Reason #15 why it's better to be on a bike than in a car

I heard them about ten or fifteen seconds before I saw them: They let out two or three mournful shrieks, though at first they were concealed behind a local stand of trees. Two red-tailed hawks, gliding maybe a hundred feet above me.

They were keeping roughly opposite one another in the same lazy circle, about fifteen or twenty feet across, as it slowly drifted east to west above me.

Five-fifteen pm – with last weekend's time change, that puts it about two hours before sunset around here. So it's really the same story everywhere, I suppose: they're wrapping up the day, on the commute home (if it's the same pair that's been around for several years, they nest near an overpass about half a mile from here) and just looking for some take-out for dinner. Some evenings you just don't feel like cooking, you know?

A running joke among my condo neighbors is that when we feed the birds and squirrels we're just fattening them up for the hawks. That may be why I've taken to feeding the crows (who, from their point of view, have taken to training me to feed them when they give the right mid-morning call): I'm sure a crow would lose a street fight with a hawk, but they're too smart to get caught, and anyway the hawks would probably prefer something a little more epicurean than crow. Something tasty and delicate like a mourning dove, many of which have moved back into the neighborhood in the last few weeks and are – and I mean this in the nicest way – among the dumbest and most target-worthy creatures in North America.

And I'd never have known the hawks were there if I'd been in a car.

Good news everyone! Another application of the principles of free markets

This week, Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy wondered aloud if charging a driver $500 to run over a bicyclist might be a fair price:

It’s a $500 fine for a motorist to hit a bicyclist in the District, but some behaviors are so egregious that some drivers might think it’s worth paying the fine.

Milloy also longs for the good old days when DC bicyclists were mostly black kids so cops would feel freer to come down hard on them:

I recall in the not-so-distant past when the city’s bikers weren’t newly arrived, mostly white millennials but black juveniles whom D.C. police frequently stopped — at least in neighborhoods that were being gentrified. Stopped for riding on sidewalks. Stopped for riding in parking lots.

Hat-tip to djw at LG&M for noting both Milloy's sleazy logic and his thinly-disguised class anger. And while perhaps Milloy isn't responsible for the headline of his column, it's a bit rich to see an opinion writer, suggesting that it might be a good idea to declare open season on cyclists, calling his targets "bullies." It really does indicate that the term might be reaching the end of its usefulness.

And a tip of the bike helmet to Atrios, for digging deeper into this smug creep's record, including his disturbing habit of talking about his car in a manner that makes you want to avert your gaze.

And credit back once again to djw at LG&M again for demonstrating the p3 theory that it's just as easy to crowdsource many big-foot bloggers like Atrios as it is to follow their high-noise/low-signal blogs until they post something good.

And this happened this week

My training buddy from Cycle Oregon 2005 left me this message:

Wow, the miles you have traveled! I just pinned these miles to map (just to see how it feels). You could have biked to Nova Scotia, then NY, all through the south to Florida, then down Guadalajara, and made your way towards Brazil! AMAZING!!!!!! Bicycles dreams are the best and not bad for the heart too

Brazil?

Hm. . . .

Saturday afternoon tunes: Their fathers' magic carpet made of steel

So I'm riding home last night and traffic was stopped at a grade crossing because a locomotive was switching around about eight or ten freight cars, all designed to carry plywood from the mills, although most were empty.

The bike lane gets a lot closer to the tracks than the street traffic gets (whether that's because we're assumed to have better judgment or because we're assumed to be more expendable, I prefer not to guess). So I was able to chat for a moment with the fellow on foot by the track switch, who was in radio contact with the locomotive. The last car slowly cleared the intersection, and we nodded good night to each other. As a parting shot, I said, You know, I've wanted your job since I was a kid.

He grinned and said, I can't believe I got this job.

“City of New Orleans” has been covered by just about everyone – most famously by Arlo and Willie. But I still like hearing Steve Goodman, who wrote the song in 1971, perform it.

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.

Erratum

Last Wednesday I was grousing about having broken the Presta valve tip on my front wheel. It was, I said, the first time that had happened since I did Cycle Oregon in 2005.

As it turns out, the last time I broke the tip on a Presta valve was November 2009.

p3 regrets the error.

A ticking bomb of bicycle maintenance

Argh.

This morning as I finished airing up the tires on my bike, the little lock nut on my front-wheel Presta valve broke off the stem.

That means it will hold its pressure for now, the same as an undamaged valve, but as the tire gradually and inevitably loses pressure over the next few weeks, I'm not going to be able to re-inflate it. The next time it gets soft I'll have to replace the inner tube.

Not the end of the world, but what a pain. The last time this happened it was the night before Cycle Oregon.

Seven years ago at p3: Sour crepes

Yup, that's how long this has been going on:

So Lance has retired from the Tour, but they're going to continue to pursue him. I suppose we can all be grateful they only think he took performance drugs; imagine if they thought he'd stolen a loaf of bread.

To which, this week, I can only add:

Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do.

You can look it up.

The unforgiving minute: Top three painful ironies in Oregon cycling

1. Getting chased to the curb by a car with a Coexist bumper sticker.

2. Getting chased to the curb by a car with a Baby on Board sign in the window.

3. Getting chased to the curb by a car with Oregon Share the Road plates.

Minute's up.

I don't love Portland because they do things like this -- I love Portland because they even think of doing things like this

(Updated below.)


Bike Portland passes along the news:

As part of the public art planned along their Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail project, TriMet is considering something quite interesting for the new Willamette River Bridge — a "sonic bike path." […]

The "sonic bike path" concept is still in its early stages, but at this point, the idea is to create a series of grooves on a 150 foot section of the bikeway on each end of the bridge. The grooves would be placed in such a frequency and depth that a melody would be emitted as bicycle tires rolled over them. As for the song, the artists are considering Simon and Garfunkel's "Feelin' Groovy."

The proposed sonic path would include an opt-out lane (naturally; this is Portland) for people who don't want 60s folk-rock as part of their alt-transit experience. And apart from its intrinsic Keep-Portland-Weird factor it would function as a heads-up to cyclists that the bridge was ending and they are about to be dropped down a ramp into urban traffic patterns again.

Portland: Out-"Portlandia"-ing "Portlandia."

Update (October 2011): Sigh.

Treading that fine line between hope and dispair

The return of the rainy season brings an extra hazard for bicycles: Sharp debris from the roadway may cling to the wet tire for a couple of revolutions, giving little bits more than one chance to cause trouble.

This morning at about 6.30am I picked up a piece of glass a little smaller than a paper match-head in my rear tire, and that was enough to bring the commute process to a near-standstill.

I should explain, though, it was a Continental Ultra Gator Skin tire, purchased in August 2007, and it had about 4700 miles on it, which ain't shabby but is also past the recommended usage time. (CUGSs are almost too good; I just about never get a flat, so I don't carry my patch kit with me like I should. Tsk.)

Come to kindly terms with your ass, for it beareth you

This is actually a bicycle story, so stay with it; but first:

Long before the "Idiot’s Guide" (to everything) series became a license to print money, there was the original idiot’s guide: How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot. First published in 1969 and still chugging along over four decades later (the 19th edition is out there, and the book has outlived both author John Muir and illustrator Peter Aschwanden, to say nothing of air-cooled VWs), the Idiot’s Guide (air-cooled VW owners never call it anything else) offers this pithy adage from olden times:

Come to kindly terms with your ass, for it beareth you.

Muir’s point -- in those pre-Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance days -- was that, if you’re going to depend on a vehicle (especially a VW), you’d probably better try and understand it, at least a little.

Tat tvam asi -- Thou art that -- after all.

(Some VW engineering purists argued that Muir’s advice, steeped as it was in hippie quintessence, could tend a little too much toward the improvisational, the approximated, and the MacGyver-esque, sometimes recommending techniques that would get your bug or bus back on the road in the short term but at the risk of harm to its well-being sometime down the road. YMMV.)

I mention that to prepare the ground for this observation:

In what were quite possibly the last warm sunny days in these parts until next spring, a lot of drivers seemed to peer through their windshield at the bright, multi-colored autumnal terrain in front of them this week and suddenly realize that they had no interest -- none whatsoever -- in looking at a cyclist’s backside in front of them, even if only for the next 40 or 50 feet in a parking lot. During those three warm and sunny days, I had more drivers try to pass me inappropriately – oh hell, let’s say it: dangerously and usually illegally, in intersections, on single-lane streets, and for no apparent reason other than to see me in their rear-view mirror rather than through their windshield -- than I’ve experienced in quite a while.

I can’t say what terms they were on with their own asses, but they certainly weren’t coming to kindly terms with mine.

After some thought, I decided it might be the motorist’s version of raging against the dying of the light.

Then I thought about it some more, and began to wonder if -- perhaps -- their problem wasn’t so much with the presence of bicyclist qua bicyclist within the horizon of their sensorium, but rather with the ass that beareth me specifically.

To be painfully candid, here was the bicycle saddle I was riding on (click to enlarge -- if you dare):

It’s over 6 years old, and had beareth-ed me for over 10,000 miles, and although I hated to face facts, there's no denying it’s been falling apart for over a year. At first I resisted the idea of replacing such a fundamental interface with my beloved ride, and I didn't feel much better about mending it with duct tape and whatnot. And then I decided that its resulting theft-deterrent ugliness might be a net plus. But the rainy season is gradually asserting itself again in these parts, and as a result the exposed padding and old shop rags inside the thing were starting to exude the funk of old sweat socks, making it arguably an assault upon both the eyes and the nose of the fastidious driver.

Who knows: If I saw that thing in front of me, maybe I’d try to run it off the road myself, simply as a gesture against urban blight.

Well, anyway. What with one thing and another I found myself in my local Bike 'n' Hike (a completely gratuitous plug for my one true bike shop) on other business yesterday, and there, hanging on the wall rack, quietly humming "Tat Tvam Asi . . . Tat Tvam Asi . . . " at me, was my new bicycle saddle, although I didn't immediately recognize it as such.

Really, it's the same specs as the old one, with the original manufacturer’s WBT brand on it this time rather than the bike manufacturer’s (Giant) -- and at a surprisingly decent price. To get from seeing it to grokking it to paying for it was the work of a moment, and after installing and road-testing it I discovered another benefit: Six years of beareth-ing my ass had slowly but inexorably pounded almost all the cushion out of the old saddle. The new one is much, much kindlier where it counts (as the original probably was, back in the day).

That left only the question of what to do with the old saddle. After some discussion at the bike shop, the consensus was to put it in the garden to keep crows away.

One last related item: In Ireland, ”iron donkey” is slang for bicycle (a completely gratuitous plug for the best bike tour I ever took).

10/21/10 3:19pm PT

[Updated below.]

If I didn't have thumbs, the equivalent to this event would have occurred in early November 2009, when I hit 7999.9, but no one would have known because I couldn't have taken the picture with my phone. [Think about it.]


[Update: Earlier stories about my bike computer are here and here.]

Divine right and the four-way stop

(Updated below.)

The route of my morning commute for the last couple of weeks had four traffic lights and one four-way stop.

Two of the signals have sensors in the auto lane, but they don’t detect bicycles. One has a sensor in the bike lane, but it apparently doesn’t sense bicycles either, for reasons of its own. (I’m thinking about experimenting along these lines.) One has a sensor mounted on the light boom over the intersection, and it always seems to notice me. Ironically, it’s also the only intersection with easy access to the pedestrian-crossing button.

In all four cases my street is the less-busy cross-street, and the system seems to prefer giving the major street much more time on the green light. (Two of the intersections are among the most high-traffic spots in the county, I’ve been told.) This makes the cars around me impatient too (it's morning commute time, remember), and when they act on their impatience things can get difficult. As rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke once wrote, whether the pitcher hits the rock or the rock hits the pitcher, it’s bad news for the pitcher.^*

Clocking it a few times and doing some quick mental arithmetic (you know me), I discovered that something like a quarter to a third of the whole commute time was spent at those lights.

But the risks and annoyance at these intersections are as nothing compared to that single four-way stop. It’s at the crossing of two wide, straight streets, no trees, no parked cars, and a well-marked bike lane. To the unschooled eye, it’s the intersection that seems best-designed for bike and auto traffic sharing. It’s also the intersection I fear most.

This intersection is of considerable theological significance, not unlike the location of the Garden of Eden, Noah’s ark, or the ark of the Covenant -- the only difference being that this intersection is on Google Maps but those other three, as far as I know, aren’t.

The significance is this: This is the intersection, alone among all the intersections in all of Creation, where God Himself sends those drivers He specifically wants to go through the intersection first.

The drivers all know they are among the elect whom the Divine Hand has placed there to enter the intersection first -- boy, do they know it. They also fully understand that it would be second-guessing Divine Will to use their turn signals. That might be interpreted as something less than perfect belief in their own exalted status as God’s Chosen Drivers. It would be like Noah taking out flood insurance. 

Cyclists, as children of a lesser god, enter that intersection at their peril. Many is the time I’ve stopped in the bike lane, put both feet flat on the ground, and waved the motorists through. Occasionally the driver seems to hesitate -- politeness? a crisis of faith? -- and I have to make it clear by pantomime that I’m perfectly prepared to sell the bike right there and go the rest of the way on foot rather than give them a clean shot at me by rolling out there in front of them.

^*Long time p3 correspondent Doctor Beyond -- who was reading p3 before Paul Krugman made reading p3 cool -- did the checking and found that the pitcher/rock line is actually from "The Man of La Mancha." I was certain it was Burke, so when I did my Google check, I left "burke" in among the keywords and never found it. But I ran with it anyway, figuring that Burke was just too obscure for Google. (Try finding mention of his "A Definition of Man" online sometime.) DB was pretty sure it was MoLM even before the search, just from listening to the cast album. Out-flanked on show tunes -- damn!

Sun and moon

"The first day of the dwarves' New Year is as all should know the first day of the last moon of Autumn on the threshold of Winter. We still call it Durin's Day when the last moon of Autumn and the sun are in the sky together. But this will not help us much, I fear, for it passes our skill in these days to guess when such a time will come again."

The Hobbit

Durin’s Day would have landed somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas on our calendar; I’m not sure what the Dwarves’ calendar called the same day at the end of summer, but arrived here on Thursday morning, and it was absolutely beautiful.

Riding down 5th Street in the crisp, clear air at about 7am, the sun was up over Mt. Hood behind me; and there, straight ahead of me, at about the same elevation in the western sky, was a beautiful full moon, the last full moon before fall begins. It was as white and perfectly etched as the snowcap on Mt. Hood.

Next will come Harvest moon and Hunter's Moon.

An extra treat: That night, at about 9pm, I was riding downtown (in Northwest) and there was the full moon again, back in the lower eastern sky, just as beautiful as it had been 14 hours before.

Saturday morning toons: In the village, the quiet village

If you're looking for me this afternoon, I'll be selling tokens at the Tour de Fat down at Waterfront Park. My shift starts at 1:30pm.

It's a great annual fundraiser for the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, so by all means -- stop by and say hi.

And speaking of tokens:

Did I mention that Oregon has really strong freedom of speech laws?

And those laws make bizarrely awesome things like this possible:

An estimated 13,000 take part in Portland's Naked Bike Ride

Congratulations Portland! Your penchant for pedaling pantless has set records once again. Estimates from last night's World Naked Bike Ride put the number of riders at 11,000-13,000 people*. Wow. I think that would be the largest ride of its kind the world has ever seen.

And those same laws, bless 'em, also protect scolds whose biggest fear is that someone, somewhere, is right this minute having harmless fun they wouldn't approve of:

Portland's Naked Bike Ride: Full Frontal Rude-ity

I see by pictures on the web here that some of the 2010 Portland Naked Bike Ride occurred in the nighttime. But some of it happened in the day time--in front of thousands of people gathered at Saturday Market, along 33rd Avenue by a busy Grant (High School) Park and undoubtedly many other places according to emailers and callers to the Victoria Taft Show.

The word there that gives it all away, of course, is "undoubtedly."

Have to say I'm not really interested in riding naked myself, but I figure that the day the law says I can't, that's the day the terrorists have finally won.

Ah, Oregon, my Oregon.

Life's little victories*

(^*Acknowledgment to the works of Keith Knight.)

To put things on the table, let me first confess that I'm a bit of a bike nerd. And when I first started riding again, several years ago, I found that it was easier to get back into shape if I got an odometer/computer and logged my data on a spreadsheet. (Hence "bike nerd" rather than, say, "bike enthusiast.") The counting rituals and number games were motivators. The same was true when it came time to get ready for my first Cycle Oregon a few years later. It's just the way I'm wired. Deal with it. I have to.

My Cat Eye cordless FR7CL has gotten on in years; and the once-waterproof seal around its control button started letting a little moisture in during the rain (which has been pretty much all the time around here lately). So I've gotten into the habit of unclipping it from the handlebars and pocketing it when I lock up the bike outside.

At some point yesterday morning I realized that I hadn't replaced it on the holder, and it wasn't in my pocket. I rode back to the coffee shop (where DLers Carla and Roy and I had our traditional Friday morning sit-down). It wasn't under the table where I'd been sitting. It hadn't been turned in at the counter. So I began backtracking -- where else had I been that morning? No luck. Even went to the place I'd been the evening before, after convincing myself that perhaps I wasn't sure I'd put the computer back on the bike at the end of the night. Nada.

(I should mention that, since I log all my stats regularly anyway, I would only be out the replacement cost, the ten minutes it would take to install and set up the new model, and -- here was the painful part -- the inescapable knowledge that the logs would now be wrong because the time spent backtracking couldn't have been recorded. See above, re: "bike nerd.")

By the end of the day I had convinced myself that I was out of luck. I'd even gone around to the local bike shops to start pricing a replacement. But on the way home it began to nettle me: It was gone, yet it wasn't anyplace I had been. It would be of no use to anyone who didn't happen to have the mounting hardware, sending unit, and spoke magnet it needed to work. A magpie might have carried it away, but otherwise . . . ?

Sherlock Holmes famously said:

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

But Dirk Gently, Douglas Adams' holistic detective character, raised a convincing objection to Holmes' maxim:

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.

Explaining the improbable often requires a concatenation of several statistically unlikely events to occur, while solving an impossible problem may simply require one missing piece of information.

I parked myself in a comfortable chair, closed my eyes, did some relaxation exercises -- and realized that I had not lost the computer at those earlier places; I'd had it with me then. Only self-doubt had talked me into considering those other false leads. I had to have lost it at the coffee shop, shortly after which I first noticed it had gone missing. Warm.

If I lost it at the coffee shop (perhaps I accidentally dragged it out of my vest's side-pocket when I reached in for something else), then either it hadn't landed where I looked, or I hadn't looked where it landed. Warmer.

Yesterday was one of the rare mornings when all the tables at the coffee shop were taken when I got there at about 8:30am. Carla had arrived even earlier, so she was sitting in one of the low, padded faux-leather chairs by the front window, laptop steadied on her knees . . . and I had sat back in the matching two-seater. I had forgotten that detail because it was a departure from the routine, and once a table had opened up we colonized it and the routine was restored. And the earlier in the morning it is, the more I am all about the routine.

The shop's padded furniture sits so low, in fact, that your knees would be higher than your pelvis, and your pockets would be tilted back at a spill-encouraging angle. Warmer still.

It was by then about nine o'clock, and the coffee shop would be closed. But I realized two things right away: First, the idea that I'd lost it had been irking me all day, even when I was busy with other things. Second, even though I couldn't test my hypothesis until this morning, I knew last night that it had to be right, and for the first time all day, the irked feeling that had been buzzing around my head like a mosquito disappeared.

This morning, I went directly to the coffee shop, politely asked the person minding his own business in the two-seater to stand up for a moment, and immediately plunged my hand down behind the cushions. It took two or three dives before I found it, down there amid the ancient dust bunnies and other things, older, fouler, and best left unnamed and unimagined, that lurk beneath coffee shop couch cushions. I pulled it up, dusted it off on my shirtsleeve, and held it before my eye like a pearl of great price. The uprooted customer just stared at me like I was a daft conjurer.

As Holmes once explained to Watson in connection with a different case, I knew it was there because it could not be anyplace else.

So I have the computer back, and I not only didn't have to replace it, I recovered it mainly through the exercise of the little gray cells (if I may switch literary-detective allusions). Shame on me for doubting the LGCs in the first place.

As Keith Knight would say, "Yes!" Ah, life's little victories.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to log yesterday morning's numbers, incomplete though they may be. Of course, the log will never be 100% accurate again. But that's a mere detail.

Really. Doesn't bother me in the slightest.

New Year's cycling, Oregon style

Here's how you do it.




Props to Trailhead Coffee Roasters and the Bicycle Transportation Alliance.

Christmas morning, 1962

As I look at this photo this morning, I don't think about how little I miss Midwestern winters. I don't think about those teeth crying out for orthodontia. I don't want to warn him off the red-and-white handlebar streamers (he'll figure that out himself, soon enough.)

I don't even think about that Charlie Brown winter hat.

No, I look across the years at that kid, standing proudly with his new Schwinn, and I want to cry out, "Are you insane? Don't try to ride your bike when the road has a layer of packed snow on it!"

But I might as well try telling him he'd shoot his eye out with that BB gun.

Hope and despair

Saturday, 10:10am: Coming home from Farmer's Market, I realized my front tire was low. This is the tube I bought in a vulnerable moment from The Bike Shop We Do Not Name. First time I'd been in there since a bad experience about 6 years ago. The presta valve has never seated properly on either of my pumps. (Not my fault--the back tire tube seats fine. I consider this evidence that TBSWDNN still has it in for me. It's mutual, guys.)

I fiddled with getting the pump on the damned thing, and the wholly predictable happened: The valve lock nut broke off. As Douglas Adams once wrote of manuscript deadlines, the remaining air in the tire made a pleasant whooshing noise as it went by.


Saturday, 11:00am: After digging around and realizing that it had been so long since I had had a puncture that I couldn't find a spare tube around the place, I walked the bike down to my regular guys, and got a new tube.

There are few things sadder than the sight of a bike with a flat tire. There are few things more encouraging than the faint, resonant hum of newly repressurized tires the moment they first hit the pavement again.