Halloween

The seventh episode in season three of The Twilight Zone is a very good one - it is the retelling of an age-old fable, this time set in the old west. Appearing in this version is Lee Marvin, Strother Martin, Lee Van Cleef and various other players. The story is a good one, well told. For those who have not seen it, go watch it now. 

Are you back? Good, otherwise what follows might be a spoiler. That Twilight Zone epi reminded me of something that actually happened to me on Halloween evening back in 1990. In those days I lived in a town that had over 60 miles of paved trails through the neighborhoods - the trails went uphill and down, all around through the woods, and you could get to any part of town without riding on the road. Sure, you would cross various streets, but there wasn't much traffic, so sometimes I would hop on my mountain bike and get some miles in after work but before it got too dark.

This particular Halloween it was a dark and non-stormy night, with Halloween stuff all over the place - ghosts hanging in trees, pumpkins carved into hideous visages glowing from some ungodly internal light, skeletons lounging about, spider webs draped everywhere, and some of the webs were not made by the spiders in the woods, doncha know.

So there I was riding along, minding my own business, riding fast so I could get home before it got pitch black out in the forest and while climbing a short rise that led up to a cul-de-sac, the strangest thing happened. A thing I had never experienced in my tens of thousands of miles of bicycling. As I cranked up the hill my right ankle was gripped by a bony hand. How can this be, I thought? I mean something had grabbed my lower leg, front and back and it was not letting go. I glanced down to my right, thinking that perhaps a dog had come out of the woods and latched on to my tender ankle with his sharp teeth. Nope, no dog. Maybe it was a Dwayyo? Nope, no Dwayyo. What the hey?

Since I still had my wits about me and I still had some momentum, I rolled up to the cul-de-sac and stopped to see what the hell was going on. Well, what do you know, the top cap head bolt, a lowly Allen screw, one of the two that secured my water bottle cage to the seat tube, had backed out and was gone, leaving the cage free to rotate and grab my leg like a bony, skeletal hand of death trying to drag me down into the earth. Phew - that was a close one. I retrieved my Allen wrench set from my tool kit and removed the one remaining screw, put the bottle cage in my other pack and rode on, thankful that I had dodged the supernatural for another day. Some day I won't be that lucky.

I rode on gilded splendors.