Safe Inside

When I ride, I tuck the ends of my hair under my helmet. I notice everything. The road, cars with their blinkers on, the sound of a bus approaching behind me. Because when you’re waiting at a red light and it turns green, you go. You don’t think to look for a bicycle in your blind spot or turning halfway across the intersection. You are inside your two-ton steel machine, checking your facebook updates and your twitter feed and your texts. Safe and warm and entertained. There is music or talk, there is heat or AC. At night the moon follows you in the side window.

• • •

I want to talk about how every time I hear about a bicycle accident, I feel people's eyes on me, and internally, also, I feel like a brother to these sufferers, and hope against hope the accident wasn't their fault and that they recover quickly and completely. Whether the person is a road biker or transportation biker or mountain biker doesn't matter to me. I usually don't know these people personally. In fact, I only know a few people in that first-degree-of-separation sense who have been hit by cars while biking. But it's not the degree of separation that matters to me — when I hear about these biking accidents I feel for them to a degree that seems out of proportion to my relationship to each victim.

A few weeks ago, my colleague’s 13-year-old nephew died. He was biking across a main road and a high-school kid crashed into him. And he was a great kid, she said, and her kids were close to him.

That same week, a boy in my town was biking to school and was hit by a 22-year-old driving a dump truck. A family-biking blogger I follow was hit by a car while riding her Bullitt with her son onboard; her leg was shattered in the crash.

In a meeting at work, my colleague tells me that one of the people she's contracted to edit and review our work has been out of commission for a few weeks because of a road biking accident in France. He broke his clavicle, his shoulder, and two ribs. Everyone in the room turns his head to me when this news is shared with the group: We are both "cyclists" even though I hardly consider myself able to handle a road bike, much less race in France.

I recall the part in Annie Dillard's essay "The Deer at Providencia" in which she feels all the attention of her companions, whom she figures are watching her expressions to see how she's handling the sight of the deer tied up to the tree and thrashing around as it dies: "Gentlemen of the city, what surprises you? That there is suffering here, or that I know it?" But I react as expected; I feel a forceful sympathy for this person I've never met.

• • •

I am beginning to recognize this as a familiar feeling — it is a strong mix of embarrassment and curiosity, of empathy and grief — and it occurs to me that it's the same feeling I have as a Jew in the World.

Whenever there's an article in the Times about Jews behaving badly, I cringe. When Jews suffer attention (either from their own mistakes, or from persecution or bias), I thirst for details, wanting to find out exactly what happened, to sleuth out from the report whose fault it was, and whether or not it was something inherently Jewish that caused the trouble. Sometime last year, an investigation about a Chasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn suffering an epidemic of herpes came out. I scoured the article and clicked on the links for indications that these people were so different from me so that I didn't have to feel such guilt and shame for their actions and their ways. I spent the whole week that the articles were circulating lecturing Chasidic people in my head about hygeine and getting rid of outdated and dangerous customs — that (seriously!) could ruin the whole Jewish people by making the World think we were nuts. And I'm nearly as far away from the Chasidic or Orthodox community as you can get without leaving Judaism entirely.

The feelings I had of sympathy and fear and shame are out of proportion to the connection to these people — I'm not related to them, not friends with them, and by most common measurements of connectedness, I shouldn't feel so bothered by their troubles.

By contrast, when I find out someone I barely know got into a car accident, I have a passing, "oh, that's too bad" reaction. Cars are universal, but bikes are a tribal tattoo — a mark of membership that conveys a sense of responsibility — of community.



• • •

I'm pretty sure that eventually urban street design plus community activism, peak oil, future recessions, and all kinds of other factors will get more and more people out on bikes. It's happening in Europe — bicycles are outselling passenger cars — and I think it'll happen here, too. And when it happens, I venture that my fierce loyalty to the bike clan will fade away into the fuzzy borders of the majority. Then I'll still have the cool pride of the early adopter, along with the easy vernacular of the armchair bike mechanic. And I'll still have my Jewish tribe, which is (by my count) always going to be a minority — and that's actually a comforting thought, as countercultural and illogical as that sounds.