Readers' Ride #2: Southwind Suicide-Ride

This past weekend was the occasion of the second more-or-less monthly Cycling in Wichita Readers' Rides, this one along the venerable Arkansas River bike path. Saturday's ride was an intimate one: no one was able to meet me at the southern terminus at Garvey Park, so on the way back home I took a quick sidetrip through O. J. Watson Park then took Pawnee back to the river. The park didn't seem to have any dedicated bike paths, but that morning there were only a few cars and some runners to contend with. It was a pleasant place for a leisurely ride.

Now Sunday's ride, on the other hand . . .

I have never before worked so hard as a cyclist.

I was pleased to be joined by Chris of Random Chaos (his take on Sunday's ride, the title of which accurately sums up things for me as well, though I didn't ride nearly the distance he did) is here). Admittedly, when I made my way up the embankment at 21st Street Park and felt the full force of yesterday's steady south wind, I was afraid neither he nor anyone else would show . . . and, truth be told, I wasn't so sure I should have shown up, either, as I contemplated the ride back home. Kansas' very name comes from a Sioux word that means "south wind," and I doubt very seriously that any other state name so closely and unambiguously unites signifier and signified as "Kansas" does. At any rate, it was certainly true yesterday. Anyway: Despite ominously warning me just that morning that if it was windy he wouldn't show, here Chris came a few minutes before 1:00, having ridden all the way from his neighborhood near Harry and Webb. What a man.

While we waited to see if others would show, we talked shop. Chris is a friendly, articulate fellow who, just as his blog indicates, is serious about cycling for practical reasons and is interested in doing his bit for advocacy by being a positive presence on the streets when cycling. He got into cycling back in February for fitness purposes; he's the owner of a schweet-looking Felt bicycle (a new-to-me brand) that, as he reports over at his blog, he's customized a bit.

At about 1:15, we headed out. At first the ride was pretty pleasant. Most of the path north of downtown was fairly protected from the wind, and so we could ride and talk as we did. But just south of Exploration Place the river and path run more or less due south, and it was for that entire distance that we rode directly into a wind that was never less than 15 mph and occasionally gusted so hard that it felt as though it briefly stopped my forward progress. Just north of the Harry Street bridge, I told Chris that I had to stop and rest a bit.

As we did, an older man came strolling up the path and "conversed" with us. Actually, that's not quite the word: Chris will confirm that, aside from his telling us that we were headed the wrong way (i.e., into the wind, and never were truer words spoken) and briefly telling us that he worked for Meals on Wheels, for the entire time (15-20 minutes) we were there he only told us riddles. Some samples of his wit: "Q: What did the fish say when he swam into a concrete wall? A: Dam!" "Q: What do you call pallbearers in Oklahoma? A: "Carry-Okies" ("Karaokes"). He was the Henny Youngman of riddles . . . except, not to be mean, I liked Henny Youngman more. We might still be there yet--he was certainly in no hurry to be on his way, that's for sure--if I hadn't decided that I had rested enough.

We set off again, and the wind was every bit as strong as before. I was soon worn out again, and as we approached the Pawnee Street bridge (about a mile south of where we had stopped to rest), I gave very serious thought to telling Chris that this was just nuts and we should bag the rest of the ride. But no, I told myself: we had just a couple more miles to go to Garvey Park; riding into this is good for building up endurance and strength; what commentary on my manliness would my quitting now offer up to Chris?; etc., etc. And besides: my legs, though a bit weary, still felt okay.

We rode on and eventually reached Garvey Park. As Chris and I chatted, I confessed that I'd almost called Uncle, and he admitted that he would have been okay with that if I had.

Men are weird that way.

The ride back, this time with the wind at our backs, was the stuff of what makes cycling in Kansas a pleasant experience 50% of the time. My bike felt like it had magically acquired a carbon frame like Chris's bike, and we zipped along until, at the Harry Street bridge, we parted company.

I told Chris that, weather permitting, I hope to continue scheduling these Readers' Rides through the fall and winter, with the next one for either the weekend before or the weekend after Thanksgiving. In the meantime, we'll keep a weather eye . . .

Thanks again for joining me, Chris.

Yeah, but it's a warm 20-mph wind

At least it was today. But the calendar tells me it's October--how many warm winds do we have left this year?

The morning ride to McConnell was a bit chilly, but the air was dead-calm. As the sun began to warm the air, it was actually quite pleasant for the last couple of miles. This afternoon, though, was another story entirely: a steady 20-mph northerly wind that, given my route, I had to ride directly into for a total of about half the ride. Even with shifting into an easier gear that I'd never felt the need to use before, the ride home took about an hour. (Usually, it's 45 minutes, though I've been known to make it in 40 if traffic permits.)

I've been home almost 3 hours and my legs still feel tired from the ride home.

Aside from the usual and obvious lack of bike-friendly streets here in Wichita, another possible explanation for our city's abysmally-low percentage of folks who commute to work occurred to me on the ride home today. Perhaps folks have given bike-commuting a try in the past but--as will happen sooner or later here--end up riding on a day when the wind is blowing hard and steady and they get home and wheel the bike into the garage and decide they've had enough. That is of course their choice, but I would say to them, were they to ask, that that decision comes of not fully dissociating from recreation their image of cycling. If they instead framed their riding in terms of transportation, the wind doesn't blow any less hard, but I suspect they would persist: cycling-as-transportation shifts one's focus to concentrate more on the long term than on the short term.

Usually, it so happens that my commute is fun, or at least enjoyable. On some days, though, it is work to keep going--and by this I mean mental more than physical labor. This, for me, was one of those days. But, truth be told, I've not had very many of those days.

Oh: and in case anyone is thinking I'm just a wimp about this wind thing, have a look at Chris's recent post over at Random Chaos.

Yesterday's commute: The Arkansas River Path as alluvial plain, and other observations

As local folks know, on Friday and Saturday we got enough rain here (none of it from Ike--this rain was the weather gods' special gift to southern Kansas) to cause rivers and creeks to rise substantially. I didn't go to the base on Monday, so yesterday was my first ride that way since the rains.

This was another time that I wished I had any sort of digital camera. For most of the stretch I ride (from Exploration Place to the bridge at Harry), the path had been under anywhere from 1' to 4' of water (for those who haven't been there, at the path's closest approach to the river the path is a foot or so above the water). For much of the way, the path now resembles a hard-packed dirt path--the concrete in those places just isn't visible. Flotsam and jetsam litter the path and leave telltale signs up the embankment to show how deep the water got. In one place close to Exploration Place, there is a 15-foot long, foot-and-a-half diameter tree trunk on the bank between the water and the path. A couple of park benches on the path have substantial debris caught on their armrests.

So: this was obviously nothing compared to the floods that used to occur here before the Big Ditch was dug, and certainly like nothing that Texas experienced over the weekend. Nevertheless, it can become too easy to think of the Arkansas as yet another of those shallow and slow-moving, easily-controllable Great Plains rivers and forget that Nature (still) Matters.

Other stuff now:

Last week, I noted that I had found that day's ride very difficult for me physically. Peter and Coppercorn were kind enough to weigh in with suggestions for how to handle cooler weather; and so yesterday morning, the weather being comparable, I took their suggestions to heart. On last week's ride, I'd worn a sweatshirt; this time, I wore just shorts and a T-shirt (though I had warmer gear packed, just in case). Also, I made a conscious effort not to try to go fast but just take it easy. After all, as Andrew of Carbon Trace says--nay, declaims here, there's no reason at all to sweat on a bike. (I was also recalling my membership with these folks). At any rate, I took it easy, not trying to go "fast" and in a fairly easy gear. I figure my speed was around 10 mph. If it had not been for the Mrs. calling me via cell-phone while I was en route, I would have made the trip in about 50 minutes: about the same amount of time I have done it in the past when pushing harder and having to rest as a result. Even better, I had to shift to an easier gear only once, when climbing the Mt. Vernon overpass at I-135. I did sweat--sorry Andrew, but it's what I do--but nearly as much as I usually do. The trip home, meanwhile, though always easier than the morning ride, was even easier, with no shifting at all for the I-135 overpass. So: Slow-biking it is from here on.

On the way home, I almost hit a middle-schooler, also on a bicycle, at the intersection of Mt. Vernon and Estelle. He was getting ready to cross Mt. Vernon as I approached from the east and had just looked in my direction before looking west and, as he did so, began to cross. He just flat hadn't seen me. I had to shout at him twice before he turned my way, and even then I had to brake to keep from hitting him. I do find it a bit humorous, though, that that has been thus far my closest to having an accident with anyone. On the other hand, for the first time in my time cycling a motorist behind me honked at me as I waited at a stop sign. I suppose he couldn't see it, but I felt it prudent not to pull out in front of a school bus. As it turned out, though, when I did cross, I could hear his car die. His impatience, I suspect, had less to do with me than his internal-combustion-challenged Buick.

No interesting carrion sightings to report, you'll be relieved/disappointed to learn.

So: all in all yesterday's ride was a good one, my best in terms of my physical well-being.

Your trite environmental sentiment for the day

"We can all do something."

My long-time bloggy friend Pam of Tales from the Microbial Laboratory is, in terms of geography, about as far removed from Wichita as one could be: she lives on the South Carolina coast, where she conducts research on microbes that live among coral reef ecosystems. Oh--and she gardens and loves (good) poetry, too. But--the blogosphere being the strange place that it is, she and I have come to know each other, for which I'm glad.

Anyway. The other day, she posted a blurb on behalf of Al Gore's new project, We Can Solve It--and a rejoinder to those whose criticism not just of Gore but of other proposals to reduce our dependence on carbon-generated energy is, in essence, it'll cost too much/we shouldn't do anything until others do, too/What will we have to give up?/etc./etc.:

I think it's alot of baby steps - little changes that globally result in big changes - and old technologies coming back (rain barrels!) and new technologies coming forward.

I love this stuff because it makes sense. We need to get the price of icynene down to where we all can afford it. We need to quit taking our leaves to the landfill - and leaving them on our land. Grow your own lettuce in the winter. I'm tring to build a LEED certified home, and I'm saying 'no' to a paved driveway because...is it really necessary? I could go on, but I need to go back out into my garden and weed before it gets crazy-hot. But I guess how I feel is that we can all do something here - and the things we need to do aren't necessarily big or expensive. Just do something. It becomes contagious.

In response, I forwarded her a link I'd found somewhere--I don't recall now--to something called The PB&J Campaign, a project of Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs. Their goal is simple:

The PB&J Campaign is working to combat environmental destruction by reducing the amount of animal products people eat. The PB&J Campaign approaches positive change one meal at a time by illuminating the differences one single dining decision can make.

And here are some numbers to contemplate:

Each time you have a plant-based lunch like a PB&J you'll reduce your carbon footprint by the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets. For dinner you save 2.8 pounds and for breakfast 2.0 pounds of emissions.

Those 2.5 pounds of emissions at lunch are about forty percent of the greenhouse gas emissions you'd save driving around for the day in a hybrid instead of a standard sedan.

If you have a PB&J instead of a red-meat lunch like a ham sandwich or a hamburger, you shrink your carbon footprint by almost 3.5 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.

Full disclosure: I have no interest in becoming even a vegetarian, much less a vegan or some such--I do loves me the occasional rib-eye and pork ribs--but I've been choosing to eat much less meat of late, in large measure because of the sorts of statistics the PB&J Campaign highlights. There's also the not-insignificant matter of simply being mindful--and respectful--of where the vast majority of our beef, pork and chicken comes from and how it's produced: a process invisible to almost all of us these days. To my mind, the PB&J Campaign's great value is in making people more aware of the fact that environmental expenditures also figure into the statement "where our meat comes from."

So, yeah: "We can all do something." And all that little stuff, if done by enough people, adds up. So, go and make yourself the occasional PB&J.

Or, go ride a bike.

Cycling in the rain; or, defying the cultural logic of Late Capitalism

Friday evening, I had my biking all planned for the next morning: a trip downtown to the Farmers' Market and thence to Bicycle X-Change on West Douglas to buy a set of hex wrenches for my bike (I should have thought of this back on that heady day when I bought the bike, I know), and maybe even a trip over to the art museum (Saturdays are free admission). But. As I begin writing this, it's early sunrise on Saturday and it's pouring down rain: there's thunder and lightning, and--continuing this getting religion metaphor--my fledgling faith is being sorely tested as we speak. Stay in and say The hell with it, or saddle up and say The hell with it? Or triangulate the matter and blog about it?

Heh. You lucky people.

Earlier this week I rode a fair distance in a moderate, steady rain (I wore a windbreaker but no poncho) and, aside from being absolutely soaked through didn't mind that at all (I was concerned about wet brakes, but that wasn't a problem). But this . . .

Prior to today, my thinking about how weather would affect my cycling was chiefly confined to the winter. There will be a fair number of days from November through early March where cycling will be just too cold and/or too risky an option. But I frankly hadn't thought through the equally-basic truth of Wichita weather that the summer is extremely changeable. Thunderstorms usually pop up in the afternoon and evening, but since (for now) I don't plan to ride at night, those didn't worry me too much. What I hadn't thought through was the psychological impact on me of such things as trying to pedal head-on into a steady 20 mph wind (no freakish thing in Wichita) or, this morning, looking forward to some morning cycling only to wake up to a downpour like this.

To the dedicated cyclist, as to the farmer in his/her way, weather--Nature, more generally--matters. That would seem to be so obvious as to go without saying, except that for the past long century or so Western culture has been resolute in doing what it can to render Nature into something of no consequence. That's the source of the discontent (in a Jamesonian spin on Freud's sense of the word) I feel this morning: Nature is Mattering in a most hellacious way this morning, and I don't want it to.

Here's Fredric Jameson himself to explain what I mean by that:

In modernism, . . . some residual zones of "nature" or "being," of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that "referent." Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature." Indeed, what happened to culture may well be one of the more important clues for tracking the postmodern: an immense dilation of its sphere (the sphere of commodities), an immense and historically original acculturation of the Real[.]. . . . So in postmodern culture, "culture" has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself: modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself. Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process. (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, pp. ix-x)

All this is a long way of getting to something that I came to realize this morning: that resistance I was feeling to saddling up and saying To hell with it was both a reminder of the truth of Jameson's argument regarding Nature's having been refined out of existence (that was the "resistance" part) and, on the other, my recognition that cycling repudiates that very argument. Nature matters after all. Or again, depending on whether you think of cycling as a return to some simpler, more elemental way of performing a job of work, or as an implicit critique of The Way Things Are.

Or perhaps, just perhaps, cycling does both.

Because Nature matters to cyclists, they become different sorts of consumers of their world. Topography and weather and their bodies' and bicycles' needs, not fantasy, shape their choices--indeed, those factors reacquire an immediacy that, Jameson argues, postmodern culture had assumed for them. The local and immediate are what catch and hold their attention. Theirs are pragmatic sorts of choices, and being compelled to make such choices has a way of revealing just how superfluous and self-indulgent most people's choices are. This, of course, is something the vast majority of manufacturers, marketers and merchants would prefer we not dwell on too thoughtfully or for too long.

I'm not arguing that serious cycling is at its heart anti-capitalist but, rather, that it goes against the grain of how consumerism has come to shape our thinking about wants and needs and how to meet them. It thus opens up a space for the individual to see him- or herself relative to those dynamics and respond with a bit more autonomy than s/he might otherwise have.

Over at In Medias Res, my friend and fellow Wichitan (and cyclist and thinking-locally advocate) Russell Arben Fox has been thinking recently about late capitalism's effects on food production and has a typically rich and meaty post up on the subject. I encourage you to read the whole post, but it's in the paragraph below, a critique of a comment in an interview made by Michael Pollan, best-known for his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, that Russell makes a distinction that gets at the sort of autonomy that I mean above:

There is much wisdom in that passage, with its invocation of Burke's "little platoons" and its slam on Friedman's "flat," globalized economy. It is properly suspicious of corporations and respectful of localist "economies of place." So what's the problem? Nothing really...except that, in the end, it seems to posit the revival of such localism in terms of "resistance" to a government invariably corrupted by various industrial and "expert" interests. The goal is local "autonomy," which--unless one wishes to get all philosophical and argue over different interpretations of Kant--is, politically at least, another way of saying local "independence." And I've nothing against independence. But an independence that does not address how that locality is not just supposed to become free, but also how it is to be sovereign--that is, able to establish itself, govern itself, exercise authority over its place and build something lasting there--is not really going to be able to pull off the kind of cultural transformation John [Schwenkler, in an article here advocating that "renewing the culinary culture should be a conservative cause"] wants to see happen. He speaks, to be sure, of nurturing self-government, but also of resisting government--which is sometimes necessary, but which also leaves the door open to libertarian assumptions that I do not think are helpful to his--to our--cause. (Russell's italics)

In the comments section for Russell's post, I noted that it seemed to me that his distinction between independence and sovereignty could be extended by analogy to discussion of neighborhoods

in urban areas that themselves are diverse economies in miniature--here in Wichita, for example, I have in mind the Delano District, which lacks only (and thus could use) one of those small "corner" grocery stores (not a convenience store, and not some fru-fru gourmet food store) to achieve a kind of economic sovereignty relative to Wichita. Compare Delano, though, to the Hispanic/Asian neighborhoods just to the north of downtown Wichita, which have numerous "corner" stores of just this sort.

I went on to mention that, at least in those cities I'm most familiar with that are encouraging people to move into urban centers to live, developers are building shops and restaurants like crazy . . . but no corner grocery stores. The effect is something like a bedroom community turned inside-out: now, people have to leave the neighborhood not to work but to buy food to prepare and eat.

No: cycling can't make corner markets appear in a neighborhood. But I think that cyclists, by being alert to and patronizing their neighborhoods' products and services, can play a role in affirming the community as a place unto itself, with a measure of (economic) sovereignty relative to the city that surrounds it. To tar with a broad brush: cars encourage us to leave the immediate area, to perhaps even see that space as in some way lacking, and don't encourage us to get to know the neighbors--they insulate us from a community's "weather," from its nature. Bicycles encourage their riders to take stock of that same area's resources and, at least in my own brief experience as a cyclist, to see it as richer than they once thought it to be. Far from being "flat" economically, the business topography of healthy communities is varied and often surprising.

As it turned out, the rain let up enough that morning that I was able to run my errands without feeling as though I was riding through a car wash. At the bike shop, when the clerk saw the hex tool set I'd selected, he said, "Oh--we have a less-expensive one over here." He walked over to the display rack to find it, gave it to me, rang up the sale, and I went out to my bike to tighten up some bolts. He was happy, and I was happy. And I'll be sure to go back.