It was a cold and windy day, but the sun was out and there was no risk of rain, so I finally got to take the bike out for a little spin. It was a short one, just over and down the hill to lunch and the coffee shop so I could get some work done and also maybe, just maybe see some real live adult people. I’ve been snowed under by the grind of teaching every day, and it felt great to get out of my house and my office and wake back up to the city. Continue reading
Empty Lot at Greene & Fayette
Last week’s ride found me back on the bike part of my commute, and oh boy was that nice. I zipped over and over and over and down and over and down and up and over and up and down and over to the bike racks nearest the shuttle stop. I was plenty early, as is my usual, so I had about 15 minutes to walk around the neighborhood. This is bustling downtown, plenty of workaday wallets heading to offices to do that paper pushing many of us do since we became bureaucracies back in the day. But still, in downtown Baltimore, there are vacant lots like this one. No Trespassing, the sign reads, and I wondered about the privateness of this property and the part where it seems so normal to us to heed the demands not to use land that isn’t being used. I’m sure the fear is people using this as a place to set up shop, or to live here, to sleep, to tent, something like that. The part where some people have nowhere to sleep, though, it’s intimately related to the part where others have private property that is protected like this. And then my shuttle came, I spent the day at work, and then I was back on the bike to home. Days are getting longer, people.
That Taste of Salt in My Mouth All Over Baltimore
I haven’t been riding my bike much lately, chosing the bus and a reliable ride home–thanks, Barrows sisters!–to avoid ice and sub-freezing temps. Sure, I could ride my bike, but I could also flex my multimodal muscles for greater ease. But then it’s Monday, I’m just heading to Mount Vernon, and oh boy, I miss my bike. So I took it, breaking my rule against riding in the rain, and felt at home again. Except for the new taste of salt that kicks up in my mouth when I ride in the city in the winter. I forgot about all about it, but there it was, the visceral reminder that the stuff they spread on the roads is stuff, and it has to go somewhere; it doesn’t just evaporate with the ice. A little might end up on my tongue, but much more ends up in the bay, and it’s not benign. And then I rode home, tucked the bike away, and felt grateful for choices.
Desks Inside a Giant Pressure Cooker at Gay & Lanvale
Yesterday’s ride took me down the hill, around the harbor, and back up through Federal Hill for a cheap haircut and a morning with my favorite fresh baby and her mom. It was a windy ride there and back, gusts that blew me of my course and went straight through my windproof gloves. I had the wind at my back when I was riding down the hill, a fact I realised only on my way back up. I didn’t head back out again until the evening, when I layered up and strapped on all the lights to zip over to the Humanim building on the east side. I’ve passed that building by accident a bunch of times and always wondered why a castle rises over the blighted blocks of this neighborhood. Turns out it’s because Humanim decided to find the 25 million bucks to renovate it and turn out into a workforce development and community organizing force for the area. This night it was for a meeting of Baltimore Corps, and I was there to task about why local history matters. The Humanim rep said it mattered because it matters. I said it mattered because politics and justice and how are for here and how we could be elsewhere and all sorts of reasons. And then I was done and left to roam the building. I headed straight to the second floor to see how they’d repurposed the giant pressure cooker of this old brewery–it’s another workstation, a magical one. Sometimes history matters because look at this place. And then I got back on my bike for a windy ride home, happy to be back in action after a long winter’s nap.
Intersection at 25th & Guilford
2014 was a great year for bicycling. I rode in new places, got a new commute, and did a whole lot of exploring. I blogged less this year than the last few, but that’s because I’ve been writing more in other places, writing gigs I’ve picked up only because I’ve blogged regularly for the past five or six years. Turns out writing gets easier by writing more and regularly. Same goes for biking–it became my primary form of transportation back in 2008, and I am just so terrifically grateful that the bike and I found each other, and that now it is just common sense that if we’re going there, we’re going by bike. What a gift, to see the world from two wheels like that. Continue reading
Cars, Trees, and People at President & Fayette
Thursday’s bike ride took me down the hill and up the other side to visit A. and her sweet baby girl for the afternoon. It was such a nice ride on a cool, windless day–and that second part makes a big difference. I was mostly just happy to stretch my legs on a ride that wasn’t taking me to work. And then we had a ridiculously nice day, the kind you can only have when one of your companions reliably giggles and coos every time you fake-sneeze or stick your tongue out at her. For all the ugly in the world, it was good to remember that there’s this other kind of divine goodness, the still-fresh baby; she’s also part of this world. Continue reading
Police Helicopter in the Sky at St. Paul and Mount Royal
Wednesday’s ride was all commute, happily since Monday’s rain-out meant a super crowded bus ride home. It was so crowded, in that way that reminds you how relative that whole “no touching” dictum is. I mean, if the kinds of physical contact happening on that Monday bus ride were to happen at the workplace, somebody’d be out of a job. Wednesday’s ride home was a different kind of slow slog, this one taking place right after I heard that Eric Garner’s killer was not indicted. That means the grand jury didn’t think there was enough evidence for any reasonable person to even possibly find the killer guilty of any kind of crime. It sucked the air right out of me, but I had the privilege for that to be a passing feeling, and I returned to breath, shallow for a bit, but there. Continue reading
Boarded Buildings in Old Chinatown at Park & Mulberry
Sunday’s ride took me down the hill to meet N. for some work. We’re co-teaching a class, which I’ve never done before and now want to do all and every time, and we’ve got our students putting together short pieces for the radio. The students are doing all the work–the research, the writing, the interviewing, the recording–and on Sunday our job was to go to the places they’ll be talking about to gather some ambient noise to add to their pieces. I locked my bike up in Mount Vernon and we gathered the recording equipment and headed out on foot. Continue reading
Row House at Presstman & N. Carey
This is a post about what I saw when I rode my bike around last Saturday morning. I got up early to ride over to Carver Vo-Tech High to judge some high school debate with BUDL. I rode past the Waverly farmer’s market, already bustling with shoppers at 7:30am. I watched cars treat red lights like they were bad suggestions, because I guess on a Saturday morning nobody’s watching. I passed the crowds outside the methadone clinic on Maryland Avenue, because addiction doesn’t take weekends off. I pedaled past the riders waiting early to be first on the Bolt bus, and then through the quiet streets of Mount Vernon. I took a right past Meyerhoff Hall, where the symphony plays, and then west of MLK, on Dolphin. I stopped to check my maps before taking my right on McCulloh, left on Presstman, watching as the old glory of Druid and Marble Hill, of Pennsylvania Avenue, gave way to the steady decay of a neighborhood laid waste by political, economic, and civic abandonment. No, it’s not really abandonment. That makes it sound like folks just left, but the policies of urban renewal purposely slated neighborhoods like this one for destruction, and this bike ride was a reminder that those policies continue to reverberate. And then I was at the high school, locking up my bike, judging a couple rounds of smart high schoolers making strong cases that we should rebuild our coral reefs if we want life on earth to continue. I was totally convinced we should do that, though neither affirmative team running that case won the round they were in. Debate, man–it’s not just about the best idea, and that’s pretty scary when that rule translates into real life. The bike ride home was a reverse tour, and I stopped at the corner of Presstman and N. Carey to snap this picture of a row house standing alone. I’m not sure where it’s neighbors went, or where the people who used to live here went. But this house is still here, and people are still here, and the settled assumptions that white people and capital shall not go west of MLK continues to make just this kind of difference. This is what I saw on my bike ride last Saturday. And then, like everybody else, I was sitting, waiting to hear whether or not Darren Wilson was going to be indicted. I watched as the state set up its police in advance of the announcement, because they know this shit is terrible, and they know it is only the use of force that can force people to keep eating this shit. And the announcement came down, and the resistance that is always there, steady, made itself visible, and the few narratives of this single event dominated the talk cycle, and the rest of us waited for it all to quiet down a little so we could get back to shopping and eating and taking pictures of our cats, and I wanted all of us to have to take some history classes, because how do we end up in a world where Darren Wilson can tell us Michael Brown “looked like a demon” and thus required him to shoot to kill, and how does this world keep spinning on just like this? It’s a long story, and I am reminded of that on every single bicycle ride through Baltimore City, because look at this place. No, really look at it.
Column of Steam at Pratt & Constellation
Thursday’s ride took me down the hill and around the Inner Harbor and up and over through Federal Hill for a day with A. and her sweet baby girl. The wind was light, which meant an almost balmy day, and it put me in such a good mood. I followed the newly-striped bike lane down Guilford down to South Street. It’s all scraggly, running right alongside parked cars, jogging right and left as it passes through one intersection after another. It’s striped all the way to the Inner harbor, big NO PARKING signs lining the street across Lombard. On this day, the bike lane was filled with limousines transferring rich people to the Renaissance hotel, and I was like, seriously? Continue reading
What I Saw Riding My Bike Around Today 