If You Want Dignity, Choose Chess

I've been bicycling for a long time. Lots of things have changed. For instance, fifty years ago, people bought components for their beloved bikes designed to shave a few grams off the weight, even though it would be a lot less expensive to just take it off their thighs. Now, bicycles are made out of some kind of miracle metal where the atoms are so far apart that the whole thing wouldn't tip a scale against a bag of chips.

Also, modern bike saddles have some cush in them and are no longer made out of pterosaur clavicles.

Plus, people have helmets now, and stuff. They're made out of old ice coolers, but they're better than nothing, which was the style helmet I wore for the first 35 years.

Old-timers like to make fun of this sort of thing. What a bunch of sissies. We did just fine without all that guff, they say. Old-timers love to say "guff." Of course, the ones that didn't do so fine are no longer with us.

One time, our old beloved Hostel Club group went off for a week-long tour in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, the home of zero cars and food bigger than your head. A couple of our friends put on strappy little leather helmets and toeclips and raced each other to Pennsylvania. From Virginia. They loaded up on salt tablets, because that was a thing then. We were already there, transported by motor vehicle as Nature intended, just in time to see them race up side by side, blast into the parking lot with a spray of gravel, lean over, and vomit copiously on their shoes.

If dignity were the goal in life, this did not appear to be the activity to get into. Naturally, we got into it.

The toeclips distinguished the serious biker from the hobbyist. They were little cages for your feet, and you jammed your toes in them, reached down, and cinched up the leather strap. With your feet locked in, you could really move. Problem. A moment of inattention while you're locked into your pedals, and you will go over like a dead dinosaur. It will look very majestic: no struggle, no fuss, no flailing, just your inert body, tied to a stake named Gravity. Modern bicyclists have abandoned the toe cages for a system wherein their shoes are locked into the pedals. You're supposed to click out of your pedals easily, but it doesn't always happen. Also, it is possible--I hear--to come up to a stop, click off one pedal, and lean the other way. Everyone's done it at least once. Lance Armstrong has done it too, I assure you, but he cleated all the witnesses. He stomped them into amnesia or worse.

So that's one way to efficient your way into a case of "road rash," or the transfer of all or part of your epidermis to pavement. I have never had a bad case of it, because no matter what I do, the road beneath my wheels doesn't go by all that fast. And if I get going down a mountain where my friends will gleefully reach speeds of up to 55 miles per hour, I will show up at the bottom considerably later, and my forearms will burst into flame from braking.

Clothing is different also. Seems to me my serious biking friends in the '60s wore wool shorts and tee-shirts. Now you are expected to deck yourself out in Spandex. It's not attractive. I don't care who you are. You're going to look like a bunch of link sausages in Technicolor.

The Spandex, at least, makes a certain amount of sense, and reduces chafing, but does not solve all the problems in the shorts region. On one long trip, I emerged from the porta-potty with a distinctive hitch in my git-along and eased myself back in the saddle. A woman rode up to me and said, quietly, medicated diaper powder, and then rode off before I could thank her.

I submit that if the first words from a complete stranger include "diaper powder," you are not engaged in a dignified activity.

Against The Wind

It's easy to justify driving your car when you're going to Costco to pick up a shipping container's-worth of food and paper products. But I was just going to buy a little camera and decided to take my bicycle. I used to ride it daily, but it's been moldering in the basement for a while. At the last minute Dave surprised me by offering to join me.

 

Huh! Back in the '80s he found a bike at Goodwill for $15 and bought it on a whim. It was a classic, and identical to the bike he rode in college: a bright orange Schwinn Varsity. The sucker weighs in at a smooth two hundred pounds if you take the saddle off, although that makes it marginally less comfortable, and you do need a strong dwarf with a wrench to take off the wheels. 

 

He rode it straight downtown to surprise me at work, and we rode home together, uphill, and then he stashed it in a dark corner of the basement. Fifteen years later he peeled a felt of dust off it and joined me on a half-day trip, after which it was dispatched to an even darker corner of the basement. The geyser of inspiration for Dave to ride a bike has a fifteen-year periodicity, and I guess he was due again. So we hauled out our bikes, pumped up the tires, blew up one of them with a boom that dropped war vets for a mile around, and eventually spanked them into working condition.

 

Our route took us along the Columbia River on a dedicated bike path. It was swell! It was grand! The temperature was mild, ospreys wheeled in the sky, herons struck picturesque poses along the shoreline, wishes were lavishly granted. I marveled once again at what a wonderful invention was the bicycle: with almost no effort at all, we were gliding along at a nice clip, with Mt. Hood smiling in the blue in front of us. We were strong! We were sailing! There was no limit to our powers! We rolled smugly through the acres of SUVs at the Costco parking lot and found, to our amazement, a bike rack right out front. It didn't have a scratch on it. I bought my camera and we headed home.

Within a few blocks we were back on Marine Drive and nothing was right. We ran into something a lot like Shinola. We were pressing miserably into the wind, pedaling hard just to stay ahead of our own dark impulses. Here's the thing. When the wind is at your back, you don't even notice it. You think you have superpowers. But a headwind is debilitating. You'll brave the rain; you understand the rain. You're fine with pushing up a mountain; you understand a mountain. You expect to work harder when you've loaded up your saddlebags with heavy things. But you can't see a headwind. You can only feel it, and it feels pervasive, and wrong, and deeply unfair.

Still you battle on, with salt in your eyes, inching closer to home. But you can dream. You can imagine flipping it around just one more time, just to feel those righteous sails billow, to be mighty and invincible again. All we need is one U-turn, and we're suddenly awesome, we're right back in charge. Just two white kids flying into the future we so deserve.

Doing It Right

Sometimes, on good days, Portland reminds me of Dresden, without all the bombed-outness. We visited a friend in Dresden some years ago, and even though significant portions of the city were war-damaged or soiled or missing altogether, there was still a sense that people had their priorities straight. You could tell right off that they were doing something right because they were energetic and healthy while carrying a beer in one hand and an ice cream cone in the other. No one seemed either particularly prosperous or destitute. Our friend didn't have much money but neither did anyone else. There's a level of contentment to be had in modest means, shared. The roads were filled with pedestrians, or people walking their bicycles, which doubled as baby strollers. The middle of any street was packed with people, and behind them would be a humbled automobile with its gearshift set on "plod." One didn't get the sense that the driver was at all impatient, either. He understood where he belonged in the processional. The celebrants were all ahead of him and he just carried the train.

This is as it should be, people.

As the masses milled about the ancient city, its stone buildings stained by a few hundred years of coal, with bright flounces of graffiti at their hems, I felt I was looking at the past and the future at the same time. This poorer nation was demonstrating our future--if we do it right.

Portland is groaning under new wealth but still taking deliberate aim at a sensible future. Meet Sunday Parkways. Periodically, on summer Sundays, the city closes off a goodly loop of streets to auto traffic and the neighborhood blooms with bicyclists, enjoying life in a civilized setting. It's not at all enjoyable for people in cars trying to get somewhere in the vicinity, of course. But shoot: car-driving makes people crabby anyway. That's a known fact.

Our local loop was eight miles, give or take, and included three major parks, with musicians and entertainers in them, along with food booths and free stuff. I've been in many mass-bicycle events but this one was different; we poked along, coasting behind little boys on scooters, and tandems with freeloading toddlers, and life in general slowed down so much it was strokeable. Portland Opera was set up at the first park and we discovered that, whatever else we'd planned to do that day, we had plenty of time to sit in the grass and listen to a dozen arias.

The entire first half of the loop was downhill with a sturdy tailwind, so I was bracing for the return trip, but in FutureLand it's downhill both ways. So many neighbors had claimed the peaceful streets that it seemed impossible we wouldn't run into someone we knew. Dave ran into someone he didn't know, but neither of them got too badly banged up. His bike is fine too. You can't really mess up a 1965 orange Schwinn Varsity. That vintage hunk of lead is now a certified classic and earned many compliments from those not called upon to operate it.

I looked around at the liberated streets and the smiles of the children and I said, fuck it: I'm leaving my helmet at home. I never wore one till I was 35 or so and I've hated it ever since. I suppose I should have been a good influence on the children, but then I realized that now is as good a time as any for our young people to recognize I'm not their best role model.

Hiphop at Alberta Park, blues at Woodlawn; gentle breezes turned with us and remained at our backs; miracles abounded; and then we rode right past a particularly fine brewpub. Ha ha! Of course we didn't. If you don't sit on a bioswale with your bike against a tree on a Sunday Parkway enjoying a pint of Breakside IPA, you're not doing it right.

You get a city like this on purpose. You combobulate neighborhoods where almost anything you need or want is a walk or a bike-ride away, and then--well, that little girl with the butterfly wings and the pink helmet and training wheels? That's all the faster you need to go.

Now to shut down some of those streets for good.

Ed's Face

This is my friend Ed. He has a business called Pedal Roaster and he roasts coffee beans and delivers them by bicycle. He recently lost an argument with Willamette Boulevard, and this is the result. You'll have to take my word for it that prior to his attempting to use his face as a brake, it was quite lovely, and no doubt will be again. But right now, his body is his temple, and his temple needs renovations.

I never ground up my face to this extent, but I've taken plenty of spills on a bicycle, due to the sheer number of hours I've spent on a bicycle and my casual relationship with the vertical. One time I landed on my face, too.

I was in Boston. I was riding my bike home from work in a snowstorm. The rule in Boston is you get five cars minimum through the intersection on a red light. If you actually stop for a red light you will get rear-ended, even if the person behind you could have stopped in time, just so as to acquaint you with the rules. Two or three minutes into rush hour this results in a total citywide turgid clog with everyone reaching into the glove box for the flask and honking lavishly.

The other rule is that you approach all such intersections with confidence and blinders and never, ever let the other guy know you see him.

I was coming up on one of these chicken games and applied my brakes and immediately went flatways and I entered the icy intersection in a slow, graceful, balletic spin, chin first. It was dreamlike: the flakes coming down, the street swirling 360 degrees, once, twice, the various frictionless car tires approaching sideways, and by the time our little Swan Lake episode was over, I was gazing into the tread of an automobile tire a yard away, and the driver was peering down at me.

"What's your medical insurance?" he said.

"Harvard Medical," I said, politely.

"Cool," he said. "I'm a doctor in that plan. My office is in the next block. Let's get you fixed up."

He helped me up and we walked my bike over to his office, leaving his car in the intersection, where it wasn't due to trickle out for another half hour anyway, and we went into his office, where he got out some instruments and began to pluck gravel out of my chin. He hummed happily. He clearly loved his work, although all Bostonians get an extra spring in their step when they've left their cars in the middle of the road.

"Looks like you could get by with a butterfly bandage," he said. "But I could make it perfect with a couple stitches. Do you want some stitches? I love doing surgery."

I was already feeling queasy about his gravel extraction efforts, and a little nervous about his enthusiasm. I declined. I have a thin scar now.

I don't remember ever being billed. Maybe I wasn't. Two years earlier I was living in London and waltzed into a clinic with a much more serious condition that was also related to my youthful indiscretions, and I got fixed up and sent out the door without a bill then too. It was slick. This is what it would be like if we had single-payer health insurance here.

I know Ed has insurance because he, like me, is a retired letter carrier with a decent benefits package. That's the sort of thing middle-class people used to have before unions were revealed to be a plague on humanity during the Reagan administration. We've been duly educated in that regard, and also are up to date about the horror of socialized medicine, so there's no danger the insurance industry is going to have to give up a ton of our money anytime soon.