the end of an era

In August 1998, one week after moving to Salt Lake City for my Ph.D., I bought my mountainbike. It was a used Trek 990, a heavy beast of steel, small and vicious. On it, a little shaky at first but always doing damage to my friends on climbs, I discovered off-road riding. The Wasatch Crest Trail marked my first real ride, a few days after buying the bike. I loved it. Other trails that grew dear to me were the Pipeline and Original Trails around Salt Lake and the Porcupine and Poison Spider Trails near Moab.

The bike held up amazingly well until 2003 when everything seemed to fall apart almost at once. First, at the legendary Intermountaincup season opener down in Saint George, going through snow, slush, mud, and water, the forked seized up and needed to be replaced. I took the opportunity to go sissy and swapped the steel hardtail for an aluminum fully, a Fuel 90 frame.

A little later, after throwing the bike down the hill behind Red Butte Garden one too many times after getting stuck in the rocks up there, I had to get new wheels. By the time I moved to Grenoble, the only original parts left were the stem and the handlebar.

I put the bike into the basement and all but forgot about it. My passion is road biking here. I haven't ventured off-road in more than a year.

...

On Thursday, I discovered that my mailbox was broken open and the key to my basement was gone. A day later I finally got hold of a replacement key. Shining a flashlight into the darkness, the first thing that struck me was the complete lack of sparkling reflections. The Trek was gone.

Someone must have noticed I always keep the basement keys in the mailbox when I go out riding or to work and taken advantage of that. Clever, criminal, fucked-up? Certainly shameless and absolutely unbelievable because it must have been someone from the building - or at least someone tipped off by a neighbor.

Anyway, the good news is that my roadbike was with me when the break-in happened. That would have been a truly heart-breaking loss. But the mountainbike? It had served me faithfully for seven years. I just wish I could have retired it more gracefully.