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.
Look What I Found!
I was biking up Greeley this afternoon, and found this lying in the weeds:
Somewhere in Portland, there is a frantic Senegalese physicist.
Electric Poles
Biking down Willamette today, I saw a sign stapled to a wooden electric pole that said:
LOST DOG
Half a mile down the road, I saw another sign on another wooden pole. This one said:
FOUND CAT
That pretty much sums it up, I’d say.
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.
Half and Half
In the bikelane of the ramp connecting Greeley to Interstate, there lies an empty half-gallon container that used to hold Organic Valley Half and Half. This strikes me as odd for two reasons.
First of all, most empty containers lying on the shoulder of the road are there because someone finished eating or drinking whatever was inside, and then tossed it out the window. But who chugs straight half and half out of the carton? And even if someone just poured the last of the container’s contents into their coffee, who carries a half-gallon of half and half in the car? Most people use those little one-serving containers that look like Barbie trashcans. Anything bigger than that, even just a pint, would take several days to use up, and the milk would go bad in the car.
Secondly, why would someone groovy enough to buy organic half and half, rather than the cheaper, conventional, carcinogenic kind, throw garbage out the window? Although that stretch of pavement is hardly a scenic highway, littering is still not the green thing to do.
Perhaps we should take this as a metaphor for the largely empty trendiness of organic’s current popularity. Organic Valley dairy products are shipped to Oregon from Wisconsin: that’s a heck of a lot of hydrocarbons put into transport, especially given that this is a farming region (the Tillamook dairies are only 70 miles from Portland). I seriously doubt that it was a cyclist who pounded the last of that half and half and then threw the carton on the ground, so it must have come from some kind of motor vehicle emitting greenhouse gases. These days, buying organic is as much about personal vanity and conspicuous consumption as it is about how conventional farming practices degrade the environment, so why not toss the packaging into the bikelane when you’re done? Wouldn’t want it to clutter up the foot-well of the BMW.
Then again, I suppose it’s possible that the carton just fell off the back of a garbage truck or something.
The Gloves Are Off
In my sixteen miles of biking today, I saw no fewer than fourteen (fourteen!) individual gloves lying in the bikelane, shoulder, and nearby grass. They were spread out over about a five mile stretch in North Portland, including residential and industrial areas, on both sides of the road, at both mid-morning and around dusk. Four of them were work gloves, the kind Ben uses for building or that someone might wear while landscaping; the other ten were latex gloves, in varying shades of green, purple, and bright blue.
I have a few theories: maybe the Portland Police have stepped up body cavity searches in North PDX; maybe the City’s waste disposal unit has added curbside needle exchange to its list of services, along with recycling and the collection of yard debris; maybe we have a large number of hypochondriacal rig drivers on Willamette and Greeley. Maybe there’s a bike commuting surgeon with a hole in his pannier who uses the same route I do?
I wonder if the preponderance of latex gloves had anything to do with the several dozen blue and white pills scattered across the bikelane downtown this morning, on Broadway? Maybe someone had to get rid of the pills quick when they heard about the body cavity searches?
Update: the dead cat was still draped over the curb this morning; it appears to have gotten a good soaking in the rain. I stopped to see if it had a collar with a tag, so I could at least call the owner, but the furry little cadaver was unmarked. The last time there was a dead animal in front of the University of Portland (a possum, last month), it took them weeks to remove it, so I’ll probably be looking at that poor stiff calico in various stages of disintegration for the rest of the school year.
Oh, yeah. This evening, in the same general vicinity as the cat, I saw about thirty young men in tuxedos playing Ultimate Frisbee.
The Regret
There’s a great moment in the otherwise overwrought movie Magnolia
in which the old man dying of cancer moans to his son, “The regret! The fucking regret!” That regret, that fucking regret, is exactly what I felt today standing in the bike lane where the I-5 South ramp splits off Greeley, as I finally gave up on getting Ben’s digital camera to take a photo of the battered, run over American flag laying on the road. With forty-five-mile-an-hour eighteen-wheeler traffic roaring past me in either direction, I was already running late for a 9 am meeting on campus, and the damn memory card was full, with no obvious way to delete the sixteen pictures I took a few nights ago of my bicycle-shaped winerack (to upload as my wordpress avatar). You’ll just have to take my word for it: that cheap, likely Made-in-China flag was a sight to behold, with its split balsa-wood pole and the muddy bike tread across the corner. The VFW would have a mass coronary if they saw it.
I also saw: one dead cat a mile from my house, which made me glad I’d been willing to bust my foot chasing Max; a woman standing at the bus stop reading “Overcoming ADHD” (she seemed very focused); a group of striking demolition workers picketing a big hole in the ground; and the head of a golf club (a putter maybe?) laying in the bike lane.
A Random Memory on a Day of Rest
It’s Sunday and I’m working on a term paper rather than biking anywhere, but I wanted to post a random bike commuting memory to support my broader thesis, which is: the riddle of humanity can be solved from my bike.
Not once, but twice now (the first time under the Broadway overpass heading north on Interstate, and the second time biking up Greeley), I’ve seen plastic soda bottles in the bike lane that have been filled with urine, then carefully recapped and presumably tossed out a car window. On the one hand, this actually seems like a fairly sanitary way to dispose of a bottle of piss– no splashing, tidy containment for easy pickup and removal. On the other hand, this is an urban area! It’s not like driving through miles of Iowan cornfields with nary a rest stop in sight. Just stop at a Burgerville and use the can! My conclusion: vehicle passengers like pissing in bottles and throwing them out the window. They do it for fun.
