One Good Turn

I didn’t leave downtown until after 10 pm on Thursday evening.  The night was clear, though, and there was little traffic, which made for a pleasant ride through downtown, up over the Bridge, and along Interstate.  On the stretch of Greeley where the elevation begins, there was an old SUV pulled over onto the bikelane.  As I got closer, I saw that it had stopped for another car, an aging Tercel, and that two men were standing outside their cars, talking worriedly.  I checked my mirror and entered the deserted right lane of traffic to give them wide berth, but one of them looked over at me and made the international hand gesture for “Do you have a cell phone?”  So I stopped.

The younger of the men asked if I knew the number for a tow company.  I told him I didn’t have a car.  After conferring, they decided to call their insurance company, so I stood there while they used my phone.  They clearly weren’t from North Portland– they didn’t know what street they were on, and they gave the operator an address in Southeast.  English wasn’t their first language, and I got the sense that the insurance company was giving them a hard time.  Finally, however, they managed to set something up with a tow truck.  They thanked me, and I pedaled off, liberal naivete intact: I had stopped to help to men on the side of the road late at night, and only good had come of it.  The world is an okay place.  Most people mean well.

Riding high on my good deed (because, really, it’s arduous to stand around while other people listen to Muzak on your phone), I went up Greeley and over onto Willamette, rounded the quiet curve of Mock’s Crest, and bore left at the University of Portland.  After crossing the light at Portsmouth, I was in my homestretch, already thinking about whether Drew might have saved me any leftovers, when I heard the roar of a fast-approached engine behind me.  A burly, shiny pickup truck zoomed past me on the left, and as it went by, I heard a chorus of young women shout out the open window at me, “Fuck the environment!”

As they pulled ahead, their high-pitched giggles poured out of the back window, and I saw a glimpse of platinum-blond hair through the tinted glass.  Our nation’s future.  I blew them a kiss.

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).

Another Bike Death

I’ve been fuming all week over Monday’s fatal bike accident: an experienced cyclist was killed in a collision with a garbage truck turning right across the bike lane at Interstate and Greeley, an intersection I ride through twice a day, four or five days a week. Jonathon Maus at BikePortland.org has done great work covering the accident and its aftermath: the cyclist was a competitive racer and Bike Gallery employee; apparently, the driver of the truck has a distressingly long and varied record of traffic violations and other illegal activities. That’s the second person killed by a large truck while riding in a bike lane in the last three weeks.

I first heard about this accident while in the computer lab, fine-tuning my thesis proposal. Procrastinating, I decided to check my blog stats, and in the recent search terms, I saw that someone had found my site by searching “biker killed on interstate and greeley” (I write about those streets a lot, since they are part of my regular commute). I immediately ran the Google search myself, and sure enough, BikePortland had posted a breaking news story an hour earlier.

There have been a lot of accidents lately, which I chalked up to the return of the rain: decreased visibility, slick conditions, fewer daylight hours, drivers who have forgotten to watch for bikes beyond the range of the windshield wipers, and new cyclists who don’t have a lot of winter riding experience all add up to an increase in collisions. However, Monday was a beautiful, clear day, and this accident happened at 12:30 in the afternoon.

Biking home in the dark on Monday evening, the intersection of Interstate and Greeley was desolate and quiet. I pedaled past warily, half-afraid there would still be blood stains or pieces of bicycle on the road. I stopped at the crosswalk a few dozen feet from the corner where it happened and pushed the activation button once, then several times fast, eager to get over onto Greeley and away. Suddenly, the overhead street light winked out, plunging the intersection into darkness. As I stood there blinking, a whistle from the nearly trainyard began to howl, close. Finally, the walk sign lit up, and I rode over the MAX tracks, spooked out and doubly anxious about not having a red light on the back of my bike.

Over the last few days, I’ve watched the monument evolving on that corner. Within 24 hours there was a Ghost Bike on the scene, to which people have been adding flowers and other mementos. Last night, there was lit candle and a red bike light flickering on the sidewalk beneath the Ghost Bike, a lonely vigil in the dark. On Tuesday a statue of a cyclist made out of scrap metal, the kind you see on the roof of the River City bike shop on MLK, appeared on the corner as well, I hope permanently.

The titanium lining to all of this is that City Hall is convening emergency meetings to address some of the issues (such as failure-to-yield violations across bike lanes) raised by the accidents. Still, I wish bicycle safety didn’t require martyrs to get attention.

Please wear your helmets, and ride defensively.

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.

Odyssey

As I enter my last year of grad school, I’m compiling a list of Books I Should Have Read If I’m Going to Have an MA in English Literature.  Hence The Complete Works of William Shakespeare in my messenger bag.  Hence reading The Scarlet Letter during my vacation (Nathaniel Hawthorne: fellow Bowdoin alum).  Hence the one-credit discussion group on James Joyce’s Ulysses that I’m taking this quarter.

I’ve tried to read Ulysses twice, and never got past the third chapter.  However, several people whose opinions I respect have told me that it is The Greatest Book Ever, and I feel like a fraud having it on my bookshelf without having read it: it’s like hanging a taxidermied moosehead on your living room wall when you’ve never even been hunting.

So, I decided that the best way to get through Ulysses was to join a support group.  Hi.  My name is wheeledpower, and I didn’t understand what the hell was going on in chapter three.  I need accountability.

Perhaps you’re wondering what this has to do with bikes.  At our first meeting last week, one of the other group members brought us all CD copies of the audiobook version of Ulysses.  I loaded the whole thing onto my iPod, and after reading the first three chapters for this week’s meeting, I began listening to the audiobook during my ride to downtown.

How do I describe the experience of listening to James Joyce on a bike?  I had no body: it was just my head, and the wash of words, wind, and intermittent water drops.  Ulysses is so much about the sounds of words and phrases, and the idiosyncracies of associative thinking, to a degree that I didn’t understand when taking the text as a string of visual symbols across a page, rather than spoken living language.  It’s dangerous biking literature: it’s so acorporeal, and I’m already predisposed to deny the reality of my own physical being.

Great literature has the power to electrify, maybe even to kill.  Ulysses, considered the quintessential modern novel and one of the most significant literary achievements of all time, might do both to me: it can’t be a good idea to wear earbuds with exposed wires on my bike in the rain.

Hobos in My Train Yard

I was biking past the busy train yards between Greeley and the Willamette today, amidst whistles blowing and black greasy smoke, when I heard the piercing moan of a harmonica. It was soulful, moving, and expert. I imagined a ragged trainhopper, squatting on an old wooden crate between freight cars, filthy bandana-wrapped hands cupped around the harmonica as he wailed away. He had long scraggly hair, holes in pants, and a shadow across his face that could be dirt, stubble, or both. I was already mentally composing my blog entry on this vision.

And then I realized that the sound was not, in fact, coming from the train yard. It was coming from the earbuds of my iPod, the background music to a rerun of a This American Life episode about summer camp. The disappointment was bitter– I’d seen the old hobo so clearly in my mind. I found myself feeling tempted, seriously tempted, to write this blog entry as though I had, in fact, heard the sound of a harmonica coming from the train yard. No one would know the difference, and it would be so much more satisfying, aesthetically.

While I was up in Washington visiting my folks last weekend, my sister, a college freshman, asked me to proofread a paper of hers: a personal essay. It was the first time I’d read anything by her that wasn’t a livejournal entry or a text message, and I was startled to find that her writing reads an awful lot like my own, but funnier. We have a similar sense of humor, a similar beat to our written comic timing. Since she was writing about several events that I had experienced with her, I also discovered that we have a similar habit of, as we call it, “making shit up,” when it suits our literary purposes: sometimes the rhythm of the sentence, the parallel syntax of an accumulating comic list, demands an aesthetically necessary lie.

I’m not creative enough to be a fiction writer, but I’m not honest enough to be a real non-fiction writer, either. I like to think that exaggeration (and, okay, occasional outright deception) serves some sort of cosmic, if not literal, truth. I’ve always lived my life in the moralistic conditional tense (“should”) rather than the simple present (“is”). When a story sounds so good, that’s how it should have been, and I often convince myself that that’s how things actually happened; it takes some kind of external memory jog to remind me that I’m full of shit.

In this blog, I’m making a rigorous effort to describe things that I actually see (and sounds I actually hear) as I actually see (and hear) them. Fair warning, though: be vigilant for harmonica-playing hobos in my train yards. I can’t promise that I’ll always remember that I made them up.