by Dave Mann
August, 2009
As a cyclist, I've been thinking a lot again about cycling as social unrest or cyclist as societal outsider.
This came to me the other day when I sat with the family dog on some asphalt in the shade of a rather nondescript self-storage building along a two lane highway while my wife and kids grabbed some fast food at the restaurant next door. We, the dog and I, sat and waited there because there was no other place to be. It was a common place--the kind of place that you drive by or drive through about a gazillion times a day but that is really invisible unless you get out of your car for some reason. And even when you get out of the car, it's not like you really "see" the place since you're only in that place when you're walking from the car into the building. So, even outside of the car, it's not like you even pay attention to it. It's really more like you're passing through the place instead of being in it so it remains invisible, sort of like the 8th dimension or something. And it occurred to me how much I felt at home in that place--sitting there with my back against a forgotten brick wall and my legs stretched out across broken pavement. which was all marked up with the industrial graffiti of a Dig Safe program.
A flood of memories came back to me--memories of long bike tours. Of changing tires while sitting on steel guardrails. Of sleeping in town parks and rest areas while hoping the tent was well enough hidden from drivers. And of course, of eating other meals sitting in the shade of other invisible buildings along other roads that have started to run together into one single road in my mind.
I'm sure I got thinking about all of this because of spending a Sunday afternoon the weekend before helping a young guy get his bike prepped for his attempt at a cross-country ride. He was so focused on the bike, and I kept trying to tell him that it's so not about the bike. I tried to tell him to relax--that he couldn't do the ride in a day, and that he would have to get comfortable about being somewhere but not really being there because he would really always be on the edge of that place and mostly invisible...except in the eyes of the few who can actually see people in invisible places, like cops, or like the nervous mothers keeping on eye on you while you eat at a park picnic table. And he would nod and say that, yeah, he understood all that but that he was really concerned about keeping his wheels true and his brakes adjusted. It was like we're talking but we're not really talking because we really can't till he's done it.
So, I sat there in the shade with the dog thinking about all the other places like this that I've sat and I looked up and down the road, which was just like any number of two lane highways in the US--it was just lot upon lot of connected car-nothingness. You know...our car dominated roads and the junk properties next to them are really, really ugly. And as I sat there I wondered aloud (the dog, like my kids, thinks I'm nuts) why in the world do I choose to tour on bike when so many of these roadways are the same monotonous and interchangeable strips of sameness that could be anywhere--and that end up looking like nowhere. And, why I do feel entirely at home sitting on the side of car dominated roads, wallowing in car detritus and sitting in the shade of underused asphalt parking lots. Man, I'm a freak. And now that I'm a dad, I worry more about being a freak than I used to. Do my kids see me as a freak? I mean, it's one thing for me to be odd, but is it contagious? And, what do I want to teach them? Do I want them to be accepted? Or to be odd? To conform? Or to stand strong?
Anyway, all this is going through my head and I'm also thinking about the page on British bike racing on Dave Moulton's bike blog, where he discusses how at the turn of the century the common folks used bikes as transportation, and to the horror of the rich folk, the common folks started riding out into the country to tour and to race, which prickled the sensibilities of the rich folks, so the rich folk got the cops to start harassing the cyclists. This was over a 100 years ago.
So this too is going through my mind as I'm sitting there eating a Taco Bell burrito while sitting on the broken asphalt next to this self-storage building, and flicking pebbles at a concrete-filled steel piling, and watching a steady stream of Durangos and Tahoes and such go by, and I got to thinking that here in the US nearly everybody is rich enough to drive a Durango if they want to, and all the rich Durango driving people really don't want bikes on the roads anymore than the British nobility did.
And then we all piled into the minivan and started to drive home. We had driven 25 miles to my daughter's soccer game and grabbed a quick bite to eat at Taco Bell after the game--and that is both perfectly normal and perfectly mucked up beyond all reason. Driving home, the road kept splitting into two roads, moving in and out of phase with each other. One was seen by a rich dad driving a nice, big minivan, and the other by a cyclist. Noble and commoner. Commonplace and freakish.
I wondered if we, my family, could rearrange our life so that minivans and 25-mile drives to soccer games weren't normal--and it's a thought that I dismissed as soon as I had it. What kind of parent would constrain their kid's opportunities to those that can be ridden to by bike? But what kind of collective insanity makes endless car nothingness the norm?
There's a part of me that can't wait till gas prices go up to $5. Maybe then "normal" will tip in another direction, and my kid's dad will be seen as an early adopter and not a freak.
Dave Mann
The Bike Geometry Project
Editor's Note: We recommend André Gorz's "The Social Ideology of the Motorcar" as a companion piece to this article.