Roughly three days a week early on my inbound commute for about a year now, I pass a small long white haired Asian man(who favors the late Pat Morita) usually wearing one of his many baseball caps. We tend to meet on a one mile section of side walk along a scary section of Lawyers Road. It has always been a cordial occurrence where he usually throws up an arm and yells in a sharp tone, "Hi!" I give him the nod and a morning greeting, he steps to his left, I lean to mine and we both continue on our paths separately away from each other. While rolling in on the Cream Roller the day before yesterday I spotted him on his morning walk from around about 35 meters out. His head was down and he was carrying a long walking stick. Within a few seconds I rang my newly acquired New Belgium Bell but the man did no look up. I slowed internally just a bit, scrubbing off a little speed and then I actuated the easily accessible thumb trigger on my bell again. Nothing. The gap was closing and his head was still down. It was only seconds of time passing but the point of impact seemed to be near at hand. At 10 meters closing I looked over my left shoulder quickly and saw a scary auto viper line racing in towards their 4million and spotted 18" of gutter I could use if it came down to that. I belled one more time and his head never looked up so I dove into the litter covered asphalt edge of Lawyers. We passed in a flash. He looked over surprised to see my familiar presence and yelled sharply, "Hi!" As soon as I cleared him I looked down and to my dismay saw a cardboard Budweiser 6 pack holder on its side. Obviously there was at least one 4th of July throw away celebration out the window under the banner of Nationalism here in town. It looked like 3 or 4 of the brown bottles were out of their thin containment slots and smashed in various sized chunks directly in my path for about a meter and a half. I flew through the debris field trying to pick a line that avoided the bigger pieces. Just as I thought I had cleared the trash of a nation, my rear tire slammed a piece of sharp glass causing an instant rip in the side wall and a flat that left me rolling on what felt like my rim. I screamed an obscenity because I was already a tad late for work which was still about 9 miles away, plus I knew that there was prolly close to two months of serviceability left on that rubber. A nauseous feeling of being stranded and held up from what I was doing came over me. The buildings seemed so far away and my mail pick up was going to be late. I pushed the sick stomach feeling out and went to work.
*I made all of the images below many hours after the above described incident went down.
I soon found the damage, it wasn't pretty and would need a Boot.
Thankfully I had a piece of a Meal Ready to Eat(aka MRE) bag in my tool satchel for such an occasion.
After booting the tire, installing a new tube and airing up I continued the march to town. Later that day after work I went to the barn to find a better back up for the gashed tire. I looked through some of my old spares for a worthy rubber hoop.
Wallah! This one will do until my order from the Ultimate Bike Shop comes in...
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