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Bicycle Commuting
Sep. 12th, 2008 07:37 amFifteen or so years ago, I was a bicycle commuter. I lived in the city but worked in a place that had once been completely rural, before the sprawl of suburbia surrounded it.
Still, it was such a huge property that once you walked down the red clay road, beyond the chain-link fence that enclosed it, you still had that sense of rural isolation.
Once, when I was having problems at home, I slept in my car just outside the gate. In the morning, I awoke to the sound of voices, passing by in the semi-darkness. I got up and followed shadowy forms through the gate.
If you walked all the way to the back of the property, past the small office just inside the gate, past the open storage sheds, and past the newly-built truss plant where I worked, there was a railroad siding.
The siding was one link to the place's origin as a concrete plant for the St. Lawrence Seaway project. The three huge, gray, rusted towers that stood like sentinels near the siding were another.
They had once been loaded, from rail cars that came into the siding, with the sand, gravel, and Portland cement used in casting the structural components which were then shipped northeast to the Seaway on other rail cars.
That was during the mid-1950s. Thirty years later, after the truss plant was built, the siding was used to bring in the carloads of steel connector plates and Canadian lumber that we used to build roof and floor trusses.
I was a structural designer and worked in an office inside the plant. Several of us rode bikes to work but, as one of the guys in the plant pointed out, I was the only one who did it because I wanted to. The others had multiple convictions for drunk driving and it was the only way they could get to work.
It was a distinction I never would have made, much less commented on. I just did what I did and made no more of it than if I'd been driving a car or taking the bus. Walt, who was one of the foremen, handled it differently.
Like the others, he'd started bicycling after his second or third DWI. But somewhere, on that uncertain road between work, the courthouse, and his twelve-step program, something had happened. Walt had decided, no bullshit, to quit drinking. What he did, instead, was to ride with a passion akin to violence.
I was in my early fifties at the time, had always been physically active, and, by the third or fourth week of the season, could hold my own on the road with men half my age. And by the time I'd been at it a few years, what had come out of the box as a high-end mountain bike was set up with smooth-rolling German tires, lightweight pedals and crank arms, and other improvements.
Walt, on the other hand, bought a succession of used 10-speed bicycles at garage sales and rode them like a madman until pieces too important to ignore began falling off of them. And after riding to work, and toiling in heat that sometimes exceeded a hundred degrees, he would ride five or six miles to a local bike trail and do a training ride that would've killed Lance Armstrong and half the pelloton of the Tour de France.
As long as I knew him, Walt never owned a decent bike. Or one that cost over ten dollars, for that matter. But if he'd ever ridden up beside me, out on the road, I'd have let him cruise on by.
Then one spring, with a quarter-million dollars worth of new orders waiting for the ground to thaw and the building season to start, the truss plant was closed. Shortly afterward, I took a job with a competitor, about thirty miles from town, which was simply too far for a bike commute.
I put everything I had into the new job, my considerable design experience, a genuine interest in customer service, extra time in the office after the rest of them went home. But within three months, I'd been undercut by office politics, blamed for someone else's mistakes, cheated out of a bonus I had coming, and then let go.
I never heard what happened to Walt after the plant closed. So all that I can really say, about what happened after those times, is that I never rode again.
Still, it was such a huge property that once you walked down the red clay road, beyond the chain-link fence that enclosed it, you still had that sense of rural isolation.
Once, when I was having problems at home, I slept in my car just outside the gate. In the morning, I awoke to the sound of voices, passing by in the semi-darkness. I got up and followed shadowy forms through the gate.
If you walked all the way to the back of the property, past the small office just inside the gate, past the open storage sheds, and past the newly-built truss plant where I worked, there was a railroad siding.
The siding was one link to the place's origin as a concrete plant for the St. Lawrence Seaway project. The three huge, gray, rusted towers that stood like sentinels near the siding were another.
They had once been loaded, from rail cars that came into the siding, with the sand, gravel, and Portland cement used in casting the structural components which were then shipped northeast to the Seaway on other rail cars.
That was during the mid-1950s. Thirty years later, after the truss plant was built, the siding was used to bring in the carloads of steel connector plates and Canadian lumber that we used to build roof and floor trusses.
I was a structural designer and worked in an office inside the plant. Several of us rode bikes to work but, as one of the guys in the plant pointed out, I was the only one who did it because I wanted to. The others had multiple convictions for drunk driving and it was the only way they could get to work.
It was a distinction I never would have made, much less commented on. I just did what I did and made no more of it than if I'd been driving a car or taking the bus. Walt, who was one of the foremen, handled it differently.
Like the others, he'd started bicycling after his second or third DWI. But somewhere, on that uncertain road between work, the courthouse, and his twelve-step program, something had happened. Walt had decided, no bullshit, to quit drinking. What he did, instead, was to ride with a passion akin to violence.
I was in my early fifties at the time, had always been physically active, and, by the third or fourth week of the season, could hold my own on the road with men half my age. And by the time I'd been at it a few years, what had come out of the box as a high-end mountain bike was set up with smooth-rolling German tires, lightweight pedals and crank arms, and other improvements.
Walt, on the other hand, bought a succession of used 10-speed bicycles at garage sales and rode them like a madman until pieces too important to ignore began falling off of them. And after riding to work, and toiling in heat that sometimes exceeded a hundred degrees, he would ride five or six miles to a local bike trail and do a training ride that would've killed Lance Armstrong and half the pelloton of the Tour de France.
As long as I knew him, Walt never owned a decent bike. Or one that cost over ten dollars, for that matter. But if he'd ever ridden up beside me, out on the road, I'd have let him cruise on by.
Then one spring, with a quarter-million dollars worth of new orders waiting for the ground to thaw and the building season to start, the truss plant was closed. Shortly afterward, I took a job with a competitor, about thirty miles from town, which was simply too far for a bike commute.
I put everything I had into the new job, my considerable design experience, a genuine interest in customer service, extra time in the office after the rest of them went home. But within three months, I'd been undercut by office politics, blamed for someone else's mistakes, cheated out of a bonus I had coming, and then let go.
I never heard what happened to Walt after the plant closed. So all that I can really say, about what happened after those times, is that I never rode again.
