Bike Tribes

by Mike Magnuson

  She asks, “What are you studying at school?”

  “Nothing this semester,” he says. “I’m working at a job for a while.”

  “Doing what?”

  “IT stuff. I fix computer networks.”

  “And you ride your bike to work?”

  “Trying to reduce my carbon footprint,” the guy says. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  Michelle says, “Right on!” And she tells him her name and what year she’s in at school and a bunch of other stuff. He says his name is Ned and that he rides 4 miles to work each day and loves the fresh air and the clear head that comes with it. Michelle can’t believe how well they’re clicking.

  After a few more blocks, Michelle has to turn toward campus, which she tells Ned. They both slow a moment and have one of those awkward moments when Ned is probably supposed to ask her for her cell number. He doesn’t.

  He says, “Nice to meet a fellow bike commuter. See you again sometime.”

  Michelle says, “Sure.”

  She watches Ned pedaling away and thinks, Shoot, I’ll bet he already has a girlfriend.

  the Commuter: NED

  Heavy duty lock. If his bike gets stolen, he can’t get to work. Period.

  Helmet has a visor, but he’s not really sure why.

  A few blocks later, Ned feels a liquid blob of molten-rubber shame sinking from his shoulders all the way to his shoes spinning his bike pedals.

  A semester off from school. Biking to work. Telling pretty girls it’s about the carbon footprint. What a load of crap! He picks up his pace to vent frustration, forces his legs down with each stroke, almost with anger, but the frustration passes. It always does when he’s on his bike. His bike is like a two-wheeled happy pill. Besides, what else is he going to do? Ned has no choice but to ride his bike everywhere he goes.

  See, what he couldn’t tell that nice girl is that the reason he’s riding to work and not driving is because his driver’s license has been suspended for a full year because he’s had the profound misfortune of receiving not one but two citations for Operating a Motor Vehicle While Under the Influence—in fact, the same cop arrested him for drinking and driving two Saturday nights in a row! Of all the crappy luck!

  No point in griping about it. He just has to suck it up and live through the suspension, and when it comes to pass that he meets a pretty girl riding a bicycle, when he knows damn well she wants him to ask for her number, he can’t ask for her number because then he would have to explain the OWI situation and the license suspension, and what would she think of him then? She would think he’s a no-account drunk—that’s exactly what she would think.

  But Ned’s not a no-account drunk. He happened to go out drinking two weekends in a row and happened to get nailed both times, but those were freak, isolated incidents.

  Or then again, maybe he was getting out of control with the whole party lifestyle. He’s out of the party life now, for whatever that’s worth, and he has to admit that with each successive week commuting, he feels happier about life in general. He’s lost a few pounds. He’s sleeping better than he has for years. When he’s not riding, he finds himself thinking about his bicycle—the feel of the road and of the sun and of the air faintly whistling through his helmet. And get this: Both days last weekend, for no good reason other than that he thought it would be cool, he went on 3-hour rides on the bike path. And he’s been making increasingly frequent trips to Big Ed’s Cyclery and looking at new bikes.

  Ned can tell you one thing for sure: When he does get his driver’s license back, he’s going to keep on biking. No doubt of it.

  Now he feels a presence near him. It’s Karl pulling alongside. Ned seems to bump into Karl almost every day on the ride to work—a guy in his forties, usually wearing a dress shirt, except on Fridays, which are casual days in Karl’s office. Today, Karl’s wearing the shirt and tie and got the dress pants, and he’s riding a really cool-looking steel bike with fenders and a rack that holds his briefcase.

  Karl says, “I hear there might be rain on the way home.”

  Ned says, “That’s what they’re saying.”

  Funny thing that’s happened since Ned started riding a bicycle everywhere: He’s an expert on the weather now, the kind of person who checks the forecast on the radar obsessively on his computer all day. Every cyclist Ned’s bumped into is the same way—they are all like farmers on two wheels, always jabbering about the weather!

  Ned asks, “Do you ride your bike when you’re not commuting?”

  Karl says, “Sometimes. Not too often, really.”

  “Do you have to ride your bike to work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you have to? Like, do you have no other choice but to ride to work?”

  Karl thinks about this. “I do,” Karl says, “but only because I’ve been riding to work for so many years I would think something was wrong if I didn’t.”

  “That’s cool,” Ned says.

  They roll along and don’t speak for a while, but there is no awkwardness or discomfort.

  Karl says, “Tomorrow and Friday are supposed to be midseventies and sun.”

  “Low temps in the fifties. Could be cold on the way in to work.”

  “Could be,” Karl says.

  Ned smiles. He likes the way bike people talk with each other. He can foresee lots of good things coming from this.

  the Commuter: KARL

  Top-notch touring bike, with fenders, suitcase, and bar-end shifters.

  Facial expression that says, “I am not thinking about my job.”

  Helmet, proof of intelligence.

  Light, just in case something goes wrong on the way home.

  Karl thinks Ned is a good kid.

  When Ned makes his turn, Karl tells the kid to have a great day, then rolls a few more blocks toward where he works, the Pig, which is his secret code name for the insurance company where he’s a statute analyst. He’s been working there for 20 years and has been bicycle commuting—6 miles each way—for almost the entire 20 years. He’s missed some stretches owing to the weather or a broken-down bicycle or the simple wrongheaded desire on occasion to hop in a car and drive to work like everybody else. Still, this commute is an aspect of his life he’s certain he couldn’t live without, if only for the complete solitude from the world of professional hassles: no phone calls, no e-mails, plenty of fresh air and happiness.

  He rolls into the company’s parking lot at quarter till nine, and the lot is mostly empty. In 5 minutes, cars will come tearing in from what seems like all directions. Once nine o’clock hits, the insides of the building will be teeming with what Karl likes to call “microscopic life,” because it lives and it moves, but it doesn’t spend too much time thinking. Karl, of course, is proud of the fact that he can think, and he believes bike commuting has helped him to be the kind of person who can think.

  He parks his bike at the rack. He’s the only employee who ever uses it. He notes with some satisfaction that the management agreed to move the rack under one of the building’s concrete overhangs—this way, his bike stays out of the sun, and if rain falls, the bike stays dry. Now he locks the bike with a U-lock and takes the strap off his right pant leg and takes the bungees off his briefcase and exhales very deeply. Okay, he thinks. Game face.

  He hears his name now, spoken by a gruff lady’s voice. Millie. An actuary. She’s been with the company since the final days of the American Revolutionary War and is relentlessly skeptical of anything in this world that strikes her as out of the ordinary.

  Millie says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about your bike for quite a while now.”

  Twenty years? This is the first she’s going to mention his bike?

  “It’s a steel frame,” Karl says, “and it’s been a great bike so far. I’ve had this one for 2 years now.”

  “I don’t mean your bike itself. I mean, why do you ride your bike to work? Do you not have a driver’s license?”

  Karl takes a moment
to calculate a polite response. “I could drive, I guess, but I enjoy riding to work. It clears my head so I can concentrate better at my desk.”

  Millie shakes her head in a dismissive way. “Why don’t you just go to the gym?”

  “Because I enjoy my bike.”

  “What do you do when it rains?”

  Karl’s mind races with nasty things he might say to her, how he could give a damn about her rheumy eyes staring at him and her puffy face wagging in disapproval of him, but he lets it go. He’ll vent his frustration later, on the bike ride home. So he says, “When it rains, I get rained on.”

  Millie says, “Sounds stupid.”

  Karl says, “It is stupid. But I enjoy it anyway.”

  He nods to her and walks with his briefcase toward another long day working inside the Pig.

  The Bike Commuter

  Next to the touring cyclist—which we have to phrase in a sort of cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness way—the commuting cyclist is the person all cyclists most want to be.

  For illustration, let me ask a stupid question, rolling my eyes when I ask it: Have you ever heard of bicycle commuting? Your response will be, Have you ever heard of oxygen? And I will say, Then why aren’t you commuting to work every day? Or why are you driving your car three-quarters of a mile to the liquor store to buy a six-pack of Pabst? See, the bicycle is designed to transport a human being from one place to another. Like, duh? So how come most cyclists—in the United States, at least—consider bikes to be a recreational item and not a mode of transportation?

  You would have to ask a real bicycle commuter for that answer, and, sadly, except on college campuses, the presence of real commuters is scarce indeed. Even the toughest weekend cyclists—roadies, mountain bikers, winners of multiple races—drive cars to work and to the store and to the department store and to the daycares and the schools their children attend. Cyclists like to ride bikes for kicks but not for getting somewhere, and, of course, all serious cyclists feel incredible guilt at not riding everywhere they need to go (except for certain hard-core roadies who feel that when they’re not training or racing on a bike, they should be at complete rest). Consequently, the sad truth is that the true bicycle commuter is cycling’s equivalent of a bald eagle soaring over the streets of, say, Chicago in the middle of winter.

  It’s not easy for the commuter to manage the routine of getting to and fro, especially if this person works in a professional environment that requires attire other than sweaty bicycle clothing. We’re talking about leaving earlier for work, finding a way to get cleaned up and changed upon arrival—not to mention stockpiling clothing at work—then reversing course at the end of the day and pedaling the long way home. And what happens in the rather likely event of rain? Sleet? Earthquake? Alien attack during rush hour? At minimum, the commuter will be inconvenienced, and in the case of alien attack, the aliens might befriend the commuter because the commuter is so entirely foreign to our culture.

  It’s a nightmare all around (aliens notwithstanding). But this doesn’t deter the commuter, because the commuter operates on a commitment to human-powered motion, which is good for both the environment and the rider.

  the Critical Mass Riders: CAMERON and ATHENA

  Had Che Guevara lived to see Critical Mass, he would have insisted everybody wear a helmet.

  THE MASS IS CRITICAL

  On Thursday night, Athena and Cameron, girlfriend and boyfriend, in their twenties, are unlocking their bikes outside a coffee shop.

  “How much time we got?” Athena asks. She’s much shorter than Cameron and is wearing hemp capri pants and an olive-drab T-shirt, and when she talks, she has a way of making cleaverlike gestures with her hands.

  Cameron says, “No worries. We’ll get there on time.” He’s in jeans and is wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

  Athena says, “We really need to make a statement tonight.”

  “We will,” Cameron says. “I heard we’re going to ride through the mall tonight.”

  “Through?”

  “Yeah. Just open the doors and all of us will ride from one end of the mall to the other.”

  Athena asks, “You think we can get arrested for that?”

  “What are the cops gonna do? Arrest a hundred people at once for riding bikes through a mall? Cops don’t have that kind of manpower. That’s why it’s called Critical Mass, because we’re massed together and can totally make a statement about the need for bikes and not get in legal trouble for it.”

  Athena says something about how cool that is and they start riding toward the city center, where the Critical Mass ride forms every Thursday night. They ride side by side in the road, almost in the middle of it, and they’re totally not worried about motorists getting irritated with them.

  Like now. A man in a Hyundai is behind them and can’t get past them because they’re taking up the full lane. He starts honking.

  Cameron says, “Can you hear something? Because I can’t hear anything.”

  Athena laughs.

  The guy behind them sticks his head out the window and yells, “Hey, assholes! Quit taking up the road. Use the goddam bike lane!”

  Athena says, “You’re not going to flip him off, are you?”

  “Why bother? Our actions are flipping him off.”

  They reach a stoplight now and stop near the curb. The Hyundai pulls up next to them, and the man rolls down his passenger-side window and leans toward it. He’s skinny, with short hair, and looks like an athlete. He says, “If you people are going to ride like idiots, you at least could wear helmets.”

  Then he drives off quickly when the light changes.

  Athena asks, “What did he say?”

  “I have no idea,” Cameron says. “I never listen to people in motor vehicles.”

  Critical Mass Riders

  A commuter is one thing, a great and admirable thing, and quite another thing is the rider who gets around on bicycles because it demonstrates a commitment to sustainable living,

  to streets where bicycles can pass safely, with bicycle lanes and proper signage, streets free of redneck assholes in pickup trucks trying to run you off the road. All cyclists want safety and bike lanes and respect from people in motor vehicles. We will not budge on that one bit.

  Critical Mass, therefore, is a popular form of group protest wherein cyclists do exactly what their name suggests: They mass together and protest the lack of respect to cyclists shown not only by drivers of motor vehicles but by the city planners who don’t accommodate for regular cycling in their communities. In smaller areas, obviously the mass is smaller; in larger areas, the mass is bigger. And in this mass they literally take over the streets. They stop traffic; they block intersections; they draw attention to themselves in any way they can because they want the public to know that bicycles are here and that bicycles deserve the same space on the streets that automobiles have. They do not care about whatever inconvenience they may cause to the motorists during the Critical Mass ride, because look at the inconvenience the motorists cause to cyclists!

  Nobody—cyclist or motorist—will deny that the Critical Mass movement has a valid point. If we want to conserve fossil fuels, if we want to reduce carbon emissions, we need to find methods of transportation other than the single-passenger automobile that is as common to the streets of the United States as horseflies are to the backs of horses. So there is no opening for debate here.

  The methods the Critical Mass movement uses, however, are a cause of continuing controversy, mostly because Critical Mass pisses motorists off and in turn pisses law enforcement off. Some folks wonder whether an undeniably correct idea (that bikes are necessary and need a place) is undermined by the undeniably obnoxious manner in which Critical Mass promotes it. And the non-Critical Mass riders sometimes end up taking shit from motorists because of Critical Mass.

  Most cyclists, deep down, support Critical Mass and what they’re up to. Many cyclists who support them, like me, wish more of them would wear helmets during th
eir protests, because hundreds of unhelmeted cyclists taking to the streets to promote a better world for bicycles, well, just seems plain stupid. Other than that, yeah: Fight the power! Ride a bike!

  the Track Racer: HEIDI

  Head slightly cocked to make up for the track’s angle.

  Full concentration.

  Body is solid muscle.

  WE CAN FIXIE THIS

  On the velodrome track, before her first interval, Heidi feels philosophical.

  It occurs to her that if she had chosen a more spiritual path in life, she might have been an excellent monk. Look at her life: She goes to bed every night before 9:00 and gets up every morning at 4:30 so she can get to the gym when it opens at 5:00. At the gym, she lifts weights and does muscle conditioning and plyometric routines for at least an hour, usually a bit longer than that. You want to know the reason she comes to the gym this early? Because she’s a 5-foot-3-inch, 125-pound, 29-year-old woman, and if that’s who you are, you need to use the free weight area in the gym long before the muscle-minded weight-room jackasses show up and commence hoisting more weight than they should, because when they’re not staring at themselves in the mirror, they absolutely will hit on a woman who looks like Heidi. It’s not her fault. It’s theirs. It’s gross, too. She’s there to improve her strength for racing bikes on the track, not to set herself up romantically with some meat-for-brains who enjoys flexing his biceps in front of a mirror.

  After the morning session at the gym, she spends her day putting out metaphorical fires at the logistics firm where she is in charge of making sure semitrucks loaded with groceries and electronic merchandise arrive safely, and on time, at distribution centers all over the country. In logistics, the old saying is “Everything goes wrong, all the time.” Her job is to make everything right. All day, she wishes she were out training.