Easy Rider

The other day I slouched forth from my basement to put on some road miles and check out the rail trail of sorts that starts under the 205 bridge and runs along the Portland side of the Columbia. It was a perfect day here in Portland, the sort of day normally found only in Disney movies involving animated birds and bunny rabbits, which mean the river and shore were packed with people out enjoying the day. Likewise, the bike path was starting to see a lot of traffic.

Before this next part, I need to clarify something about myself: I am not a fast bicycle rider; I am a physical derelict who also happens to be a proud bicycle rider, and the combination of those characteristics is like the third leading cause of Simultaneous Massive Heart Attack and Spontaneous Cranial Explosion Syndrome in North America.

I mention this because I’d taken out The Fast Bike for this ride, and The Fast Bike does not like to get passed. The fast bike was made by Bob Parlee in Massachusetts and could care less about the ineffectual sack of ground beef turning the pedals. It has business to attend to.

So off we go charging into a deafening headwind and picking off wobbly boardwalk types here and there, but basically maintaining an average speed approximately 12kph faster than any doctor would tell you I’m supposed to be going.

And then I see him, a speedy-looking Fred like me in the distance ahead, the rabbit that’s going to keep me buried for another ten minutes or so. Only a few boardwalk cruisers between us.

But do I really want to be doing this? So what if I catch him, but I’m all blown up and pathetic-looking? How bad would that be? And what if I get by and then just hover there like the aerobic muppet I really am? I take a second to remind myself to give an “on the left” before going around the cruisers while I continue to give this some more thought.

It’s then that I notice I haven’t gained any ground yet. I mean on the cruisers. A quick check shows some frantic leg action by Cruiser Woman, following by power coasting, then more frantic leg action. My own cadence has been relentless. It’s pancake flat, but the wind has my legs in “long climb” mode. Temporarily, everything I’ve ever believed is wrong.

I lock onto the blur of the two cruisers in my head and chase like a drooling fool. At some point I notice the woman is wearing flip-flops. I’m in the drops. If a small child in a bathing suit were to step out in front of me, I would forever be cleaning him off my glasses. People play volleyball and barbecue on the broad expanse of beach-like area along the river. I have gained some ground. The flip-flops are blue.

As I close in, it becomes clear that something is wrong. We’ve passed the guy I’d originally set out to catch. There’s a kind of bobbing to the heads of Cruiser Guy and Girl. The wind is so loud that only when I’m within a bike length do I hear the motors–two-stokes at that, chainsaw loud. My bicycle and I have now drawn up alongside bikes with motors, and I feel the way a dog might feel after working for a half hour to corner a tiger, only to realize he’s cornered a tiger.

I get around them by pretending I have a motor and use the image of their slouching bodies and vaguely bored expressions to pull away. I have passed motherfuckers on motorcycles.

And then I think, “There were motorcycles on the bike path.” I still don’t know how I feel about that. At the beginning of the ride I’d had to pass two guys jogging side-by-side and had felt bad for being a faster-moving bicycle, disrupting their conversation, and here were two chainsaws on wheels zipping along on the same path.

I need to get used to it.

According to Make Magazine, this Blackbird is a “super-charged pedal-powered super cruiser.”

It’s cool and everything, and kudos to the guy who fabricated it. It’s a pretty impressive piece of work. Except that it’s not really pedal powered.

According to Makezine.com:

Eleven feet long and 150 lbs, the ‘Blackbird’ is ‘a fully custom made electric recumbent chopper bicycle constructed of off-the-shelf parts from the hardware store’ combined with scrap bike components, along with a commercial motor and battery. As for being super-charged, this bike is driven by a 36V DC motor capable of delivering 50 miles per charge at up to 20 MPH. If necessary, it can be switched off and instantly becomes a pedal-powered chopper! An array of cateyes, headlights, a pair of monkeylights, and even a singular spinning strobe light would definitely cause this machine to be confused with a UFO late at night!”

So here they are, the new vehicles in the bike lanes, and I have to admit I’m still processing the significance of that.

On the one hand, that contraption really is pretty cool in a kind of Mad Max, Steampunk sort of way, but something about the “150lbs” part makes the sentence, “If necessary, it can be switched off and instantly becomes a pedal-powered chopper!” seem a little optimistic. Having previously pedaling something that weighed about 150lbs, I can assure you that nothing about the experience warranted an exclamation point at the end of it.

And I guess that’s what bothers me about this motorized bicycle thing. I love motorcycles–grew up riding them–but we’re really starting to have a good thing going here with human-powered ways of getting around cities, and there’s a kind of self-sufficiency that comes with that that I’m not sure you get with a motor. Has the emphasis already swung back to needing to get there that must faster?

Or maybe I’m just still sore about getting roughed up by some people in flip-flops. Tough to say. Even my bike’s still confused.