Piece of Cake

I haven't owned a car since the twentieth century. I used to own cars--for years I found them indispensable. Like everyone else, although I denied it for years, I accepted the fact that we live in a car-culture, designed for cars and car-friendly, in fact so car-dependent that it's practically unpatriotic or at least slightly perverse to avoid them. I'd say I spent nearly $50,000 just to get cars, before figuring in the money spent pampering them, maintaining and modifying them, and thousands more on insurance and registration.

As a teenager in the 1970s I understood that owning a car and driving one daily was a crime against the environment. Pollution and depletion of natural resources related to car culture is an undeniable fact. The OPEC-engineered gas shortage of those days illustrated clearly that owning a car was also a political liability. When fuel prices doubled or tripled in a few short years it not only caused record economic inflation that has never gone away, but it exposed America's dependence on the unscrupulous international profiteering of the oil monopolies. It also made us all uneasy partners with nations, such as Saudi Arabia, which have shown recently that they do not have our best interests at heart. They don't even have them in mind.

On New Year's Day, 2001, my last clunker wheezed to a stop on a freeway off-ramp. I gathered my belongings and took to my feet. Not long after, I got a bike. I didn't think I could commute ten miles to work and back each day, until I tried it. Not only could I do it, but it left me feeling healthy and energetic each morning when I got to work. I also started spending gas money on food, so that my diet improved in quality and quantity, and I was able to metabolize the extra goodies so that I did not become an immobile block of unmanageable and useless flesh as would have happened had I eaten the same diet while driving.

As another benefit, I started meeting a cooler class of people, hanging around bike shops. The hours I had previously spent being taken advantage of by gearheads in smelly garages whose word I was forced to take on faith, were now mine. The few hours I had to spend in bike shops were and are much more pleasant, without the hazardous waste everywhere and with much simpler problems to solve, as well as lower prices for spare parts.

Besides that, I became a kind of mascot for those who saw me cycling to work each morning. They would wave through their car windows and greet me happily if they saw me in town, as though they were pleased to see that someone actually could manage on a bike.

Of course it has not been a completely positive experience. I had to learn to dodge reckless drivers and anticipate hazards, and in bad weather I am in a more exposed position. Yet I have discovered that I do not melt in the rain.

The worst new problem is the attitude of a small minority of drivers who don't seem to believe that a bicycle has right to the road, not even to the narrow, crumbling, glass-strewn shoulder of the road. I've been taunted, insulted and challenged by aggressive drivers. I've been told to get my "fat' ass out of the road. I've been hit by unidentified projectiles and missed by bottles half-full of soda and beer, as well as empty cans and small stones. I can't speculate as to why someone would want to hurt a bicyclist except that it's probably a form of aggression closely related to the over-amped, short-circuited, psychotic dependence on...cars.

When I moved to Sacramento it was by way of my bike. I hitched a small aluminum trailer to my rear wheel and headed over the nearest ridge. I took a three-hundred mile detour just for the fun of it, and all it cost was the price of a few burgers, some convenience-store burritos, and a few gallons of water and juice. About as much as I would have spent on a single tank of gas.

It took longer than a comparable trip by car, as I know from having driven the same route. But I saw the world as I never would have seen it through a car window. Every breath of air from the coast to the Tower Bridge was a fresh and real experience. I would even say the whole event was priceless. And I was healthier when I got here than when I started, instead of bloated, weary, and flabby. The coyotes singing me to sleep just over the Colusa county line, the numerous flattened rattlesnakes, the hundreds of swallows wheeling under the Bear Creek bridge; even the dozen or so abandoned Old Glories lying on roadsides all gave me a unique and valuable impression of Northern California which wouldn't have been available through a car window.

Civilization was born and endured for millennia without a single automobile. The two are not synonymous. In fact it doesn't even appear they are compatible.

Sacramento is a nice town to ride a bike in. For one thing there are no hills. If you live near work and school it's considerably easier to get around here than it is to drive a car and spend ten of fifteen minutes of each trip trying to find a place to park it. While you're doing that, I'm having another cup of coffee and a nice piece of cake.I haven't owned a car since the twentieth century.As another benefit, I started meeting a cooler class of people,I've been hit by unidentified projectiles and missed by bottles half-full of soda and beer, as wellSomeday, we may all be riding bikeswww.eskimoepie.net