No. It is not what you might think. My daughter and I decided to saddle up the motorcycles last night and ride to the Pottawatomie Fishing Lake. But first, I needed to air up the tires on my bike and the only place close is the truck stop on Interstate 70. The trouble with the truck stop air hose is that it is set up for the big rigs. I could not get the eight inch steel nozzle to fit squarely on the valve stem. I succeeded in letting air out, to the point that the front tire was dangerously low. I was stranded. I tried to disassemble the hose from my tire gauge to use, but the threads did not match. I lost more air out of the tire.
Long story short, two bikers came rolling by on Harleys and I quickly told my daughter to flag them down. No man alive would ride past her when she is wearing her kevlar motorcycle pants. I thought maybe they would have an air hose adapter, but they had something better: American Male Ingenuity - pliers, vice grips, muscles, and a challenge. They were such GUYS. A lineman arrived in his work truck and from the vast dark interior of the tool boxes, from the jumble of steel, wires, gears and gadgets, arcane and mysterious, he pulled an old, greasy, flexible air hose nozzle - with a handle!
The two bikers, father and son, disassembled the truck stop air hose, put the lineman's company equipment on it, aired my tire up, and replaced the truck stop nozzle. Good ol' American men - Y chromosomes at their highest evolution - roaming the countryside on Harley Davidsons. Hell, yeah.
Terrorists have no idea who they are really messing with when they mess with American men. If our military could fight without all the political trappings and diplomatic restrictions, the job would have been done already and the world would be a safer place for everyone. George Bush needlessly sent our guys into Iraq and once there, they found that their government issue equipment was woefully inadequate. American soldiers armored their own vehicles. They adapted, made do and got by. My uncle tells the same stories of American soldiers repairing their own planes and equipment in World War II using nothing but their wits and scrap iron.
American male ingenuity. God, that is soooooooo sexy.
2 comments:
Who knew reading about a low tire could be so interesting?
(Between you and me, we BOTH had a lot more fun with what I might have been thinking!)
We have a whole section on our (bicycle) store website for tales of just this kind of (mostly) male mechanical ingenuity. Standard boondock flat tire fix is a dollar bill folded between tube and rim. Rich people can use $20's.
What a fun story. You also forgot to mention the American male knight-in-shining-armor dynamic at play here. I've always been surprised by the way the average unromantic, Pilgrim-practical American male responds to the ye olde damsel in distress. I've been rescued a few times, myself. Love this tale.
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