It Must Be a Movement

This guy was stopped in front of me at a light on Interstate this afternoon:

When I asked if I could take his picture, this Obama enthusiast said I was the second person to ask that day. Damn rival bloggers. This is good news for the Illinois senator: if you’ve got Portland cyclists in your back pocket (as snug as, say, a U-lock?), you’re a movement.

Kegged, Amongst Other Things

Broadway is always a pain in the ass, but at least I got a laugh out of the obstacles blocking my path yesterday: a beer truck had unloaded three kegs onto the middle of the bike lane in front of Mary’s. I guess this bike brakes for beer, whether she likes it or not.

While Monday and Tuesday of this week were stolen days of summer, yesterday was clear, brilliant and chilly. I guess the rules of winter riding in Portland are coming into effect: your choices are warm and wet, or clear and cold. As long as I have my trigger mittens (perfect for operating bike brakes on frigid mornings), I’ll always take clear and cold, even with the brisk north wind that usually comes with it. Yesterday, it was so clear that I could see the peak of Mt. Hood from Mock’s Crest– we hardly ever glimpse the mountains from North Portland.

Although I wrote yesterday’s distressed post about the recent cyclist fatalities just before leaving the house, it only took five minutes of pedaling in that sharp fall air before I felt exhilarated again. The trees line Willamette like blazing torches, and everyone’s out on their bikes on these dry days; we smile at each other, and nod.

Biking is like (or as) a metaphor for life (those of you who know me well are aware that lots of things are metaphors for life): there’s always a certain amount of danger involved in doing the right thing, but the reward is a more meaningful existence. I have never felt as alive on the most epic road trip as I feel on my daily commute by bike. That’s well worth the risk, and worth fighting for today at City Hall.

Red Light

I somehow lost my rear red bike light between Portland and La Grande (or maybe between La Grande and Portland) a few weeks ago, and I’ve been riding with just the white front light ever since. It is now dark when I leave the house on my early mornings, and dark when I leave campus on my late evenings (unfortunately, my early mornings and late evenings are on the same days). This is especially exciting when it rains.

Technically, the law only requires me to have a white light in front and a rear reflector, on the theory that cars approaching me from behind will see my ass winking in their headlights, like the eyes of that sodden possum that’s smeared across the road near my house.

One of my co-workers got hit on his bike on Vancouver last week. Some little old lady took him out at a stop sign in the rain. His bike got fucked, but he says he’s okay, except that his ribs hurt when he sits in front of a computer, lays down, or breathes. Fortunately, it happened right in front of Legacy Emanuel– a doctor was standing on the corner, saw the whole thing go down, and rushed to his aid. Last week was a bad one for Portland cyclists: a 19-year-old girl got killed on 14th and Burnside when a cement truck turned right across her bike lane. The same day, a Ghost Bike appeared at the intersection.

I’m not afraid of death: I’m afraid of how afraid I’m going to be when I realize I’m about to die. Riding my bike home in the damp dark, I can hear the swift-moving vehicles rushing me from behind on Willamette, and sometimes I imagine how it would sound, how it would feel, if one hit me. If it ever happens, I hope I never see it coming.

I should really get a new red light.

Flat.

It rained and gusted all night, and when I woke up in the dark at 6 am, I could still hear the angry splatter on the skylight. I put the kettle on to boil, took a quick shower, then ground some beans and poured the steaming water into the new French press*, shivering in my damp towel while watching the wet trees shake in the wind outside the kitchen window. For forty-five minutes, as I dressed, assembled my books, and reviewed my lesson plans, I debated whether to bike or take the bus: if I hadn’t been scheduled to teach today, there would have been no question, but I’m still figuring out just how wet and muddy I can be and still maintain some authority in the classroom.

Finally, as the cat chimed 7, I decided to just catch the 16…which was leaving St Johns in five minutes. I threw my things into my bag, did the iPod-wallet-cell phone-granola bar check, and ran out the door, only to realize that, while it was still windy, it had stopped raining outside, and was actually rather warm. So I dashed back inside, stripped off my teaching pants in the living room without taking my shoes off first, staggered into my rain pants and coat, stuffed my clothes into my bag, and ran back out to the shed, where I had to unpack my bag again to get my keys out of my pants pocket.

There was a lot of spray off the newly rinsed road, and I felt like I was having to pedal a lot harder than usual along Willamette; I chalked it up to the wind and an especially heavy bag (a pox on The Complete Works of William Shakespeare!). As the morning light warmed, I could see that Sunday’s oppressive cloud cover was breaking up.

Because of the dithering around about the bus, I was running late and cranking hard. Still fine-tuning my lesson plans in my head, I don’t remember the stretch down Interstate and over the bridge. I do recall being very careful crossing the westbound MAX tracks at Pioneer Square– they can be slippery and treacherous in the rain. A block later, I traversed the eastbound tracks with equal caution, and as soon as I was over the rails I could feel something different: a thwacking thump paired with an immediate loss of momentum. I looked down, and sure enough, my rear tire was flat.

I had fifteen minutes to get to my class, maybe half a mile away, so I got off the bike and started jogging, pushing my lamed steed by the handlebars, my bulging messenger bag bouncing on my back. I cut west to the Park Blocks and chugged uphill for seven or eight minutes, arriving at the library just in time to duck into the bathroom to change and wash the mud off my face before class.

Once I was done teaching for the morning, I walked my bike over to the Bike Gallery, on Tenth and Salmon, where they fixed the flat for me (I wasn’t carrying a spare tube or my pump). I also bought some new bike lights (my old ones seem to have disappeared since late spring).

I’ve been reading a lot of Shakespeare lately: Was that flat nature punishing me for my hubris this morning? Should I have humbly submitted to my fate and taken the 16? Or perhaps the universe threw that staple into my path so that I would buy the bike lights, which will in turn prevent my untimely demise via UPS truck this evening. After all, everything happens for a reason.

Oh, wait. Every happens because of a reason. Never mind.

*For some reason, every time we have house guests who are more than ten years older than us, they give us gifts of kitchen goods. We must be living in appallingly primitive conditions that inspire pity in those forced to share our privations.

Bang!

Some of you have been clamboring for pictures of bangs. Can’t nobody say that wheeledpower never did nothing for the peoples:

Here It Comes

Here’s the current weather map for Portland:

That big green mass you see, looking like a noxious gas about to smother the city, is Fall. It’s almost here (landfall is estimated at 9:30 am Pacific).

From June until late September, Portland really is the ideal biking city. Not only is the infrastructure in place, but it’s generally sunny and warm, but not too hot, all summer. However, for the other eight months of the year, biking is, often as not, an assertion of principle and bad-assedness rather than a strictly pleasant, enjoyable mode of transportation. Fortunately, the weather blows in and out, so you stand a good chance of getting your ride in between showers, but the bike lanes become significantly clearer at this time of year, as all the fair-weather cyclists start buying Tri-Met passes again.

This is the first Gore-Tex day of the academic year: I’ll be putting on my rain pants, my light rain jacket that balls up into a pouch on its own sleeve for easy storage (anyone remember Popples?), and my Keen rain shoes, which are still in great shape after five months of damp daily wear last winter. Hopefully at least some of my wool socks still make matching pairs.

One of the key considerations at this time of year is breathability: if you wear too much clothing under the raingear while the temperatures are still in the fifties, you’ll be soaked with your own sweat by the time you get downtown, which is worse than getting rained on, because it stinks. It also means that, once you stop sweating and cool off, you can get very chilled very quickly. This year, I might experiment with wearing only my skivvies under the raingear, and bringing a set of warm, dry clothes in my messenger bag, which is waterproof.

I’m also going to have to get my ass in gear to outfit my “new” bike for wet-weather commuting. I still need to put fenders on it (the splashback off the tires is actually much worse that the rain on most days), and I haven’t transferred the mounts for the lights from my old bike yet, either. I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but I always feel least safe biking on rainy days, during daylight. At least at night cars can see your flashing lights, but the wipers don’t clear the very edges of the windshield, which is exactly where I’ll be if a car is about to hit me. When it rains, I like to use my lights even in daylight.

It’s not always super pleasant, but I think biking through the rainy months is the best way to beat any hints of season affective disorder. Even if you don’t get much direct sunlight here in the winter, my experience is that the indirect sunlight and fresh air of bike commuting staves off the depression of the unremitting gloom. I’ve also made it through two winters without getting a cold or the flu, and I attribute that to spending less time cooped up inside with other people’s germs, and also the the curative powers of sweat.

Finally, there are some economic considerations that favor biking through the Dark Times.  Have I mentioned that Tri-Met is a buck seventy-five each way now?

Wardrobe Malfunction

It took me more than a month of riding my “new” bike to discover that one of the bolts attaching the seat to the frame has a jagged spot, which has been systematically ripping a hole in the left ass cheek of every pair of pants I own. I figured it out when I felt an early fall breeze waft through the rear of one of my nicer pairs of teaching pants. When I reached down mid-pedal and surprised myself by touching two inches of exposed butt flesh, I also encountered the rough nut that did the damage. Once I got home, I examined all of the other pairs of pants I’d recently worn on my bike: two pairs of workout pants and another pair of teachin’ britches had two-inch holes in exactly the same spot.

Up until now, I’ve made most of my clothing purchases with bikeability as a top priority. I like being able to jump off my bike and walk right into whatever class or meeting I’m attending. However, I’ve also recently come to terms with the fact that what I wear actually has some bearing on how seriously people take me, and affects my job prospects. It turns out that I am not the Invisible Floating Brain, operating entirely in the Ethereal Realm of Ideas and free from Petty Material Concerns, that I always thought I was. Which sucks. And means that I need to stop showing up for things that matter with chain oil all over me.

To this end, I’ve started wearing grownup earrings, unstained pants, and the occasional Business Casual Jacket to work. I even got a haircut with bangs (the Wandering Hare in St Johns is awesome: Heather was very emotionally supportive while I was having a panic attack over the prospect of a haircut different from the two I’ve alternated between since I was twelve).

As I said, I’ve always tried to bike in the clothes I wear all day– in addition to the convenience, it’s sort of a commuter statement: “See? Getting around by bike is a normal mode of transportation, one that doesn’t require any fancy apparel or expensive layout for gear. Just role up your right pant-leg.” I own one chamois (pronounced “shammy,” the silly padded crotch thing you see on bike shorts), but I only ever wear it for longer, 30+ mile trips, not commuting. However, after laying out money I didn’t have at the last minute to replace my teaching pants before school started, I decided, reluctantly, that I might have to start carrying clothes with me and changing from grungy biking clothes into my bourgeois know-it-all ensemble once I got to school, if only to make my nicer clothes last longer.

I tried it out yesterday, and it was, in fact, kind of a pain in the ass. With a full messenger bag and helmet, plus to two sets of clothes, those bathroom stalls are pretty cramped, especially since one of my lower-order neuroses is a fear of accidentally dipping or dropping my belongings into public toilets (this anxiety stems from lived experience). Plus, the bottom of my messenger bag appears to have been lined with crushed Saltines, because my pants were crumbier when I pulled them out than when I packed them.

Even with the pants and a jacket that looks like it’s made from an airline blanket, I guess I still didn’t manage to project an aura of mature adulthood. A professor told me that with the bangs I look like I’m twelve.

Too bad: I was actually going for more of a Joni Mitchell thing.

Apparel Cop Far East

WordPress has a Blog Stats page that gives me all sorts of great statistical information regarding my readership, which I’ve begun obsessing over as my vacation wears on. One of these juicy data sets is a list of all of the search terms that have led viewers to my blog over the last two days. Sometimes, these lists read like cryptic and/or translated free verse. Here’s today’s:

oil up my bicycle
centralia used bicycles
outlaw bikers and police portland oregon
park tower portland man september 2007
apparel cop far east

This is probably the first day that the search term haiku hasn’t featured the words “nude” or “Collins Beach.” When I posted my little nude beach vignette here a few weeks ago, my daily numbers went through the roof. For a week or two there, almost every search term that brought readers to the site was somehow related to sand in the crack. It got to the point that I took the Creepy Collins Beach post down, because I felt it was attracting the wrong element to my blog. Somehow, though, Googling “nude beach” still kept bringing readers to wheeledpower, even when there was nothing here to see.

So, is this post just a thinly veiled attempt to up my viewership by tossing around titillating key words? Perhaps. But if you’re one of those perverts who’s only reading this because you were looking for nudie pics on the internet, don’t ever say that wheeledpower doesn’t deliver:

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.