Bicycle Epigram #1
Some days I just want to bike off into the sunset, but I don’t have the energy to make it over the West Hills.
Methods
I’m supposed to be writing the “Methods” chapter of my thesis right now, but the sun is shining through the rain and I’d rather be biking. As a compromise, I’ll write about bikes, pausing only to gaze wistfully out the window.
Title:
The Effect of Winter Cycling on Low-Grade Respiratory Viruses
Hypothesis:
Bicycles have miraculous healing powers.
Methods:
A subject with a minor pulmonary infection biked sixteen miles a day for five days. During the trial period, she supplemented this vigorous physical activity with a range of auditory stimuli, including several National Public Radio podcasts touching on timely political and economic concerns, and a comprehensive review of the entire Mountain Goats independent rock catalogue, inspired by two live shows at one Doug Fir Lounge. The subject also attempted to manage her symptoms with a variety of alcoholic home remedies.
The subject’s health was measured throughout the week, with on-going evaluations of throat pain, in-class coughing, enthusiasm for thesis research, and general disposition toward humanity.
Results:
The subject began exhibiting symptoms of a sore throat on Saturday, February 23. Initially, the subject believed that said sore throat was an unanticipated outcome of the ill-advised ingestion of rosemary oil– earlier in the day, the subject’s sister had paid her $2 to squirt Max the Cat’s foul-tasting anti-lick spray onto her own tongue, which resulted in lingering side effects throughout the day. However, the sore throat persisted, eventually spreading to the subject’s bronchial tubes.
Symptoms persisted throughout the week, with a peak of in-class coughing on Tuesday. On that date, the coughing was disruptive enough that the subject missed several minutes of a presentation on dramatic signifiers in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta because she was doubled over in the hallway, gagging. A lack of enthusiasm for her thesis research intensified throughout the week, abating temporarily during a fascinating interview on Thursday, but returning with renewed force on Friday, when her general disposition toward humanity also plummeted to a record low. While the subject has often exhibited higher-than-average levels of misanthropy, regardless of her health, oxygen deprivation and exhaustion combined with academic stress and a disgust with institutional politics to trigger a truly pathological aversion to the human species on Friday. Rather than doing her work, the subject was forced to bike from downtown Portland to St Johns via Sellwood, grinning into the harsh wind on the Springwater Corridor the whole way south.
Discussion:
Despite lingering symptoms of existential crisis, the subject experienced a remarkable amelioration of physical discomfort in her respiratory system over the course of the week. We can only conclude that it was the 90+ miles of road cycling that led to such a rapid recovery. However, we should note that this outcome may have been bolstered by unseasonably sunny weather in the Pacific Northwest, which resulted in elevated Vitamin D levels and a slight diminution of melancholic tendencies.
Conclusion:
All indications support our hypothesis that cycling has miraculous healing powers. In fact, we would go so far as to endorse cycling as a treatment for a range of medical conditions, including restless leg syndrome, tennis elbow, and watery mouth. At least until a future Democratic president institutes comprehensive healthcare reform, we recommend cycling as the primary medical plan for the nation’s uninsured, along with black coffee (for digestive health) and St John’s Wort (for all mental health conditions).
Mac Store
I’m updating from the Mac Store at Pioneer Place Mall, while I wait for the gentlemen at the Genius Bar to look at my laptop. This place is very weird: it is very well designed to make me want top-of-the-line Apple Everything. It’s all part of the iExperience.
Generally, I try not to carry my iBook on my bike. I have a nifty little corduroy sleeve to put it int, but I’ve heard horrible stories of writers getting into bike accidents and losing both their novels-in-progress and the use of their legs. Nonetheless, baby needs to see the doctor, so I loaded it up.
I have a lot to say about the poor guy who got killed on Interstate and Greeley yesterday. More later, if this power cord issue is easily resolved (although, as Andrew put it, my computer might be having “female troubles”– it’s the power socket that seems to be the source of the problem, not the penetrating component that plugs in the cord).
Bike Trailer Bounty
Today I took two hours out from Richard II to bike with Ben and the Burley to Sauvie Island to get a pumpkin. Yesterday it was pouring, but today it was just a little cloudy, not too chilly, with gold and red leaves suddenly visible again in the indirect sunlight. We went over the St Johns Bridge, up 30, and over the (endlessly under construction) Sauvie Island Bridge. The empty bike trailer slowed me down a little, but not much: if anything, I felt like it gave me greater visibility and wider berth from the fast, heavy traffic through Linnton. Once we crossed onto the island, Kruger’s Farm was just another mile and a quarter up Sauvie Island Road.
At the farm, we locked the bikes and the Burley together on the lawn, and wandered around the busy market. Kids were running around everywhere, begging for pony rides, climbing on hay bales, and loading onto tractor-drawn platforms bound for the pumpkin patch. We’d come for one large pumpkin, but settled for two smaller pumpkins (one orange and round, one green and curvy) and a cabbage the size and weight of a medicine ball (for Andrew to carve). We also ran into our former neighbor, Mike, working his grill, and he gave us some vegetarian lasagna.
Getting onto the island was easy. Getting off of it again, with all that produce, was another story. The cabbage alone weighed 16 pounds (I’m telling you, it’s an enormous cabbage). We had to strap the two pumpkins into the Burley like babies:
I couldn’t bike the damn thing up the steep hill from Kruger’s to the main road, so I had to get off and push.
Once I was on pavement again, it wasn’t so bad, although the two bridges were the only time I’ve ever used the smallest front gear on my “new” bike. It was just a matter of chugging. The Burley is a weird kind of weight, all tugging from behind rather than pushing down on the frame. I think that keeps the bike more efficient, because the tires aren’t so compressed; it definitely saves wear and tear on my ass not to have that weight on my back. Climbing was almost like being on a stationary bike, pedaling and pedaling without too much resistance, but not getting very far very fast. Fortunately, the weather held, and traffic on the St Johns Bridge was light on a Sunday, so no one gave me a hard time for taking the lane.
An idyllic fall afternoon: now back to Dick 2.
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.
Oregon Trailer
Although it’s been raining hard all day, I couldn’t wait any longer: I had to try out my “new” bike trailer:
There are two things that I’ve always wanted to be able to carry on my bike but have never figured out how to successfully secure on my bike rack: big bulk bags of cat food and large plastic jugs of cat litter. I was easily able to fit both of those into the Burley, plus a pound and half of coffee, a large brick of cheddar, a new carabiner-handle coffee cup to replace the one I left on a cafeteria tray at Pacific University this summer, and a bottle of Simple Green for cleaning my bike chain, with lots of room to spare.
It’s about four miles to New Seasons from the house, and almost entirely flat, which made for a great trial run with the trailer. The steady rain was the only drawback; however, in my experience, biking on wet pavement often feels easier– I have no actual scientific evidence for this, but I think there might be less friction between the tires and the road surface when there’s a coating of oily water on the asphalt.
I could definitely feel the weight of the empty trailer behind me on the way there, but it was a smooth ride. There were a few places where I had to kick it down to the middle gear because of the wind (I’m not sure if it was the extra weight or the added wind resistance of the trailer that made it too hard to stay in the big gear), but once I had momentum, I hardly noticed I was pulling it in most places.
The trickiest part of the ride was figuring out how to lock the whole rig up in front of New Seasons. Because of some mobile carts and permanent pillars near the bike racks at the main entrance, I ended up u-locking my bike parallel to one rack, pivoting the trailer at a right angle to the bike, and cable-locking it through wheel and frame to another rack; I didn’t feel great about this setup, because it made accessing a few nearby racks more difficult for other cyclists. Fortunately, I think the weather today kept demand for bike parking low.
On the way home, I could definitely feel the added weight of the full trailer: it became a bit jerkier, and it was more difficult to start, and especially to stop. Still, given how much I was hauling, it was remarkably easy to maintain a steady pace.
The major sacrifice that comes with pulling the trailer, as far as I can tell, is agility. One of the great things about riding a bike is the ability to weave in and out, fit through tight spaces, hop up on the sidewalk, or even stop and carry your bike over an obstacle if need be. None of these is possible with the trailer. It does, however, add whole new functional dimension to getting around on a bike: now Ben can carry his tools by bike, if he wants to, and I can participate in the community bike moves that are the Portland equivalent of barn raisings.
Swan Island: Neither a Swan nor an Island. Discuss.
Today, Ben and I biked down to Swan Island to check out an isolated spit of trail on the Bike There! map, and to scout out the proposed route of the North Portland Greenway. After biking down the Columbia Boulevard Trail and up through Kenton to Interstate (with a quick stop at New Seasons to buy some granola bars made out of flax seed and hippie spit), we headed down Going to Swan Island, which is a huge riverfront industrial park that I’d never actually ventured into on my bike (for a rough map of our route, click here).
As you can see on the map, Swan Island is actually low-lying peninsula on what must be a former floodplain along the Willamette. As you can only partially see on the map, it is crisscrossed with railroad lines (particularly the Union Pacific) and encrusted with large warehouses and shipping centers: the place is essentially a parking lot for freight trucks. Although it was Sunday and relatively quiet, I did not see a single swan.
Along the southwestern-most edge of the peninsula, there is a recently-completed stretch of trail that we wanted to investigate. After some ducking in and out of parking lots, we found a waterfront sidewalk that eventually took us to the real trail: a magnificent expanse of permeable concrete that would make a glorious trail. It unfolded along the river, offering views of the glittering Willamette and the new Sauvie Island bridge under construction on the opposite bank (it will be floated downstream once they’re ready to put it in place), before ending abruptly at the chain-link fence surrounding a concrete plant.
The North Portland Greenway is a proposed trail stretching from Cathedral Park, under the St Johns Bridge, to the East Bank Esplanade across from downtown. It would run along the river, and would allow me to commute to City Center without biking on Greeley, an endeavor worth every single tax dollar I’ve ever given any government. There’s an activist group that has been advocating for the NPGreenway for several years now, and one of my post-grad school plans has long been to get involved with them, maybe see if they need a volunteer to write some copy. Now that Ben is getting into biking, and is developing a taste for all of the route-planning and pouring over maps that I love, it might be a way for us to become civically engaged together (instead of bowling alone).
At the northern end of Swan Island, we discovered a Navy/Coast Guard Reserve Center, which was a little taste of home for me that I don’t get very often in Oregon. Right about that time, we realized that we had fifteen minutes to get home, with two choices: either bike back to Going, then go up Greeley and around Mock’s Crest, which would involve about two miles of backtracking, or carry our bikes up the unpaved switchbacks along the steep hill up the University of Portland, and bike from there. Of course, I was the one with all the spare tubes, food, orange juice, and water in my panniers, so Ben thought it was a great idea to scramble up the hill with bikes over our shoulders. It worked out fine, especially once I made Ben carry the panniers for the last third of the ascent; I even got a little taste of cyclocross ruggedness, which everyone is gearing up for here in Portland.
The bicycle is the perfect vehicle for urban exploration.
Down by the River
The day before yesterday, I did a circumnavigation of the Portland portion of the Willamette River. I started by crossing the St Johns Bridge and going down 30, through NW to downtown, then along the Willamette Greenway Trail on the west side to the Sellwood Bridge. After picking my way across that miserable plank across the river in the far south, I came back up the Springwater Corridor Trail to the East Bank Esplanade, then along my usual commute up Greeley to Willamette and home (for a rough map of my route, click here.)
This route was an interesting combination of street riding and trails. I hadn’t gone from St Johns to downtown on the west side since last summer, when I gave the glass-strewn bikelane through industrial NW one shot before deciding to stick to Mock’s Crest. Riding down 30 is pretty much the worst taste of street biking you can get while still being in a bike lane: no views or interesting architecture, heavy and fast truck traffic sucking at you constantly, dust in your eyes, and sharp objects in your tires. However, on a Saturday it wasn’t too bad; much worse, to my surprise, was the multi-use path along Waterfront Park, downtown. Pedestrians, it turns out, are much more annoying than 18-wheelers.
After practically walking down the Waterfront, I connected to the Willamette Greenway Trail. While parts of this paved, (again!) multi-use trail were very nice, offering views of Ross Island and the boathouses along the Willamette, overall the trail was fairly unpleasant: it cut back and forth from the river to meander around various condos and stretches of private property; it was cracked and bumpy in many places because of growing tree roots; and it was perhaps four feet across and in use by many pedestrians, which meant I was rarely going more than five or six miles an hour. By the time I got to the (wretched) Sellwood Bridge, I had worked myself in quite a state over the inferiorities of urban trail-riding compared to road-riding.
Fortunately, my wrath was immediately tempered by an excellent trail-riding experience on the Springwater Corridor. On the north-south stretch along the Willamette, at least, the Corridor is the ideal urban bike trail. It goes on for miles with no stops or intersections with car traffic, features excellent views of the river, is paved as smooth as butter, and in most places is around eight feet wide and divided by a street-style dotted yellow line, to keep traffic moving in both directions. There were many pedestrians out, but there was enough room for them to keep to the right as I passed without forcing me into on-coming bike traffic. While the Willamette Greenway is more of a paved walking trail that grudgingly permits bikes, the Springwater Corridor is like an actual road, all for cyclists.
On the Springwater Corridor, I also saw some excellent bike graffiti (click on the picture for a larger view):
I don’t know what, exactly, “Gotcha all fixed up” means, but it’s officially entering my lexicon.
The Springwater Corridor connects to OMSI and the East Bank Esplanade through some nicely labeled streets between warehouses. On one of those warehouse walls, I saw this moving expression of faith:
Now that I think about it, if Eric Clapton is God, that explains an awful lot.
The north end of the East Bank Esplanade is a floating sidewalk, a trail that rises and sinks with the water level: riding across it feels almost like biking on the river itself. I paused there, and elsewhere along the east side, to take a few pictures of Portland’s Willamette, my personal favorite Superfund site:
Behind some floating sidewalk, the Steel, Broadway, and Fremont Bridges
The Burnside Bridge, and beind it, the Steel and Broadway Bridges
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.
