountains, and more than enough to send us all to bed with something worth dreaming about.