Angelina broke one of her pedals completely off on the way to Winco for groceries. Dang.
She had to push the bike to the store, and then push it home, loaded with groceries. She detoured to stop at Joanne’s to buy supplies for her “Stitch and Boots” Etsy shop – she’s making shoulder/shopping bags that exactly fit in the smaller Wald bike shopping basket.
Her saga reminded me of a story my Anthropology teacher told of an Inuit fishing trip. An ethnologist (a sociologist for non-European non-upper non-middleclass people) set out on a fishing trip with some Eskimos. About a day out, the outboard motor broke, and they paddled over to an ice floe and set up camp. One of the Eskimos found a piece of broken metal, and the leader guy started shaping it to replace the broken gear. After two days, it was ready. They fit the part in, and tried the engine. Failed. The ethnologist is getting really antsy now – they’re running out of food, three days into their three-day fishing trip, and he’s been on a 1/2 acre ice floe for two days watching a guy file metal.
They spent another day on the ice, filing that gear into the right shape. Finally, after a full day of file-file, fit the part, fail to start the engine, they ate the last of their food, filed a little bit more, put the new gear into the engine, and… fired it up! Thank God!
“Finally! We can go home!”
The Inuit looked at him. “Fuck that. We came to fish.”
That's the way to do it.
Reminds me of a story.
A while back my roomate John and I took his little vangaurd 16 sailing up at lake sonoma one day after work. We drive up there with the boat on top of his toyota and were headed down towards the boat ramp not 300 feet from the water and we hear this odd loud POP sound and the truck starts running real rough, like it's on three cylinders. John quickly backs the truck up to the upper parking lot before it has a chance to die and get stuck on the ramp. We pop the hood and it seems one of the spark plugs decided to unscrew itself. There wasnt a ton of daylight left so we put the sailboat on its dolly and walked it down to the lake and did what we came to do, go sailing.
We ended up being able to drive the truck home too, got the spark plug screwed back in with a pair of vice grips an 1/8 of turn at a time in the dark…
Good on you for sailing anyway! I'm impressed at clearing the ramp before the truck died, too.