On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 1/1/2009
Turning Over a New Year
I was puttering around out along my back property line recently when I noticed my water meter hiding in the tall weeds. I hadn't messed with my meter in quite some time, so I decided to pry up the concrete lid and see if all was well. All was not well. I don't mean we weren't getting our water or that we had a leak. In all those important ways, things were fine. But the box was filled to the brim with freshly turned topsoil. Busy, burrowing gophers had churned things up to the point that nothing could be seen except a solid mass of dirt.
So I got a trowel and dug it all out and polished up the glass over the little meter. I did this so the meter reader won't have to do it the next time he comes around.
I suspect many people would feel that it's the meter reader's job to deal with things like that. It's all part of what he's being paid to do, right? Not quite. Not in our neighborhood. We're part of a 50-home mutual water company. Mutual water companies are owned jointly by all of the homeowners, and the system is administered and maintained cooperatively by those same homeowners. No one gets paid to manage the system, and if something needs to be done, we do it ourselves.
The meters are read - twice a year - by one of those homeowners. Mark is a retired lawyer who used to work for the EPA. It may seem strange to have a retired attorney crawling around in the tall weeds, checking people's meters, but it's no stranger than a commercial artist being the President of the water company. That would be me. At least I used to be the President, for several years. Someone else is now. We take turns with these tasks.
Sitting there with my trowel, rooting the dirt out of the meter box, my mind got to rooting around with one of my favorite subjects: volunteerism. Or, more to the point, the notion that we all live in a sort of metaphorical mutual water company; that we are all in this together, and that if something needs to be done, we had better figure out how to do it ourselves.
Okay...I'm into the sixth paragraph here and I haven't mentioned bikes once. I'm getting there. Let me tie this to bikes with another anecdote, this one drawn from my bike club. I'm the club's ride director. That means I work to coordinate all the rides we list on our monthly schedule. The rides are what make our club a bike club. Without our rides, we would just be some sort of social club without much of a purpose. In fact, we wouldn't exist as an organization without our slate of rides. There would be no point.
All of our rides originate as volunteer efforts. A member thinks up a ride and posts it in our newsletter with a specific time and place, a route, and various specs to let folks know what sort of ride it's going to be: how fast, how long, how hilly, etc. My job is to coordinate the listings so we end up with a broad sampling of all sorts of rides in every week...something for everybody..variety good, redundancy bad. No rides at all: very bad.
At the end of the year, I give out Ride Leader of the Year awards to those who have led the most rides. I simply add up all the rides in the 12 monthly newsletters and see who ends up with the most checks next to their names.
Depending on how you count family memberships, our club has between 700 and 1000 members. That's a lot, it seems to me, although we would never expect to see all of those members on any given club ride. We have many different rides for many different types of riders...a big-tent club.
I still have the page of figures I jotted down to find the winners of the awards for 2008, presented at our year-end holiday dinner last month. There are about 70 names on the list. Some of those people led only one ride all year. Many of them led a few rides. A few led many rides. Out of the 70, only seven led more than ten rides in 2008.
So we start out with a club that has at least 700 members. Out of all of them, only 70 (10%) led even a single ride last year. And only seven (1%) led rides on a regular basis. The single most important thing the club does--the thing that makes the club a bike club—and we end up with 1% of the membership doing most the work while everyone else just sits in and reaps the benefits. And bear in mind: we think of this club as a really good one, with lots of dynamic people involved in all sorts of busy projects. We think we're pretty hot stuff.
I have been the ride director for this club for about 15 years, and I have wrestled with this challenge for all of those years: how to get more people involved in the process of leading rides. In fact, we almost always have enough rides on the schedule, with something for everyone, but it isn't always easy to fill all the weekend slots with quality rides. It takes some juggling and it takes a certain amount of beating the bushes to get folks to step up to the plate. I think I can say with some confidence that no one can top me in the matter of thinking up more different ways to say the same thing: "we need your help."
I wouldn't want all 700 members to be posting rides all the time. Our schedule would be overwhelmed. We don't need that. But we do need more people to be active in this never-ending program. We need new people to get on board as others move on or cease to be involved for one reason or another. We simply need more people to be thinking about cool rides they want to share with their friends in the months ahead…to have that mindset: if something needs to be done, I had better be the one, or one of the ones, to take care of it.
Leading rides is probably the most obvious and most vital of the volunteer tasks that animate a bike club, but it is far from the only area of endeavor that needs attention in this sort of organization. The fuel that drives any such mutually supportive community is volunteer energy. Whether it's sitting on the club's Board, working at a rest stop on a club-sponsored century, manning the barbecue at a club picnic, being a course marshal at a crit...you name it... The jobs don't get done if many individuals don't step forward when the calls go out for volunteers.
This is true for myriad other entities that make our society whole and robust: without volunteer energy, our world would pretty much grind to a halt. Pitching in at a soup kitchen; acting as a docent at a park or museum; being a Big Brother or Sister; doing a tour with Habitat for Humanity; helping out with an environmental restoration project; spending a day on a bird count; taking kids on field trips; being a youth sports coach or a volunteer firefighter. Hundreds of chores. Thousands of tasks. Millions of opportunities to make a difference; to be a net positive in this world.
I am writing this in the week between Christmas and New Years, 2008. It is intended for my first column of 2009. I have spent the past few days of happy holiday cheer in the company of my children and my infant grandchildren. Seeing those future generations and considering the world that we are bequeathing to them, and what they might make of it after we're gone…well, I get a bit stirred up, plain and simple. It makes me want to work just a bit harder in the new year to make it a better year than the last one. It makes me hope that more and more people will grab hold of that notion that if something needs to be done, then we're the ones who will have to do it.
Later this month, we will see a new President sworn in and we will - we hope - turn the page as we turn the year, expecting and planning for brighter days ahead. I don't know exactly what the new President will say in his inaugural address. (Hard as it is to believe, he did not see fit to send me a rough draft of the speech for proofing.) But I think I can predict that there will be, somewhere in the address, a stirring call to volunteerism, echoing the famous Kennedy refrain: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country!"
Historians and pundits are still debating whether those words were merely empty rhetoric or whether they really did represent a sea change in our national, cultural values. Goodness knows, we've seen plenty of the "me first!" mentality in the intervening decades since our brief flirtation with Camelot. Lots of self-absorbed instant gratification and not so much idealistic altruism. Will it be different this time around? The various excesses of the past few years seem to have finally had an impact on the way we view the world. The pendulum appears, if ever-so-slightly and if only for this briefest moment, to be swinging in another direction.
My hope for the new year is that we can all, to one degree or another, jump on that bandwagon of change; that we can all--each of us individually and all of us collectively - carry that mutually cooperative mindset with us every day, and pursue it to its obvious, logical conslusion: that whatever needs doing, we will be the ones to do it. It doesn't matter whether we will be rewarded for our efforts with a pay check or even with anyone's expressions of gratitude. It may be that we simply understand that such efforts will repay us and our children and grandchildren, far into the future.
This is a topic that's much bigger than just bikes and bike clubs. It embraces a vast paradigm shift in how we see ourselves integrated into our society. But if you insist that I keep this at least a little bit tied to the subculture of cycling, let me conclude with this: if you did any organized centuries or tours or races or club rides last year, or if you plan on doing any of them this year, ask yourself how many of them would have been there for you without the work of numerous volunteers. Answer: none. In this bright new year, make a resolution to give something back…to pitch in somewhere. You don't have to volunteer for every job out there. That leads to burn-out. Just a task here and a chore there...and a ride on your own club's calendar every couple of months.Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net