No, The Chinese Aren't Responsible For Climate Change. I Am: I Took A Ride Today!

It was spring-- almost summer, really--until I crossed the bridge.

In past years, I have noticed a seasonal change when I rode across the Cross Bay Veterans' Memorial Bridge.  To be specific, when I'd be riding through Broad Channel--a shoestring of land dangling from the "mainland' of Queens--the temperature is about 20 to 22 degrees Celsius (68 to 72F) and I would feel the sun against my face.  That is, until I reached the Bridge, which spans Jamaica Bay.  While riding up the ramp to the bridge, the wind would whip waves on the water and I would feel the cold through whatever I was wearing.  By the time I got to the Rockaways--another shoestring of land, this one splayed between the Bay and the Atlantic Ocean--the temperature would have fallen to about 10 degrees C (50F) but it would feel much colder.

I usually experience such momentary climate change in early or mid-April, when the ocean water might be about 8 degrees C (45F).  But I had such an experience today.  It was 64F (17C) when I left my apartment just before noon; the temperature would climb another few degrees by the time I reached Broad Channel.  But, as I crossed the bridge, I was glad I'd brought an "extra" layer with me. (Is something "extra" when you end up needing it?)  A thermometer in Rockaway Beach read 50F, but the wind--which I didn't notice until then--blew the cold from the very depths of the ocean.  According to at least one source, the water was 41F (just over 5C) today.  During the next few weeks, that temperature will fall by another couple of degrees to its seasonal low, which it reaches at the beginning of Spring.

I imagine that the water at Point Lookout, my destination today, was a little warmer, if only by a degree or two.  Knowing that, I understand why down is such an effective insulator!

Anyway, I had a great ride:  I saw a few other cyclists and joggers along the boardwalk and on the streets of Long Beach.  As best as I could tell, they weren't wearing down.

Into The Hole

Today I rode to a hole.  No, I didn't go to the Grand Canyon.

All right.  I rode to a ghost town.  And, yes, I stayed in the cofines of New York City.

Mind you, it wasn't my destination:  I didn't have one for today.  I just felt like riding and after an overcast morning turned into a sunny and unseasonably warm afternoon.  I rode Vera, my green Mercian mixte, with no particular itinerary in mind.  I just pedaled forward and turned whenever it looked interesting or I simply got tired of the street or lane I was riding.

I briefly covered a part of yesterday's ride:  through Howard Beach and Beach Channel, the latter of which is partly contained in the Gateway National Recreation Area.  Vera gave me a couple of brief encounters with the ocean, but the bodies of water I saw, mainly, were ones that open into the Atlantic--namely Jamaica Bay and Starrett Creek.

And this:

As we've all been told, immigrants of my grandparents' generation were lured to America by rumors that the streets were "paved with gold".  Well, there is a street under that puddle, or whatever you want to call it, made of emerald.  All right, that's a bit of an exaggeration.   But the street is called Emerald Street.  A block away is another venue called Ruby Street; nearby thoroughfares are Amber and Sapphire Streets.  

In a perverse irony, these "jewel" streets comprise a neighborhood--if it might be called that--commonly called "The Hole."  It's easy to see why:  the land drops about five meters from the grade of Linden Boulevard--which itself lies below sea level.  According to some reports, that puddle lies 30 feet (9 meters) below sea level.

In another twist, the nearest building that has any connection to the rest of the world is about 50 meters away but seems to have its back turned to it: a psychotherapy center.  And, across Linden Boulevard--a.k.a. New York State Route 27--from it is the Lindenwood Diner, where travelers to and from JFK Airport and truckers to and from all points imaginable stop for burgers, shakes and such.

To give you an idea of how desolate--or, at least, how far removed from the rest of the city--The Hole is, no one seems to know whether it's in Brooklyn or Queens.  Perhaps it's a separate borough?  It certainly seems to exist in another time, if not jurisdiction.

That puddle in the photo might've been a result of the snow we had last week.  But, from what I hear, there's almost always an unnatural wetland there.  The Hole is, to my knowledge, the only part of New York City that doesn't have sewers--people use septic tanks and drains--because the land is too close to the water table.  

That geographic feature is probably a reason why it most likely shares agrarian past with the neighboring Brooklyn community of East New York.  In the late 19th Century, Brooklyn was--believe it or not--the second-largest (after southern New Jersey) vegetable-producing area in the US.  No doubt some of the folks living there--off the grid--are growing tomatoes or cabbages or other vegetables in patches of sod surrounded by rubble-strewn or weed-grown lots.  Most of the houses are abandoned; the people who call the area home are living in trailers, campers or trucks--with or without wheels.

The Federation of Black Cowboys stabled their horses in The Hole (and a few Cowboys lived there) until about a decade ago, when the city housing authority chased them out in order to erect middle-class housing that, to date, hasn't been built. In 2004, bodies of Mafia figures were found there, confirming longstanding rumors that the area was a mob dumping ground.  

Anyway, I have a rule when I ride:  If I can't see the bottom of any body of water I won't ride through it, unless there's no other way.  Not even if I'm riding a bike with full fenders, as I was today!

My Morning Commute: Only In 1984. Only From Cannondale.

On my way to work today, I saw only one other cyclist.  I wasn't surprised because this morning was the coldest we've had since February.  And it was windy, which I really noticed when crossing the RFK Bridge.  

That cyclist, though, was riding a bike older than he is.  That, in itself, is not so unusual, as I often see people--particularly the young--on machines passed on to them by parents or older siblings, or found in basements, garages, barns or yard sales.

Some of those bikes could fetch money on eBay as "vintage" items.  In a way, that's very funny to me, because I remember when they were the sorts of things you'd see every day.  Most were good for the sorts of rides and riders they were designed for, but we never thought they were exceptional in any way.

But the rider I saw today was pedaling a rig that was unusual when it was made--and simply strange today:

Cannondale made its first mountain bike in 1984.  It's the one in the photo above--and the one ridden by the fellow I saw today.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to take a photo of the bike.  But, from my brief glimpse of it, I don't think it had been ridden very much.  

When that bike was made, mountain bikes were still new to most people who didn't live in northern California or, perhaps, upper New England.  It seems that those who were involved in the then-evolving sport of mountain biking hadn't developed any notions about what mountain bikes were "supposed" to be.  

At least, their notions seemed fluid compared to those of us who were road bikers, even those as young as I was:  While the designs of certain components had evolved and refined, a good road racing, touring or sport-touring bike had more or less the same design and elements (lugged steel frames with a certain range of geometries) they'd had for about two or three generations before us.  

On the other hand, the first mass-marketed mountain bike--the Specialized Stumpjumper-- began production only three years earlier.  Its design was a kind of cross-breed of the custom mountain bikes Tom Ritchey, Gary Fisher and a few other pioneers had been making for about half a decade.  Although the first shipment of 125 Stumpjumpers (built in Japan) sold out in six days and subsequent runs sold even more quickly, the Stumpjumper would not set the standard for mountain-bike design--at least, not for very long. 

The truth was that even folks like Ritchey, Fisher and Chris Chance were still figuring out how to design their bikes, which had begun with Schwinn cruisers retrofitted with multiple gears and caliper brakes.  By the time the Stumpjumper came along, they and folks like Charlie Kelly were building lugged or fillet-brazed frames of chrome-moly tubing with long wheelbases--which, really, were lighter (yet stronger) versions of the old cruisers.  

According to the information I've come across, all of the early mountain bike frames--including that of the Stumpjumper--were built from steel.  That is no surprise when you consider that about 99 percent of bikes were still being fabricated from that material. The only difference was that the lighter, more expensive bikes used alloy steels--maganese molybdenum (Reynolds 531) or chrome molybdenum (Columbus and Tange), while cheaper, heavier bikes used carbon steel.  

Although bikes were made from it as early as the 1890s, aluminum was little-used as a frame material until the mid-1970s, when the "screwed and glued" Alan frames were built.  A few years later, Gary Klein designed an aluminum frame with wide-diameter tubing to make it stiffer.  In 1982--the year after the Stumpjumper first saw the light of day--Cannondale made the first mass-produced aluminum bicycles.

Those first Cannondales were road bicycles--racing, touring and sport models.  If you rode one of those early Cannondales, as I did, you know that their design has changed quite a bit.  So, I think it's fair to say that if Cannondale was still figuring out how to make aluminum road bikes, they were really starting from "square one" with that first mountain bike.  But it's also fair to say that no one else knew how to design aluminum mountain bikes, for--at least, from the information I've gathered--no one else, not even Klein, was building them at that time.

For all I know, the fellow I saw today on an early Cannondale mountain bike may have no idea about the history I've just described.  He probably just knows that he's riding a funny-looking bike.  Maybe he doesn't care.

Still, I can't help but to wonder who came up with the idea of designing a bike around a 24 inch rear wheel with a 26 inch front. As fluid as ideas about mountain bikes were at that time,  Cannondale was probably the only bike maker that could get away with doing such a thing.  And 1984 was probably the only year they could have done it.

Riding Until The Storm Comes

Many years ago, I read a tale--Japanese, if I recall correctly--about a young boy who is infected with terrible disease that will eventually kill him.  The really cruel part of his fate, however, is that he will grow more beautiful--and seem healthier--the closer he comes to his death.  So, of course, his parents cannot revel in the radiance of his youth, and nobody can understand why they are so sad.

Why was I thinking about that story today?  Well, Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Tropical Cyclone Hermine was supposed to strike some time  this afternoon.  So, after gulping down some green tea, Greek yogurt (from Kesso's , of course) with bananas and almonds, I got out for a ride this morning.  I figured I could get in a couple of hours of spinning, which would be a sort of wind-down from yesterday's ride.

The morning started off partly cloudy/partly sunny, just as the forecast promised.  The temperature was quite agreeable--19C (66F) when I started.  And the wind, while more brisk than what I encountered yesterday, was not an impediment to riding, even though I pedaled into it as I started down my street.

Anyway, I pedaled in the direction of Rockaway Beach, even though the ride I took yesterday included it.  I chose the ride because it's a good, safe bet for two to three hour round trip, depending on what conditions I encounter and how long I want to linger at the beach.  Also, I figured I could see the tides swelling, churned by the storm off the coast.

Well, the tides did grow--or at least seemed to--from yesterday, and during the time I was there today.  Still, some surfers and a few swimmers dared them, the Mayor's warning against rip tides and other dangerous conditions be damned.  I must admit, I was tempted to run into the water,  if only for a moment.  

It was easy to understand why people were in the water, on the beach and strolling, cycling and skating along the boardwalk:  The sun threw off its shackles (some of them, anyway) and shone ever more brightly through the morning.  Even as the sea grew more turbulent, it reflected the luminosity of the orb that seemed to fill more and more of the sky.

So, I continued along the boardwalk and Rockaway Boulevard to Riis Park and Fort Tilden, the tides rising higher and the sun shining brighter along the way.  I could even forget that at this spot

a dune once stood, until Superstorm Sandy swept it away four years ago.

After crossing the Gil Hodges/Veterans Memorial Bridge, I took a turn I didn't take yesterday, through Floyd Bennett Field and onto the path to Canarsie Pier. I wasn't at all surprised to see it ringed with men, most of them from the Caribbean, fishing.  I haven't cast a line in years, but I recall that some of the best fishing comes right before a storm.

Then I retraced my steps (tire tracks?) along that path back to Flatbush Avenue, where I crossed and continued along the Greenway that winds along the South Shore of Brooklyn to Sheepshead Bay, then to Coney Island.

And the day grew brighter and more beautiful.  I kept on riding but couldn't help but to wonder about the storm. Maybe it won't come this way after all, I thought. Or maybe it will strike later.  If it does, will it unleash even more power and fury than it otherwise would have?

By the time I wheeled my bike into my apartment, the sky was completely blue--or, at least, as clear as we can see it in New York. The sun glinted off my windows.  I turned on the radio, just in time for another weather forecast:  Hermine will come tomorrow.  Maybe.  Until then, we can expect clear skies.

The World Is About To End, Again, And I Decided To Enjoy The Ride!

The world is about to end, again.

So what did I do?  I went for a bike ride, of course.

All right...I wasn't as cavalier as I might've sounded.  For one thing, the situation isn't quite as dire as the end of the world, or even the end of the world as we know it.

But tomorrow the beaches will be closed.  Think about that:  Beaches closed on the day before Labor Day, a.k.a., the penultimate day of summer--at least unofficially.

Hurricane/Tropical Storm Hermine has plowed across northern Florida and Georgia and is in the Atlantic, where she is surging her way toward New Jersey, New York and New England.  Even if we don't get the wind and rain she's dumped to our south, forecasters say that the strongest riptides in years will roil in local waters.  So, as a precaution, Mayor de Blasio has declared that our beaches--Coney Island, the Rockaways and South Beach of Staten Island among them--will be closed tomorrow.

I decided to ride toward those littoral landscapes.  First, I took my familiar jaunt to the Rockaways and, from there, to Point Lookout.  

The view to the east was ominous--at least, in the sky.  Those clouds looked as if they could have solved all of my hydration problems for a while.  But, as the day was relatively cool (high temperature around 25C or 77F) and the sun wasn't beating down on my skin, I didn't sweat much.

People seemed to think the beaches were already closed (well, the Mayor's pronouncement wouldn't affect Point Lookout).  Not many of them were on the sand or in the surf--or even on the boardwalk--in the Rockaways.  With those skies, it looked more like a mid- or even late-fall day than the End of Summer.

And Point Lookout was deserted!  Even the streets were all but empty:  the few cars I saw were parked.  A long, wide sidebar surfaced in the water, belying the predicted storm surge.  Normally, people would walk themselves and, perhaps, their dogs, on it.  But today the seagulls and egrets had it all to themselves.

Vera, my green Mercian mixte, seemed to be enjoying it.  Or, perhaps, she was anticipating the ride back:  We had pushed into the wind most of the way from my apartment to the Point.  So, of course, it would give us a nice push going back.

Except that I decided not to pedal directly home.  The ride felt so good that as I approached Beach 92nd Street in the Rockaways--where I would normally turn off the boardwalk (where we rode today) or Rockaway Beach Boulevard for the bridge to Broad Channel--I decided to continue along the boardwalk to its end in Belle Harbor, and from there along the Boulevard to Riis Park and Fort Tilden.

Then I rolled across the Gil Hodges/Marine Parkway Bridge to Brooklyn, along the path that rims the South Shore to Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach and Coney Island.  

Along the way, fissures split the cloud cover.  By the time I got to Coney Island, the sun had reclaimed much of the sky.  And, when I got there, I saw crowds of the size one would expect on a summer day.  I wonder whether they had been there all day or if they started to stream in for their "last chance" as the sky cleared.

Sunlight glinted off the water as I rode the promenade from Coney Island to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, where I once again saw the kinds, and numbers, of people one normally finds there on a summer Saturday:  cyclists, skaters, skateboarders, fishermen, young couples, older couples and Orthodox Jewish families enjoying their shabat.

Speaking of enjoyment:  Everyone has his or her own definition of that word.  Apparently, some Nassau County officials have their own interesting interpretation:

For the record, that women's bathroom in Point Lookout Park was filthy.  And the doors of the stalls didn't shut.  Nor did the front door of the bathroom.  I thought about calling Supervisor Santino, but didn't.  I was enjoying everything else about my ride and didn't want to interrupt it--especially since, if we incur Hermine's wrath, I won't be able to take another like it for a while!

Where Was Everybody? I'm Not Complaining!

I swore that I wouldn't ride to any beach areas on weekends this summer.   Well, I broke that promise. It was just so hot and humid I couldn't think of anywhere else I wanted to ride--or go by any other means.

Actually, I didn't ride just to one beach.  First, I heeded the Ramone's advice and rode to--where else?--Rockaway Beach.  I worried when I encountered a lot of traffic on the streets near my apartment--at least some of which seemed headed toward Rockaway.

But, as soon as I passed Forest Park, traffic started to thin out.  By the time I crossed the bridge from Howard Beach to Beach Channel, the streets started to look like county roads in upper New England or routes departmentales in the French countryside--at least traffic-wise, anyway.  And, oddly, there seemed to be less traffic the closer I got to the Rockaways. I thought that, perhaps, whoever had planned to be on the beach today was already there.

What I found when I got to Rockaway Beach invalidated that hypothesis.  Although temperatures reached or neared 100F (38C) in much of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan--and humidity hovered around 90 percent--there actually was space to stretch out on the beach!  I've seen days where people were literally at arm's length, or even less from each other.  That's what I expected to, but didn't, see today.

I didn't see this. (Apologies to Francisco Goya.)

What's more, I could ride in more or less straight lines along the boardwalk:  I didn't have to swerve or dodge skateboarders, or families with men and boys in shorts and tank tops, women in bathing suits and cover-ups and little girls in frilly dresses--or dogs on leashes that seem to span the length of the boardwalk.

After soaking up sun, surf and sand (perhaps not in that order), I ate some of the salsa I made and tortilla chips from a local Mexican bakery.   Thus fortified, I decided to ride some more.  

Along Beach Channel Drive, I encountered even less traffic than I did on the way to Rockaway Beach.  There were even empty parking spaces along the street, all the way to Jacob Riis Park.  The beach there was slightly more crowded than Rockaway, but still nothing like what I expected.  The streets from there to the Marine Parkway Bridge were all but deserted, and the bridge itself--which spans an inlet of Jamaica Bay and ends on Flatbush Avenue, one of Brooklyn's major streets (it's really more like a six-lane highway at that point)--looked more like a display of Matchbox cars than a major thoroughfare. 

Stranger still, I saw only two other cyclists on the lane that parallels Flatbush, and none on the path that rims the bay along the South Shore of Brooklyn to the Sheepshead Bay docks.  From there, I encountered one other cyclist on the way to Coney Island--a bicycle patrolman!



Surely, I thought, I'd see throngs of strollers, sunbathers and swimmers at Coney Island.  Throngs, no.  People, yes--but, again, not as many as I expected.  

I didn't complain.  I finished the salsa and chips.  They were really good, if I do say so myself.

The Real Reason To Ride A "Flip-Flop" Hub!

When I converted a Peugeot U-08 into my first “fixed-gear bike” (I hadn’t even heard the term “fixie”!), hardly anyone else—and only one cyclist I knew—had ever ridden one.  Others had seen them—actually, track bikes, which are a slightly different species— in a store or trade show, or in a magazine or catalogue (Remember, there was no Internet in those days!) but could not conceive of riding them anywhere but a velodrome. 

Riding a fixed-gear bike, even with brakes, seemed like one of those things that someone like me would do.  You see, I was not much more than twenty, full of testosterone and other substances, some of which were produced by my body.  Most of the cyclists I knew then—including members of the club I sometimes rode with—were older and started cycling when there were even fewer adult cyclists, and thus less of a knowledge base, than we have now.  I would guess that none of them had seen anything with a fixed gear, let alone seen anyone riding such a machine, when they first took up cycling.

Now, of course, hipsters and all sorts of other people ride “fixies”, at least in places like New York.  A few ride real track bikes. Others are on bikes that came equipped as “urban fixies” or “singles” while still pedal converted ten- and three=speeds.  As it happens, I now ride one bike that’s made for single-speed/fixed gear use (Tosca, my Mercian fixie) and another (my LeTour) that was converted from a 1970’s ten-speed.

Even if there weren’t so many people riding single speeds and fixies, people probably wouldn’t look at me askance.  After all, I am now a woman of, ahem, a certain age who lives with cats.  I am more or less expected to be eccentric, just as nobody was surprised that I tried “crazy” things when I was a young male.

Anyway…There were some things even I didn’t know about when I was cranking down on the French-threaded bottom bracket lockring I used to secure my fixed gear to the Normandy hub that came with that Peugeot.   One was, of course, that track hubs had two sets of threads:  one on which the cog threads and another, threaded in the opposite direction, for the lockring.  It’s amazing that I rode my first fixie for as long as I did without unthreading it!  Another thing I didn’t know about is something that’s nearly ubiquitous now:  the “flip-flop” hub.  Almost all “urban fixies” and “singles” are equipped one; so are many conversions and even true track bikes that are ridden on the streets.

A few “flip-flop” hubs are made for a fixed cog on each side.  Usually, each cog is of a different size so a rider and “flip” the wheel to get a different gear.  But the more common configuration is a fixed gear on one side and a single freewheel on the other.  If you’re riding your fixed gear and get tired, you can “flip” over to the freewheel so you can coast for at least some parts of your ride.

But I discovered another practical reason for a “flip flop” hub yesterday, when I was running some errands on my LeTour.

I’d been pedaling through an industrial area of Maspeth, a part of Queens almost no tourist ever sees.  There, the streets are moonscapes or the Ho Chi Minh trail or whatever metaphor you want to use for something that has more potholes than smooth surface.  The reason for such road surfaces is, of course, the trucks that rumble over it.

I’d been pedaling at a pretty good pace when, suddenly, my rear wheel seized.  Since I was riding the “fixed” side, my feet, pedals and cranks stopped in unison:  On a “fixie”, if your wheels aren’t turning, neither are your pedals.

When I stopped, I discovered the cause:  The chain had popped off the cog and wedged itself in the gap between the right crank and bottom bracket shell.  When I got off the bike, I discovered that part of the chain had doubled over itself on the rear cog, which had unscrewed—along with the lockring—from the hub. 

That led me to think that perhaps the lockring had vibrated off before the “derailment”.  Whatever the cause, I knew I had a particular problem:   After reinstalling the cog and ring, I could tighten the cog easily enough just by pedaling it, but since I didn’t have a tool—or even a hammer and screwdriver or punch—I couldn’t tighten the lockring enough to prevent a similar mishap.

So—you guessed it—I “flipped” the wheel to the freewheel side.  And I was back on my way.

Now you know at least one reason why you should ride a “flip-flop” hub on your commuter or errand bike!  And you don’t have to be a crazy young guy or a woman “of a certain age” with cats to get away with it.  As Ru Paul says, it’s how you “work it”!

When The Rain Held Out For Time

I am not a shadow; I am not cycling among shadows. There are no shadows:  A couple crosses from a dark canyon of shutters and silence into a delta spreading from the streaming white current of the streetlight and sprayed by a flashing traffic signal.  

The couple crosses the intersection, their bodies making slight bobs with each step.  They look younger, much younger, than I am, but carry with them ages of stone, ages of fire, far older than the bricks and shingles and window panes that line these streets.  

Perhaps they will live the rest of their lives, and their children theirs, on these streets in which the flow of time stops for their history, their eternity, every Friday night.  Or, perhaps, when the streams of sodium vapor light and steel will swell, or the glow of neon will turn the brick houses into the walls of an inferno, and they will leave as, perhaps, their grandparents did from some other place where a cyclist who wasn’t one of them rode through a deserted intersection—or stopped—as they crossed.

They have, probably, another block or two to walk before they reach they reach their parents’ or grandparents’ or friends’ homes—or shul.  I have about another hour of riding ahead of me before I come to my apartment, and Max and Marley.  I hope the rain will hold out until then; it has for most of the afternoon and evening, and this night, for which it was promised.  Even if it doesn’t, I wouldn’t care; in fact, I might even wend my way through more of these streets.

********************************************************************** 

 

 

As it happened, I did ride up one of those one-way street, turned at an avenue, descended another one=way street, and continued along that self-imposed maze for a couple more kilometers than I would’ve ridden otherwise.  Although the night was humid, the air felt more like the kind of pleasant spray you feel on your skin when you stand by the ocean: It was somewhat cool for this time of year.  

I arrived at my apartment dry.  The rain held out, not only for my ride home, but for the ballgame—the Brooklyn Cyclones vs. the Auburn Doubledays—to which I rode, in Coney Island.  Thirty-some-odd kilometers there, a few more than that back.  The Cyclones, in spite of making four errors, won the game in the last at-bat.  As the saying goes, a good time was had by all.