Monday, February 2nd was the first real thaw, the first real nice day, since January set in with all of its winter savageness. The sun was out, the sky was blue, the air was clear, and the temperatures inched up in the 40 degree Fahrenheit range. Snow was deep on the ground, but after weeks of frigid temperatures, this felt like a thaw.
Looking at the calendar now I notice with a bit of amusement that the 2nd was Groundhog Day. A southern reader might say “Well, if it was such a nice day and the sun was shining the groundhog must have seen his shadow.” Ha ha. Around here, my friend, we don’t believe in groundhogs. Whether some rodent sees his shadow or not, we know there will always be six more weeks of winter. At least six more weeks of winter. We just try to enjoy the few goods days between now and then.
I first noticed exactly how nice a day Monday had turned into when I went out shortly after noon to feed the chickens. Stepping outside, I was met by bright sunlight and mild air. My first reaction was something along the lines of “Whoa, this is nice.” The pleasantness of the weather immediately lightened my mood and put a smile on my face. I went to feed the chickens, but on the way back to the house I stopped. The day was, I decided, more than just nice. It was wonderful. It was fabulous. Who could have believed the sunshine could be so nice? Exactly how long was it since the last time a sunny warm day like this had come around? Too long.
I stood in the middle of the snow-covered chicken yard and looked over the house to the snow-buried hillside and the blue sky above. Today, I thought, the world was looking beautiful. Everything was so nice, I had to do something. How many days like this would come in February? I just had to be out soaking up this sunshine, running, moving–doing something besides sitting shuttered up in the house like I could any miserable day. It was a persuasive argument I made myself, one I couldn’t resist. It was impossible for me to do anything productive outside, but it sure was a good day for going on a bicycle ride. I sure wanted to go on a nice, long bicycle ride instead of spending the afternoon inside writing.
No sooner thought than decided. I was going to play hooky for the rest of the afternoon, and I wasn’t even going to feel guilty about it. The one bit of justification I did was tell myself this bicycle ride would be instead of my Tuesday morning ride. This reasoning was plenty enough to excuse my dereliction of duty.
Before I left on my bike ride I did some minor maintenance on the bicycle. Winter weather, with all of its snow, salt, and sand, is brutal on a bike. The brake joints were getting stiff, the gears gunked up, and the chain was in need of another oiling. Also, a rasping, grinding sound had started to come from within the crankset (the crankset is what the pedals and the forward gear system are part of). I figured that somehow a bit of sand had managed to get inside the bearings and was grinding around. I hoped the noise would just go away, and I sprayed a liberal amount of DW-40 in the cracks, wishing that it might somehow magically help solve the problem. Bicycle all primed to go, I started out with windbreaker on my back and digital camera strapped to my side.
It didn’t take long for me to realize I had not managed to wish away the rasping, grinding sound from within my crankset. The noise came with every full pedal, a slight, rasping grind which only reminded me too well of a ball bearing set going bad. Drat. But there wasn’t much I could do at the moment. (In fact, I didn’t know anything I could do at all. There weren’t any grease fittings on the bike.) I was determined to not let this sound of perhaps impending doom for my bike spoil the ride. So long as it didn’t get worse and didn’t keep me from pedaling the bicycle, I intended to enjoy myself.
I didn’t want to take just any old bicycle ride on this absolutely fabulous February day. I wanted to do something special–something exciting and new and invigorating. The ticket for that was to do some more background exploring, something I consider a fun adventure, and something I haven’t done in a long time. I already had a distant road picked out that I wanted to find out where it led. Even better, the shortest way to get to this road was to go up B. Hill Road. B. Hill Road takes a one lane bridge across the river and railroad tracks to become a narrow winding road that leads steeply up B. hill to give any traveler a view of the vast spreading vista of rural New York. Last summer I took a round-about route so that I could ride down B. Hill Road and enjoy the sight without having to work through the steep climb. Today it was February and I wanted a challenge, so I decided to ride up the hill.
The trip up the hill started out well enough. I knocked the bicycle into a slightly easier gear and began the climb without much trouble. Once I’d gained enough altitude to have a good view I stopped and took out the camera for some pictures. I continued the ascent and stopped at another good point for more pictures. The world spread on and on, blanketed in snow. It looked peaceful and at rest, waiting for winter to end. However, all was not going well with my bicycle. As anyone who has ridden a bike much knows, starting from a dead stop on a steep hill is hard. On that day I was not finding it so very hard to restart my ascent, but every time I did the bicycle ground alarmingly from within the crankset. I was beginning to wonder if I was going to make it to the top of the hill with a bicycle in one piece. It was beginning to seem like a very bad idea to keep stopping for more pictures, but I persisted out of stubbornness and the desire to not let the cranky old bike ruin my picture taking expedition.
Well, the bicycle got the last laugh. I was starting up from one such picture taking break when the bike ground loudly, then gave a final snap, and broke–simple as that. The crankset always seemed so completely attached to the bicycle. It was the center of the bicycle, the part that always worked. No longer. The guts of the crankset had broken out of place, the forward gears and chain were twisted at an odd angle. The whole mess looked utterly broken, and I was a bit stunned that I had managed to break it so easily.
There would be no more adventuring that day. But my thoughts were already leaping ahead. The bicycle was broken–forget about today, how would I take my thrice weekly bicycle ride? Fixing this bicycle looked like an unrealistic dream–which meant I would have to buy a new bicycle. Double drat.
Back to the present. I was three quarters of the way up B. Hill Road. In the short term I didn’t need the ability to pedal because I could just coast back down the hill. However, once I reached the bottom of the hill I still had three or so miles before I reached home. I wasn’t really looking forward to walking the whole way, but . . . I would deal with that once I got to the bottom of the hill.
As it turned out the bicycle was not so utterly broken as I first thought. The bicycle was not exactly usable but it was not completely unusable. The front gears slopped around whenever I pedaled, making the chain leap from gear to gear wildly, but I could propel the bicycle forward in a slow and stuttering manner. It was something, at least. Enough for me to limp the bicycle home.
Once home I set about trying to figure out if there was any way I might possibly fix the bicycle. I started out not even knowing exactly what had happened, but once I had completely disassembled the crankset the malfunction was evident. One of the ball bearing rings had worn away from all my pedaling and all of the ball bearings had burst out of their container. The ball bearing case was only a thin scrap of metal, utterly useless. Seeing the state of deterioration the ball bearing housing was in, I was surprised I had been able to continue riding the bicycle as long as I had. (And it makes me wonder how unnecessarily hard the riding was.)
When I discovered what the problem was, I had a brief moment of hope in which I thought it might be fixable. It was simply a worn out ball bearing ring–couldn’t I just buy a replacement? I checked the idea out on the Internet. A quick search told me I was only beginning to get a dim glimmer of how naive I was. The bicycle I was looking to fix was a dirt cheap Huffy mountain bike, and this is not the era of the Great Depression when people try to fix everything. Normal bicycle parts stores didn’t sell anything less than the entire crankset, and it seemed the very cheapest crankset they were willing to consider selling cost more than my entire bike. (And we won’t mention the cranksets that were selling for over $200!) Reading between the lines, I was picking up the fact that people aren’t expected to fix dirt cheap bicycles. If something like a ball bearing ring in your crankset goes bad, well, buy a new bicycle.
Thwarted again. I can’t say I was very surprised. Probably every crankset has its own ball bearing rings, and so if I was going to buy a replacement for my bicycle someone would have to store the ball bearing rings for a pathetically cheap bike that only four people in the entire world would ever dream of fixing. Okay, so I can dream, can’t I? At least I didn’t walk up to some bicycle store clerk and ask if I could buy one ball bearing ring for a very cheap Huffy bicycle.
***
Monday wasn’t a single-day fluke of warm weather. The temperature stayed up around freezing on Tuesday, but we got a snow storm, which dumped a fair amount of very wet snow. No big surprise there–this is February after all. But then today turned into another wonderful day. That was a surprise. If possible, today was even better than Monday. The fresh wet snow stuck to all the trees on the hillside and made the world a glittering sight. My excuse for staying outside today was I needed to shovel snow.
The good weather won’t last. Snow is supposed to come late this week, and the weather people are projecting snow next week. These days were the first faint glimmers of spring, but only a southerner would think spring is around the corner.
As another note, I’m still waiting for the icicles to fall away from my upstairs window. I only have a few thin slits where I can look out between the teeth of ice. I think my view is 80% blocked. I thought they might fall down in the warm weather, but no. One thing I’ve been trying to puzzle over is why so many icicles form on this one part of the roof. My guess is that the other side of the house catches the northern wind and most of the snow is blown off that side of the roof, while on this side most of the snow melts, and thus forms icicles.
I think it is a sign of how slow things have become that I actually spend time wondering if my entire view will be blocked by a solid wall of icicles before they fall down.
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