Musings on life and how I choose to interpret it…

[Nov. 30, 2007] There was a swirl of flurries sweeping the road before we headed out, but I didn’t think much of it. The flakes were bit-sized, and quickly vaporized under the heat of car exhausts and steam from underground. As we descended on Bloor Street, a hauntingly beautiful show of wind and snow danced before us under the warm, tinted street lights. Traffic wasn’t as heavy as on a normal Friday night, drivers perhaps daunted by the cold and opting to stay indoors for the evening. We felt a surge of adrenaline, as is the case with the onset of most Critical Mass rallies. Our chests swollen and our bells ringing in furor, the sidewalk pedestrians gawked in bemusement at this troupe of cyclists cum activists riding in the chilly November night. We were making a point, damn it! And we wanted to show that come snow or rain, we were going to persist.

The guy with the trumpet was there, as usual. One of these days I’m going to introduce myself and compliment him on his ridiculous lung capacity prowess. But for now, I was just content with admiring him from afar. He blared away at all intersection stops, playfully trumpeting at car drivers. Holiday season was in the air and his tunes followed. The pack was steadily resembling a mass now, and we had yet to hit the ROM.

My garb for the evening was a basic courier getup: tights underneath my cargo shorts, a pair of arm warmers to go with my windbreaker and a neckgaiter. A couple of layers and that was it. My modus operandi was dress light and resistant to the weather. I also wore a pair of gloves that was meant more for having your hands inside a pocket than for being exposed to the frigid air on the handlebars. The weather forecast before I hit the tarmac was pegged at a little below zero. Slightly freezing but I figured that the insular pocket of climate within the city would bump it up a degree or two, and I naively estimated that the collective mass and exuberance of the cyclists would round up the actual biking temperature towards a balmy degree or another above freezing. I was set. And I looked like a hardcore cyclist, I vainly mused.

We turned at the corner of University, I think. I can’t remember clearly because I was too distracted by trying to have my gaiter cover my chin and mouth. As usual, a couple of corkers were stationed beside the sidewalk, thanking motorists for their patience and wishing them a good weekend. It is a noble endeavour, this play at politeness, to try and placate drivers who wouldn’t normally think twice about cutting in front of a cyclist and endangering the life of the person on the set of two wheels. We live in a contrived world where the so-called majority of car owners have to test their patience on that one Friday night when responsible and environmentally aware citizens demonstrate that it is okay to actually take the road on your bicycles.

To understand this tumultuous relationship between car drivers and cyclists in a metropolitan city such as Toronto is an effort of equal parts frustration and a deepening loss of faith in humanity. On the one hand you have cars: multi-tonne amalgamations of steel, rubber, plastic and oil. A moving island in itself, where all sorts of amenities lie at a person’s disposal — a force of humankind that reduces the culpability of a person to the trials of meeting appointments and hauling items over long distances. They allow us, simultaneously, to get from one point to another while listening to the radio, making a few calls, staying warm or dry (or cool), hold a cup of takeout coffee, and maybe even having the baby sleep in the back. It is a gift of Olympian proportions, this device of ours, and nowhere is it more evident than when you’re stuck in the freeway during rush hour. We tap at the wheel, let our foot off the gas and on the brakes and then on the gas. A friend of mine once remarked on how being in a car is like an extension of being inside the womb. We hunch in a fetal position, the seatbelt serving as the cord, and a flurry of emotions envelope us through the course of one trip. Panic, controlled rage, road rage, frustration, boredom, car sickness, happiness, contentment, drunkenness. It is rare that a driver is ever struck by the awareness of being inside a womb. And even if he is, that quickly snaps away the second that asshole cut into his lane. Temperament is a blinking sidelight: ready to be taunted and taunting at a moment’s notice.

And then you have the humble cyclist, often mislabeled as an overzealous and self-righteous crusader of the road. Imagine a city brimming from sidewalk to sidewalk with cyclists. A place where people on wheels could actually see each other’s face and acknowledge their presence with bell rings that would be construed less as a sign of impatience and more likely as that of camaraderie. On streets where the most serious collisions between bikes would normally result in a few scraps on skin and twisted wheels, rather than the hair-pulling grievance of dealing with seedy insurance companies over the most minor of dents. At street lights where pedestrians can feel safe about crossing the road and maybe catch a glimpse of a cute bike courier, zipping by in a blur as she hits one tower after another. Maybe this is all a heady, disillusioned, romantic notion of a fantasy land where people still tip their hats and paperboys announce the results of court proceedings beside the steps of the city hall. This isn’t productive or meaningful in any which way. But a person can still dream, can’t he? And when he’s in downtown riding along a bunch of other passionate, well-meaning “crusaders”, he has a reasonable excuse to drift away in a brief reverie before he gets hit by the immediate, face-punchingly obvious wall of cold on the last Friday of November 2007.

And it was cold. Remember how I wrote of the surge of adrenaline and swelling chests earlier? Well, that pride quickly gave away to numb fingers and jaw cracking cold. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but I certainly didn’t factor in the chilling propensity of the wind and the fact that we wouldn’t be riding hard, but more leisurely instead. No one would get a point if all they saw was a bunch of speeding cyclists catching their breath at every stop light.

And so we set at this pace, our bodies slowly getting hunched into ever which shape to conserve as much heat as possible. Due to the controlled speed, and the steady slope of Yonge St. southbound, we didn’t even have to pedal much, thereby further ensuring that we were generating as little heat as possible. Some tried shouting at random intervals, as if calling out the winter and yelling it back to its place. Some, like I, tried shaking it off. We’d flick our hands, tap our feet to the ground and stutter inchoate sentences every now and then. My estimate of the cold blowing against my face was somewhere around minus 20 degrees. That, my friends, is Canadian cold. That is cold that will freeze a pack of six and a lake. That is cold of the cold alert type: the ones that send EMTs into overtime trying to retrieve drunk, homeless people off from the street. That is the kind of cold that makes you really appreciate the people behind this Critical Mass who still try to rally their troop and promise a hot cup of chocolate at the end. That is the type of cold that would dissuade me from taking the car, let alone the TTC. Again, serious Canadian cold, that one is.

I would’ve even preferred a generous dump of snow over this dry, vacuous and almost evil breeze that was in the air. At least the humidity would have kept the wind chill at bay.

But throughout it all, I kept my head up high, gaiter covering my mouth or not. Because you know what: it’s worth it. It’s worth it to show people on the sidewalks that cycling can be useful and fun even on a night as ungodly as this. To show motorists that we won’t concede neither to their short-sightedness nor to the numbing cold. And it was all well worth it when you can finish the night off watching some free cycling documentaries while sipping a cup of donated, organic chocolate. I wouldn’t want my Friday night any other way.

And I still managed to look like a bad-ass cyclist through it all.