A Love Letter to Bicycle Maintenance and Repair

It was the twenty-eighth of June in 2020—the perfect summer day. I remember it distinctly because two important events took place that day. The first was the unfortunate discovery that I am highly sensitive to the venomous hairs of the oak processionary caterpillar. Unless you’ve ever wished you could use a cheese grater to stop the itching on your arms and legs, you can’t understand how I felt for two solid weeks that summer.

The second event was the seemingly inconsequential purchase of two secondhand bicycles. My wife and I drove to a local park to test-ride a couple of ’90s-era Trek 970 bikes a guy had restored in his garage. We didn’t know a thing about bicycles, but we liked what we saw; the bikes worked great and felt very nice to ride (that I rode through a floating cloud of oak-processionary hairs would only become apparent the next day).

We took our new old bikes home and started riding them around;