The Problem with Trying to Write a Blog

One of the problems with trying to write a blog, beyond making the time to write, is the degree to which you need to turn everyday occurrences into narrative.  Along with that narrative, there should be photographs.  It seems very odd to take a photograph of say, your bicycle at the library, which was part of our bike ride today.  This photograph is not of our branch of the Santa Fe public library.  I took this photograph in Florence, Italy, and no, I do not normally travel overseas - this is not one of those blogs, and it is well outside my normal budget - but our daughter, (who is the middle of the three folks in the foreground) - got a free ride to the United World College in Duino, Italy for her last two years of high school, and we used her graduation as an excuse to go take a quick look around and eat more gelato than is humanly possible.

The bicycle, pedestrian, and street life of Florence is what I want the bicycle, pedestrian, and street life of my city to be like.  But to be fair, we were tourists in a particularly pedestrian part of the city, staying in an AirBnB near a university, and there may be other parts of the city that are just as choked with automobiles and road rage as any part of the United States.  We are all prone to romaticise the places in which we do not live.  Still, look at all those bikes.  Bella!  And that street we are walking on is not a street closed to motor vehicles.  They would occasionally nudge their way through the crowd.  It all seemed so civil and balanced somehow.  I served on our city's Bicycle and Trails Advisory Committee for a few years, and I would occasionally bring up creating more mixed-use zones in the city, particularly in the city center of Santa Fe, but mostly the bicycle advocates here just want to gripe about the cars and have more bicycle lanes and more bicycle trails built.  Some of them are very nice, granted, and the city has come a long way since I moved here in 1986, but the fundamental shift to a more convivial streetscape still feels a long way off.

Here's what we did do today, without photographs, because I kept thinking, "well, I could take a picture of the Happy Little Three Speed here," and then feeling ridiculous about it.

It has been snowing quite a bit in Santa Fe, more than it has this time of year in more years than I remember.  The day after Christmas, we tried to do a long ride in what started out as a light snow, (I took the three speed because the derailleurs always ice up on my other bikes), and we ended up in a blizzard with heavy fog out on the the 599 bypass.  We took shelter under the highway bridge, bought a load of wood that was being sold there, and got a ride back to our house, with our bicycles strapped on top of the wood.  Since that day, it feels like it has been mostly snow and ice and cinders and road salt.  I have been feeling very cooped up.  We may have abandoned being the carfree family, but we are still a one-car family, so when it is icy, I usually drive my wife to work, and my son to school.  There's just been a lot more driving than usual lately.

So I was looking forward to getting out on the bicycle today.  Yesterday, it snowed all morning and into the afternoon, so it was looking dismal, but the roads were largely clear today.

I think about drawing more from time to time, (and I thought about making drawing every day my new year's resolution, but instead I made it more bicycle touring), and the local library branch had Robert Franck's book Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing, which I like to read even though it doesn't seem to inspire me to draw much more than I already do.  My wife, hereafter to be known as Laura, and I bicycled out of our neighborhood and over to the LaFarge library to pick up the book.  I was on the three-speed, and Laura was on her Long Haul Trucker.

We worked our way through back streets from the library to the rail trail.  That involves a tiny bit of bicycling on the sidewalk, and, as a past League Cycling Instructor, trained in the days of intense reliance on John Forester's Effective Cycling, I have to point out that the sidewalks are usually the worst place to ride, but the emphasis there should be on "usually."  Sometimes it's fine, and as long as you aren't speeding along, and there are no pedestrians, and you are looking for turning traffic that may not be looking for you, go for it.  Relax.  Cycle at a pedestrian pace from time to time.

I have to thank the city for plowing the bike trails, at least most of them seem to be plowed, and at this high altitude, they dry out quickly, which is nice.  The trails seemed to be in much better shape than some of the roads today, but that's largely because the shoulders of the road are now full of red cinders, and I don't like riding through them and getting cinders and road salt on any of the bikes I ride.  However, I don't bathe my bike in buckets of warm water at the end of the day either. Who has the time for that?

We took the rail trail down to the Santa Fe Railyard, which is a nice bit of community development that should be doing better than it is.  The Flying Star Restaurant, which was a nice place to hang out with a cup of coffee, closed down several years ago, and the space has remained vacant.  The Santa Fe Farmer's Market is still there. (I used to sell honey from our hives there back when I was an at-home-parent and had more bees.  I was the only vendor bicycling my products to market.  I have since heard of one other bicycling beekeeper in Chicago, but I have not been in touch with her).  The Violet Crown Cinema is there, which also has a decent restaurant, and the Second Street Brewing Company has a restaurant there, as well as Sky Coffee.  Today, however, we bicycled on through, past the Santa Fe Depot, where you can catch the Railrunner commuter train to Albuquerque.  We dropped off onto Montezuma Street, took that over to Galisteo, and then turned onto West Devargas which turns into East Devargas, paralleling the Santa Fe River and Alameda Street.  You can take that route past the Santa Fe Playhouse and Upper Crust Pizza and dump out onto Paseo de Peralta just above Canyon Road.  We headed up Canyon, hung a right onto Garcia and stopped At Garcia Street Books, where my sister had called in a gift certificate for me and Laura for Christmas.  (Thanks Melinda!)  We loaded up on a few books and cards - I picked up Prague Spring. I hope it's good.  Rather than head back to the DeVargases, east and west, which were still a little icy and slushy in places, we headed up Garcia, (quite a climb, even with the conversion to three speeds), turned onto Camino Corrales, down Lejo, San Mateo, and so on to the St. Francis Trail, Rail Trail, Arroyo Chamiso Trail, which drops us off near our house.

How long was the ride?  I don't know.  I seldom keep track of that kind of thing.  I would guess it was somewhere between ten and fifteen miles.  The roads and trails were drier than I had reason to hope for, so it was joyful on that count.  It may be hard to believe, but it was just this year that I realized I could get to Garcia Street Books and the adjoining Downtown Subscription coffee shop by taking Devargas, east and west, so I was feeling clever.  (In the past I either took Paseo de Peralta - a busy road with no shoulders - or Alameda - another busy road with no shoulders, or I would approach along the route we rode home, which involves gaining, and then losing, a lot of altitude.)  There was a beautiful smell of garlic cooking at the Inn of the Five Graces near the Santa Fe Playhouse.  Near Upper Crust Pizza, we got off our bikes and walked them through the slush and banked ice, which was also nice in its own way.

It was just running errands, and it seems silly writing about it, but it brings me back around to the beginning of this blog post.  It was a thoroughly enjoyable way to run errands, especially after being more or less snowed in.  (I consider feeling compelled to use the car to amount to being snowed in.)  I like to use the word "convivial" quite a bit because of Ivan Illich's Tools for Conviviality, which I enjoy, even if I don't always enjoy Illich's prose.  The bicycle is a convivial way to run errands, and this is an easy city in which to do it.  However, I cannot recall seeing another person riding a bicycle on that entire round of errand running.  I think there must have been one or two that I just don't remember, and there were some bicycles on the bicycle racks around the railyard, but it is surprising to me that there weren't more.  I do have to say I have seen a large increase in the number of bicyclers over the years, and I am always delighted to see other people out. Still, what is it that keeps the majority of the people in almost any city in the United States, and many parts of the world, reliant on their automobiles, even for short errands, when there are more pleasant, healthier, and more community oriented alternatives?

Should I add some three-speed content?  I think the three-speed, being more utilitarian than sporty in appearance, is maybe just a wee bit more convivial.  I like to think that I am a good-will ambassador for bicycling for utilitarian and quiet enjoyment, as I make my way about the city, though in fact, I probably just appear to be one more middle-aged man with a beard on a forty year-old three speed.  No, that's not quite right - I'm not one more; I'm that middle-aged man with a beard on a forty year-old three speed.  I'm thoroughly enjoying myself.