Shadow’s death is getting to be a bit easier to take. The torrent of emotion will hit me when I walk inside my parent’s home for the first time next month.
My new year’s resolution of riding to work as often as I can is progressing nicely. I went home for lunch on Monday, in my car, and rode my bike back to work. Haven’t been in the car since. I love the view of the world that you get from a bike. Robert Pirsig, though he was writing about the experience of riding a motorcycle, described it best when he said that riding on a motorcycle ‘puts you in the scene.’ On your motorcycle, or bike, you are a part of the environment, inches away from the ground, feeling the wind, the sun, smelling the air. In a car, you’re suffering through the experience of watching the external world go by as if watching through a television set, made up of the windows of the car. Those panes of glass seal you off, and lock you up in your cage. The experience of riding a bicycle takes all that you get from motorcycling and enhances it by virtue of your having to provide the energy to move from your own body. You are the motor that takes you where you want to go. I can’t think of a place that I feel happier.
I am learning some new etiquette from having taken my bike to the train station, and then taking the train to San Francisco. There is an order to placing your bike in the bike car. You line them up next to each other, and bungee them to the side of the car four bikes deep. You’re supposed to put the bike that has the furthest to go closest to the wall of the car to minimize traffic at the stops when people need to get on and off. Makes sense. People even label their bikes with their destinations so you don’t have to ask every one on the train about the bike. You just look at the tag and determine if your stop is before the stop labeled on the bike you’re about to ‘park in.’
Something Morbid: This is another, although morbid, experience that I could only have had on my bike. On Sunday, I was riding across the Golden Gate Bridge back into San Francisco, when I arrived at the tower closest to the city, the south tower. I saw a group of people looking out, some straight out, some looking rather intently over the side of the bridge. I stopped to see if the view was something spectacular and unique for the time of day that it was, although I didn’t think that it could be, because it was only 2:30 in the afternoon. I looked out into the ocean and, though nice as always, didn’t see anything that warranted the gathered crowd. I looked down as most of the others were, and then saw what was the object of everyone’s fascination: the dead white male floating face down in the cemented in portion of the bay surrounding the pillar. I was shocked, but not for long. I started up conversations with the people that were watching, and we talked about how sad it was, and whether he had jumped or whether it was a murder. We decided that it was probably a suicide, and I think that this is the right assumption, as I couldn’t find anything in the SF Chronicle’s website that gave any further details. I stuck around on the bridge, along with a few others who stayed the entire time, and with the presense of one of the CHP officers. I watched the Coast Guard boat circle the tower a few times, sometimes drifting out on the ebb of the bay. The SF Fire Department eventually sent a boat, and tow firefighter divers arrived and dragged the body under the bridge from everyone’s view. I really wanted to how they were going to pull it out,but no such luck.
So, 100,000 people die every single hour, and I happened to see one of them floating in the SF Bay. It definitely wasn’t something that you see everyday, and something that I only could have seen while on my bike. Happy riding!