More Trouble at Interstate and Greeley
As I passed through Interstate and Greeley this afternoon, I saw that several orange and white reflective barriers were up along the left edge of the southbound bike lane, effectively blocking any vehicles from turning right across the path of cyclists coming down the hill. A big white Channel 8 news van was parked around the corner. I just figured that the City had already gotten started on some of the safety upgrades they’ve been discussing for that intersection, where a right-turning garbage truck killed a cyclist a few weeks ago.
When I got home, however, I saw that several people had ended up at this blog while searching for information on bike accidents at Interstate and Greeley today (that’s exactly how I found out about the fatal collision at that intersection a few weeks ago). I performed my own Google search, and sure enough, another cyclist was hit by a right-turning vehicle at that exact same spot this morning. Fortunately, it sounds like her injuries weren’t life-threatening, but the City has decided that enough is enough: by early afternoon, they’d set up the barricades I saw, to prevent any vehicles from turning right across the bike lane until they’ve made safety improvements at the intersection.
This is very scary. In class today, a friend told me that just a few hours after she and I had been talking about bike safety last week, her boyfriend, an experienced cyclist, had been hit out in Beaverton in yet another of these failure-to-yield, right-turn-across-the -bike-lane accidents. Fortunately, he was wearing a helmet, which she said got so badly battered that the doctors insisted on performing a CAT scan; aside from a badly scraped shoulder, though, he seems to be okay.
Two hours later, a student in another of my classes was talking about what he called the “car versus bike” debate. “Out where I live, way out east near 163rd,” he said, “they’re all saying, ‘Yeah. People are dying. We need to get those bikes off the road!’”
I really hope that’s not where this conversation is going in the Greater Portland area. Two tragedies seemed to galvanize the city into a commitment to infrastructure at some of the most dangerous intersections, and all the local print media did big stories about the dangers of cycling in “Bike City USA” (here’s the Mercury, here’s Willamette Week, and here’s the Oregonian online). With all this coverage, though, I’m worried about bike accident fatigue among drivers in the city– for those who aren’t committed to cycling as a green mode of transportation, a source of exercise, and a lifestyle, the simplist answer may indeed seem to be, “Get those bike off the road before anyone else gets killed.” If people perceive that “too much” money is being spent on safer infrastructure (even though an improvement like bike boxes would only cost about $200o per intersection), or that drivers are being “unduly” inconvenienced by concessions to cyclists (for instance, having to take the long way to Swan Island when they can’t make the right turn onto Greeley from Interstate), the tide may turn from sympathy to resentment.
I don’t have a solution or a proposal here– I just want to stay safe on the road, and see more investment in off-road options for commuters, like the North Portland Greenway. However, I know how easy it is for us to listen exclusively to our own echo-chambers in the media and on the web, only to be taken by surprise when it turns out that we’ve lost the majority (as you can see, I’m still suffering from PTSD after the 2004 presidential election).
I hope the woman hit at Interstate and Greeley heals quickly. I also hope that the city starts issuing citations for failure to yield! They have yet to give a ticket to any of these right-turners with tunnel vision.
Vote
For the last month, my morning bike route has been festooned with pleasantly alliterative signs, all white with black, all-caps stenciling:
STRIP MALLS OR STRAWBERRY FIELDS?
PUMPKINS OR PARKING LOTS?
CORNFIELDS OR CONCRETE?
LOVE OREGON?
YES ON 49
A few weeks ago, there was one lonely NO ON 49 sign, posted near the top of my evening climb up Greeley. After a few days, I saw that it had been pulled up from its curbside location and tossed into the blackberry brambles: we liberals are always such a class act.
Tomorrow is the last day for Oregonians to vote on Measure 49. I’ll spare you yet another rehash of the debate (here’s yes, here’s no, here’s Willamette Week, and here’s BikePortland.org); essentially, Oregon’s progressive anti-sprawl zoning laws were dealt a huge blow when Measure 37 passed in 2004, and Measure 49 is an effort to curb some of the most excessive development that Measure 37 has made possible.
For those of us who like the city to be the city, so we can live car-free, and the country to be the country, so we can go bike in it, there’s no real controversy. For those who own undeveloped property that they’d hoped would fund their retirements, and for development companies that have been jumping all over the loopholes in Measure 37 to build sprawling McMansion communities and big box stores, Measure 49 is, as the No on 49 folks like to say, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” To me, this is an issue of the greater interests of the community (and the planet) outweighing the potential profits that would fall to a few.
Right now, though, it’s not looking very good for us wolves. So vote already.
Dangerous Intersections
As part of the community conversation ignited by the city’s recent fatal bike collisions, the Portland Mercury is compiling a list of reader-reported dangerous intersections. I’ll be chiming in on the hairiest parts of my commute, and thought I’d post those thoughts here, as well. These are the Intersections Where I’m Most Likely to Die, listed from least to greatest potential for carnage:
The Place Where the Swan Island Ramp Pipes Traffic Onto N Greeley.
The southbound bike lane runs downhill, along the shoulder of N Greeley. About halfway down the hill, a ramp leads up from Swan Island, a busy industrial park with, amongst other large commercial trucks, huge fleets from FedEx and UPS. The bike lane ends abruptly at the ramp, and you have to come to complete stop in the middle of a descent, and look for traffic coming from almost directly behind you, since the ramp traffic is merging from the north. The vehicles come flying up the ramp, picking up speed to go 45 mph on Greeley, and because of the curve of the ramp, you can’t see them until they are about 5 seconds from barreling across your path.
Crossing the Ramp from N Greeley onto I-5.
Continuing down Greeley towards Interstate Avenue (where the cyclist was killed earlier this week), there is a heavily-used ramp on the right that takes traffic onto I-5 and I-405. Because the southbound bike lane runs along the shoulder, you have to cross the ramp to stay on Greeley. The traffic here is building up highway speed as it approaches the ramp. Worse, many drivers shift from the inside lane, which stays on Greeley, to the outside lane, which turns into the ramp, at the very last minute, usually signalling late or not at all. This makes predicting whether it is safe to cross over to the spot where the bike lane picks up again very difficult. I’ve had some very scary moments with commercial trucks here.
N Greeley and N Willamette
N Willamette Blvd is easily the most pleasurable part of my bike ride home, especially the stretch that is local traffic only. The problem is that, particularly at rush hour, getting on to Willamette from Greeley is hideously dangerous. Making the left turn from the bike lane involves crossing the northbound lane of traffic, which is often backed up from the light at Greeley and Killingsworth (one block north of Willamette) down the hill past the Adidas campus. Sometimes I have to wait here for several minutes; usually, some kind motorist waiting in traffic will wave me across. However, because of all of the northbound traffic (often trucks, vans, and SUV’s) and the bend in the road, I can’t see whether any smaller vehicles are coming from the opposite direction until I’m halfway across the intersection. I’ve had a few close calls here, and some angry hand gestures from drivers: the irony is that I’m trying to get to a low traffic street, out of the way of the cars.
There’s a lot of discussion going on in the city right now (for instance, here and here) about bike infrastructure at dangerous intersections, including talk of bike boxes, widened and/or painted bike lanes in conflict areas, and loop-activated warning lights when bikes are present. I’m glad that the city (most visibly, Traffic Commissioner Sam Adams) is moving to invest in these safety measures while the (non-biking) public has the tragedy-induced will to act/spend.
A parting thought: one major way that Portland could address all three of these shitty intersections on my commute to and from St Johns would be to fund the North Portland Greenway project– the only thing safer than Sharing the Road is not needing to.
What I Smelled from My Bike This Week
The leaves changed all at once this week: the maples got red, the oaks bright yellow. In the evening now, the air smells of the long-disused fireplaces and wood-burning stoves bleeding smoke again. On dry days like today, its rich scent is pervasive and differs from block to block, depending on what kind of wood they’re burning; on wet days like earlier in the week, I only smell damp smoke for an instant before I’m out of range.
There are lots of other smells along my bike commute. On Greeley, I often get noxious belches of exhaust in my face when the big trucks off Swan Island pass me. On Interstate, I occasionally get a noseful of the pungent steeping smell of wart boiling at the Widmer Brewery. During heavy rains the city’s sewers tend to overflow into the Willamette, and as I pass under the Broadway Bridge I can smell the sharp bite of shit water.
On a completely unrelated note: today on Broadway, I got cut off twice, and someone almost doored me– another cyclist slapped the person’s rearview mirrow and shouted, “You’ve gotta look!” As a north-south bike corridor through downtown, Broadway really sucks. Here’s my thought: the city ought to take the two streets on either side of the Park Blocks (which are already one-way streets with little through-traffic other than seekers of on-street parking), turn most of the stopsigns towards the intersecting streets, and make them bike boulevards. With some stoplights at major intersections like Burnside, that would create low-traffic north- and south-bound bike routes through the heart of downtown where I won’t get run over by RAZ buses, or by out-of-towners in rental cars pulling away from valet parking at high-end hotels.
Addendum
I don’t think I emphasized this enough in yesterday’s post: it would be especially awesome if the NPGreenway was constructed with permeable (or “pervious,” which sounds a little creepy) concrete, and here’s why. If you’re going to build a new trail, build it right, and build it sustainable.
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
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.
I Need a Hero, Part 2
Sorry for the lag in posting– I’ve been out camping in Eastern Washington with the outlaws for the last five days. Ben and I barely made it back last night, after the little Tercel threw a rod 60 miles north of Portland. Fortunately, his folks have 100-mile towing on their AAA, so they came and saved us: one phone call and a miserable drive through Chehalis road construction to sign the requisite paperwork in person, and they were able to get us a free ride home on a towtruck.
I had brought my bike along for the trip on a rack on the back of the Tercel, in the (unfounded) hope of maybe getting a little riding in. When they loaded the ailing car up onto the flatbed of the towtruck, I asked whether the bike would be secure there, and the driver assured me it would. The whole setup worked fine for at 70 mph on I-5, but five miles from home, we hit some rough roads in industrial NoPo. The rack, leveraging off of the car’s suspension, on top of the truck’s suspension, functioned like a catapault– only Ben’s sailor knots kept the bike from being flung right off the back of the truck. Instead, the rack itself bounced loose of its moorings, and the whole apparatus landed in a precarious tangle on the very edge of the flatbed. I’d been keeping an eye on my bike in the rearview mirror the whole drive home, and the first time the rack came loose, I yelped, jumped out and clambored up the back of the truck to reattach the rack to the car. We fumbled with the straps and tried to secure the bike as best we could. “Look,” I told the driver. “I care more about this bike than I do about the car.”
We were only a few miles from home at that point, so we tried to just take it slow, but when I saw the bike jounce violently again, and land so that it was dangling even further off the edge of the bed, I yelled, “Shit!” and lept out of the truck. This time, I insisted on riding the rest of the way home: at midnight, in the dark, wearing a dark gray fleece and flipflops, with no lights or helmet. Thankfully, the bike rode fast and smooth, none the worse for wear, and the full moon lit the whole the way down industrial Lombard, back to St Johns.
The whole experience made me glad, once again, that I do not rely on a car for my day-to-day transportation. If you’re not rich enough to afford something in decent shape (and if, like me, you have no idea how to fix such a complicated machine when it breaks), it’s a constant source of anxiety and a good way in make sure you never have much money saved for long. For the cost of a total piece-of-shit car, you can buy a top-of-the-line bike that will last you for decades. Three cheers for urban density.
P.S. We finally located Ben’s digital camera. It was under the seat in his family’s Vanagon, where he left it during a climbing trip last month. So, contrary to widespread rumor, I was not the one who lost it, afterall. The point being that I will resume posting original photos soon.
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.
