Seán Fitzpatrick
Day 1 (Tuesday, 5 July)
At 0723, I roll out of the driveway, on my way to Center City.
At 0726, I roll out of the driveway, on my way to Center City with my security badge. Well, I didn’t expect the transition from SEPTA to cycle would be seamless.
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My plan is to bike Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I expect I’ll see a few things and learn a few things, but I’m hoping my rides won’t be too interesting. The Chinese wish, “May you live in interesting times,” is not something one says to a friend. “Interesting” was how Pope Leo referred to the Huns and Vandals. Vietnam was interesting. Corporate sexual harassment codes make life interesting.
I’m going for pleasurably routine. Another goal is to pique others’ interest in bike commuting, and I don’t want to scare anyone. This log is not about bikes; I am neither enthusiast nor expert. It is about commuting by bike, and what I see and think while I’m doing it.
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This morning I am taking the routine automobile route into town. I live just off West Chester Pike (Route 3) where it crests the first high ridge West of the city. Because of the elevation, in 1897 the University of Pennsylvania opened an astronomical observatory here on a farm. The observatory moved in 1947; that part of Highland Park is still known as Observatory Hill. On West Chester Pike, the grade down the face of the ridge is more than a half-mile long. At the foot of the grade, I pass the SEPTA Terminal in Upper Darby’s 69th St. shopping district. Then Route 3 squeezes through the permanent construction under the Market St. line and down Chestnut. Traffic is heavy, and all down Chestnut buses roar past, then block the lane at the next intersection. This seems incompatible with the spirit of the whole enterprise.
I get to 19th St. at 0809, about the same time it takes by bus and subway.
Day 2 (Thursday 8 July)
It’s a gorgeous day with low temperature and humidity; more like September than July.
At West Chester Pike and Bywood, where the trolley tracks come out of the terminal, I pass stopped cars and start to run the red light. Then I notice the police car stopped on Bywood on the other side of the tracks. I decide to keep going. As the Jesuits taught us, sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Anyway, I’m on a bike and the rules are different for me.
OK, that’s not true. Bicyclists just act as though the rules were different. It’s a perfect Proof by Exception of Mom’s favorite Kantian dictum: “So you think the rules don’t apply to you, young man? What would happen if everyone decided to do just what he pleased, young man? We’d have chaos,” Mom would say. So did Mother Superior, my Scout master, Father Headmaster, a couple of college deans, several Army sergeants, and assorted managers.
Fortunately, the cop is not a Kantian.
Actually, bicyclists do abide by the rules for cars and pedestrians; we just interpret them in the light of the Two Wheeler’s Three Laws of Motion: Don’t get hit. Don’t hit anything. Don’t stop.
But make no mistake—Mom and Kant were right. Bicyclists’ ability to flout the letter of the law—OK, flagrantly disdain every scintilla of order and constraint—depends on automobiles’ adherence to the law. We can run red lights and ride between the lanes because we know that drivers wait for the green and keep in their lanes. In turn, we mustn’t do anything that inconveniences or startles a driver. We don’t interrupt their traffic flow; they let us ride to our own rhythms. Viva USA!
Anyway, whenever a driver gives me an opening, I wave my thanks.
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In the evening, as I pump up a steepish slope in Millbourne, a young woman on the sidewalk gives me a big grin and a cheer. She reminds me a bit of my sister Mary, who would cheer cycle commuting as an act of virtue. But it is probably just that Lance Armstrong is already kicking serious Frog derriere in the Tour de France. Sometimes the (middle-aged) amateur athlete can surf that sort of fantastic effusion for a few seconds, reminded by a pretty woman that he is at least from the same planet as the Princes. But Lance Armstrong? Too fantastic even for irony.
Day 3 (Wednesday 14 July)
The morning is not too warm, but thunderstorms are forecast for the afternoon.
Seeking a better bike way than Chestnut, I go down Locust right into the Penn campus and come out on Spruce. There is a stop sign every block, but they don’t slow me as much as stopped buses, and the reduced traffic is a definite plus.
At work, I start to lock my bike to a parking meter and find I have the key ring without the bike key. No problem. I can park the bike inside, in a corner of “the Pit”, where they put all us consultants. Then I find that I also left my security badge at home. I could get a temporary (or “special needs”) badge, but I’m too demoralized. I ride back home. After a quick shower, I take SEPTA back to work. I’ve gotten my exercise, and there are those thunderstorms.
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More background: I haven’t been a regular bike commuter since I lived in Pittsburgh 20 years ago. Ten years before that, I rode my bike to work on the Mall in Washington, D.C. This Summer I am on a consulting gig in a tall building near 19th and Market. I began thinking about biking to work back in March, but the cool wet Spring didn’t give me much chance to ride until June, when I took a few days vacation in Lewes, Delaware. As she often does, my sister, Donna, came over from D.C. to sail and cycle. Donna rides her bike to work regularly, and in the Fall, she goes bicycling in France and Italy. When we visit D.C., her husband and my wife hit the second-hand bookstores, while Donna and I do something like riding up the towpath of the C&O Canal from Georgetown to Great Falls.
It’s a good thing our spouses are compatible.
I enjoyed the errands and excursions around Southern Delaware, but I realized I had a backlog of maintenance. I spent the next two weekends tuning up my bike: clean, adjust, and oil the chain, gears, and brakes; put on new tires, tubes, and brake pads; adjust the spokes; replace a broken derailleur pulley; and finally get that anatomically correct saddle that never seemed justified.
Day 4 (Monday 19 July)
This morning I bear right at the foot of Spruce past the Penn anthropology museum to the South St. bridge. This doesn’t look like a good bike route. There is no room to ride, neither in the street nor on the sidewalk, and the pavement across the river on South is nasty.
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On the way home, I hear screaming as I approach a traffic jam on West Chester Pike. About 150 feet from the Upper Darby #3 firehouse a kid is lying in the middle of the road. Up the road, someone is hurrying from a car into the firehouse. I assume it is the driver who hit the kid. Cars have stopped but no one has gotten out. This is what I meant by “interesting.” Oh, well. Help is on the way but there are things that can be done immediately.
The boy is about five. He clutches his leg to his chest and howls “It hurts. It hurts.” He obviously is having no trouble breathing, so without touching him, I check for bleeding. I tell him he’s going to be fine and the doctor is coming. I ask his name. He keeps howling.
Seconds after I arrive, a young woman runs up, wringing her hands. “Call 9-1-1” she cries to no one in particular. I figure she is a neighbor and give her a sitrep, but I don’t think she hears me or even knows I am talking. She rushes to the boy, practically pushing me aside. “Oh dear, oh dear” she says. “What’s your name, honey? What’s your name?”
Oh. I see. This is all about her, responding to an emergency. If I were a doctor (I’m not, thanks for asking), I’d throw her across the median strip. I settle for ensuring that she doesn’t try to move the boy or shift him around. She can ask him his name as well as I can.
She hasn’t checked to see whether anyone has called 9-1-1, but I see the EMTs trotting over from the firehouse. I move out of the way and secure my bike in the gathering crowd. I stay around for a minute or two to see how the EMTs treat the boy. They don’t touch him, just give him some comforting words and talk on the cell phone with the ambulance—”Possible broken leg”. When I leave, the woman is still at the boy’s side, with the EMTs working around her.
Day 5 (Wednesday 21 July)
I check my tires’ pressure before starting. They are low, so I inflate them to the full rated pressure of 90 psi. When I get to the SEPTA terminal, about a mile and a quarter from home, the front tube is bulging out of the tire. I am midway between two gas stations; I ride back to the one closer to home, reset the inner tube in the tire, and reinflate.
As I turn onto South St. at the Penn field house, the rear tire blows out with a crack like a .22-cal. rifle. I wobble to a stop. Both the tube and the tire are shredded. It’s a mile and a half to work.
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Pushing my bike through the streams of university staff arriving for work doesn’t require as much brain power as riding in traffic, so I have time to reflect that one of the pleasures of Summer in the city is the girls in their Summer dresses. Not entirely inconsistently, I also rue modesty’s decline. As I tell my children, modesty is neither prudery nor low self-esteem (those modern sins against the self). It is the virtue (that is, a good habit) of shielding your inner self from those in society who would use you and conversely of sparing society too raw an expression of your inner self.
Riding SEPTA, especially climbing trolley steps, often brings me eye-to-uh, to whatever, with tattoos that were probably intended to be private. I don’t want to get into the aesthetics and sociology of tattoos, even less the psychosexual quirks behind piercing, but if peek-a-boob clothes are immodest, then exposed body art is doubly so.
Start with the reason people usually give for ostentatious displays of ink and metal: I’m “expressing myself.”
Allow me a snort of demurral. Is your inner self all on the surface? Is it expressed by a death’s head or a naked woman? Whether you force yourself upon the attention of others, to show that you don’t care what they think, or do it out of a need for attention and approval, you surrender a bit of yourself to the vulgar gaze. Either way, you are open to exploitation. Modesty, on the other hand, is marked by reserve, reticence, and integrity. Familiarity and intimacy are gifts granted to the worthy. Make a list of pop-tarts who have given over their lives to the need to take slash-and-turn-on clothing yet farther, such as Spears, Aguillera, Hilton, Lopez, Madonna, &c. Then make a list of celebrities who seem craziest and most soul-damaged.
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When I get to work, I am tentatively thinking that I will come back in the evening to pick up the bike. A friend who lives in Center City suggests getting the flat repaired downtown. At first that seems to be too much hassle, but a few minutes on the Internet finds some repair shops to call. Bicycle Therapy, at South and 22nd, answers the phone. They are terrific. They recommend their favorite pizza and sub shop, and while I eat lunch, they put on a new rear tire and tube and reset the tube in the front tire.
Is that a thousand cuts? Whatever. Interesting, anyway.
Day 6 (Friday 23 July)
The cycling is starting to have a training effect. At the gym (Fencing Academy of Philadelphia) last night, I upped my leg press to 140 lbs. over my weight.
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My cousin tells me that in England, riding between lanes of stopped cars is legal and is called “lane-splitting”.
In Philly, the arrangement is informal, partly because the number of bicycles is relatively low. Drivers tolerate and even accommodate individual cyclists—don’t want all that paperwork. But there are not so many bicycles that drivers as a group cede part of the roadway to bicycles as a concept, the way the sidewalk is for pedestrians (and bikes, when we need it). If the number of bicycles were to reach that point, the informal arrangement would have to change, and the bikes would have to stick to their lanes.
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Several people at work have asked me whether commuting by bike isn’t dangerous. One, a woman, meant West Philly. Another is a twenty-something immigrant from Red China; he means the cars. I find this surprising at first, because bicycles are mass transit in Red China, especially in the provincial city where he grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But then I realize that hardly anyone had a car. Our traffic must look pretty fearsome to him.
Day 7 (Monday 26 July)
Today I start wearing an arm brace. My tennis elbow has flared up and I want to reduce stress on it. I can barely use the Vacuvin to pump out a wine bottle. It isn’t painful to ride, but the tension and bouncing of riding might be aggravating the inflammation or slowing healing.
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Some days as I start down Observatory Hill, I pass a man struggling up the hill. His right arm and leg have been twisted and frozen at the elbow and knee in the way polio does. I breathe my usual prayer of gratitude that I and mine are whole and hearty. In the momentary shadow of fear, the vulnerabilities of speeding virtually naked three feet off the pavement raise their voices. What if my front tire blows? My brakes fail? The front wheel falls off? Down! Down! Get back in there! yells my left brain, while my right brain scans intently for potholes and the flash of brake lights.
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When I leave work at 5:00, the rear tire is flat. I forgot my cell phone today and have to scare up a pay phone to tell Leslie I’ll miss dinner. She says she can give the kids snacks, and we’ll have dinner a bit late. By then, Elizabeth, who is working the early dinner shift over Summer break, will be able to join us.
At Bicycle Therapy, I learn that I had over-inflated the new tire. It is only 70 psi instead of the 90 psi I had assumed. The hot mid-day sun must have completed the job. I tell Brian it’s my fault, but he doesn’t charge me for the tube, just the labor.
Day 8 (Friday 30 July)
Cycling isn’t the best way to scout out lunch spots. Cars are a distraction, and forget about checking menus. I ride around between 15th and 19th a couple of times. Finally, I get a chili dog, a kielbasa, and Coke from a cart and have lunch in Rittenhouse Sq. Carrying the swag is no problem. I just unfold the basket attached to my luggage rack.
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Yesterday the department manager reminded everyone about the dress code. Men had been seen coming through the lobby with their ties loosened. I stay after the staff meeting and ask what this means for me, coming through the lobby in sweaty shorts and tee-shirt. John doesn’t want to say I shouldn’t. The rocket from above was about people doing the dress code wrong, not ignoring it completely. I suggest we wait for someone to complain. I flash out the line about it being easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. He looks startled and then agrees enthusiastically.
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Thinking back to my colleagues’ questions about safety: What do I think is dangerous, besides my own behavior? Trolley tracks. The soles of my feet ache and sweat with anxiety at the thought of my front wheel catching on a rail and turning a graceful, dynamically balanced trajectory into a spastic and distorted tumble. The lips of driveways are equally treacherous. I am careful— conscientious, fanatical, obsessive—about crossing trolley tracks at an obtuse angle. They are the only trammels that beset a bike.
I’ve had a few close calls with cars, but tracks figured in the only time I felt out of control. I was down-shifting and bouncing across two sets of tracks as they turned a corner, when a van pulled away from the curb. I couldn’t get my hands on the brakes, and turning would have lined me up with the tracks. Maybe I yelled. Maybe the driver saw me. In any event, he gunned away before I hit him.
The other dangerous thing is my eyesight. When I glance back over my shoulder, I can’t look through the right section of my trifocals, and my peripheral vision misses the lenses altogether. Cars behind me are blurs or bright glittering headlights. Either way, I have the depth perception of a potato.
Day 9 (Monday 2 August)
Monday! I forget my shoes.
Maybe this is a good time to talk about clothes. The company I’m working for requires business dress, including tie and dress shoes. I ride in tee shirt, shorts, and sneaks. There is no locker room in the building, so I change in the extra-wide, wheel-chair accessible toilet stall. (I am no big fan of the Americans with Disabilities Act, but I am happy to use the wide toilet stalls and curb ramps.) I take a shower before I leave in the morning and do what I can at work with towel and talc.
This morning I forget to put my shoes in the basket. My sneakers are plain white court shoes. No one notices or says anything, and I decide to forget the leather shoes from now on.
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Speaking of curb ramps. In the mid-’70s in Washington, D.C., I took the long, long hill down Massachusetts Ave. from the National Cathedral around the Naval Observatory. Shortly after I started, curbs at intersections all down Mass. Ave. sprouted little bike ramps overnight, so the broad but deserted sidewalk could be used as a bike way. It even made the papers. The urban guerrillas who had spent a busy night with Sakrete were never identified. I used the ramps sometimes, but I preferred to ride through the sluggish traffic.
By the way, when I worked at the National Air & Space Museum back then, there was a locker room where we could shower and dress.
Day 10 (Tuesday 3 August)
The reason I ride Monday-Wednesday-Friday is that I work out and fence on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and it’s more convenient to take SEPTA and drive back into University City at night. Now though, the tennis elbow and tendonitis in my wrist have gotten so bad that I can’t wield a sword effectively, so I’m going to give my arm a rest. Without the bag of weapons and uniform, I can go directly from work to the club (or salle, as fencers call it; even I never considered a Francophobe alternative like “liberty gym”). Now I’ll be able to ride five days a week.
I get to the gym at Race and Lancaster Pike about 5:45. I do footwork drills, exercises to improve my balance, and regular resistance training on the machines. I add some reverse curls to strengthen my forearm, and I use a homemade device, using my fingers or hands to wrap a weighted rope around a piece of broomstick.
I’m on my way a little after 7:00 and get home before sunset.
Day 11 (Wednesday 4 August)
This is my third day in a row. Yesterday my thighs and hips protested as I started out, as though I needed to warm up, but today there are no aches as I start out. Maybe it’s the three ibuprofen I had for breakfast.
Even in the middle of rush hour in the middle of the week, traffic is light. All those people on vacation are missing the balmy air and bright sun.
As I get below 47th St. on Spruce, into the yuppified University City area, I fall in behind a bicycle messenger just setting out for the day. I follow him closely. Maybe I can pick up some tips.
Two things I notice right away. He pedals steadily, and his bike is like mine, a touring frame with drop handlebars and narrow tires, but he has no gears or brakes. As we approach the big intersection at 38th St., he crosses the right lane to the center stripe and maintains his steady pedaling, rather than keeping to the bike lane along the curb. There is construction at the intersection, and the centerline takes him outside a temporary walkway that bulges out from the corner. When I see the walkway, I also shift to the center stripe, feeling very exposed between two-way traffic. But wheee! Instead of tangling with pedestrians in the bike lane, we zip across 38th and start down the long hill through the University of Pennsylvania.
There are no cross streets for 5 blocks, but buses and stopped delivery trucks always congest the right lanes here. Again I follow the messenger onto the center stripe. He is pedaling steadily—no coasting, no braking, no speeding up. I suddenly realize he doesn’t have even a coaster brake. He has to pedal, because his pedals are directly linked to his wheel. At the bottom of the hill, Spruce, South, 34th, and 33rd make a double intersection. The messenger pedals smoothly across both intersections and takes off down South St. Inspired by his example, I skip to the head of the left-turn line at 33rd and follow a truck making the last turn, like a pilot fish coasting next to a shark.
On Chestnut, another messenger on a stripped down bike passes me, and I speed up to stay with him. On the Schuylkill bridge, we are moving as fast as the cars. The messenger leaves the bike lane and moves left to ride the center stripe. I know why he wants to avoid the curb lane. At 24th St. there’s a light: the bike lane disappears, cars make right turns, and the pavement looks as though it was last repaired by Ben Franklin.
A gap between cars gives me an opportunity to get on the center stripe, but I don’t do it the way the messenger did. I cautiously take a position in the right lane, as though I were a car, then move to ride the stripe. Conceptually, I am riding on a stationary road trying to avoid the cars whizzing by. The messenger rides the traffic flow the way a fish swims in a river. The lane he wanted was the “lane” on the centerline between two rows of cars. The entrance to that “lane” was next to the left bumper of the car ahead of him. He just swam through the traffic to the entrance and rolled down the “lane” between the cars.
I pull up beside him when two wide trucks block Chester at 20th. He has sandy whiskers and looks a bit like Kiefer Sutherland in The Three Musketeers.
“You don’t have a free-wheel on that, do you,” I say out of the side of my mouth.
“Nope,” he says.
Then we are off.
Day 12 (Thursday 5 August)
Last night I moved the seat forward an inch, rotated the handle bars back a bit, and slid the brake levers farther up on the bars. I am hoping this will make it more comfortable to lean on the handlebars and also make it easer to grip the extension brake levers that I use for riding in the high position.
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I read an article about John Kerry’s riding his $8,000, custom-fitted, Serotta bicycle. He takes it with him on the campaign plane, but seldom gets away to ride it. If I were into the politics of envy, I might resent that Kerry’s bike cost nearly 100 times what mine did, and that he wears upwards of $200 worth of cycling clothes. But I get to ride and he doesn’t. I also get to wear hiking shorts bought on sale and a give-away tee-shirt. Priceless. Xin lối, John. Sorry ‘bout that.
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As I come down the hill toward 42nd St., a college kid on a trail bike swings onto Spruce and pedals hard up the long hill toward 40th St. This is a challenge. I catch up to him as he slows behind a truck blocking the bike lane at 41st. I swing to the centerline, pass the truck on the left, and zip across the intersection. The kid must have taken it as a challenge, too. As I slow to check the cross traffic at 40th, he passes me. On the flat beyond 40th, a solid line of cars holds me behind him in the bike lane, but as we head down the slope toward 38th, I again lane split past the pedestrians and the cars turning right. I beat him across the broad 38th St. intersection and sail smugly down the hill.
Day 13 (Monday 9 August)
Over the weekend I reduced the backward tilt I had given the handle bars a bit. I also adjusted the spokes to get rid of most of the rims’ side-to-side movement. This allows the brake to be set more closely.
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Last week I would have ridden all five days, but on Friday my mother-in-law invited her in-town daughters and their families to Cirque du Soleil(®) Alegria and dinner in the Italian market. At first, I was a bit put off by the gratuitous grotesquerie. At the beginning—well, it was a bit hard to tell when the show began—some birds waddled out, clucking, nodding their heads, and bumping into each other. They were part of the clown troupe, dressed in American Gothic meets Sergeant Pepper meets Michael Jackson. Although I never really warmed to the birds, I liked the other clowns. They weren’t afraid to do stuff without any laughs to create a time of ordinariness out of which their absurdities could crystallize. Beyond that, the tumblers, aerialists, and contortionists were very satisfying. The music wandered around between the Euro pop and folk-rock genres. It sometimes achieved poignancy. The title song, in particular, evokes things you will never have and don’t know how to ask for. But in the European way, the poignancy often seems to be striving for profundity, an impression confirmed by the lyrics.
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I eat lunch at the sidewalk tables of the Good Day Deli on 20th St. There are bikes of all sorts everywhere. All along Market and throughout Center City, bikes are chained to bike posts, parking meters, street signs, small trees. The Trader Joe’s at 22nd and Market has a bike rack (partly for its employees). My bike leans against the wall next to my table. Locked to a post at the curb is a fancy 18-gear trail bike with the seat on a cantilevered shock absorber instead of a straight post. Across the street is a bike that could be my bike’s twin. It is the same color, has the same brand of brakes and gears, and even has the same rack with a spring-clip and single folding basket. The only difference is that it is labeled Raleigh and mine is Panasonic.
The riders are mostly young, Caucasian with a good portion of Orientals, maybe 70%-80% male. A surprising number wear business casual clothing, but few wear cycling togs. Backpacks are common. The bikers are amazingly quiet. No bells, no whistles. I sometimes give a shout or wordless call to attract drivers’ attention. Once, as I gazed to the right, poised to dash through a break in traffic, a cyclist (a rare black guy) approaching from the left got my attention with a shrill, no-hands whistle. Classy.
In Rittenhouse Sq., I saw a young woman in an office-to-cocktails summer frock finish her lunch and ride off wearing strappy high-heels. Her bike was a shabby suburban-girlhood three-speed, with the old-style handlebars that let you sit up straight; what we mean by “bicycle handle bars.” As I sit at my deli table, an old gentleman in a Panama hat rides slowly down the narrow sidewalk on another old touring bike with a Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub.
Day 14 (Tuesday 10 August )
This morning I leave at 0835, running a bit late. Around 69th St., I start to press and don’t feel like stopping. Part of it is that I’ve gotten the wheels and brakes adjusted so the brakes don’t rub. I feel energetic, and then, as I start down Spruce, I feel a twinge in my knee on the down stroke. It’s not a pain, exactly, just a tightness below the kneecap. I’ve felt it before. Usually it goes away. I keep up the speed, but don’t press on the upgrades. The twinge goes away. West of the University, I blow past two students for the best possible reason—just because I can. I make it to work in 30 minutes.
———
I’ve settled into a new training routine at the salle. Yoga warm-up and stretch. Footwork in front of a mirror. (One of the best fencing practice rooms I have ever seen was the dance studio used by the fencing club at the University of Alabama. Great floor, and mirrors everywhere.) For balance, stand on one foot while swinging and tossing a medicine ball from hand to hand. To make it harder, stand on a squishy pad. Then my usual modest resistance workout with added exercises for the forearms. Yoga stretches to finish and ride home.
Day 15 (Wednesday 11 August )
Yeeah-ha! 26 minutes door-to-door. I’ve found the groove. I’m in the zone. When I pass people, they stay passed. Spruce has a long smooth stretch with a slight downgrade from 61st to 47th. At 61st, a couple of distinctive cars pass me at the light. They pass me again at 47th. I’m not even breathing hard. NPR had a report on Kerry’s stump speech this morning, which closed with Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Good”. It’s been running through my mind; on the down-slopes, I can belt it out pretty well—He could play a guitar just like ringing a bell—but on the up-slopes I need to breathe.
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In the afternoon, the radar shows a mass of thunderstorms between Allentown and Scranton. I’m concerned about another cell a bit North of Havre de Grace; it has a long finger just reaching into Western Chester county. I beat it home by 30 minutes.
Day 16 (Friday 13 August)
Yesterday, rain and thunderstorms were forecast all day, so I didn’t ride. It was sunny at noon, and dry until a late evening shower. Today starts dry. Tropical storm Bonnie is due, but I’m feeling lucky. I ride.
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A friend who used to be a coach at a Main Line college replied to my e-mail about commuting with a description of bicyclists from a cycling magazine of 30 years ago. We are “urban deer,” slipping silently through the noisy city, fleet, agile, alert, and aware. We flit along our own invisible trails, unhindered by One Way signs or traffic signals. Occasionally, like deer at dusk, we cross paths with cars. Oh, they’ll swerve; no one wants to hit a deer, but it does happen.
As I take my usual “lane” across the bridge on Chestnut approaching 24th, a bus’s butt blocks my way. The driver in the right lane makes a space for me to get around. When she comes even with me at the light, she smiles up through her window and says “You be careful”.
Day 17 (Monday 16 August)
Hurricane Charlie blew past over the weekend. It’s a bit rainy when I get up, but the air is clear when it’s time to leave and the forecast is for clearing skies. Even taking it easy, because of the wet roads, I’m at work in just 32 minutes. In addition to my tee-shirt, I wear a cotton pullover against the cool damp air.
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Coming home on Spruce, I get caught in the familiar vicious cycle with a #42 bus. It passes me, then stops at the end of the block. It pulls over just enough to block both the bike lane and the single traffic lane; both I and the passengers end up in the curb lane. I can usually get ahead, but not so much that the bus can’t pass me before the next stop. No-parking zones at each stop are ferociously enforced, but the buses don’t use them to pull out of traffic.
My cousin tells me that some German cities take bus-stop pull-off bays seriously. They are controlled by traffic signals. Drivers have to let the buses merge, so bus drivers are willing to pull out of traffic. Traffic flows and buses run on time.
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My friend who told me about urban deer was a bike commuter in NYC back in the ‘70s,. He lived on East 72nd St., and ranged up and down Broadway from the Bronx to the Village, taking the subway only when the snow was too deep. “Only this week,” he wrote,
I have tuned up my ten-speed and been out on our bucolic rails-to-trails pathway five minutes from our house [outside Baltimore]. Calmly peddling through the glens, listening to the bike’s tic-tic-tic and tires’ crunch of gravel, nodding to fellow cyclists, I had reason to think of my other cycling life. Could any of these Marylanders jump into that slipstream behind a truck? Whack a jaywalker and limp home on the pretzel-twisted rim? Escape a mugging and ride home with heart beating with a combination of fear and elation? Nyah! I don’t think rails to trails brings this out in the local bike fraternity.
Day 18 (Tuesday 17 August)
I bird-dog a messenger through University City. At 34th & Spruce he has to squeeze past a car and protests the obstructed bike lane. Over my shoulder I can hear the driver’s response. I don’t think you usually use the f-word in apologies.
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When I come out at 6:15, my front tire is flat. The tire is fine, but the tube is shredded. I inflated it to the specified 90 psi in the cool of the morning. I guess the heat of afternoon sun caused the air to expand, pushing the bead of the tire away from the rim so a bubble of inner tube could escape. Bang!
The bike shops are closed, and I was planning to go to the gym, anyway. I walk there through the Drew campus and call my wife to pick me up later.
Day 19 (Wednesday 18 August)
Last night I put a patched inner tube in the front tire. At lunch, I ride over to Bicycle Therapy for a new tire and tube. The tech is surprised I don’t want the old tire back. It is brand new and looks OK, but twice it has let the inner tube blow out. B’bye.
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I’ve gotten into the cherry cocky zone, that level of experience just past the first flush of competence, that affects pilots (I’m told) and motorcyclists (as I know from personal experience). I’m taking chances without realizing they are chances. More than over-confidence, it’s that I’m focusing too much on what I am trying to do. A couple of times I have been so focused on where I was going that I didn’t notice the cars that also wanted to go there.
Contributing to the problem is that the sun is in my eyes now during rush hour. Sun glasses make the shadows too dark. When I peer into the shadows for potholes and bumps, I don’t, as the security types say, maintain situational awareness.
And sometimes I take chances that I know are chances.
At the bottom of Spruce, I take 33rd St. across Walnut to Chestnut. At Walnut, a bus blocks the curb lane and a large panel truck is in the next lane. I roll between them, feeling nervous as the sky closes above me. There is very little chance that the drivers know I am there. I have to duck to get my shoulders under their mirrors. They pass me in the next block and again block the road at Chestnut. Without a thought, I go between them again, this time pedaling to keep my speed up. (It is counter-intuitive, but faster is better. You spend less time in the danger zone.) I duck the mirrors, pop out in front of the bus and truck as the light changes, and am around the corner before they start moving. Imagination is the enemy of action.
Day 20 (Friday 20 August)
I love how good bicycle messengers are. There are lots of girl messengers, but relatively few of them ride bikes with no gears or coaster hubs. This morning at the 30th Street post office, I wait at the light with one who does. She is balancing, rocking the bike back and forth. (I have my foot on the ground, since I can only go forward.) To level her pedals, she pops her rear wheel off the ground so it can turn without moving the bike. Well, I’m impressed.
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In the evening, next to West Philadelphia High School, a car sits half out of the parking lane and blocks the bike lane. As I approach in the curb lane, the driver suddenly starts to back toward me. I swerve, and as I squeeze past I bellow “Watch out!”
I am half-a-block away before the driver finds her voice. The words are a bit indistinct, but the rhythm and intonation are clear: Low-high-mid-mid-high-mid. The next-to-last word is clear: “What you doing here, white boy?”
Those are sort of fighting words, and as I fly away, my fight response raises my choler for a moment. In these glancing urban clashes, blacks take advantage of social mores that let them—but not whites— go right to race. The other day I said “no” to a panhandler at the subway exit. He followed me to the corner, cursing and calling me “Cracker”. I was angry enough that I hoped he would get physical. But then I started to laugh at the repeated “Cracker”. I knew Crackers. Crackers were my friends. And I’m no Cracker (suburban white-bread geek, maybe …you got a problem with that?).
That’s where the balance is. When blacks use racial epithets, it’s rude and vulgar, but it can’t really hurt us, whereas whites can be truly insulting. The “black is beautiful” vogue in the ‘70s and the occasional “Irish and Proud” bumper sticker show the difference. The former was hype, unsuccessful propaganda, while the latter is a simple expression of sentiment. The double standard—or unilateral disarmament by whites—may avoid some altercations, but it lets blacks use race to block interaction and reflection. If the driver had yelled without playing the race card, I might have turned back. Maybe she would have apologized. Maybe I would have apologized for approaching in her blind spot. Maybe I should have gone back, anyway, and asked “What the hell does skin color have to do with it?” Maybe it’s just as well that I didn’t.
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There are family stories of bad treatment of the Irish—”no Irish need apply” and so forth; those days are long gone. Eighty years ago my grandfather, who immigrated in 1908, listened to a woman go on about her Mayflower ancestors. When she paused, he said “That’s all very fine, but my family could afford to wait until accommodations were better.”
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All the way home, my front derailleur keeps pushing the chain off the larger sprocket.
Day 21 (Mon 23 August)
The forecast for the whole week is cool and clear.
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The front derailleur still won’t stay in place. On Friday, coming uphill, I compensated with the rear gears. Going in, sloping down to the river, I need the higher gear. I try holding the shift lever in place as I mull over the problem. A spring in the derailleur pulls the derailleur over the low sprocket. The shift lever pulls the derailleur over the larger sprocket, and friction keeps it there against the spring.
So something is slipping that should be sticking. Have I put on too much oil? At a light I look for screws loose on the derailleur. My mental fault analysis works its way up to the shift lever. The lever! As I ride, my fingers feel for the nut that holds the lever on its pin. The nut is loose, practically flopping. What’s more, it’s a wing nut. I finger tighten the nut and shift to high gear. The derailleur stays put.
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Out at lunch, I pass a guy pushing a bike with no gears, like the ones the messengers use. He tells me it is called a fixed-gear or racing hub. He has a neat arrangement. On one side of the rear axle is a sprocket on a racing hub, on the other is a sprocket on a coaster hub. To change hubs, he just pops the quick release and flips the wheel over.
Day 22 (Tues 24 August)
I haven’t mentioned wind. If it is breezy in the morning, the wind is in my face. It will be in my face on the way home, too. Just one of the Bicycle Mysteries. Afternoons, it is almost always windy on the Walnut St. bridge over the Schuylkill.
This morning I fly down Spruce hitting green lights or runnable reds at almost every intersection. As usual, there is a bit of a head wind adding to my wind speed. I can feel energy draining right from my thighs into the air through my fluttering tee-shirt, but I still make it in 30 minutes. Forgot tie. Maybe I can make it up by wearing a tie on casual Friday.
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This evening, at the gym, I raise the leg press to 175 pounds more than my weight. I get home after sunset, which is a half-hour earlier than it was at the beginning of the month.
Day 23 (Wednesday 25 August)
Overcast and cool in the morning. Could use an extra layer. It’s memento mori aestivi, a reminder that there are only another three to six weeks of bike commuting left. By the equinox, according to Weather Underground, the average daily high temperature is less than 75° F. That’s great cycling weather, but it means some days are chilly and mornings and evenings can be uncomfortable.
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I hurry home, expecting to grill steaks. About 55th and Spruce I have about the least dramatic flat you can imagine. The tire just gets softer and softer, and after two blocks I have to start walking. At 69th St., I finally get through the teenage-daughter busy signal to my wife. We aren’t grilling steaks, and dinner is almost ready. Ten minutes later, I’m loading the bike into the minivan.
After dinner, I patch the inner tube, two pinholes an inch apart. In revenge for the telephone tie-up, I consider annoying Katie with my vampire bit: “Lat me introdooz myzelf. I am Kownt Dracoola. May I bite choor nehck? Just two smahl punktcha holes at the bayse af the thhrroat! Your daddy will nevah know!” Katie stopped thinking it was funny when she was eight, but I still enjoy it.
Day 24 (Friday 27 August)
Yesterday morning, I reassembled tire, tube, and wheel and pumped it up. Turned out there were three puncture holes (Kownt dem, THREE!), so I took the subway. I bought an inner tube at lunch and installed it last night.
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As I ride, I often feel and hear the same things…Rubbing or squeaking…The chunk of the chain slipping onto a sprocket or the ineffectual whirring and clanking when I miss the shift…The metallic ticking of a misaligned derailleur…Ripples in the asphalt rattle the bike’s frame and mine, too…Cars rumble up behind me; stereos thump and buzz…The wind shushes past my helmet and ears, cooling the sweat or chilling my temple into an ear ache.
Life is richer for my eyes and ears, much of it to be avoided…There are traffic lights, turn signals, and brake lights to be monitored…Pot-holes lurk in shadows…Broken glass glitters in elongated plumes…I try to make eye contact with merging drivers, often in a side-view mirror…Will that woman peering hopefully for the bus get out of the bike lane? Pedestrians crossing against the light mean I can run the red…In Center City intersections and on Penn’s campus walkways, pedestrians react more decisively to the angle of my front wheel than to head, hand, or verbal signals…I can’t spare the attention for sight-seeing, but unusual costumes and pretty girls get a second flick of the eye…And cars, always cars, and even more important, the moving spaces and gaps between them.
Cars nowadays really don’t smell bad, except for the smoky older bus or oil-burning minivan. As for pollution, I may breathe in more than a passenger, but I breathe it out faster, too. A couple of months ago, sport doctor Gabe Mirkin reported that bicyclists in rush hour urban traffic breathe in more carbon monoxide than car riders do, but have lower blood levels of carbon monoxide.
Meanwhile, people swirl past my nose in an olfactory kaleidoscope…In a residential block, a cesspool stench rises from a sewer drain…Where people cluster at corners and bus stops, I sail through invisible wafts of savory tobacco smoke or perfume and cologne (citrus notes have been popular this Summer)…A diner has burned the breakfast toast…Another fries bacon and sausage…A barbecue’s garbage from last night stinks of sour milk…I rest my foot on the curb at a light and catch a whiff of hot coffee and creamer as my momentary neighbor sips cautiously… Sidewalk carts all smell of LP gas and hot oil, but each mixes its own particular character: spices from China, Vietnam, Lebanon, sesame oil, stir-fried vegetables, steak, onions…I ride without warning, with the suddenness of hitting a wall, into a block of bright floral scents; where a breakfast and lunch cart usually sits, a flower vendor has set up business for the going-home crowd.
Day 28 (Thursday 2 September)
Today I try something to deal with the sun glare. I wear a baseball cap under my helmet. It works. It looks dorky, but it works.
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At the salle, instead of fencing practice bouts, I have concentrated on footwork. I have a bad way during a bout of drifting to the side and stepping off the strip. This is a foul and it’s even cost me bouts. All month I have advanced, retreated, and lunged in different combinations in front of a mirror, trying to see when my feet go out of line and how my body position is throwing me off. I think I have made some improvement. My arm is definitely better. I’m ready to pick up a sword again.
Day 29 (Friday 3 September)
This seems like a good place to end this journal. What with weather and flat tires, this has been my first full week of cycling. I’m just one day short of 30 days between 4th of July and Labor Day.
I’ll keep riding, but the mornings are getting cooler and the days shorter Last night I left the gym about 7:00 and rode up Spruce staring at the setting sun. No more of that. I’m not rigged for night running.
Back in Pittsburgh, I rode through the Winter out of necessity. I had to stay late at the computer center at the University of Pittsburgh. We bought our first computer in 1984 so I could write and run my programs on the university’s mainframe from home and not have to traverse icy streets at night.
That Kaypro 4’84 had a 4-MHz, 8-bit processor, a 300 bps modem (that’s bits, not kilobits), and no hard disk; the inflation-adjusted cost for it and a low-line dot matrix printer was 6.4 times that of my Windows® XP machine and color inkjet printer. If bicycles’ price/performance ratio had changed as much, bikes would have anti-gravity and my legs would have the power output of an F-14. I’d also be paid to ride. O.K., I’m exaggerating, but I’d at least get lunch.
So it’s time to start the transformation from urban deer to SEPTA herd beast. Till next Spring.