I agonize over the fact that I don’t compost. A high energy bill is something I think I should repent for—to whom or to what I’m not really sure. I have seriously considered washing all of my clothes by hand. My eyes scan for items made from recycled materials, carob, and spirulina. I bike everywhere and, on the best of days, buy next to nothing.
These are the first-world confessions of a Madisonian greenie.
I heard on NPR not too long ago that people now give carbon offsets to their friends as gift certificates. The idea is that the amount of carbon your friend used on her last roundtrip flight can be offset by the amount of renewable energy you purchase for her, thereby bringing her total carbon impact back to zero. According to some environmentalists, it is one way among others to diminish your carbon footprint.
The thinking behind carbon offsets definitely signals a change in collective consciousness at least among some young professionals and baby boomers. I can’t remember caring about buying local even a couple of years ago; now it seems like second nature. Nor can I recall feeling nauseated anytime I drove my car. Now on those scant occasions when I seem to have no other choice but to drive, a slight feeling of nausea stays with me from the moment I back the car out of the garage to the moment I park it. I look at the thing with a mixture of pity and disgust as though it were a fixture of the past, too much an alien thing to still be a part of modern life.
These sorts of reflections are probably what led me to start making my bike my primary mode of transportation. But this transition, one made over the course of six years, hasn’t come off without a hitch.
*
By its very nature, biking puts you closer to the elements. Rain, snow, coldness, darkness, potholes: these are the conditions that shape your life, often in unexpected and sometimes in rather frightening ways. When the temperature falls below zero, I’ve found it necessary to cock my head to the left and breathe shallowly out of the side of my mouth. Hours later, my lungs still feel as if there were something stuck in them. When it’s rush hour and I’m biking in the bike lane, I can feel the impatience of the bus, its squealing breaks indicating its desire to go 35 when I’m pedaling reluctantly through the days-old snow and pale-gray mush. And when it rains or snows, I’m bound to swear under my breath. It’s anger I feel, yes, as well as revenge, but also and no less poignantly the feeling of being cosmically duped. "A mere mortal," the Chorus intones, "thinking that things are under his control finds out for the first time that the world is not a home. How pitiable he is, how ineffectual his teeth-gnashing."
No, certainly not for the first time. I’ve been known to bend my will according to the chill in the air and the darkening sky. Lack of humility is not—or is no longer—one of my shortcomings. That much I have learned from biking year-round.
On my bike I’ve become more like a woodland creature, watching the weather patterns and the seasons, waiting for my chance, aware, above all, of my vulnerability.
*
The punchlines I’ve heard from the cadre in pickup trucks:
"Tour de France! Tour de France!"
"Pedal, pedal, pedal. Faster, faster, faster."
"Run, Forest, run."
Two observations and then a question. The first observation: I know their jokes are meant to shame me. I am, as it were, a first-time lover, unsure how this tête-à-tête is supposed to work, inattentive and self-absorbed from the start.
The second: it is just as pleasurable as it is awkward to catch up to them at the next red light. They have nothing more in their repertoire, and so the whole thing is rather like trying to say goodbye for a second time to someone whom you barely know and whom you have no desire to ever see again.
And now my question: why the harassment? Why, that is, such hostility? To begin with, consider that Urban Bikers are a strange lot, belonging neither to the People of the Sidewalk nor to the People of the Road. Only those who belong to this strange world filled exclusively with Sidewalk and Road People genuinely exist. Indeed, recognition of your group affiliation confers upon you a legitimate existence. Without such a conferral, the Urban Biker remains nothing but an anathema or a being to be tolerated—anathema to many, tolerated by a few.
In some cities I’ve biked in that are especially hostile to cyclists, particularly at various sections of the urban landscape where poverty and despair clasp hands, I’ve biked on, homeless, unseen, ill-seen, or unrecognized. When I became known, I became known merely as an impediment or as an obstacle—an impediment that stands in the way of forward momentum or an obstacle that has to be overcome one way or another—and almost always as an unwelcome surprise. The driver intending to turn right finds as he is in the midst of turning that I am there in front of him. By his lights, I shouldn’t be there in the first place, shouldn’t be at all. Anger therefore on one side, silence on the other. So it goes—usually anyway.
Usually but not always. Not too long ago while I was living in Milwaukee, I was run off the road by somebody I foolishly flicked off. The man behind me was obviously in a hurry, and the road was wet and narrow on account of the fresh snowfall, parked cars, and ongoing construction, so narrow in fact that there was no way for him to get by and no way for me to get over. There was, suffice it to say, little that I could do. Thus my flicking him off as he aggressively approached me from behind. And why not, right? I turned around, looked at him intently, and shaped my glove-hand in such a way that could only convey blamelessness, self-righteousness, and bloodlust: the majestic middle finger.
I should say that flicking drivers off is so far from my modus operandi that it could only have happened after a long day during a long winter that at the time I thought would never end. (Pain, Emily Dickenson once wrote, seems after a time to make the memory of life without pain indistinct and vague.) In any case, my self-described act of resistance resulted in his pulling off the road and then doing his best caricature of the Angry Put Out Man. I thought as he slowly approached me, his hands making obscene gestures, his voice rising and falling with every footfall, that nothing good could come of this.
It was stupid and short-sighted, so stupid and short-sighted as to be incompatible with my Stoical view of urban biking. Stoics urge us to assume no willful wrongdoing on the part of others, to admit only the best of intentions, and to grant from the outset that wrongdoing is necessarily and invariably accidental. In short, let nothing get to you and you’ll get by. Accordingly, mental tranquility always trumps retributive justice.
*
These kinds of risks, though, pale in comparison with biking at night. On one especially cold night in early January, I decided to do just this. Not a wise decision. It had snowed very little the day before, just enough so that while the main arteries of the city were entirely cleared of snow the side streets had been woefully and unaccountably neglected. Not knowing this, I decided to take the side streets in hopes of avoiding heavy traffic. This proved to be a great blunder for here I was sliding down snow-packed, dimly lit streets. Because my headlight had been stolen days before, no oncoming car could see me. Thus ensued the none-too-pleasant game of trying to steer clear of trailing impetuous cars, to avoid ill-seen potholes, to ignore the bitter cold, to find bits of the street where my tire met pavement, to pick out road signs, and to ride at a decent clip. It occurred to me then how easy it would be for me to get into an accident—how very likely that would be and how easily I could be injured.
How stupid I can be sometimes. What reason did I—an uninsured and typically fairly reasonable person—have to put myself in harm’s way not once in a while but quite often? And why do I continue to put myself at the mercy of others, why indeed when this involves trusting those who might unintentionally injure me? These questions are never very far from my mind.
I’ve concluded that stubbornness can’t be the whole story. Nor, for that matter, can it be chalked up simply to self-interest, enlightened or otherwise. I suppose that like many of us I’ve come to feel, somewhat inchoately and without too much deliberation, that I have obligations to the unborn, to those who “shall inherit the earth.” Why I have them I can’t say. What obligations exactly I don’t really know. But they are obligations all the same. During more pellucid moments, I suspect that the whole thing is just an expression of some vague and not fully grasped religious sentiment. And that it’s quixotic too, that ultimately it’s very soppy.
Very soppy indeed.
But I can’t so easily shake off the feeling that this doesn’t entirely explain what’s going on here either. I’d like to think that it’s simply the noble or virtuous thing to do without the words “noble” and “virtuous” being taken as laugh lines by those who’ve long suffered life’s slings and arrows. In my mind, I’m addressing myself to the more sober and less cynical ones among us. To them, I’m trying to communicate something of deep ethical importance about how we should live our lives. The lingering issue is that I’ve yet to figure out which group I belong to.
Andrew Taggart is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. His work has appeared, most recently, in Butterflies and Wheels and in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy.
