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COMMUTING
One less car on the road
BY LEWIS RICE

I’m not the type of person you’d expect to bike to work. That’s because I treat my body as if it were merely my mind’s plodding host: practical, but best left to fulfill only the minimal requirements. Like depressing the pedals on a mid-size, sturdy, preferably Japanese-made automobile, turning the pages of a book, or digesting a nice brisket. But I bike to work anyway. And I hope you will too, at least tomorrow, which is National Bike to Work Day. Because then I won’t have to worry about your car.

I started riding after a co-worker suggested it. He had a point. I work in Cambridge and live about six miles away, in Arlington. The lot I park in is about as far away from my office as my house is. As for public transportation, I think the bus that travels from Arlington to Cambridge down Mass Ave is called the 77 because it stops every 77 feet.

So I gave it a try. First, I bought a mountain bike, built for durability, not for speed. Then came D-day, or: dear God, am I going to die before disembarking at my dauntingly distant destination? My first day started out easy — all downhill, followed by a smooth cruise on the Minuteman bike path. Then into Cambridge, the mean streets. A car pulls up beside me but won’t pass. This is it, I think, this is one of those drivers who love to terrorize defenseless bikers, about to smack me with a tire iron. But it’s a woman in a minivan, for goodness’s sake, not exactly David Carradine in Death Race 2000. She swerves in front of me to drop off her kids at a day-care center. I join the drop-off ritual.

Things pick up when I arrive at work. The best part of doing most anything is finishing it, and so it is with biking. Rose, the security guard, gapes at me, as if she’s thinking the scrawny guy with the clever coming-and-going repartee has something in him she didn’t expect. And when I leave, bike helmet in hand, sweatshirt on torso, the lithe young women who overpopulate my workplace look at me perhaps a millisecond longer than the usual millisecond, as though they’re thinking, here’s a man I wouldn’t actually date, but maybe if he were the last person on earth I would procreate with him as a not-entirely-onerous duty to the human species.

I ride home, and at this time of day the streets are crowded. The space between the curb and the cars fits a pothole and not much more. Should I ride on the sidewalk or squeeze through or stop and hail a cab? Instead, I fall down.

I get up with a feigned jaunty wave to the concerned drivers (concerned about liability) and a bloody elbow. I make it to Arlington and only then understand an immutable law of physics, that downhill one way means uphill the way back. It rains on me and I am sweating and straining. But once I get home, panting and drinking a gallon of water, I have to say I feel pretty good about the whole thing. The next time I do it, it’s a little easier. I’m never going to be one of those bike people with the skintight clothes and the bitchin’ attitudes, but I can do this. At least when it’s above 54 degrees.

Friday, May 17 is National Bike to Work Day. The Mass Bike Coalition will lead commuter rides departing at 7:30 a.m. from Adams Park in Roslindale and Ace Wheelworks at the corner of Elm and Beech Streets in Somerville. A bike-commuter breakfast will take place in City Hall Plaza from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. Call (617) 542-BIKE or visit www.massbike.org for more information.

Issue Date: May 16 - 23, 2002
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