Man and Machine Merger

I have been thinking for a while about my relationship with things, with possessions. Despite having lived at times with very few possessions, which led some people to think I was some sort of spirtualist or ascetic, I am actually a devout materialist. As I described at the beginning of another of my too-many-blog posts, one of the most important influences on my understanding of the world and my place in it has been Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan claims that all of our inventions are extensions of ourselves. We are our technologies. Technology in current common use seems to be limited to our electronic devices, but of course we humans have a long history of developing technologies which we mold, and which then remolded us. If we are aware of the technological soup in which we swim, if we can understand it, we might not escape it but we can at least be a bit selective in how we are remolded.

This is going to be a longer ramble than most of even my ramblings, so feel free,  as if you didn't already, to skip the whole thing, or at least to skip past all the pictures to the final paragraphs, by which time I hope my review of my life with bicycles and how they have influenced me will have made more sense to me.

One of the most important human inventions has been the wheel. In it's many and varied iterations it has remolded everything about us from how we move to how we make war, from how we use our rivers and streams to how we build our cities. Of the many iterations of the wheel, my favourite is the bicycle. It is probably the bit of technological kit that, besides the book and more recently the smart phone, with which I have chosen to be most intertwined, the extension of myself that I treasure the most.

My great grandmother called bicycles 'the wheel'. I suspect now that it is because she grew up at the time when the bicycle was the first wheeled device available to people of moderate income that was uniquely individual in a way that ox carts seldom are. I found her use of 'the wheel' to describe bicycles particularly interesting because by the time I knew her, she was confined to a wheelchair. I never thought to ask her, and she never volunteered to tell me, if she had ridden a bicycle when she was a young woman, when riding a bicycle was a liberating event. but I suspect she either had or wished that she had, because she made sure that her daughters all went to college.  Her daughters extended themselves with cars. Nell in particular was an avid motorist, buying a new Chevy every two years. Her first test of her new wheels was a particularly twisty route up Crowley's ridge and back. The new car needed to be faster than the old one, or she would wait a year.

I had a period of intense interaction with the automobile, mostly because I spent a period of my life trying rather desperately to be 'normal'.  I had disliked cars before I was married, and when I came out of the closet and was divorced, I allowed myself to dislike cars again. I think they are interesting as art, but not very useful as urban transportation, and that they are rather overpowering extensions that tend to overwhelm the persons inside them ,who become reduced to a sort of removeable brains.

Bicycles, however, I have found to be empowering without also being diminishing. I can ride for days and still walk or run afterwards.  My entanglement with bicycles began when I was about five. My grandmother won it in something downtown Jonesboro merchants called 'tradesdays', when every purchase gave one a ticket for prizes. It was  a Schwinn Panther, pretty much the two-wheeled version of a Buick Roadmaster.

It was much bigger than I was, but it was a device of great splendour, surpassing in my eyes anything I had previously hoped for or imagined. I could only mount it by standing on ab old water tank that was between a neighbor's garage, and I had to stay on it until some similar step came along. I could not sit on the seat, but that was no matter. I had the freedom of the road. When I was a bit older, I got a huge basket for it and it could carry almost anything. I would cruise the town looking for coke bottles to sell at Big Star for money for important camping or scientific equipment. It would carry all my camping equipment or my portable lab. Alas, it had a sad but noble end. I tried to make it into a submarine, with ballast tanks and much too small paddle wheels that never really did stay on the rear hubs. It submerged fine, but the snorkel I thought would let me blow the ballast did not work fine. It sank in the mire of a local stock pond.

Its immediate replacement was a bike of similar design but much less pretension, a sort of Chevrolet Biscayne of red utility from the Oklahoma Tire and Supply Company. But soon I found the ride that would take me into adulthood: the Schwinn Varsity.

In Memphis and Chicago and again Memphis, I rode a series of those sturdy Schwinns enough miles to go to the Moon, if not to Mars. I would always take off the fenders, and if they came with flat bars, I would replace them with drop bars. I say they because they were a favourite of bicycle thieves. Fortunately, my homeowners insurance policy paid for itself by replacing them with a wide array of stylish colours. Once, when I was living on the south side of Chicago and had ridden from 53rd. Street to Congress Expressway for class, I came out of the Auditorium Building to find my bike buried in snow. It was several days before the snow had melted enough that I could ride it home, but when I came out of the building, some thief had beat me to it.

The bike which would replace my line of brightly coloured Varsities was perhaps the most expensive bike I have ever owned, and the blandest in colour. A 1972 Raleigh Carlton, it was certainly the most expensive I had had until then. Perhaps its very bland brown paint was the reason it was never stolen. It didn't always get the riding it deserved, because I had it through much of my married life, but when I did ride it, it was a joy.

I rode that wheel for seventeen years, through all sorts of Mississippi Delta Weather, and only gave it up because Raleigh went sort of belly up and I couldn't find parts for it. I was about to move to Santa Fe, in the mountains, and I convinced myself that I needed a mountain bike, ugly though I thought they were. So I bought a  1999 Giant Sedona. It was Santa Fe garish. Giant called it Banta Blue, but it was turquoise, with pink tubing on the cables and yellow letters. It was, of course stolen, to be replaced with a dark purple  of the same model, also stolen. A few years later I would buy a used Sedona, which I gave away. It was red, and if it has been stolen, it was from its new owner.

When the second Sedona was stolen, I entered the world, the very reasonable, it seemed, world of cross bikes. My next Giant was an Innova, and it was a dark green. The first weekend I had it, it carried me on my first trip up Atalya Mountain in Santa Fe, the first time in four years I made the trip on my bike. It was a delightful wheel, but its colour was perhaps prophetic. I moved with it to Charleston, where I discovered that it was in fact Charleston green.

If I had good sense, I would probably still have that bike. In Charleston I lived on Folly Beach but got my mail downtown, so I had a forty mile round trip to the mail box. I loved it, but it was not considered very sexy by many people. My bike mechanic would always ask, 'Do you still have that same old bike?' So, when a friend had his bike stolen, I found an excuse to get something more socially acceptable. I gave him the faithful green Innova, and bought another mountain bike, this time one from Marin County itself: a Marin Eldridge Grade.

The colour was a surprise to me. I had looked at one in San Rafael, but hadn't bought it then. I ordered one from a shop in Santa Fe where my friend whose bike had been stolen lived and where I would make the self-serving gift. But just enough time had passed that the gun metal grey I had seen in Marin County was replaced by a new model year's red. Again, the colour proved prophetic, for I would soon move to the Pacific Northwest, where the red and black of the Eldridge Grade was central to the palette of the art of the coastal Indian Tribes. And again it was a somewhat ironic purchase. I had never ridden my first mountain bike on mountain trails, but I rode the cross bike on mountains from its firs day out of the box. The Eldridge Grade would take me on road trips all over western Washington, often from Bellingham to Seattle and back. But it was study as a mule, and I bought panniers and toured with it. Finally, I decided that it was silly to ride such a heavy bike. A friend had an orange Schwinn Collegiate which he gave me. I felt like a kid again. I sold the Marin. But when I left Washington for Arkansas--again--I left the Schwinn with another friend who seemed to need it more than I. It was stolen from him. Thieves love Schwinn Collegiates.

I was in Arkansas for a while with no bike. Eureka Springs has too many tourists on too narrow roads to be a very good biking town. Several times I almost bought something. There is a bike dealer there who kept having just the bike for me. Each time, I would be about to go on a hike or a paddle  somewhere and thought I would buy it when I returned, and each time someone else would have given it a good home. I would see those bikes around town with their happy owners, much more sincere than I, and share their happiness. But finally, Denton said he really did have the bike for me this time. It was a Globe, one of a line of bikes Specialized made for a while in an effort to save the world. It was black, the colour of my first Schwinn, with a curvaceous frame like that first love, and it even had a sticker that said 'one less car'. I did my part to save the world and bought it. Everywhere I went, people said it was a beautiful bike. I was living in a tent on the edge of town at the time, having camped there for a weekend before finding an apartment in Fayetteville, a weekend that lasted for six beautiful months. Dominic--the Black Friar--did look beautiful among the oaks and pines.

What Dominic, or what Dominic and I, did not do, however, was really bond. He never felt like an extension of myself. So, he went to live with one of his admirers, and they got along fine. I mentioned that I thought I might like a white bike, and that same admirer ordered me a very beautiful white bike. It was another Schwinn, and I thought that was rather wonderful. I tried to take very good care of that bike, and it carried me all over several Northwest Arkansas counties.

I named that bike St John, for the only apostle who lived to a ripe old age, thinking that this might be the last bike I would ever need. I gave it showers. I oiled the chain every Thursday. What I could not do was find spare parts, Schwinn having fallen into the same black hole as Raleigh, and St. John needed a part. So he also went to a new home, to be ridden for quite a long time by a friend who wasn't so particularly about consistency as I--that is, he's less obsessive compulsive. So I bought the next last bicycle I would ever buy, a nice sensible flat-bar Trek. I had never owned a Trek, and had admired several of their models. I had actually ordered something else, but a dock strike in San Francisco prevented its delivery, and I had already given St. John to his new rider, so I was having serious withdrawal symptoms. Enter Diablo Negro.

 

There was a lot to like about that bike. Black is beautiful, and there was an elegant simplicity to its structure, but my hands hurt when I rode him great distances, which I often did, in the Arkansas heat. I realized that I had reached the age when the warnings about old people staying out of the heat were aimed at me, and I decided that I could learn as much about quantum physics on line as I was doing at the University of Arkansas--the excuse I had given for the move--so I sold the Black Devil and moved back to cooler climes, where I expected to live to a comfortable ripeness.

In my old age my head is still easily turned by beauty, and when I got back to Port Townsend, I met a beauty which was willing to be mine for just a big more than $800, including tax. It was another Trek, but with geometry like my old Raleigh, and it was a red hot number.

It was quick. There was no reasonable way to junk it up with racks because the short wheelbase didnt leave room for panniers. I really liked riding that bike. I felt young again. Silly me. I felt young again enough to think I would take on the Arkansas heat again, and had it shipped to Fayetteville. Unfortunately, in less than a year that bike did not seem young. It had rust in places no other bike I have owned has ever had rust. And the Trek dealer was worse than useless. He actually asked me if I had ridden it often. So I sold it and went back to the brand of bikes which has been most faithful to me over the years, Giant. And I bought a bike that seems to me like an old man's bike, not so quick as the Trek, with flat bars, but which happily never makes my hands hurt. 

I call the last-so-far last bike I will have to buy Grey Wolf. Giant calls it an Escape.

Adjusted for inflation, the Escape probably is in the same price range as the old Schwinn Varsity. I confess I bought it because I like the way it looks. I didn't want to at first, because it's heavy by today's standards. But it takes me comfortably everywhere I want to go, and so far it hasn't begun to rust. It feels like a part of me.

If you are still on this ride, faithful reader, then you are very faithful indeed, and I thank you. What I have realized writing about these bicycles, these machines that have been extensions of myself for the past sixty-seven years, is that my memories of them are much more vivid than my memories of nearly anything else I have known, including most people. And their styles and colours have been the biggest influences on my clothes and backpacks and other kit that I have chosen to 'express myself'.  There is much talk these days about interactive technologies as if that were a new thing. But all technologies are interactive. Some interactions take more than they give. I realize that different people interact differently, so I am not condemning you for not riding a bicycle or going everywhere by car.  I find I get the better part of the interaction with bicycles. I was amused last summer when I came to the top of a very steel hill in Fayetteville and a woman in a Prius rolled down the window of her air-conditioned traveling living room, something that is very useful for people who spend a lot of time in traffic, and thanked me for doing my part for saving the planet. Shit. I hadn't ridden up that hill thinking I was saving the planet.  I hadn't even ridden up that hill in the sweltering heat thinking I was saving me, although I do think bicycle riding helps avoid clotting from my incompetent veins. I rode up that hill in the sweltering heat because I could, because it was just as much fun as it had been to ride my first bike, that big black Schwinn, up the hill  on Jefferson Avenue in Jonesboro I was breathing heavy just like when I was six. I think Giant misnamed my bike. I don't think it's an Escape. I think it's an Entrance, an entrance to a deeper understanding of who I am as a human animal, an animal who is part meat and part machine.