How I Want It To Be, Just About

Well, the Miss Mercian is just about done.  Oh, it's been rideable for more than a week now.  But I finally got the rack I wanted for it.  


I know that there are all kinds of fancy-pants racks out there.  Some are quite good; nearly all of them are overpriced.  I'm not talking, now, about the constructeur racks, vintage or current, made by hand by a few small builders.  Rather, I'm thinking about some that try to be more, and end up being less, than they are.


One high-end rack in particular that I saw fits that description.  But Hal said that it's really no stronger or otherwise better than the rack I bought.  Plus, it was ugly, at least to my eye.


So what did I get?  The "old reliable":  a Blackburn Expedition rack.  I know it's good because I've owned a couple of them before. In fact, I used them for all of my multi-day (or -week) tours.  And I very stupidly left them on bikes that I sold.  Hal has used the same model to cross the USA by bike--three times.  In fact, he used the same rack all three times!


So why was getting another one such a big deal?  These days, it's made only in black.  That probably would've looked OK on the bike, but I thought silver would be prettier.  I thought I was going to get one on eBay.  I submitted what I was sure would be a winning bid.  That was a few hours before the end of the auction.  But, in those last few hours, someone submitted a winning bid--fifty cents higher than the one I submitted!  


I guess if I'd waited a bit longer, another would've turned up on eBay.  But I didn't want to to lose in the same way.  So, I broke down and bought  from one of the few retailers that still had silver racks in stock.  I ordered one from Probikekit which, like the other retailers that had it in stock, is located in the U.K.  Surprisingly, the rack, even with shipping, cost me slightly less than it would have cost to buy it here.  Thank the still-favorable exchange rate and the fact that the quoted price included VAT, which you don't have to pay if you're not in the UK or EU.  


For good measure, I bought two.  At that price, why not?  I could always use it on Arielle if I need to carry more than a Carradice saddlebag on it.  Or I could use it on some future build.  At least I've got another good rack in silver that didn't cost more than the first five or six bikes I owned.

Trails And A Track, Then and Now

For the last couple of days, I think I've had some version of a summer cold.  I have felt congested and tired, and a bit weak.  So I didn't cycle today.  However, yesterday I rode to a couple of places I hadn't been to in a while.  Neither is very far from me, but I just haven't had occasion to go to them.

One was a place where I used to ride off-road with a few guys I used to know.  It's at the far end of Queens, near Nassau County.  I rode on the dirt paths in the woods of Alley Pond Park, which even in the most suburban part of New York City, seems bucolic.  I didn't try any of the jumps we used to do:  I haven't done them in a long time and, frankly, a lot of what I did in that park--and off-road generally--I did to show off.  Yesterday, even though I felt myself riding slowly, a man about my age who was riding one of those bikes that you'd think was a bargain if you found it for about ten dollars in the Salvation Army store looked at me and yelled, "Whoa, lady, slow down!"

Hmm....Maybe I am a fast woman after all.

I had gone to the park after the real purpose of my ride, which involved meeting with the chair of the English Department at a community college not far from the park.    I actually had met her once, years ago, in the only other time I had ever been on that campus.  I don't know whether she remembered me:  Back then, I was still one of those guys riding on the trails in Alley Pond Park, among other places.  I didn't mention that to her.


I started to think that it might be good to work there, and with her.  It'd be a fairly lengthy commute, but if I were to pedal it regularly, I'd really get into good shape. Even in the unlikely event that she remembers that brief, long-ago meeting with me (which wasn't bad), I'm not sure it would matter.  I don't think anyone else in that college knows who I am.  That, as you might have guessed, is one of the reasons why I thought I might like to work there. 


Save for Sheldon, who now works at Bicycle Habitat, I have not seen any of those guys with whom I used to ride the trails since we rode those trails.  They are like some other people from my past:  I would be curious to see them again, to see what they look like and what they're doing now.  I'm not so sure, though, that they'd want to be friends with me, or that I would with them.  They weren't bad guys, but our whole relationship was that of guys doing those rides together.  They may not be the same sorts of guys I knew then and, well, I'm not a guy.  And they may not be riding anymore, or they may be riding differently. 


And, in the course of my ride, I stopped somewhere else where I used to ride with some other people I haven't seen in years:  the Kissena Velodrome.  Yesterday, only one cyclist, a young and shy Latino, was pedalling on the banked oval.  

Ironically, Robert Moses built the Velodrome.   He was not known as a friend of cycling, or of anyone who isn't behind the wheel rather than astride two, or on his or her own feet.  (His motto could have been auto uber alles.) Two of his best-known projects, the Verrazano Narrows and Whitestone Bridges, don't have paths for pedestrians or cyclists.  And the Major Deegan Expressway, which he also built, has made it all but impossible to pedal across the Bronx from the George Washington Bridge, not to mention that it destroyed a few neighborhoods and was instrumental in the decline of the Bronx.


I used to ride on the 'Drome, as we called it, on a Bianchi track bike.  I'm talking about the real thing, not the prototypical hipster fixie you see everywhere.  The one I rode was an older Italian-made Bianchi, with a lugged frame made from Columbus SL steel tubing.  How real a track bike was it?  The geometry was right, the dropouts were those nice thick rear-facing horizontal ends you see on track bikes and--yes, here's the clincher--neither the front fork nor the rear stay bridge were drilled for brakes.  I could have drilled that front fork for a brake, but in those days, that seemed sacrilegious.  Besides, I didn't ride it on the streets:  If I wasn't on the Velodrome, I rode it on an enclosed loop that was closed to traffic, such as the ones in Central and Prospect Parks.  

Women's National Championship at Kissena, 1964

I thought, for a moment, about riding a lap or two.  Would that have made me the first woman to ride it in a dress?  The idea was tempting, especially since the track was in much better condition than it was back in the day.  Back then, one of us joked that we were going to design the first dual-suspension track bike specifically to deal with the Kissena surface, which at times resembled the Ho Chi Minh trail after a monsoon.


One of these days, I'll go there with Tosca.  Its geometry is not quite as aggressive, I think, as that of my old Bianchi, and it does have some amenities to make it more rideable on the road.  But it's actually a better-quality bike and, being a Mercian, has a bit more character.  I've been told that these days, I do, too.

Where There Are No Riders But Me

Sometimes I ride through the Neighborhoods Where Women Don’t Ride Bicycles.  Other times, my bikes take me through those places where no one over the age of sixteen or so mounts a saddle.  But today, my ride included a neighborhood where, it seems, nobody rides a bicycle.

I usually pass through or near the neighborhood on my way to work.  And, some years ago, when I was writing for a local newspaper, I used to go to the neighborhood’s local police precinct, community and school boards, and to various other offices and events in the community.  And, every time, if I pedaled there, I was the only one on a bicycle.

What’s interesting is that it’s neither a poor ghetto nor one of those tony areas where kids get chauffeured to soccer practice and dance lessons.  Rather, it’s a thoroughly working-to-middle class neighborhood where nearly all residents live with their families.  Unlike Astoria, where I now live, there aren’t very many young single people or childless couples.

Although the cast, if you will, has changed, it’s still the same sort of neighborhood it was forty years ago.  I know that because in those days, relatives of mine lived there.  Then, most of the people in the neighborhood were Italian-Americans, like my relatives, or Irish- or German-Americans, and nearly everyone was Catholic.  Most of the men were blue-collar union workers or self-employed, and most of the women stayed home to raise kids.

The only difference is that now, most of the people in the neighborhood are Sikhs or Indo-Caribbeans.  On a summer day, sights like this are not uncommon:

But I’ve never, ever seen any Sikh or Indo-Caribbean on a bicycle, at least not in this area.  Before they emigrated, many of the people rode bicycles for transportation or work.  I guess that, for them, cycling still has that connotation.  Where they come from, people ride bikes because they had little or no choice.  It’s certainly not seen as a sport or recreational activity, and not something the educated do.  I read somewhere that, in contrast, the majority of bicycle commuters in New York are college-educated.

If my hypothesis is correct, then the Indians and Indo-Caribbeans of Richmond Hill , where the men in turbans congregated, and neighboring Ozone Park are acting like past and present  immigrants from countries where people’s bikes were beasts of burden and utilitarian in other ways.

I also can’t help but to wonder whether the bikes they rode turned them off of cycling.  In the last bike shop that employed me, we saw a few Indian three-speeds, and I fixed a few of them.  I take that back:  Those bikes don’t get or stay fixed.   They may be the worst bikes I ever encountered.