Leave of Absence

Until August 4, I will be engulfed in a live-in teaching experience in Forest Grove, so my updates will be sporadic. I won’t have my bike out here for another week and half, but once I retrieve it, I’m hoping I’ll be able to take some boony-rides, and you’ll get to read about migrant farm workers and rogue tractors and automated irrigation systems. Until then, have fun, but don’t forget to wear your helmet.

Guardrail Rabbit

Can you spot the rabbit in this picture?

I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but at some point over the last month, this rabbit appeared on a guardrail on Mock’s Crest. At first, I thought it might be some kind of protective warning (“Caution: Do not squish a rabbit between your bumper and this guardrail”). However, if that was the case, wouldn’t the drawing be of a wild rabbit? This rabbit is clearly domesticated: note the cow-like markings about the neck and shoulders.

Then I thought that it might be some kind of guerilla marketing campaign for a rabbit-related product. The New Rabbit, by Volkswagon? Maybe there’s a Rabbit Vodka? Come to think of it, they did just open a salon in St Johns called The Wandering Hare (great place– going there was the only time in my life that I’ve been able to talk politics to the person giving me a trim).

Here’s my favorite theory: maybe there is a new, North Portland-based rock band called Guardrail Rabbit, and this is their tag. I’d buy the T-shirt. In fact, if there isn’t already such a band, someone should form one. Andrew?

First, There Is a Building

Last week, there was a large Victorian mansion on the northwest corner of Broadway and Columbia. Now, there’s this:

Actually, there is a very well-structured hole in the ground where the house was. This is the building behind it. The last time we saw that old mansion, it had been jacked up off its foundation. Over the weekend, they moved the whole damn thing somewhere else, and tore down the neighboring building while they were at it.

It’s unsettling to me that we, as a civilization, are capable of up and relocating a huge, long-standing structure like that Victorian mansion. I don’t know where they’re taking it, or what they’re putting in its place (my guess: a parking garage), but it doesn’t seem right somehow. Maybe it’s all the years I spent in Europe, but I sort of feel like an old building ought to just stay in place until it mysteriously burns down and someone collects a lot of insurance money.

This is just one of the many summer construction projects downtown that are forcing me in front of Tri-Met buses during my morning commute. While I’m all for the new MAX line, all of the work on Broadway is taking up way too much of the right lane. Traffic-cone orange is rapidly becoming my least favorite color.

Ben once told me that a common trend in development is that residents are completely fine with all of the growth that allows them to buy property in a community, but want all development to cease as soon as they move in. I may be in danger of falling prey to that attitude myself here in Portland. Unless you’re adding a bike lane, I want to tell city planners, don’t change another thing.

It’s Not Worth a Thousand Words, but It’s Worth Something

But It Pours

Here’s something I love: biking in a downpour without raingear on a warm Saturday.

I rode my bike the ten miles out to the Hawthorne District today, to spend the afternoon with my oldest friend, who is back in town on break from med school in Omaha. It was overcast when I left, but I was so busy ransacking the house for my lost keys that I didn’t stop to think about the weather. I just topped off the air in my tires, grabbed my helmet, and took off, happy for a long ride to a neighborhood I seldom visit without the usual heavy bag full of school books. As I rounded the curve where Willamette turns into Portland/Rosa Parks, I felt a few drops on my forearms, but the sky looked more depressed than threatening and I figured it would blow over.

Around Vancouver and Fremont, the slight sprinkle turned into a torrent; within a minute I was soaked through. By the time I got to Skidmore, the rain was pouring off my helmet so fast I couldn’t see. At first I was furious that I was going to be arriving in Southeast irreversibly wet, but once I realized that there was nothing to be done, I couldn’t help but smile, and then laugh. I laughed all the way to Tillamook and 7th, grinning and waving at the other cyclists cowering in bus stops and under store awnings. There’s something delightful about being swimming pool wet out in public when you’re not going anyplace where looks matter: you let everything go, because there’s no way to undo it, and the weather becomes a bond between you and every stranger you see.

Have I said before how much I love Portland? I love Portland the way I love Ben: in my bones, in a way that renders all other possibilities nonexistent. The smell of rain on warm pavement in Portland is like the smell of Ben’s neck in the morning. It makes my heart squeeze.

Fractured Dispatches from the Heartland

Yesterday, I cheated on my bike.

I spent the last few days in Goshen, Indiana, and on Thursday, I borrowed by uncle’s bike to ride up and down the Millrace Canal Trail. It was incredibly hot. That bike was everything my bike is not; it was kind of like hooking up with a laid-back, chubby blonde after two years of exclusivity with a high-maintenance, eating-disordered brunette who’s always got her derailleur in a twist. It was a fat-bottomed bike, with a big wide seat that was like riding a couch; it had thick, wide tires, like cankles. The handlebars were broad and bosomy, so I could ride sitting straight up: effortless. I couldn’t go very fast on the gravel trail, but it didn’t matter. My high-strung commuter bike is always in a hurry, but now I was straddling a lazy, voluptuous vacation bike, and I could take my time.

The Millrace Canal was teeming with life; Indiana always is. A few years ago when I was visiting, there were so many wild creatures in my aunt and uncle’s front yard that I actually saw a rabbit jump over a duck. This time, on the fat-ass bike, I almost ran over a turtle crossing the trail because I was looking at a great blue heron picking its way along the water’s edge. I saw two rabbits, half a dozen more turtles, and some cardinals, robins, chipmunks, and black squirrels. The air was hot and humid: it was like biking in nature’s vagina.

A few hours later, this general sensation of frightening fertility culminated in my cousin announcing that she is pregnant. Kimberly is slightly less than two years older than me. We spent a lot of summers together as kids, back when that branch of the family still lived in South Carolina, another hot, humid place where the insects shriek all summer.

The irony of all of this insistent life is that I was there to say good-bye to my grandmother. As a kid, I used to spend at least a month a year living with my grandparents back in South Carolina, hanging out in the tiny private library that Gramma ran in Summerville. It was at their house that I first read Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald and E. M. Forster. Smart, well-read, and always smelling like tea rose, my gramma was a septuagenarian soul mate for bookish teenager heartsick from moving every other year.

Around the time I started college, in 2000, Gramma began forgetting things. Last night, I spent two hours talking books and history and politics with her and my grandfather: after I left, she turned and asked my grandpa, “Who was that lovely girl that was over here this evening? Is she a friend of Pam’s?”

I rode off on my uncle’s bike yesterday to get away from the spectacle of my grandmother’s disintegration; in the midst of all that burgeoning life, I tried to out-pedal the throbbing cicada call of death. It was the opposite of joyriding: griefriding.

Hobos in My Train Yard

I was biking past the busy train yards between Greeley and the Willamette today, amidst whistles blowing and black greasy smoke, when I heard the piercing moan of a harmonica. It was soulful, moving, and expert. I imagined a ragged trainhopper, squatting on an old wooden crate between freight cars, filthy bandana-wrapped hands cupped around the harmonica as he wailed away. He had long scraggly hair, holes in pants, and a shadow across his face that could be dirt, stubble, or both. I was already mentally composing my blog entry on this vision.

And then I realized that the sound was not, in fact, coming from the train yard. It was coming from the earbuds of my iPod, the background music to a rerun of a This American Life episode about summer camp. The disappointment was bitter– I’d seen the old hobo so clearly in my mind. I found myself feeling tempted, seriously tempted, to write this blog entry as though I had, in fact, heard the sound of a harmonica coming from the train yard. No one would know the difference, and it would be so much more satisfying, aesthetically.

While I was up in Washington visiting my folks last weekend, my sister, a college freshman, asked me to proofread a paper of hers: a personal essay. It was the first time I’d read anything by her that wasn’t a livejournal entry or a text message, and I was startled to find that her writing reads an awful lot like my own, but funnier. We have a similar sense of humor, a similar beat to our written comic timing. Since she was writing about several events that I had experienced with her, I also discovered that we have a similar habit of, as we call it, “making shit up,” when it suits our literary purposes: sometimes the rhythm of the sentence, the parallel syntax of an accumulating comic list, demands an aesthetically necessary lie.

I’m not creative enough to be a fiction writer, but I’m not honest enough to be a real non-fiction writer, either. I like to think that exaggeration (and, okay, occasional outright deception) serves some sort of cosmic, if not literal, truth. I’ve always lived my life in the moralistic conditional tense (“should”) rather than the simple present (“is”). When a story sounds so good, that’s how it should have been, and I often convince myself that that’s how things actually happened; it takes some kind of external memory jog to remind me that I’m full of shit.

In this blog, I’m making a rigorous effort to describe things that I actually see (and sounds I actually hear) as I actually see (and hear) them. Fair warning, though: be vigilant for harmonica-playing hobos in my train yards. I can’t promise that I’ll always remember that I made them up.

The Fashion Issue

If you were to design a tool for the sole purpose of giving intense, practically subdermal wedgies that could never be removed by natural forces, it would probably look something like this:

Which leads me to an important topic in bicycle commuting: underpants. If you are one of those commuters like me, who insists on biking eight miles in the clothes you plan to teach in that day, you are going to need a multipurpose underpant. I recommend cotton, which is stretchy and breathable and, if you are female, less likely to lead to an itchy case of baker’s crotch. Unfortunately, if it’s finals week and you’re digging into the back of the dresser for those undergarments you only wear when the laundry should have been done a week ago, you may encounter a Subprime Underpants Crisis. And by “you,” I mean “me.”

The problem with a serious bike commuting wedgie is that there is no inobtrusive way to unwedge it. Generally, you’re in a bikelane on a bustling street, with vigilant drivers coming from either direction (they may not see you when they’re making right turns across the bikelane, but they’ll always see you if you try to discreetly tug at your undergarments). It’s worthwhile to stand on the pedals and bounce a little, to see if you can dislodge things using gravity, but if you’re in a Subprime Underpants situation, there’s no way the make a change without using hands. The trouble is that, generally, if you’re standing on the pedals, you have both hands on the handlebars, and if you have one hand off the handlebars on a busy street, you’re almost always sitting down. So in order to pick a wedgie, you have to actually break, stop, put both feet on the ground, and reach around back. This is embarrassing in rush-hour traffic.

It is therefore important to have pre-identified places on your route where you can make a pit-stop to manage these situations. When I’m wearing Subprime Underpants, I usually plan a pause on the off-road path right after I use the crosswalk to traverse Interstate Avenue, the one that pipes me over onto northbound Greeley. Especially now that the foliage has returned, this is a good place to pause for an underwear adjustment if I’ve had any unfortunate developments leaving downtown. The path is frequented by an old guy who likes to walk his dog next to the I-5 on-ramp and a homeless man who sleeps in the bushes, so I make sure to scope things out before I get into any serious hand-down-the-back-of-my-pants action. This spot has the added benefit of sloping downhill, so starting up again after the pause doesn’t require a lot of effort.

In other fashion news, I’m issuing an official advisory against wearing corduroy jackets on bikes in the springtime. Along Greeley, there’s some kind of plant that sheds white fur, like dandelion fluff, that is irresistibly drawn to corduroy. The fluff was blowing around like plush tornados in the bikelane today, and by the time I got downtown I looked like an albino Pomeranian.

Update

I’ve just been informed that what I took to be a great idea for a cheap birthday present– creating a personal on-street parking spot for someone with electrical tape– is actually an obnoxious means of staking out a good spot for watching the 100th Annual Rose Festival Parade. I liked my interpretation better.

Parking Spot

Downtown today, on Broadway, I saw that someone had created an on-street parking spot where there hadn’t been one by placing strips of electrical tape across the pavement. Apparently, it was a reserved spot, because inside the rectangle, they’d used the electrical tape to spell the words BIG BOB. That seemed like it would make a great cheap birthday present.

The dead cat is still there. Also, someone picked the American flag up and hung it from a speed limit sign.

And I saw a very life-like rabbit painted on a guardrail along Mock’s Crest. I’ll try and get a picture soon.