Blanche Dubois in the Okanagan Country

I had gotten only a few miles out of town before the rear tire went flat. This was both annoying and time-consuming because all the luggage had to be taken off in order to set the bicycle upside down. After replacing the tube and reassembling everything I found that the replacement tube wouldn't hold pressure either. I had three spare tubes and none of them were any good. Apparently they were all punctured at one time or another and I threw them in the attic with the intention to repair them later. Later never came, and I forgot about the punctures. So I patched and reassembled and pumped up, and patched and pumped and reassembled, and patched and pumped and reassembled over and over. And hours passed while I screwed around with it over and over, trying this, trying that. None would hold pressure no matter how much I patched them

I thought about how this seemed to be yet another delay in getting on with the bicycle trip yet it didn't feel like it. Fixing flat tires is not a delay in a bicycle trip -- it is part of the trip. The saying that the object of a trip is the journey, not the destination, is not just another annoying platitude when speaking of a bicycle trip. It is literally true. I didn't get frustrated because of the delay, but I did get annoyed when I realized the problem was that the patches I was using were NFG (a Navy acronym for 'No Darn Good').

It was surprising to realize that I am not actually in any hurry to get to Alaska. It would be nice to succeed and fun to brag about, but it doesn't truly matter. Bicycling through the beauty of the northern vastnesses is what I came here to do, not to reach anyplace. Just as I realized this, it sank in that the whole time I had been futzing with the bicycle tire, tube, pump, and patches I had had a fine view of Lake Okanagan and the surrounding mountains and hadn't until then thought to enjoy it. I smiled at myself, because enjoying the vista was a sign of an autumnal growth of self-acceptance and world-acceptance. I am not just getting old. At 61 I am also still growing up.

Getting old may be good for some things but not for others. At 61, finding a pinhole in an inner tube requires reading glasses. I simply could not have done it at all without them. The decline in my vision has passed beyond being an inconvenience. It is a genuine disability in the ADA sense of the word. Though the prosthetic device is cheap, readily available, and effective, I can no longer perform some basic functions in life without them. It is fair to say that, like other people my age, I am partially blind.

I finally accepted that, with bad patches, I could never succeed. I assembled everything one last time and was just about to begin hitch-hiking when the Mounties arrived. A troop of Canadians mounted on bicycles was riding up the grade toward me. One of them gave me a kit of the old-style, actually-work, type patches and glue. Dudley having Doneright, they rode away.

Soon the patches were on, and I was off. As I resumed my trip I reflected, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."