Snapshot of a Saturday Detroit

So this snapshot actually begins on Friday night.  My bike's bottom bracket, which had been making funny noises for a couple days, finally gives out.  What this means is that the pedals all but stop turning.  I'm most of the way home from a great book and clothing exchange in Woodbridge, I'm in Corktown, almost back to Mexicantown where I live.  It is a bummer, but not a desperate situation.  I walk my bike up the pedestrian overpass and then ride it down.  Eventually my bike finally slows and it makes more sense to walk than coast.

Then suddenly DOGS ATTACK!  Or not really attack, but three roaming street dogs start barking at me in a way that makes me really unhappy.  This sort of thing occasionally happens while I'm on my bike, but it is way less scary when you can get your vehicle up to 20 mph, rather than having it weigh you down.  I figure if all else fails I can throw my steel behemoth at them, but first try what my coworkers have told me to do at Romanowski which is to say "NO" in a loud deep voice, and what do ya know, it works.

The next day I leave my house around 10 to take my disabled bike to the Hub Bike Shop.  As I may have mentioned before, they are an awesome bike collective that does lots of bike programming with kids.  They also are the nearest bike shop that I know of to my house.  As I walked over I got "Good Morning" and "How do you do" several times.  I passed a really trashy empty lot on MLK Blvd where a street ministry group was passing out food and clothing and blasting praise movement out of some speakers. 

Shortly after that a city bus pulled up beside me and the driver shouted out that I should throw my bike on the front and get a ride.  I pointed out to him that my extra long frame wouldn't fit on the rack.  Very shortly after that a white guy in a winter coast riding a Schwinn rode up beside me and tried to diagnose the problem with my bike, which of course I already had.  He was very friendly though and was the first of three people today to point out the value of having a back up bike.

Finally I arrive at the Hub.  Darrin recognizes me from both the Progressive Dinner ride and the fact that we often cross paths on our ways to work.  He quickly agrees with me that my bottom bracket is totally dead, and unsurprisingly doesn't stock the fancy pants one that I use (that while fancy pants actually holds up decently to the amount of abuse I put it through).  He orders one though and makes sure that I have a bike to ride.  I just want to point out how amazing this is.  I loved/love the guys at Allegro Cyclery in Walla Walla, but they never seemed very sensitive to the fact that my bike was the ONLY way I had to get around.  They never offered to rent me a bike for a week and often seemed pretty casual about delaying getting my bike back to me by a day or more.  I have no doubt that if I had told Darrin I was bike-less while my bike was out of commission he would have given me one of the refurbished bikes for sale in the shop to use for the week, no questions asked.  That is awesome.

Afterwards I walked the rest of the way to Eastern Market.  Picked up milk, oats, stew beef, flour, granola, onions, apple cider, and probably some other things that I forgot.  Found out my cow is giving out plenty of milk and looked at a lot of wreaths.  I think I could make better ones, definitely going to try next year, will just need to find a source of boughs.

On my walk back from Eastern Market I ran into the friendly bus driver again.  This time I was all too happy to grab a ride.  He insisted that I didn't need to pay fare (I'm not sure DDOT would be that happy about that).  He then asked me about my bike and then whether I went to church.  "Well...sometimes." "What's the name of your God?" "er...depends on the day of the week" "Well I'm a minister and Jesus is my God...." and then he went on to tell me about how if I accepted Jesus as my Saviour and was washed in the baptismal waters all my sins would be washed away and I would speak in tongues.  Minister Greg the kindly bus driver, who would have known.  He wasn't giving any sort of hard sell, just wanted to let me know about Jesus.  Then we talked about trees and gardens.

Finally I got let off at the corner of Grand and MLK Blvd and walked the rest of the way home.