The Diamondback Haanjo Trail. I bought it in August 2018 anticipating a September trip on the C&O canal trail from Washington DC to Hancock, Maryland. The bicycle was perfectly fine for the ride. The trail, on the other hand, was inauspicious, muddy and infested with mosquitos. The bike lives on. It is in many ways my favorite ride for NYC cycling. It has been roughed up, bathed in rain and dirt and sustained many a curb to road nasty drop. The wider tires 700 x35 X’plor USH tires are forgiving with potholes and broken surfaces and I have never had a flat with them. I know I shouldn’t have typed that. I now believe disc brakes are required components for this big city. I most certainly would have saved myself several cuts, bruised ribs and a couple of scars if I had been sporting the disc brakes on previous bicycles of my past.  Mostly though, what I love about the 2018 aluminum red Haanjo Trail gravel bicycle with rear rack and unmentionable stock seat is that this unassuming, modest bicycle never gets a “nice bike” comment from the average NYC fancy road cyclist. That may sound like I have an inferiority sensibility, and perhaps I do, but it’s more complicated than that.  I bought the bicycle through one of those payroll company’s supplemental benefit plans that offered discounts on trips and spas and exotic plants and bicycles. Right before this purchase I read a good review of this model in the latest issue of Plug Ugly in the summer of 2018. Diamondback made BMX bicycles in 1970s. Years later, after mergers and acquisitions, on-line marketing and department store sales the brand continues on. Does its company name have some kind of corporate prosaic bicycle stigma attached? I could say I don’t care, but I imagine that I harbor some repressed umbrage of those with much higher end carbon fiber gravelly bikes from boutique brands like Horseradish Harry’s. I take pleasure with this particular bike though. That is what matters.  I even wrote a letter to Plug Ugly after I had ridden the first two hundred pleasing miles.

The bicycle has 2760 miles on it now. That is not a lot for a bike that I have had since 2018, but there was a pandemic and loss of smell and motivation and I have nothing to prove. I commuted to Yonkers several times a month in 2019 and 2020 on the Haanjo. Its less than aggressive geometry prevented backache and fatigue. The fatter tires saved me on the rapidly deteriorating roadways of Inwood, Manhattan. 

There is something else too. I love bicycles in all of their glorious functional and non-functional attributes. And my Haanjo reminds me of all those places it has gone since 2018; the dirt trails of Connecticut, Maryland, New Hampshire and New York, the NYC trails of Shirley Chisholm park, the day long ride from Brooklyn to Danbury, Connecticut. If I had a barn for bicycles, I would never give up any of them. I am talking to you, my 1992 Wheeler mountain bike with no suspension that I converted to a single speed experiment. I miss you Mister Wheeler. I remember you so fondly on those wonderful bikes rides of my twenties where I collected Marlboro cigarettes packs for their bar codes on many a meandering hometown trip.  And I invoke you Sir Wheeler in my adulation of bicycle memory. I gave away the Wheeler. I moved on. He didn’t. He still lurks in the dusty corners of my head, insistent that I come back, apologize, see his worth and start again. 

One day Mr. Haanjo will have to make the same emotional adjustment. I will leave him behind. He dreads that day. He sees me as insouciant about our relationship, and that I will only miss him when he is gone. I know he is right, but for now I commend his steadfastness and dependability. And ride another day.