Nordic Hordes

I don’t have a lot to report, as I’ve been staying home and coddling my sore throat for the last few days (according to WebMD, I either have a low-grade virus or thyroid cancer). However, from my riding earlier in the week, I can tell you that the athletic teams are back on campus at the University of Portland, a private Catholic college a mile and a half down Willamette that I pass on my bike pretty much every day.

On Tuesday, not eight blocks from my house, I was startled to look up and see a horde of twenty or so grimacing young blondes in sports bras and short-shorts running straight at me. Honestly: almost every one of them had a bobbing blonde ponytail, and they were all very fit. Fortunately, they saw me coming and got out of the shoulder. Maybe a quarter-mile behind them came another sweaty gaggle, this time all men in little running shorts with no shirts. It was like the male half of the Von Trapp family hurrying to catch up with their sisters: the grouped looked very Aryan. Also, I didn’t see one chest hair in the bunch (I know, Erika, I know– nobody has body hair anymore).

My emotional relationship with the UP community is complex, given that I’ve only actually entered the campus once. On the one hand, they have attractive landscaping, I usually use the stoplight in front of the school as my turn-around spot when I go running, and on my bike, the bend in the road in front of the campus means I’m only about five minutes from home (and done with the windiest part of my commute). On the other hand, the bike lane sputters out temporarily in front of the school, to make way for student parking, which often takes the form of SUV’s with California plates that threaten to door me or pull out in front of me without looking. The sidewalks around the campus also feature the usual parade of young, attractive, well-dressed kids, unwittingly displaying their privilege (or doing a very good job imitating the entitlement of their peers).*

I bridle at the familiarity from my own time at a private liberal arts college in Maine (there, the SUV’s had Massachusetts plates), where I was never quite a cultural match for this crowd, but I still benefited from the protections their (okay, our) money purchased. UP raises my hackles, though I’m still youngish and blondish (but very poorly dressed), because it reminds me of and makes me feel guilty for everything that’s been easy in my life.

Also, they hosted a fundraising lunch for Bush in 2003.

*Obviously, I don’t know any of these kids, and I’m sure I’d actually get along with many of them if we ever got a chance to hang out. I mean this as a look at my own relationship with the class symbology, not as a personal attack on anyone wearing J. Crew.

A Lousy Bike Day

Sometimes I catch myself being so fucking Portland that I want to throw up, and I would, too, if I hadn’t spent so much money on probiotics and kelp (that’s a lie: most days I can’t even remember to eat breakfast). I had one of those moments yesterday, as I was biking the seven miles to our CSA pickup spot, half-listening to This American Life on my iPod while gloating over a week of great political news (in case you hadn’t heard, Alberto Gonzalez got fired for propositioning Larry Craig in a public restroom).

We belong to Helsing Junction, a CSA (community-supported agriculture) farm operated by friends of Ben’s family in Rochester, Washington (20 miles south of Olympia, 100 miles north of Portland). CSA’s operate on a membership basis: essentially, we bought a share in the farm’s harvest for the year. For $22 a week, we get a box of fresh, seasonal organic produce every Wednesday, mid-June through the end of October. And compared to the shitty produce at our neighborhood Safeway, these vegetables haven’t traveled very far, which, at least in theory, reduces our carbon footprint. The great challenge is figuring out how to use all the produce in one week. For instance, how the hell do I cook these? I’m not even sure what they are:

We never know what we’re getting week to week, which is part of the fun, and we can usually fill in any produce gaps by walking the three blocks to Proper Eats.

But I digress. My point is that I should have had a pleasant trip, riding extra high on the self-righteousness meter (tra la la, riding my bike to pick up my organic veggies… look at my chain-oil-stained Levi’s… on your left, ding ding!). However, it was ninety degrees out, and I’d been on the couch nursing a sore throat and wading through (virtual) reams of spreadsheet all afternoon. I’d have happily stayed there, miserably analyzing data, but both of my roommates were working, which meant I was the lone gatherer available to collect our produce. I waited until the last possible moment, still operating on my East Coast misconceptions about when the hottest time of day ought to be, but finally had to get off my ass before someone declaired our share abandoned and confiscated it.

I don’t know if it was the heat, or if there is some kind of mating cycle that happened to coincide with the swampiest day of August, but the early evening air was dense with gnats the entire way to the pickup location near Irving Park. The flying bugs bounced off my sunglasses, and some of the more robust ones actually hurt my face as I biked through their congregations. They kept going up my nose, which made me sneeze and snort involuntarily and caused my eyes to water; when I tried breathing through my mouth, instead, they got sucked down my bronchial tubes. This would have been kind of annoying under normal circumstances, but I was already feeling run-down and crappy, and respirated gnat juice was doing nothing for my sore throat.

Additionally, my rear tire could have used some air, so my bike and I were both dragging. I did, however, make it to the backyard where the boxes of produce are stacked every Wednesday, and loaded all the vegetables into my panniers (this week we got a bunch of spinach, some garlic, two red onions, four roma tomatoes, two cucumbers, an eggplant, four ears of corn, broccoli, two of something that I think is probably fennel, and those three squashy objects pictured above).

The bugs weren’t as bad on the way home, but biking due west at sunset presents some visual discomfort. I was also tired and sweaty, and by the time I was back on Willamette, I could calculate my heartrate from the throbbing inside my throat.

I know: whiner, whiner. There was a silver lining, though– when I got home, I figured out that Otter Pops are long enough to serve as icepacks for your tonsils:

See? If I was really all that Portland, I’d be using herbal teas and healing crystals instead of frozen Kool-Aid.

I Need a Hero, Part 1

One of the great things about riding a bike is the way it leaves you open to communication with the people around you. Once in a while, as I experienced last week, that openness and ability to see and hear the distress of those you encounter creates the opportunity to become a cell phone hero.

Before we left for camping on Thursday, I rode out to the Community Cycling Center to have them check out a funny clinking noise/derailleur catch/occasional gear slippage that started up on my new bike after an unfortunate shifting incident on the Broadway Bridge. The bike wasn’t unrideable, but the noise was worrisome; I suspected, based on the regularity of the sound, that I had a slightly deformed link on the chain that was catching the rear derailleur. I’d have taken the bike in sooner, but it took me a few days to find my warrantee paperwork (turns out I stuck it inside a book for safekeeping– if you’ve seen my house, you know that’s like storing your will in a shoebox at Payless).

At the CCC, the same cute mechanic who sold me the bike a few weeks ago (Benjamin!) quickly diagnosed the problem: I was right about the chain defect, plus I needed a new front derailleur, which is what caused the shifting problem that fucked the chain up in the first place. They fixed the whole thing for free while I ate Thai food and watched the tall-bikers from the Clown House ride up and down Alberta (I’m glad I got a chance to see that once before those Portland icons leave the neighborhood).

Since I was already that far east, and still riding high from my Berkeley elevation revelation, I decided to take my (now even sweeter) bike out to Rocky Butte, an abrupt volcanic protuberance in the NE 90’s. After consulting my Bike There! map (the best $6 a Portlander can spend), I cut south to Skidmore, which looked like the NE east-west bike highway.

I’d like to take a moment here to bitch about Skidmore: this street is clearly marked, both on the map and through some excellent signage and road markings, as a designated bike route. Yet, especially in the residential areas through the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s, it seems like there’s a stop sign at every single intersection, even at cross-streets that don’t look any wider or busier than Skidmore itself. It is much more difficult to stop and start again on a bike than it is in a car, and not being able to keep momentum on an otherwise flat road for more than a block or two is extremely frustrating. If the city is going to make a street a bike route, part of that plan ought to include minimizing the number of stop signs that cyclists face. Otherwise, in quiet residential neighborhoods like the Alberta Arts area and Roseway, the temptation to just slow slightly while blowing through the signs is irresistible.

Anyhow, I rode out to Rocky Butte, biked up the spiralling road past a mega-church/bible college complex whose unifying architectural theme seemed to be “Concrete Igloo,” and loitered around for a while at the funny fort-like park on the hilltop (the park is a memorial to a man named, coincidentally, J. W. Hill, who founded a military academy in the area in the late nineteenth century). Rocky Butte offers a commanding view of the I-205 bridge, the new Ikea store out by the airport, and the eastern suburbs. On this particular day, it also offered a commanding view of a couple of Russian girls in impractical shoes vamping along the stone walls for the camera.

The roads are tricky and not particularly well-marked at the base of the hill, and on the way back down I managed to miss my turn, and had to muck around in some dead ends before I got my bearings and figured out what I needed to do to get back to my route home along Siskiyou. I was headed west on NE Russell, heading toward 82nd, when two boys on BMX bikes came tearing down a dirt hill on my right. One of them darted right out in front of me and across the path of an oncoming SUV, forcing both me and the other vehicle to hit the brakes; he gave me an expressionless glance before cutting left down Russell back toward the Butte.

I turned onto 82nd, and was downshifting to crank up a steep block-long hill, when I saw a heavyset kid running down the sidewalk. At first I only noticed him as a pedestrian to watch out for, but as he got closer, I saw that his face was flushed, and he was crying, issuing the kind of high-pitched keening sounds that kids make when they’re panicking.

“Help!” he yelped in a cracking voice as soon as he was close enough. “Help me! Some kids just stole my bike!” The kid was sweating and slobbering and looked like he might hyperventilate.

I stopped and pulled out my phone. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll call the police.”

“They stole my bike!” he kept saying, over and over.

I dialed 911, explained the situation and our location to the operator, then handed the phone over to the kid so he could give his personal information. He told the officer his name and said he was 11, and gave a description of his bike and the kids who took it. Then he closed the phone.

“Are the police coming?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. His breathing was slower and he seemed to be calming down. “Is it okay if I call my mom?”

I said that sounded like a good idea. When his mom picked up on the other end, he began speaking in Russian, with some English words thrown in here and there. From his tone it sounded to me like they were arguing. After he’d hung up, I asked, “Is she angry?”

“No,” he said, “She’s just worried.” We stood on the sidewalk, waiting for the cops. The sun was hot.

As he pulled himself together, the kid started telling me pieces of the story: he’d been at the bus stop near the skate park up the street with his friend, and two boys (only one of whom had a bicycle) came up and asked if they could try out his bike. He told them no, and then, when the kid let go of his bike for a moment to help the friend load his own onto the front of the bus, one of the boys grabbed it and the two took off. From the kid’s description, they sounded like the two boys I’d encountered on Russell.

After maybe ten minutes, a cop car pulled into a nearby parking lot in front of a bowling alley. The policeman took the same information about the bike at the 911 operator (a dark blue Haro F3 series) and physical descriptions of the boys who took it. Then he got another call; he told us that another car would be along shortly, and he peeled out. I decided I’d better wait around until I was sure the kid was going to make it home.

“If the police don’t get my bike back, will they give me a new one?” the kid asked me.

I smiled, sad. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way,” I said.

“That bike cost $300,” he said. “My dad bought it for me at Bike Gallery. He said it cost what he makes working three nights, overtime.”

“Are your folks from Russia?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

After a while, the kid said he was thirsty. I was out of water, so I told him I’d stay in the parking lot and watch for the police if he wanted to go into the bowling alley and look for a fountain. He came back out with a whole cup of water they’d given him.

As he regained his composure, the kid turned out to be almost comically adultlike and personable. At one point, he exclaimed, “Oh! You know, I don’t think we ever actually introduced ourselves!” We exchanged names and shook hands. He must have said, “I don’t even know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along” three times. After we’d been standing there for a while, I got him to call his mother again to update her on the situation.

It took 45 minutes for the second police car to arrive, and when they finally did pull in, it seemed pretty clear that they considered this case neither hopeful nor particularly important. I hung back while the lead cop took down the exact same information about the bike and the bicycle thieves that the 911 operator and the first cop had already recorded. It seemed like he was mostly humoring the kid by going through the motions. Once he’d finished questioning him, the police officer turned to me, eyebrows raised, and I explained that I was just the lucky owner of the cell phone, but that I’d seen the kids fleeing the scene. I guess that made me a witness, because the cop took down my contact information, as well.

“It was nice of you to stay with him,” the cop said, gesturing toward the kid with his pen. “Most people wouldn’t have.” That seemed very sad to me, and I hoped it wasn’t true that most people would leave a freaked out kid in a bowling alley parking lot next to a busy road in 90-degree heat.

Then the cop started asking me all kinds of questions about whether I did a lot of biking and what kind of riding I liked to do, because he was a pretty avid cyclist himself. It seemed awfully chatty when the business at hand was time-sensitive, and the kid was standing right there waiting for the grown-ups to fix the situation. I tried to steer the conversation back to the bike, saying that I would post a description of the Haro F3 on BikePortland.org’s stolen bike listings.

“Oh, hey,” the cop said, excited now.  “Did you ever read about a guy who was going over the I-5 bridge on his bike, and someone had strung a wire across the walkway?”

I shook my head.

“That was me! I was coming down the walkway on the bridge, and the wire got me right across the face. I landed in a southbound lane on I-5!”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s terrible.”

“Yeah!” he said, grinning. “Got me right across the cheeks and nose.” He pointed to the lingering scars. “If it had hit my throat, I’d be dead! It was on BikePortland.”

“Wow,” I said again. “I’m glad you’re alright.” Only in Portland, I thought, do you encounter people who consider themselves bike accident celebrities.

“Excuse me,” the kid finally piped up. “Excuse me, but f you guys don’t find my bike, can the police, like, give me a new one, or some money for a new one?” Apparently, he wasn’t going to take my word for it. I could feel his struggling kid sense of justice rejecting the idea that the bike could just be gone for good, with no compensation.  I remember similarly conflating law enforcement and property insurance when I was that age.

“Sorry, kid,” the policeman said. “I wish it worked that way.”

The kid looked disappointed, but asked, pragmatically, “Well, can you guys give me a ride home?”

“Yeah,” the cop said. “Yeah, we can do that.”

Once I saw to it that they were actually going to load him into the back of the car, I shook the kid’s hand again, and wished him luck. He thanked me, and then I climbed back on my bike, heading north to Siskiyou just as the police car turned south on 82nd.

I hope that kid got his bike back.

I Need a Hero, Part 2

Sorry for the lag in posting– I’ve been out camping in Eastern Washington with the outlaws for the last five days. Ben and I barely made it back last night, after the little Tercel threw a rod 60 miles north of Portland. Fortunately, his folks have 100-mile towing on their AAA, so they came and saved us: one phone call and a miserable drive through Chehalis road construction to sign the requisite paperwork in person, and they were able to get us a free ride home on a towtruck.

I had brought my bike along for the trip on a rack on the back of the Tercel, in the (unfounded) hope of maybe getting a little riding in. When they loaded the ailing car up onto the flatbed of the towtruck, I asked whether the bike would be secure there, and the driver assured me it would. The whole setup worked fine for at 70 mph on I-5, but five miles from home, we hit some rough roads in industrial NoPo. The rack, leveraging off of the car’s suspension, on top of the truck’s suspension, functioned like a catapault– only Ben’s sailor knots kept the bike from being flung right off the back of the truck. Instead, the rack itself bounced loose of its moorings, and the whole apparatus landed in a precarious tangle on the very edge of the flatbed. I’d been keeping an eye on my bike in the rearview mirror the whole drive home, and the first time the rack came loose, I yelped, jumped out and clambored up the back of the truck to reattach the rack to the car. We fumbled with the straps and tried to secure the bike as best we could. “Look,” I told the driver. “I care more about this bike than I do about the car.”

We were only a few miles from home at that point, so we tried to just take it slow, but when I saw the bike jounce violently again, and land so that it was dangling even further off the edge of the bed, I yelled, “Shit!” and lept out of the truck. This time, I insisted on riding the rest of the way home: at midnight, in the dark, wearing a dark gray fleece and flipflops, with no lights or helmet. Thankfully, the bike rode fast and smooth, none the worse for wear, and the full moon lit the whole the way down industrial Lombard, back to St Johns.

The whole experience made me glad, once again, that I do not rely on a car for my day-to-day transportation. If you’re not rich enough to afford something in decent shape (and if, like me, you have no idea how to fix such a complicated machine when it breaks), it’s a constant source of anxiety and a good way in make sure you never have much money saved for long. For the cost of a total piece-of-shit car, you can buy a top-of-the-line bike that will last you for decades.  Three cheers for urban density.

P.S. We finally located Ben’s digital camera. It was under the seat in his family’s Vanagon, where he left it during a climbing trip last month. So, contrary to widespread rumor, I was not the one who lost it, afterall. The point being that I will resume posting original photos soon.

Elevation Revelation

I’m back from Berkeley, where Willie introduced me to the glories of elevation. I’ve always been kind of a weenie about hills (biking across Kansas sounds like a fine touring idea to me), and last summer, when I’d been biking for less than a year and hadn’t done many recreational rides, we did a three-day ride around the San Francisco Bay with some elevation that really kicked my ass. What I really love about biking is that it makes me feel like I’m awesome, and wheezing on a roadside because I can’t hack the climb makes me feel like I’m not awesome. So this visit, I told Willie that I’d rather not do any serious hills.

I paid for my wussiness. On the first day, we did the Iron Horse Trail, a 25-mile stretch along an old rail bed through the suburbs east of the Berkeley hills. The only elevation gains on the entire ride were a couple of “overcrosses” bridging the highway. The fact that we were on a trail did allow us to ride side by side, so that we could talk about some bike-related entrepreneurial ideas I have. For instance, I’d like to see an Oregon Trail-style video game about bike commuting, in which you choose what kind of cyclist you want to be (bike messenger, racer, BMXer, DUI offender, etc.), and get points for the following: how far you get; how well you manage hazards like buses, dogs and squirrels unexpectedly running into the bike lane, and flat tires; how quickly you reach your destination; and how few resources you started with (grad student cyclists would get more points that Spandex-clad surgeons). I also think that a line of Santa-on-a-Bike Christmas cards would be a big seller in Portland. Overall, though, it was a pretty boring ride by epic Bay Area standards, which was all part of Willie’s master plan.

We took the next day off to do some urban hiking in San Francisco; our first stop was the (apparently) famous Duboce Street Bike Mural (photo cribbed from the designer’s website– click the image for a bigger, better view of all the people riding without helmets):

We walked along the Panhandle and Haight Street, and went to the top of some vista points in the city, including Buena Vista Park, Tank Hill, and the twin and a half peaks of Twin Peaks. I found charging up the hills so easy that I was willing to entertain the prospect of biking up something, as well. So the following day, after a bunch of dicking around with a flat tire, we biked up to Grizzly Peak. It was over an hour of biking uphill, with an elevation gain of around 1600 feet. At the top, we had an amazing, surreal view of the Bay, the city, and the Golden Gate Bridge (this image also cribbed, from here, because we were too dumb to bring a camera):

While I was definitely sweating, this ride wasn’t nearly as difficult as I remember last year’s being, and the payoff of the view was so worth it. A year of commuting half again as far, and the long rides I’ve taken over the last few weeks, must have left me in much better shape to handle the elevation. I am officially a convert, now that I know I can tackle the hills.

From Grizzly Peak, we biked around to Inspiration Point (very inspiring), and along a trail called Nimitz Way, which gave us another 600-foot elevation gain and a view of the entirely different ecosystem on the east side of the hills (image stolen from here):

Almost as good as the bike riding itself was witnessing Willie’s system for tracking his rides. He’s got every long ride he’s ever done mapped out on the Gmaps Pedometer, and keeps a master map of the Bay Area that shows all of the routes at once. He also has a spreadsheet that he uses to log each ride by date, total miles, and elevation gain. It struck me that we are both meticulous recorders of our rides, but I write impressionistic, qualitative prose musings about what I do, while his notes are entirely quantitative. I guess cycling offers something for everyone?

Another Leave of Absence

I’m in Berkeley until Tuesday, and it is very important that I look at palm trees and talk to Willie while I’m here, rather than writing. I expect I’ll be doing some biking in the next few days, though (Berkeley: Home of the Bike Boulevard), so I’ll have some sweet rides to write about when I get home.

Do Something

During my first year in Portland I lived near Albina and Lombard. My commute to downtown was five miles (which seemed epic to me at the time) and took me down Mississippi Avenue every day. Two years ago, that up-and-coming neighborhood wasn’t quite as happening as it is today, and several of the buildings and storefronts that have since been turned into restaurants and boutiques were vacant or vandalized.

At the southern end of the retail street, just before the steep hill that takes you down beneath the I-5/405 overpasses to Interstate, there are several old warehouse buildings. For a couple of months in late fall and early winter of 2005, scrawled in brown spraypaint across one of the warehouse walls was the imperative:

somebody DO something

Mind you, this was only a few months after Katrina, and less than a year since the 2004 elections. Things had already been going to shit in Iraq for some time, but Karl Rove still seemed like an omnipotent, unvanquishable demon, and the administration had not yet sunk into tragicomic irrelevance. The despair on the left was palpable, and those three words on the wall felt like a wail into the abyss.

That graffiti was a clarion call to me at that moment in my life. Every morning, as I pedaled toward downtown, the insistent phrase was a much-needed affirmation of the choices I had just made. It was a reminder of why I’d abandoned a burgeoning freelance writing career on the East Coast, spent every penny I had moving cross-country, and taken a part-time job watching rich people’s kids for less than ten dollars an hour. Instead of just talking (and writing) about oil dependence and global warming, I’d sold my car, moved to Portland, and drastically cut my carbon emissions (both by not driving and not having to heat an apartment through six-month snowbound winters). I may have reached a point of paralysis in my writing, and perhaps I was wasting an expensive, hard-won education, but at least I had DONE something.

At some point that winter, the graffiti got painted over: part of the neighborhood’s revitalization, perhaps, or an indignant landlord’s assertion of ownership. I missed the words when they were gone; the emotions they fired in me were part of my initial experience of cycling, and became all bound up in the fierce, only half-utterable devotion I feel for my bike, and for this town, with its art and urban density and public transportation. Portland, always and increasingly a city of newcomers, is a place where anyone and everyone can do something.

Landless Native

The bike up Greeley to Mock’s Crest isn’t unbearably steep, but it’s a mile long and is pretty slow-going, with lots of industrial traffic buffeting you as it passes and blowing microscopic grit into your eyes. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s easily the least pleasant part of my commute, but since starting this blog, I’ve discovered that it’s also one of the richest repositories of interesting litter in the city.

Today, as I was chuffing up Greeley under a notably malevolent sun, a scrap of cardboard laying on the weedy hillside next to the road caught my eye. It was tipped at an odd angle because of the undergrowth, but I could read the top line of some text scrawled in black permanent marker:

LANDLESS NATIVE

In my brief glimpse, I didn’t catch the middle lines, but I did see, in larger script along the bottom, the words

GOD BLESS YOU

Landless Native what? Landless Native American was my first guess. Or it could have been Landless Native Portlander, which would also make sense in this rapidly gentrifying city. The sign was clearly one of those held up by spare-changers at stoplights; it was lying along the same stretch of unappealing, blackberry-brambled land where I often see makeshift camps and empty wine jugs and cans from malt liquor.

As soon as I’d seen the sign, I was already past it. I wondered what the missing lines were, and thought about going back. Turning around, though, would have meant losing both elevation and what little momentum I had going up the hill. Backtracking would have taken me off the course I had set for myself, and would have caused me to ride against traffic. Even as I stifled my curiosity and compassion for the story on the sign, I felt a little ashamed of myself. This is the way most of us guilty liberals deal with the homeless: we see and recognize the indicators of humanity, but we are unwilling to deviate from our own minor but consuming struggles. We congratulate ourselves for noting the person’s existence, but aren’t willing to lose any of our own elevation or momentum over it. Maybe we feel somewhat precarious ourselves, balanced on two teetering wheels while the 16-wheelers roar past us. We definitely aren’t interested in going against the flow such high-powered traffic for the sake of a sad story on a scrap of cardboard.

As I pedaled on up the hill, I told myself I would stop on the way home tomorrow and check out what the sign had to say. Sorry, I don’t have any cash on me today.

 

Also, there was a pair of tighty whities laying on the street a block from my house.

Bridge Pedal Detritus

Ghostly remnants of yesterday morning’s Bridge Pedal marked my entire ride home from Union Station last night. Bridge Pedal is a massive annual charity ride here in Portland, during which cyclists are able to bike over all ten bridges in the city (Sellwood, Ross Island, Marquam, Morrison, Hawthorne, Burnside, Steel, Broadway, Fremont, and St Johns), several of which are not open to bike traffic any other day of the year. There are also a few shorter routes for people with children and other excuses. The last leg of the full ten-bridge route goes through St Johns, with a massive aid station and rest stop in the neighborhood’s downtown, which is three blocks from our house. Then all of that bike traffic is piped back down the peninsula along my regular route to and from city center.

Willie and I had a great time doing Bridge Pedal last year (even if the shirts were kind of lame): we got to cross all the bridges, see some of Portland’s bike crowd in carnival mode with all the costumes and freakshow bikes on display, and register for raffles we didn’t win. I tried to talk my dad into going with me this year, but we ended up deciding to kayak this weekend, instead (“Olympia: Where Puget Sound Comes to Rest”). According to Jonathan Maus at BikePortland.org, whose coverage I live and die by, they had a lot more bottlenecks and traffic jams to contend with compared to last year, and the delays caused some people to miss crossing the Fremont Bridge, but the 20,000 people who rode still had fun.

Last night, as I rode home under the threat of imminent rain, reminders of the morning’s ride were everywhere. Haphazard piles of ROAD CLOSED signs sat on street corners, awaiting collection, and urban tumbleweeds blew along the roadway, flashing Safeway and Fred Meyer logos as they traveled. In downtown St Johns, there were empty water bottles all over, and someone had made a sculpture out of mini-bagels and banana peels on top of one of the traffic posts. The whole neighborhood had that after-party feeling, when you and your roommates sit on the back deck with drinks, surveying the mess that the guests have left, and tell each other you’ll clean it all up in the morning.

P.S. I promise to resume taking pictures of things soon– I’m the kind of person who always brings a notebook, but never carries a camera, so this form of documentation is still new to me. Also, I can’t find Ben’s camera. Don’t tell him.

Multimodalism

Bikes and trains seem to be on the same team, and here in the Pacific Northwest, that team has been on a winning streak. The Cascades line, which runs from Eugene to Vancouver, BC, and back, is one of the few Amtrak routes that turns a profit. It may not be a coincidence that this same line allows passengers to stow assembled bikes on racks in the baggage car for only five dollars– this is compared to the Coastal Starlight, which runs (generally at least ten hours late) from Seattle to LA, and requires that bikes be packed in bike boxes. Last summer, when I took the train down to Berkeley, this bike box requirement was a real pain in the ass. The box was difficult to haul around on my own with other luggage, I had to carry a set of tools with me to California so that I could put the bike back together, and after the half hour it took to reassemble the thing, I had to stop twice in the first few miles of riding to work out the kinks from my own inept handiwork. It’s so much easier to just get off the train, grab your bike from the baggage car, and ride off into the sunset. I did this once last year, disembarking in Centralia, Washington, and biking the fifteen miles or so to my out-laws’ house in the sticks, and I felt like a marvel of self-sufficiency.

Today, though, I was taking the train up to Olympia to stay the night with my folks and wouldn’t be needing the bike at the Washington end. It was a brilliant sunny morning in Portland and I still wanted to get a ride in, so I threw a book, my notebook, and some overnight stuff in my messenger bag, hopped on my (sweet sweet new) bike, and headed toward downtown. My train was scheduled to depart at 8:30, so I left the house at 7:15; that early on a Saturday morning, the city hadn’t yet woken up to its hangovers, and I had the streets to myself. On the local-access-only stretch of Willamette, someone had chalked the word ME next to the warning painted on the asphalt before a speed bump, so that it said

BUMP ME.

I’m not sure whether that was meant as a sexual proposition or a plea for assisted suicide (which is legal in the state of Oregon).

It’s six or seven miles to Union Station from St Johns: as you cross the Broadway Bridge, you see the station’s landmark clock tower, which suggests in insistent neon that you

GO BY TRAIN.

I wheeled my bike right into the station, which is pleasingly archetypal with its high ceilings, Roman-numeraled clocks, and polished wooden benches. For three dollars (less than roundtrip bus fare to and from my neighborhood), I was able to store my bike overnight in the secure baggage area. Tomorrow, when I get off the train, all I’ll have to do is show them my receipt, and then I can hop on the bike and ride home. There are also bikeracks out front, and I probably would have been fine just locking up out there for free, but my bike and I are still in that oversolicitous honeymoon stage, and I didn’t want to take any chances.

The mark of a functioning alternative transportation system is exactly this kind of easy multimodalism: I don’t have to bike all the way to Oly, and I don’t need the train to stop in St Johns. Rather, the infrastructure and storage options co-exist in sensible, overlapping ways, so that I can combine methods of transit to fit my needs for each individual trip. Maybe next time I will want to bike to my parents house from the Olympia-Lacey train station– in that case, I’ll be able to pony up my five bucks and bring the bike along in one piece. When the weather turns, I could decide to abandon the bike altogether, and take Tri-Met to Union Station, instead. On one occasion, I even rode my bike north to Vancouver, Washington, and picked up the train at the station there. I saved a few bucks on the slightly shorter train ride, and got to experience the horror of the three-foot-wide “bike/ped” Ledge of Death on the I-5 bridge. The point is to provide options for connecting modes of transit to create appealing, efficient alternatives to driving (note: the Ledge of Death does not meet the “appealing” criterion, and therefore fails to constitute effective multimodalism).