for Love of the Machine

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between the work we do on things and the attachment we feel towards them.

As I've mentioned before, my bicycle's on old criterium racer (short urban race courses) from a time when water bottles were hung from the handlebars. Accordingly, there's no place to attach water bottles to my frame. After some research, I found a nifty little device designed for the dark art of cycling, triathlon. It's a double water bottle holder that hangs down from the seat. In the as-aerodynamic-as-possible world of time-trialing/triathletics, the idea is that putting the water bottles behind your ass will keep the round, already-aerodynamic objects from interrupting your slipstream. For me, it was a nice way to avoid drilling my frame without putting three pounds of water over my front wheel (and thus affecting handling). I should mention that the apparatus cost me a pretty penny (at least what I'd made that day). So my second ride out with them, I'm about to climb over the Manhattan bridge when the harsh terrain of Fulton Street (first paved street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant of the 1800s and apparently untouched ever since)knocks a pivot bolt loose and the whole apparatus swings precariously over my rear wheel until i get to the Manhattan Bridge and flag down a fellow cyclist to ask after his toolkit.

Testament to NYC's bike culture, this guy pulls over immediately and digs through his pack for the tools I need, making small talk as I work. It quickly becomes apparent that getting to this one little bolt will require taking the damn thing apart, and I give the dude an "I'm really sorry to be taking all of your time" look, and he just smiles. "This is why they call triathlon an executive sport," he says. "Guys are so rich they never need to work on their stuff. They just buy a new one."

Likewise, I was reading a book in the local Barnes & Noble, the other day while waiting for Kay, entitled "The Need for the Bike". It was by a french book publisher who has been an avid rider and follower of racing all his life, composed of little vignettes about cycling. Phenomenally well written, I recommend it. Anyway, he does a bit about the difference between racers and mechanics. To unjustly simplify, racers hate the bike, it is the source of their pain; mechanics love it deeply as a thing of beauty.

A few nights ago I was repacking the bearings on what I call the Raleigh's race wheelset -- very light, quick clincher wheels that I built a little while ago, wheels that would definitely hold their own in a cat 4 or cat 5 road race (if paired with a quicker rider than me). If you've never repacked bearings, it's not a pleasant or particularly fun job. You have to take apart the wheel hub, remove about 18-24 ball bearings caked in old, grimy, gritty grease, clean each of them, clean all traces of the old grease from the hub, repack the hub with new, very sticky, very messy grease, plop the bearings back in and reassemble the hub, all while straining your eyes to make sure not a single speck of dust gets in there with them. Then you have to adjust the hub to spin freely without any play along the axle. And as I was doing this, I started wondering how many riders in the whole Tour de France peleton had done this since their first ten-speed. I was holding a wheel that I had built, knowing that if my front end was wobbling later, it'd be my fault. Knowing each spoke and bearing that'd carry me downhill in excess of 40mph.

That's why I dig my mechanic buddy Malcom. He's a racer. Damn fast. But he has the look of a man who now cares for the machines he used to abuse. It's a balance.

Our ability to act upon the world is what makes us human... but it's the old Hegelian thing: if we just get what we want, without having to go through the motions of bringing it about, we're the same as servants who bring about only what they're told to do.