Boneshaker Magazine / Issue #13

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© papercutsbyjoe.com

Creating Boneshaker issue #13 has been like the best of bike rides: strange, meandering and coloured with serendipity. Across the next sixty-odd pages we climb mythic peaks and tickle cycling’s counter-cultural underbelly, finding not anguish at altitude but happy ghosts; finding not darkness but light-heartedness and love amidst the freak-bikes and fire. We take a spin around the world’s smallest velodrome, follow a girl as she races her visa allowance across China, consider the emotional power of potholes and meet a man who’s building a recumbent crocodile. Like all the best rides, it’s been a journey into the unexpected.

Welcome to issue #13.

Mike White, co-editor

Š chris perry | whatchrisdid.com

Contents Let’s get lost

4

We are everyone

10

A moveable beast

14

The flyers of ‘87

16

Swaton Road

22

Do mountains have memories?

28

Underbelly 32 A midsummer’s ride

42

An invitation to the undertaker

46

The ring

50

Keeping going

54

My beautiful bike

60

A heart-shaped hole in the tarmac

62

contributors Words... mike white, alastair humphreys, daniel bosworth, imogen pettitt, lacar musgrove, daria bogdanska, barry lewis, andy miles, philip perkins, john migden, jet mcdonald, emily chappell, paul manson, jimmy ell Drawings... jeremy slagle, a-k pirata, karolina burdon, tim parker, sergey maidukov, chris perry, david mcmillan Photos... alastair humphreys, joe bagley, daniel bosworth, david granero, david mccaig, guy reece, alexis ellers, mikey wally, spencer harding, andy miles, philip perkins, john migden, emily chappell Design... molly cockroft, jordan carr, never know defeat, dani mayes, max randall, chuen hung-tsang, luke francis, chris woodward, jack sadler, mel skellon

backpats and handclaps penny morris, elena corchero at lflect, amy tocknell, james perrott, benny zenga, santa barbara county sherriff’s office, rob wall and all the gang at roll for the soul (this issue was fuelled by their halloumi wraps), sustrans, london cycling campaign, adam faraday, ben hamilton, jorge martin & betsy the kitten

copyrights & disclaimers

Boneshaker is a quarterly publication. The articles published reflect the opinions of their respective authors and are not necessarily those of the publishers and editorial team. ©2013 Boneshaker. At present, we are committed to remaining free from advertisements & advertorial. rinted by Taylor Bros Bristol on FSC ® certified paper P made from sustainable sources, using vegetable based inks.

13–25 Wilder Street, Bristol BS2 8PY (taylorbros.uk.com) Conceived by james lucas & john coe Compiled, edited and brought to life by jimmy ell, mike white, chris woodward, luke francis & sadie campbell Lead designers luke francis (keepriding.org) & chris woodward (chriswoodwarddesign.co.uk) Cover image by jeremy slagle (jeremyslagle.com) Inside front and back covers by a-k pirata (princesapiratadistro.wordpress.com) ‘A moment’s silence’ illustration (opposite) by chris perry (whatchrisdid.com)

LET’S GET LOST

Words by Mike White & Alastair Humphreys Photography by Alastair Humphreys

Mist curls across the valley floor. The redblue shift of dawn glows at the horizon as you open your eyes, blink slowly and remember where you are. You sit up, the frosted grass crunching beneath your bivvy bag. Silence.

The night before you’d left work as normal, but instead of riding home, you rode north out of the city as dusk fell and the lights began to come on. You cycled out into open countryside, the hedgerows rising and dipping alongside.

After a hot meal and a few fortifying pints in a pub, you left quietly, then made a beeline for a hill-top, fairly remote, three large fields from the nearest road. As the stars began to pinprick the inky blue above, you swung your bike over a gate, pushed it across the hill’s broad shoulder and found a spot to stop. And there you lay down to sleep, as the constellations shifted slowly a million miles overhead.

Now, eight short hours later, you’re awake, packing up, riding back through fields, suburbs, city. Back to your familiar desk, and cup of hot coffee. You smile quietly to yourself, feeling glowingly alive.

“You do not need to fly to the other side of the planet to find wilderness and beauty,” says Alastair Humphreys, and he’s right. Alastair has been to the other side of the planet several times. Among his many expeditions, he’s cycled 46,000 miles around the world, rowed the Atlantic, walked across India and run a 150-mile marathon across the Sahara desert. But such escapades are beyond the reach of most people.

They’re too far-flung, too time-consuming, too expensive.

So, two years ago, he began a concerted effort to simplify adventure, to break it down to what it really means, to demonstrate how all of us – even those with families, jobs and beer-bellies – can have adventures.

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“Adventure is a loose word, a spirit of trying something new, something difficult. Above all, adventure is about enthusiasm, ambition, open-mindedness and curiosity,” he says. “If this is true then ‘adventure’ is not only rowing oceans, climbing mountains or cycling round the world; adventure is everywhere, every day and it is up to us to seek it out.”

Always one to lead by example, Alastair himself started small, riding coast to coast across England when he was 15.

“We did the classic Whitehaven to Sunderland route, but we somehow got so lost that we ended up going over the summit of Great Gable (a 3000ft mountain in the Lake District) with me crying on the way down. But it was an amazing trip – my first proper bike journey and my first microadventure.”

‘Microadventure’ may be a familiar term - known in the States as an S24O (sub-24hr overnight), it is “an adventure that is close to home, cheap, simple, short, and yet very effective,” says Alastair. “A couple of weeks ago I walked a circle around my house. You could just as easily do it by bicycle too – the radius of the circle determines how long the journey will be. You head out along the radius line to the circumference, ride the circle, and then head back home down the radius again. I wanted to do it so I had just one night away, but only a three-mile radius makes quite a long walk. If you did a 6 or 7 mile radius circle on a bike that would be quite a decent ride [49.7 or 57.98 miles respectively, maths fans]. It was fantastic, just for discovering so many things in a three-mile circle of my home that I’d never seen before. You can do it as accurately or as vaguely as you choose; my three-mile walking circle fitted quite nicely with leaving my desk at 5pm and getting back at nine the following morning.”

The ‘5–9’ thing is key – the idea is that such adventures can fit around ‘real’ life. Although many of Alastair’s microadventures have been a little more involved – travelling the length of the Shetland Isles by Brompton and pack-raft, for example – lots more have meant only one night away. This summer he decided to ride the route of the first stage of next year’s Tour de France. “It’s starting in Yorkshire; I’m from Yorkshire so I’m very chuffed about that, but it also seems absolutely ridiculous, and not something that’s likely to happen again, so I decided to go and ride the first stage of it. I did it as minimally as I could. I wanted to go fast and pretend I was Bradley Wiggins, so I took my racing bike, a bivvy bag and a credit card and that was about it.

8

“Adventure is all around us, at all times.�

9

“ It’s about letting go, uncoiling the spring of anxiety inside.”

It was great. The stage was 120 miles, but because I took the train up from London where I live now, I didn’t begin cycling until lunch time, starting out up the dales. Unlike the actual Tour riders, I had fish and chips for supper and a few pints in a pub, then slept on a hilltop, and did the rest the next day.

When I first woke up it was drizzly and I thought ‘this isn’t part of the script’ so I rolled over and went back to sleep for a couple of hours. When I resurfaced there were clear skies and a rainbow, right up in the dales, with all the different greens of the fields laid out in squares, and I was there, high on a hilltop with the whole valley laid out before me, and the road I was about to ride snaking away into the distance. That was a great start to the day.”

Another one-nighter saw Alastair and his Brompton taking the ferry to the Isle of Wight, then riding the island’s edge back to where he started. “I did it with no map, no planning, no idea how far it was or what I’d find along the way. So I had no idea of what stage of the ride I was at, and I never knew where the next food stop might be. I knew it would take roughly two days, with an overnight stop somewhere, so I took a bivvy bag and slept up on the cliffs. From the setting of the sun I could work out I was on the south coast of the island, so I knew I was roughly half way round, but that was my only way of estimating how far I’d have to ride the next day. I deliberately didn’t take any food with me; it was just a case of ride until you reach a shop or café, which added a little bit of spice to the trip.” Keeping things simple and deliberately not over-planning are important tenets in the microadventurer’s creed. There’s a tendency these days to obsess about kit, checking the weight and the technical spec of everything, fretting that your ultra-lightweight tent or super-packable jacket might not perform as well as the marketing wonks said they would.

We’ve become so anxious about getting lost or a bit damp that every expedition is meticulously planned, with routes pre-programmed into GPS and a space-age techno gadget for every eventuality. But endless fretting about kit and what might go wrong is not healthy. Microadventures, by their very nature, are much simpler than big expeditions.

You can risk it. Sure, you could go through the kind of logical thinking most of us do, which, Alastair reckons, goes something like this: “There is an X% chance of something going wrong.

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If that happens then I am Y% confident of being able to deal with it. Which leaves only a Z% chance of something really bad happening. And ‘Z’ is sufficiently small to be worth risking against the reward of success.” But normal people probably just articulate their decision by shouting “fuck it – let’s do it!”

If it’s only one night and you’re only two hours from home, pack light. Throw away the map. Get lost for a bit. It’s about letting go, uncoiling the spring of anxiety inside. That in itself takes effort. Most of us have a tendency to be cautious which it takes a force of will to override – even Alastair: “My nature is to be quite careful and worried, to have maps and plan everything, so I try to force myself not to be like that and to just go with the flow a little bit. Recently I did a one-day trip that was just to take a train to somewhere about fifty miles from my house, somewhere I’d never been to before, and then cycle home.

I deliberately didn’t take a map, I just used a compass so I knew I was heading in roughly the right direction, but at each junction I had to go left or right and hope for the best. I had to relax and go with the flow, dealing with a few wrong turns, just seeing whatever came my way. If my philosophy on life is ‘pragmatic idealism’, my philosophy on adventure is ‘pragmatic recklessness’.

As Mallory said, “The greatest danger in life is not to take the adventure.”

Above: Alastair (far right) aged 15, on his first micro-adventure.

Alastair doesn’t fetishize kit; he’s utterly no-nonsense and down-to-earth. His gentle humour and clear-eyed enthusiasm are infectious. It’s been two years since the microadventure phenomenon first took hold of the public imagination in the UK. Since then it’s been bandied across the papers and entered the lexicon, not least because it seems within reach of ‘ordinary’ folk. “The thing that really resonates with people is not so much the ‘epic’ little trips like the Shetlands but the really simple, tiny ones which you can do mid-week, leaving at five and being back at your desk for nine the next morning - which of course is not a new idea, I’m just trying to re-encourage people to do it.

going to leave after work you only want maybe 10 or 20 miles away. If you cycle 10 miles in a straight line from where you live, you can be in the countryside, wherever you start out. I tested this recently by just walking north from the centre of London, just trusting that I would end up in beautiful countryside. And I did, in less than ten miles. If you can do it from London, you can do it anywhere.”

Travel light. “For one night away you can just eat in a pub, so all you need is a sleeping mat, a sleeping bag and a bivvy bag - for your first time you can use one of those orange survival bags, which cost less than a sandwich.”

What’s been really enjoyable this year has been seeing social media spread the idea - the #microadventure hashtag meaning that people online can see what other people have done and realise that it’s not just super-fit professional adventure guys doing it – it’s novices, on crap bikes, with big bellies. That’s really been key to getting lots of people out and trying stuff, seeing lots of ‘people like us’ doing it first.”

Many of Boneshaker’s readers may already have encountered the concept, seen the hashtag, watched the beautiful short films Alastair posts on his blog. But have they actually done it?

It’s so easy to make excuses about time, family commitments, the usual guff.

“If you are too busy, too stressed, too broke, too tired or too unfit for an adventure, then you definitely would benefit from a microadventure”, Alastair says.

“This is a call to action. Do it by yourself or with friends. Do it with your parents or children or colleagues from the office.”

Be unambitious. “Get a map and pick somewhere you’ve never been before that’s a suitably unambitious distance away. If you’re

Pick a spot away from people. “Sleep on a hill or in the woods or wherever you like, once you’ve had a hot meal in the pub and however many beers you need to get your courage up to sleep outside in the middle of nowhere. Assuming you’re somewhere where you’re comfortable to sleep out in the open, it’s probably not somewhere that’s overrun with bike thieves, so you can probably leave your bike beside you. I actually take a tiny little bike lock – a token gesture really, but you’d need to cut it to make off with the bike; I think it’s ample for the middle of nowhere.” Smell the earth.

Watch the stars shift silently overhead, hear an owl, a fox, the susurration of wind in trees. Wake with the dawn, the dew shining diamonds in every cobweb. Then pack up and cycle back for work.

You can add in bolder variations as you get the hang of it. Swim in a river, cook over a driftwood fire. Don’t worry that you’re behind the curve, that others have done it first and now you’re copying them. The whole point is that each adventure will mean experiencing something absolutely new. Every adventure’s different; each one is fresh. Each first-timer will get that giddy rush as they wake somewhere completely unfamiliar, hear the frost crunch beneath their bivvy bag and watch the dawn mist curling across the valley floor.

Find out more at: www.microadventures.org / www.alastairhumphreys.com 11

WE ARE

EVERYONE What a personable machine the bicycle is.

Perhaps it’s because the engine is human; the engine has hopes, fears and daydreams; the engine has eyes to see, ears to listen, a nose to savour or wrinkle in disgust at the lissome drift of life’s ever-changing scent.

Armed with an ancient field camera, cycling photographer Daniel Bosworth set off around England’s capital collecting portraits of the city’s bicycle riders for London Cycling Campaign.

His aim was simply to find a broad spectrum of people “to show how cycling democratizes” – how it nudges life towards the democratic ideal, levelling social inequalities.

WORDS BY MIKE WHITE AND DANIEL BOSWORTH PICTURES BY DANIEL BOSWORTH / WWW.DANIELBOSWORTH.COM

GREG HALL, 29

LONDON • SURLY STEAMROLLER • GHETTO DISK REAR WHEEL “This was taken at Full City Cycles on Leather Lane. The shop was chaotic and bustling with cycle mechanics so most of the actual business seemed to happen out on the street, but it was always a good place to find subjects like cycle courier Greg with his Surly Steamroller. I used to try and find out what part of London each cyclist was from but all I could get from Greg was that he was ‘from London’. Whether this was because he had a heightened sense of paranoia that I might be ‘The Man’ with an elaborate and slow system of surveillance I’m not sure, but I concluded that cycling through the night, living in his saddle and only stopping for occasional sustenance at Full City was more likely. A kind of anarchic cycle superhero in a German army helmet.”

KAT JUNGNICKEL, 37

SYDNEY • VINTAGE BRIAN ROURKE “I caught Kat at the cycle café Look Mum No Hands. The crowds were engrossed in the infamous stand-off between Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador, whilst I accosted poor patrons and dragged them off for portraits.

Kat’s from Sydney but had been living in London for a few years with a collection of vintage and eccentric cycles – she may only have been riding a vintage Brian Rourke when I met her, but she’s won races on her full-size penny farthing, although riding it round London has proved hazardous at times: kids throw things and squirrels hurl themselves kamikaze style at the spokes for some reason...”

THOR, 51

BERMONDSEY • TOWNSEND DAYTONA “Thor at Druid Cycles recycles bikes in an arch under London Bridge and is helped by various eccentrics. He came over from East Germany after the Wall came down and has been raving ever since.

The archway is done out like an illegal rave circa 1991, with glow paint spirals daubed on walls and scaffold. The place is crammed with junk that Thor talked me through with a heavy accent as he pulled on a roll-up. He had to shout over the gabba techno.

There was a bloke squatting in the back welding, and Thor explained what was being made as if he was planning a revolution. “Up there, we are recycling laptops into a giant screen”. It was like a scene from a Terry Gilliam film. I came out of there smiling from ear to ear.”

RICHIE BARNET, 44

DEPTFORD • TREK 930 SINGLETRACK “Richie at Rotherhithe police station was the hardest working bike mechanic I’ve met. He was submerged in his own bike world in the bowels of the station - they had given him the boiler room: a windowless box and the hottest place around. It was a summer day when I dropped by and despite the fan it was uncomfortably sweaty. Richie is freelance and the cycle police are a major customer.

The police use their bikes heavily in chases where cars can’t go, and don’t give them much respect when abandoning them to take to their feet. They apparently also throw them down as pathway blocks and to knock cycle mounted perpetrators from their bikes. I pictured this to be like TJ Hooker with his truncheon, but I doubt it was that spectacular.”

Because there is such a rich variation of subcultures in cycling, from bike polo to BMX, roadies to re-cyclers, Dan says that although he did find “a mutual respect and warmth between anyone on two wheels”, it’s hard to say if he discovered a ‘democracy of cycling’ in any homogenized sense.

But perhaps that’s to be expected.

Those who ride bikes are as different and unpredictable as any other group of people. It would be fatuous to try to identify what unites ‘people who walk’; the same is true of people who ride. We often find common causes to rally round - cycle advocacy unites most under a mutually beneficial banner - but cyclists are as diverse and unpigeonholeable as anyone else. We are the mothers on the school run, the dawn-rising racers, the kids on the pump track, the commuters in the sideways rain.

WE ARE EVERYONE.

Words by Barry Lewis Main photo by Guy Reece / www.strikingfaces.com

a moveable beast

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Being a sculptor is one of those strange jobs that really throws you into the dice roll of life; you never know what’s around the corner.

One day you’re in the papers and meeting celebrities and the next you’re broke. I had a taste of this in 2012 when I was commissioned to create a bicycle-inspired sculpture for the hospitality tent of the Tour of Britain cycle race, after the organisers had seen my exhibition, ‘You Are What You Eat With’. Years ago I had been rebuilding a friend’s medieval house in the south of France and when I wasn’t building stairs or fitting beams, I was raiding skips for ancient bits of metal and old bikes that I broke up and made into birds, dogs, stags, fish and other beasts that I sold in a gallery nearby, so I already had a few ideas of what I could create for the Tour of Britain. This time around though, instead of destroying a bike, I would bring an old one back to life. The cowbike was born! It proved extremely popular at the event and actually went on to become my main means of transportation after I had to scrap my van.

It wasn't long after the cowbike that I set about building the horsebike - the link between horses and transportation and carrying loads all came together. I originally thought that it was going to have to be based around a tall bike construction, but after various, slightly hazardous attempts at this, decided to stick with just the one storey. As with the cowbike, it is made out of old stainless steel kitchen appliances and tableware, meaning it doesn’t rust and it has a sort of Fritz Lang Metropolis look about it, which I'm rather fond of. Making these bikes is a real challenge as they have to be strong enough and practical enough to actually be able to use them!

Having said that, the horsebike’s saddle is about one foot above the crossbar, just too tall to put your feet down, but I have some boots with extra thick soles to help out with this. It made its debut in the pub car park close to where I live – the people inside came running out thinking that there was an actual horse charging around their car park after seeing it on the CCTV. Not long after, we had a slightly more glamorous appearance at Glastonbury Festival, where there were plenty of big fields to test ride it and lots of long grass to fall off into when required. If I'm honest, it wasn't the first time that I've been asked if I'm completely insane, but I have never been asked it so many times in one day!

“Through building these bikes, I have rediscovered the exhilaration of cycling”

I am always foraging for parts to use in my sculpture. I have dragged various things out of rivers and skips, and am always visiting scrapyards. In the past I've made elephants out of old cement mixers, a crocodile entirely out of spoons and an ostrich from the remains of an old kebab oven.

Art can be so pompous sometimes but it doesn’t always have to be meaningful – it can just be fun.

When I was young, I used to cycle about 1,000 miles a year and in the Welsh valleys there are some tough hills and harsh winters, so when I got my first car that was it. But now, through building these bikes, I have rediscovered the exhilaration of cycling. I'm now finishing work on the third instalment of my bicycle trilogy, the Stagbike. Well I say trilogy, but plans are already afoot for another one - a recumbent crocodile…

Facebook: Barry Lewis Sculptures 17

Words by Lacar Musgrove Illustrations by Karolina Burdon / www.karolinaburdon.com

This was the Thanksgiving Day bicycle road race of 1887, and no one had seen anything like it before The day was crisp and clear, a pale autumn sun hanging high in the mid-afternoon sky. Still full from their Thanksgiving dinners, a crowd gathered beneath the bare branches of the sycamore trees in the center of Canal Street. Bisected by rail tracks and flanked by the lace-ironwork balconies of multi-story buildings, the broad boulevard divided New Orleans between the old Creole sector downriver and the new American side, Uptown. That afternoon the shops and offices were closed and the street, usually choked with traffic, was traveled by only a few horse-drawn omnibuses, their hooves clopping steadily on the granite blocks of the pavement.

The chatter at the rail stop rang with words like “flyer,” “header,” and “scorch,” and with the names “Captain Hill” and “Guillotte.”

Wagers were likely passed between them, the men for money and cigars and the women for gloves and handkerchiefs. Soon their chatter was drowned out by the hiss and rumble of a steam engine, before the crowd poured into the seven cars of the special train.

All were going to the same place, the West End, one of the lakeside resorts to which the denizens of the city flocked on Sundays and holidays to find respite from the noise and filth of a late nineteenth century industrialized city. The packed carriages shivered with a special giddiness of anticipation. The train pulled forward and a few blocks later, reaching Claiborne Avenue, stopped again at the ‘neutral ground’, the oak-shaded strip of grass that divided the avenue. A crowd had gathered there, too. Men, women and children 18

jostled elbow to elbow, standing on tip-toes and craning necks to get a look at the road. The train passengers pressed against the windows at one side of the carriage, jockeying for view. Assembled at the large intersection were fifteen gentlemen dressed in short pants and riding caps, each wearing a distinctly-colored arm band and standing beside his high-wheel bicycle. The train, functioning as a moving grand stand, was to follow the cyclists as they dashed the five and a half miles up Canal Street and then along the New Basin Canal to Lake Pontchartrain. This was the Thanksgiving Day bicycle road race of 1887, and no one on the train had seen anything like it before.

The New Orleans Bicycle Club had been formed six years earlier under the auspices of a prominent businessman named A.M. Hill, whose grand jewelry store occupied a prime corner spot on Canal Street, the city’s fashionable shopping corridor. Hill and his fellow bicyclists, all gentry and businessmen, had been trying for years to garner public regard for this new contraption as both an instrument of gentlemanly athletics and a practical means of transportation.

The previous year, Hill (known as “Captain Hill,” having been the first captain of the bicycle club) and two other members of the club had set out to ride their bicycles from New Orleans to Boston, a distance of fifteen hundred miles, in thirty days. Their aim was to prove that one could travel that distance by bicycle “as well as any other way.” The three men accomplished their feat and gained respect and publicity, but the trip turned out to be an ordeal that

hardly demonstrated the bicycle as an easy means of long-distance travel. It had proven the extent of their pride, more than anything.

Still, the NOBC hoped to promote the bicycle as short-distance urban transportation. Cities were simultaneously expanding and becoming confining. People needed a way to get around the city, to travel between home and work—which were increasingly distant from each other—and to escape to fresh air and exercise in the country. Late into the nineteenth century, despite the invention of steam engines, human society was still very much dependent on the horse for transporting both people and freight. The city was crowded with horses and smelled like a barn from the manure.

However, people did not just ride around the city on horses. For one thing, it was not acceptable in cosmopolitan society to show up at one’s destination reeking of horse. Also, it took a skilled rider to manage a horse in the chaos that was urban traffic, and very few individuals could afford the cost of owning a private horse in the city, anyway - a private horse and carriage was the Learjet of its time.

“The Bicycle is so vicious that few, even among the wickedest of New Orleans boys, dare to ride it.”

To fill the needs of transportation for the masses, horse-drawn omnibuses and street cars carried people across the city, whilst “suburban” steam engine lines dispatched people to parks and resorts beyond it. Public transportation had its limits, though, in the form of schedules and routes. The bicycle offered an alternative. Although the cost of a bicycle was at least twice that of purchasing a horse, 19

They swung their legs over their wheels and began their furious pedalling … a bicycle didn’t require feeding or stabling, and it took much less skill and training to operate. Also, it was smell-less. The bicycle offered affordability and practicality over the horse, independence and flexibility over the streetcar, and speed over walking. For its enthusiasts, bicycling was perfect urban transportation, and it fit New Orleans especially. A traveling cyclist named Mr. Drew visited New Orleans in 1881 and declared its streets the best in the country for cycling. And that was before four and a half miles of St. Charles Avenue became the first asphalt in the city in 1882.

The bicycle was slow to catch on in New Orleans though. Many people were afraid to ride them, with good reason. The dominant design of the machine at the time was the high mount, one in which the rider perched in a small seat atop a large wheel, 48 to 54 inches in diameter, trailed by a tiny wheel. The machines were a challenge to mount and dismount and prone to tipping not only sideways but forward, in a type of bad fortune known as a ‘header’. The bicycle also struggled against bad public opinion.

At best, the public regarded the bicycle as a fad and a toy, not a machine to be taken seriously. At worst, bicyclists were chased down the street and attacked. Children threw rocks at them.

From early on, cities responded to public outcry by passing ordinances banning bicycles from streets and parks. In 1881, the year of the forming of the NOBC, Lafcadio Hearn wrote a column for the City Item in which he called the “velocipede” (the old-fashioned name for the bicycle) “wild, treacherous,

… squinting through the dust kicked up by the other cyclists, face muscles stretched in concentration, crouched low over the wide handle bars, elbows splayed, legs gyrating… diabolical, and unspeakable.” “Happily the Bicycle,” he wrote, “is so vicious that few, even among the wickedest of New Orleans boys, dare to ride it.”

The New Orleans Bicycle Club was out to defeat the stigma and convince the public of the bicycle’s utility and grace. Dressed in riding uniforms and organized into rigid military-like ranks, they made regular rides around the city and out to the lake resorts, often taking advantage of the shell road that connected the edge of town with the Lake Pontchartrain to the north. Paved with clam shells collected from the nearby sea, the shell road had, three decades before, been famous for “the display of fast horses”.

That road offered good riding and was popular with cyclists, but the really fine cycling was to be found on St. Charles Avenue, a street shaded by oak trees, lined with the elegant homes of the uptown elite, and newly paved with asphalt. The smooth, solid asphalt pavement was a surface after the cyclist’s own heart. The cyclists of New Orleans used St. Charles Avenue as a training ground and a track for races and time trial contests. In February of 1887, members of the local chapter of the League of American Wheelmen awed the public by holding an illuminated bicycle parade to celebrate New Orleans Carnival. Almost one hundred costumed riders—a cavalcade of silk, velvet, and glitter representing popular figures of the Victorian imagination—rolled up St. Charles Avenue, their bicycles and tricycles ornamented in silver and gold and lit by rings and arches of Chinese lanterns.

The NOBC began holding official LAW races in 1885, but they were not well attended at first. Organized sporting events including boxing and baseball had taken hold as mass entertainment in New Orleans in the late nineteenth century, but because the cycling races were held as road races, the spectators had a chance only to witness the finish, a circumstance the Picayune called “unsatisfactory.” A couple of weeks after the

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Carnival parade, the club sponsored a meet held at the Audubon Park driving track, which allowed the public to witness for the first time the entirety of the races. The organizers of the event hoped that the new format and the attraction of a new sport would encourage a large turnout. They hoped in vain; the turnout was disappointingly low.

Yet, that spring, bicycling seemed to be catching on in the city, as transportation and exercise, if not spectator sport.

Unfortunately for Lafcadio Hearn’s sensibilities there were now at least 150 “wheelmen” in New Orleans, riding all around on their “vicious” machines. Many of those new cyclists may have been riding Rover-style ‘safeties’, a new chain-driven design with wheels of roughly equal size, which had become available that year by import from England. As the name suggests, this design greatly reduced the danger of falling. Roads had become friendlier, too. By then New Orleans had, including St. Charles Avenue, ten miles of asphalt and eight miles of shell road. The bicycle had begun to be appreciated not only as practical means of transportation but as an incomparable human pleasure. “A peculiar exhilaration comes from this sport, which cannot be expressed in words, and is best represented by the word ‘flying.’

The rider feels like a bird, light and airy; for, on a smooth and level road, a slight expenditure of effort carries him forward at a very brisk rate. This sensation is what a jaded, nervous wornout business man or clerk needs…” The bicycle functioned not just as convenient transportation, but also as an antidote to the stresses of modern life.

With the ubiquity of the bicycle grew the membership rolls of the bicycle club. In June of 1887, a local wheelman was reported by the Picayune to have remarked that the ridership of the city was such that it warranted the creation of another bicycle club.

A month later, the Louisiana Cycling Club was formed by a celebrated rider and sharp-witted penman named R.G. Betts.

A rivalry ensued, and the “Louisianas” would soon have their first match-ups with the veterans of the NOBC. That September, the Louisiana division of the LAW would hold their third annual meet at the Audubon Park track, the first bicycle races in New Orleans to feature competing teams.

Meanwhile, cycling gained favor with the public. As the young members of the LCC were busy vitalizing the cycling culture of New Orleans with their progressive spirit, the League was rallying to put on the biggest bicycle racing event in the South.

The organizers of the meet took a different tack in drumming up a crowd of spectators. Rather than sell tickets, the League issued 5000 personal invitations, which quickly became a hot commodity in the city. The event turned out to be one of the largest social events of the year. The streetcar to Audubon Park ran on a special schedule leaving every three minutes all day. The meet came off as “the most successful cycling affair in the South,” according to the Picayune. “Yesterday was a proud day for New Orleans Bicycle riders…and…a flattering tribute to the growing popularity of cycling.” The ladies of the city, especially, turned out in force, making up two thirds of the crowd in the stands.

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To attend public amusements outside the home was a fairly new privilege for women. In other cities women had been the majority of the crowd at bicycle races. They came to Audubon Park that day dressed in “airy spring costumes,” sporting ribbons either of blue and white in support of the New Orleans Bicycle Club or purple and gold in support of the young Louisiana Cycling Club. Down on the track, the unaccompanied men pressed against the fence and the riders themselves entreated each other repeatedly to turn around and look at the stands, which looked like a hillside covered in wildflowers.

From above, the riders were brilliant atop their gleaming machines, outfitted in neat, colorful uniforms. But on the track conditions were rough. The sun beat down fiercely. The Audubon Park track, though convenient for the view of spectators, was not good for bicycling, being made of dirt and dust several inches deep. The ladies wearing purple and gold for the LCC met with disappointment and loss of their gloves. In their first match-ups against the seasoned riders of the NOBC, the younger club did not fair well. None of the Louisianas won a race, and in the team race they were trounced. A few of the members of the LCC were former members of the older club, and their defeat would have earned them some stinging jabs from their former teammates. When the races were over, Henry Hodgson, the Chief Consul of the Louisiana LAW, handed out prizes, 22

including bicycle accessories, shoes and bells, several gold medals, the State Champion medal, and a silk pennant to the winners of the team race. From the stands erupted huge cheers and long applause, the people of New Orleans having finally caught the fever of bicycle racing.

That fever was in full effect come November, when the city’s two clubs were ready to put on the Thanksgiving Day road race. The race would be a handicap, one in which, to make for a more exciting race, less-proven riders were given staggered head starts against the more accomplished ‘flyers’. There was considerable interest in the race, the sports spectators of New Orleans now being acquainted with the various rivalries.

The brand new LCC was entering its best talent against the old NOBC. Within the NOBC, the cycling hero and Louisiana state champion, A.M. Hill, would ride a rematch contest against his close rival, C.B. Guillotte. There may have been some drama of hometown pride involved.

Although A.M. Hill, now almost forty years old, had come to New Orleans as a young man, he was still an American from the North. C.B. Guillotte was a native, his name suggesting roots in the French heritage of the city. He was young, too, only twenty-two years old. While Hill had for several years been New Orleans’ premier cycling athlete, Guillotte had started riding only a year before, but he’d already caught up to Hill’s speed and skill.

They flew at twelve miles an hour, half as fast again as a trotting horse … … to the uninitiated observer, they looked to have been kidnapped by carriage wheels.

In the two previous League meets, including the recent Audubon Park event, each had taken a one-mile race. The Thanksgiving Day handicap would pit the two of them in a five and a half mile race as “scratch men,” meaning they would start together after the other riders had taken off with head starts of up to five minutes.

In the League races the previous year, Guillotte had taken a nasty fall in the five-mile road race and had been unable to finish. This would be Hill and Guillotte’s first long-distance re-match. The train waited with the scratch men, the stars of the show, at the corner as one by one the handicapped riders mounted their machines and sped off. Finally it was down to the scratch men, and as they swung their legs over their wheels and began their furious pedalling, the train rumbled forward, then picked up speed, passing each rider one by one. Soon the pavement ended and the road turned to dirt. From the windows of the seven cars the passengers howled and shouted the names of their favorites. When the train hit the turn to follow the New Basin canal towards the lake, Hill and Guillotte, crossing the bridge onto the shell road, had nearly caught up to it. They caught up to and began to ‘scorch’ the handicapped riders, blowing past them one by one, contesting every inch of ground with each other all the way. Squinting through the dust kicked up by the other cyclists, face muscles stretched in concentration, crouched low over the wide handle bars, elbows splayed, legs gyrating, they flew at average speeds of twelve miles an hour, half as fast again as a trotting horse. They may have felt Inset image © The Historic New Orleans Collection

like they were flying, but to the uninitiated observer, they looked to have been kidnapped by carriage wheels.

At the finish line at the West End, it was a flyer from the Louisiana Cycling Club, “Mal” Graham, who crossed first. The train had pulled ahead of Guillotte and Hill again, stopping at a bridge just before the finish line. The passengers streamed off and crossed the bridge to watch the end of the contest between Hill and Guillotte. Finally it was Guillotte who crossed the line first, capturing the best actual time at twenty-four minutes and seventeen seconds. Graham had won with a generous handicap, four minutes, but the race launched him and Guillotte into a heated rivalry the next season, one that would again fill the stands at Audubon Park, mostly with ladies eagerly betting their gloves.

After strenuous efforts by the city’s now two bicycle clubs, cycling had finally caught its zeitgeist in New Orleans. In 1890, the cyclists of Louisiana won their first legislative victory in the form of the Liberty Bill, which gave to riders of bicycles and tricycles the same rights as any other wheeled vehicle on the road. Although, as in other American cities, the bicycle would soon be all-but-forgotten with the coming of the automobile, the human-powered machine of locomotion had achieved the respect of the public mind and the ardor of the public heart.

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SWATON ROAD

WORDS BY DARIA BOGDANSK A PICTURES BY DAVID McCAIG / WWW.DAVIDMCCAIG.COM

It was fall. I had just moved from Warsaw back to London, completing the cycle of getting sick of those cities and then missing them again. Loving them and hating them. Leaving, only to come back. Again and again.

I had started working in one well-known bike shop – considered to be fancy but in reality rather disorganized and crazy – but it was fine for me at the time. I have always avoided paying rent in London (okay, except for two months in a cool bike house on Webber Street). I’ve always lived in squats, which makes me fit the stereotype of a Polish immigrant in London even more.

It was always my choice though, ’cause I couldn’t imagine paying more than half of my monthly salary to some landlord when there are so many sad, empty buildings in the city that could easily be inhabited and brought back to life. The bringing back to life thing is important.

This time my friends invited me to stay with them at a squatted house in East London, which turned out to be part of something very special, something built around bikes.

THE HOUSE WAS SITUATED ON SWATON ROAD. BUT THIS WASN’T JUST A SQUATTED HOUSE AND IT WASN’T JUST ANY STREET IN EAST LONDON. IT WAS SOMETHING MORE.

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There were three more squatted houses on Swaton Road, almost next to each other, and together with all the people inhabiting them they created a community, something that is talked about a lot these days but is actually pretty hard to come across. All four houses were really old and needed a lot of hard graft and dedication to change them from just empty buildings to cosy places you could call home. Our house had lots of holes, so it was hard to keep the warmth inside during the winter. When everyone came home from work we’d cook dinners together and spend a lot of the time in the warmest room, the kitchen.

People from each house had keys to the other three, in case of an emergency, or if we just needed to borrow some tools, a cargo bike, a ladder, a sewing machine or a lightbox. And we all shared a communal bike workshop in one of the houses.

All the people living in those four Victorian houses on the street knew each other. Some were close friends, some were workmates, others collaborated on projects. Everybody shared two things though: mutual trust and a love for bicycles. Almost everyone living in one of the four houses had worked as a bike messenger at some point, and most of them worked in bike shops, raced, sewed bike bags, built frames, were involved with the London Courier Emergency Fund, constructed tallbikes, played bike polo, went bike touring or just got around on two wheels. But even though we had so much in common, we also had other projects: drawing, making music, photography, or travelling. Swaton Road was an example of dozens of totally different people from different countries and different backgrounds drawn together by bikes, helping each other out and creating a common place to share space, things, lives and ideas. We were there because of this one thing we had in common:

BIKES WERE THE HUB OF PR E T T Y M U C H E V E RY T H I N G.

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A L L F O U R H O U S E S O N S WATO N ROA D W E R E E V I C T E D I N T H E S PR I N G O F 2 011. B U T W H AT WE HAD BEFORE THE N LIVES ON IN OUR MEMORIES.

A world that revolved around bikes, that included bikes as a matter of course, as a default, infused into every aspect of our freewheeling existence. Maybe for some people it might seem utopian. But we didn’t see it like that, it was just our life. The bike scene and the sense of community went hand in hand – and the eviction couldn’t end that. Community is an idea, and that idea can live on anywhere.

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Illustration Tim Parker / www.timparkerillustration.com

Words and Photography John Migden

Do Mountains Have Memories?

“These ancient mountains are full of the ghosts of riders past”

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efore my first cycling trip to The Alps, they represented a place where people went to test their mettle, a place to tick off mountain passes and build their cycling CV. But it didn’t take long before I felt utterly submerged in the sense of the place, lost in the high-altitude visual memories of those who had gone before. For me it was like tumbling through the back of a wardrobe and emerging into a simpler and more gratifying world. My cycling computer meant less, the brand of my jersey meant less, the kind of bike I was riding meant less.

Both before and after the trip I had and have been fielding questions from cycling friends about routes, climbs, times, wattage and speed, and yet, strangely, when talking about the Alps - the place where arguably all that stuff matters most - it means very little to me. I’d rather talk about the beauty, the history, the­sense of being part of something.

What I will remember most about those climbs is not the time they took to ride, but the time since that I’ve spent thinking about them. These ancient mountains are, to put it simply, (and somewhat sentimentally) a wonderful place full of the ghosts of riders past, the echoes of screaming fans, their sunburnt faces leaning in over the tarmac, arms aloft, homemade flags waving madly in the thin Alpine air.

The names of riders, scrawled by fans onto the roads, were still there on the tarmac when I visited and every time my wheels passed over a Valverde or Cadel or Froome Dog, I felt that little bit closer to the warmth of cycling as a sport.

I had assumed that writing about that trip would involve presenting each ride as a conquering; a bagging, Munroe style - that I would focus on gear ratios, bike set-up, gradients, temperature, nutrition, power output and length and height of climbs. But thinking back now to that first night, as I sat full of nervous energy imagining what it was going to be like to tackle these legendary rides for real (instead of following

them on TV as I sat sweating on a turbo trainer) it’s clear that this trip became something altogether more involving.

Although I went to the Alps thinking about these climbs in a technical, almost mechanical way and although during my rides I had plenty of time to curse or rejoice in what I had brought (or not), how I had set up my bike and what adjustments I needed to make (both to man and machine), most of this stuff faded into the background as my surroundings enveloped me. One thing that did matter, which hit me almost immediately as I turned off the main road from Grenoble and headed to where I was staying in Bourge d’Oisans, was that I was finally entering the Alps, the spiritual home of sport cycling.

Something else that struck me as I crept up through the low cloud was that the mountains I was headed for were really big and looked angry.

I don’t follow football, so I’ve missed out on having a place to focus my obsessions; I have never revered hallowed ground with the true fan’s religious fervour, never joined the howling worship of a stadium like Old Trafford or Wembley. Cycling does of course have its own places.

They’re mainly on mountains – the places, perhaps, where we come closest to something spiritual - but these special places are always only roads in the end, and when the race is over, the roads revert from being gladiatorial arenas to well, roads... unremarkable ribbons of tarmac with cars on them. The appeal is somewhat diffused when all you can really do (apart from ride them of course) is stand two feet away from the toiling traffic as you stare at a bit of tarmac and explain to your long-suffering wife how in the fourth hour of a race in the mid-2000s Fabian Cancellara made this corner famous.

The Alps give us our Place. These roads fertilise the magic and mystery of cycling.

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hat very quickly became apparent to me is that, for many cyclists, the Alps give us our Place (with a capital P). These roads fertilise the magic and mystery of cycling. They are special, but what makes them really special is that they are there for all to enjoy. When they sold off pieces of Wembley turf I remember thinking “god what a waste of money” but as much as I would like to think that I wouldn’t, if a piece of tarmac from the road that carried Emile Georget over the Galibier came on the market I may well find myself sitting in a room staring at a framed lump of rock hanging among my family photos.

I can happily watch rerun after rerun of pretty much any stage of any grand tour (or indeed any one day race come to that) until I know it pedal stroke by pedal stroke. I suppose although I wasn’t ever really watching them for the scenery it had somehow subconsciously formed a significant part of my overall recall of the climbs I was now embarking on. As I was hauling myself up and up I would remember something that my brother had said to me about making sure you look around you when you ride. And when I ignored my burning legs and aching lungs to take his advice I saw not only the beauty of the mountains framed by the surreal blue Alpine sky but also the images in flashback form of all the famous climbers riding the mountains that I was now on. It was, I suppose, as close as I will ever come to riding with them, but I certainly felt that I was on their

roads, their tarmac, and they were sharing with me some of the pain and exhilaration through which they had earned that right of ownership. I was borrowing an experience, and the excitement and freedom that I always get from riding was exaggerated and became a hyper-real version of what I had expected to feel. It was probably while climbing the Col d’Izoard – a high mountain pass at 2,361 metres – when I felt this most sharply. As you make your way up from the road nestled in the Guil gorge you have to keep reminding yourself that this is nothing; nothing at least compared to what is in wait after you reach kilometre 17 out of Guillestre and start the climb proper.

There are only a few things to say about this climb and none of them are new. It is long, hot, steep and irregular, all of which make for the kind of hellish experience I had gone to the Alps to enjoy. By the time you make your way through Arvieux and follow the road as it spears upward into the pine forest your legs are beginning to speak to you, but what they have to say at this point is best ignored as there are four kilometres of switchbacks to contend with and you’ll need focus and rhythm to follow the road as it attacks it way upward, finally emerging into the wind-blown moonscape of the Casse Deserte. It is here that you have a brief respite from the gradient and a chance to look around, but as you do, you catch a glimpse of the Col and it seems further away than you thought it would be, further at least than you had hoped.

As you make the short descent to the foot of what is the final push you pass the memorial to Fausto Coppi and Louison Bobet and suddenly something strange happens.

Here, when it is arguably at its hardest, the road gives back a little bit of the energy and strength that it has been sapping from you. Enough just to pause and think about where you are, what climb you’re on - what climb you’ve nearly finished - and it is here when you turn the corner and are faced with a wall of tarmac you can suddenly push a bit harder, spin that little bit faster and cross the summit wanting more.

Perhaps the most punishing part of major climbs like this is that they leave you wanting to do it again.

As you cross the finish line the experience is solitary. You are small and alone among the looming mountains and yet you have become part of something far bigger. You have triumphed and as the breath from your famished lungs is swallowed by the fierce wind, you stand among the ghosts of all those who have ridden before you.

What I will remember most about those climbs is not the time they took to ride, but the time since that I’ve spent thinking about them.

Words: Paul Manson / teaandpedalgrease.tumblr.com Pictures: Alexis Ellers / alexisellers.com Mikey Wally / mikeywally.com Spencer Harding / spencerjharding.com

The cycling world glitters.

Crisp sleek lines and contemporary design, modernity spinning on smooth cartridge bearing hubs: straight, efficient machines. Flashing pro riders, festooned with logos and branding, clean bike shops selling the latest colourways, magazines with the latest styles, the tweed runs with their latest fashion parades.

But there has always been another side, an underbelly that shines more with welding flux than glitter. There are the mischief makers and miscreants, the punks and mutants, from the bicycle wall-of-death builders like Whiskey Drunk Cycles and the Ministry of Bicycles to the rabble-rousing inventors of the Fun Bike Unicorn Club and their offshoots, like deranged engineers Krank-Boom-Clank and freak-bike builders Bunnyfluffer Cycles.

Not forgetting ‘eccentrification’ pioneers the Zenga Brothers. Google any of these and you’ll find a gallery of gleeful Gilliam-esque lunacy.

This is a tale of part of that dark cycling underbelly, that rebel soul, simmering beneath…

“I’ve lived here all my life,” says Don ‘Roadblock’ Ward, “but Los Angeles isn’t an easy place to ride.”

LA is notorious for being one of the most motor-centric cities in the world, where to live is to drive and the smog hangs oppressively on the lungs. And yet there are normally six or seven, often massive, group rides planned for every night in the city.

“People want to ride bikes here, but it’s still a bit of novelty.

The roads are kinda crazy.” It was a simple flyer, Roadblock told me, sent to a few friends about a decade ago that led to the Los Angeles cycling scene exploding and convulsing beneath the mainstream cycling drawl.

“My friend Kim Jensen sent out a flyer for a Friday night bike ride. It was called the Downtown Fountain Tour. I turned up on a skateboard; the flyer had said ‘skaters are riders too’. There were maybe eight of us, doing this eighteen-mile ride through LA. It ended in a bar, and we all realised how fun it was. So we planned the next night ride for two weeks later.”

This was the beginning of the Midnight Ridazz – a self-styled ‘party on wheels’, reminding anyone who’d listen that ‘riding a bicycle is a sensual alternative to the “boy in the bubble” car voyages that hide everything good that a city has to offer’.

Immediately, the late night rides doubled in size. The core 36

group organising the rides, The Mammas and The Papas, planned routes, created themes and made sure that no rider was left behind. One ride was called Friend of the Friendless: riders would pick a random direction and the first lone cyclist they saw would be surrounded with shouts of “Friend of the Friendless!” and escorted to their destination. Roadblock laughed as he told me what happened: “We followed this couple and they ended up inviting us home.

They cooked food for us, and we made friends with them! We had a party.”

Even un-connected riders wouldn’t be left behind. This wild open-heartedness surrounds the Midnight Ridazz, and Roadblock seemed amazed as he spoke to me, even after all these years.

“It really felt like we were starting something.”

The rides grew and grew.

“By the time we hit two thousand riders, it was starting to get a little crazy. You know, cars were having to wait twenty minutes at a light, fights were breaking out, someone pulled a gun. I decided to put up a community website, basically trying to encourage people to start their own rides, with their own themes.”

Wild ride themes did begin to emerge.

nce a year, not so very far from the pulsing fumes and raging orange street lights of LA, a temporary society boils fleetingly to life in a desert.

“Burning Man opened my eyes to different bike cultures,” says Joe Borfo over a shaky internet video call, on a quiet, hot LA afternoon, and a drizzly British evening.

“For people who didn’t know what the Burning Man experience was like, I wanted to bring that to the Midnight rides… The idea of society as spectacle.

I was amazed how awake we could be in society, how autonomous. I don’t like the commercialization of it now, but ultimately the idea of a whole bunch of people getting together, building, riding bikes and not driving cars, that’s really sexy. There’s no money, you’re not buying things. That’s how I felt on my first Midnight Ridazz ride. It was pushing the boundaries, taking the whole fucking street, a whole bunch of people riding in a big bike train. It was a party.”

Joe Borfo is from LA, and grew up exploring the city on his bike with his brother. It was Midnight Ridazz that drew him into a wider group.

“There were themes, people dressed up, I was the crazy bunny guy...”

IT REALLY FELT LIKE WE WERE STARTING SOMETHING The Burning Man experiences fired more ideas for Joe though, and themed rides were not enough.

“One of my first ideas was having a field trip. I wanted to go someplace different and see what happened with everybody. I called them ‘zone trips’ which was based on this Burning Man idea of autonomous zones, of going someplace and entering a different realm. Being self-reliant, meeting like-minded people. So the first thing I did was take people to Salton Sea and Slab City, which is this off-the-grid kind of place, where people are squatting. There’s this interesting community, taking care of themselves.”

“The first trip was around 2007. It was at a hitchhikers’ camp, right below Salvation Mountain at Slab City.”

The group projected movies onto the abandoned buildings, danced in the old water towers. They rolled burning tyres down hills. They went on a forty-mile ‘Ride to Nowhere’... “...to this kind of post-apocalyptic place, Bombay Beach.

It’s this salt lake and there’s all these tilapia fish that die in the summer. The beach, you realise, is just all these dead fish bones. It’s a surreal, apocalyptic thing. You’ve got buildings that are falling into the sea. It’s romantic and freaky at the same time; a man-made disaster.”

The tale, maybe, starts to sparkle and shimmer...

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With the scene in Los Angeles building on the foundations of the Midnight Ridazz, a new group began baying at the midnight skyline. Roadblock told me of two prominent Midnight Ridazz organisers: Skid Marcus and Richie T. A film-maker in the middle of a production, Richie constantly shifted about the room as he talked excitedly to me from an LA film editing suite. Inspired by what they’d seen in other places, a group had slowly begun to build their own tall bikes.

“We were the freak-bike group of Los Angeles. (Skid) Marcus McKenzie made a freak-bike-only ride. You couldn’t bring a normal bike. That was the start of Los Angelopes. Since then, it’s become something of a cult.”

Los Angelopes has mutated into far more than a ride theme.

This is where the tale spins faster and faster and yet slips off to the side, to a place maybe you wouldn’t expect. Every rider, of course, has felt one of those moments of connection to another cyclist. The sideways glance in the driving rain, the warm hoot at the hill finally cleared, the caring chat at the traffic lights, or the tearful hug as you lie bleeding on the tarmac. Cycling will always be open and joyful, it will always be connected. But Los Angelopes grew beyond this, coalescing into something like a family.

This strange, sprawling warehouse became the infamous Casa del Angelopes, home and hub for a nascent bike community.

A group of the Angelopes found a warehouse on Craigslist.

The roof was twenty feet tall. Richie continues:

“That was the first real big space in LA for our scene. We had houses before, with a lot of rooms, but this was specifically an art/work space. When I lived there I lived at the very top. I’d open my doors and be on this balcony, overlooking this big space where there was a music studio, another hang out loft, a welding area, a paint area. It was really cool...Most people think you can’t do things because it’s not the way it’s supposed to be done, and then when you wake up and you let the situation hit you: ‘OK: I live in a warehouse with 12 people, and all we want to do is do things.’ There is something really freeing about it.”

“The previous tenant had built this ten-bed house inside, thinking he was going to make a lot of money filming in there… He had a lot of sets. We think maybe he wanted to use it for porn. I don’t know. Anyway, it was perfect.”

Los Angelopes were building tall bikes, swing bikes, pivot bikes, wild contraptions, mutant contortion bikes that buck and twist and delight, welded in the Casa from scraps found on the streets.

“When you have a group of people that not only get along, they influence each other, they are your best friends and you do everything with them, then you want to live with them too.”

CYCLING WILL ALWAYS BE OPEN AND JOYFUL, IT WILL ALWAYS BE CONNECTED “There was an addiction to wowing people, getting people to giggle and get excited.” When there were only a few tall bikes, the amount of attention that they got… You got to see the spark in people’s eyes that they wouldn’t normally have.

It’s addictive, to feel like you’re infecting people with the confidence of ‘hey, maybe I could do that.’ “ The Angelopes staged an illegal freeway ride, “and rode faster than the cars. The cops couldn’t even catch them because they were stuck in traffic,” says Roadblock.

The spirit of Midnight Ridazz, the soul of Los Angelopes, they were spilling out into the LA community: “Let’s drop their jaws. Let’s do this event and make everybody pee in their pants...”

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Los Angelopes have certainly been doing that. Take Stoopid Tall, a fourteen-foot-high tall bike Richie constructed and rode in one triumphant, self-videoed meander across LA to the sea.

It became known around the world, posted on mainstream news websites and Facebooked to infamy. Richie brought the bike out on a CicLavia ride, when some of LA’s streets are closed off to motor traffic. He leaned it against a wall and prepared to climb up. Instantly, a huge crowd gathered.

“I was like ‘fuck, now I need to do this, this is terrible.’ When I got on top, and got to look away from the wall and see how high I really was, I just remember thinking ‘this is so dumb.’”

But he pushed off, and rode, terrified, through LA, towering above the streets, scraping his knuckles on the underside of flyovers, soliciting cheers and hoots from all sides.

There’s a sense of violence sometimes in the videos Richie makes, documenting the scene he is a part of. Cars burn in desolate wildernesses, wooden ramps are crushed underfoot, people slam into concrete from jousting blows. I wondered if this wasn’t a world so far from the wasteland of Salton Sea, the gruelling cycles of life and death and dead fish floating up, stinking. orn as a West Side response to Midnight Ridazz’ East Side roots, the notorious Crank Mob rides eventually became something dangerous, something violent. Roadblock explained how Crank Mob “brought bands in parking lots, tall bike jousting and created a bigger party than we had on the east side. Crank Mob just got huge and that’s when the riot cops came out.”

“When something is small and slowly growing, the new riders get to look at others and see how to react, and find out what is and isn’t okay. You get schooled. But when things grow too fast, people show up in groups of their own with their own ways of doing things, they don’t learn the ropes. That’s why the big rides have kind of diminished.”

With vandalism and riot cops antagonizing matters, the event petered out. But it was seen as so important that Crank Mob’s passing is marked every year, with an anniversary party called Crankmas. “Like Christmas is the birth of Christ, well Crankmas is the birth of fun,” Richie explains. “Everyone dresses crazy, bakes cakes, chalks on the ground; there are pillow fights, live bands, kegs, mayhem. The cops always kick us out of places and it’s always a lot of fun.”

os Angelopes may not have the polished sheen of mainstream cycling life. It may not have the glossy designer aesthetic and you certainly can’t buy the jersey. But it’s brighter, I think, than all that gold.

“We all have a dose of that anarchy in us. But you’ve got to have a group, establish trust.” Joe explains. It may be less cinematic, less dramatic, but this is where the interest really

As the popularity of Crank Mob grew, the tone of the event changed.

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lies. As a bicycle tribe, Los Angelopes has built an environment where they share their resources, their skills, their care: “If you know something, teach it. This community is really good at that. Everyone wants to improve each other. People are like ‘I would love to build a tall bike…but I don’t know how.’

‘Oh, let me show you, I’d love to teach you.’ That happens constantly. I’ve never seen that in any other group of people. I wished that happened a lot more, in every community.”

In 2011, a rider called Tomatoes died. The Salton Sea trip that year was a memorial to him. It was Tomatoes who had got Joe interested in Slab City.

“Tomatoes was a very eclectic guy. Every day was his birthday, you know?” Richie says. “We built this memorial. Every day of the ride had this undertone of doing it for him.” The Angelopes covered Salton Sea with printouts of Tomatoes’ face stuck in the sand with popsicle sticks. They built a memorial in scrap wood, and burnt it, undefeated, noble, at the end of the trip. They mourned and celebrated their friend, as a group, as a family.

“Everyone wanted to be there. It wasn’t faked, that was real stuff, really organic love... Some of the best times of my life were on Joe’s field trips...It’s the biggest extended family I’ve ever seen. Everyone looks out for each other.”

Where did that come from?

“The rides themselves were the glue. That was the true foundation, because for you to go out and make a ride, you’re already opening out to make your own adventure. It was that common attitude, being open to hug a stranger, that brought people together. It all began with the rides.”

The mainstream bike world could easily give you the impression that cycling is about nothing more than going fast on plastic bikes. But out in the desert, on the edge of ecological disaster, howling cyclists pedal together and hold each other up.

That’s not a dark underbelly at all. That’s love.

ome two thousand miles away from Los Angeles’ dust and neon, bodies flit through Chicago alleyways looking for excitement.

It took some time to arrange to talk to Rat Patrol. Vague emails bounced around across the Atlantic: “Your magazine fits in to the category of magazines that we don’t just immediately tell to fuck off, however...”

Fearful of being misrepresented, of stereotypes and the presentation of a certain party line, Rat Patrol seems impenetrable at first. But when we finally talked, Rat Patroller Alexis Ellers explained that fear.

“There was one Rat Patrol article that was fairly inaccurate and resulted in some people being evicted from their apartment.

The article said something like: ‘Fifteen year old kids drunkenly welding at their house!’ Their landlord read it and said ‘get the fuck out.’”

Alexis told me that they like to keep some mystery.

“We don’t want our club spelled out to people, or give people preconceptions before they experience riding with us and are able to form their own opinion.”

Other bike clubs are similarly reticent. I was told in no uncertain terms that talking to New York’s Black Label Bike Club would be “impossible.” And so it proved, with everyone I reached out to coming up blank. But once we started talking, the Rats were joyful and warm.

THAT’S NOT A DARK UNDERBELLY AT ALL, THAT’S LOVE Max Astell beamed from the seat of his homemade rickshaw contraption in the front yard of his house in Jefferson, speaking excitedly about the club.

“Rat Patrol started with a bunch of guys riding around, looking for rats, picking through garbage. Then they started building choppers, they met some guys from Black Label, started building tall bikes, and it all just culminated in one big rolling pile of…mess. It’s shifted a lot through the years, starting as a bunch of… I don’t want to say nerdy guys… but more traditional cyclists, but now it’s a bunch of punky kids. We all still hang out, but it’s changed and people are happy about that.”

Alexis too buzzed as she told me about her introduction to Rat Patrol: “I had a friend from Ohio who moved here to Chicago at the same time as me and he met them, then invited me over. He brought me to a Rat house, and said ‘You have to build a bike right now!’ and he found all the stuff and we built a bike in one day, right there on the porch.”

Built on the foundation that rubbish can teem with new life – hence the ‘picking through garbage’ thing, Rat Patrol is a freak-bike club. They create tall bikes, front wheel pedalling recumbents, gangly tandem monstrosities, nigh on impossible to ride and spectacular when attempted. Made up of a half dozen loosely connected chapters around the world, Rat Patrol create their bikes from raiding dumpsters for scrap metal, scavenging old bike parts where they can, chopping and welding late into the night. They hold playful events that spin through cities creating their own mischievous fun: “You take a chopper, take a TV electrical cord and tie it to a seat stay. Then you do the same with another chopper, and you have a drag race...The only rule is if your TV explodes, you automatically win. I don’t know if you’ve ever smashed an old TV, but when you do they go BOOM…” Many of Rat Patrol’s bike games turn into a melée, like the one called Whiplash. Two riders each slip on a harness made of inner tubes. They’re connected by ropes with an inner tube in the middle. The competitors ride at each other, continue on past, and wait for the snap...“Whoever doesn’t die, wins.”

orn and bred in Chicago, Yly first discovered Rat Patrol when he was still young, and his mother gave him a clipping from the local alternative newspaper.

“I saved that article for years. She just thought it was something I might like. But I was immediately like ‘Oh my god, I gotta build a bike and hang out with these people!’ There were so many new ideas introduced to me in that article that I found cool. I was in high school and really impressionable… I had never thought about eating food from the trash – perfectly good food that had been thrown away by large corporations, or small boutiquey food stores, whatever it might be, that just blew my mind. I was really excited by how these people live for free.”

With the help of his grandfather, and welder father, Yly built his first freak-bike.

“My first bike build was a tall bike. I loved that bike. It was built in a very strange way. I feel like there’s a sort of accepted 41

way to do things when making a tall bike. There are ways that are easier. I welded a pipe through the bottom headset, with no bearings or anything, straight to a fork. It just dangled around. When I first showed up at Rat Patrol with that, everyone was like ‘What the hell did you do here?’ It lasted a good few years…so long that I got tired of rebuilding it: it got run over by a car, hit by a bus, mangled in a joust. It had been through the ringer.”

Building bikes is at the very core of Rat Patrol. Everyone I spoke to stressed that Rat Patrol has no rules, but there’s a sense that to be a Rat is to ride a freak bike. Max is a particular advocate. His house is filled with the debris of bike hacking, and his arc welder seems to get little rest. He tells me he can’t even count the number of bikes he has.

“It’s important...it’s fun to build a bike, but if it gets smashed, you get to build another one. It’s the creativity factor, the circle of life.”

“It was kind of an insane idea to me that you could just weld,” says Alexis, “that it wasn’t something you went to school for four years and apprenticed. Just melt these two metals together, that’s it. It’s like sewing. Everyone can sew, but the better you get at it, the better it looks and the longer it stays together. At the time I was oblivious to safety. I was in a wooden, enclosed, non-ventilated room, cutting metal, and it never crossed my mind that that was incredibly dangerous and really bad for you!”

Rat Patrol stand apart; they operate some way out of the world in which most cyclists exist. Not for them old framebuilder lore, or geometry tables and drooling over lug work, wearing immaculately tailored tweed with immaculately specced bikes: “There’s a certain amount of irreverence involved,” says Max. “Some Rats get a bit upset if you chop up a nice old Italian frame or whatever…But it’s kind of a big fuck you to the bike industry. I’ve got this old Schwinn and I’ve been asking myself whether I should chop it. It’s in great condition; it’s a really nice bike. I’ve been beating myself up about it. I asked some of my friends, and they said “of course you should chop it, why are you even asking? Chop it!’ It’s a unique bike; it’ll make a unique tall bike. It’s just a bike. People get so high and mighty about a lot of this stuff, forgetting that it’s just a bike.”

omewhere in Chicago, there’s an all-American clapboard house. But this house is a little different to most. The fence round the front yard is made of mangled old bike frames, welded at haphazard angles; an odd penny farthing freak bike thing hangs above the porch.

Grinding, no doubt, can be heard much of the time. This is the Barber Chop.

“Everybody knows that if you’re from out of town, and you’re going to see Rat Patrol, you’re going to turn up at our house.”

Yly lives at Barber Chop with a bunch of other Rat Patrol riders and an empty attic space always ready for the ever-changing crews of other clubs that come to Chicago to ride. There are bikes everywhere. The garage is the primary

build space for the club. Max remembers the Angelopes’ visit to Barber Chop: “They were like ‘Oh, is this your build space?’ We were like ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well do you have another one?’ ‘No just this one’ Cos they have like fucking warehouses. We just have one garage.”

Yly smiles when he talks about the Barber Chop though: “The person who owns the house is in Rat Patrol, the house has been lived in by many members of the club, and it’s always where the rides kick off from, where the afterparty ends up.

We have ‘Ratsgiving’ every year, where all of us get together and celebrate. It’s a potluck, a hang-out as a community.”

The house is at the centre of the bike club experience. With food and clothing coming from the trash, living costs are low.

“Everything is basically for free except for welding wire, electricity and grinding wheels. That’s all I pay for pretty much.”

The empty attic has played host to dozens of out-of-town bike club members, from Black Label, Los Angelopes, the Dead Babies from Seattle, the Nashville Rat chapter, Mosh and Brew from Cincinnati. For Yly, this is the great joy of Rat Patrol.

“That’s something I like about bike clubs – we can always be like ‘Oh, you’re in a bike club too?’ I’m automatically going to extend to you this hospitality and generosity, and if I showed up in your city, I would probably expect that too. So when people from different bike clubs show up and want to hang out, I’ll lend them a bike, we’ll hang out, I’ll provide them with some food, we’ll go on bike rides… It’s a great way to make a meaningful connection.”

All across America and beyond, circles intertwine and connect, spreading freak bike shenanigans across border lines, stretching to the west, the south. Within this, Rat Patrol gathers together behind their colours. Alexis explained this to me. Rat Patrol is essentially an anarchist organisation; there are no presidents, no prospects. When someone has been riding with the club for a while and they decide they want to join, that’s it. They make their own patches, their club symbols and colours, sewn by hand to a denim jacket, a t-shirt, a jumpsuit, whatever.

“The nice thing about colours is if you go somewhere with other clubs, people will talk to you and if you’re wearing colours they’ll talk to you about your club.”

And within the sea of riders at anarchic bicycle happenings like NYC’s Bike Kill, Seattle’s Dead Baby Downhill or any big bike club event, the group will be seen, and known, and belong.

ehind battle scars and patches, beneath the thousands of Midnight Ridazz, under the trash and porno sets, these groups ride to a different cadence. The mainstream bike world often leans away from their anti-consumerism, from their art-making and chaos-forming. But the essential joy of riding bicycles – that eternal fun – fills everything about Los Angelopes, Rat Patrol and all the rest. As Yly said to me, “When you’re in the same bike club, you’re family.”

And riders everywhere know what that feels like.

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a midsummer's ride

Words and pictures by Andy Miles 44

It’s late in the morning when I finally get on the road. At least I think it’s morning. The sun has been up for ages.

The long daylight hours will become perpetual when I cross the Arctic Circle. The 12-hour clock on my cycle computer only adds to the confusion. I can’t remember the last time it was dark at night. In Inuit mythology, the Raven is known as the trickster, a bird of cunning, who’ll outwit the unwary on their journey. It seems like he’s up to his old tricks.

hectic lifestyle of mainstream America, and was now in need of some adventure and excitement.

The Raven is making different mischief with Scot and Andrew, my cycling companions. They came prepared with a guidebook to cycling the roads of Alaska and the Yukon. Each day they would pore over the book to discover that it was a day of cycling through rolling hills. As each climb became longer, steeper and harder than the last they became convinced that the sole purpose of the book was to demoralise them.

The section across the Eagle Plains, an area at the heart of the Yukon, is by far the toughest of the entire ride. It’s a 90km stretch without water and the plan is to camp halfway. I fill my 10 litre water bag at the last river I see and load it on the bike. The extra liquid means another 10 kilos of weight on the bike. I’m not surprised to find the road climbs sharply away from the river. As the sun circles overhead I’m forced to sweat my way up another long climb. All I can do is drink and pedal. The Raven is playing with me again.

Scot and Andrew are two Americans that I teamed up with in Dawson City, home of the 1898 Klondike gold rush. Scot is a cycle courier from New York and Andrew teaches English in an Alaskan village. Scot was getting away from the breakneck world of urban riding and back to nature. Andrew had eschewed the

The road we are on is the Dempster Highway, the only road in Canada to cross the Arctic Circle. A 777km ribbon of gravel, it winds north from Dawson City before snaking out across the Mackenzie Delta towards Inuvik. The road is a link between these two frontier towns that have seen boom and bust.

On the fifth day, we reach the Arctic Circle. It is marked by a simple wooden sign in a car park. A swarm of motorists wait their turn to be photographed by the sign. The sight of three

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“What will take them 10 hours to drive in air-conditioned comfort will take us 10 days to cycle, with a different sort of air-conditioning.” cyclists momentarily distracts them. We take our turn for the obligatory photo stop and politely field questions regarding our sanity. What will take them 10 hours to drive in air-conditioned comfort will take us 10 days to cycle, with a different sort of air-conditioning.

At the top of Wrights Pass we enter the North West Territories (NWT). The road stretches eastwards towards Fort McPherson, the first settlement of any size since Dawson City. The road surface we’re cycling on has deteriorated dramatically since entering NWT. Car traffic breaks up the compacted gravel surface in a unique way.

Horizontal ridges form across the road and these gradually widen and deepen. This washboard surface shakes the bikes - and us violently.

On the final 15km descent into Fort McPherson, Scot and I decide to race each other down. The speed picks up and as we top 60kph, the Raven strikes again. Scot hits a patch of soft gravel. This causes the back of his bike to weave alarmingly like a salmon tail flicking from side to side through water. Meanwhile, the heavy panniers on my bike make the steering unresponsive and the brakes sluggish.

I’m going too fast to avoid the same gravel patch and have no choice but to try and ride through it. With the rear of our bikes swimming about, we just hold on and wait for everything to sort itself out as the tyres fight to get some grip on the compacted dirt. Eventually we stop and catch our breath. Then we start laughing nervously, both aware of the grave consequences had either of us crashed.

Re-mounting our bikes, we roll on down, laughing and whooping at the tops of our voices. It had been our turn to out-trick the trickster.

The three of us reach the first crossing point of the River Mackenzie, but the ferry service has stopped for the day. The dull grey light from the overcast sky gives the impression of evening. It’ll stay like this until the sun breaks through again. The only area we can find for our tents proves to be a mosquito-ridden hell.

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For the next two days, we fight against chilling headwinds blowing down from the Arctic Ocean. Combined with the damp cold, the wind saps our energy.

At the edge of Inuvik the road suddenly changes to tarmac.

With papal grace I fall to the ground and kiss it; a smooth relief from the jarring of the Dempster Highway. The huge welcome sign at the edge of town tells me I’ve reached civilisation after 10 days of wilderness cycling; getting here is both a relief and a disappointment.

Inuvik is a nondescript town of fewer than 3000 people. A frontier town like Dawson City, Inuvik bravely tries to forge an identity of its own from both the native communities and the influx of oil workers. The main street is dominated by the large Catholic church, which is shaped like an igloo. A small sculpture in front of the church signifies the meeting point of different cultures.

The name in Inuit means ‘Place of Man’.

The Raven has one last laugh at our expense. When the town was built, it was designed to have everything a modern Canadian city would require. Riding down the main street we inadvertently ‘jump’ the only traffic lights in town. Car horns blare at us. We found out later that the designers had forgotten to include traffic lights in their master plan; they were graciously donated by another city.

We head to the campground for a hot shower, then retire to the only hotel in Inuvik and exchange our saddles for the most comfortable seats in town. After the initial euphoria of reaching civilisation, Inuvik itself is almost a non-event. For Scot, the town is too quiet, and he decides to head back to Dawson City the following day. Andrew and I decide to push on north to see the Arctic Ocean. One journey finishes, another begins. But who will the Raven follow?

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Š Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office

Wo rd s a n d p i c t u re s by Ph il ip Perk ins w w w. p h i li p p e rk i n sp h o t o gr a p h y.com

Rubber moans across smooth wooden boards.

The bikes become a blur, faster and faster. Occasionally, a rider will lose their line and hurtle over the trackside, somersaulting to a stop as the crowd leaps, wincing, out of the way.

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A far cry from the hurly-burly of city cycling and the wide-open spaces of long-distance touring, The Ring, also known as the Minidrome, is a velodrome measuring just 15m in length and 40m in circumference. It’s a velodrome, but concentrated. In just a few pedal strokes the cyclists can reach speeds of up to 40kph, completing a lap in a smidgeon over three seconds.

Its intensity and unrelenting speed make it a magnet for extreme sports types but The Ring remains relatively unknown, though corporate cash is beginning to turn marketing’s hungry spotlight on this tiny loop of adrenaline.

There are only four rules to The Ring:

Helmet. Gloves. No Brakes. No Gears.

The only rule broken regularly is the gloves; some competitors say riding bareknuckle gives a better connection with the bike. Today, there are two permanent Minidromes in the world: one in Australia and one in France.

A third, portable Minidrome (owned by a popular caffeine-based sugarpotion-peddler) tours the world as the Minidrome World Series.

In spring 2013, the permanent Minidrome in L’Isle Jourdain, France hosted an event for Italian helmet-mongers, Met. Over 40 participants represented 15 countries. First prize was a sought-after qualification spot for the World Series in Paris later in the year. The winner, Thomas Dalbigot from Toulouse, set a new lap record of 3.334 seconds. Canadian Guirec Moisan, a regular in the World Series, fought his way to runner up, narrowly missing the final to second place local Edwin Cruz. Great Britain was represented by professional cyclist Juliet Elliot, who trounced all comers to bag first place in the women’s competition.

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There were six major accidents.

Four required medical attention.

But all six got back on their bikes and completed the lap.

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Words & photos by Emily Chappell | thatemilychappell.com Illustration by David McMillan | davidjmcmillan.co.uk

KEEPING GOING

IF I JUST KEPT CYCLING, WHATEVER PANIC, OR FEAR, OR SADNESS, OR EXHAUSTION I FELT WOULD EVENTUALLY DISSOLVE INTO SOMETHING ELSE. THE TRICK WAS ALWAYS TO KEEP GOING.

I

was already exhausted when I started riding. This was the eighth day of the eleven that I had to cover more than 1,000 miles of eastern China, owing to its lack of generosity in granting me a third visa. I’d spent the previous two days struggling along highway G307, which, when I joined it shortly after Lanzhou, had been a pleasant strip of clean tarmac, undulating gently through rustling cornfields and shimmering silver birch woods, but was now becoming a nightmare of mud, potholes and traffic, as I made my way further and further into the overpopulated industrial hinterland of China’s eastern provinces.

keen on letting me in. After two hours of circling the city centre in increasing desperation, I understood why. When, finally, a smiling receptionist led me up to my room, I closed the door, looked in the mirror, and burst out laughing in spite of myself. My face was black with grime from the dust and fumes I’d been riding through. The peeling skin on my nose (from the sunburn I’d suffered the previous week) was caked and encrusted with filth, and round my eyes were pink circles where my sunglasses had been.

Goodness knows what the immaculate hotel staff must have thought when I’d walked in. I was even more amazed that they’d given me such a hearty welcome.

The previous evening I’d arrived in Taiyuan, determined to treat myself to a hotel for the night, but none seemed very

And now I was back on the bike, just a few hours later, attempting to get myself back on the G307 to carry on

east. I hadn’t slept well, the exhaustion of cycling 100 miles, eight days in a row tempered by the nervousness of knowing that I still had over 300 to go until I reached the port at Tanggu, and only three days left before my ferry left for South Korea. My body ached with tiredness, as if it were the end of the day rather than the beginning, and I wished I could just turn around, check back into the hotel and spend the entire day asleep.

But then I’d be lost – I didn’t even know what would happen if I found myself in China with an expired visa, so I had to keep going, fighting down the panic that occasionally surged up in my chest, because it really felt like this time I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

The road was broad and smooth, but on a slight incline, so that although it seemed

flat, I crawled along barely above walking pace and it took me an hour to get to the outskirts of the city, where I paused next to an enormous bus station and regarded the tangle of busy junctions and flyovers, wondering which of these roads I was supposed to be on. A few curious people detached themselves from the crowds and came over to ask if I needed any help.

None of them spoke English, of course, but having spent over two months in China, I no longer considered this the insurmountable obstacle I’d expected it to be. This was the first country I’d cycled through without even a passing familiarity with the language or the script, and before I crossed the border I’d been worried that it would be simply impossible to survive if I couldn’t communicate. But fulfilling my basic requirements (food, shelter, occasional directions) had proved easy enough – all I had to do was walk into a restaurant and point at my mouth, and someone would take care of me. What was more difficult, more exhausting and more alienating, was the perpetual estrangement from those around me. They returned my smiles and laughed at my sign language, but I could tell them nothing of my doubts and fears and opinions, nor could I learn anything of theirs. There was no scope for discussion or argument, for the subtleties of conversation, and, I realised yet again, when the crowd outside the bus station launched into a frenzied debate about which way I should be going, no way of judging the veracity or the reliability of any information I did manage to glean.

I had thought, when I set off to cycle round the world, that I would be more firmly in control of my destiny and direction than I ever had been in my life. I was riding alone, and so had sole responsibility for everything from fixing and maintaining my bike to planning a route through the mountain passes and red tape of Central Asia. But at times I realised just how dependent I still was on other people. I was free to accept or reject the decisions they made for me, but this freedom was actually fairly worthless without the ability to determine whether these decisions could be trusted.

The powerlessness of it bothered me.

I felt petulant as a smart young man in a designer t-shirt (with the help of an English-speaking friend at the end of a phone and a crudely drawn map) confidently explained that I needed to go back the way I’d come, all the way back down the slight incline to the railway 58

station near my hotel, and then right, and then left. I argued with them, pointlessly, insisting that this couldn’t possibly be the right way, that I’d just come from there, trying to convince them that the G307 must be one of these roads right here. But of course they knew best, and I’d spent the last hour pedalling in the wrong direction.

I thanked them with a mournful smile, turned the bike around, and retraced my path, following their directions back down the hill, past the station, then right, and then left. But I didn’t seem to be getting any closer to the edge of the city.

“ENDURANCE SPORTS AREN’T SO MUCH ABOUT STRENGTH, AS THE ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE, MANIPULATE AND WORK WITH ONE’S WEAKNESSES” I asked a man in a suit for directions, showing him my China map and pointing to the next city along the road (Shijiazhuang, 150 miles away), and he pointed me firmly in the direction from which I’d just come.

The panic started to rise in my chest again. Things hadn’t always been easy since I cycled away from my parents’ gate in mid-Wales, twelve months previously, but I’d learned very quickly that, if I needed it, help would materialize, and if I just kept cycling, whatever panic, or fear, or sadness, or exhaustion I felt would eventually dissolve into something else.

The trick was always to keep going.

But I’d already been going for several hours, and had probably clocked up 20 or 30 miles just riding around Taiyuan. I still hadn’t found the road I was supposed to be on, and I hadn’t even started the 100 miles I had to ride that day. And all my body wanted to do was sleep.

I took a deep breath and tried to muster my last fragments of strength, then realised

that I was going to cry instead. Like most people, I’ve tended to dismiss crying as a sign of weakness, and had resolutely avoided it for most of my journey, fearing that if I let myself fall apart like that, I might never put myself back together again. It’s only comparatively recently, reading the accounts of other, more accomplished explorers and athletes, that I’ve noticed a lot of them readily admit to crying from time to time, that it doesn’t seem to have impeded their achievements in any way at all – that in fact their willingness to unleash their emotions might even have helped them.

Endurance sports (if I may be so bold as to include my own in this bracket) aren’t so much about strength, as the ability to recognise, manipulate, and work with one’s weaknesses; to learn the different stages of exhaustion and to know what one’s mind will do as it reaches them; to see a breakdown coming and to know how to distract it; to decide whether this is the time to cry, or the time to swallow the pain and keep going. To keep going.

I wasn’t thinking any of this that morning in Taiyuan though. As I steered the bicycle into a small green park, sat down on a bench and finally let my eyes overflow, all I could think of was how hopeless and nightmarish this was. I had to find my way out of this city. But I’d tried and tried, and I couldn’t. I sat there until I’d finished crying, then ate the packet of emergency M&Ms that a friend had given me in Hong Kong, got back on the bike, and carried on.

A few minutes later I spotted a European – the first I’d seen in weeks, and flagged him down, desperate for the spurious camaraderie of a shared language, even if he couldn’t help me. But it turned out he could. Apparently I should have turned left and then right at the railway station, instead of right and then left. I thanked him and hurried wearily off towards the edge of the city, stopping to buy bananas from a roadside fruit stall, after a brief and rather silly debate with myself as to whether I could really spare the time. (It took less than 30 seconds; of course I could.)

There are a couple of large highways leading east out of Taiyuan, but I’d elected to stay on the old G307, correctly surmising that it would be quieter. What I hadn’t anticipated was that it would climb over the Taihang Mountains, which lie between Taiyuan and Shijiazhuang, and which I hadn’t even noticed during my rudimentary route planning a week ago.

It was a relief to be on the right road, but the climb was agonizingly slow, and the sun uncomfortably hot, and I noticed with a slight sense of unease that I hadn’t seen another vehicle for quite some time. As I neared the summit I found out why – the road was being resurfaced, and for several miles had been churned up like a ploughed field. Cycling was impossible, and some parts were so uneven that I had to carry the bike, helped by a couple of curious workmen (from whom I tried to hide my once-again-imminent tears).

I stopped briefly at the beginning of the descent, to top up on calories and gaze

out over what lay ahead, then I plunged down the side of the mountain, into a gathering headwind, finally on the move, but uncomfortably aware that I was already several hours into the afternoon, still had the best part of a century to cover, and would have to ride into – and possibly through – the night in order to remain on schedule.

“I COULDN’T AFFORD TO STOP, BUT I KNEW A LIFELINE WHEN I SAW ONE” I lost a couple more hours to a jeep full of enthusiastic boys who told me they’d show me a quick route through the next town. I followed them down the hill through the twilight, alongside the river – and then they either got bored of driving slowly or decided that I could find my own way from here, and accelerated off with a wave and a smile.

By the time I had found the G307 again it was so dark that I couldn’t see the road, and was relying on the lights of the trucks that growled past me every few minutes to illuminate what lay ahead. I seemed to be riding through a range of hills, or up a valley – the road undulated constantly, and was full of potholes, so that going uphill felt like I was trying to cycle up

steps, and going downhill I gripped the brakes and rolled nervously at walking pace, fearful of what might happen to my already shaky wheels if I hit one of these invisible craters at speed.

The temperature had dropped, and I found myself shivering, with exhaustion as much as the cold. Although I felt no strength in my legs, they somehow kept turning, and I pushed myself dully on and on, occasionally wishing that something miraculous would happen to deliver me from this situation, though all I could think of was that a broken leg or collarbone would force me to quit, and be rescued and airlifted out of this infuriating country.

I always make my worst mistakes when I’m cold or tired or hungry, so perhaps it was inevitable that, descending a hill with a touch too much bravado, I went into a pothole, tumbled over the handlebars, slammed into the road and heard the bike and all its bags skitter across the tarmac behind me. Thankfully this occurred in one of the gaps between trucks, which meant that I wasn’t immediately run over, although I did have to collect myself and my scattered belongings in the dark. One of my panniers had been ripped from its moorings, and the bananas I’d strapped to the top of it were nowhere to be found.

My right knee and one of my hands were grazed.

Grimly, I put the bike straight, got back onto it and carried on rolling slowly down the hill. But now I was shaking 59

with shock as well as exhaustion, and I knew I’d have to stop. Through the darkness I spotted a small square building, with lights on and a couple of trucks parked outside.

The men and woman running the transport café took a while to get their heads round this pale, shivering foreigner, who stumbled in from the dark, collapsed into a chair, rolled up her trousers and started blotting her bloodied knee with a piece of tissue. They poured me a cup of tea, and then retreated to the bar to discuss what to do with me. By the time I’d drunk the tea, they’d brought out three steaming plates of fresh food and a damp towel for my knee, offered me a tot of whiskey, and settled down at my table to find out who I was and where I was going. Across the large, sparse room, a couple of truck drivers regarded me with tired curiosity from behind their noodles.

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Using the usual combination of repetition and sign, my new friends suggested I have a shower and a sleep, and continue my journey in the morning. I couldn’t afford to stop for more than a couple of hours, but I knew a lifeline when I saw one, so I gladly helped them wheel and lift my bike inside, and was ushered downstairs, to what was clearly a rudimentary motel for the use of the truck drivers. At one end of a long shadowy concrete corridor was a room with taps leading to a showerhead and, to my great surprise and delight, hot water. And once I’d washed off the blood and dust and sweat, my new friends showed me into a small windowless room with a bedstead, and a cricket chirruping loudly in one corner, wished me a pleasant sleep and closed the door. I lay down, wondered how I’d ever get to sleep with the noise the cricket was making, and promptly fell asleep.

“MY BODY ACHED WITH TIREDNESS AS IF IT WERE THE END OF THE DAY RATHER THAN THE BEGINNING”

My alarm woke me less than three hours later, and I crept out into the grey pre-dawn twilight, rolling quietly away between two long lines of stationary trucks. The road continued to wind in and out of the hills, and half an hour later I rounded a spur and was unexpectedly confronted by a segment of the Great Wall of China, towering up on the hillside above me, sheer and crenellated, and shining in the first rays of the rising sun, which hadn’t yet reached down into the valley. Weeks later I checked the map and realized that this couldn’t actually have been part of the Wall itself, since it doesn’t come anywhere near as far south as I was. It must have been some other ancient fortification. But as I saw it I was flooded with the sense of hope and relief with which human beings have always greeted the rising of the sun after a long and difficult night. Somehow, I knew the worst was over.

And although I was still carrying all the exhaustion of that horrible night – and the preceding week – from here the ride got easier. Shijiazhaung, when I reached it, was bright and leafy, and the end of the bad roads. Some policemen drew me an elaborate (but mercifully accurate) map to get me onto the road that would take me to the coast, and although I still had over 200 miles to go I finally felt I was on the finishing straight; that I might yet make it. I sped along, in and out of the clouds of smog and chemicals exuded by towns and factories, and a few hours into the following night stopped at a petrol station much like any other, thinking to have a rest and eat some noodles before carrying on for another hour or two.

The people who lived there offered me food and watched companionably while I ate it, neither unfriendly nor overcurious. Quite unexpectedly, a wave of

happiness washed over me. This petrol station, with its large, quiet forecourt, the cars swishing intermittently past and the occasional motorbike puttering up for a refill, the fields of corn swaying on either side, the calm, smiling family and the cool, soft night air – for the first time in several days, I didn’t want to be anywhere else. They readily agreed to let me pitch my tent alongside the building and within half an hour I was fast asleep.

Two days later I pulled up outside the ferry terminal building in Tanggu, lightheaded and light-limbed, and already struggling to recall the fear and exhaustion with which I’d struggled out of Taiyuan.

Somehow, we rarely remember pain at its most acute, and this can be both a curse (since our forgetfulness condemns us to repeat our ordeals) and a blessing. Or, perhaps knowing that all will one day be forgotten is what helps us to keep going.

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t i u f u a l e Bike B y M Words by Imogen Pettitt / www.imogenpettitt.co.uk

Photos by David Granero / www.davidgranero.co.uk

I have spent most of my life living in the countryside and using a bicycle to get around, but it’s always in the city that I fall in love with cycling, over and over again. I forget, all the time, but then some little thing, some new joy or silly idea will reveal itself and it’s reignited instantly.

City cycling changed my life. It was a clear moment. The moment the cycle went beyond ‘functional’ and became an interface, a material, a discipline, a means of creation and interaction, a prop, a performance tool and a protest. My life changed in a dramatic and unexpected way, a glorious, riotously colourful, bold and beautiful way. BOOM! Thanks to some rip-stop and netting tape the world exploded for me. With the help of My First School of Bicycle Arts, I decorated my bike: colourful plastic between the spokes, carefully wound fabric around the frame. Looking back it was pretty tame but it started something wild!

The world unfurled into a feast of colourful creative opportunities and through this new cycle ‘art’, I discovered a new way of being, a new lust for life, a vibrancy and hilarity that just hadn’t been there before. It began slowly; my newly decorated bike drew smiles and invited interaction with strangers. When people start smiling at you in the street, the world becomes less forbidding. Life became public, the streets one huge performance venue.

I began to ‘own’ the streets. We all own the streets. They are not just functional for the purpose of people travelling between commerce opportunities, they are our public space and we can do with them what we want. A colourful bike - a costumed bike - is an invitation to play, a step away from a consumer culture and a step away from controlled public space. It invites the clown into your daily life and with a clown inside you... who knows what will happen?

With a mini-bike, all pretence of functionality is gone. It is pure style, fun and (moderate) danger, the glory of a troupe of fully fledged adults flinging themselves around on children’s bikes may never cease to light up my life - and theirs. The bikes themselves – oh, they are beauties. The mini-bikes I have loved are numerous; each has its own speciality, name and personality. There’s ‘Mountain Cub’ who’ll throw you if you do bunny hops; ‘Vivi’ whose handlebars tend to come off as you’re riding along; ‘The Special’, who doesn’t like spins; ‘Tutti Fruity’ who can do anything but is a bit wonky... and then there’s ‘Team Hawk Blazer’…

Team Hawk Blazer. It was love at first sight. And don’t think it’s just a flash in the pan. I’m more than mini-bike-curious. I was several storeys up when I spotted Team. I looked down, across the courtyard and my experienced eye could tell this was no ordinary kid’s bike. When I saw Team, a small red bike with yellow detailing, even the saddle and tyres - so perfectly retro in every way, it was on the scrap heap. I couldn’t help myself, I grabbed a friend’s bike lock and charged down the stairs two at a time, hoping I would get there in time - Team had to be mine!

I don’t know who I was expecting to take him though, the car park is locked and I’m in charge of the scrap pile he was heaped on.

Nonetheless, I won my race against myself and Team and I are... well... a team. I made myself a matching outfit so as not to sully Team’s beauty. We’ve zoo-bombed together, danced together, led carnivals together. We have a serious future together too: first we have to make a mini-bike bomberdrome, then we move on to leaping through rings of fire!

A decorated bike was the beginning. A lit-up bike was next, a paint bike - rather ineffectively dribbling paint as you cycle along, then a noisy bike (since you ask, a violin mounted between the handlebars, being played by a bow on a bamboo cane which was attached to a pedal. It sounded dreadful. I loved it), a noisy social tandem (The Tandemonium), several giant bike-mounted sculpture-puppets and then... ultimately... the mini-bike!

It was a clear moment. The moment the cycle went beyond ‘functional’ and became an interface, a material, a discipline, a means of creation and interaction, a prop, a performance tool and a protest.

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A Heart-Shaped Hole in the Tarmac

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his story’s title might sound like the opening line of a country and western ballad, but it really is true for the street outside my house. I pedal over the scrape in the road every day and each time I think I must get down on my hands and knees and fill it in with a pot of red paint, a kind of infant yearning to turn the streets into a colouring-in book.

But I never do this. I never lean my bike up against the car wash facility run by the hardest working economic migrants in town. I never kneel down and carefully, tenderly, fill this unloved patch of macadam that has so randomly worn itself into a code for human tenderness.

And I like to think this demonstrates my ambivalence not only for the road but for surfaces in general, the whole braille of the planet I bumble across believing, somewhat naively, that I am ‘getting somewhere’.

I, like a lot of men with twitchy fingers, have purchased a smartphone that tells me how to get places. It will pinpoint my exact location and destination. It also pins me to my smartphone. It has a sensual magnetism. But it acts in reverse polarity to the natural world. The more I use it to tell me how to ride somewhere, the less time I actually seem to spend riding, diverted into other worlds of social inaction. So, on the back of my smartphone, I have written in marker pen “look out the window”. And out the window I see the road. “Get on the bike,” the road demands, get your little red heart beating, thud, thud, thud, through the shoddy macadam.

Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy concerned with our subjective experience of the world. It is concerned, quite obviously, with phenomena; appearances of objects within consciousness.

There are some philosophers rather at odds with phenomenology, ‘materialists’ we’ll call them (pah!), who tenet that existence can be explained by its objective material properties, that all experience is the interaction of material atoms bouncing and banging around like pinballs in a worldly machine. This is the kind of doolally thinking that proposed the mind is merely the sum of its nerves, the flesh and blood it contains, that human consciousness is but a piece of software running on a soggy circuit-board. That

Words: jet mcdonald Pictures: sergey maidukov / prktr.com.ua

the mind is, in other words, a smartphone, albeit a bigger one with more storage and less market value.

More literary philosophers, (hooray!), such as Sartre and Proust, suggest otherwise; that consciousness is a lived and present moment in which mind and body interact with the environment to create something less tangible, something the materialists can’t fully explain, that is, ‘qualia’. Qualia are sensations as they present themselves in our mind: the taste of a hop beer, the smell of tangerines, the gritty heart of a tarmac pothole as we ride over it. Do computers have qualia? No. (Although there are PhD students who would fight me to the death in a velodrome to prove otherwise, clearly unable to taste the blood in their mouths as I bash them round the head with seven volumes of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.)

What does any of this have to do with cycling? Particularly for hypocrite writers riding around with a nice smartphone in their pocket on a contract deal...

The false seduction of technology is that its complexity leads to simplicity. That ‘interfacing’ locks our lives into a more complete whole with those around us. But that interaction, that prodding and mailing and linking, lacks the very ‘qualia’, the present sensations, which make life so enriching.

In opposition to this, the bicycle is a retrograde sensation machine.

It is a rogue trooper, an old-school technological advance that retreats towards nature. I can think of few items that transport you so immediately into the realm of smell, touch, sound, sight, taste, temperature, kinesthesia, balance and chemoreception (detecting salt and carbon dioxide in our blood as we exercise), engaging with the resonant particles of life like a whisk in a bowl of raspberry juice.

And this matters; this really matters. So much more than how we connect in the prodding of non-existent keyboards on shiny screens.

There is a famous interview with the English playwright Dennis Potter at the end of his life. He is speaking at a time when he only has weeks left to live and he sips at a glass of champagne and a flask of morphine as he pauses. But this lack of life isn’t his preoccupation: “The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene...

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Below my window...for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom” ... last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it...

The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous.”

And sometimes when I am riding I understand this, this present state, this conjuring of ‘nowness’ through lived sensation, an aliveness to the natural world apparently at odds with an earnest preoccupation for a dirty heart-shaped hole in the city tarmac.

I always used to ride around on bikes with flat handlebars but, having felt punished by crosswinds and heavy loads, I took to drop handlebars which entailed more road examination - the cyclist’s equivalent of navel gazing. It was in this way that I began to notice the subtle variations in road surface, the melted chewing gum, the worn road divisions, the kerb blips and paving wrinkles. Why should anyone take pleasure in this? I understand now that it is the act of sensation that cycling engenders, the sensory attunement to the environment that matters, as much as the sensation itself.

“ T he bicycle is a retrograde sensation machine” My newborn son has an instantaneous sensitivity and it’s not just the leaves and the flowers in the garden he’s sold on, it’s the plastic bags, the high viz on the coat rack, the crisp packet scuttling on the table. The world is bleating and crackling and there is no Linnaean division for him into animal, mineral and vegetable, pretty, ugly or banal... Perhaps it is too much to ask of cycling that it can return us to this infantile delight and yet I too have had the dribbling gah-gahs on a bike. Mainly going downhill snorting bits of banana out of my nose.

I overheard a conversation in a posh bike shop recently where the vendor was explaining how he had become a connoisseur of tarmac. How the perfect alpine descents of France and Switzerland gave him whizzy highs and all other roads seemed tawdry in comparison. I can see his point; there is no smoother way to travel than on perfect pitch with skinny tyres, and yet there is something about a crappy road that jolts us awake, that rattles us into our senses. I am not the kind of fool that would enjoy cycling on endless corrugation to Timbuktu but I am wise enough to know that the least tended path is often the most interesting and that the super-smooth highway too often parallels the smart phone’s sheen, apparently offering the fastest service as it aggregates us to the largest provider, the motorway ‘service centre’ and its generic life-styling.

I have a friend who likes to cherish broken things. He covers dilapidated objects in old wallpaper. He once went round splashing up paste and squares of flowery prints over the pumps of an aban-

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doned petrol station. Should we cherish fuel stops? Probably not.

And yet I can understand his need to celebrate the forgotten, the misplaced, the disregarded, as we accelerate into shiny newness with our parcel-packed delights.

And here amidst the chaotic bumble of the inner city roads, the happy multicultural discord, beside the ‘Car Wash Here – cheap price’, amongst the tarmac excavations, is my heart-shaped graze.

Part of me, the good citizen, recognises I should email the local Council’s pothole hotline, get the men in high viz to turn up with their skips of pitch and their lead weight thumpers. The other half wants to cherish these scudded scars, these injuries in the skin.

My old Raleigh Explorer bike has a red gloss coat and if you look closely you can see bits of sparkle in the teenage finish like party girl lipstick with added glitter. Here and there the paint has worn through, showing the rust of the frame underneath where the lock has held it to a thousand railings. I could get a spray job and yet I appreciate these mementos of the journey, the ups and downs, the bumps and scrapes.

Before the smartphone there was the brick phone. Its plastic came off like crumbs and in my ‘downtime’ all that was left to do was prod at the case and observe its disintegration down to the metal shell. This was never going to be as exciting as watching a YouTube video and yet it offered a certain kind of roughshod satisfaction, a reminder of the broken edges of things.

Some day, probably in the early hours when no one can see what a crazy-ass pretentious fool I am, I will lean my bike against the kerb and fill that heart-shaped scar in the tarmac with a pot of red, really very red, paint. It will be pointless but will offer endless payback with secret, delicious, livid sensation as I ride around and, so often, through it. www.jetmcdonald.com

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My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles.

They both move people forward without wasting anything.

PETER GOLKIN 68