Rainy Days, Cyclists and Cats

The sky is darkening; the fine light rain seems to be suspended between streets slickened with streetlight reflections of drizzle.  Earlier today, harder rain plunked against the awning by my window and seemed to drive all reflections in streams down pavement that’s even darker than the sky is becoming now.

For three days, we’ve had weather that’s been one variation or another of the two kinds I’ve just described.  But that’s not the reason I haven’t ridden.  

The other day, I still felt I had the mild case of the flu, or whatever it was, that found me over the weekend.  I felt congested and lethargic:  not the conditions under which most people choose to ride.  Yesterday, I still wasn’t feeling so well, but I had an appointment and only the vaguest notion of where it was, much less of how to get there.  So I took mass transit.  The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) here in New York has Trip Planner, a variation of the Google map on its website.  You can type in the addresses of your starting point and destination—or the names of landmarks—and Trip Planner will show you which buses and/or trains to take and estimate your travel time.  Cyclists need some version of that:  When you use Google or similar systems, they usually show only the routes over main highways.  I once tried to use the bike map feature, but it was worse than useless:  It gives directions like “Proceed down Maple Street.  Turn left.” 

Anyway…Today I was preparing myself, logistically and mentally, for tomorrow, which is the first day of the new semester.  Charlie and Max were content to spend time in my lap or simply curled up next to me.  And I was content, too. 

Is it my imagination, or is there some affinity between cyclists and cats?  It seems that most of the cyclists I’ve known have had cats, or wanted to have them.  On one hand, it doesn’t make sense:  After all, it’s pretty difficult to take your favorite feline with you when you’re riding.  I know that a kitten or a small cat can curl up inside a basket on the front of the bike, and that, with a bit of ingenuity, a kitty carrier can be attached to a bike rack.  But cats don’t seem to take very well to such arrangements. 

Sometimes in parks or other places where there’s little or no traffic, I see cyclists “walking” their dogs.  Those dogs are on leashes and trot a few paces behind the bikes. Of course, the cyclists are ride slowly; sometimes they pedal just enough to keep themselves balanced and moving forward.  Even so, I don’t think it’s possible to take a cat out for a “walk” while riding.  At least, I’ve never seen it.

So why do so many cyclists like cats?  OK, I guess this is where I get to promulgate with another of my crackpot theories.  (Actually, most theories are pretty crackpot.  That’s one thing I’ve learned from being around people who’ve gotten tenure, or made careers in other ways, from them.)  My guess, I mean theory, is that even as cycling has become more popular, it still takes a certain amount of independence to be a cyclist, especially a committed one. 

Even though cycling has become a more socially acceptable activity in the US—at least in certain segments of the community—it’s still not something one does to gain approval from the society at large.  Some people don’t even get approval from those who are closest to them when they start riding, first for recreation, then for transportation, let alone when they decide to take off for weeks, months or even years on a bike trip. 

Also, when we want—or need, for that is what it is for some of us—to ride, friends, lovers, spouses and other family members may feel as if they’re being ignored or snubbed.  Likewise, some people see cats as aloof or simply unaffectionate because they don’t snap to, the way dogs will, when humans summon them.  When a cat slinks off into a corner or sashays to the windowsill rather than to the lap of the person with whom she or he lives, said cat is not shunning or ignoring said human.  Rather, the cat is fulfilling a need, whether or not people can understand it.

Plus, I think that cats simply enjoy their own company.  It’s almost trite to say that you have to enjoy your own company before you can enjoy anyone else’s company because, well, it’s true yet people try to live as if it weren’t.  If you’re going to spend lots of time on the road by yourself, you’d better enjoy your own company.  But even if you ride with others, you need to be able to be Thoreau’s “majority of one” because, even when done in large groups, cycling is still an individual activity in ways that other sports and activities aren’t.

Finally, of course, there is a good logistical reason for cyclists’ affinity with felines:  They can be left alone when we spend all day on our bikes, and if we go on multi-day rides, all they need is for someone to give them food and water—and, if we’re gone more than a couple of days, clean or change their litter boxes.  Dogs and other pets—not to mention some humans—need more.

At least cats understand that we’re coming back.   And the funny thing about independent people is that they usually come back.

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.