On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 2/1/2012
Tossed Salad, with a Side of Irony
Last month, in the spirit of the holiday season, I wrote a feel-good piece about all the nice interactions I have with folks while I’m out on bike rides. Further, I resolved to pay more attention to those positive moments and spend less time (and emotional bandwidth) fuming about the occasional unpleasant encounters.
I specifically declined to call that a New Year’s resolution. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because they almost always end up broken before the month of January is out. This will prove to be a case in point, as I now want to focus on one of those bikes-vs-cars incidents which befell me on a ride recently. I am happy to say this was not one of those scary or ugly incidents with a crazed, out-of-control loony. Yes, it was a confrontation of sorts, but it was at least civil and non-violent…and it hasn’t altered my general resolve to look on the bright side when weighing the good and the bad in my bike life. But I want to tell this story anyway, primarily because it has a funny side to it. I’m a little exasperated by what happened, and I guess I could choose to be upset about it--I was at the time, for a few minutes--but in the end, I’m mostly amused by it.
If you’ve cycled for any length of time at all, you will have had a similar experience to this. It is such a banal, commonplace event that any veteran rider will begin to yawn and have his eyes glaze over as the story unfolds. Been there, done that…more times than any non-cyclist could possibly imagine. But I promise: there is what seems to me to be a humorous kicker at the end of the story, so bear with me as I cover what looks like old territory once again…
This happened on Carmody Road, a lightly traveled rural lane that lies half in Sonoma County and half in Marin County, to the south. It’s a true back road: no centerline striping, in fact, no striping at all…just an old ribbon of blacktop with typically crappy pavement on the Sonoma County end and slightly better paving over the line in Marin. There is a medium-steep climb near the north end and then a long descent and roll-out into Marin as the road heads south. Once over the summit, the road is almost ruler straight for two miles. It descends rather steeply--up to 10%--for the first third of a mile, then does another fast third at about 5%, and finally rolls out as a long false-flat downhill for the balance of this straight section. What that means, in the context of this story, is that you have unobstructed sight lines from the top of the hill for the full two-mile section.
I was heading north to south on a bright, crisp winter day. I had crested the little summit and was launched into the fast, straight descent, probably doing 35-mph. I was through the steep part, into the 5% section, when I saw a large, rough section of patching ahead along the right side of the road…six feet wide and 30 feet long. The usual Sonoma County approach to road work. Seeing as how there were no cars ahead as far as I could see, I elected to ride around this lumpy section by shading over onto the left side of the road. (Remember: no center stripes, dashed or solid.) I took a look in my mirror and saw one car behind me, but it was at least a quarter of a mile back, maybe more, so not a problem. I wasn’t going to get in its way.
Just in case you’re not clear on the California Vehicle Code on this point, let me review it. Section 21200 says that a cyclist must ride "as far to the right as is practicable" when traveling at less than the prevailing speed of traffic on that road at that time. That means that if I’m the only traffic on the road at that time, my speed IS the prevailing speed and I don’t have to ride as far to the right as is practicable. I could ride anywhere on the road I wanted. I suppose we could debate whether one car, a substantial distance behind, could alter that equation. But I was going to get my patch-avoidance swerve done long before he approached me, so I didn’t see that as an issue. In any event, even if that car were closer, I would still have the right to take the lane to avoid a road hazard. Had the car been closer, however, I would not have done my swerve. I could have and would have ridden through the bad pavement. Unless the road hazard is bad enough that it might make me crash or flat--and this wasn’t that bad--I would rather bounce through the lumpy section and give the car the lane. But with the car so far back…
So I carved a long, lazy arc over onto the left side of the road, dodged around the rough patch, and then got back over near the right shoulder. A few minutes later, well on down the false-flat section, the car finally pulls up next to me. I assume he’s going to pass, but no, he holds station with me, zips down his right-side window, and starts talking at me. I won’t say yelling, because, really, he just had his voice raised a little. I was pretty sure he was hassling me, but he wasn’t going bonkers about it. I called back: "Hey, too much wind noise…I can’t hear you! Please pull on through." Nope. He wants to talk. Stays right there next to me, now at about 20-mph, still yapping. So, fearing he might start to go ballistic, I stop and put a foot down, hoping he’ll grow tired of his game and drive on. Nope again. He stops too.
He’s a 30-something guy in a VW Passat. Nice, normal-looking guy…no sense of the raving maniac here.
So I say, "Okay, what is it you want to tell me?" He begins: "I don’t want to hit you…" And I say, "Well, that’s good to know. I appreciate that you don’t WANT to hit me." He chooses to ignore my sarcasm and continues: "But you were all over the road back there!"
Now…pause…my little loop around that patch of crappy pavement was such a non-event in my world and at that point close to four or five minutes in the past, that I had completely forgotten about it already…erased it from my front brain. So when he busted me for it, I confess I was momentarily nonplussed. Stupefied. I said: "I did what?" And then he gave me his lecture on riding responsibly, blah, blah, blah. I was still so stumped on the point of having ridden "all over the road" that I let him say his piece and then replied: "Hey, if I really inconvenienced you back there, I do apologize." And with that, he drove off, feeling, I’m sure, as if he had done his good deed for the day: straightening out this clueless dweeb about the rules of the road.
I stood there, over my bike, watching him cruise off into the distance, and with the conversation now over and done with, and with my brain finally up to speed again, a couple of things occurred to me…things I wish had occurred to me at the time. (Isn’t it always that way? We think of our best comeback lines after the opportunity to put them in play is long gone.) The first thing I thought of was my swerve around the bad paving. Oh…that! I rewound the tape of the incident in my memory and considered it. I knew I was within my rights to have done what I did, but I’m not sure I would have had much success explaining it to this guy, had I recalled it while he was lecturing me. Someone who has taken on that hectoring, lecturing role rarely has an open mind for hearing the other guy’s side of the issue. But at least I understood what he was upset about.
But here’s the part that seems so funny to me. After he drove off, I suddenly saw, in my proverbial mind’s eye, as clear as a film clip, what I had been seeing but failing to register as he sat there scolding me about my bad riding behavior. Our self-appointed arbiter of proper vehicle operation was sitting there with a large bowl of mixed salad in his lap, cradled between his thighs, half under the steering wheel. It was a jumbo-sized styrofoam take-out tub, about nine inches on a side, filled to brimming with assorted lettuce, beets, beans, cucumbers, croutons, tomatoes, etc, all, I suppose, lathered up with his dressing of choice. And while he was yapping at me, he was actually driving home his talking points by jabbing his plastic fork in my direction!
Think about that: while he is rolling along the road behind me, he is looking down at his lap, spearing forkfuls of salad and conveying them around the steering wheel and up to his pie hole, presumably devoting some measure of his attention to getting the juicy, slippery bites just right and not dripping dressing on his Dockers. Obviously, he had a little attention left over to get cranked about my behavior, but how much attention did he have available for actually driving his car? I know a lot of people eat while they drive. We see their fast food containers all over the shoulders of the road. (We sometimes have to ride through them while riding "as far to the right as is practicable.") I do it myself sometimes--eat and drive--even though I know it’s not all that smart to be doing so. But eating a cookie or an apple is one thing, a tossed salad quite another. I can’t offhand think of another food item that would be so complicated and distracting to be dealing with while driving than a tossed salad wedged between one’s thighs, under the steering wheel. I should think the level of impairment would be considerably more severe than that for cell phone use or texting.
Had my wits served me a little better at the moment, I might have said something to the effect of: "Listen pal, you’ve got a lot of gall, chastising me for how I’m operating my vehicle here, while you’re in the midst of your lunch break there." Had I done so, would he have had the honesty to see the hypocrisy? To realize it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black? I don’t know. He looked like a reasonably intelligent fellow. Probably a decent guy. But he was very much up on his high horse, or his high Passat, and I’m not sure he could have managed to make the transition from his seat of self-righteous superiority to some humble acceptance of his own culpability.
So that’s about all there is to it. I draw no special moral from the story except for the obvious one about people in glass houses throwing stones. I won’t generalize from the particular: won’t proceed from this one anecdote to any broader conclusions about the rightness or wrongness of bikes and cars. As I noted last month, most of our bike-car interactions out there are at worst neutral and sometimes even pleasant. Yes, there are some bonehead motorists, but so too are there a fair share of bonehead bikers. I can personally confess to having been both of those at one time or another. So no sweeping, satisfying conclusion is in store here, the whole tale wrapped up in a pretty ribbon of eloquence. No…I just wanted to tell the story. Since witty repartee abandoned me when I needed it most and I wasn’t able to get in the last word with my forked-up driver friend, I’m doing the next best thing: getting in the last word here.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net