Take biking to work, for instance. You may know where I am coming from and where I am going to and not even know the route I take. Most mornings I grab my helmet, carry my bicycle down the stairs, and turn south onto Eustis St. I ride my bike down to Como Avenue and turn right. I cut through the Park-n-Ride lot, though, to avoid the intersection light. After I pass under the MN-280 bridge I peer at the open field to my right. You may have noticed this field. You may have also noticed that, even in the last year, it wasn't always a field. It used to be a rough-cut concrete foundation of some abandoned warehouse building. A retaining wall buttressing the highway showed scribbled spray paint graffiti. Eventually, I saw construction machines smash the concrete and haul it way. They churned up dirt. I fully expected another warehouse building to be erected on the lot. Instead, they planted grasses and let the grass grow long.
But lest this field go to nefarious uses, they put up wide concrete slabs facing the street, as if to protect the open field from a car bomb, as if to say, "This delicate piece of urban nature is sancrosact. Do not park here; do not play ball here, do not, above all, vandalize this field's crumbling beauty with your spray paint. This field shall stand here, doing nothing, being nothing but a field."
Finally, in the past couple of days, I noticed a shade tent erected in one corner of the field and one of the slabs pulled away. Old gentlemen guided cars in, row by row. A city bus pulled up to the tent and admitted free-ride passengers headed to the state fair. Such is the tale of Minnesota's facility and utility.
I ride past this field, and since Como Avenue is cut up for construction. I turn right on 33rd Avenue. This is barely a street, public only by means of its appearance on a map. It rises up toward Hennepin Avenue through factory and warehouse buildings. I guide my bike slowly past semis and railroad track. Then I turn left on Talmage Avenue on a road so pitted I coast for a half a block, my 10-speed tires so narrow that acceleration, I fear, could send the bike out from under me. On Talmage was another open dirt lot. But they churned up dirt, piled it high. Now, they use a crane to place giant concrete slabs in place, side by side, row by row, to form a building like a stone house of cards.
I ride Talmage to a student housing co-op. I ride through the co-op and reconnect to Talmage. I turn left on 22nd Avenue, cross Como Avenue, and turn right on Fairmount St. When Fairmount veers right, I jump a sidewalk, which takes me onto Rollins Avenue. Then I turn left onto 15th Avenue, on to my office, the route of which you may know.
Along my route, I see a constant wood-carved statue, seemingly twice my height, of a priestess cradling a rabbit. I see glass broken and glass cleaned away. This is the common experience of bicyclers, an experience of observed growth, development, and patterns. We see buildings rise and crumble, streets pit, pot, dismantle, and knit back together (And once they're knit, we take them). We see roads and sidewalks, backyards and frontyards. We see the same bus commuters, day after day, at the same stops. We witness the slow personal vision of sights that cannot be witnessed in the speed or enclosure of a car. Bicycling, we are next to everything we pass. We hold a silent comradery of one cavaet: a fear of being tread upon, of someone else cutting off our path. Road construction impedes us and we make new routes, like water leaking from its source to its southerly destination. Cars and pedestrians interrupt our pace, make us swerve and slow. And us bicyclers, congizant of this fear, observe each others silent path, consider our speed with the faster fellow behind us. Our communication to each other is nothing more than mutual getting out of the way.
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