In the middle of the journey of my life, I am--as always--a woman on a bike. Although I do not know where this road will lead, the way is not lost, for I have arrived here. And I am on my bicycle, again.
In October, Anchorage (Alaska) Assembly member Christopher Constant introduced an ordinance that would have required the city's bicycle owners to register their bikes on a free online database, or face fines. I've never been to Alaska, so perhaps my perception of its people is a stereotype: If nothing else, they are rugged individualists. Somehow I don't think people end up there by following the crowd. Whatever the truth about them may be, the citizens of The Last Frontier's largest city lived up to my perception when their outcry over the fines forced Constant to withdraw his proposal.
While bike registration isn't a deterrent against theft and certainly doesn't guarantee that a stolen bike will be reunited with its owner, it does make it easier to get the bike back to whoever bought, rides and loves it. And registering the bike, and keeping a record of the bike's serial number in your own records will make it easier to prove that a bike is yours--especially if it's a common model--if it is recovered. All of that, of course, assumes that the serial number is still on the bike. As often as not, if the bike ends up in a "chop shop", the serial number is removed. The same thing often happens to other stolen items that are re-sold. In Alaska, those items include propane tanks. Constant--the same assembly member who introduced the failed bike-registration mandate--has just introduced another law that would make it a misdemeanor to remove a serial number from a bicycle or any other merchandise. It passed unanimously on Tuesday night. I concur with Austin Quinn-Davidson, another Anchorage Assembly member, who said that this measure won't, by itself, do much to combat theft. She believes thieves will simply find ways to do their work without tampering with serial numbers. While the new law is a "first step," the city needs to "come in and get registration up," she said. She is right, but even the combination of registration and a ban on removing serial numbers will only put a dent in the city's bicycle theft epidemic, just as similar measures in other places would help, if only somewhat.
What do Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the first mass migration from New England to points south and west, and the draisienne have in common? Well, they all came to be within a few months of each other, in 1816-17. The reason for that, though, might surprise you: Climate change. Well, sort of. Yes, that was an issue two centuries ago, though no one saw it as (or called it) that. All people knew was that in North America and Europe, the weather was unusually cold and the skies preternaturally dark. In fact, 1816 is still called "the year without a summer." In the eastern United States, according to Michael Wysession, "Crops failed, winter rains were freezing, it snowed in summer; there was mass starvation." As a result, he said, "whole towns in New England actually decided to pack up and leave," causing the migration I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Meanwhile, "Europe was also devastated," Wysession added. The Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri) Earth and Planetary Sciences professor says that, while experiencing "massive flooding", the weather was "cold, bleak and rainy" through much of the Continent--including the shores of Lac Leman, a.k.a. the Lake of Geneva. That's where 18-year-old Shelley, then known as Mary Godwin (She would later marry the poet Percy Bysse Shelley.) went for a summer vacation with Lord Byron and writer-physician John Polidori. But when they got there, the weather was cold and the atmosphere gloomy. While holed up in their lakeside lair, they read, aloud, from Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of German horror tales. That inspired the writers to a competition to see who could write the best horror story. Byron, renowned for his poetry, wrote a fragment of a story but abandoned it. We don't know what Polidori wrote during that Swiss soujourn, but he later used Byron's fragment as the basis for The Vampyre, the first vampire story published in English. And the story Godwin came up with became--you guessed it--Frankenstein. Around the time she was writing it, and Yankees were moving across the frontiers, a fellow in Germany attached two wheels to a wooden frame that was hinged at the front. The part in front of the hinge included, in addition to the front wheel, the handlebar.
He called his creation the Laufmaschine. When it was reproduced in France and England, it was called, respectively, the Draisienne (in honor of its creator, Karl von Drais) and the hobby-horse (for its shape). It is often seen as the forerunner of the bicycle. What is almost never mentioned, however, is what motivated von Drais to come up with it: the same climate crisis that led to the New England exodus and Frankenstein. When crops fail, humans aren't the only ones who starve and die. Animals, including oxen and horses, can also fall victim, as they did in 1816-17. Some that didn't die outright were killed by their owners who couldn't afford to feed them. So, with all of those animals dead or dying, a new mode of transportation was needed. Von Drais was trying to provide it. Because they didn't have electronic communications and 24-hour news cycles in those days, people on each side of the Atlantic didn't realize, until later, that they were experiencing the same conditions unsuited to growing food for humans or animals as folks on the other side of the pond were enduring. And it wasn't until still later that anyhone realized those catastrophes had a common root: the colossal volcanic eruption of Indonesia's Mount Tambora in 1815. Many scientists think it was the largest such explosion in history: It was heard more than 2000 kilometers away, reduced Tambora's maximum elevation from 4300 to 2850 meters (14,100 to 9300 feet) and spewed enough ash to filter or even block sunlight more than halfway around the world. The effect was so great that even though the Earth had been warming somewhat for more than a century after the "mini ice age" of the 17th Century, several years of unusually cold weather (including the summer-less 1816) followed. So, the forerunner of the bicycle was a response, if unwitting, to temporary climate change. And getting more people to ride bicycles today is one of the best responses we can make to the crisis in climatic change that faces us today.
As the 2000 US Presidential Election showed us, there are some things that happen "only in Florida". Or so it seems. Then there are those things that, according to Floridians, happen "only in Miami." "Only in Miami": That exclamation came from a driver who recorded the scene in the video.
From what we can see, the man on the bike was wearing only a headband, hot pink socks and what looks like a thong--as he's weaving in and out of traffic on Interstate 95. According to news reports, it's not the first time he's done such a thing. But this time, according to various accounts, he "upped his game": He rode backwards. Naked and backwards. Hmm...That describes a few things done in South Beach clubs. But by a cyclist--on I-95?
The great artist Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucentes) inscribed "Yo lo vi" ("I saw this") on the plate bearing his etching "Los Desastres de la Guerra" ("The Horrors of War"). I probably will never do anything as great as any of his work. I do, however, tell my students stories (in the context of whatever we're doing in class)--from my own or other people's lives--and end them with, "Yes, that happened during my lifetime." One example is that of the Lovings. Richard, who was white, and Mildred, who was black, married in Washington, DC. One week after I was born, cops in Virginia burst into their home and arrested them. Their case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided for them and struck down all remaining miscegenation laws in the United States--less than a month before I turned nine years old. Another story comes from a woman I knew. She went to a Seven Sisters college back when women's institutions of higher learning were still called, usually dismissively, "girls' schools. (Even when I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s, the women's sports teams were often called "girls'" teams.) She applied for a job in a corporation and, after passing the typing test--which all female applicants took, even if they had advanced degrees--got a job as a secretary. There, she met the man she would marry and later divorce. He had just spent time in the Army, which is probably the reason why he was hired. He didn't (and never would) attend college; in fact, he had only a General Equivalency Diploma (which, despite its name, is not "equivalent" to a regular diploma when you're applying to colleges or for a job) that he completed while in uniform. He did his job "well enough" and got several promotions. She, on the other hand, was never promoted in spite of excellent performance reviews. In those days, their company--like many others of the time (early to mid 1960s) had this policy: If both members of a married couple were working in the company, the woman could not hold a higher position than the man. I found myself thinking about those stories after a piece I heard on National Public Radio this morning. According to that report, a women's bicycle race in Belgium was delayed because one of the riders caught up to the men's race, which started ten minutes earlier. Yes, you read that right: A women's race was delayed because they caught up to the men. The Omloop Het Nieuwsblad is the first "spring classic" of the Belgian racing season. Held annually, the 74th edition ran yesterday. The first edition of the female event commenced in 2006. Now, when I say that the women caught up to the men, I'm exercising a bit of, um, poetic license. Actually, one rider--Nicole Hanselmann, the former Swiss national champion--found herself riding right behind the ambulances and other support vehicles for the men's race. Race organizers claim that they delayed the women's race out of fears that the riders of "the fairer sex" would get "entangled" with the support vehicles. And they didn't call their action a "stoppage" or even a "delay; instead, they said they "neutralised" the race until the other women caught up, and the men moved ahead. Whatever they call it, it threw off Hanselmann: She finished 74th. I can't help but to think, though, that at least one of the men's race organizers was a religious fundamentalist--or just a plain-and-simple male chauvinist--who wanted to penalize Ms. Hanselmann for being a fast woman. And to think: This happened during my lifetime!
On a couple of occasions, my seat was stolen when I parked my bike. I've since learned a trick that, I think, will prevent most such thefts most of the time. When you lose your saddle, you have one of two choices: a.) Walk the bike or, b.) Ride it standing up. The latter option is more viable if you haven't far to go. I don't think I'd want to ride for a few hours and, when I'm tired, bend down to sit on a missing seat! Or you could try this:
The other day I wrote about someone from El Paso on a bicycle. Today, I am going to write about another such cyclist, though she's not nearly as well-known. The other day, I wrote about Beto O'Rourke--who, outside of his home state, wasn't much better-known than the woman I'm going to mention today. While O'Rourke might be thinking about surviving a primary challenge next year, Sylvia Alvara is surviving something far more formidable: cancer.
And, if you will, she, like O'Rourke is hoping to ride to victory on a bicycle. Actually, the fact that she is riding a bicycle is a victory, though she probably doesn't see it that way. That might be the reason she's taking on a greater challenge: the Mighty Mujer triathlon. To help make that possible, the members of "Pay It Forward" at KFOX-14 in El Paso gave her a new bike from Trek El Paso. At the West El Paso shop, she will have $500 to spend on other gear, courtesy of City Lights Limousine. And a trainer is being provided to help her get ready for race day. I hope that she and O'Rourke both win their races!
In New York City, my hometown, 460,000 daily trips were made by bicycle. That is up from 270,000 trips in 2011--a 70 percent increase. Some of that, of course, has to do with the Citibike share program, which launched in 2013. The operative word here is "some": Many more cyclists are riding to work on their own bicycles. During the past four fiscal years, the city has set up an average of 1633 new racks. Now, what do you think the average was during the previous four years? 2808. In other words, 42 percent fewer racks have been installed during the past four years, which have fallen squarely in Bill de Blasio's administration, than in the previous four, which were mainly under Mike Bloomberg's administration. What that means is that the city lacks "essential infrastructure" needed if bicycling is truly to become a transportation option, according to Bike New York spokesman Jon Orcutt. "Everybody's talking about Citibikes and scooters, but it's the humble rack that needs more attention," added Orcutt, who served as the city's Department of Transportation policy director under Bloomberg. Citibikes are fine for commuting if there's a bike port near your home and another near your workplace--that is, if there are available bikes when you leave for work and if there's an available space in the dock when you get to your job. You can ride your own bike, but there might not be a dedicated bike rack or other safe facility at your destination. Or, if there is such a facility, there might not be any space available when you arrive--or it might simply be unusable for whatever reason.
So, you look for a signpost, lamppost or other seemingly immovable object--which aren't as impervious to bike thieves as they seem. And they might be full, too. Then, you lock to fencing, scaffolding or even a waste basket. I've even seen a bike locked to the chain that holds the cap to a fire hydrant. Those things, of course, are easy work for a thief who has the time you spend in your workplace or classroom. Rose Uscianowski, an organizer for Transportation Alternatives, learned that the hard way when she locked her bike to scaffolding in front of a building on John Street, in the city's financial district. "I came out of my office and found a bar of scaffolding on the floor and my bike missing," she lamented. "The only reason I locked up to scaffolding is that there are only a few racks on John Street, and they're always taken up." Even scarcer are racks by subway stations or other public transportation facilities. For people who live in areas that are a mile or more from the nearest subway or bus station--which is the case for people in the outlying areas of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, and for nearly everybody in Staten Island--truly having the option of riding to transit and feeling more or less certain that your bike will be there when you return might do as much, or more than, congestion pricing or other proposed methods to reduce traffic. Plus, I think that making bike-parking facilities available at public transportation stations will help the public to see that cycling is a transportation alternative for people from all walks (pardon the pun) of life rather than the plaything of the young and privileged, and tourists.
Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power. Michael Cohen echoed something I've thought for some time. But even if he hadn't made that the remark at the end of his testimony yesterday, the talking heads and political bloggers would have been talking about who might run against the incumbent, and whether Cohen's testimony makes it more likely that Trump will indeed lose to one of them. So many people have already "tossed their hats into the ring" for the Democratic nomination that it's no surprise when anyone else--including someone almost no one outside of his home towns has heard of--does the same. Until last fall, Beto O'Rourke fit that category. Then the three-term Congressman narrowly lost an election for one of Texas' two US Senate seats to Ted Cruz, who himself came in second to Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination two years earlier. I'm still learning about O'Rourke. He sounds pretty good to me. I must say, though, that even though I like most of his views, there is something else about him that appeals to me:
Lest you think he is trying to appeal to the hipsters on his Surly Steamroller fixed-gear bike, here he is on an '80s Bridgestone:
Three years ago, the Canal St. Martin was drained. The City of Paris does that about every ten or fifteen years. In dredgings past (sounds like a series of old therapy sessions!), the "treasures" at the bottom of the Canal included home furnishings, street signs, gold coins(!), World War I shells and even a car. But the most recent drainage served as a sort of geological record of changes in the neighborhood around the canal--mostly the 10th Arrondissement--and in the City of Light itself. The streets around the waterway have become the sites of bars, restaurants and clubs. (The Bataclan, site of a mass shooting during a November 2015 concert, stands literally steps from the canal.) The area is home to "Bobos"--a term combining "bohemian" and "bourgeois". They are probably the Parisian equivalent of hipsters. At any rate, they share many of the same tastes with their Brooklyn counterparts. They include a thirst for craft beers (French as well as American) and wines. Empty bottles and cans bearing those labels littered the bottom of the canal when it was dredged. So did another passion of that evanescent group: bicycles--specifically, those from Velib, the city's bike-share service. As far as I know, neither of the city's two canals--the Harlem River Ship Canal and the Gowanus Canal--has ever been drained. Interestingly, the Gowanus--one of the most toxic waterways in the United States--flows, like the St. Martin, through a hipsterizing (Think of it as the hipster equivalent of gentrifying.) neighborhood. According to an urban legend, the Mafia used to dump their "hits" in the Gowanus because the bodies would dissolve. Which brings me to this question: Could a Citibike survive a dive into a city canal?
Somehow I doubt it would be even as intact as the bike in the photo. That Citibike, missing since September 2017, showed up in the bike-share service's port at 73rd Street and Riverside Drive, where filmmaker Ted Geoghegan found it. Its coating of barnacles and mud indicates that it spent time in the Hudson River--which, at that point, is actually an estuary. No one, it seems, can explain how it got from the river (or wherever it was) to the bike dock? Did a thief take it, dump it, feel guilty and dive into the water to fetch it? That seems unlikely because, well, that's not what thieves usually do, but also because if the thief did indeed dump the bike in the river, he or she wouldn't have found it in the same spot, or anywhere nearby. The more likely scenario is that some boater or fisher found it and, not knowing what else to do, quietly brought it to the bike port.
That bike is more than likely beyond repair. Spending almost any amount of time in the water would have destroyed the bike's electronics, and the growth on the rest of the bike indicates that the brackish water has corroded the rest of the bike so that it's structurally unsound, and its moving parts are probably irreparable.
(Interesting aside: The Gowanus and Harlem Ship are the only two canals in New York City today. In the 17th Century, however, lower Manhattan was laced with canals. That's not surprising when you realize the area was then called Nieuw Amsterdam, and the Dutch settlers were following a model of urban planning for which their capital is famous.)
I wear a helmet when I ride. Well, most of the time, I do. Whatever the naysayers might say, I have had two occasions when wearing my helmet probably, if not saved my life, then at least prevented serious injury. In the second of those incidents, my helmet actually broke in two but I escaped with only a few scratches. I admit, though, that I've ridden bareheaded, even after those incidents. When I ride in Florida, I don't wear a helmet: Even on cool days, most riders, it seems, aren't wearing them. And on my recent trips to Paris, Rome, Cambodia and Laos, I went sans casque, except on the Grasshopper tour in Siem Reap. I think the only reason we had those is that Grasshopper tours is run by Westerners and was probably covered (pun intended) by insurance regulations in the US or someplace else. Otherwise, in Southeast Asian countries, I'm not sure I could have even found a helmet: I didn't see any in the bike shops I peeked into, let alone the bike stalls of the market places. In the Italian capital, I followed the age-old advice: Do as the Romans do. I did the same in Paris, which meant that in both cities I didn't wear helmets. It wouldn't have been hard to find a hardhat in either city: In fact, some rental services offer them. But it seemed that no one else was wearing them, so I didn't. So, even though I have had occasions in which wearing a helmet might have saved me, I am still hesitant to support laws requiring every cyclist to wear one. We don't have such a law here in New York, though every once in a while some police officer tickets an unsuspecting rider who isn't wearing one. In some places, like New Jersey, helmets are mandatory for kids; a few other places require them for adults. But even though helmet-wearing has become more or less the norm in much of the US, there are still relatively few places that require it. I am more ready, however, to support another ban: one on headphones, at least ones that cover the ear. Right now, the city of Washington, DC forbids cycling with headphones. So do a few other jurisdictions; more, however, do not allow motorists to drive with mini-speakers covering their ears.
Now some startup company, Conduit Sports, has come out with a headphone that doesn't cover the ear and block the ear canal. Its creators say their device allows for "situational awareness". By that, I assume they mean that you can hear horns and other traffic sounds while you listen to Cardi B or Brockhampton.
Riding with such headphones may well be safe. Still, I'll stick to riding without them, or without any other audio stimulation other than what's provided by my surroundings when I ride. Even if I'm doing a ride I can do in my sleep, I prefer to hear what's around me, in part because it helps me to think, meditate or simply relax while riding. Also, I reckon it's safer than riding even with those new headphones. But I'll still wear my helmet. Most of the time, anyway.
