I've been a cyclist, now, for over 60 years - it seems unreal.
However, despite the ranting of both motorists and hard core (or is it corpse - take your pick!) cyclists, I find it difficult to be angry at all other road users. Why? Well, I suppose the best way to describe it is that old quote from Pogo "We have seen the enemy, and he is us."
The other way to describe it is this: I'm NOT a "cyclist" (some sort of strange sub-species of H. sapiens) I AM a driver - who has, and still does, spend a significant amount of his driving time on two-wheels, entirely self-powered.
There's a real difference. I do not view the driver of that car or truck as my foe - to be feared, to be bested, and to be screwed over at every possible chance. I see him (and this includes HER, always) as just someone like myself, busy doing what I'm doing - getting from here to there as best he can - for whatever reason. I do not, as a rule, cycle for exercise - even though I do rejoice in the exercise I get from cycling. I DO enjoy the experience - the successful surmounting of hills, the effort of working into the teeth of the wind, as well as the avoidance of all the obstacles in my way - cars, trucks, busses, pedestrians, dogs, holes in the road, slick steel plates or manhole castings, even the slippery swathes of traffic paint meant to show me where it is safe to ride. No - it's not really safer on that swath of green paint, in damp weather - it's an invitation to a slippery fall, if you are not careful. It's just that this is a "safe area", where motorists are not supposed to attempt to hit you. Yet cycling, for me, is not about any of that - it's about getting to my destination, as quickly, as easily as I can - for the least cost - at least as I see it.
Let me wander back in history. Imagine a boy - barely ten years old, and rather small for his age - living in a farm-house three miles (or 5 Kms - about the same) from the village, and at least a kilometer from any possible playmate. Get a "lift" over to a friend's house? Not a chance. All the others around us were working farm families - with more important things to do than cater to the whims of small boys. Dad worked in the city - a good hour's drive away - and Mom never did master driving - a badly smashed left ankle as a child made mastering a clutch too difficult. Perhaps Dad was a bit too doctrinaire about the use of automatic transmissions- but maybe not. They were not very effective, in those days. No - the only way I was going anywhere, except with the family on weekends, was either on foot, or on that bike. Once I mastered the basics (I could actually ride a straight line, and didn't fall off every couple of hundred feet.) the bike won out, hands down. I could go any where, at three times the speed of walking, or better. On foot, going in to the village would take most of an hour (trudge, trudge, trudge) while the bike took only about fifteen to twenty minutes - a huge improvement.
What did it matter that I might have to walk up a couple of hills - at first - or that there was little room for me to meet a car, and I might have to stop - I could GO!
Of course, muscles soon grew with use, stamina improved, and I learned how to navigate the windrows of loose, coarse gravel on either side of the beaten tracks. No more stopping for cars - I just rode on.
Here, obviously, is where the love of cycling first bloomed. A few years later, now living in the city, I became even more comfortable with cars around me - and realized that, if I behaved as the drivers did - stopped for stops, stayed to the right as a rule, signaled my turns, and so forth, I'd be accepted. It was fairly simple.
Those were, truly, the "good old days", a time when most drivers had, themselves, of necessity, used bikes beyond childhood. Who could afford a car in the depression era? Not that many. Who could afford to drive everywhere during the war? Very few. So most drivers were comfortable with bikes around them - having had to bike in traffic themselves. Eventually, I turned sixteen - the desired age of all teens, and could get "real wheels". As I started my driver's lessons (eager enough to learn properly, I was prepared to pay, out of my own pocket. It never occurred to me to ask for assistance) I soon realized that I only had half the business to learn - that of controlling the car (Ease the clutch in until the engine starts to slow, then flip the right foot from brake to gas, simultaneously easing up the clutch enough to prevent the car rolling backward down the hill. Damn! Stalled it! Neutral, brake on, restart, wait for the light to change, try again. Damn! - repeat the scenario until you DO get it.) I already knew about traffic, and what to look for - and realized that the faster you go, the farther ahead you had to look. Suddenly, as never before, I saw cycling as "just another form of driving", and set out to act that way. Why should I be afraid of traffic? I WAS traffic!
Of course, it took time - far more than I'm completely happy to admit to - to realize the full inwardness of this. However, it did make it possible for me to accept the fact that we were not flush enough to afford a second car, and keep on riding - now just a form of driving - all through my teens.
Let's skip about a decade, to the late sixties. Better paid jobs allowed me to become a car-owner - but I found the habits of the past were still too engrained. I actually LIKED cycling. Part of it was the fact that I now lived on the Wet Coast of Canada, where the weather made it possible to ride in reasonable comfort 14 months of the year. Contrast this with April icy roads in the Ottawa valley - where the winter had been far too long already. Another part of it lay in the parsimony with which I'd grown up - driving a car - fun as it is - costs MONEY, and I was a "Starving Student". Bikes paid no parking fees, cost no gasoline, nor did I need to pay for "Proof of Financial Responsibility". In a big city, like Vancouver, it was not that much slower than a car - particularly if traffic was heavy. Besides, I didn't need to go to a Gym to maintain fitness. So I rode, and get even better at dealing with traffic.
The bulk of the 70's was spent in a small outport at the north end of Vancouver Island - only sporadically connected with the rest of the world. Roads that were scarce-improved logging trails, a fairly strongly vertical topography, and the distances involved, rather left cycling as a thing I once "did". But then, a change of employment moved us (now four) to Victoria. If possible, I was determined to live where I could easily commute by bike. I wished to avoid the expense of becoming a multi-car owner - particularly if one were used almost entirely to get me to and from work, and that was all. I succeeded, and almost immediately after moving, bought a bike, and began to ride. In a funny way, it was as if the previous decade had not occurred - all my traffic skills were there, and in good shape.
Over the last four or five years, I will admit, the eagerness with which I ventured out into winter rains, just to get to work, has waned. I no longer refuse to see the comfort of using a car in such weather. However, the skills that had me riding are still there, and the sheer pleasure of hustling along, under my own steam, still stirs.
Perhaps I'm selfish - but I don't wish everyone were out there with me. There's no sense in which I want to see others "suffer" as I did (but did I?), nor any notion that I am, for some reason "Better" than all these. I just accept the quiet pleasure that I can still do what gave me such a thrill sixty years ago - and that it IS, still, just as much fun as it was, then. So, when I can, I concentrate on teaching others my few skills, my attitude towards the road, and everyone on it. Right now, I'm working on a couple of grandchildren, who bid fair to be as much pleased with the thrill of independence of movement as I was. The world has changed - but it also seems to have come, almost, in a full cycle. Where, in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, cyclists were seen as something to brush off the road, and were feared, because most drivers hadn't a clue what they were going to do, we have come back, now, to a world where cyclists are seen - more or less - as simply part of traffic, and are rated on their merits, as we do other drivers. The world has become, once again, almost safe for us. That, if nothing else, is a matter of real satisfaction.
