Take the Lane

What did you get for Christmas?

Christmas presents for me with a bicycle theme are pretty much a guaranteed success, so no surprise that this was a part of my seasonal "haul" for 2012.

The bell is another Dring! Dring!, which will grace my orange-and-red road bike come spring. I was given my first Dring! Dring! by my son and daughter-in-law after they found the hand-painted bike bells in a Quebec City shop. Then HMV brought in a boxload for their stores at Christmas. They still have some on the shelves.

Extreme X-Bikes is a cubicle time-waster: a bicycle you can take apart and re-assemble, complete with teeny tiny bicycle tools. I'm looking forward rebuilding it as an art object.

Just Ride, by Grant Petersen, is the subject for a separate post. But if the weather is unsuitable for bicycle riding, you can't go wrong with bicycle reading.

When King Street hummed with bicycles

A couple of threads were tied together today when I read a post on the Vintage CCM bicycles blog about the bustling bicycle-building culture in late-1800s Kitchener (then known as Berlin).

The post tied in with the book I picked up at a remainder table at Wordsworth Books in Waterloo: The Lost Cyclist, by David Herlihy. It's the tale of Frank Lenz, who attempted a solo bicycle ride around the world during the height of the late 19th-century bicycle craze.

At about the same time that Lenz was riding his "safety" bicycle beside the rice paddies of China, Arthur Pequegnaut was repairing bicycles in his jewelry shop in Berlin. By 1897, he had switched over completely to bicycle-making, with two models: the Berlin (his own design) and the Racycle, a U.S. design.

You can see a photo of the Berlin here, on the Canada Science and Technology Museum website.

The Lost Cyclist is an engaging read, despite knowing how Lenz's trip will end (badly). The late 1800s was the time before motor cars, when the railway was still the major dependable regional and continental connection, with roads just being hard-packed dirt byways with minimal maintenance and connectivity (hmm, sounds like our bike lanes today).

It wasn't just Chinese villagers who were dumbstruck (or who turned violent) at the sight of a "foreign devil" riding these otherworldly machines. The book recounts how the appearance of an "ordinary" (big front wheel, small rear wheel) or a "safety" (both wheels the same size) could excite and perplex residents of small town America when they appeared.

Perplex because bicycles were part of the godless new technology, along with telegraphs and telephones (if God had wanted man to move faster than a horse, he would have given us wings). Excite because the future-thinkers saw bicycles as "the coming thing," and urban areas of any size could boast a club of "wheelmen," sometimes even including female riders. Early global cyclists had to be prepared to scare off bandits, convince isolated villagers that they were no threat to the heavenly order and prevent eager observers from manhandling their mechanical mounts or removing the odd "souvenir."

The Lost Cyclist is a fascinating read, for the tales of the global cycling adventurers, and for the picture it paints of a pre-motoring North America.

I imagine King Street, humming with Berlin bicycles from Pequegnaut's shop, likely scaring the horses.

On cycling and one's mid-life

It could be that Bruce Weir of the Calgary Herald is paid by the word, or it could be that I have become used to the saucy brevity of Facebook status updates: in the event, I did battle through to the end of his column-cum-feature on mid-life crises and cycling, and quite enjoyed it.

I, too, have seen the bicycle light coming from behind in my rear-view mirror. Older I am than Weir, and happy to report that I am usually able to accelerate sufficiently to maintain my relative position on the road vis-a-vis my pursuer. When the pursuit is broken off (because the rider turned off into the Tim Hortons or a side street), I imagine that it was just an excuse to avoid confronting the truth: that I was faster.

It must be the chemical factory that kicks in when you're riding a bike, that permits, even encourages, such  flights of fancy.

Partly, that is Weir's point. A bicycle is a flight of fancy, a rocket, an aeroplane, a sleek predator knifing through traffic, a way to let the world unroll before you, one pedal stroke at a time.

That he ventured off into electric-assist bicycles hardly matters.

Escaping the High Park cyclists, circa 1890

It might be hard to believe that hundreds of cyclists would leave Toronto to get away from the cyclists, but that really happened, according to a Brock University professor.

Phillip Gordon MackIntosh, a professor of geography in the university's social sciences faculty, has been writing about the place of the bicycle in the 19th and 20th centuries for more than a decade, but I just read some of his work as a part of a new book, Covering Niagara, Studies in Local Popular Culture, edited by Joan Nicks and Barry Keith Grant (Wilfrid Laurier University Press).

MackIntosh's contribution was Polite Athletics and Bourgeois Gaieties, which studied Toronto elites and their leisure pursuits in Niagara-on-the-Lake in the late Victorian era.

Just as the Bike Train ferries Toronto cyclists to the Niagara area today, trains and ferries carried the well-to-do (and the working class) to the Niagara area, in the 1890s and early 1900s, largely to escape the oppressive heat (booming Toronto had become a heat island).

The working class could only afford to go for day trips or overnight, while the wealthy could afford to stay for weeks at a time, or the whole season.

According to MackIntosh's reading of the newspapers of the time, part of the reason for the wealthy to leave Toronto was that the heat drove everyone outdoors, and public spaces were crowded with buskers, party-goers, rowdies, music, public drinking and, in the case of High Park, too many cyclists: "two to three thousand young men and women there at one time."

Horrors. I wonder how many cyclists one might find in High Park on a summer's day today.

So the elite took their bicycles on the trains and ferries to Niagara, particularly Niagara-on-the-Lake and its Queen's Royal Hotel, where, according to the Globe of 1895, the owner had to construct a "bicycle stable" to house all the two-wheelers of his guests.

The elites enjoyed tournaments of tennis, lawn bowling and something new to me: the bicycle gymkhana. One day was a decorated bicycle parade; the next a day of bicycle games. I chuckled to read of some of the games. The Maiden's Scurry (for girls 16 years of age and under) involved a course that featured at least one obstacle 18 inches in height that the participants must lift their bikes over (early women's cycle-cross). The Tortoise Race, in which the last person to cross the line is the winner, would be familiar to Can-Bike instructors today. And the Tankard Race, where the cyclist must ride to a line of pewter mugs, dismount, take a mug, remount and drink the contents and return to the finish line with mug in hand (you may have unknowingly participated in just such an event yourself).

It was an amusing glimpse of attitudes to cycling from more than a century ago. I wondered about our current relationship with bicycles and how much, or little it has changed in a century. In 1900, a bike was a toy for the elite, but a measure of independence for the High Park young people. It sometimes seems that our policy-makers still think of bicycles as no more than toys.

Road cycling skills book fails geek test

I wouldn't have been so ticked off if Bicycling Magazine's Complete Book of Road Cycling Skills had been promoted as an essay in nostalgia.

But the Rodale Books telemarketer who called me because I was a "loyal Bicycling magazine subscriber" to offer this collection of articles "by the editors of Bicycling magazine" didn't mention that the book was published in 1998 and based on articles from before that.

Now that I have flipped through the book, I can't see which of the "editors of Bicycling magazine" who are in it are still on the masthead of the current magazine. (One of them, in fact, writes sadly on his now-nine-year-old cycling website about the awful day when he was blindsided and dumped by his beloved employer.)

Road cycling is all about geekdom: the latest and greatest in technical tricks. What would you think of a book on road cycling skills that didn't mention the shifting potential of compact chainrings or the ergonomic advantages of modern (and often, carbon) handlebars? Heck, what would you think of a book about road cycling skills that referred to Lance Armstrong as an American rider who won a stage of the Tour de France, or showed photos of bicycles with quill stems and lugged frames, or in the section for women cyclists didn't talk about WSD (women specific design) bikes and recommends the Cannondale R600C, long ago retired from production?

Hmm, historical document.

Not to say that Bicycling Magazine's Complete Book of Road Cycling Skills is without merit. The emphasis here is on skills, and articles on riding posture, training approaches and street cycling survival techniques are evergreen. It just would have been nice to get some of the training advice from the current stable of Bicycling magazine editors -- Lance's trainer Chris Carmichael, for instance.

As a historical document, it is not worth the $29.85 (book, shipping and handling) it would cost to add this to my library. Fortunately for me (if unfortunately for Rodale), the company has an excellent return policy.

Unless you want a trip down memory lane, when the telemarketer calls with this offer, hang up.

I'd go riding with David Byrne, anytime

I haven't finished reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries, but feel pretty confident in recommending it to you.

Byrne may be well-known as a founder of the New Wave band Talking Heads, as a solo performer and as an installation artist, but he is also a cyclist. And not a "new wave" cyclist, but a longtime cyclist who chooses the bicycle to get around for many of the reasons that many of us do: it's convenient, it's fun, it gives you time to think, it allows you to explore places and people you may never have thought to explore before.

His new book reminds me that driving is often like using a telephone: You make the call and you hang up; you drive to where you want to go and you park. Cycling is like surfing the internet: you start out going somewhere, and you go somewhere else. You see the new Sudanese restaurant and think about the way the neighbourhood is changing. You watch a mom with her toddlers and you think about relationships, or your own parents, or what Fisher-Price is up to now.

Bicycle Diaries is not really a diary. Byrne is working from a variety of journals, field notes or memories of different cities he has roamed around by bicycle over the past two decades, and has constructed a book of city-themed chapters -- Istanbul, Manila, Sydney, Berlin, London. The chapter headings are simply an organizational convenience, as each chapter is a collection of his mental ramblings about everything from music to politics to architecture to climate change.

At first, I thought the "bicycle" angle was just a convenience, too, a foil for his opinions. But Byrne is a committed utilitarian cyclist. While the cycling devotee might make pilgrimmages to cycling meccas (Amsterdam or Portland, Oregon), Byrne rides where his work takes him, and tells of his experiences in cities that are shockingly cycle-impoverished. I was startled to read that Buenos Aires, which I have often thought of as a world-class city, is so cycling-primitive that Byrne's casual riding around the city was considered newsworthy enough to be reported in the local newspapers.

He opines on bike lanes, transportation planning, the divide between cyclists and motorists and the potentially fatal attraction of the car culture for nations that still count bicycles as a major way to get around.

As I wrote, I haven't finished the book, but I feel I would be very comfortable joining Byrne for a ride. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Books. Read more about Byrne at his website, where you can link to his blog.

Major Taylor

If you read Todd Balf's article on Major Taylor in the June 2006 issue of Bicycling magazine, then you might be interested to know that Balf has taken his research book-length.

Major: A Black Athlete, a White Era and the Fight to be the World's Fastest Human Being, is engrossing and disturbing.

Balf does a good job of portraying the era of the late 1800s and early 1900s: racial tensions on the rise in North America as the children of freed slaves became adults and expected to get more than the white world was offering; rampant corruption in sports, including competitive cycling; and a society eager to believe that a person could still reign supreme over any form of technology (the time of John Henry, Paul Bunyan and other larger-than-life characters).

Marshall Taylor, who came to be known as Major Taylor, was one of the real larger-than-life characters. A smooth track cyclist with a powerful kick, he virtually owned the track. He was three-time world track champion, and when he embraced his faith and refused to race on Sundays (world championship races were on Sundays), he'd arrange to race the title-holder later and generally beat him. Taylor rode in matches around the world, including in Montreal, and wowed the crowds at every appearance. Yet he confronted racism at every turn, from those who did not want him racing with whites, to those who did not want him living in their neighbourhood.

Balf spends a bit too much time setting up the rivalry between Taylor and California-born white track cyclist and crooked cycling promoter Floyd McFarland. The final race is a bit of a letdown. But the story of Taylor, the obstacles he faced, and the legacy he left in Major Taylor cycling clubs and associations around the U.S., makes a good read.