Temporal Tuesday: I Want to Ride My Bicycle

For missionaries serving in areas where bicycles are their primary form of transportation, it doesn't take them long to figure out how important their bike is as a missionary tool. Ironically, most missionaries buy the cheapest bike they can find.

When I arrived in California I hadn’t given much thought to bicycles, and neither had my parents.  Ideally, we should have had a little extra in the bank that week for buying a good bike.  As it was, I went to a bike shop in town and found a pretty good deal for a 12-speed bicycle.  Of course, you get what you pay for, and I eventually found myself filled with buyer’s remorse.  I must confess that I was also filled with mountain bike envy.  Mountain bikes were a new thing to me, I never saw one ‘til I got to Palo Alto, and the mountain bikes my comp and the other two missionaries in my flat (apartment) had seemed so much sturdier than my 12-speed.

After a few months a sold the 12-speed back to the bike shop and bought a mountain bike from Sears. In retrospect, I think I should have just bought two new, better rims for the 12-speed, as the original rims were the only source of complaint I really had about that bike. Right after this I was transferred to my second area where, because of an injury my new comp had sustained before my arrival, we were blessed with a car. So I didn’t ride my Sears mountain bike very often, which made its catastrophic failure all the more surprising.

My companion and I were assigned to Seaside, which is just north of Monterey.  The other two elders in our flat were assigned to Marina which was farther north.  In between Seaside and Marina was Fort Ord, an Army base which has since been closed by the government.  There was a bike trail along the coast that passed by Fort Ord, and one day I accompanied one of the other elders on a bike trip to Marina.

On the way back to Seaside, a gear on the back wheel of my bike sheered itself in half.  Additionally, this was a middle gear, so I couldn’t shift from the highest to the lowest gears.  Well, the trail was amidst rolling hills, so I needed to be able to shift.  As it turned out, the other elder towed me home on the down side of the hills and on the flat parts, but I had to walk up all the hills.  This, naturally, slowed us down and we arrived home much later than planned. Fortunately, I was able to sell that bike to a missionary who was able to fix it, though I had to by the new gear set up, and I bought from him the best bike I ever owned, a Raleigh Technium 12-speed.

The lesson here is that a good missionary bike needs to be sturdy, but it also should be light, and the lighter the better. That Raleigh was both, and it no longer mattered that it wasn’t a mountain bike. The only real problem I had with it, besides all the flat tires I had to fix, was one rim getting so far out of true (meaning it got wobbly) that I had to replace it. Speaking of flat tires, most of the flats I got were on the front tire. I had so many that fixing them almost became routine. I patched the front tube so many times that I eventually had to replace it.

Missionary work is hard and a prospective missionary should prepare by getting into good physical shape.  I was not prepared for the amount of bike riding I did when I first arrived in the mission field.  I had trouble keeping up with my companion and considered myself lucky at times if I could still see him, way out in the distance.  One day we got separated at a traffic light that had turned red after he had gone through the intersection, but before I arrived at it.  Fortunately he stopped and waited for the light to turn green so I could cross over and join him.

Whenever I got to a new area, I would start picking out landmarks so I could familiarize myself with the city or town.  One of the first landmarks in my first area was a bridge near our flat which we went over on the way to our area.  I remember struggling to keep up with my companion on the way home the night of my first full day in the area, and thinking I wasn’t going to make it.  Then I saw that bridge and knew we were almost there.  What a great sense of relief I felt as I realized we were just a stones throw from our flat.

After a few weeks it got easier to keep up with my companion as I got plenty of exercise tracting and bike riding.  After two months I got a new companion who had to follow me around because I knew the area.  This allowed me to set the pace.  On the other hand, my new comp almost ran into me one day as I stopped, somewhat suddenly, at our destination.