Beautifully crafted, reliable mediocrity

 Like finding an old friend's obituary on the internet when I'm looking for something else, I noticed posts reporting that Surly had discontinued the Cross Check. I knew it was on the way out when they discontinued the complete bike. You could still buy the frame, and I considered trying to stock up, but I have two already. Don't be a neurotic hoarder. But now they're gone. The ones in the wild will quickly command collector prices. 

The end of the era got me thinking about how misguided popular perception eventually destroys everything simple and true and good. I don't worship everything done the old way. I don't miss road brake levers with the cables coming out of the top. I don't miss downtube shifters. Compared to the targeted perfection that consumers are fed today, older bike technology is horribly primitive, and an actual impediment. Only in the long view does its superiority emerge. But who bothers with a long view anymore?

Riders decide what is superior for their purposes. Some will purchase their bike without thinking about how to care for it beyond a place to park it. Others will budget some amount of money to pay a technician to maintain and repair it, the way they would with a car. A few will work on their own machines with varying degrees of success. Or maybe they have a friend who can help them, who will actually take on the more intimidating tasks in their back room or basement work area.

As far as I'm concerned, hydraulic brakes, finicky shifting systems, tubeless tires, and suspension do not add enough value to make up for the increased upkeep. Someone in love with those things will put up with their many flaws for the beautiful moments they spend together. Someone brainwashed by marketing into thinking that those elements represent laudable progress will endure the troubles for as long as they want to bother playing with bikes at all. In the meantime, like some unconquered tribe that has evaded assimilation for generations, we who ride The Old Shit, keep pedaling through the background, patching and replacing inner tubes as necessary, changing cables when they fray, feeling for the chain to engage correctly on the next cog, mile after mile of pleasurable utility interrupted by simple tasks to keep the machine going and going and going.

Love is work. Love is compromise. What feels like love can be temporary. The end of a relationship depends on the type of relationship. When it's with a bicycle, it's not consensual between parties with equal freedom. It's more like a pet, only this pet can be rejuvenated many times, especially if it's an old, steel-framed pet with rim brakes and friction shifting. You have to decide whether to give it the lethal injection, or abandon it on a country road, or turn it in to a shelter, or take advantage of the bike's near immortality to rebuild it. You can even modify it, which was one of the Cross Check's greatest strengths. One of mine has been a fixed gear since I put it together. The older one has been a commuting, exploring, and light touring bike with 24 speeds (initially 21), for 23 years. It has evolved more and more practical features. And I plan to put a multi-gear setup on the fixed gear 'Check as soon as I get around to it.

With long horizontal dropouts, the Cross Check offered not only an easy setup for single speed and fixed gear riding, but an adjustable rear wheel position to change the ride and load handling, as well as accommodating some cassette and derailleur combinations that should not officially work. But versatility requires thought, and any option has its drawbacks as well as advantages. The bike industry wants you to buy multiple individual bikes perfectly set up for their latest version of each particular riding style. They'll abandon you next year, but don't think about that right now. Your bike will probably last two or three before you have enough problems to need expensive work...unless you're a mountain biker, in which case you might have stuffed it in the first three days and need a $300 derailleur. In any case, the industry hopes that you will weigh the cost of service on something they've already forgotten the spec on, versus buying the Shiny New Thing, and pick the latter.

I always approached gear purchases like they were the last one I was ever going to buy, in a life with no end in sight. Now I'm closer to the statistically likely end than the beginning, so I see the changes in the bike scene more in the context of the era that will die with my generation. I can feel sorry for the young ones who have never known the self sufficiency and reliability of simple componentry that is well made, but I can't say I'll be there to help any of them who might seek to reinstate it. There's a subculture of old steel bikes, but less and less coming into the field unless it's expensively hand built by dedicated fabricators. And even in the practical steel bike subculture there are devotees of disc brakes, and probably poor bastards beguiled by tubeless tires as well. I don't want to ask for details, because knowing would only annoy me.

For the riders who demand the ephemeral performance of the latest technology, it is vital. They could not ride in the style they have chosen if they didn't have the technological support of those machines. It's a devil's bargain that would not concern me if it hadn't invaded my profession by forcing me to decide whether to keep toiling to help them pursue their bad decisions or look for some other line of work in which I have no experience. So far, I just do the best I can to make bad designs work as well as they can, and enjoy the schadenfreude when they fail anyway due to inherent flaws. It's nowhere near as fun as fixing something that can actually be fixed and sending that rider happily back out for more pleasant adventures, but stuff like that is increasingly going the way of the Cross Check: withdrawn by the manufacturer due to decreased demand.