Category: Automobiles

Red blanket by the freeway

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
If this looks chilly, it’s because it is.

The weather took a seasonal turn yesterday. The gods knew I’d be dropping the Subie at Reincarnation downtown around 8:30, and they didn’t want me to be too comfortable as I cycled home on the Soma Double Cross.

It wasn’t what I’d call wintry. There was a pretty brisk wind, but hey, this is New Mexico. Wind ain’t blowing when you wake up, you may have died during the night. Anyway, it was pushing me along the North Diversion Channel Trail. So, winning, etc.

I was properly attired, with a light jacket over a long-sleeved jersey and an ancient Hind base layer, bibs and tights, wool socks, full-fingered gloves, and a tuque under my helmet. Kept it all on, too, as the wind became a little less friendly on the Osuna-Bear Canyon trail.

When you start your day with a 65-mph sprint down I-40 to University and then cycle from Mountain and 2nd, up Odelia-Indian School, and along the NDCT from Indian School to Osuna, you see the homeless folks getting their mornings on, if you know where to look.

One dude was camping beyond rough, rolled up like a burrito in a red blanket on a concrete slab off on the north side of I-40. I might not have seen him were it not for that blanket. If he had a shopping cart, a bicycle, or even a bindle, it was pretty well concealed.

As I pedaled up the NDCT a small group was shaking itself awake just off the trail below Montgomery. One guy had a bike; we exchanged waves.

Later, after I was home and warm and full of lunch, Reincarnation rang me up to say my 20-year-old rust-bucket would require a deeper dip into the wallet than I had anticipated, imperiling a considerable slice of what I had until that moment considered disposable income.

I felt sorry for myself, briefly, until I remembered that at least I’d have the Subie to sleep in if everything went south on me all at once. There’s even a locking rack up top for the Double Cross.

Home on the range

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Where the skies are not cloudy all day (lately, anyway).

On Thursday the lads at Reincarnation had a look at Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster and told me she required no heroic lifesaving measures at this time. It’s a red-letter day when a geezer on a fixed income with an equally ancient rice grinder can escape a mechanic’s clutches for under a hundy.

Plus I managed 30 cycling miles — 15 after dropping the old gal off downtown and then cycling back home, and another 15 picking her back up. Though the mileage is identical in both directions, the first leg feels the longest, with 1,150 feet of vertical gain. There’s less than 200 feet of vertical on the return trip, most of it in the first mile.

There are still a few hurdles to clear, though. The people whose “home” is the weedy industrial area alongside the North Diversion Channel Trail huddle together in what shade they can find come the heat of the afternoon, usually on the west side of the bicycle path’s underpasses, south of I-25/Pan American.

Like, wow. Like, bow wow, man.
Like, wow. Like, bow wow, man.

Many wear dark clothing and are hard to spot in the shade, if you’re new around here and don’t expect to roll up on a small crowd sprawled in a blind corner. Here’s a guy who looks like the Feral Kid from “Road Warrior,” with a dog instead of a boomerang. There’s a pensive young woman who seems to be revisiting her life choices as the temperature creeps into the mid-90s.

We were all on the same path, but not really. I was riding a bicycle that’s worth more than the car I was going to pick up. I was wearing sunscreen and about half a G’s worth of cycling kit, with an iPhone in one jersey pocket, wallet full of cash, credit cards, and health insurance in another. I knew where I was going to sleep that night, even if the Subie didn’t start (I was riding a bicycle, remember). The place has food, drink, beds, toilets, showers, doors and windows that lock, climate control, and a lid on all of it.

Cycling past the street people I always feel like a tourist gawping at the wildlife in some squalid national park. Possibly because I am one, and always have been, never more so than when I was pretending to be a hippie, hitchhiking, panhandling, and taking all those gosh-darned drugs that were so much fun.

Maybe the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed me around one dark night, way back when. Or maybe I just wised up to all that unearned middle-class-white-boy privilege I was wearing like a Superman costume under my hippie garb. Because I never had the balls or the bad luck to take anything that might leave me sprawled under a bridge on a searing August afternoon, as some bastard on a bicycle breezes by.

The cars always win

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
The giant Chevy Tahoe rental tank that Herself drove to Function Junction to handle some library bidness back in 2012. Sumbitch was bigger than the house we lived in.

The headline is lifted from a piece in The Atlantic about Noo Yawk Gov. Kathy Hochul croaking what would have been the nation’s first first congestion-pricing plan for traffic, charging motorists a fee to shoulder (fender?) their way into the ultra-swank Manhattan central bidness district.

The idea was to reduce traffic and pollution while raising money to improve the subway system.

Author Sarah Lasgow concedes that such a scheme could work in very few places in the Land of the Free. But one of them should’ve been the Big Apple, with its wide variety of transportation possibilities, among them subways, buses, and commuter rail.

Yet even if congestion pricing were only ever implemented in New York City, it would have been a signal that U.S. politicians could shake up the nation’s rigid transportation systems in the service of cutting back emissions. That cars appear to have won out even in New York shows how little room there might be for us to try anything different.

Sigh. I’m strictly a hick from the sticks, a rube who’s never even visited Noo Yawk, but I remember being seriously impressed with the mass transit in San Francisco during my first visit, back in the Seventies. I drove to that hilly town from Colorado in a Datsun pickup, four-speed manual, and was I ever glad to park that rig for a spell and find some other way to get around, something that didn’t involve me trying not to stall out as the light turned green on some ski slope of a Gay Bay intersection.

The bus system we had in Bibleburg was a bad joke, one that told you what you already knew: You want to get around in this town, you best get you a car, son!

But in San Francisco bus travel actually seemed feasible, to say nothing of a whole lot easier on the clutch. Plus, if you were lucky and happened to be at the right stop, around 10th and Judah, you might see some giant bald woman in black leather with a little dude on a leash, like an organ grinder’s monkey. Now and then she’d pop him on the noggin and he’d bounce up and down, grinning like a jackass eating yellowjackets.

This is about the time I realized that Gilbert Shelton was not always working strictly from imagination when he penned The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

Speaking of ways to get around, especially to places where juicy artisanal tacos are sold, my man Mike Ferrentino has a delightful piece up on NSMB about achieving the flour tortilla state of mountain biking despite the braying naysaying of beautiful hippie taco vendors and broplow drivers.

Wheel estate

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Irish Space Travellers docking at The Duck! City Vortex? Nah, just our weather station.

Some vortexes suck more than others, I guess.

The Guardian has picked up on a story I saw earlier in The Washington Post, basically the same ol’, same ol’, about how some of The Beautiful People in Sedona would rather that the Help did not share their ZIP code.

It seems Sedona, like Santa Fe, Taos, Aspen, et al., is a few rooftops short of affordable housing for the worker bees who keep their fauxdobe hives filled with organic, free-range, GMO-free honey. Thus, some of the folks who fluff Swiss chard at Whole Foods or pillows at resorts keep getting rousted from local parking lots, state parks, or the national forest, where they live in their cars between shifts in the barrel(s).

One short-term solution being considered is a “safe place to park” program that would accommodate 40 vehicles (belonging to Sedona’s unhoused workforce, not itinerant bands of Travellers, meth cooks, and hookers). The idea is to provide bathrooms, showers, and a fixed location for workers who are already living in their autos wherever they can find a place to park them. A social-services organization would vet the “tenants” to make sure no Irish were sneaking in.

Jodi Jackson, who lives in an RV and works at a local coin laundry, told The Guardian: “We may not be housed and living in town, but we’re the ones who are doing your laundry, working at your gas stations, working at your restaurants — all of the lower-wage jobs – delivering your pizza, for God’s sake. We’re not bad people. We just need a little bit of help.”

Don’t we all, at some time or another? When I was a pup I occasionally brushed up against the rough edges of capitalism, newspaper style. It’s why I declined an offer of “casual labor” on the copy desk of the San Jose Mercury News — “casual labor” meaning “We don’t know exactly when we’ll need you, but it won’t be 40 hours a week with the usual bennies.” It’s why I decided to settle in Española instead of Santa Fe when I got the gig at The New Mexican.

As regulars here know, I don’t mind kipping in my auto now and then. But all the time? It was grating enough to watch the People of Money (© Ed Quillen) strutting around the Plaza when I had a roof over my head that didn’t come with wheels under me arse.

As I noted above, Sedona’s a familiar story: tourist town, short on affordable housing, long on Airbnbs, rising rents, and exploding home-sale prices, possibly overstocked with POM© and the sort of self-satisfied simp who muses over his venti green tea frappucino with a strawberry smoothie base, two pumps of caramel, three espresso shots, whipped cream and a caramel drizzle about how nobody wants to work anymore.

They want to work, all right; they just want homes to go to when the shift’s over, like everyone else.

• Editor’s note: The headline is lifted from “Blue Highways” by William Least Heat-Moon, who during a stretch of personal and professional difficulty kipped in a 1975 Ford Econoline while motoring around the country to see how other people were getting along.

Salty dog

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
The Soma Double Cross wearing its winter kit.

Seasonable weather may have returned for the moment, but The Duck! City remains a sandy, salty, gooey mess, and thus the Soma Double Cross now sports mudguards because hey: Sometimes a fella doesn’t feel like taking his exercise on a 32-pound touring bike just because it has fenders.

The DC is another of those absurdly versatile sport-utility bikes, suitable for cyclocross, light touring, or simply trying to keep the muscle memory alive in January, when its lesser poundage — just under 26 elbees with a saddlebag and handlebar bell — makes a real difference on the hills.

I used it for a three-day credit-card tour of central Colorado in 2012, and it’s logged plenty of hours on roads and trails in New Mexico, too.

The DC is just a little small for me, which is fine, especially if you suddenly happen to straddle it on some sketchy stretch of singletrack. When I first got back into cycling in the mid-Eighties I started with a 60cm bike, then downsized to 58, and again to 56, before finally inching back up to 58 for pretty much everything save the cyclocross bikes.

The Steelman Eurocrosses, Bianchi Zurigo Disc, and Soma DC are all 55cm, while the Voodoo Wazoo is a 56cm. I should turn the Wazoo back into a drop-bar bike one of these days, but I kind of like it as a flat-bar, single-ring deal. It’s also less welcoming to fenders and a rear rack, should I want them.

Ordinarily when the weather goes sideways I turn to trail running. But we’ve had enough moisture lately to turn crucial segments of the foothills trails into skating rinks, peat bogs, and tar pits, which makes running nearly as much of an exercise in staying upright as cycling.

“Well, at least the motorists can’t nail you on the trail,” you quip. Ho ho, etc. Wrong-o, sport. Lately they’ve been hitting everything from traffic-light stanchions to tattoo parlors, restaurants, and private homes. Stationary objects, easy to avoid, unless you’re ripped to the tits on your reality-management substance of choice.

The wiseguys used to say that you’re taking your life in your hands just by getting out of bed in the morning. Now you can wake up to find yourself sharing the old king-size with a Ford Expedition.

Not even fenders will keep the road grime off your ass then.