Intellectual Theft
Back in May, a pair of bolt cutters wielded by a thief shattered three weeks of joyful unwinding from the go-go-go of deadline-driven work during a road trip. I’d picked our particular destination based on a bike path we hadn’t explored before. So to go out to the car in the morning to grab John’s biking clothes and discover our bike rack splayed open and our pair of bicycles gone? Disbelief. Dismay. Then shock.
Before I broke the news to John, I ran to the front desk and waited my turn, impatiently, almost blowing up at the desk clerk. A security cam was right above where we’d parked. Surely someone should have seen this happen? Duly summoned, a young police officer took our report. He pointed to another hotel down the row of hotels along this U.S. highway and said they’d had thefts, too. Well, lovely.
In the heat of the moment, John took it in stride. I couldn’t. Over the next handful of hours, anger yielded to sadness. I tried to walk it off, but it hurt me to leave him behind at trailheads when he could’ve been biking if this hadn’t happened. I kept trying to agree with his take on it. Okay, it’s just stuff. We weren’t physically harmed. Our car wasn’t vandalized. We can get home. We can replace them.
What upset me as well was the scene of the crime. I’ve always trusted small towns. John bought the bikes the same year we moved into our home. On tens of thousands of miles of road trips since, we’ve left the car with our bikes locked on the rack exactly like they’d been this day in parking garages, lots, and parallel parking spaces in places like NYC and DC, Houston and El Paso, Santa Fe and, on that very trip, Pittsburgh and Dayton.
Our bikes are hefty, not easily wheeled into elevators and up to hotel rooms. I’d picked the small town we stayed in that night to write about it. I’d been there before; John hadn’t. Given the aftermath of the theft, I feel uncomfortable even naming it. There was no negligence on our part. Heavy duty cables and multiple locks did not deter someone who knew their way around a bike rack. We were forced to park behind the hotel, but we parked under the security camera.
Long story short, the thief was caught. Not specifically due to stealing our stuff, but for a greater crime, and they tied him to ours thanks to that security camera. If we’d been in any parking space but that one, we’d have had no chance. The police kept in touch during the search and after they’d recovered our bikes. Surprisingly, the thief had kept them, not sold them. The police invited us to come retrieve them, since they were still usable but had been stripped of all their customization and made to look like pieces of junk.
After picking them up, we couldn’t make it home in a day so we stopped at a hotel. After an hour’s break, we headed downstairs to our vehicle. Both our phones sounded an alarm: there was an airtag nearby, and it was tracking us. I was genuinely terrified. I had no idea if the thief was in jail or on bail and might be in pursuit.
I knew nothing about airtags other than when they first came out, people were slipping them in baggage and purses to stalk others, so Apple changed the software so it would do exactly what we experienced: warn you there was one in proximity to you. Of course it ruined our dinner, and it took tearing the bikes apart to find the thing. Fortunately I figured out how to use my phone to do so and how to deactivate it. But seeing that line charted from the police station to our hotel freaked me out, knowing if the thief had his phone, even in jail, he knew exactly where we were.
It was a miracle to get our bikes back. They are still in the shop, awaiting reconstruction of stolen components. And our incident pales in comparison to the horrors being inflicted on everyday Americans these days.
But it hijacked my brain. Stole my intellect.
I’d try to sit and write about it, and I couldn’t. In retrospect, it’s best I had to wait until the other thing occupying my brain, a deadline renegotiated twice, was over and done. Because the moment I realized we were being tracked, I also realized the thief could’ve been in the community Facebook groups I’d posted in about our stolen bikes. I immediately went in and deleted those posts. And I decided I wasn’t about to share the location of this theft online. Including here.
What we both realized after we’d returned home, having to page through photos of our bikes to share with the police for identification, is how their theft hit on an emotional level. It was a cruel ending to a decade of memories we’d made together on these bikes.
I wasn’t a cyclist when John bought them. It was a learning curve for me, and he was a patient teacher. I learned to lean the bike to mount it rather than try to hop on it, and to trust him to raise the seat to where my feet couldn’t touch the ground because I should be using brakes to stop. I learned not to fall over when stopping for road crossings. How to keep adjusting my hands on the handlebars so my neck (almost always sore from years of whiplash injuries) could handle longer and longer rides.
As John’s ability to hike without pain diminished, I kept trying to push my mileage so we could do distance rides together. Once I topped 25 miles and pushed for 30, my body said NO. A dozen miles are plenty for me now. A bike path in the woods is a pleasure, a side path is not, and I’d rather not ever do another road ride.
The bikes were a symbol of our travels together. Without their concrete representation of those memories, a dark hole opened in my heart. If not for the must-do book project in front of me, I’d have fallen deeper down the rabbit hole of depression that yawned in the aftermath of the theft.
That is why virtual reality hasn’t taken off. That’s why the time suck of social media doesn’t capture all of us. We need physical roots in our existence.
When I saw that splayed open bike rack and the absence of our bikes, I didn’t realize all they’d stood for. We both do now. I look forward to getting back out there on them, together, and making new memories so this year’s harsh one flattens out to a speed bump in the trail.
