Fishers Of Bicycles

If you grew up in Brooklyn during the 1960s and early 1970s, as I did, you heard stories about the Gowanus Canal.  One such tale held that it was the Mafia's necropolis:  Under the cover of night, hitmen hauled bodies from car trunks and tossed them into the turbid water.  The sheer number of such corpses, according to the legend, accounted for the foul smell that wafted from water as lifeless as the bodies submerged in it. 

A variation on this urban myth said that one reason why the "mob" chose the canal as its graveyard is that the chemicals in the water dissolved those bodies, effectively making their benighted owners disappear from the face of the earth.

While I must admit that I don't find such stories wholly implausible, I must also add this bit of historical fact:  Mesopotamians built the earliest known canals about 6000 years ago, while modern sewer systems have a history of not much more than a century.  Thus, almost any body of water could turn into a dump for everything from agricultural offal to industrial waste.  Really, just about anything that any person or company wanted to dispose could end up in a river, lake, ocean or canal.  

Yes, anything--including a bicycle.  A onetime riding buddy confessed that a bike he no longer wanted and couldn't sell "ended up" at the bottom of Jamaica Bay.  I have no doubt that thieves similarly disposed of bicycles they couldn't fence or simply didn't know what else to do with.  And I'm sure that more than a few people have tossed bikes into the nearest stream along with household trash.

via">http://giphy.com/gifs/bike-bicycle-amsterdam-3o85xAnA3oeurjxQRi">via GIPHY

Apparently, the latter fate seems to befall two-wheelers in Amsterdam.  So many bikes piled up in Amsterdam's canals that, by the 1960's, they were scraping the bottoms of boats, according to Diane Kleinhout.  She is a spokesperson for Waternet, an agency in charge of keeping the canals clean.  In the agency's attempt to clear out bikes--as well as scooters, wheelchairs, shopping carts and other wheeled items--Waternet employs bike fishermen.

Yes, you read that right.   The job of Richard Matser and Jan de Jonge is to use a huge hydraulic claw to trawl the canal's waters and base for the old bikes and other debris.  Their job has been compared to sticking your hand into a sink full of sudsy water and groping around blindly, with your fingers, until find a spoon or whatever you were looking for.  When the "fishermen" find a bike, they pull it out of the water and load it into a barge behind the claw.  Eventually, the bikes and whatever else the "fishermen" pull up will go to a recycler.

De Jonge says they "catch" about 15,000 bicycles a year.  Given that there are about two million bicycles in Amsterdam, that is a small percentage. Still, no one knows why that many bikes end up in the city's waterways. Some are attributed to thieves.  Ironically, in a city where, it seems, everybody rides bikes, two-wheelers don't get the same reverential treatment that American bike enthusiasts lavish on them.    Utility bikes can be bought for very little money; repairing them can cost more, so--according to one theory--people simply chuck them.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning

Look carefully at this photo:

What do you see in the bottom right corner?

If you said, "bottom bracket spindles", you:  a.) have a great eye, b.) have the right app handy, c.) spend too much time looking at bike blogs or d.) have seen Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

That seminal British New Wave film basically put Albert Finney on the map.  In SNaSM, his second film, he plays Arthur Seaton, whom we meet at work in the film's very first scene.  Where, exactly, does he work?  We know it's a bicycle factory, and we learn it's in Nottingham.  Let's see...If it were an American film and it said he worked in a bicycle factory in Chicago, we would probably assume--rightly--it was the Schwinn plant.  Likewise, our hunch that he works in the old Raleigh factory proves to be correct.

Now, as much as many of us would like to work in the bicycle industry, working in a bicycle factory is really just as boring and repetitive as working in any other kind of factory.  And so it is for Arthur, in spite of the good wage and esteem of his colleagues he earns.  

The tedium of working the lathe and his humdrum life lead him to spend his free time in pubs, where he meets Brenda, the wife of a co-worker.  He gets falling-down drunk, she takes him home and they have breakfast before her husband returns from a weekend at the races.

If I were to spend my time giving advice about everyday living instead of teaching academic skills, one of the first things I'd tell young people is that they should never, ever get into bed with anyone they meet while drinking.  It never ends well.  It doesn't for Arthur, either.  You can guess what happened. And later he confesses everything to Doreen, a young unmarried girl he meets during another night at the pub.  

Oh, if you're not interested in looking at the inner workings of the Raleigh factory or a working-class pub, you can enjoy the adorable Shirley Anne Field, who plays Doreen.

Riding To Ride, Again

A month has passed since I came home from visiting my parents in Florida.  Today I did something I hadn't done since returning: I took a bike ride that wasn't a commute or errand, or wasn't in some other way utilitarian.

I got on the bike with no specific plan other than to pedal toward Rockaway Beach and do whatever came next.  Rockaway is about fifteen miles (25 km) from my apartment.  So, I reasoned, even if I pedaled there and back, it was a reasonable ride--especially if I rode it in a fixed gear.

So out Tosca, my Mercian fixie, came.  I had another reason for riding her today:  I had just cleaned up Arielle, my Mercian Audax, and Vera, my green Mercian mixte.   Part of the clean-up included installing new chains and cassettes. I hadn't yet done the same for Tosca, though I plan to do so.  (I probably won't change the chain, though:  1/8" chains don't wear nearly as quickly as 3/32" chains  used with derailleurs.)  I figured that there was still some slop on the streets, so if I got some in Tosca's drivetrain, it will give me incentive to clean her up.  

Oh, I had one other reason to ride Tosca:  the course would be flat.

Riding her felt great.  So great, in fact, that I didn't turn around at Rockaway Beach.  Instead, I decided to ride along the ocean from Rockaway to Riis Park and across the bridge to Brooklyn, where I'd continue pedaling along the ocean to Coney Island.  

It was a lovely ride in the late-afternoon sun (I woke up late today!) even though for most of it, I was pedaling into 25-35 KPH wind, which blew out of the west.  Of course, there was something else in the west:

I would ride alongside that sunset from Coney Island all the way up to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.  When I reached the end of the promenade, the sky was darkening and I reached into my seat bag for my lights.  I figured I would ride to Greenwood Cemetery (about 3 km) or Barclays Center (another 3 km) and decide whether to dodge the drunk trust fund kids who, I figured, would be tumbling out of bars and onto the streets and bike lanes of Williamsburg.

At Barclays, I decided to continue, as I was feeling good and traffic had been lighter than I expected.  Best of all, I didn't see any of the drunk trust fund kids tumbling ouot of bars.  Maybe it was too early for that (though, I must say, I've seen them not long after noon on weekends!).  There weren't even many cyclists on the Kent Avenue bike lane, especially given how mild the weather was for this time of year.

So...I did 85 kilometers today.  Yes, they were flat.  But I did them on a fixed.  And I rode into the wind for about 25 of those kilometers.  Oh, why am I counting anything?  I had a really nice ride. I'm happy.