I was on my way to the post office when one of my new neighbors spotted me.
“Excuse me, can I ask you something?”
“Well, that depends”: my usual response to such a question.
“I’m going to ask you this because you look like an environmentalist…”
She wanted some advice on what to do with some seeds that have sprouted. Now, I don’t know whether my response was any more sagacious than what I could have told her if she had asked what to do about a guy. I was, however, intrigued by her perception of me. “What made you think I’m an environmentalist?”
“I always see you on your bike.”
While my reasons—which I hardly think about anymore—for cycling aren’t primarily about the environment, they do help to keep me in the saddle. For one thing, I know that I’m putting a lot less carbon in the air than I would if I were driving. For another, even though I’ve had more bikes than the average person during my life, I have kept and ridden a few of them—including at least three of my current bikes for longer than most people (or Americans, anyway) keep their cars. That might also be a reason why I recycle and reuse whatever I can: I believe that my ethos behind such practices is linked to fixing whatever I can on my bikes rather than replacing them with the “newest and latest.”
To my new neighbor, my bike gave me away as an “environmentalist.” Might she also have seen me sneaking granola when I thought she, and nobody else, could see me?
