Growing up in State College, I used to think bike theft was a myth outside of behemoth cities and foreign countries. I’m going to avoid sounding like a curmudgeon when I say that ‘things have changed,’ but I’m finding myself to be more and more incorrect in the past year or so as I get closer and closer to victims of bike theft on campus. In America, a bike is stolen every 30 seconds, and I finally had the closest possible encounter with the crime this past weekend after I carefully hid my bike behind the Millennium Science Complex to see my partner, Sage, at work. I didn’t have a lock on me because I was returning from a ride, so I did my best to make the muddy mess look as inconspicuous as possible. Truth be told, though, it’s hard to make a $5000 cross-country racer look like any other random hunk o’ junk on campus. I was inside for only 15 minutes, and I came back out to the damning realization that my bike’s parking spot was now vacant. I felt like I had lost a child, and my blood was boiling.
After a good few minutes enveloped in an existential crisis, Sage encouraged me to give scavenger hunting a try for the evening, and they gave me their bike to scour every nook and cranny on campus. I searched for an hour and a half, riding from the HUB to each residence hall and doubling back empty-handed. We had checked all four major dorms on campus, and I was starting to feel deep in my gut that I had lost my brand-new bike for good. I was starting to feel nauseous, and I nearly passed out as stress hormones pumped through my brain like water through a plugged garden hose. Thankfully, though, the ‘denial’ stage of grief is much more persistent in me than that, and I decided to scan the North side of campus again. I looked everything over again, rode by the Nittany Lion Inn, and decided there that I should just go home.
As I was heading back on Fischer Road, I was telling myself that it would take a miracle to find my Cannondale again. I wasn’t really looking for it anymore, and I felt defeated like I never had before. Suddenly, though, as I was riding past the parking deck on Fischer, I noticed a single light flickering in a bike parking area inside the building, and I could just barely make out the tan-walled tires of my Scalpel leaning against the wall. It’s as if it were calling out to me, seeing me ride past and using some divine force to grab my attention. I ran inside, and, wildly enough, the imbecile who took it left it in a wide open space, unlocked, and took off for somewhere else. Perhaps they were looking for a better hiding spot, but that speculation isn’t important to me beyond this point. I beat ridiculous odds and brought my bike back from what would have surely been the quickest $50 eBay sale of all time, and I still can’t wrap my head around how lucky I am to be writing this as the MacGuffin of this story sits next to my bed unscathed. I talked to campus police right after my incident to get an insider’s look at what might have happened through security footage, and they told me they had been following the thief on security cameras for around half an hour while I searched. He was obviously a student who lives on campus, not being able to take the bike into his dorm and opting instead to keep the bike moving throughout the evening.
If there’s anything I’ve taken away from this night, it’s the realization that bike theft is a serious, real crime on campus. I’ve tested fate too much with my theory that people don’t steal bikes in State College, and it nearly cost me gravely. If I’m going to salvage anything from this, I hope that my idiocy can help provide a real-world example of what otherwise sounds like a crime ripped from a kid’s cartoon. Thankfully, we’re still not in a big city where experts recommend using two D-locks to secure each wheel, but a lock through the frame on campus would be plenty to deter any potential thieves from picking your bike first. It’s not about making your bike untouchable, but rather making it unattractive. I didn’t have any way of bringing a lock with me in this particular story, but I probably would have opted to stay out of a situation like this again in the future by just going straight home. It was a stressful evening, and I feel like I’ve really been dealt the best hand possible for this situation. I wouldn’t anticipate having this luck a second time.
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