Cycling in the South Bay

Yesterday I had a rare blogging lapse and spent the day considering whether I was going to keep forging ahead with daily writing. It took a lot of reflection, by which I mean lying in bed, to realize that of course I’m going to continue.

All that bed-lying came on the heels of two happy rides. The first was two days ago. I started out at the bottom of the mountain, which I’ve still yet to ascend completely, and made it about an hour and twenty minutes up until the snow got too deep. Much had fallen since my last time I’d ridden up that high, but much was also melting, which meant boggy, sloggy, not-very-rideable conditions.

On the descent I practically had my ankles jarred up into my shoulders. The downhill is rough. Giant cracks cross the road and the only shock absorbers I had besides my 35mm Panaracer touring tires were my elbows, knees, neck, and spine. It took a solid twenty minutes to get to the bottom, and my hands were so cramped up from the constant clenching that I had to stop at one point to relax them.

About an hour up there is a big green house. It’s four whole miles up this dirt mountain road, and five+ miles in total from the highway. There is no other house once you hit the dirt. Those folks are isolated. The house is powered by a massive diesel generator. They have a gas tank on stilts that holds hundreds of gallons of fuel. I supposed they like being alone; we all do after a fashion.

But this kind of solitude seems fake. The generator is incredibly loud and smelly, belching as it does diesel exhaust. The idea of being alone in a mountain home far from humanity doesn’t work so well when you sound like four or five humanities with your smoking, choking generator.

Half a mile further up is a small house on stilts. It runs on propane, I guess. The curtains, which are big cloth tarps, have always been drawn the two times I’ve been up, and like the other house there has been no human activity ever visible. I figure that these people do what everyone else does. They watch TV or sit in front of their phone.

Is that the whole point of solitude? To watch TV? Can’t you do that in, say, Los Angeles?

There’s another problem with solitude, as I’ve learned and re-learned countless times in my life. And it’s this: If things aren’t quiet in your head, it doesn’t matter where you live. You’re never going to have peace of mind simply by changing location. Now it’s true that environment helps to quell the mental racket, and in a lot of cases it’s the environment that is the source of the racket. So you can make a lot of progress towards reaching solitude by leaving that type of racket behind.

But true solitude, where you are able to listen to nothing and hear only what is on the wind or in the trees or within the bounds of the streams, that kind of quiet requires a mental aloneness that only comes with a lot of practice and with the careful jettisoning of society’s cowbells, work whistles, ringtones, and the barking dogs who populate the infinity of the Internet.

Though I’ve never yogaed or meditated, I doubt that either of those things can bring you long-term solitude if you’re still surrounded by the normal racket of things once the session ends. Those folks stuck up high on the mountainside may have achieved a kind of silence–they sure can’t hear the sound of the trash truck–but I doubt they’ve achieved solitude, since both houses have pretty sizeable satellite dishes stuck to the siding.

For a while at least I’m holed up at the paved end of this mountain road. It’s pretty quiet up here even though I have neighbors who I’ve yet to actually see. The sun rose a few minutes ago, noiselessly. The morning wind blew. There was a little racket in my head but now it’s all here, on the screen, and the important space is quiet once again.

END

I had started off on a dirt road that turned into deep sand and then morphed into rocks and then big rocks and then broken pavement and then a jagged asphalt lip and then a proper road that led back to the highway.

All in all a bust, as I’d been looking for a dirt route that would follow the river all the way to my destination, four or five miles hence.

After a half-mile on the highway I spied a dirt road down below that looked like it might parallel the river, so I took a USFS trail and almost went over the bars going down a slope that Manslaughter would have taken at 30. The dirt road was good until it wasn’t, becoming sand then mud then dead-end into the river. I bushwhacked for a while until I got tired of hike-a-bike, as the foliage kept getting denser and the nonexistent trail kept not appearing.

I walked back to another dirt trail and to the highway, rode for another mile, and had another stab at it. Again, I found a nice dirt USFS road that became a plunging fall but I didn’t even try to ride it. More walking. One thing about not being in a hurry and about being old (they’re related), and riding with sneakers is that I don’t really mind getting off and walking. It’s the cyclist’s version of multi-modal transportation.

Eventually I wound up in someone’s backyard, which was butt up against an abandoned mill filled with arsenic, mercury, and lead tailings. “KEEP OUT: CANCER AND BIRTH DEFECTS” it said. I did. No pregnancy of mine was going to be endangered by mill tailings.

I rode on the road a bit then skipped off into an abandoned golf course which took me through more sand, more mud, more walking, more pushing, and finally to the river, where a redneck bridge spanned a tiny, gushing, beautiful stream. There were some bright red stockings and underwear and a bra hanging on a bush. Someone had reached that moment where she had to tear everything off asap and didn’t care where it landed.

It didn’t look like there was going to be a Northwest Passage. I had to climb through some brush to get back on the highway, went another minute or two, found another trail, and rode it til it petered out. It was bumpy and jarring. My old bones didn’t exactly love the rattling.

On the way home I stuck to the highway and passed a Catholic church outside town. The spire was rusted but they had a marquis that said, “Live Your Faith.”

What is your faith? Catholicism? Protestantism? Islam? Sikh? Buddhism? Science? Money? Racism? Cars? Bikes?

That sign reminded me that everyone has a faith but few people live the faith they espouse. Most people’s faith is money but they try to live it according to some other faith like religion or morality. But morality and religion cannot be reconciled to the faith of money, so such people end up being hypocrites and miserable.

If you believe in money, live it. Proclaim that money is your solution, your grail, the standard by which you judge yourself and others. Let money be your guide and it will guide you. You will be a lot happier than claiming to care for the poor and the afterlife when, in the privacy of your own home, you are cutting every corner on your taxes, pinching every penny, scheming how to make more, or doing everything you can to show others that you are MAKING IT.

Same for the other faiths, whatever they may be. That church marquis nailed it. Live your faith.

My faith? Bicycle. I believe that my bike is my solution and riding it is my grail. It’s how I judge myself. Did I ride today? Then I lived my faith. Did I use my bike to improve the world today? Then I lived my faith. Etc.

I had to struggle a bit to get home; it’s a 1.2-mile climb up a bitterly steep hill. I was sweaty and tired because, well, I’m not that strong. But I didn’t have any trouble, really, getting up the hill. My faith, you see, was with me all the way.

END

I was walking along the Strand and saw a guy with a bike digging cans out of the trash. The path was crowded with people, beautiful people, not beautiful people, vigorous people, slothful people, made-up people, ponytail people, all of them there to see and be seen. But no one seemed to see this guy, Jesse, as he opened the garbage and dug around in it with his hands.

“Hey, man,” I said.

He looked at me for a split second, the streetwise analysis, friend or foe? “Good morning,” he said. A lot of the time people simply want to be acknowledged, that they exist. I passed him and continued to to the pier.

On my way back, much farther down, I saw him again and stopped. We had already exchanged that initial greeting, so there was no hesitation on his part when I tried to strike up a conversation.

He lived in Long Beach, took the bus to Redondo four times a week, and then rode his bike along the Strand collecting recyclable trash. “It’s only a few dollars but it helps,” he said. “I’m just trying to make a living. I don’t want to go back to prison.”

“When did you get out?”

“A year ago.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m at a sober living house in Long Beach. I got a place to stay and food but I need to make money. Can’t get no work because of my record.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“Construction.”

“How long were you in prison?”

“Twelve years. Started out with nine years and nine months but I got more added on inside. You can’t go to prison and not get time added on, that’s how they set it up.”

“What did you go to prison for?”

“It was at night in front of my house, I had had an argument with some guys that morning and they jumped me with baseball bats and these big pieces of rebar, there was three of them. They was beating me but I got out my knife and then they all ran away except the one guy.”

“What happened to him?”

“You know I was crazy mad, crazy with pain, they had broke my shoulder and my head was covered with blood and I was crazy mad, man, I didn’t even know what I was doing. They wanted to give me 29 years to life but it wasn’t my fault, those dudes attacked me but what was I supposed to do? If I hadn’t done something they would have killed me, it was me or them.”

“So what happened?”

“They got it down to manslaughter, nine years and nine months. Then I had trouble inside, man, you know the politics.”

“What politics?”

“There is the Mexicans and the blacks and the whites and when the Mexicans is beating up a black dude you gotta join in or they kill you, right there. Or if the blacks are beating up a Mexican the blacks gotta join in or they turn on you, man, right there, why aren’t you helping? So I was in a lot of prison gang fights and got more years. I didn’t want none of that I just wanted to get out but the politics is what they are, if you are a Mexican you are a Mexican.”

“So how did you ever get out?”

“For the first couple of years it was hard ’cause I was always out in the yard. That’s where everything goes down, you can’t go out in the yard without the politics. That is where they buy and sell the drugs, the alcohol, that’s where they fight, everything goes down in the yard. And the COs they like the violence, man, they love the fights.”

“Who is that?”

“The guards, man. They let a fight go for a long time before they break it up, then they stick you with more years. And they bet on the fights, man, they don’t care if you get beat to death, in High Desert, they were really bad. I was in five prisons during my career. High Desert was the worst.”

“So how did you get out?” I asked again.

“I started going to classes and working in the prison. In the beginning I didn’t like the rules you know, I was a grown man coming from the streets, don’t nobody tell me what to do, why I gotta follow some rules? But in prison, man, you learn the hard way or the easy way, but you learn or you stay there the rest of your life. So I took all the classes I could and every job I could get, so when they was like, ‘Hey, man, we going to the yard, come on,’ I could be like, ‘No, man, I can’t go, I gotta go to class’ or ‘I gotta go to work.’ Anything keep me out of that yard, man, anything. Only thing I want now is I don’t want to go back.”

I gave him ten bucks and couple of ones that I had in my pocket. It was more money than he was going to make for his entire day of work. “If you ever get arrested or in trouble, call me. I don’t look like it, but I’m a lawyer. I won’t charge you anything.”

“Really?”

“Really. What’s your number?” He told me and I texted him my info.

I don’t know if it was the twelve bucks or the knowledge that if the worst came to pass, at least there was someone he could call, but he gave me a warm handshake and a warmer smile.

Next time you see someone digging in the trash, take a second, if you dare. Whoever they are, they are a real person, worthy to be seen, acknowledged, for the humans that they are.

END

The hardest thing about returning to LA has been trying to figure out where to ride my bike. The biggest temptation is to fall back into the group ride, of course. But that’s a cul-de-sac. After riding around the country for a few months, the idea of going back to sporty riding sounds pretty dull.

Plus, I’m not mad anymore.

One idea that has stayed with me is the idea of homelessness, and I thought about that as a topic. What is homelessness? Who are the homeless? Does homelessness matter? Why should I care about it?

So I googled a bit and learned that the word itself is fraught. There are numerous other ways to talk about homelessness than by using the word “homeless,” simply because the word itself expresses little, but prejudices much. One of the best things I read was the comment that the description of homelessness should be limited to scenarios where it is relevant. And the more I thought about that, the more I wondered when, at least in my travels, it ever was?

Some people I met lived on the streets, some in shelters, some in cars. Others appeared to simply be moving from one place to other. What relevance was the state of the physical place they spent the night, or the day? More to the point, in my interactions with people I met, what difference did it make where they lived except that, when they appeared to have no fixed abode, it made it easier to approach them and talk?

In the same vein, with a few exceptions, the people I met never talked about where they were living. It wasn’t a point of discussion except to the extent that I asked them about it. This drove home something more common and general about many of the people that I met: They were poor. Some had more housing security, some had less, all were a few dollars away from having nothing.

I’m reading an amazing book right now called “The Invention of Capitalism” by Michael Perelman. In the first few short chapters he makes the compelling point that in order for capitalism to work you have to have poor people. A lot of poor people. And in fact, no capitalist society has ever existed that hasn’t deliberately created them in huge numbers. In the same way that Marxist socialist countries could never demonstrate the workers’ paradise, no capitalist country has ever been able to exist without poor, subsistence-level strata that make the whole thing work.

It drives home a central point, which is that, left to their own devices, no one wants to work for someone else if they can avoid it, and in the sense of being a wage-slave, no one really wants to work at all. It is only the idea of having others work for you, and profiting from their labor, that can really fire people up.

Thinking about the people I met on my bike, I realize that despite the heterogeneity of their living conditions, all were poor and sitting at one end of the security v. freedom spectrum: The more security, the less freedom. The more freedom, the less security.

Humans and all animals want to be free. They want to search for or raise their own food, secure their own shelter, and go about their business without having to punch a clock, wear a uniform, pay a tax, or do what someone else tells them to do.

Many years ago I was in France, visiting with the family of my wife’s friend. The father, Jean, was explaining to me why he had refused to take a parcel of land from his father-in-law when offered it, and instead had bought land and built a home of his own.

“You see this ground?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“I want to piss here, I piss here. I want to piss there, I piss there. Nobody tell me where to piss.”

Understanding that homelessness has little to do with people unless you’re talking about where they live clarifies a lot for me. One, I don’t have to use the word any more. Two, interactions with people on my bike are nothing more than a way to talk, interact, see if people are in need, and if so whether there’s anything I can do to alleviate it, even if it’s only a few bucks. It’s a way to educate myself and to appreciate the communion of human fellowship.

I’ve run across so many amazing and insightful people simply by pedaling around and taking a minute to chat. Think I’ll keep it up. Beats the group ride, at least for now.

END