Bike Snob Page 7

  But for all the bad stuff I always got to do and see unexpected things. After a while, I certainly felt like I’d been in every building in the city. I could also hear an address and know exactly where a particular building was located. As I said earlier, cyclists have supernatural powers, and mine were becoming quite honed. I was fit and I was completely at ease on the bike. Weaving through city traffic at high speed was actually as soothing as, well, weaving. Best of all, I only had to set foot in the messenger company’s offices to drop off my manifest or to collect my paycheck. Otherwise, my dispatcher was simply a pleasant voice on the phone, and my days were spent entirely on the bike, bookended only by sleep.

  Then my bike got yoinked.

  But in retrospect, that was a good thing. Actually, it now seems uncannily like fate. Even though I got another bike, having my bike stolen really dampened my enthusiasm for messengering, mostly because the financial loss was sobering. Not only is messengering on (what was for me at the time) an expensive bike pretty foolish, but doing so with no medical coverage is doubly foolish. Really, compared to an injury a bike loss is pretty mild. Plus, almost immediately after my bike was stolen I was finally hired for a new job I’d been hoping to get for months. It’s almost as if the Great Obvious Bicycle Metaphor had stepped aside so that my life could enter into a new phase, and once things settled down It returned.

  “So is that it, Great Obvious Bicycle Metaphor? Have you really been with me all along, just like in the parable?”

  “No, idiot. You locked your bike to a mailbox. What did you expect?”

  You’re probably familiar with the famous Joseph Campbell quote: “Follow your bliss.” (This is not to be confused with the first lesson in mohel school: “Follow your bris.”) Well, I finally understand what’s so irritating about the beach parable. It’s that it’s passive, and that there’s someone always walking beside you who will help you out of a jam. Cycling has always been a part of my life not because it follows me around, but because I follow cycling around. It’s my bliss.

  Knowing what you love is knowing yourself, and something that you love can serve as a guide. It’s a fixed and tangible point in the world on which you can pin your passions and hopes. You can have a relationship with cycling. You can enjoy the discipline of cycling, or the freedom; you can enjoy the physical exertion, or the convenience and relative ease. Regardless, a strong relationship based on love will take you far, and it will also improve other areas of your life. You can depend on cycling in a way you can depend on little else. And it’s always there even when it’s forced aside due to injury or circumstances. Sure, it may be more about the love than the cycling, but if you’re going to love something cycling’s a good choice.

  PART TWO

  Road Rules

  “WHY IS EVERYBODY TRYING TO KILL ME?”

  Fear, and How to Survive on a Bike

  Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.

  —Mark Twain

  Vehicular Intimidation

  Dominance Through Stupidity

  When you’re a cyclist and you talk to non-cyclists about riding a bike on the road, one of the first questions you hear is, “Aren’t you afraid?” Fear of traffic is one of the main reasons people cite for not cycling, and when you do ride a bike you’re sharing the road (or, more accurately, fighting for your small sliver of it) with motorized vehicles that vastly outweigh, overpower, and outnumber you. Moreover, very often the drivers of these motor vehicles out-stupid you as well, since their vehicles allow them to forget they’re driving and to become distracted by things like stereos, cell phones, beverages, their children, their dogs, and entire meals that they’ve ordered at fast-food drive-throughs. It is sobering to think that, as a cyclist, all that’s between you and being run over by a Ford Explorer is the driver bending down for half a second to retrieve a dropped McNugget.

  Yes, the truth is that when you ride a bike you really do sometimes feel like you’re Emilio Estevez in Maximum Overdrive, and it’s often easy to forget that these roving death machines are actually piloted by human beings—that is, until a tinted window finally lowers to reveal a face, from which emanates a voice demanding that you “Get out of the road!” This is infuriating in the way that only truly stupid statements can be. Telling cyclists to get out of the road is like telling women to get out of the voting booth and go back into the kitchen, or telling Japanese-American people to “Go back to China!” The ignorance inherent in the statement is almost more offensive than the sentiment behind it.

  But even worse than “Get out of the road!” is “I didn’t see you!” You hear this one when you’ve almost been hit (or actually been hit) by a driver who was either momentarily distracted by something (a phone, a mascara brush, a deeply lodged booger) or who just wasn’t paying attention in the first place. Amazingly, drivers actually think “I didn’t see you!” is a dual-purpose phrase that not only serves as a valid excuse but also as an apology we should accept. However, neither is true. As much as I hate “Get out of the road!” I’d rather someone yell that than almost kill me because they didn’t even know I was there. At least being yelled at means I matter. On the other hand, I’m not particularly comforted to learn that I was almost maimed because I commanded less attention than a piece of dried mucus. “I didn’t see you!” is a confession, not an excuse. It’s like explaining to a cop, “The only reason I didn’t stop at that tollbooth was that I’m completely plastered.”

  So why is it that you’re either in the way or invisible when you’re on your bike? Simple—it’s because the average non-cyclist actually believes that no sane person would possibly be on the road without being encased in two tons of sheet metal. The typical driver is like a woman in a female-only household who falls into the toilet when a male guest visits. After all, the seat’s always down—why even bother to check? It’s an article of faith. Plus, motor vehicles have gotten so huge drivers barely even notice other cars, much less bicyclists—which, we all know, belong on the sidewalk.

  But the worst is outright hostility. All cyclists have encountered drivers who will use their vehicles to intimidate you. This can be anything from gunning their engines to actually swerving into you intentionally, but most often, it’s the horn. Sometimes it’s a quick tap to let you know they’re there, and other times it’s a prolonged laying on of hands and a deafening blare meaning, “I’m in a tremendous hurry. Furthermore, I hate you, I hate having to look at you, and I especially hate having to move my steering wheel ever so slightly to pass you.” It’s stupid and degrading. Drivers who do this might as well just walk around with air horns all day and blast them in people’s ears until they get what they want. “Welcome to Arby’s, sir, may I take your order?” “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAMP!!!” Roaming around the countryside in bloated vehicles while masticating food and communicating via a series of monotone bleats really makes us no better than livestock.

  Since I refuse to live as a cow or to take orders from cows, my response to car horns is always the same: “I don’t care.” In the case of the quick tap, I don’t care because I’m already aware there are cars on the road. The horn just means the driver sees me. Big deal. I’m not worried about the drivers who see me; I’m worried about the ones who don’t see me. The nose-picking texters don’t honk before they run me over. And in the case of the prolonged “I hate you” blare, I really don’t care. The implication that someone’s destination is somehow more important than mine, or that I should cede the road to someone because they’re in a hurry, disgusts and offends me. The only vehicle that has the right to make loud noises and expect me to get out of the way is an emergency vehicle like an ambulance or a fire truck. If a person is not driving one of those things then nobody else’s life is hanging in the balance except my own.

  Sometimes, when drivers violate my space or demand I get out of the way, I simply ask them, “Why?” The answer is always the same: “I’m in a car, and you’re on a bike.” Ah, of course, that’s an excellent reason. See, they
don’t give cars to just anybody. Only really important people get to drive. Plus, you’ve got to take a test to drive a car, and it’s so hard that they don’t let you do it until you’re in your teens. Never mind that these people are usually driving cars with Blue Book values significantly lower than what our bicycles would fetch on eBay; either that, or they’re driving some really expensive contraption that any sane person would be embarrassed to be paying for, like a Cadillac pickup truck, which allows you to look like an idiot at the country club and at the ranch. The fact is that a motor vehicle is a “major purchase,” and major purchases are how people express their self-importance and project it to the rest of the world. But they’re not important; they’re merely self-important.

  And that’s the real reason everybody is trying to kill you. It’s because they’re self-important. And self-important people are way more important than you can ever hope to be. Consequently, self-importance makes people act stupidly. It’s why certain people spend tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars on cars with leather interiors and climate control and lavish sound systems, yet will drive them in such a way as to endanger human lives so that they don’t have to spend an extra twenty seconds in them. Major purchases such as automobiles are how self-important people measure their self-worth, which is why they’ll sometimes do anything they can to get the keys to as expensive a car as possible—including lie about their address, cut corners in other areas of their lives, and take on debt that they can’t afford to repay. So when you do something as audacious as question someone’s importance by obstructing the physical manifestation of that importance with your bicycle, you are an affront to their very existence. After all, the driver you’re blocking has a lease on a Nissan Altima, and they don’t give those to just anybody.

  If this makes you angry, it should. What it should not do is make you afraid. Never be afraid to ride your bike. Once you understand that everybody is trying to kill you simply due to ignorance and bloated self-importance you’re already at a tremendous advantage. In addition to the psychic ego flab belligerent bad drivers are carrying, they’re also coddled by seat belts, air bags, ABS brakes, rain-sensing windshield wipers, and vast crumple zones. These things may make drivers safer than you in theory, but in practice they simply make them lazier. Many drivers have forgotten that they’re operating a machine. Instead, they feel like they’re in their living rooms, and the scenery outside their windows is simply a show on television they passively observe until they get to where they’re going. And you’re just the cat who jumped on the couch, landed on the remote, and unwittingly changed the channel right as the batter was about to swing.

  However, cyclists never forget that they’re operating a vehicle. If you forget to pedal you stop moving. If you lose your balance you tip over. You can’t fall asleep. You have to be aware of the road surface at all times, and you feel every inch of it. You actually recognize different types of pavement. You know there will be ice when it’s cold, you know that heat can make the road surface softer, and you know that the painted lines can be slippery in the rain. You’re engaged. Sure, you’re less protected on a bicycle, but the fact is that this makes you a safer driver, because you’re also thinking. Your brain can be a far more effective safety device than a seat belt or an air bag, or even a helmet. And as long as you’re involved in what you’re doing, that safety device is operational. The bike sharpens your mind like it strengthens your body. You’re actually at an advantage over car drivers in the same way those prehistoric proto-mice turned out to have an advantage over the dinosaurs. (You might find a mouse in your kitchen, but you’ll never see a brontosaurus.)

  So lose the fear. Cycling is dangerous, but it’s simply not that dangerous. Riding safely and intelligently will take a lot of the risk out of cycling in traffic, even with the high idiot driver factor. Plus, the benefits of cycling far outweigh the dangers. People are afraid to ride bikes in traffic, yet they do lots of other pointless and potentially deadly things all the time without even thinking about it. They take recreational drugs that can stop their hearts, they smoke cigarettes, and they have unprotected sex with strangers. In fact, they sometimes do all three at once. This is to say nothing of the many ways people nearly die every day while doing the most mundane things. Have you ever walked into the middle of the street while texting and almost been hit by a car? Riding smart is infinitely safer than texting like an idiot. If you’re not riding a bike because you might get hurt, you might as well just seal yourself inside of a hypoallergenic bubble and never leave your house.

  Anti-Veloism

  Prejudice and Propaganda

  I don’t blame people for being afraid to ride their bikes, though. It’s conditioning. As you grow up, no authority figure will ever tell you to ride your bike; they’ll only tell you not to ride it. We’ve been subjected to a campaign of propaganda and lies our entire lives. I’m not sure who’s ultimately behind it, though I suspect it’s the same cadre of conspirators who brought us Forrest Gump, Pizza Hut stuffed crust pizza, and the band Creed. The most important component of this propaganda campaign is convincing people that using a bicycle as transportation is crazy. Why do they want to do this? To sell us the metaphorical cheese!

  Driving is by far the most culturally acceptable means of personal transport, and it’s easy to see why. Cars can be extremely convenient, and for millions of us they’re a necessity. Sometimes you’ve simply got to cover relatively long distances quickly without physical expenditure and with control over your route and time of departure. But they’re also really, really dangerous. Roughly the same number of people die in the United States each year from automobile accidents as from guns. Yes, a machine that is designed to transport you and keep you safe is in practice just as fatal as a device that is designed with one sole purpose, which is to kill. Granted, more people have cars than have guns—in some parts of the country. Cars and guns each kill about sixty times more people in this country every year than plane crashes kill in the entire world. Yet fear of flying is considered normal. It’s okay to take a pill before boarding a plane, or to go to a class to get over this fear, or even to refuse to fly at all. People will accommodate you. Yet you rarely meet anybody who’s deathly afraid of car travel, and if you did you’d probably think they were a little crazy. Sure, there are people who never learn to drive, but even they won’t hesitate to be passengers in a car. If you’re going to be afraid of any form of transport, be afraid of cars. They crash into each other, flip over, and even burn up for no reason at all. It happens all the time. Fear of flying is a little crazy, but fear of driving is actually quite rational.

  This is not to say that cars are evil, or that we should do away with them. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without cars. Even though automobiles truly do put the “car” in “carnage,” I know that sometimes you have to drive, and if you’re going to live in fear you might as well stay home and knit. No, I have nothing against cars; I only have something against idiots. But I’m also a big fan of using the right tool for the job, and a car is not always the right tool—especially when it comes to safety. Using a car because you have to make a hundred-mile trip with your family makes sense. Using a car instead of a bike because it’s safer is like climbing out the window on a rope ladder because of the remote possibility your staircase might be infested with termites. Meanwhile, bicycles—which require no licensing or training and are used so widely by people of all ages that you can even buy them at Wal-Mart—don’t even manage a four-figure death toll in this country. Sure, it’s still more people than airplanes kill, but you can’t exactly fly across town to go hang out at your friend’s house or go shopping for mittens.

  So if people are more frightened of planes than they are of cars—which are as dangerous as guns—then what chance could bikes possibly have? If you regularly use a bicycle as transportation, you’re probably used to people thinking you’re crazy. I’m always amused when I prepare to leave someone’s house by bike on a warm summer evening and
they act like I’m about to strap a bungee cord to my ankle and leap off the 59th Street Bridge. “You’re going to ride home? Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Well, no, I’m not sure. I mean, anything could happen. I could fall down into an open sewer and rupture my spleen on my handlebars. I could take a car service instead, but I’m not sure I’ll be okay in that case either, since we might get into an accident. The only thing I’m sure of is that, assuming all goes well, my bike ride home will be fun and free, while the cab will be boring and cost me like $20. If I’m going to spend money on the way home I’d rather just stop at the store and buy some beer.

  By now you’re probably thinking, “I know who’s behind the Gump/stuffed crust/Creed/bike conspiracy—it’s the oil companies and the auto industry!” Well, it’s not so simple. Sure, they may have been involved, but they never could have pulled it off by themselves. Oil companies are too busy controlling the auto industry, and the auto industry’s not even smart enough to keep itself in business. No, none of them could have done it without the cycling world. Yes, the cycling world has done as much as anybody to convince us that cycling is a high-risk activity. Between the bicycle companies and the bicycle advocacy groups, there’s now a perception that you have to be a raving lunatic to ride a bicycle without a helmet. Thanks to them, people consider simply going near your bicycle without a helmet tantamount to lighting up a mentholated cigarette, taking a deep drag, and exhaling it right into a newborn baby’s face.