Cars, part 2

Six-hundred riders

chase the Lion of Flanders

Up. Down. Up. Down. Up.

On Saturday I joined a bunch of other cyclist, including about a half-dozen guys associated in one way or another with the team, for de Ronde van Oeste Portlandia. I did this ride last year and was glad to have some friends along for the suffering this time. The weather was beautiful - really, the nicest day so far this year, which probably helped drive the turnout, which was estimated over 600. I think that's incredible for something that's unofficial and just organized by word-of-mouth and the net. You can read more about it here and here.

Unfortunately, one of our teammates, John, was seriously injured on one of the descents when a driver made a left turn directly in front of him and a group of riders. John was probably traveling 30+ mph and the accident sent him over the truck and left him with a badly broken leg and numerous other injuries. Our group had been split in half by a wrong turn a little earlier, and I came upon the scene a couple minutes after the crash. Fortunately, John was conscious and

 responsive, but he was in a lot of pain. There's no telling for sure, of course, but what I saw was as good an argument for the value of a helmet as I have ever seen. We were all left fairly shell-shocked, and those who were literally at his side when the collision took place were quite traumatized. The comment that most struck me was "it looked like a bike explosion."

In a previous post I talked about the price we as a culture seem willing to pay in order to drive. For me, this tragedy puts a violent and angry exclamation on that. I'm sick of what feels like the senseless brutality that drivers of cars inflict on vulnerable cyclist and pedestrians. And I'm sick of the voices that dare to say that cyclist and pedestrians are somehow to blame because the roads were made for cars. I refuse to use the term "accident" for this type of violence because to do so implies that it was inevitable, and that there wasn't a human at fault when there was. I'm not claiming the driver assaulted John, but when someone is at the wheel of a car and his recklessness or lack of attention or poor driving skills cause injury, a crime has been committed. I don't say this out of malice toward the driver, who, if he's like most of us, must feel sick with remorse. But I say it because I believe that if things are ever going to change - if road safety for all users is ever going to be a priority, we need to see more bad drivers charged with a crime. I hate saying this, because I take no pleasure in anyone's punishment, regardless of what they have done. But the close calls are beginning to wear on me and those who love me. Those of us who choose to regularly commute by bike can recount frightening close calls by the dozens. And despite the familiarity with bikes that inner-Portland drivers have (and bless their hearts most of them are great at sharing the road), there's still far too much selfishness and aggression out there. I want the driver who hit John charged with a crime not because I want him punished, but because I want the rest of the drivers out there to get the message that they must take the responsibility of getting behind the wheel as serious as a heart attack. I want the same rules for the road that I have for my classroom - that is, doing the wrong thing must be harder and more uncomfortable than doing the right thing. When a motorist can send a cyclist to the hospital and get back behind the wheel and drive home, something is seriously wrong.

Face It

Your car, like mine

cannot leap through giant hoops of fire

or loop, upside down, in gleaming tunnels of steel

it cannot scale cliffs, ascend roadless peaks

or plow through towering drifts of snow

your car will never speed across Bonneville, 

cut midnight cookies in New York City,

or drag race in a parking garage

Your car is not sexy

and doesn't make you sexy either

it is not a weapon or a toy 

it does not symbolize freedom

independence America power

an animal or you

Your car, like mine

is an appliance 

like a washing machine or a refrigerator

good to have 

necessary to the job at hand

a tool fit to its purpose

and when your car has been used with gratitude

and carefully kept from carnage

guided through neighborhood streets

gently purring past children as they play

at the end of the age of the auto

your car, like mine

will come to a stop

maybe in a quiet pasture

to rest and rust and return

until all that remains

is a dull orange headstone

leeching iron back into the earth

photos by Dave Roth

Joe Henry

You know how certain albums become the soundtrack for periods your life? I just automatically assume this is true for everyone, but when I talk to others about it, I realize that not everyone sets their life to music. I can return to certain albums like Led Zeppelin III (you know, the "acoustic" Zep album?), Bob Dylan's Desire, Inner City Front by Cockburn, or U2's October and each will transport me back to a specific time in my life when it was the soundtrack. This is even true for Out of the Blue, by ELO, which I can't listen to without thinking of the summer of '78 and working at Old Faithful. I remember the deadheads in the kitchen threatened murder every time I put it on. I still like ELO, and I still don't much like the Grateful Dead.

Recently I've been listening to this:

This is poetry, which I suppose could technically be said of all music. So, since this is my blog, I'll claim I think this is good poetry. Really good. Joe Henry's music is evocative of Tom waits without the gravel. I also hear echoes of Randy Newman. In his haunting remake of "When you wish upon a Star" from the children's compilation Mary Had a Little Amp I'm reminded of the much-missed (by me) Harry Nilsson. In places he reminds me of beat poetry, maybe because of the obvious jazz influences. The song "Parker's Mood" is in tribute to Charlie Parker, and Ornette Coleman plays on his earlier tunes "Scar" and "Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation" (which is as phenomenal a song as the title suggests.) Here's a sampling of lyrics from Civilians:

The carriage horses stamp and fume

Until all color's gone,
They leave the street in black and white
And bring the evening coming on.
Lovers tug their way out of gloves
Out of shoes, and gray chiffon,
The driver pulls his blanket high
And pretends to look beyond.

Oh, pray for you, pray for me.
Sing it like a song -
Life is short but, by the grace of God,
This night is long

from "Civilians"

or this:

lovers laugh and cross this way
weaving out into the street
it seems we never were so young
or it was never quite so sweet
but the world is always beautiful
when its seen in full retreat
the worst of life looks beautiful
as it slips away in full retreat

from "God Only Knows"

The centerpiece of the album is the tune "Our Song," in which the narrator says

I saw Willie Mays

At a Scottsdale Home Depot
Looking at Garage Door Springs
At the far end of the 14th row
His wife stood there beside him
She was quiet and they both were proud

I gave them room but was close enough
That I heard him when he said out loud

This was my country
This was my song
Somewhere in the middle there
Though it started badly and it's ending wrong

This was my country
This frightful and this angry land
But it's my right if the worst of it might
Still somehow make me a better man

The song is a beautiful meditation on what is right and wrong about our time. I have added it to my playlist, which you can listen to in the sidebar. I'd like to know what you think.

As I did a little poking around, I discovered some interesting Joe Henry trivia. He's a highly respected producer of some albums I really like, like Aimee Mann's The Forgotten Arm, the Elvis Costello/Allen Toussaint collaboration The River in Reverse, and the multi-artist soul & gospel album I Believe to my Soul. He knew the famous killer Jeffrey Dahmler in junior high. He went to high school with Madonna and has been married to her younger sister, Melanie, since 1987. Madonna has recorded a couple of his songs, and the two performed the number "Guilty by Association" for Sweet Relief II. Joe Henry sounds nothing like Madonna.

Winter Commute

A final kiss goodbye

A prayer my family sleeps safe

Layered gloved and helmeted

I step into the dark, latch the door mount up and

Ride into the final days of winter

Into the lees of the last snow

Treacherous gravel and wet grime curb to curb

I take the center in the fog until overtaking headlights

force the drift and skate of the shoulder sandbars.

Arrival the postponing of a skirmish

Resuming in the evening through quartering wind

cars hissing rain, following my feeble arc of light

Home, back knotted with work and road rudeness to

Uncoil the hose and flush muck and oily grit

Into the thawing earth.

Above, the slimmest shard of the new moon

rattles in the winter wracked limbs of the old dogwood

curved arms of light

reaching for the nearness

of the one star in the sky.

Read, ride, repeat.

ah! bright wings.

God's Grandeur

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

This poem has been haunting me lately. Hopkins is considered a 2nd tier British poet. He's called by some a religious poet, and by some a nature poet. I guess if one needs boxes, those fit. He was born Anglican but converted to Catholicism in college, taking orders as a Jesuit. Whether his sometimes bleak personality was a result of this or led to it is, I guess, a chicken-egg argument. He seemed torn by his sense of duty to his religion which - to him - conflicted with the longing of his soul to see and write beauty. I think this poem captures well the sense that the world is God's gift to us, and we have trashed it . And yet... day dawns, "nature is never spent," the Holy Ghost of God "broods" over the world (as in mother hen, I think, though I'm uncomfortable with the image). There is, behind what can be seen, a greater unseen.

I considered, instead of Baiku, calling my blog "ah! bright wings."

Though he suffered from serious depression, and fatally contracted Typhoid fever at age 45,  Hopkins' dying words were  "I am so happy. So happy."