I had just reached the top of UBC hill on my road bike and was feeling pretty good.
I’d had to push myself out the door this Easter Sunday. Rain was threatening, the cappucino machine was calling,  and I almost convinced myself to stay put. But as always, after ten minutes on the road I was happy to be out there.
The climb up this familiar hill had gone pretty well, and I’d even managed to drop a much younger rider who had been hanging on along the flat section of Spanish Banks. As I crested the hill, a mild east wind assaulted me; a sure sign of rain in Vancouver. The last section is a flat 8 km stretch, then Camosun hill and home. With luck I’d get there before the deluge began.
I pulled out around a couple of riders, stepped on the gas and then without any warning it happened. PWANG!  Right under my butt, something snapped like a rifle shot.  My bike seat fell off, metal bits clanging to the ground. Just like that. My rear end slid off with the seat, but I kept the bike under control, and luckily I was going slowly and was able to pull over to the curb.  I dismounted and stared with disbelief at the bare seat post sticking out of the bike frame.
The other riders called out “your stuff’s over here!”. The first thing that went through my mind was not about that stuff, though, it was about MY stuff. Having been in a few minor crashes I know that with a body full of endorphins we don’t immediately feel any pain.  So, I conducted a quick anatomy check to make sure nothing else had, umm, fallen to the ground. Phew: no gashes or puncture wounds, but I had that familiar ache that every male knows, the one from getting bashed in that most sensitive place of all.
I gathered up the scattered bits (the bike’s, not mine, thank god) and got back on, the seat hanging limply off the post, held on by a gear bag strap. 8 kilometers to home. Manageable, but of course it had now started to rain. I pedalled standing up for a while, a technique that gave me a whole new respect for pro riders, who can do this for hours. It’s exhausting. I stopped, managed to prop the seat onto the post and sat down. My riding position was precarious and so low that I looked like a circus act, but at least I could sit.
The really odd thing, though, is that this was the second time. About a year prior, exactly the same event transpired. I was riding a flat stretch, not pushing hard, and suddenly the seat bolt snapped. Before you get the wrong idea, yes I could stand to lose a few pounds, but I weigh 175, not 300. I do pedal like Lance Armstrong, but 50 years into the future. In other words, I’m a purely average, recreational rider. How is it I can snap steel bolts in half without really trying?
The last time this happened, the mechanic at my LBS (local bike shop) just shrugged and installed a new part. This time I want a titanium bolt that F18 pilots would stake their lives on.  I don’t need a colonoscopy from my seat post!
And as for Devinci Bikes, where are they sourcing their parts from?  This company makes a token effort at customer service by having an e-mail address, then ignores their customers who actually write in (I know, I’ve tried). Are they trying to infuriate their customers, or are they just tired of  responding to angry messages about broken bike parts? Tell you what, Devinci Bikes, how about someone kicks YOU in the crotch, and then you e-mail me and we’ll talk about it?

I’ve been sporadic about bike commuting over the past few weeks, for reasons ranging from the legitimate (work and time constraints) to the simply lazy (I just didn’t get it together).  But overall, I’d worked out a pretty good system.  I never expected to bike in every day; too many things just get in the way.  I figured if I managed 50% of the time, I was doing OK.  From my chats with other commuters in the change room, lots of others adopted pretty much the same attitude. 

So, I’d drive my car in on Mondays, leave it there and bike all week, then drive home on Friday.  If I needed a car during a work day, I had one.  Evenings I could manage.  That also allowed me to do a laundry exchange over the weekend.  It was working fine, but I was sure that I’d run afoul of the rules by leaving my bike overnight.  Especially the last few weeks when my riding had dwindled down to just a few days.

So I called the property manager and readied myself for a lecture on the proper use of the bike cage.  I was shocked when they put through to security, who told me that there had been a theft from the bike cage early that morning, around 4 am.  I described my bike and they asked me to come over right away and review the security camera video.  I went to a cramped small office in the parking garage of another building, where I saw on a small tv monitor two thieves at work.  While one stood by on a bike (stolen, no doubt) the other slipped through a hole they had cut in the mesh fence, hoisted my bike off the rack and disappeared out the door in under a minute.  Just like that, gone.  The brazen thieves just rode away, no attempt at disguise or subterfuge.  The last glimpse I had of my bike was some bastard perched on my custom seat, disappearing up the driveway and out into the night. 

I have heard that bike theft is rampant in Vancouver, but this really brought it home.  In May, my youngest daughter’s bike was pinched from her school, in mid-afternoon by thieves who brazenly cut the cable lock and slipped away with it in mid-afternoon.  My daughter was traumatized by that episode.   Now my turn.  I had trouble sorting out my emotions. At first I was furious, I wanted to go to the downtown eastside, where I imagined stolen bikes are fenced, find my bike and pummel the thief.  Actually, I thought of running over him with my car.  Then I felt a great loss, as though my commuter bike were a faithful pet.  Then I felt a surge of defiance, wanting to immediately get another bike and a giant lock. 

Instead, I’ll settle for a letter to Peter Ladner, city councillor and mayoral candidate.  Peter is a dedicated bike commuter and I’d recently  told him of my nascent experiences.  He was keenly interested, wanting to know my exact route and how it was going.  Maybe this sad story will help motivate the city to figure out how to crack down on bike theft.

The final disturbing part of this story concerns the thief simply lifting my bike up and heading for the door.  That bike was locked onto the rack.  Yes, the lock was an inexpensive cable/combination affair, but it was nowhere in sight when the thief grabbed my bike.   Somebody had already removed the lock.  When?  How?  The security guys seemed nonplussed when I told them this detail and just shrugged it off.  So, not only can thieves slip through fences, they can make locks disappear at will.  Creepy.

This 2-day, supported group ride starts at Birkenhead Lake and goes to Pemberton on day one, with an optional highway ride from Pemberton to Whistler for diehards.  Pete, proving his mettle once again, rode the extra 35 km to Whistler, , on steaming hot pavement, and in a stiff headwind with over 1500′ of net elevation gain  The rest of us shuttled to Whistler on the provided bus, and were showered and fed by the time Pete arrived.

Day two descends from Whistler to Squamish on a mix of singletrack, logging road and highway.  With the Whistler highway under construction, we were forced to brave six kilometers of dangerous , winding road with no shoulder.  The four of us were in close single file, and I remember yelling at Holly to stay in line as cars roared by us, seemingly inches away.  Descending some of the singletrack on this ride seems risky, but has nothing on this part of the ride for actual danger.

After a lunch stop on the side of the highway, the route descends down through the Cheakamus Canyon.  I’ve been told this is the original “pioneer road”, and it has a lot of sections that mere mortals like me simply walk down.  At one point the cliffside roadway has fallen away, and a cable-supported wire mesh bridge fills the gap.  We were warned not to ride this section, which of course motivated Pete to do just that.

I confess to recurrent nightmares about this section, specifically the parts where a departure off the trail will take you over a cliff and far down into the river canyon below.  I made Holly and James dismount and walk through some of these sections.  From there its more descending on a washed out boulder-field of a road, much like a dry creek bed, into the Squamish River valley, and then a long but relatively flat ride out to the finish.  It sounds dreadful, but its remarkable how confidence builds on these descents and you find yourselves riding down a rockstrewn roadway that you would sworn was way over your head.  It’s exhilarating.

Once down and out into the flat ride out I breathed a sigh of relief that the dangerous sections were behind us.  I was out in the lead along the rutted dirt road, pushing hard and trying not to inhale too much dust from the occasional passing car.  Then I happened to glance back: no Holly and no James.  I turned the bike around and sprinted back until I spotted them on the side of the road.  Holly had crashed, hard, and was sitting on the side of the road, covered in dirt, bloodied and gasping for breath.  For some unknown reason, her bike had suddenly gone out of control and crashed, with the handlebars jamming hard into her abdomen.  Holly had suffered an internal injury earlier this year, that turned out to be potentially very serious.  I was very worried that she might be reinjured, and recalled the doctor’s lecture about not wasting time getting help if that were to happen.  

We got Holly settled, sent Pete and James up the road to a nearby house for help, and turned to flag down a passing truck.  Little did I know I was about to experience the best and the worst of human kindness.  The truck’s occupant, a lone male, slowed and stared at us as he passed.  It was obvious we were in distress: I waved at him to stop and did everything but leap in front of his vehicle.  He continued to stare as he slowly passed and proceeded to simply drive away.  Amazed and infuriated I kept waving at him to stop and turn around, but was forced to watch him disappear down the road.  Maybe a rock through his back window would have made him stop, but it seems nothing else would. 

Then good things started happening and quickly.  Pete and James came running back down the road with the occupant of the nearby house, who happened to be a member of Squamish Search and Rescue.  Another truck came by with three sympathetic locals, who stopped, and bundled Holly and I into their car.   Alex, the Search and Rescue technician, checked Holly out.  By now she was calmer and breathing properly, and it appeared she was okay.  But I wasn’t taking any chances.  The locals drove us the twenty-five or so kilometers to a walk-in clinic in town.  There Holly was diagnosed with a badly bruised abdomen, but with everything internal still whole and in the right place. 

Holly, now recovered, and I, still recovering, rejoined the trail and walked the last few kilometers to the finish of the ride.  Pete and James, having ridden in, rejoined us and were greatly relieved to see Holly in one piece. 

What a scare.  And how ironic that we should come through the dangerous, technical parts of the ride with flying colours, and then be undone by a mundane section of dirt road.  Thanks to Alex and the locals (whose names I never got) for your unselfish help.  I’d like you to know how much the kindness of strangers means in times like that.

How the heck does this thing not tip over?

On the long weekend (in Canada our version of Independence Day falls on July 1, a Tuesday this year, so we all made it a 4 day weekend) I felt the urge for a little boat journey.  So, Paige, my youngest daughter and I launched our 13′ inflatable and set out on a voyage of discovery for her, re-discovery for me.  Our little boat is a marvel, designed in Italy, built in Venezuala.  It falls under the category of “rigid inflatable”, which means the hull is solid (aluminum in this case, lightweight and strong), but it also has the traditional air-filled tubes surrounding the hull.  It’s powered by a four-stroke Honda 30 hp outboard, and with the 2 of us aboard will cruise at over 20 knots with very reasonable fuel consumption.  I use this boat to get from Vancouver Harbour to Howe Sound, about a 15 mile journey through some potentially rough waters.  It’s a very dry ride, and it hasn’t let me down yet. 

The back side of Gambier island was beckoning, somewhere I haven’t travelled in over 2 years, since the days when I used to work on boats.  Gambier is in northern Howe Sound, which starts practically at Vancouver’s doorstep, though very few people have ever actually travelled there.  In my mind I can be in some remote northern inlet.

As we set out down the east side of the island, the dark blue waters quickly give way to a milky green, fed by the snow melt and glacial runoff of the Squamish river.  Civilization quickly fades away and soon we were looking at rocky  oints covered in fir trees, towering peaks and valleys that disappeared enticingly into the surrounding mountains.

Little has changed up there over the years.  There are a few more cabins, and each year a little more of the island yields to development, but only slowly.  There are still a couple of yacht stations, surprisingly remote yet packed with boats.  Ever-present are the scars of recent logging.  Unlike years past when logging debris was left lying and scattered on the hill, today’s cuts look almost groomed.  Also a pleasant difference from years past is the much reduced air pollution that spews out of the Port Mellon pulp mill complex.  Until pollution controls were put in place the mill used to fill the entire sound with an acidic fog that could be smelled from miles away.

Our voyage, which was roughly 22 miles or so, was overy surprisingly quickly.  Suddenly we were back in the more populated parts of Howe Sound, where Gibsons and surrounding towns increasingly encroach into the landscape and boat traffic abounds.  Still, it gives me hope that in 25 years the northern reaches of Howe Sound will still evoke that feeling of remoteness and discovery that still permeates them today.

The Long Road North concerns Gwendal Castellan’s cycling trip from the tip of South America to the Canadian arctic over a period of 18 months.  As the journey progresses he is joined alternately by his girlfriend, family members and various hangers-on.

Like many journeys, The Long Road North starts with a wide-eyed fascination with every encounter that gradually tapers down to an exhausted determination just get to the end of the damned road.  South America is given generous coverage, the U.S. less, and the journey from Vancouver to Inuvik (half of the total distance) happens in the blink of an eye.  It reminded me of reading John Stackhouse’s “Timbit Nation”, a travelogue that starts with an unhurried meander through the Maritimes and concludes with a perfunctory sprint across BC, seemingly just so the trip can be properly book-ended.  If our nation were sized according to the word count given each province, B.C. would be one-tenth the size of Nova Scotia.

Surely such a trip as the Long Road North is full of moments that stretch all the way from ecstasy to sheer agony, that explores the paradox of long-distance travel, where epiphanies are pressed out of the sheer will to go on.  There was one such comic moment, when Castellan seems forever trapped in the purgatory of a South American river on a boat with a wonky outboard motor and a confounded skipper.  I waited in vain for more, the inevitable confession of “my ass is sore, what the hell was I thinking, I want to go home, but I’ll just make it over the next hill”. Instead what we heard were weak platitudes to understand the significance of the trip like “this journey really helped me put my life in context”, profound but token-seeming travel quotations pulled from some book, and a detailed account of Castellan’s sun rash.

The Long Road North points out the difficulty of pointing a camera around on your epic trip, but with only the vaguest idea of a script and a story.  Don’t get me wrong; cycling two continents is a massive accomplishment, but I have nearly equal admiration for the film’s editor who, handed a box of digital videotapes, tackled the mountainous task of trying to stitch together something of meaning in this story. 

The first six blocks are a climb to the top of Dunbar Street, and it always takes me by surprise how much of an exertion it is first thing in the morning.  On cold days I’m grateful for getting warmed up; today it’s just business as usual.  Once on Dunbar it’s a fast descent down to 16^th Avenue, jockeying with the buses and watching out for the early commuters racing downtown but not yet fully alert.

The descent on 16^th Avenue is steep and fast; the electronic speedo says I’m approaching 50 km/hour.  That doesn’t sound really fast, until I think about what a crash at that speed and that hour would be like, and I reach for the brake levers as the traffic light at the bottom of the hill starts coming up fast. 

I can never quite decide on what route to take to get to the 8^th Avenue bike route.  Ahead of me a woman on a mountain bike veers left onto Balaclava and I decide to follow.  Surprisingly, it has bike route signs on it, a new discovery for me.  Pumping hard now, I pass her; cyclists rarely nod or acknowledge one another, something that surprises me a little.  I thought there would be the camaraderie of travelers, but we both just press without so much as a nod.

The flats of 8^th Avenue turn into a long slow climb up to Arbutus, and I’m gearing down more than I want to.  I can hear her bike behind me, which spurs me to push a little harder.  Then it’s down Arbutus, onto 1^st Avenue and onto the Burrard Street Bridge. All the way I’m ignoring stop signs, jumping lights; is this wise?

I pass a few more mountain bike commuters, and then three fit young guys on road bikes blast by me like I’m standing still.  Why does it always turn into a race?

At the downtown end of the bridge, I maneuver the bike so I can cross the exit lane while firmly making eye contact with the drivers who almost always yield me the right of way. This looks like a prime spot to get wiped out by a car.

From there I jog over one block to Hornby for the fast final last leg through downtown, and into the parking lot and the bike cage.  Just over 25 minutes, not bad.  By now I’m freely pouring sweat in the morning heat, as I start pulling off my helmet and gloves.  Who should wander by the bike cage, but my doctor, the very one who warned me of my rising cholesterol and need to get healthier.  He stops to say hi, tells me of his recent back surgery and says he wishes that he too, could be a bike commuter. I wonder if he really means it. 

But first I needed a bike, and that’s where the gear-geek in me got excited.  I went around to a few bike shops and looked at the latest commuter, sometimes called hybrid bikes.  These have mountain-bike style frames, an upright riding position, but with skinnier tires and no suspension.  But I had a problem.  I like good quality gear, which means moving up the quality ladder a few rungs.  What caught my eye was a navy blue Brodie Energy with disc brakes and a swish Shimano  Deore gear set.  But this bike was $800; what if my enthusiasm for commuting proved to be short-lived? 

Also on my mind was my old road bike, a Trek 660 that sat in our garage, more or less permanently hooked up to a stationary trainer.  It had been a good bike in its day, at least equal in quality to the Brodie, and was still pretty much pristine.  I didn’t need three bikes cluttering up the place (mountain, commuter and old roadie), and it bothered me to sell off a perfectly good machine for next to nothing.  Lots of bike couriers ride converted roadies, because they’re fast, available cheap (or used to be) and have a retro, mutant kind of cool.

So, I dug into my spare parts box, found a straight handlebar to replace the Trek’s drop bar, and picked up a couple of inexpensive new tires from the Co-op. Then I booked the Trek into my LBS (local bike shop) and had them do the conversion. My Trek was sporting the original super skinny road tires that max out your speed, but transmit every bump in the road through your body.  Those were beefed up into wider700 X 28C tires that are a little more forgiving (not much), and the bike was fitted with shifters and brake handles that fitted the flat bar.  The total cost for everything was under $150, pretty cheap I thought for bringing new life to my old steed.  The soul of a bike is the frame, and the Trek’s circa-1988 True Temper steel frame is as springy and lively as ever.  Steel frames are rarely seen anymore, having been passed over by cheaper, lighter aluminum.  But to bike geeks, a lugged steel frame (see the photo) is a work of art.

So, how’s it working out?  I love the bike as a commuter.  It’s quick, has lively handling and the original Shimano 600 Ultegra gears shift faultlessly.  Not everything is ideal; being designed as a race bike, there are no mounts for fenders or a rack.  I jury-rigged some quasi-fenders and carry my stuff in a pack.  Worst of all, though, are the brakes.  How did I ever stop on this thing?  It takes the hand strength of Hercules to lock up the rear wheel, though it’s surprising how that strength comes to you when you’re about to pile into a car.  Anyone know where to get good brakes cheap?