My old rowing-friend Ingo has gone all the way to Vancouver, where he's swapped boats for bikes (it happens to the best of us.) Another happenstance we have in common is bike theft. I admit, I don't know any of Ingo's [many] bike theft stories, but I do have one of my own.
It was a Raleigh Tarantula. Purple. Grip shifts. I used to ride it to the beach for a day of swimming and frisbee. I rode it to my summer-job picking berries at Hi-Berry Farm. I rode it to music camp, racing along the rail trail with friends pretending we'd be the next Olympic mouintain bikers.One day shortly after beginning my second year at U of T, I'd just spent a boat-load of money on new gears, rings and the like so it would be all the more fit to carry me to and from rowing practice. I lived in a high rise at the time, and bringing the bike up was sort of a nuisance, so one night I left it locked to the rack downstairs at Yonge and Bloor. My roommate (and mutual rowing friend of Ingo and mine), Ross, said someone would steal that bike in two seconds flat. I didn't believe him but the next morning the joke was on me. Even as I approached the empty bike rack, I refused to believe my eyes. I thought maybe I'd brought it up afterall ... or this wasn't the right rack. But eventually, as all of us who have lost a bike know, that heavy, sick feeling settled into my gut telling me I'd never see that beauty again. And also now getting to rowing practice was going to cost $20 in cabs.
If you know that shitty feeling, check out Ingo's new web-series, "To Catch A Bike Thief" in which he and his merry men (and women) chase down those lowly criminal-types who prey on the two-wheeled joy machines to find the answers to burning questions like:
- Why did you steal my bike?
- What are you going to do with it now that you've stolen it?
- How could I have prevented this whole thing?
And if you like what you see, help these guys out on their mission by visiting their indiegogo site and dropping a donation in the hat: http://www.indiegogo.com/To-Catch-a-Bike-Thief. The very first episode has dropped and you can watch it there as well, free of charge.
What an awesome blog post! thanks a lot for sharing the story. We've developed a really interesting network of people that are willing to go to some pretty extreme lengths to try to do something about bicycle theft.
ReplyDeleteHope you stay tuned - pretty soon you might be able to do that on TV as well - we've had some interest from TV studios in helping make our show into a real TV show, so we'll see!