In the Spring, a young man’s fancy…

My first longish ride of spring. 33 degrees when I left the house. 57 when I finished, but the sun (and lack of wind) when I relaxed with a post-ride Maibock at Capitol Brewery (since that’s where the ride started and ended) made it seem warmer. Since it was lunchtime and I was still far from home, I ate at a nearby diner. The flowers may not have figured out that it’s spring (but they’re coming along), but the spring peepers were out in force. Hard to believe that much sound comes from such tiny frogs.

I rode ~60 miles, which seemed like a lot until I remembered that on this day the year I rode the Death Ride, I was riding the Chico Wildflower Century. Of course, it wasn’t snowing mid-April that year (and I was 26 years younger).

The last dregs of snow

Also this week, I went to two choral concerts. Saturday night was “Free Wheeling: A Tribute to the Bicycle”, which featured “Song Cycle: Vive la vélorution!” by Alexander and Joanna Forbes L’Estrange. Also on the program were six bicycling poems set to music, five of which were world

premieres, commissioned for this event.

Some of the singers were dressed in bike clothes and a couple of songs featured bike bells and tire pumps as percussion instruments. The choirs were accompanied by a sextet of piano, trumpet (and flugelhorn), trombone, bass, drums, and percussion. I will link to the whole piece, but among my favorites were: “Freewheeling” (featuring trumpet), “The men who ride for fun” (featuring male voices) and “A woman (wearing bloomers) on a wheel” (featuring female voices).

On Friday night I heard the Choral Arts Society Chorale performing “Would You Harbor Me? music of longing and belonging” with songs of the diaspora and the immigrant experience, featuring the song cycle “The Golden Door” by Ronald Perera, with the choir accompanied by violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, clarinets, and percussion. The piece included the words of immigrants at Ellis Island and an ad for passage to the US juxtaposed with the experience of riding in steerage from Europe. (The first seven songs at the above link are the piece, though not in the same order as performed Friday night).

The performance included a talk by the Artistic Director with information on local opportunities to get involved in supporting immigrants.

 

get outta town!

Most of my riding for fun is on back roads. When I lived in California I tended to ride up narrow, poorly-paved, switchback-laden roads that cars tended to avoid. At climbing speed, poor pavement wasn’t a big issue. I rode down well-paved highways with broad, sweeping turns.

Dead end of Sanchez Street, one of the ways you can’t get to Cumberland Street.

In Santa Clara I could ride a very short distance from home and be climbing in the Santa Cruz mountains. I just tried to get a photo of one of those roads on Google Street View –  there are no photos available, so I guess they couldn’t get their car up or down it. The other images on this page are from Google Maps. In San Francisco I discovered urban riding. I lived at the top of a hill that was steep enough that, on three sides, the streets dead-ended in steep stairways (left). There was only one street that made it up the hill to my house. I didn’t ride my bike when I first moved there, thinking it was too steep.

Vermont Street, less famous than Lombard Street, but no straighter

One day I couldn’t take it anymore, so I rode to work. Coming back up that hill was fun and easier than anticipated, so I started riding a lot more. I found streets in the neighborhood where you had to park perpendicular to traffic (bottom) due to the steep grade. I discovered the not-so-famous second crookedest street in the world (right). I had to be on call for work some weekends, so didn’t want to leave town, but still wanted to ride my bike. I realized that I could ride the “49 mile Scenic Drive” (below) and get in a 50 mile bike ride without ever straying more than about 10 miles from work or home.

The 49 mile scenic drive

I later tried venturing farther afield on weekends, as I wasn’t getting many calls. I had a great ride out on Point Reyes before I found there was a paging dead area out there. Had I been paged I would have ridden blissfully unaware all day. (Since I headed this “get outta town” I thought I’d better put in a word about riding out of town. Really, I guess the point of this post is that you don’t have to get outta town to have a good time on a bike.)

Hill Street, one of the steeper streets in the neighborhood

I’m not sure why I’m writing about San Francisco this week – maybe it’s because the temperature has been below zero for most of the last two weeks as I write this in early January. San Francisco, by comparison, is fairly warm this time of year. (Though not so much in the summer. You have probably heard the line misattributed to Mark Twain: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” While there is no evidence Twain said it, and it was apparently initially a reference to Duluth, I can attest that it can get pretty cold in the summer in San Francisco. I made note of the date one evening when I went for a walk in the neighborhood. It was July 29. I was wearing my winter coat, hat, scarf, and gloves, and was chilled to the bone. A cold ocean fog was blowing in and a wind tunnel had formed down my street. I knew what Twain, or someone, meant.)

P.S. Signs that it might actually be spring: the loons have headed north, replaced by coots;

John Hart, Wisconsin State Journal

hyacinths, daffodils, and irises finally blooming, a dozen hammocks hanging behind Kronshage Hall; tables and chairs are back on the Union Terrace!

I think I’m done with this topic.

One last thing about safety and etiquette. This may seem obvious, but traffic laws are intended to make traffic flow more smoothly by getting us to follow some basic principles.

Stop signs are there to tell people going one direction to stop. The clear implication is that people going the other direction don’t stop. It makes things nice and orderly. We don’t hit each other. That’s pretty much the way most traffic regulations work.

Sometimes, someone tries to be polite and stops when s/he doesn’t have to. Let’s say I’m proceeeding north on my bike and you’re proceeding east in your car. I’m stopped at the stop sign with my foot on the ground. You don’t have a stop sign. Convention says you keep going, but you want to be polite to the bicyclist and you stop and wave me through. Now what? I can accept your generous offer and go, or I can point to my stop sign and wave you through.

Let’s say I (bike is the white car) take you (you are the blue car) up on your offer and I  start to cross the intersection. A car behind you (red car), wondering why you stopped for no reason, pulls around and hits me. Oops.

Or maybe there are two lanes and the car in the next lane over doesn’t know why you stopped and continues through, since he has the right of way. Oops. (Sorry about the white arrow indicating the bike turning the wrong way in this instance. I “borrowed” these diagrams and added to them. Think of the bike going straight.)

Or maybe the traffic going your way stops but traffic going the other way doesn’t. Oops.

Or maybe you change your mind and decide to go again; maybe you remember you’re in a hurry, maybe you didn’t think I took you up on your offer soon enough, maybe you just have it in for bicyclists and decide to run me down.

In all of these scenarios, the bicyclist loses. In all of these scenarios, the bicyclist is at fault in the crash, for failing to yield the right of way. Maybe in the last paragraph’s choices, where the very car that waved me through hits me, I have an argument. But that supposes that: 1) I’m alive; 2) I don’t have a head injury resulting in amnesia for the time surrounding the crash (common in even mild traumatic brain injury or concussion); 3) the motorist admits fault; 4) the police/judge/jury believe the bicyclist over the motorist. We all know that bicyclists can’t be trusted. In the post “Better Safe than Sorry”, I alluded to the “otherness” ascribed to bicyclists in our car-centric culture. My daughter reminded me that this experience is common to all “other” groups. We are seen as representative of a class and not as credible as the dominant class. The bicyclist in this scenario may be considered an unreliable witness because he might have a head injury and thus remember it wrong (ironic, if this is actually someone who does remember), or just unreliable for his “otherness”.

Regardless of the question of fault (actual or ascribed), it is always the bicyclist who comes out of this scenario with the physical injuries. That’s why, if you try to wave me through a stop sign out of politeness or solidarity or for any other reason, I probably won’t take you up on the offer. I risk being seen as rude or unappreciative, but I don’t risk being dead.

P.S. I will admit that I accepted a “wave through” this winter. I was stopped at a stop sign, foot down, waiting for traffic to clear. The next car that approached on the through street was a police car. The officer stopped and waved me through. The temperature was -5° Fahrenheit. There were no other cars approaching from either direction. Rather than “argue” (even if only with hand signals and pointing, as his window was closed) with a police officer on a cold day, I went through the intersection.

P.P.S. I can’t end this topic without acknowledging John Forester, a bicycle transportation engineer, originator of the “Effective Cycling” program, advocate of “vehicular cycling”, and one of the prime thinkers in the area of bike safety. I also want to acknowledge Bob Mionske, former professional bike racer and now attorney working in the field of bicycle safety and rights. He writes a regular column for VeloNews. Some of the ideas in the last three posts certainly came from them.

P.P.P.S. A Dude Abikes posted on safety this week, about a campaign in Austin – “Please be kind to cyclists” – check it out.

Next week: urban cycling, San Francisco

Spring arrives with a vengeance!

I wander occasionally from my plan of weekly pre-ride postings when I think I have something to say. Feel free to disagree.

In the midst of three weeks of postings on traffic and safety, we’ll take time out for some updates and shameless commercial plugs.

Between rounds one and two of a scheduled 6 rounds of me vs April showers on Sunday, I stepped out to pick up some pastries from Batch Bakehouse. Since I was out I stopped for a shot of espresso at Cafe Domestique, to allow my wife some more time to sleep in before I made some asparagus, pea, scallion, and Ameribella cheese omelets. (Since I am shamelessly plugging friends, I made another cup of coffee with breakfast; beans from Just Coffee.)

The “showers” clearly won the first round. By round three I was making a comeback.

Domestique, for those of you who don’t follow bike racing, is a term for

(Photo credit LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/GettyImages)

those on a racing team who do the heavy lifting to help the team star(s). They ride back to the team car and pick up a bunch of water bottles, then ferry them forward to the other racers. They set the pace, exhausting them selves and (if all goes well) the other teams, so their star can win a stage.

Image from “Classic Factory Lightweights”

Cafe Domestique is an homage to those unsung heroes. They also pull a pretty good espresso and have a changing display of cool bikes. Today they have some old Gary Fisher mountain bikes. Owner Dan Coppola tells me they have some pre-1970 Schwinn Paramounts coming in next. I plan to talk with my neighbor to see if he wants to display his 1970-era Holdsworth racing bikes.

After breakfast I went back for round three of sweeping, scraping, and shoveling those April showers from the steps and sidewalk. The crocus I photographed a couple of weeks ago is/are still the only thing(s) blooming, if you can call this blooming. By this time last year, the irises were in bloom.

Crocus under April showers

I ramped up the training this week. Last Sunday I had a free spinning class with my co-workers at a “theatre” that shall remain nameless to protect the guilty.

On Wednesday I took the road bike out for the first time this season. While the computer swore that it would start raining between 7 and 8 PM, the stuff falling on me starting around 5 sure seemed like rain. It was mostly a light mist and arm warmers and tights were enough to keep me warm and dry-ish for ~25 miles. Post-ride pizza and Montepulciano completed the rewarming process.

I found this guy hanging around my front door