The Seat less Wonder + Refrigerator High + Ice Cream Medic

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Duct Tape. If you've ever watched Star Wars, you might make the far off connection that duct tape has a few similarities with the 'Force'; they both have a light side, a dark side, and they both hold the world together.

Ok, maybe duct tape can't hold the fabric of the space-time continuum together as well as the 'Force', but it was an essential tool in solving the "Seatless Wonder". The "Seatless Wonder" is another Peace Corps volunteer's bike that I had brought down to Ha'apai.

Like its name implies, it has no seat. There's only a dangerous metallic stump where the seat should be attached. Since we had no wrenches to remove the stump, it only served as a shining warning to any rider that it was quite capable of tearing a new @-hole to anyone who dared sit down.

We never bothered to solve the problem until now, mainly because of our innate laziness and now only out of necessity; another volunteer and I needed a means of transportation to Sandy Beach, the only 'palangi' beach nearby. We had two bikes, one fully operational and the other being the 'Seatless Wonder'. We were too cheap to pay for a taxi and too lazy to run so we had to fix
the 'Seatless Wonder' with the only other wonder we had at hand, the wonder of duct tape.

To form the new seat, I used leftover pieces of cardboard (from when I was making my Optimus Prime Halloween costume), the soft packaging that Nathan used to protect the CD's he sent over, a soft sandal that we found lying on the street, and the bubble wrap package (that a Tongatapu volunteer used to send me a can opener).

This was all combined and held together with enormous quantities of duct tape. I wish I could say that the project was a complete success. However, it was not. I realized this as soon as the bike went bumping into potholes after potholes. At that moment, I realized how I was going to die. It wouldn't be some random coconut that would fall on my head, or some tsunami that appears too quickly before I'd be able to follow the expert advice of my Safety and Security Officer to "climb a coconut tree."

No, my cause of death would be some form of internal bleeding. There were simply not enough cushions for the bumpy dirt roads of a developing country. My design was flawed in more ways than one though. The seat had been moved up a bit so as to be slightly awkward and very
uncomfortable.

It was as if I were riding a bicycle that was comically small, like one of the clowns performing their act with the traveling circus. The rider's knees are bent and arched slightly outwards. Each pedal works enough strange muscles that it finally makes you wonder if the bicycle is really causing more effort than simply walking.

We finally scrapped the plans to go to Sandy Beach because of our flawed engineering. Instead, we bought ice cream, got light-headed off the vapors of a now broken refrigerator, and made quesadillas.

Note: Do not clear the frozen ice in a refrigerator with a machete. We accidentally destroyed a pipe filled with coolant, which released a vapor that made us instantly light-headed.