I needed to go to town yesterday to get some hardware for two stalled cabin chores. While there I would stop at the post office to get some small packages: The post office has been an issue lately because I normally come to town with D&L but they’re having to go to the big town about 50 miles away every single weekday for hyperbaric therapy and the only day L has for water/grocery runs is Saturday. Fine for water and groceries, not so great for the post office. But we’re getting into the warm season, so as long as the packages are small I can do that on my bike.

I knew it was a windy day. But you have to do more than just get up and out of my hollow before you can learn how windy it is: Where I live there are lots of junipers, you’d be polite to call them trees but they are mighty big bushes and tend to break up the wind. But once I got to the county road, where I parked the Jeep and unloaded the bike, I was in prairie: There wasn’t a tree in sight, the wind had a fetch of miles and was really blasting. Right into the teeth of my ride.
Motor assist or no motor assist I was gritting my teeth and working the gears to force the bike toward town against this really unpleasant wind. Once I got to town I decided that riding up the wide high road was a bad plan so I detoured onto side roads in an effort to escape the worst of the wind. Didn’t really work, but I finally struggled to the other side of town. Now everything I had to do was downhill and downwind: My work was more than half over. So I thought.
I went to the hardware, got my fittings and hose clamps, rode down the road to the post office. Now I had an issue: I never go anywhere on the bike without a tool bag strapped to the cargo rack…

…which renders the rack useless for anything else. Mostly it doesn’t matter because I have two big folding pannier bags but this time one of the packages was a new hiking cane.

I had to start using a cane in January because my old prosthesis started injuring me, and kept using it for a while until the new one was properly adjusted. Which it is, by the way: It’s no longer causing me pain and I don’t need the cane anymore but in the meantime I learned that when I’m out hiking I kind of liked using a cane. But the regular cane wasn’t cutting it during hikes: I’ve worn out two cane tips on the rocks and sand since January and wanted something with a spike. Hence the new cane even though I no longer need a cane for regular walking.
But getting back to the bike: Now I had a long skinny package to transport which meant I needed the cargo rack. It’s a little bit of a hassle but no big deal: I take the tool bag off, stick it in a pannier and then bungee the package to the rack, right? Except in this case I had a bunch of other stuff to rearrange in the panniers first so I set the tool bag off to the side “for a moment.” Arranged my packages, got on the bike and rode blithely away.
It was still really windy but now it was directly at my back: I was going 25 mph and sweating a little because I didn’t feel any wind at all. And it was mostly downhill. This was nice! I could go for this. And I was all the way across town and off pavement, starting to think about how I was going to pack this stuff in the Jeep, including what I was going to do with the tool bag…
Wait. Did I put the tool bag in the pannier? Oh shit.
I stopped the bike, dismounted, and rummaged through the panniers. No tool bag.
I turned around, facing back into the wind, and was so daunted by the prospect of going all the way back against all that wind that I actually considered ditching the whole thing. For a moment. But the bag was expensive, the chain was expensive, the inflator was expensive, and I finally got that thing just the way I like it and damn it all and the horse it rode in on. I heaved a sigh and commenced struggling upwind and uphill.
So I finally made it back to the post office, and of course there was no tool bag. “(Bad word!) (Bad word!) Somebody already stole it. Well, it’s my own damned fault.” And I was just turning the bike around to leave when I heard “Mr. Simon! Mr. Simon!”
I turned around and here was that nice post office lady I had spoken to maybe half an hour before, hurrying out the door and waving my tool bag around.
If I were a hugger I’d have hugged her. “Bless your heart!” I said. “Thank you so much!” And we exchanged smiles and I rode home again.

And I still have all my gear.