My Bike Milky
The hero of this story is my bike Milky. The constraints: zero research or knowledge on bicycles, minimal time spent browsing Facebook Marketplace, a milk-crate stolen off the side of Norton St. The outcome: thousands of kilometres around the Greater Sydney area, hours spent replacing an absurdly worn second-hand drive-train and a milk-crate that has carried things for every version of myself - the office drone to the dirtbag climber.
I’ve spent a lot of time on this bike and if you spend enough time with a piece of gear, you start to develop a real relationship with it. With Milky, I feel gear changes like a man with a bad knee feels the rain coming. I clean and lube the chain like I am making love to it. On perfect summer evenings, golden light filters through the gum trees and Milky and I are one.
Honestly, I long ago gave up on the pursuit of perfection in regards to this bike. The value it brings is what I can do in spite of it. It’s a vehicle of contradictions. On the one end is knocking over an entire bike rack as I try to get the beast out. On the other is the joy of riding your own handiwork and seeing the familiar world in a brand new light.
•
It was the January long weekend and I was off alone on a bikepacking trip around the NSW Southern Highlands. This trip started off resoundingly well. On Friday night, I clocked out of the office and wheeled my bike down to the station. I propped it up against a wall, hurried into the bathroom and swapped out my jeans for a pair of suitably green shorts. Dressed for adventure, I hopped on the southbound towards Mittagong.
By the time I got there I was itching for adventure and started pounding up the local hill. As I switched into first gear, I heard a sound I was to get very familiar with: my bent rear derailleur smacking the spokes of my wheel.
tatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatata
tatatatatatatatatatat
tatatattatatat
tatattatatatatata
That night, I wheeled Milky into the scrub a few metres off the track and nestled myself behind large granite boulders to block the gaze of early-morning dog walkers. With no space for my tent, I laid out in the open and stared at the stars working through plans for the next few days in my head. The sound of the derailleur played through my head as I planned the distances. 80ks tomorrow. If the bike carked it mid-way through, I’d be at least 20ks on foot from the nearest town. 30kg of bike and gear to push in the January heat. Typical solo adventure anxieties. The type of thoughts remedied only by the fear of returning back to Sydney and having to explain all weekend why I was home early.
So that morning, I packed up my stuff and put bad thoughts out of my head. I spent it on a $150 bike seeing the Southern Highlands in their full summer glory. I sat in the open shoulders of empty highways yelling nonsense at curious cows in wonderment at the golden gleam of the countryside. At one point, I spotted a vague footpad and pulled over. I followed it into increasingly dense foliage. I pushed aside ferns and thick vines and soon stood in a shrouded fairy glen. Water pooled at the foot of a small cascade. I sat on a sodden log, pulled out my multi-tool and began to cut out the liner of my shorts. My chafing had been killing me.
I took my shorts off and stuffed them and the mutilated lining into a dry bag. I clambered down into the water and waded out to the cascade. I dipped my head under the whitewash and smiled to myself.
By the afternoon I was looking at 20ks of fire-trail to camp, almost entirely down-hill. I anticipated a smooth ride on my mountain bike and was stoked at a bit of reprieve from the day of hard climbing. At the first gate I smiled and enjoyed the process of heaving Milky over. At the second one I gave a little sigh but told myself they didn’t need more than two gates to keep cars off the trails. After the third gate, I had to apologise to some walkers going the other way for all the loud swearing. By the sixth, I had lost a trekking pole and half my dinner as I inverted the milk crate in increasingly acrobatic maneuvers to get my 30kg rig over these absurd barriers. After these, the trail steepened. When it flattened out, I got off my bike and sat staring into the scrub thinking about how fast things get miserable while I massaged my cramping brake hand.
At camp, I threw Milky to the ground, immediately stripped and ran down to the river. We needed some space. After an entire block of Cadbury, a pouch of tuna, an apple, a bag of Red Rock Deli chips, a granola bar, some Jatz, a heaping of cheese and half a tube of cured chorizo, I felt much better and apologised to her. By the time other people rolled into camp I had got her upright, pumped the tires and reindexed the gears. Stationed next to my tent, we made quite the aesthetic couple.
•
The morning climb up to Kangaroo Valley was a slog. After a well-deserved coffee and roll, an old man approached me in the toilet block but fortunately just to ask me where I was headed. I told him over the mountain and down to Berry. He gave me a knowing shake of the head.
“Oh I wouldn’t do that if I were you. The mountain’s not safe. Take the detour.”
I had no idea about the detour. He described it to me in vivid detail. Bucolic country pastures, no traffic and if the old man was to believed, pigtailed European women in dirndls. Best of all, basically the same length. So I hurried off down the highway.
PSSSSHHHHHHHHHHH
Immediately, my back wheel popped.
I pulled over onto the shoulder and got to work on fixing it. I levered the tire off, dislodged the tube and then started wracking through my bag for spare parts. Fittingly, I had forgotten a key part of the pump and now found myself stuck on the side of a rural road, 30ks from a train station with half a bike. Thank god for the kindness of yet another old man.
Dave came out from his property and waved me into his shed, passed me a worn floor pump and asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to Berry and he shook his head and said:
“You’re not going over the mountain are ya?”
I told him that I had been warned off it and he said it was best I take the detour as well. He spoke of unerringly steep hills, blind corners and awful, cyclist-killing drivers. We stood there in the shed as the heat of the day began to build and as I began to sweat I bade him farewell.
At the junction I took the old men’s advice and turned left. I watched the steep road up Berry Mountain disappear and whistled a tune to myself.
But I couldn’t help myself. I began to think about the hard road. I had never made a sensible choice in my life.
•
The planning of our wedding was a comedy of errors. Our relationship had been hard enough. Weeks together scraped off years of long distance 16,000km apart. For the past few months we had been trying to figure out what was needed to get me living over in America with her.
One American evening, we sat on other sides of the phone, crossing off a dwindling list of visa possibilities when I accidentally proposed to her.
The ceremony was booked on a cheap website about a month out. We pitched it to her stunned parents over the phone. After the call ended, we laughed at how much easier it was than expected. They just wanted to hear that I loved her.
Two weeks before Joey was due to fly into Sydney, my mother called me to tell me she’d gone to hospital. It’s ridiculous that your own immune system can rebel against you and it’s plain rude when it’s done just before your son’s wedding. My sister and I visited her in hospital. She cried when we spoke about the upcoming wedding. I told Mum that Joey had made me promise we’d spend every day of our honeymoon with her.
Mum made it out two days before the ceremony. On a perfect autumn night, the wedding party retreated to a gazebo in the local park. The boys took their shirts off in the evening humidity and belted out Silver Jews. Before long it was LCD Soundsystem and the entirety of my world was up and dancing together.
We settled on our vows in the Uber to the wedding by passing back and forth a tattered copy of “The Prophet”. She picked a passage about eternal love and I picked something about climbing mountains. We realised we left our rings at the hotel and shared a kiss anyway. It rained the entire time and was comfortably the best day of my life.
Afterwards, we drove down to the South Coast for our honeymoon. Five days on the beach free of anyone else. We spent the first evening picking up where we left off in the gazebo. We danced salsa out of rhythm between the kitchen counter and the screen door. Our dancing took us down to the beach where we held each other under a luminous sky.
Then I got strep throat. She cleaned the floor of my panadol wrappers and snotty tissues. I spent three days sick and useless. On the penultimate day I realised I had some old antibiotics in a first aid kit I had brought. It gave us a single morning at the beach.
On the way back, the car engine began to smoke. We tentatively got back on the road after filling the coolant reservoir with water. My dad had very kindly given up his house for our last night together. Knackered, we opened the bedroom door to a messy room. Joey kicked a bag out of the way to make room for her suitcase and watched a cockroach sprint out and under the bed.
Amidst her tears, I told her everything would be alright and we’d just sleep at Mum’s.
We came back to a bare mattress, my brother having stripped it after finding out he had brought a bedbug infestation home. So we spent our last night together for 9 months, lying on a broken bed frame, sharing a sleeping bag and a single stuff sack with a down jacket inside.
•
I could see the grand sandstone walls of the escarpment towering above me. Farms are great, but mountains? Mountains are ceremonies drenched in rain. Endless afternoons without her for the chance at a few days together.
I pictured lying next to Milky on the top.
So I stopped whistling, put my headphones in and against all good advice, turned back towards the mountain. On my weary legs, I redlined the entire time. The type of effort that radiates into one’s brain. Frequent, heavy gasps as feeble attempts to power your stupid fucking bike up the mountain. I couldn’t hear the music in my ears for the cacophony of derailleur against the rear wheel and the squeak of a beaten crankset. You could not stop for all the cars and the narrowness of the road. Bloodlust for the summit eclipsed all mortal suffering.
But I made it. I got to the top of my mountain. I drank water for desert nations. I let out a woop, put on Floating Points and prepared to feel divinity on the way down. Of course, I immediately hit a pothole and snapped my rear rack in half.
Bent derailleur? Whatever.
Pop a tire? Dave’ll help you.
Snap an arm on your rear rack? All shelter, food, water - all your worldly possessions - now barely hang above your rear wheel.
So now I had the unpleasant task of making my way down the other side of this mountain, brakes barely functional and the prospect of complete structural failure a single sharp turn away.
But I refused to believe the trip was to end here. I watched YouTube videos on how to tie trucker’s hitches and jury-rigged an extra attachment to my seat post. I made for camp and felt the rope give as the milk crate came crashing into the wheel. I began to mourn for Milky as I pulled her over to the side of the road.
On the train home I sat beside her. Her once proud figure, reduced to tatters. A milk crate held up by twine and a ski-strap. It was easy to be sad. Yet, it had been a good weekend. You can only push so hard. So I sat, stinking up the carriage, browsing Facebook Marketplace for second-hand gravel bikes. I stared at the screen for a few seconds and decided to close the app.
•
It was a miserably cold August day in the new house. Rain had been pouring in from a leak in the roof for hours. The bucket underneath had filled with water overnight. I started my day by swapping out the soaked towels underneath. After a coffee in the grey, I sat at my desk to call my wife.
I had just logged on for the day and she had just gotten home from work. It had been a few months since the wedding. We were planning the next time we’d see each other. We argued about grad school applications and the need to plan for this trip. Both of us could feel the distance acutely. Selfishly, I stammered out attempts at comforting platitudes.
“I just want you to know, I would never make it hard if you wanted to break up. It’s so important to me that you know you aren’t trapped”
A quiet beat.
“It’s just that, if the distance is ever too much, I would never blame you”
I tried to make sense of the texture of my wall. The cold, crinkled plaster. I counted the folds in it as I waited for her to respond and pressed my arm into the space behind my bed. I felt the cold and flicked the damp off. The paint was stippled. I felt tiny peaks and ridges along the expanse of the wall. I tapped my phone to see if she was still on the line.
•
I opened Facebook Marketplace up again. Milky sat beside me. My finger hovered over the search bar. I stared at the grime-covered bike chain and decided to read my book instead.