A few nights ago, I had my bicycle up on the stand in our garage, pulling the old chain through the derailleur, thinking about how I used to do bike maintenance in the bathtub (not while bathing). And that I’d had the same chain tool ever since those days, almost 19 years ago now.
I laid out the old chain on my workbench, next to the new chain. The guy at the bike shop had cut the new one for me a few hours earlier, with a few extra links. As I paid for it, he asked me, “You have a chain tool, right?” I said I did.
The bathtub bike maintenance phase feels like a long time ago now. I was in my late 20s, living in central Denver, in a small, carpeted apartment, with really no other space where I could work on a bicycle and not destroy the carpet. So I’d set the bike upside-down in the bathtub and sit on the edge of the tub with a few tools, and let the dirt and muck drop into the tub. I had no idea what I was doing at first, over-inflating tubes sometimes, having one pop after 10:00 p.m. one night, going off like a shotgun as I lay in bed reading, wondering what the hell just happened. I adjusted my bike’s 1989 brake calipers over and over again, grasping in ignorance, finally figuring out how to get them to actually stop my wheels from rolling when I squeezed the levers without rubbing the rims constantly on one side or the other.
I had asked my brother about which bike tools I should buy, reminding him that I didn’t have much money, and he said: Just buy a basic set of cheap tools, and if you break one, replace it with a nice one from Park Tools. So I got a basic set from Bike Nashbar, and they’ve moved with me to seven addresses, and I’m still using them. One of the clasps has broken off the tool case, and I lost the tire levers somewhere, and used all tube patches probably before Obama took office.
I got my first real road bike back in 2006, a gift from a dear friend, a used Trek 330 that was at that time 17 years old. To keep it rolling for my daily commutes and rides, I had to learn a lot: How to fix a flat, how to replace the pedals, and the wheels, and the brake pads, and the brake cables, and the chain, where to put grease and where to put lube, how to wrap bar tape, and most importantly, how to get around a city. I got a cable cutters, a chain whip, a master link pliers, multi-tools, a freewheel remover, a cone wrench, a pedal wrench, dozens of tubes and bottles of chain lube.
In the time that has passed since then, bikes have of course gotten way fancier, and my bikes have, well, not gotten much fancier.
I am somewhat aware of the technological advances incorporated into the best bicycles humans are making nowadays, like electronic shifting and electronic dropper posts and carbon this and that, and I know that if I wanted to spend $16,000 on a bicycle right now, I could do that. And that $16,000 bicycle—just like my much-less-fancy bicycle that goes bikepacking and on gravel rides and to the grocery store—transfers power from the rider to the rear wheel via a chain. And the chain on that $16,000 bike, which might cost a bit more than my chain, works pretty much exactly the same way my chain works.
If my phone breaks, I can’t fix it—I have to take it to a store and ask them to fix it (and they’d probably just make me buy a new one). Same thing with my computer, my iPad, a great many things on my car, my toaster oven, blender, the list goes on. But my just-fancy-enough-for-me bicycle? Sure, you might say it’s more convenient to just drop it off at a bike shop and have a bike mechanic work on it. But that takes a couple days, if it’s just something uncomplicated like adjusting the brakes, or putting on new brake pads, or swapping out some tires, or a new chain. And of course I have to leave it there for a few days so they can work on it, that convenience starts to feel quite inconvenient.
Maybe it’s a little curmudgeonly, my version of Wendell Berry’s “Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer” (RIP). But can I be allowed this one analog thing to hold fast to, that is without even the faintest trace of Big Tech in its DNA, that never prompts me for a system update, that I can fix myself and keep alive as long as I want to, because maybe that keeps me human?
Besides, I’m not getting rid of this fucking chain tool. We’ve been through too much together.
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(The title of this piece is a nod to Owen Cutts, whose Instagram you should definitely check out)
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