Last weekend–my first weekend in Marfa–I decided to go for a bike ride around town to see what was what. It was a beautiful day, sunny and about 65, as I stopped for breakfast and coffee and drove up and down Marfa’s streets looking at the neighborhoods.

As I pulled up to the bookstore, I noticed my front bike tire was going flat. So, I found the closest gas station and filled it up with air. No sooner did I get back on to ride away when I noticed the tire was quickly deflating again. I thought I had better start riding home because apparently I had a serious leak. I was riding home with one tire nearly flat, when I felt something strange about the back tire. I looked behind me and, sure enough, the back tire was almost completely flat as well.

“Shit,” I thought.

Well, Marfa is small and no matter where you are, you aren’t far from home. So, I got off the bike and began to walk it…I was only about 5 Marfa-blocks away.

As I walked quietly along, minding my own new-person-in-town business, I heard the yap yap yap of one of those little miniature lap dogs. I looked toward the yapping and out of the yard of an adobe casita ran a teeny Chihuahua, yipping at me as if its little shivering life depended on it.

The funny thing about this creature was that some person, who apparently was lacking constructive things to do, had dressed it up in a pastel striped cowl-necked Liz Claiborne sweater. As the well-dressed Chihuahua was coming at me with all the anger that evolves out of an unsatisfying wardrobe selection, I nearly fell over trying to get back on my busted bike to get away from it.

“Shit,” I thought.

I hobbled back onto my bike thinking what an idiot I must look like trying to pedal away from a dog the size of a handbag, and I took off on the rims of my hopelessly flattened tires as Satan’s own Chihuahua nipped at my ankles. Already drawing the unwanted attention of Marfans standing at their doors pointing and laughing (in my mind, anyway), I had somehow managed to switch into a lower gear. So not only was I pedaling furiously away from a screaming sweater-clad Chihuahua, but I was doing it Ms. Gulch-style on my low-gear bicycle, my legs pumping much faster than I was actually being propelled forward.

The extraordinarily short rotation of each tire forced me to pedal faster and faster until I finally made it home, where I hid behind a locked door and peeked out through a crack in the blinds, paranoid the dog, which in my mind had become a pit bull wearing a leather bomber jacket, had followed me home.

Later that day, while staring at my sad little bike, I remembered passing a small bike repair shop in Alpine, a town about 25 miles east of Marfa. Alpine is bigger than Marfa with a small college, two fairly good-sized groceries, what seems to be a gi-normous hardware store (comparatively), and a Sonic (you know, just in case one needs a pineapple shake). I called the guy who runs the shop–and is known as “Bikeman”–and told him I was new to the area and had two flat tires. He responded knowingly and told me to bring the bike in. When I got there and introduced myself, he disappeared for a minute and reappeared holding a small piece of wood, about 4 inches long by 4 inches wide, on which lay at least a half-dozen tiny artifacts, glued to the surface in random formation.

“These are goatheads,” he said.

Wha?

“Goatheads,” he repeated. They are part of a plant that grows in Far West Texas (and apparently New Mexico) that wreaks havoc on your bike tires. You can read about them here, but they look like little spiky thorns and they don’t care about your bike tires or that you’re going to be chased by a tiny mean Chihuahua. Bikeman told me that the solution is to install some kind of special goo inside the tire (along with a goathead-repellent tire tube) and that should do the trick. Yay Bikeman!

Let’s just add goatheads to the category ”Stuff to know about Marfa before you move here.” Other items in that category include:

1. goo for bike tires

2. sweater-wearing, bike-chasing mean Chihuahuas

3. where to bike/run if you don’t want to be chased by said Chihuahua or other dogs running loose.

I asked around and was directed to the road in the pics below. Not bad, eh?