A Word from Richard Risemberg for August, 2005

A Taste of Paradise

Part of the reason (or excuse, as my wife would say) was that Los Angeles simply didn't have Critical Mass for a long time. And it's always puzzled me that a city where it almost never rains and where much of the terrain (outside of the Hollywood Hills dividing the city from the valley) is relatively flat, should have so few utility bicyclists in it. Rainy, hilly, cold San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, rugged and nervous Chicago and New York have many more...but LA is the kingdom of the car, after all....

Another part is that the Critical Mass rides, once they began to appear, inevitably began at 5:30 in the afternoon--while I am still at the office. But that appears to have changed. And I should have realized that, like anything else in LA, they wouldn't start on time.

So last night I left the office at 6, saddled up the little Bridgestone, and headed down to Wilshire and Western to join the crowd.

The ride, which is not formally organized in any way, meets at the Metro station there, and by the time I arrived there were already forty or fifty riders of all sorts...in fact, there was an exhilarating diversity, from chubby tattoed dykes on beach cruisers to trackbike fanatics built like Greek gods; there were commuter types, dreadlocked hipsters of all colors, shaggy goths, twentysomethings in tight jeans, and a couple of old farts (of whom yours truly was one). Clothing ranged from spandex to hiphop, and bikes ranged from fixed-gear featherweights to flashy road bikes, to converted mountain bikes, to touring bikes, to English three-speeds, to folders, with some machines looking as though they had been assembled by a poverty-stricken cycling Frankenstein using a hammer and a pipe wrench. A lot of the folks knew each other, of course, and I soon enough ended up in conversations with a few of them.

Ride time was six, or six-thirty, depending on rumor; so promptly at seven one of the disorganizers shouted, "Saddle Up!," and eventually we all did. No one was quite sure where we were going, so we headed off in the general direction, and found ourselves going west on Wilshire.

I found it amusing that most of this particular ride wound through my home neighborhood, in fact passing a couple of blocks from the apartment. So I was on very familiar streets--Hancock Park, Miracle Mile, Third Street Village, Pan Pacific Park and the Grove, La Cienega, and finally Melrose Avenue, from which I peeled off for the short ride home, as I was hungry and had brought no money. Boulevards and residential streets, all very familiar streets--and yet completely unfamiliar on this ride.

Because, you see, it was a real Critical Mass--there must have been over a hundred of us, and we took over the streets--even the main boulevards. We didn't just take the lanes, we took all the lanes in our direction, and held back traffic at intersections while the entire group rode through. And the streets were tranquil and quiet! Streets that I know as tunnels of harsh noise and arrogant metal became gentle gray paradises full of camaraderie and musical motion. People looked up from the cafés at the sudden silence, and smiled or cheered at the passage of the motley mob. Almost no motorists honked in anger, though drivers going the other way beeped approval and flashed peace signs out their windows.

It was a taste of what real life could be like, if we would permit it; if we would drive the car off the streets and build a new and loving world around bicycles, walking, and Metros. If was sweet and pleasant, and it was joyous.

It was a taste of the beautiful future, and I'll be back.

Richard Risemberg
Photo of the author by G. S. Morey

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