Bike Rack Moment of Zen #2
A few weeks ago, my parents and sister came down to visit the Portland State campus. I gave them the full tour, pointing out the good food carts, listing off the best bathrooms, and showing them all of the places I habitually lock my bike, in order of preference. Of course, during the winter, covered bike parking is at a premium at PSU (the single most popular bike-commuting destination in the city). Generally, I favor the racks under the sky bridge between Cramer and Smith– not only does the sky bridge prevent my saddle from acting like a sponge in wet weather, but I trust that the Girl Scouts, UPS recruiters, and Street Roots vendors who peddle their wares in that spot will notice someone skulking around with bolt-cutters.
My second-favorite place to lock up, though, is at the top of the stairs in front of the PSU library. Not only is the area covered, but it’s usually guarded by hipsters with cigarettes, and they tend to scare off the ne’er-do-wells. Those bike racks are also protected by this cheering graffiti gods-eye:
I’m not particularly spiritual (although I like my uplifting neurochemical cocktails as much as the next person), but it can’t hurt.
Bike Rack Moment of Zen #1
Yesterday, as I was locking up my bike next to Powell’s, I saw this stuck to a window:
Thanks to the miracle of the Interweb, I was able to take this picture with my phone and send it to my friend Kyle, who then used his iPhone to email it me. I’m sure there’s a simpler way to do that.
Update: While it’s not necessarily simpler, in that it involves my phone, two websites, and photo-editing software on my laptop, I did figure out a way to get pictures off my phone without having to talk to Kyle.
Post-Deluvian
After two days of biblical rains, during which I stayed snugly ark-bound in my pajamas, we had a summery day: 55 degrees and sunny, despite the flood debris in the bikelanes. Biking over the Broadway Bridge yesterday, I saw what looked like a felled forest floating down the high, soil-steeped waters of the Willamette. That would be the Valley washing out towards the Columbia.
This morning, my entire route was blanketed in fog. I couldn’t see the St Johns Bridge from my kitchen window anymore, and the other bikes on Mocks Crest were just blinking red rear lights. Every once in a while, the condensed fog dripped down the front of my helmet onto the fronts of my churning thighs. On the Broadway Bridge, I smiled when I saw my favorite graffiti (image stolen from this blog [sorry!], because I still don’t have a working camera– the one I see everyday is stenciled on the pavement of the bike/pedestrian path):
If This Were Art Redux
This morning, as I pedaled past the Women Making History in Portland mural and the graffiti that I mentioned in yesterday’s post (the blank wall sprayed with the words “if this were art, you’d be in a gallery right now”), I had a sudden stroke of brilliance. Given Portland’s status as America’s bicycle capital, shouldn’t we have a mural commemorating the city’s bike history, and some of the key figures who have made biking such a part of the region’s culture? I know that the Community Cycling Center has a beautiful mural celebrating bike transit, but it would be great to see something in North Portland highlighting the political will that has invested in, and continues to improve, the city’s bike infrastructure.
Of course, as Ben can attest after juicy, unrecognizable mess I made out of the pumpkin I tried to carve last night, my ability to execute an artistic vision is well below average. So this is really a project (like so many of the projects I come up with) for someone else. Still, the Albina/Mississippi MAX stop area could be a gallery, and what better to showcase with public art than bicycles, a mode of transit that crosses class and cultural lines all across the Portland? We could call it “Going Platinum.”
P.S. Willie, stop fucking with my search terms. “Liederhosen,” indeed.
If This Was Art
I somehow managed to break the memory card in the digital camera, so I’m going to go ahead and report on something I’ve been seeing on my commute, even though I’d been hoping to post pictures. Last week, as I was riding home along the Yellow MAX line near the Albina/Mississippi stop, I saw that someone had spray-painted a message along the blank white wall of a warehouse on Interstate. It said:
if this was art,
you’d be in a gallery right now.
And whoever wrote it was right: that white wall would be much more interesting if it was covered with, for instance, a mural, like the one a few blocks down the street.
I’ve been watching the progress on the “Women Making History in Portland” mural ever since school started again. It’s sponsored by In Other Words, an awesome non-profit feminist bookseller that I’ve had very positive dealings with in the past. The mural is on the wall of a building on the west side of Interstate, and I see it every day as I come around the bend in the road just south of the I-405 overpass.
In September, the mural was just some barely-visible sketches over white paint; in the last six weeks, it has become a vibrant, colorful collection of portraits of a very diverse group of women. I don’t recognize most of the names, but I’ll stop one morning when I’m not running late and jot them down, find out what they’ve done in this city.
The older I get, and the more I encounter the kind of masculine disregard, condescension, and sexual harrassment that I used to think was a thing of the past, the more I connect with the idea of feminist solidarity. When I was younger, I experienced other women as the enforcers of a gender norm with which I didn’t identify, so I blamed women for their own problems, and figured that because I had rejected “girly-ness,” sexism didn’t apply to me. Wrong! It turns out we don’t get to opt out of the structures of oppression. There are definitely times (more and more, as I step into positions of authority) when I want to grab some men (and women) by the neck and demand that they take me seriously.
Equality would be great. Failing that, I’ll take a mural.
Come to think of it, there is one small act that routinely gives me a sense of feminist satisfaction: tooling men (preferably men in spandex) on Mock’s Crest.
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
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.
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).
Mt. Tabor
Yesterday I biked from St Johns to Mt. Tabor, in Southeast. As Willie likes to remind me, compared to Berkeley, the East Side is a prairie. Aside from the stretch up Greeley and the big toe on the foot of the West Hills that I climb to get to PSU, I don’t do a lot of elevation in my day-to-day commuting. Mt. Tabor is wooded park with paved trails on a volcanic nubbin about twelve miles from my house; I’ve been meaning to check it out for a few years, which is precisely what vacation is for.
I cruised along Willamette to Greeley to Interstate, then over toward the East Bank Esplanade. On the ramp leading down to the Steel Bridge and the start of the Esplanade’s paths and stretches of floating sidewalk, someone had used pink spraypaint to write the words:
CALL YOUR DEADBEAT DAD.
HE STILL LOVES YOU.
Whether it was specific advice for one regular commuter, or a more general suggestion that we all accept the imperfect loves we are offered, it seemed wise. There are so many ways that we fail to give the people we care about what they deserve; perhaps we should be gracious towards those who fail us in countless small and significant ways.
Many consider Southeast the heart of Portland, but I am only there once every few months. It has several excellent residential bikeways that serve as east-west conduits with few lights, stop signs, or vehicles. I took Harrison/Lincoln all the way out to Mt. Tabor Park, a gradual incline that deposits you at the base of the sudden thrust of the hill. A paved road winds its way to the summit, not too steep, but relentless. I had to stop once about halfway up to catch my breath (too many tater-tots in the dining hall this summer), but it was not a long ride to the top, with its locked restrooms, statue of some guy named Scott, and scattered benches that capture the views.
Sweaty and panting, I leaned my bike against a bench that looked out over inner Southeast toward downtown, and sat down with my notebook. I had one of those hours of isolated scribbling when all of the pieces seem to fall together in perfect, revelatory clarity, a spell from which I emerge with a crystalline understanding of myself and the mess in my head that shatters the instant I come into contact with the people who make up my life. Still, it was a powerful certainty on the chilly hilltop while it lasted. My sweat cooled and I began to shiver in the August fog; it grew late, and the cold and my thoughts chased me back down the hill towards Hawthorne, where I stopped at Powell’s and looked at different editions of the same books until I could feel again.
Guardrail Rabbit
Can you spot the rabbit in this picture?
I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but at some point over the last month, this rabbit appeared on a guardrail on Mock’s Crest. At first, I thought it might be some kind of protective warning (“Caution: Do not squish a rabbit between your bumper and this guardrail”). However, if that was the case, wouldn’t the drawing be of a wild rabbit? This rabbit is clearly domesticated: note the cow-like markings about the neck and shoulders.
Then I thought that it might be some kind of guerilla marketing campaign for a rabbit-related product. The New Rabbit, by Volkswagon? Maybe there’s a Rabbit Vodka? Come to think of it, they did just open a salon in St Johns called The Wandering Hare (great place– going there was the only time in my life that I’ve been able to talk politics to the person giving me a trim).
Here’s my favorite theory: maybe there is a new, North Portland-based rock band called Guardrail Rabbit, and this is their tag. I’d buy the T-shirt. In fact, if there isn’t already such a band, someone should form one. Andrew?
