Dave Moulton wrote today about the evolution of mountain biking. He asked for his readers’ “take on the period” — here’s mine:

I grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1970s when banana seats gave way to BMX. My favorite thing wasn’t jumping ditches though so much as taking long rambles up dirt roads, I’d be gone for hours. In retrospect I was probably never more than 2 or 3 miles away from the house but it felt much farther. I had a fear of county roads and blacktop traffic, so I stuck to dirt roads: section road, irrigation access, that kind of thing.

We moved to the “big city” Lincoln in the early 80s and I bought my first grownup bike, a late 70s vintage 10-spd “racing” bike. I think it was a Sekai. I rode this and a Schwinn Varsity until high school. My new favorite bike thing was to ride those 10-spds all day, either around town into new neighborhoods, or to outlying towns. At age 13 I rode my Varsity 52 miles (round trip) on a surprise visit to a girl in a neighboring town. I taped cans of Coke to the frame for sustenance, and ate a slice of pizza before the ride home. The girl was out of town, that taught me to always call ahead.

For about 5 years I barely rode at all. It was too “uncool” to be seen on a bike at my gearhead high school, or so I felt anyway. I kept that unhealthy obsession with cars until college when I got my first MTB, a Giant Rincon (1992).

The Rincon reawakened the joy of being gone all day on a bike. This time it was back to dirt roads, and wasteland like timber claims or Wilderness Park (an undeveloped city park southwest of Lincoln). I also lived exactly the right distance from campus for steady bike commuting: too near to drive, too far to walk. After college I took the Rincon — and its successor: a Yokota mountainbike — with me on my archaeological adventures across the Great Plains. I never had the Xtreme Mad Huck personality ascendent in 90s MTB culture, I never railed on sketchy descents or caught big air. My ideal ride was a long distance on two-track in the hinterland. Exploring. Cow-trailing. Unsuspended steel MTBs excel at that.

I took the Yokota with me to grad school — I had long since given up cars entirely — where it was my primary mode of transport. Ironically, once I moved to Oregon — where we have actual mountains — I pretty stopped mountain biking. This was the mid-90s and MTB culture was no longer under the radar, and in Oregon at any rate you couldn’t just go ride a bike on all that sweet singletrack. Either it was closed to bikes, or it was developed into a kind of skills park for Mad Hucking. Mostly, to ride a MTB bike in Oregon it helps to have a car; you have to drive to a “trailhead” where you spin around for an hour or so then drive home. It has always struck me as absurd to drive somewhere to Have Fun by biking (or hiking, or skiing) around in little circles. Other than riding a bike to work, I never spent much time on a bike between 1995 and 2001.

Not quite a decade ago I bought another road bike — actually kind of a cross/touring bike, a Bianchi Volpe. That set me on my last — and most durable — love affair with bikes. With a road bike (or better, a ’cross bike), as soon as you step out the front door you’re Having Fun. That bike kept me sane through my divorce, when my all-day-bike-riding habits became a little obsessive. The peak of that period was my solo tour down the Oregon Coast.

This was how I met Jenny: she saw me carrying my bike into our apartment building (we were neighbors), and she asked “do you know any good rides around here?” I didn’t ask her out right that second but I eventually did, and the story had a happy ending. Much of our early courtship — and most of our vacations, even today — are had on bike. Sometimes on that Bianchi, or on one of its roadie successors.

Last spring I won a fancy new Kona mountain bike. I never would have bought this bike myself, and I’m kind of at a loss for what to do with it. Mostly it’s seen semi-legal singletrack in the weirdly-zoned terrain of SW Portland. I guess you still have to drive a car somewhere to have fun on a mountain bike, and I still think that’s stupid.

On Saturday, I rode my Vanilla road bike 90 miles — all on blacktop — into the beautiful rural hinterlands around Portland. I don’t get to do this as often as I used to but it’s still my favorite bike thing to do.

On Monday I rolled over 10,000 miles on the Vanilla. Sadly I didn’t have a camera, so you’ll have to take my word for it. An occasion like this is a good time to reckon what my mileage is like over a long period.

vs.

Right now I have 10,030 mi. on the Vanilla and 3516 mi. on the Soma. I know that I’ve ridden 3365 mi. since September 11, 2007, because on that day I rolled over 6666 mi. and blogged about it. 869 days have passed since that day, so I can get weirdly accurate numbers for my aggregate mileage:

This leaves off a few miles I’ve ridden on my newish Kona mountain bike, which I never bothered to fit with a computer. Also, I’ve changed the batteries on both road bike computers, which means there are a few miles off the books for those bikes as well. But really, I can’t imagine I have more than 100–200 mi. unaccounted for.

This year I resolved to ride 100 mi./week, every week, without rolling miles from long weeks into short ones. Which means I have to dig up an extra 44.58 mi./wk.

I can do a wee bit more math, this time less precise. I have previously calculated that, for my weight, and over the hills I usually ride, and at my usual pace, I burn about 550 kcal/hr. riding my bikes. (“kcal” means the same thing as “calories” in general usage.) This lets me reckon the following:

So, and not to put too fine a point on it, the excess mileage I’m making to meet my resolution lets me drink a hard case of New Belgium Fat Tire beer every week, and still lose weight.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent sentencing of Antonio Cellestine in the hit-and-run death of Gordon Patterson. Mr. Cellestine was, by his own testimony and subpoenaed cel phone records, texting at the time (and smoking a cigar). He was also driving with a suspended license, and had previously been arrested twice for driving without a license and driving without insurance. Mr. Patterson, a popular high school teacher, regular church-goer, father of three, and by all accounts swell guy, was riding his bike home in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland. Judge Roger Bennett sentenced Cellestine to 5 years in prison, with a special plea bargain to ensure that this doesn’t count as Cellestine’s “first strike” in Washington’s Three Strikes system. He also has a special dispensation for early release, meaning he’ll likely be out in two years. He’ll never be able to buy a firearm in Washington, but — and this is galling part — he’ll be eligible to renew his driver’s license a year after his release.

As a fun parenthesis, consider Cellestine’s girlfriend — a wonderful piece of work in herself — who held a carwash fundraiser for the victim’s family but may have used the money to (try to) post bail for Mr. Cellestine.

I pay pretty close attention to all the cyclist-involved collision around Portland, for reasons of self-interest as much as advocacy. But this one really struck a nerve. The discussion around this case, and its outcome, suggests a peculiar myopia in regards to the moral weight of killing someone with a car.

On Tom Vanderbilt’s How We Drive blog, Vanderbilt relays this bit of drama from the courtroom:

The text-messaging motorist who struck and killed his former high school teacher told the court: “This was not intentional. It was an accident. I’m so sorry.”

Clark County (Vancouver, Washington) Superior Court Judge Roger Bennett didn’t buy it.

“I’ve heard the term ‘accident’ used quite a bit today. But this was no accident.”

This led to an interesting discussion where famed bicycle framebuilder Dave Moulton, one of my personal cycling heroes, objected to Vanderbilt’s insistence that car crashes aren’t “accidents:”

I’m generally uncomfortable with the hijacking of language for the purpose of demonization. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, an accident is “an unexpected undesirable event,” “an unforeseen incident,” “lack of intention; chance.” Seems to me that the crash described probably fits this definition, as well as the definition of a crash (the two are NOT mutually exclusive). I have no opinion about whether or not the judge was right to convict, or whether the sentence is appropriate. I do have an opinion about the judge’s apparent lack of literacy.

I joined the dogpile on Mr. Moulton (who, I must say, has a certain point about the “intentionality” aspect of “accident”):

There’s a lot about this “accident” that was eminently foreseeable. Like Mr. Cellestine driving with a suspended license. And driving without insurance. And he had two previous convictions for driving without a license. And surely his license was suspended twice for reasons of some sort (I don’t know what) — in Washington that pretty much means repeated convictions for reckless driving, or Minor in Possession, or drug offenses. And consider that he was only 18 years old, so he had only two years in which to generate this sparkling record.

...

But there are more people culpable in this instance than Mr. Cellestine. This was not an “accident” on his part, because he knew the dangers of driving while severely distracted. And it was not an “accident” on the part of the State of Washington, who damn well knew he was a menace but failed to keep him off the road, and will fail to do so again in 2-5 years. So not only was Mr. Cellestine’s “accident” completely foreseeable, I’ll go one better and foresee his next potentially fatal “accident”, unless Washingtonians get their crap together, pass some tough laws and tighten up their licensing requirements.

Mr. Moulton had a rejoinder (“an event can be both an accident and negligent”)...but this seemed lacking to me. I tried to get the last word in, something I usually loathe:

It’s interesting that one seldom hears the phrase “airplane accident.”

People believe that when a plane crashes, someone is culpable — designers, flight crew, maintenance crew, traffic controllers, weather monitoring systems, terrorists, terrorist-minded security personnel, etc. This attitude — “there are no ‘plane accidents’” — has led to a situation where the most potentially dangerous form of transportation is actually the safest.

But somehow car crashes “just happen.” “It was an accident.” Y’know, just like knocking over a glass of milk.

Everything about Mr. Cellestine suggested he was a menace and incapable of safely driving a car, thus his suspended license. Simply getting behind the wheel that night was an intentionally hazardous act. That he no longer had a valid driver’s license was his signal not to drive, yet he disregarded it. Even by Mr. Moulton’s conservative definition of “accident” this was no accident.

I see Mr. Moulton’s point here — Mr. Cellestine had no intention of murdering anyone. But he committed the legal equivalent of pointing a gun in the air and pulling the trigger. This was Judge Bennett’s whole point. That bullet was gonna land somewhere, and it had the bad fortune of landing on a nice guy like Mr. Patterson.

(All of which, of course, leaves aside the “running away” part of this crime. Mr. Cellestine, upon committing a fatal crime, failed to own up to it. If that doesn’t negate the sense of “accident” as “unintentional” here, I don’t know what does.)

If government — if laws, and police, and courts — have any fundamental purpose at all in a free society, it is to protect the weak from the predations of the strong. It is to keep Swell Guys like Mr. Patterson safe from Raging Menaces like Mr. Cellestine. If Antonio Cellestine had indeed fired a gun into the air and “accidentally” killed Gordon Patterson, I doubt anyone would find fault in this logic. A Raging Menace killed a Swell Guy and deserves harsh punishment, after all that’s what laws are for, right? But somehow, when the weapon is a car, that logic gets turned off.

Mr. Cellestine might be a Swell Guy in some other fashion, but in regards to his abilities and judgement related to driving a car, he has amply demonstrated that he is indeed a Raging Menace. If stuff like “laws” and “morality” and “personal responsibility” have any meaning to our society, those meanings should be clear in this very case. That Mr. Cellestine could be back on the roads — our roads — inside of six years suggests that, in regards to cars, “laws,” and “morality” and “personal responsibility” have very little meaning.

On the bikeportland blog, I tried to express this notion a bit more pithily.

Everyone who ventures off their own property — by foot, bike, motorcycle, or car — ought to consider how easy it is for someone like Mr. Cellestine to keep getting back behind the wheel. In 2-5 years he’ll be back there again.

It's far too easy to get, keep, and regain a driver's license, and we are far too lenient on those who thumb their noses at the law and common human decency.

I don't know anyone who says anything other than “good riddance” to the first decade of the 21st century. I know lots of people who hope it was the anomaly, that the rest of the century will get better. I know a probably-equal number who think it’s only going to get worse.

Personally, the decade was rock bottom and tip top. This was the decade I became a Real Grownup. I started it gliding along with a certain degree of dissatisfaction with success. I’d just stumbled into my new career as a web designer, and my new marriage to my first wife. I was six months away from rock bottom in that marriage but had no idea what was coming or why, only that the unstable place I was in wasn’t going to hold. On this subject, the less said, the better. That new career was subject to the whipsaw vagaries of the Dot-com boom — although in the long run I’ve never been worried about jobs or work or money in quite the way I probably should be.

In 2000, that all cracked up. The marriage wobbled through two separations and a little ugliness until it dissipated altogether in 2002. The cool new career ping-ponged between Real Jobs and freelance and outright unemployment, until I regained my footing at Curiosity (also in 2002). 2002 was the year I learned that I was boy who never quite figured out how to be a man. It took breaking my marriage totally and irreparably to figure it out. The pecularity of modern American manhood is that it’s defined in contrast to womanhood, which is all backwards. Manhood isn’t the state of not being a woman, it’s the state of not being a boy. Anyway, by the end of 2002 I was stable, back on my feet.

2002 was also the year I began riding my bike. A lot. I have one piece of advice for someone who wants to be happier: ride your bike.

Three really important things happened in 2003. I shaved my head. I met Jenny. I put Sitka to sleep. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those three things taught me to release vanity, embrace vulnerability, and accept loss. Together they taught me the only important thing I’ve ever learned: my life isn’t just about me. When Orion was born I learned that the rest of my life isn’t about me at all. The rest of my life until I die is about my children and their children. My haircut is not even remotely important any more.

The glide path of my life turned upward after 2003. Jenny and I married in 2005 — probably my favorite year of the decade, if you really pressed me. We moved to China in 2006, and back in 2007. Orion joined us in 2008. The only two years in which nothing much happened to me personally were 2004 and 2009.

So that was me: pretty good decade I guess. A little bumpy, but the bumps made it good, ultimately.

Impersonally, this was an awful decade for America. (It was a lot better for 2-3 billion other people, though, something I won’t touch on.)

I won’t dwell long on politics except to note that no one got what they wanted. The nation didn’t get the president it voted for in 2000, but we did in 2004. By 2006, we had serious buyers’ remorse. It sucked elephant balls to be a liberal this past decade, but it had to really grate to be a conservative. Conservatives got everything they ever wanted for six or so years and it was an utter failure. I wonder if the resulting cognitive dissonance isn’t driving the utter batcrap crazy nonsense coming out of conservative mouths these days.

Lots of people will want to think September 11, 2001, was a nadir for America (and maybe the world), but I think in a couple of decades it’ll look like the 21st equivalent of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. A big deal only for the stuff that happened around it. Really big objects are in motion, globally, stuff that only crackpots and visionaries discussed ten years ago. Global warming, peak oil, globalization, the shift of global capital eastward and southward, the imminent plateau of human population, the emergence of the infosphere as a pervasive element of society. Ferdinand’s death didn’t start the Great War; the Great War was the first, protracted battle of World War II. The whole mess fell out of the final crackup of the ancient world order of empires built by monarchs.

I wonder whether the 2000s weren’t so much the first decade of the 21st century as the last decade of the 20th. The 19th century didn’t really end until 1918. And then it got worse.

The Internet and mobile phones — the democratization of information, actually — are quietly and relentlessly euthanizing whole industries. 2009 was the year people stopped consuming printed matter. Think hard about what that means. 20 years ago, if you wanted to know a random piece of information — for example, who played the second Catwoman in the Batman TV show with Adam West, for example — it would require several minutes, perhaps hours, of legwork. Minimally, a trip to the library. That’s a measure of how free information has become: we no longer rely on institutions or interlocutors to tell us what apartments are for rent, what a used car should cost, or how much our neighbors’ houses are worth. When people say “information is power,” there’s a concrete case. Twenty years ago, I was at the mercy of the used car guy. I had to hope he was honest, or I had to do days of expensive legwork to keep him honest.

The democratization of information will have consequences. Lots of people depend on that friction for their paychecks. In just a few minutes I can name a dozen or so professions fast becoming obsolete: publisher, newspaper editor, used-car salesman, newspaper carrier, ad buyer, payroll clerk, shipping clerk, bank teller, real estate agent, travel agent (anyone with “agent” in their title, really).

On the other hand, and this really blows my mind, my job title didn’t even exist when I graduated high school 20 years ago. The industry didn’t even exist. The words “web designer” were a meaningless nonsequitur. Man did I luck out there.

All this change was in the air 10 years ago, but most people overlooked the “destruction” part of “creative destruction.” The 90s had been pretty good — pretty great, actually...remember when gas was 89¢/gal? — and the 80s were nearly as good. The 70s sucked a little, sure, but Disco wasn’t as bad as everyone remembered, and black people could finally sit in the front half of the bus. 1975 was the point at which the disparity between rich and poor was lowest in the United States. (I wasn’t alive in the 60s so I can’t tell you whether anyone felt nostalgia for the passing decade on Dec. 31, 1969.) 1999 was coming at the tail-end of 50+ years of economic, political, and military stability for the United States.

I understood this, growing up, in an indirect way. When I read about Henry Huggins in 1979, the life he lived in 1949 was pretty substantially like mine. No kid lives like that in 2009.

So this is where “personal” hits “impersonal.” I’ve led a blessed life: a trouble-free childhood, my teenage and twenty-something years no worse than usual, a career I stumbled into by a fluke of history. All the troubles of my life — the divorce, mostly — are entirely of my own doing. This blessed life is a result of a lottery I won at birth. I was smart enough to be born in America, smart enough to have middle class parents with a good marriage, smart enough to be born into a largish extended family in a prosperous midwest state. All at the point in history when America was doing great and we had plenty of everything we needed: energy, water, topsoil, forests, fisheries, family farms, colleges, factories, credit cards, doctors. We still have doctors and colleges in good supply, I’m not too worried about those. Some of that stuff — e.g. factories and family farms — we’ve surrendered more or less intentionally through economic relationships, so we can get them back. Most of the rest we’ve simply eaten up and crapped out. However much there may be left of topsoil, or forests, or energy, or fresh water, we aren’t making more of it nearly fast enough. For 50 years, America’s been on a pretty effortless upward path; but there’s nothing in history or our present situation to suggest we can rely on momentum alone. I think we need to grow up a little and get a little serious about what America can do (halt global warming) and can’t do (build shopping malls in Kabul). But none of that is gonna fix itself, the way my life just kinda sorta turned out awesome. I think the “era of stuff just turning out awesome” is over.

Before Orion I used to say: I could imagine a heaven no better than to live my life again. But that’s not the heaven I want any more. Heaven to me now would be: I want Orion (and his sibling[s], and their kids) to live a life as good as mine. I mean this literally, by the way, not figuratively. I would gladly surrender personal immortality in paradise for the guarantee that my progeny get to live happy, fulfilling, plentiful lives.

From a romantic perspective, I want that life to have the exact elements I had: snow in the winter, trees to climb, bears in the mountains, paper routes and bicycles, cheap college with cheap beer, travel to fun places, no military draft, and a little dose (but not too much!) of free love. But that world isn’t gonna happen (see above re: creative destruction, stuff in short supply), and nothing as good as that will happen again unless we make it happen.

So this morning a guy yelled at me for signalling a legal lane change.

I made a (signalled, legal) lane change into the far right lane on a one-way street. Then I noticed that on the next block, this lane was closed for construction. So I immediately signalled a change back into the lane I had been in. I noticed the car that I had just changed in front of was immediately to my left (i.e. in my line of travel), so, while signalling my lane change I gave him a little wave-wave gesture meaning “you pull ahead so I can pull in behind you.”

At which point he rolled down the window and shouted at me: “You just changed out of this lane!” (For the record, he was driving an Acura, which I’m fast learning is the preferred car make of egotists with entitlement issues.)

I knew he couldn’t see the lane ahead like I could (cyclists have good visual command of the roadway, being up at SUV height and having no blind spots). So I said, as politely as I could while being yelled at, in traffic, with only one hand on my handlebars: “The lane ahead is closed, you fucking moron.” (OK, I left out the last part).

He dropped back (!) so I changed lanes in front of him. As we passed the obstruction I pointed at the lane closure and mimed “This is what I was talking about. You fucking moron.” I don’t know how well this translated, especially that last part.

But here’s what gets me: everything I did was completely, totally legal. Courteous, even. And we were all moving at the same (downtown rush hour) speed: about 13mph. There were a great many nonlegal, noncourteous things I could have done in this situation, including ride through the lane closure past the construction equipment, cut the guy off without signalling, or ride down the lane stripes. I didn’t, but got yelled at as if I had.

On my last few blocks into work, I tried to parse exactly what the Acura guy wanted me to do, and the best I can figure is “vanish from the face of the Earth.” Not just me, specifically, but all traffic between his present location and his intended destination. It’s just that I was on a bike and therefore a) unprotected and b) available for yelling at in a way I wouldn’t have been were I in a car. So he felt he could yell at me without fear of retribution.

So this reminds me of two stories.

Story the First

When I was in elementary school, all the teachers held the boys in my grade late one day. Someone, they said, had pooped in a urinal in the boys’ room, and we would all be punished until the culprit(s) stepped forward. No one stepped forward, so we were all punished. (I forget the punishment.) Indignant, all the fifth grade boys met at recess to find the bad guy, but again, no one stepped forward. While we were meeting, some of the popular girls came over and asked what we were doing, so we told them. They started laughing: because one of them had pooped in a urinal one day. (In thinking about it now, I wonder if she — one of the really pretty teacher pet types who teachers would never imagine doing such a thing, but who was one of the chief psychological tormentors on the playground — hadn’t done this particular deed to achieve just this effect: to get some boy(s) in trouble.)

A few days later, a couple of the more-troublesome boys pooped on the floor in the girls’ bathroom. The logic was flawless: if we’re going to be punished regardless of our behavior, we might as well do the things we’re being punished for. Of course, we were all punished again, but this time we knew who did it, and why, and we felt triumphant, not indignant.

So the next time you see a cyclist blow a red light, remember this story about fifth graders pooping, and my altercation with the Acura guy.

Story the Second

At some point in the 1980s, when systemic homelessness was a relatively new problem, I recall watching a talking head TV show about the subject. One of the panelists was a lady Reaganite, someone in the Phyllis Schafly mold. Hell, it might have been Phyllis Schafly. She offered no useful solutions to the problem of homelessness beyond, basically, “people shouldn’t allow themselves to be homeless.” When pressed about confounding factors like drug addiction or mental illness, she had no quick answer and kind of got flustered. She blurted out something like “if we quit feeding the homeless, pretty soon they’ll all go away.” The subtext was obvious: they would either clean up, or die. (This might actually be a workable solution, I dunno. This story isn’t really about homelessness, so lets don’t talk about that.)

Her “solution” to homelessness was exactly the same “solution” that many noisy anti-bicycle commentators (and I imagine Acura Guy) offer: ”couldn’t you all just vanish?” This is the de facto behavior of many drivers. They cut me off, hook me while turning, jump stop signs in front of me, refuse to yield right of way. They fail to see bicycles as legitimate traffic. They may (like Acura Guy) hold this view consciously, which is bad enough, but I have enough faith in humanity to assume most of the people who honk and yell at me won’t, when pressed, actually murder me.

But most drivers hold this view unconsciously, like the woman who damn near right-hooked me (i.e. turned right across my line of travel) this very morning at the Vermont/Capital Highway intersection. She wasn’t mad at me — she didn’t even recognize my humanity enough to hate me. I was not even worth looking for. These are the people that scare me, although they don’t make me nearly as mad. I have such encounters — which could quickly injure or kill me — probably two or three times a week. I’m still alive after commuting by bike in this city for nearly a decade, because I have to make the sad assumption that I actually am invisible, unless I’m directly in front of someone’s bumper, pissing them off. I’d rather have a motorist angrily acknowledge my existence than accidently kill me. Equal road access isn’t just an abstract principle; to someone on a bicycle it’s a matter of life and death.

In the “war” between cyclists and motorists (which I think is bogus, BTW, but let’s just play along for now), cyclists “win” if they continue to exist. Conversely, motorists will “win” when all the cyclists have either given up and quit riding, or died gruesome deaths in traffic collisions. These are not morally equivalent outcomes.

So the next time you hear a pro-cycling commentator bluster about equal access to the roads, remember this story about the lady Reaganite and homelessness, and my altercation with the Acura guy.