Biking Winberry

Peggy got her new bike yesterday, and we biked up Winberry Mountain today. Winberry is not a prestigious peak, but after three miles of a continuous 20% grade, we found it adequate, and our bikes found it more than adequate. Bikes, we’ve discovered, dislike hills, and despise mountains. I cannot say why—although I have certainly wondered. If a bike were a car or even a motorcycle, I could understand a certain amount of antipathy, but their riders are their motors. My best guess is that they are afraid of heights, because the steeper the slope, the more frozen—as with fear—their pedals become, and the greater the determination of their handlebars to go in any direction but up. And if the road is tilted to the side—as was today’s road—their back tires evince an appalling determination to slide off the gravel and down the mountain, leaving the front tire and the rider to carry on as best they can.

We—Peggy and I—are weary tonight. Her thighs are cramping, and my knee hurts more than a little, but not so much that I am screaming and writhing, at least not noticeably. Upon returning home, we exchanged our new bikes for our old ones, and rode to the U of O to hear a presentation entitled Amphibians of the Northern Oregon Cascades. Peggy found this final cycling insult galling to her thighs, and the fact that she was nearly run down by a speeding woman at an intersection did not improve her outlook. The driver apologized profusely, cried, offered us money, apologized profusely again, hugged Peggy, apologized profusely a third and a fourth time, hugged Peggy a second time, and walked away trembling. Peggy was also upset, but the driver’s emotions were so intense that Peggy found it necessary to comfort the very person whose bumper had just brushed her fender. I was not sure at first but what the driver was going to leave the scene, so I wrote her tag number on my palm. She saw me do this, and it could explain her apologetic reaction.

The dogs accompanied us easily on the trip up Winberry, but the trip back being downhill, Bonnie (who is now nine) was especially fatigued despite numerous stops. I really don’t know how to reconcile the dogs’ needs with ours. The most isolated roads near Eugene are in the Willamette National Forest (a tract the size of New Jersey), and they are all mountainous. This means that finding roads and trails that are both isolated and doable is all but impossible. I study topo maps, not to find a lot of places we can all comfortably go, but simply to find a few places.

I was surprised by Peggy’s considerable speed coming down Winberry since she was so cautious on her old Raleigh. In places, the gravel was loose and the road a washboard. There were also curves, low-hanging limbs, winter storm debris, and potholes. I enjoy the challenge of such an environment, yet I lack the experience to know my limits. Peggy and I later spoke of numerous moments when our back wheels were no longer following our front, and they were not comforting moments. There were even times when I was bouncing so rapidly that I had trouble focusing upon what was in front of me.

My biggest fear of bicycling (in town or in the woods) is that I won’t see something coming. Just last night, I ran up onto a curb that I didn’t see. Luckily, it was rounded at the top so I was able to stay upright, but barely. When I consider how many close calls we have had on bicycles, I almost wonder if we should ride them. Since I can no longer hike, and Peggy’s knees aren’t holding up so well either, the answer is not difficult.

Virginia Tech

If 32 Americans were killed in Iraq, how many hours of news coverage would they get? Or if 132 were killed in car wrecks during prom week? Without the media to tell us, we wouldn’t know what was important.

I heard of the Virginia Tech shootings over Fox News while I waited in the service lounge of the local Chevy dealership. I heard of it, and heard of it, and heard of it; for three and one half hours, I heard of it. In the background, Barry Manilow sang romantic music, and the grill of a $66,000 Cadillac truck reflected a harsh fluorescent glow against the gray day that drooped beyond the floor to ceiling windows. Occasionally, I would take a walk among the acres of cars. Battleship-size SUVs are not a thing of the past, I thought, as I noted the twenty inch tires on Tahoes and Escalades.

Fox had nothing new or remotely reliable to show or report, yet it couldn’t keep from showing and reporting, with split screen coverage no less. Every few minutes, the same police dogs sniffed the same spot of grass on one side of the screen while the same photographers photographed the same other photographers on the other. The announcer interviewed a student over the telephone. “Like, me and my roommate heard that the killer chained the doors,” she reported dutifully over a bad connection. “Did I understand you to say that the killer chained the doors?” the announcer asked in what I took to be mock horror. “Well, like, that’s what the man on the TV said.”

The “fair and impartial” network decided early on that Virginia Tech was to blame for not closing the campus after the first shootings, and every question was framed to prove it. The day dragged on, and I wondered why I didn’t care more. I felt bored in advance by the coming days of eulogies, analyses, and blame; and I wanted to go home. Beyond that, my thoughts were as lifeless as the machines by which I was surrounded, any one of which cost more than most people in the Third World earn in a lifetime of making things for Americans. A dozen other customers watched the flat-screen TV alongside me, and no one said anything. No one looked like they felt anything. Maybe they too just wanted to go home.

The dealership had a café, and outside the café there stood a fountain that kept throwing water back into the rainy skies, but the rain just kept on falling, and falling, and falling. I wished I had a new lover. A new lover would make me feel alive. A new lover would make me feel that something mattered. A new lover would give me a new illusion, and a new illusion would devour my thoughts, at least until she wasn’t new anymore.

I had wine for supper tonight, and I will blame what I just wrote on it, because the responsibility simply cannot be my own. The shooter at Virginia Tech—was he responsible? All the explanations we are likely to hear will be either dismissive or excusatory. They will prove that he was crazy or evil, or they will prove that society is crazy or evil, but that’s as far as they will go, and it’s not very far. Maybe we don’t really want to understand him because “…if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares also into you.” Surely, the shooter at Virginia Tech stared into the abyss for an awfully long time.

Don't come unless you're whole-hog enthusiastic

I just sent a letter about city priorities to the Register Guard. If it is printed, my name will be mud in the bicycle activist community just as it is already mud in the peace activist community. Most groups prefer no support at all to support that is qualified or ambivalent. This makes me a marginal member, at best, in every group I join. I am marginal in my lodges, because I do not believe in a personal god. I am marginal in my mineral club, because I have no interest in lapidary. I am marginal in the butterfly society that I recently started attending, because I am more interested in plants.

One of the things I valued about the anti-tax protest was that Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians, all came together in harmony to gather signatures, and no one thought it necessary to discuss our differences. I think it safe to say that we even delighted in the fact that our differences didn’t matter. I only wish I could feel that way in other groups. What I have often found—with cause-oriented groups especially—is that, because many of the members think the same about a variety of other issues, they don’t realize how exclusionary they are. Liberal groups are worse about this because people are blindest to their failings in areas they pride themselves on most, areas such as tolerance and openness.

Ralph and Rhonda

We went dirt biking yesterday—really and truly sliding through diarrhea-like mud and flying down steep and curvy hills, all while dodging stumps, roots, and rocks. The dogs thought our new hobby grand: lots of inviting mud puddles, water to drink whenever they pleased, and a speed suited to canine legs. We discovered the trail entirely by accident while biking logging roads. Someone had even installed ramps on the curves, so bikes could round them really fast. Not that Peggy and I rounded them really fast. No, not us. We walked them really slow, because we don’t have mud tires on our bikes. We have all-terrain tires, and all-terrain tires are not really meant for ALL terrains, and they turn to squirrels in mud. One minute they’re gliding along nicely, and the next minute they’re either lying down for a nap, or sliding sideways to the direction of travel.

We discussed these traits—Peggy and I—and we determined that we did not like them. They are thrilling traits, to be sure, but we agreed that it is better to have at least some idea of what one’s bike is about to do. Although nothing in life is guaranteed, even a vague notion about ones future is superior to no notion at all.

Because Peggy’s new bike is on order, she was on her Raleigh commuter with its two-inch tires. Having christened my new bike Rhonda, I determined that Peggy’s bike needed a name too, so I named him Ralph. Peggy liked the name Ralph, pointing out that since we had B names for out last four pets—Bonnie, Baxter, Becky, Buster, it is only fitting that we have R names for our bikes. That way, we can tell our dogs from our bicycles without looking at their undersides. Inspired and uplifted (although more the former than the latter) by her sentiment, I named my other bike—the one that was home in the garage—Ramon; and Peggy named her other bike—the one that is on order—Rufus. I thought Rufus was too bookish a name for a mud bike. I thought Rufus sounded more like a sedentary pipe smoker in loungewear, and I generously offered to donate the name Ramon to her for her bike, but she was obstinate as usual. On my gloomier days, I suspect that the woman lacks good sense as evidenced by the fact that she so often disagrees with me.

Ralph cost $400, yet he performed better on mud than Rhonda who cost $1,700. I was naturally perplexed—and even a little put out—by this, and I began thrashing around in my mind for a comforting explanation. Ralph is heavier by ten pounds, I told myself, so maybe his greater weight made for greater stability. That sounded plausible, but I could hardly stop with one theory lest it turn out to be wrong, and leave me with no theory at all.

My next theory was that Ralph’s 26-inch diameter wheels are more stable than Rhonda’s 20-inch wheels. I didn’t like that theory much, because I could see no upside to it if it were true. The next thing that came to mind was that Ralph is a boy, and Rhonda is a girl. No that couldn’t be it, not in our enlightened age. If women firepersons are the equal of men firepersons, then women bicycles should be equally equal to men bicycles.

This left me with but one possibility: Peggy is a better biker than I, at least in the mud. I liked this explanation best of all, because it was the only one subject to change. When a person has spent a lot of money for a bike, and said bike does not perform as well as another bike that costs a quarter as much, any explanation that excuses the bike is preferable to any explanation that blames the bike.