Regressing, Repeating Or Regenerating?

 This Spring, so far, has been strange in all sorts of ways.  For one, people are, in some ways, acting as if the COVID-19 pandemic is over:  They're not wearing masks; they're going to restaurants and movies and taking trips.  On another, sometimes I encounter people I haven't seen since the disease struck, or have seen only in passing, and I don't feel as if I am looking at, or talking to, the same person I knew.  Perhaps I, too, am no longer the person people once knew.  And strangers are even more anonymous, and even automotonic than they were before:  They seem even more walled-off from their surroundings, and other people, than they were three and a half years ago..

The weather has been strange, too.  Temperatures haven't been unusually warm--except for yesterday, when it reached 21C (70F)--but there have been combinations of wind and rain, rain and hail, wind and sun and even sun and rain we don't normally see.  There were even tornadoes in Delaware and South Jersey.

But one part of the weirdness of this season appeared to me the other day, during a late-afternoon ride.  That I saw cherry blossoms budding, or beginning to bloom--which always gladdens my heart--along Woodside Avenue wasn't, in itself, out of the ordinary for this part of the world in the first week of April.  But seeing them in that same act of their show as I saw in trees just a few miles away (and, I assume, at more or less the same latitude) three weeks ago made me wonder what's going on.

Not that I'm complaining about seeing what I saw the other day.  Of course, few trees are more beautiful in full bloom than the cherry blossoms.  But something about seeing those early blooms against the sky, in all of their fragility and ephemerality, gives me the strength of my vulnerability.

Who Are They Attacking?

Motorists' umbrage over bike lanes or other bicycle infrastructure, is expressed as a matter of losing "their" traffic and parking lanes, and other facilities, to us.

Notice the last word in the previous sentence.  While the anger might be articulated about things, in the end, I think it's really a resentment against us--or, at least the way they perceive us.  That is to say, when I've been screamed at simply for being on a bike--all the while following traffic rules and regulations--the person yelling at me doesn't see me because, to them, a cyclist is not a person like me.  The stereotype of a cyclist, at least in New York and other US cities, is that of a "privileged" Milennial who washes down chia seed-garnished slices of avocado toast with IPAs brewed in small batches--who, as often as not, comes from privilege and some place far away.  In other words, they don't see a woman of, ahem, a certain age who grew up in a working-class enclave of their city.

In that image of cyclists, we are also painted as "lone wolves" or as people who ride and hang out with other people like ourselves.  What doesn't occur to them, it seems, is that one reason bike lanes and other facilities have been built is to encourage families to cycle together, whether for fitness, recreation or transportation.  And, in some places--including, not infrequently, here in New York--one does see adults and children riding together in the lanes.

So folks who break bottles, scatter screws and tacks and leave all sorts of other large and sharp objects in bike lanes are endangering, not only those whom they resent, but people who are more like themselves and, perhaps, people who matter to them--namely, their children.

That truth has become all too evident on a bike lane along Australia's Gold Coast.  Not only did the debris cause flat tires that caused people, including children, to push their bikes several miles; the shards of glass, metal and other substances also caused more serious damage to bikes and the bodies of people--including children who were riding with parents or other adults.

In the photo on the right is a box full of objects swept off an Australian bike lane on a recent day.  Photos from the Tweed-Byron Police District, on Facebook.

Whenever I see broken beer bottles or other trash strewn along a bike lane, or anyplace we might ride, I see not only an attempt to damage our bikes or injure us physically.  I also see an attack on a stereotype of what we are.  In other words, I see another kind of bigotry.

Coloring

 Sometimes bicycle safety really is a matter of covering your rear end.

Instagram post by Manish Kamdar