Carfree Family

Why do we, as a species, behave like toddlers?

2012-01-12T15:04:00.000-08:00

The folks over at Path Less Pedaled experienced a road rage incident in New Zealand.

I have to say that I have never experienced someone getting out of their car and threatening me, much less punching me. I have, however, been the passive cause of reckless driving.

There is a one block section of my commute where I have to take the lane. I turn left onto a very narrow road. A few years ago, we -- meaning the advocacy group I happened to be a part of -- were able to get sharrows put on that section of road. It is clear, both from the width of the road and the sharrows on it, that the only place for a bicycle to be is in the middle of the road.

Most mornings, someone tries to make a dangerous passing maneuver, requiring them to accelerate and swerve in an irresponsible way to avoid both me and the oncoming traffic.

I can pontificate with the best of them. "Why they should know that they're supposed to slow down behind a slow moving vehicle and wait until it is safe to pass!"

And the fact is, it takes me less than a minute from the point where I enter that stretch of narrow road to the point where I turn right.

But in that minute, whoever is behind me has to try to pass, or at the very least ride up real close to the back of my bicycle. It is almost as if it is a point of honor for them to try to get around me, and I can imagine the surge of adrenaline they must feel as soon as they turn in behind me, see me in the road, the oncoming traffic, and try to gauge how to get around me.

Generally, I feel safe. No one really wants to crash their car into either a bicycle or an oncoming vehicle, though yesterday, the person passing me avoided the oncoming traffic only by putting on a terrific burst of speed.

Here's the thing: in spite of my ability to pontificate, I understand this desire to pass me. I think our brains just can't process a bicycle as a moving vehicle when we're at the wheel of a car, (which isn't very often for me, but often enough that I remember). There's something about us when we're at the wheel of a car that makes it impossible for most people to think, "Ah hell, he'll get to his turn in less than a minute, I'll just slow down a bit and wait."

I just wonder, psychologically speaking, what that is.

Some Trail Hypocrisy

2012-01-10T14:30:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, there were a couple of recreational trails in Santa Fe -- the Arroyo Chamiso Trail and the River Trail. The first trail followed the arroyo from Sam's Club up to Siringo Road, and most of the same route was better served by Siringo Road. The River Trail, at the time, was a sidewalk through a park. It was much easier just to bicycle along Alameda.

I lobbied hard, well, maybe not hard, but I lobbied for more money to go to road improvements. There's a certain mindset both motorists and many bicyclists get into that bicycles belong on the trails not on the roads. It's not terribly prevalent in Santa Fe, but it still exists. As part of the on-road subcommittee of the Bicycle Trails Advisory Committee, I helped push through some sharrow placement, red-light trigger symbols, and some additional striping, (though striping is controversial in the eyes of some road purists such as John Forester). The roads in Santa Fe have actually come a long way in accommodating cyclists, and I'm proud of my own, very tiny, part in the process.

Recently, I served on the Citizen Advisory Group for the Metropolitan Planning Organisation's "Bicycle Master Plan." Mostly I just said, "wow, that looks great Tim," because Tim Rogers has an astounding knowledge of the trails and roads in the Santa Fe area. I normally pick a route, and I ride it for years. I don't often look for easier ways to get places. Tim has an amazing passion and capacity for seeking out little connections between trails and roads. Most of the Bicycle Master Plan concerns itself with making these connections official trails, though the on-street facilities are not neglected.

However, I have to admit that over the years between the two committees, I have found myself on the trails more often. My haughty, Effective Cyclist, anti-trail stance has eroded a little.

Here's what's happened. The trails, which were once ignorable recreational facilities, have begun to stretch themselves all over the city. First of all, the rail trail, which was once a terrible mud bog after it rained, was paved, so from the Arroyo Chamiso trail near our house, we can now bicycle all the way down to the railyard park near the center of Santa Fe. (It also passes by both of Second Street Brewery's locations). The River Trail, once a small section of sidewalk through a park where you would have to dodge people doing Tai Chi, now follows the river all the way to Frenchy's Field near our house. They are about to complete one underpass, and once they do that, I can get down to the feed store for chicken food and be on a trail about 75% of the way. Doing so means avoiding two, heavily traveled two-lane roads with insufficient shoulders, (in places).

I am most surprised by my affection for one section of trail that is nearing completion that runs from Zia Road paralleling St. Francis Drive before arching up to the intersection of Galisteo and St. Michael's Drive. Tim likes to point out that they could have saved a great deal of money if they just ran the trail to the bottom of Galisteo St. As it is, the trail dumps out onto the sidewalk at the intersection, which is a shitty design. Who has the right of way in that situation? It's one of those places where, officially, you should become a pedestrian. I, however, scan for turning traffic in all directions, bike halfway across the crosswalk, and then try to position myself to cross the intersection with the traffic. On the way back down this trail, I'm biking against traffic, which is fine except that it crosses another intersection, and I have to look out for turning traffic that might not be looking for a vehicle coming from the wrong direction. There is a reason bicycles are supposed to behave like a vehicle. I can't quite bring myself to dismount my bicycle and walk it across the crosswalk, though when a trail dumps out at an intersection and crosses with the crosswalk, that's the official, safe thing to do. Once again -- it's a bad design. Mid-block crossings are much better for bike trails.

What the trail does for me, however, is get me out of a morning rush hour flow of traffic that is heading directly into the sun. Here in the piñon/juniper country, there are no tall trees to block the sun, and it literally shines straight down the street in the morning. Add to that all the people who only take the time to scrape a small circle of frost off their windows and the people who are dealing with their children who are late for school and are answering texts and spilling coffee in their laps -- well, let's just say I don't mind being off on a trail, in spite of its design flaws.

This year, the city should complete an underpass that will connect this little stretch of trail to the Rail Trail. It will go under St. Francis, a major eight lane road cutting north-south across Santa Fe. Once that's done, I'll be able to avoid all the sun-blinded, taking-my-children-to-school traffic. Currently my road choices crossing St. Francis involve Zia, (Capshaw Middle School), Siringo, (Santa Fe High School and St. Michael's High School), or Alta Vista, (E.J. Martinez Elementary). I'll be quite pleased to avoid all those crazed parents speeding along at 45 mph in a 25 mph zone, not to mention my daughter will be able to bicycle to middle school next year, (if we hit the lottery for our transfer request), without getting on a major road.

The trail in the photo at the top of the blog is a strange little bastard section of trail that parallels Camino Lejo. There's really no compelling reason to take it over the road, but I often do. It's nice to listen to the birds back in there on my way up to work, and occasionally I see coyote crossing the trail, and there have been bears sighted near the trail, though I have yet to see one there.

And finally, I'm excited that they're planning a section of trail that will allow hikers and bicyclists to get all the way up to the ski basin without getting on to Hyde Park Road.

So, I've become a bit of a hypocrite given my clamor for better road conditions and the degree to which I enjoy the quiet and relative solitude of the trail. I have to admit that I'm pleased to live in such a small artistic community that places enough value on trail systems to spend money on them in the current economic climate.

(And I would encourage everyone here in town to vote for the bond in March to continue expanding our bikeways).

Winding the Alarm Clock

2011-11-30T14:04:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've pretty much avoided personal computer use other than streaming movies on occasion. I've been working on becoming rooted back in my life, and I've been pondering all things internet in the process, but I don't have a great deal, as yet, to say.

Before I proceed to ramble too far, I'd like to give a shout out to the Letter Writer's Alliance. It's nice to see people promoting letter writing. I've put a membership to the alliance on my Christmas list, so I haven't actually shelled out money to them. I have, however, been writing more letters. I've probably been averaging about four letters a week. It's a real joy, with the laptop turned off and relegated to a shelf, to sit down at the table with a small fire burning in the wood stove, and to write with a pen on a piece of paper, or to pull out the old Olympia manual, or the even older Royal.

There's two branches this ramble takes at this point, and unlike Robert Frost, I am able to take them both.

Road One: In some ways, the Letter Writer's Alliance represents some things I don't like about the internet, (while at the same time, representing the best the internet can offer). I like the idea. I would like to join. Then I could be a member! Those little LWA pencils are pretty cool. There's other stuff on their site I would like to buy. I don't check my Twitter Feed often anymore, but when I do, I look for the LWA postings. So here we have something that's a pretty good idea, but it's taking up far more mental energy than I need to devote to it. Now, with me, and my personal inclinations toward the internet, if you take that example of a flourishing of interest in just one topic, and multiply it by 100, you get a pretty good idea of why it's better for me to keep the computer turned off. A certain amount of the world wide web adds greatly to my life by connecting me to -- or even just alerting me to -- like minded people. Just a couple of clicks further, and the whole internet phenomenon is carving great bloody chunks out of my lifetime, and I'm barely noticing. It only shows up in the contradiction of my claiming that I don't have enough time to read anymore yet I'm spending hours a day following the winding paths that branch off from every Twitter post that pops up on my desktop.

Road Two: I'm deeply troubled by one question. Is my exercise in writing letters, (and my love of typewriters, film cameras, and wind-up alarm clocks) primarily an expression of nostalgia, or does it have some legitimate symbolic meaning beyond its being merely something that I enjoy? The full scope of this question is beyond a blog post, but here are a few observations. One ideological reason I like to write letters is that I am, in some sense, self-sufficient. Sure, I rely on the postal service, but letters could always be delivered any number of ways. If all the internal combustion engines were to seize up, the postal service could go down to the bike store, sling the mail bags over there backs, and be off to deliver the mail. Even in the absence of the postal service, you could address a letter and find someone heading toward the city your letter needed to arrive in. Writing the letter takes the simplest of tools -- a piece of paper of some kind, and a writing implement of some kind. You don't even really need an envelope. Fold the paper, seal it, address it, and you're good to go. I intuitively feel there is some sort of value there, some sort of strength, similar to that I feel I have when I choose a simple, elegant means to travel rather than a complicated, ugly, polluting way to travel. Email is irrevocably tied to electricity, produced sustainably or not. It's tied to a very complicated and precise system of servers, software and infrastructure. It feels to me that some freedom there's been lost.

Also, it cannot be stressed too greatly what a relief it is to put a letter in a mailbox. Once it's there, it's out of mind for a while. There's no reason to go back to your mailbox ten more times on the very day you sent the letter. You can move on to something else. I have a strong suspicion that business was much more efficient in the pre-email days for that very reason.

Right now, the rest of what I have to say makes me sound to my own ears like even more of a crank than I really am. There's something ineffable that bothers me about dependance on electricity. Maybe it's because I spent so much of my twenties living in alternative situations that didn't involve electricity, (my school bus, a friend's cabin, etc.). I can't say that I see the utilities as big monsters or poster children of corporate greed, but I'm suspicious of the way more and more electronic devices creep into our lives. They require that we consume more and more power, and that power does not come from ourselves, and it does not strengthen us to use it. Electronics seem to cut us off from our bodies and from our immediate environment, even to the absurd situation of folks walking down the street staring at their smart phones. ("People don't really do that," I say to myself. Then I see someone doing it. "Yes they do.") It seems like some subtle sort of poisoning that we're all falling victim to, and it also reminds me of the Island of the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey -- the passage about which I here lift from the Wikipedia:

They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-Eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars." (translated by Samuel Butler)

It's not that the internet, (and TV, radio, smart phones, etc.), is in itself bad, but it lulls us away from more fundamental parts of our lives, from home.

So I'm living with less involvement with the world of electronics right now, and that is why you have heard so little from me. Perhaps to be unconnected these days is to go unheard, but being heard, after all, is not really the point of life. It just seems to be the point of social media.

I'm rereading some old favorite books, working my way through some of Jung's work, writing letters, cooking food and riding my bike. Slowly, I've stopped thinking, "this is so great, I should write about it on Facebook! There's a hawk! I can't wait to Tweet about it." And so on and on and on. I'm not viewing my life as a narrator right now. I'm living it.

And, as always, I get up in the morning and wind my alarm clock.

I'm Still Here, Sort Of

2011-09-22T20:21:00.001-07:00

I just haven't been on the computer very often.

I started a part time job up at St. John's College doing Administrative Assistant sort of work. It more than makes up for the fact there wasn't much honey in the old bee hives this summer. I haven't made it to the Farmer's Market to sell honey once this year. In fact, my total yield has been about a gallon of honey. Carfree Bees -- the business that has made money every year of its existence -- might actually lose money this year because I stocked up on jars early in the spring.

I work three and a half hours a day. After the kids are on their way to school, (by bicycle and scooter), I hop on my bike and ride up to the college. It's uphill the entire way. I've been using the Rivendell almost daily, with a few stints of using the single speed.

I daydream about blog posts I'd like to write as I head up the hill -- the recent rebuild of the Rivendell, the Slow Bicycle Movement, the effect of drought on honeybees...

Then I sit in the library for an hour, drink coffee, write in my journal with my pencil and read magazines. I read all the way through the two Buddhist magazines they have up there, and now I'm working my way through "Saveur" and "Cooks Illustrated".

It's not a good idea to read magazines about food when you're far away from your kitchen.

I then work from 9:30 until noon, take a lunch break with my wife until noon-thirty, and work for one final hour before heading down the hill to pick up my daughter from school. (My son has started doing an after-school tennis and tutoring program called First Serve, so my wife picks him up on her way home).

I try to have a little coffee break in the afternoon and read a little bit before starting on dinner.

So I haven't really been using the computer, and the blog entries are getting thought about but not written.

Hopefully once I settle into my new routine, I'll get out the digital camera, charge the batteries, fire up this MacBook, and plunge back into the blogging fray.

New Habits

2011-07-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

I thought I would take a moment to let everyone know how my new habits are going, with a bow of gratitude to Leo over at Zen Habits.

It does help me to think of behaviors in terms of habits rather than in terms of discipline or in terms of specifics such as, “I’m going to exercise more.” (Which, admittedly, is not very specific.)

Earlier this year, I did start running in the morning. It’s amazing to me that a person can be carfree, run all errands by bicycle, and still begin to gain weight. I joke that I knew I either needed to begin running or quit drinking my one beer in the evening, so I began running.

It’s difficult, in some ways, because I don’t think of myself as someone who exercises. Perhaps it is because I grew up with asthma, and within the rough division between sports-playing-kids and book-reading-kids, I was definitely the awkward, bookish kid.

Now, after I do my copyediting work and email off my results for the morning, I put on my free-box jogging shorts, my Goodwill shoes, and go run around the neighborhood for about an hour and a half. For those of you in Santa Fe, I run up Camino Carlos Rey to Rodeo Road, up Rodeo Road to the Rail Trail, and head back to my house off Camino Carlos Rey via the trail. I don’t know how far it is, but it feels long enough to make it time well spent.

I don’t particularly think of it as exercise, and I still haven’t added in pushups or sit-ups. The running, however, has become a habit. I like getting out in the world early in the day. The shadows of the ants are long on the sidewalks, and I dance around them so as not to crush any. When I turn onto the bike trail, I get a nice view of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

Running is a nice habit to have, and it seems to have sunk in.

One Bowl Book

2011-07-13T10:13:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to plug this book about mindful eating because I enjoy it so much: One Bowl: A Guide to Eating for Body and Spirit

I ordered the book a few years ago. I've never implemented all the advice present in it, but I have had a series of small bowls as my primary eating vessels. It makes us humans sound a little, well, stupid, but the size of our plates and bowls does have a lot to do with how much we eat.

As time has gone on, I've moved to smaller and smaller bowls. Recently, I bought a hand-turned wooden bowl off eBay that's about 3.5 inches across at the top, and then flares out slightly. It fits nicely in my hand. I've been using the To-Go Ware bamboo utensils with it, mostly the chopsticks. If I only eat one bowl's worth of food, I'm usually pretty satisfied.

The bowls that came with our dishes are monstrosities by comparison, and I unmindfully fill them up when I use them, or at least I put a greater amount of food into them than I can fit in my little wooden bowl.

The other side of the problem is making too much food. We always have leftovers, and, as I've mentioned before, I end up eating what my children don't eat, or I end up eating the leftovers during the day between meals. I'm trying to cut that habit out, and to do so, I'm trying to cook less. It's a difficult thing to do. If I cook too little, I have a hungry family looking at me with disappointed eyes. Usually, out of habit, I cook a cup of beans, or a cup of rice. One cup equals one serving, or one meal, or whatever. Actually, one cup is too much. Yesterday, I made dal for lunch, and cooked one half cup of yellow split peas and a cup of rice. My son and I ate it for lunch, (Sadie can't stand dal). There was little enough leftover that it wasn't reasonable to save it, but I did feel compelled to eat more than I would have liked to finish it off. Today, I'm seeing what one third cup of mung beans looks like cooked.

Why did I not think about what's the right amount of food to cook at a time until I was forty-five?

Sorry there's not much carfree content there. Today, we're going to put the triple back together so we can bicycle up to Music on the Hill on the St. John's College soccer field. I'll report in on whether it's easier now that the children are older. Riding the triple when they were younger was quite a chore. They really didn't throw their all into climbing hills.

Back and Forth?

2011-07-02T15:08:00.001-07:00

We have returned from our trip back east. Now we find that we are considering relocating there to be closer to family. Chapel Hill looms large on our radar. It's near the Amtrak line that would get us up to Laura's family -- in Maryland -- or down to my family -- in Columbia, SC. It also appears, at first glance, to be a good city in which to live a carfree lifestyle.

We're busy trying to figure out whether to go and how to go and how to go about looking for work there while living almost two-thousand miles away. I'm certainly not going to be popping in to the Chapel Hill Whole Foods to fill out an application.

Any of my readers out there in Chapel Hill?

While we're wondering what to do, and while my kids are home for summer, I don't know if I'll be posting as regularly. I'm also stepping up some of the copy-editing I'm doing to try to boost my own, meagre, at-home-dad income.

I've been an at-home-dad for twelve years, and I've been in Santa Fe for twenty-five. It might be a good time to shake things up.

Gary Taubes

2011-06-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

I wanted to get in one more blog post before we head off to visit family. I had mentioned that I would say more about Gary Taubes and his take on obesity. Here he is speaking at the Walnut Creek Public Library at a talk put on by Rivendell Bicycle Works:

I do agree with some of what he has to say. However, I feel that he oversimplifies things. He mentions in the video, and in his book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It, that the people attempting to justify the colories in vs. calories out theory are only looking for evidence to support their theory. I feel that he is doing the same.

On the other hand, I do feel that we get in more trouble with processed carbohydrates, and sugar particularly, than we do with other food types.

However, the stories of weight loss I know best are not heavily skewed toward a meat-based diet. Scott Cutshall, whom I knew as a bicyclist and fellow at-home-parent before I found out just how large the "Large Fella On a Bike" was, eats, I believe, a vegan diet. He brought his weight down from over five hundred pounds to a normal weight. He did so mainly by eating vegan and bicycling. I'll see if I can get him to weigh in on the comments section.

Leo Baubata, of Zen Habits, also lost his weight through switching to a vegan diet, and exercising. He also quit smoking. I'm sure that helped. (Though now that I think about it, I recall Leo has a fondness for pizza, and he still eats it sparingly, so there's probably some cheese in there somewhere.)

The one time in my life where I really lost weight was a few short months where I was eating raw food. My weight dropped from my normal stable weight of 185 to about 155 in three months. I was, however, eating a lot, and much of what I was eating was dehydrated "breads" made from sprouted grains, orange juice, cayenne and cilantro. I ate a lot of hummus made from sprouted chickpeas and raw tahini as well. My problem with the raw diet is that I felt very weak much of the time, in spite of a massive, and expensive, intake of food. I was clear-headed, thinner, and my allergies where better, but in some sense, I felt like I was starving, and we were spending twice what we budget a month for food.

And speaking of expense. Gary Taubes in the video mentions a time when a scientist he was interviewing claimed the Atkins diet was boring. "It's not boring," he exclaims, and then he goes on to list a long variety of meats and cheeses. I don't know what planet he's from, but though we're not poor, we still couldn't afford to feed a family of four on a diet that made use of meat on a regular basis. Even cheddar cheese seems a little out of there in the price department some days. And so, we do eat spaghetti more than we eat steak, and if it were up to me, we'd be eating brown rice with dal and cooked greens most days, but the kids won't eat that, so the compromises tend to run toward food that I don't feel is quite as healthy as I would like, but I'm reducing my intake.

And even if carbs are turned into fat more easily than proteins, you still can't create energy. You can't get more calories out of the food than is there.

I do agree that the high-carb nature of our diets may possibly be frying our insulin regulation system, and that may be leading to many of the problems our nation is having with obesity. However, it's not just that we eat some carbs, but that we are a nation of carboholics. I think most of us are in denial about that, and I think there's some amount of not even noticing how many low-quality carbs we consume. All I know is that if I bake a dozen blueberry muffins in the morning, they'll be gone by noon. It's like we have elves that creep out of the woodwork. I don't normally buy rice cakes because I think they're probably awful on the glycemic index, but I bought some the day before yesterday, and my kids tore through them in two days. I had to be mindful myself not to reach into the package and grab one to munch as I wandered around. My biggest challenge, as always, is to have food that the kids will eat, that is healthy. I'm still constantly bombarded by complaints that there's nothing to eat in the house. "Eat some hummus and carrots," I say. "We don't like that," they reply. "Pressure cook some beans," I suggest. "No," they say. "Dad," they add, "don't buy the peanut butter from the coop that is all oily on top. Get the smooth kind from the grocery store." "That's all sugary," I tell them. "Yes," they say, with a gleam in their eyes.

The entire issue, most probably, is so complicated that there is no easy answer. I think Taubes is trying to provide his own easy answer. He has some good points, but I think he discounts other theories out of hand and ignores the pieces of underlying complexity that don't fit into his idea of the puzzle.

Oh, I should add that, out of the goals that I wrote about in the Wait Weight post, I've stopped finishing my kids' food, I'm doing a little better at not finishing off the pad thai when I make it, and I'm browsing in the kitchen during the day a little less. I also started running a short distance in the morning. It looks like my weight is about to dip back below 200 pounds, so I've lost about ten pounds. For myself, I see it, thanks to Leo's habit-based ideology, as being about changing my habits rather than dieting. I still have the occasional coffee and croissant. I'm just being more mindful about it. It's the unconscious, carboholic gorging that gets me. Eating peanut butter off a spoon can almost be like an unconscious nervous tick that goes on all day.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of veganism, though I am not, myself, a vegan. Eating a diet with no animal products, and alas, for pure vegans that includes honey as well, would go a long way in cutting back on human cruelty to animals, and would help mitigate the negative environmental impact caused by meat farming. I have never, however, done a thorough study of veganism. It's another one of those things that is given as a simple solution to a complex problem. For my part, when I was eating vegan and raw, I felt I was coming off as a little too self-righteous. "No, no -- no salmon for me thanks. I'll just have the salad." Occasionally -- and not often -- I crave meat. Is that because my body really needs something from it at that point? Or is it just some memory or whim of the mind? For now, I'm going to trust my cravings, as long as they are not for a box of cookies or a third beer.

Veganism, however, should be explored further by folks like Gary Taubes. It seems to be working for many people, at least for those with the sense to avoid processed foods.

I'm dropping into this post one last time to say that I finally got around to reading "Is Sugar Toxic?", his recent article in the New York Times. I enjoyed the article more than the book, and I agree with his assessment of sugar. I do believe he needs to expand his area of consideration to cover other types of diets that exclude processed carbs. He is a thorough researcher and an enjoyable writer. In some ways, his ideas are similar to those put forth in Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions, a cookbook I love, but she too is dedicated to the idea that vegetarianism or veganism is not a sustainable diet. I'm not ready to accept that idea.

Little Black Hen Hatches a Chick

2011-05-29T13:19:00.001-07:00

We've had our chickens for several years now. I never have much to say about them. They live out there in the backyard, and they sometimes lay eggs, though the original chickens are fairly old now. We ate the first rooster, and after that, I didn't have the heart to butcher any more chickens -- we're just not that kind of sustainable family.

A couple of years ago, a neighbor gave us one of their Auracaunas, or Ameracauna, whichever it really is, and last year, a neighbor across the street who was moving gave us two black pullets, one of which turned out to be our third rooster, (the second rooster was given to a neighbor who presumably ate it).

The Little Black Hen, as I call her, has been brooding most of the spring. I have been trying to ignore the process, otherwise I will start Googling "chick raising", and the next thing you know, I will have purchased $300 worth of incubators and other egg/chick raising equipment down at the feed store and through Ebay.

She's been having a rough time of it. The Auracauna will push her out of the nest and lay eggs in there, and once I found one of the Red Sussex hens sitting in the nest box, (a rubbermaid container with a door cut in it), with Little Black Hen. The other chickens also seem to go in there and eat eggs periodically.

We were thinking we just needed to throw all the eggs away and start collecting subsequent eggs to eat. I went out to check on the eggs, and there, in the straw, among the eggs, was a little baby chick!

I know it shouldn't be such a surprise, but I'm very proud of her. I went out and bought some chick starter and a low waterer for the chick, but I'm trying to simply let the mother raise the chick. It's hard not to go out there and interfere. Because the Auracauna is still pushing her way into the nest, I moved the entire thing into our largest dog kennel. I hope that works out for her while we're out of town. I'm trying to make it as easy for our housesitter as possible, and I also want to protect her and her eggs and babies from the other chickens, and the skunk that seems to be wandering the neighborhood, not to mention that there's too damn many eggs in there with her. I hope isolating her will slow down the accumulation of eggs in the nest.

Currently she is sitting on about fifteen eggs. I sincerely hope they don't all hatch. That would probably be too many roosters for us to find a home for.

Our third rooster is driving us nuts. Someone on Freecycle wanted a rooster, but never showed up for him. I posted him on Freecycle, but there was no response. As in the past, our neighbors who we know either don't notice the crowing or enjoy it. We're the ones who aren't fond of our suburban rooster.

As for backyard chickens in general, I'm not sure it's the most frugal of sustainable activities, and perhaps, it really isn't that sustainable with the purchase of chicken food needed. Eggs at the Farmer's Market are about $3.50 a dozen right now, and the farmers who are selling eggs probably pay more attention to their chickens than we do. I know at least one farmer who sprouts wheat for his chickens to eat. I bought organic hen scratch for a while, but it was very expensive. The conventional chicken scratch has gone up from around $11 a bag to $16 a bag over the past couple of months. So often, I just kvetch about spending all that money for a chicken retirement community. Finding a baby chicken out there yesterday was a real treat though. We'll see what we have in the nest box when we return to town at the end of June.

Article in Today's Albuquerque Journal

2011-05-29T10:18:00.000-07:00

The news article about my bicycle-based beekeeping business came out in the Albuquerque Journal today.

Rick did an excellent job writing the article, and the photos are well-done as well. I feel bad that I gave his interview visit the Samuel Beckett treatment in this blog. I think a lot of my cranky mood earlier this spring was just a side effect of the Singulair I was taking for asthma.

There doesn't seem to be a page on the Albuquerque Journal's website where I can link to the article, at least not yet, but you can sign in for a trial preview of their online addition on their website. Just search for "Carfree Bees" once you are on their epaper.

The bees, by the way, are struggling through the drought. Their combs are the lightest I've ever seen them. Some hives have a marginal amount of nectar and honey, while others seem to have practically nil. I am struggling against my inclination to feed them supplemental sugar-syrup. If the environment is not in such a condition as to support a certain number of bee colonies, then I shouldn't be artificially sustaining and growing their population with refined sugar trucked in from somewhere else. Philosophically, that's how I look at it. It's still difficulty to watch them struggle.

There's also the issue that other beekeepers in the area are feeding their bees sugar-syrup right now, so they may have an advantage over my "natural" bees in that they have a greater population to bring in the nectar that's out there. However, I'm clearly not a person to do something I don't agree with just because everyone else is doing it.

There may not be any honey this summer to bring to market if the summer rains don't start.

The Miracle of Petroleum

2011-05-27T07:36:00.000-07:00

We leave next Friday for our summer vacation, and it is going to be the last long one for a while. We’re going to take the city bus down to the Railrunner depot to head down to Albuquerque. We’ll walk down to the Flying Star for breakfast, (I love their Southwest Bennie), and then knock around Albuquerque until it’s time for us to board Amtrak’s Southwest Chief.

Then it’s up to Chicago in coach, where we catch the Capitol Limited for Washington DC. We do have a family bedroom on the second half of each trip, so we get to hang out in the first class waiting room in Chicago.

We’ll be visiting friends and family in the DC area, then renting a car to drive down to visit my mother in South Carolina. Then, we’ll travel up the coast from Myrtle Beach, hang out with my wife’s family in DC a little while longer and hop the Amtrak back to New Mexico. If there’s anyone along our route who wants to pay me a handsome sum to give a lecture on living carfree, you’re welcome to contact me.

The idea of that train travel and the car rental has brought home to me what a miracle we have in petroleum. Apart from its destructive aspects, it is amazing that you can pump a very inexpensive — even now — amount of the stuff in your tank and travel independently wherever the network of roads takes you at an incredible speed. Having primarily bicycled for the past seven years lifts my perception of automobiles out of the realm of the ordinary into the realm of miraculous. That we, as a society, treat the automobile as such an everyday thing, and that we’re basically pissing away the top of the Peak Oil bell curve on trips of three miles or less is a true shame.

When I see people driving their children a few blocks to school, and then driving themselves a couple of miles further to work, I want to say to them, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? Aren’t you embarrassed?” But of course they’re not. Like stuffing ourselves beyond reason on a batch of cookies when they’re lying around our house, we seem to be programmed to piss away natural resources when they seem to be available to us. Most people probably don’t even think about it. Many who do, feel that they have no choice. They don’t feel safe bicycling. The bus systems also feel dangerous to them, and also *gasp* inconvenient.

I see a tragedy in the making. I’m not sure if it will be Jim Kunstler’s Long Emergency, or if there will be a series of adjustments to our lifestyles that will stave off starvation and die-offs and so on. Population overshoot and die-off seems to be the order of natural systems, only in the case of humanity, we’re not coyotes growing fat on an overpopulation of rabbits, but humans doing the same thing on an over-sufficient input of fossil fuels. It would be nice if we stopped most of the superfluous use and reserved them for the things which have become essential in our modern age. We simply don’t seem, as a species, to possess that sort of wisdom.

I’m not particularly worried. Life always muddles on, and in thinking about writing this post, I thought about one of the earliest poems I remember studying in grade school, the one that begins “About suffering, they were never wrong, the old masters. . .” Which, through the miracle of Google, I will now look up:

Musée des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Lifted from the Poetry X website.

We have all become like Icarus, only our wax wings are the miraculous things we can do with petroleum. Rather than use this resource with temperance and moderation, we’re going as far and as fast as we can.

And once it is gone, those who are left are going to walk away and continue.

It will make a glorious and tragic story.

As for myself, I’ll be a little embarrassed and a little ashamed as I drive around on vacation in our rental car, but I’m using it for an exceptional journey, and I understand the miraculous nature of what we are about to do.

I may or may not update the blog while I’m away. Probably not. I’m also taking a little bit of a digital vacation. I’m off Facebook and avoiding Twitter. I want to do some thinking and writing without being connected to the global electronic mind. I have my Olivetti typewriter out of the closet, my pencils are all sharpened, and I’m making heavy use of the library.

In July, I will be back.

Happy Birthday to Me.

2011-05-20T14:34:00.000-07:00

May 21st will mark my 45th birthday. If I’m lucky, and my health holds out, I’m somewhere along the mid-point of my life. If I only live as long as my father, I have fifteen more years. I have to say, though, that I’m happy with my life and with what I’ve accomplished so far. My kids are off to a great start. I hope to live to be ninety, to see them along in their journey, but I don’t have any regrets at this point, and if I were to die tomorrow, I would consider my life one well lived.

I’m still working on my relationship to technology. I’d like to consider myself a Luddite, but I’m not. I’m on this computer almost every day. Still, I don’t think technology is a panacea.

I do fiddle around with the computer like almost everyone else at this point. It's most useful, to me, for keeping track of our finances. I’m also currently using Things to keep track of grocery lists right now. I created a “Shopping” area of responsibility, and I tag groceries I need to buy with the stores where I usually buy them. When I’m out with the iPod Touch, I can easily look through my list.

I’m intrigued by Leo’s assertion that not having goals is the way to go, but I find with a list of daily goals I get more done. Here’s why in my case. When I have niggling things to do — like laundry, or grocery shopping, or writing a thank you letter — I won’t necessarily do them without a list. Instead, I’ll hover around in the middle of all the possible activities and accomplish nothing because I feel I have too much to do. I like checking things off, and so I'm using Things to keep track, not only of groceries, but also of all the little things I have to get done. If I have a list, I’ll get all the crap out of the way early in the day, and then I can fart around. As Kurt Vonnegut says in Man Without a Country, “We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

On the Luddite front, the idea of the cell phone has never gained much traction with me. Occasionally, I think that I will get an iPhone. I like Apple. I like my iPod Touch. However, I hate telephones in general. I don’t even like the landline. Why would I want to carry a phone around with me? I do have a pay-as-you-go cell phone that I bought at the grocery store — they actually had a rebate at the time that rendered the phone free. Every three months or so, I have to feed $20 into the account. I find, however, that I almost never need to use it, or, when I do need it, it has either lost its charge or I don’t have it with me. It is, however, getting more difficult to find a pay phone. I had a flat tire on my bicycle a while back, and I wanted to call my wife to let her know that I might need her to bike out to pick up my daughter, and I had to walk all over hell to find a functioning pay phone. That, I feel, is a tragedy. But it’s not a reason for me to spend $70 a month for an iPhone plan, no matter how nifty a gizmo the iPhone is. I do have a Google voice number now, and I put it on my business cards. I like that it emails me when someone leaves a message. I never have to pick up a ringing phone or listen to a message. I can just read the transcript of the message when it shows up in my email inbox.

I’ll have to admit that email is handy. I go through waves of turning on the email delivery to listservs I subscribe to and turning it back to the "no email" option. Right now, I’m in an off phase. I check my email too many times a day, but I don’t use it to communicate with family. I still write letters to the people who matter. I don’t write as many letters as I would like however, and fewer than I wrote in my twenties, and I receive even fewer. I would much rather receive a letter than an email. I think that is true of everyone, so why don’t we write more letters?

I still use my typewriter. I don’t, however, use it for much productive work. I would like to. I imagine myself as a stubborn typewriter person, continuing to hammer away on my old Olivetti long after everyone else has shoved theirs in the closet. Paul Auster might be able to get away with continuing to use his Olympia. I doubt any publishers would consider a page of typescript from me, so I mostly use it for writing letters or odd bits of writing.

I do still use a 35mm camera as well. I’m divided on film versus digital. I like them both. A digital camera certainly seems to waste fewer resources, though I’m not sure how it really balances out with the extra resources for replacing old cameras, the electricity to keep the computers running, and the production of the computers to extract and store the images. Still, the digital camera probably wins on the resource front, and I do use one. The photographs that I sit down and look at however, are the 35mm prints that I have in photo albums. All the old digital photographs of my children when they were babies have been lost with the demise of old computers or misplaced on unlabeled compact discs. I wouldn’t trust all my memories to digital photographs or digital journals, and I’m not going to bother paying for Dropbox to back up all my digitalia.

What makes me happiest at 45?

My family of course.

For reasons that are beyond me, I love my old Schwinn single speed. It fits me just right and makes me happy to ride. If my house were on fire, I would have a hard time deciding whether to grab the Schwinn or grab the Rivendell.

I like to listen to old jazz albums on the record player.

I love my honeybees.

I like being a cultural critic.

I love to travel by train.

Our cat, in spite of my allergies, makes me feel happy.

I love the public library and the wealth of knowledge available there on the printed page. Occasionally, I think about getting a Kindle, but I haven't read everything in the library yet.

That, for me, constitutes enough. I certainly have enough. I hope that, if I’m at the fulcrum of my life, the balance I hold now will continue as my life goes on.

Wait Weight

2011-05-09T08:57:00.000-07:00

My father in December of 1978

I’ve never paid particular attention to my weight. Lately I have, and I mentioned it in the last post, so I thought I would write a little bit more on the subject. Leo, over at Zen Habits, has particularly stirred up a few thoughts for me.

I grew up in the Southeastern U.S. My family, in general, tends toward the heavy side. (I hope I can say that without alienating anyone). When I was a young boy, my mother would take me to her TOPS, (Taking Pounds Off Sensibly), meetings. I don’t remember anything except being bored. Also, if that particular group was a model of success, part of its modus operandi must have been to banish those who had taken pounds off from the meetings. My mother would work at losing weight all the time but never effected any real change that I could see. Lately, she tells me she’s lost some weight and that she’s feeling better. She’s 78 years old now, and she does have a few health problems — pain particularly — that are probably somewhat related to her weight. Nevertheless, when I spoke to her yesterday to wish her a happy Mother’s Day, she told me some of my siblings were on the way over with barbecue and donuts. Oh well, at 78, I don’t think she’s suddenly going to start eating quinoa and hummus.

My father was also overweight. As a boy, I thought he was BIG. Recently, however, I found a picture of him at 53, and he’s not as big as I remember. He suffered a heart attack in his mid-fifties. He had bypass surgery, was recovering nicely, and was killed by a teen driver who ran a stop sign and slammed into the side of my father’s truck. Hence, probably, part of my disdain for the automobile as a means of getting around.

Now for me. I guess this is somewhat personal. I grew up with terrible asthma. It has persisted into my adult life, though not as bad. I think that because it was such an instrument of personal betrayal, I never paid particular attention to my body. I also didn’t pursue things that might be considered “healthy” when I was growing up, because I couldn’t breathe while doing them. I sat out of a lot of gym classes. It was kind of embarrassing and shaming, and I developed a concomitant disdain for all things sports. To this day, I really don’t know what sports season it is. (Is football over? Has baseball begun? Does hockey have a season?) I did ride my bicycle all the time. I think that once you get started on a bike, the adrenaline produced by riding it keeps the asthma at bay. You just have to be careful to regulate your effort — no sudden sprinting.

I believe that when I considered doing something to get in shape, like running, I shied away from it because it seemed like it was aimed at becoming something I felt that I could never be — namely athletic. Or I would think off and on over the years about things like yoga, and I would do yoga for a while, but somehow the picture of myself as the image of health at the end of the process did not seem right. I want to lay the blame at the feet of asthma, shame, and a weird relationship with my body. It’s probably that and a whole lot more.

So I’ve never consciously pursued a health regimen aimed at honing my body into the image of a some sort of golden boy, but I have been active, and I eat fairly sensibly.

My driver’s licence says I weigh 165. That was true back in my early twenties. For most of my adult life, I have weighed around 185. I’m OK with that. This past winter, I started feeling heavier and not recognizing myself in the mirror quite so much. I checked my weight, and it was 210. I’m not OK with weighing over 200 pounds. That’s a barrier for me.

Part of it might possibly be Singulair, an asthma medication I started taking regularly around November. Weight gain is not listed as a side effect, but checking the internet — always a good way to diagnose medical problems I’m sure every doctor would agree — many people complain about an associated weight gain.

Depression is a published side effect, as well as suicidal thoughts and suicidal “actions”. I spent much of the winter wondering if I was depressed. “Am I depressed? Is it just the winter? Am I thinking I’m depressed because it might be one possible side effect?” I still don’t know, but I decided to stop taking Singulair a few weeks ago. My asthma is back, but it feels like the world has gone from monochromatic back to color. (Was it the Singulair? Was it winter?) I have the energy and the interest to get out there and do things again.

My weight is one of the reasons I quit. My lower back went through two weeks of fairly intense pain. I don’t know what that was about, but I’m sure the extra twenty-five pounds didn’t help.

Anyway, I’m going to try to get down to at least my old holding pattern of 185. Abdominal weight is being increasingly demonized as the harbinger of all sort of health problems I don’t want to deal with over the next 45 years.

Leo, as always, has recently posted about habits, making small changes, and focussing on those changes in regards to health over on Zen Habits.

I’m not so good at focussing on one thing at a time, but here are the things I think trip me up the most.

1) I’m a grazer. Particularly when I’m home. If I’m not being mindful, I get stuck in a circular eating pattern. Some primitive part of my brain gets loose while I’m busy doing other things, and I find I’ve been constantly eating small amounts of things. I like having a banana with some almond butter, for example. Not so bad, eh? But this winter I would end up having three or four bananas and half a jar of almond butter in a morning. I don’t feel like doing that now, so again, I think it might have been related to the medication.

2) As a parent, I finish the food my children don’t eat. I hate to see things wasted. My children, exhibiting an unusual amount of good sense in our culture, stop eating when they are full. “Give it to me, I’ll finish it,” has become a common refrain of mine.

3) I tend to try to finish off pots of food rather than deal with leftovers. Pad Thai is particularly pernicious for me. I’ll have one bowl of Pad Thai. Since it is so good, I’ll have another one. Then I’ll eat what Zeb didn’t finish. Then, since there is just a little bit left in the wok, I’ll have a third bowl. That’s just too much food, even if you use a bicycle to get around.

There’s other issues to contend with, but I’m going to focus on those three — limit grazing, compost what my kids don’t eat, only eat one serving.

We’ll see where that gets me.

I’d rather have a bigger compost pile than heart disease.

I’ll follow this post up soon. I have a lot more to say, but I’ve already broken the golden blogger rule about keeping posts short. Particularly, I want to take issue with Gary Traub for those Rivendell Bicycle folks that might read my blog.

Seventh Carfree Anniversary!

2011-05-05T08:30:00.000-07:00

It’s our seven year carfree anniversary. Seven years ago, a waitress from the Blue Corn Café drove off in our 98 Saab. We haven’t owned a car since.

The most remarkable thing about the past seven years is how unremarkable it has been. The difficulties we face and struggle with are the same run of the mill problems most people face and have nothing to do with choosing not to own a car. There are certainly days that are cold and windy, and I just don’t want to go out there in the cold and wind to buy groceries. As far as I know, however, I would feel the same way about going out in a car in that kind of weather. I’m no big fan of winter.

There are times when it feels like we are rowing against the stream. Bicycling, for me, is at least partly about building more livable communities. It seems, however, that as the years go by, we see fewer people socially. I don’t think that’s directly related to our not owning a car, but it can be very disconcerting. Weekends roll around, and we’re not heading over to friends’ houses for barbecues or meeting other families at the park. Granted, partly we just don't make the effort. It's easy to cocoon in the house on the weekend. However, being an at-home-parent can be isolating, and it seems, as the kids grow up and make friends who aren’t the children of our own friends, it becomes more so. Friendship, community, and socializing are all essential to me. To fill in some of the gaps left by the children getting older, I’m trying to become active in the bicycling community again, volunteering on the citizen advisory group working on the Bicycling Master Plan for the Santa Fe County MPO. Tim Rogers, who is doing the actual drafting of the plan, is doing an awesome job.

I’ve started to read The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg. It’s about the “third places” that really hold communities together — the cafés, bars, general stores, and so on. The idea is that they are places people gather to talk with one another. The English pub is a classic example. A culture that is less dominated by the automobile is more conducive to third places. Part of the fantasy end of our being carfree is that we’ll have a hand in enlivening these third places. In reality, however, the third places I do visit are not the convivial places of conversation Oldenburg describes. In the coffee shops people sit, their faces buried in their laptops. We rarely run into our friends. There’s also the issue of expense. Even dropping in somewhere for a cup of coffee can get expensive if you do it often enough to become the type of regular Oldenburg discusses in his book. I like the idea of a rich and well populated casual social network, but I can’t afford to sit around sipping lattés and writing my blog entries in the Aztec Café. So I think our challenge, for the next seven years, is how to create a much richer social culture in our life. I think that’s a national issue that isn’t really tied in to transportation, except that the automobile tends to isolate people even more than they already are. Most of the conversations I fall into usually revolve around bicycling and involve meeting other people who bicycle. It is just this kind of casual social interaction that third places are supposed to encourage.

We’ve also, here at the seventh year, reached a point of owning too many bikes. If we were forced by circumstances to get rid of every bike but one per household member, we would hang on to the Xtracycles. So my advice to those who wish to be carfree is to buy an Xtracycle. Unfortunately, we ride all of our bikes, so I’m still just mentally dealing with the clutter they create. The Bike Fridays are great for bike camping with the children, though we don’t do that very often. The children ride their own bikes more frequently, but everything is close enough to us that they don’t ride very far or very often on their own. I don’t think they’re ready to head out on a tour on their own individual bikes. The tandems sit around waiting for camping trips or those times on the weekends when we want to ride with the kids but don’t want to haul them on the Xtracycles. The other bikes? Well, I’m not going to go into that here. Let’s just say that I have trouble letting go of the bikes that we now have.

I’m sure that we’re all in much better physical shape than we would be if we owned a car, though as I get older, my weight seems to be inching up regardless of my biking for transportation. As a parent, I’m curious if my children will grow up to be healthier having never relied for an extended period on being driven around. I also hope that they are at home at the street level and can find their way around on their own. I would like to think that they are more in tune with the natural world, since they are out there in the wind, sun, rain and snow. My son’s kindergarten teacher, a few years back, remarked that Zeb noticed things and appreciated the beauty in the world more than many children. He would pick up leaves to show her and point out flowers. That’s partly just his personality I’m sure, but I hope that it’s also a result of our not going from television to the car to the mall and back. (Not that everyone who owns a car lives like that. Too many do though).

I apologize for the subdued tone of this post. It’s a celebratory day, but maybe we’re in some sort of carfree midlife, though I wouldn’t call it a crisis. (I’m also about to turn 45 on May 21st, so I’m probably personally somewhere about the middle of my own life.)

Being carfree has become simply a normal state of life. The excitement of learning how to get around without a car has subsided somewhat. We now have to tackle other issues of creating a livable, vibrant community for ourselves.

Personally, I would say I need to focus on the following things in the coming years:

1. Writing for publication.
2. Building a vibrant social life.
3. Cutting down on our possessions.
4. Getting down to a reasonable number of pets through attrition.
5. Building a six month emergency fund.
6. Paying a little more attention to my health.

After seven years, we have the carfree part of life down.

Nature Boy Revisited

2011-04-19T09:24:00.000-07:00

Me in the Late Eighties in the Pecos Wilderness

I don’t mean to harp on the reporter’s question, “Would you say you live a back to nature lifestyle.” He, appropriately, took umbrage with my Beckett-like treatment of our conversation. I did not mean to impugn his abilities as a reporter, and I’m sure the article will be very nice.

However, that question, and my reaction to it, has generated a lot of thought on my part.

To a great extent, I was much more of a back-to-nature sort when I owned a car. It was at that point in my life that I was the most immersed in Edward Abbey’s writing, and when I was exploring the Southwestern United States. I went backpacking more often. I canoed down the Gila River during its spring flood. (Luckily, the river was at just the right level that I and John Ruskey made it through without flipping. Be warned — the middle box of the Gila River looks like it could be tricky when the water level is really roaring through.) I’ve rafted on the San Juan and the Green River, and after we sold the car, we went along with friends on a raft trip on the Colorado River. I’ve backpacked through the Pecos Wilderness, Big Bend National Monument, and various places up in Utah.

There was, (and is when I get out to wild places), a certain amount of searching for meaning in all that wilderness travel. Thoreau said, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” It’s a nice sentiment, but what exactly does it mean? Surrounded by nature, perhaps, we can feel a deeper sense of our place in the bigger scheme of things, but a more articulate answer to the question of Wildness never dawned on me. I’m still waiting for that moment when I feel I’m turning easily within the greater design of the Universe.

At this point in my life, I feel this division between Wildness and Civilization is more destructive than informative. In order to get to these places to hike or boat, I traveled by car, and that travel represented a gulf between the wilderness and the scope of my own life, though certainly, the idea of “Wilderness” has been both a literary and physical reality far back into the dawn of history, but before the advent of the automobile, the wilderness was the thing at the edge of the village, and you could hear the wolves howling at night. Perhaps that is still true, though instead of Grendel savaging the mead hall, we have tornadoes and rising sea levels, and those things are still arising from our shadow-side, as our irrational activities destabilize the systems that cushion us from the Shiva-like forces inherent in the natural world. Are we turning our back on our shadow-side, when we leave the cities and suburbs to seek some sort of transcendence in wilderness "areas"? Perhaps the wildness we need to confront in order to realize a better future for ourselves is that which is still in ourselves as represented by our living arrangement. Clearly suburbia is a better manifestation of our irrational, violent, and subversive natures than the remaining areas where life is allowed to unfold unmolested, though in articles such as this one, it is clear that the wilderness is no longer a thing apart. (A nice, short essay on the human shadow is Robert Bly's "The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us." Only the first part of the essay is at the other end of that link. The full essay is in his A Little Book on the Shadow).

Be that as it may, what we now name the wilderness is the thing that you drive to, and it is a place to go to get away from the difficult conditions of the city or suburb.

Jim Kunstler points out in the article I linked to a couple of posts ago, that if we took care of our own living conditions, we would also be taking care of the Earth. Livable cities would preclude the need for suburbs. Supplying our cities with more local food from surrounding farm lands, rather than filling up those lands with housing developments, would go a long way toward putting the brakes on global warming, (at this point, I am cynically in doubt as to whether we can stop it).

If we’re going to solve the problems that face us, we’re going to have to stop being Environmentalists. There’s something puritanical in Environmentalism. We need to stop slapping people over the knuckles with a ruler saying, “you can’t do that, you’re raising the global temperature,” or maybe, “look at your room! It’s a mess!”

I would much rather hear about how I could make my life better and more enjoyable than hear how I’m shouldering part of the blame for destroying the planet.

The planet doesn’t need our help. Life will take care of itself, even if, in the process, it has to reset itself right back down to anaerobic bacteria.

Human communities are what need our attention, intelligence and sacrifice.

Our being carfree probably won’t make a dint in the world’s environmental problems. I do, however, feel that I’ve already made a positive impact on my community. Life is better on a bicycle — for human beings. By taking care of ourselves, perhaps we are also taking care of the planet, but let’s focus on taking care of our cities and farmlands. In most cases, they are probably in greater need of repair than the natural world.

Accidents, Blame and Livable Cities

2011-04-17T07:12:00.000-07:00

I don't usually take the easy way out and simply point to someone else's blog, but there is a very good, lengthy discussion of traffic and livable communities over on Baiku. Thanks to Kent Peterson for the link.

One More Video

2011-04-13T21:13:00.001-07:00

I posted a link to Copenhagenize in the last post I wrote, and checking it to make sure the link worked properly, I found this video. I'm not sure what the WWF in Canada has to do with bicycling, but it's a nice bit of video, and it continues along the line of R. Crumb's "Short History of America" and brings some hope back into the picture.

R. Crumb's Short History of America

2011-04-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

More to Come

2011-04-13T19:36:00.000-07:00

I've been mulling over exactly what it is that motivates me, and how I would present a coherent philosophy of being carfree should any more reporters come calling. Central to my philosophy, and to the way we live our lives, is a belief that we have been investing in a series of diminishing returns since the end of World War ll. The ideas relevant to the way I think about culture and the automobile in general can be found in James Howard Kunstler's critique of suburbia, The Geography of Nowhere. I believe that by simply disinvesting in the automobile, we can begin to repair the damage done by automotive culture, but we do that, basically, one person at a time. It has to be a cultural shift and not a government mandate, and I see the beginnings of that shift in sites like Copenhagenize, and in the actual behavior of the people I see out in the streets -- on bicycles, on foot, out of their cars. I would say I'm much more of an urbanist than a back to nature sort, though I believe some measure of food production should take place in the urban environment. I can't elaborate too far now. I have to go do the parenting, good-night reading thing, and tomorrow I have a full day, but I have plenty of ideas, and I'll be writing about them soon.

In the meantime, this article from the Humanist should introduce you to Kunstler's ideas if you haven't heard of him, and you should listen to the KunstlerCast podcast. By the way, I'm not one hundred percent on board with Peak Oil, though I do believe we're going to run into a long downturn in energy supplies. I'd prefer to think of it as the Long Restructuring rather than Kunstler's "The Long Emergency." But whether we are about to fall off the top of Hubbert's bell curve, or if suddenly someone discovers that we can run our society off pet hair, restructuring our lives around human beings rather than around automobiles will only make life better. The automobile is a tyrannical presence in our culture. It is no longer one in our family life.

Here's the article: Deconstructing the Human Habitat

What News?

2011-04-13T07:35:00.001-07:00

An interviewer came up from the Albuquerque Journal to interview me yesterday about my beekeeping business, Carfree Bees.

It felt like the interviewer and I just weren’t on the same page. I had the feeling that he wanted to make me out to be someone I wasn’t, and I was digging in my heels. At one point, we were looking at our geriatric chickens in the backyard. We do have a young rooster and a young hen that a neighbor gave us. Once again we’re in a position where every neighbor I speak to either loves the rooster or never notices its crowing. The rooster drives us up the f*****g wall, but we’ve butchered one rooster and have given another one away. My son is terrified that this pet, also, will be dispatched in one way or another, so for now, unless we are blessed by a complaining neighbor, the rooster stays.

For the most part, though, the chickens are old. The kids won’t eat them, and I’m really not a chicken butcher. Killing one of them was brutal enough for me for a lifetime.

“Why did you get chickens?” the reporter asked.

I stared at our geriatric chickens and thought a moment.

“Peer pressure,” I said. “It was basically peer pressure. We had friends who had chickens, and it seemed like it would be a good experience for the children.”

I also don’t like buying cheap eggs because of the cruel conditions chickens are kept under, and I don’t like paying $3.50 a dozen for eggs at the Farmer’s Market, but when you figure in the upkeep of aged chickens, you end up with very expensive eggs. It would be much easier just to be a vegan, but I’m not a vegan, and that would have been too complicated of a conversation for an interview.

After we moved back into the house, he asked me some other questions. Part of the conversation went something like this:

Reporter: "Would you say you have a back to nature lifestyle?"
Me: "No."
Reporter: "But you ride your bike everywhere."
Me: "I would say we have a normal lifestyle, but we ride our bikes."
Reporter: "But most people drive everywhere."
Me: "There's not a very big difference between driving and riding a bike in such a small city. We just choose to ride bikes because it makes more sense."
Reporter: "Then how would you describe your family."
Me: "As a normal family that chooses bicycles for transportation."

Somehow, it seemed to me that the reporter was trying to write a story about how we are VERY different. As for the bees, chickens, fruit trees, worm bin -- I don't think an interest in sustainability really makes a person a "back to nature" type. As for living without a car, I kept trying to make the point that we were very normal, and that, given the size and layout of the city we lived in, bicycling was simply a more intelligent choice for a family’s transportation.

Repeat after me:

BICYCLING IS A NORMAL WAY TO TRAVEL AROUND A CITY!

I apologize for the all-caps sentence. I have a great disdain for caps lock writers, but in this case, I think it may be justified.

And I resent a newspaper reporter trying to make me out to be some kind of back to nature freak hippie man.

(Oh, alright, I did live in a converted school bus at one time, but that was a very long time ago now).

Perhaps it does, however, represent a change that is taking place in the culture, and it is a good change. We did start keeping both bees and chickens because we had friends who were doing the same — a surprising number of friends. Our entry into those two particular suburban enterprises occurred even before the great boom in interest in backyard chickens and backyard beekeeping. Since then, given the blogs and magazines I read, the keeping of chickens and bees by suburbanites has become almost banal. I think that’s why I had such a hard time drumming up any reasonable soundbites for the reporter. Bees and chickens are just part of our life, thinking about them occupies maybe two percent of my waking thinking time. Bees and chickens are right up there in the old brain pan rumbling around with my appreciation for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose description of the lawns in Long Island and John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. (The 1959 adaptation streaming on Netflix is my favorite).

I believe the reporter was approaching it from the other side of this recent cultural leap. A change has occurred, and he isn’t aware of it.

What I am excited about at this moment is the normalization of bicycling as a way to get around. That’s the cultural change I see happening at this moment. I wanted to talk about how our decision is not so radical. Santa Fe is a small city of sixty-thousand or so inhabitants. The weather is wonderful most of the year — a little bit of cold, a little bit of heat, a little bit of wind, but nothing too extreme for too long a time.

It simply does not make sense to own and maintain a car to live here.

And that’s about all the news I have to report.

Stockholm Syndrome

2011-04-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

Here's my response to everyone I talk to who says Americans have a love affair with the automobile:

From Wikipedia: "In psychology, Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors as an act of kindness."

The Wikipedia entry is here.

Bicycling Topless

2011-04-02T17:49:00.000-07:00

I asked my wife Laura to do a guest post for Carfree Family. She dicided to write about bicycling topless:

Riding topless – that is, without the helmet.

There’s something subversive about leaving your bike helmet at home and riding topless. All it took were a few subtle suggestions from Paul about challenging this unstylish cult of fear we cyclists live in for me to shed the stinky helmet and awkward rearview glasses mirror and experience the fun and freedom of riding my bike as though it was a normal activity – not one requiring a special ugly outfit. Granted I was already riding home in my work clothes, and up to work in old fleece pants and tops – never one to join the spandex bandwagon.

The first time I left my helmet and mirror at home I realized how much more I could hear and sense around me. I felt as though I was experiencing my journey even more. The wind wasn’t as loud in my ears and I could hear the birds much more clearly. At one point when I was alone on the road I heard the sound of my rear tire crunching over some debris and though it was a cyclist about to pass me. I was as alert and aware of my surroundings as when I walk, only I was moving slightly faster. I was really enjoying myself.

Somehow, once I left the ugliest part of my commuting outfit behind, I felt the urge to spruce up the rest of myself a bit – to ‘pimp my ride’ as it were. I have a pair of big- healed red leather sandals that are always great fun to wear. As it was warming up this week, I celebrated at work by wearing the sandals. Preparing to ride home, I decided “What the heck?” and wore the beautiful red shoes back home. They look good with the red jacket I usually wear and the two together matched my mischievous helmet-free mood. That ride was even better. Drivers gave me more room on the road, waved me through intersections and stopped to allow me across the street on the bike path. I was on to something!

I started fantasizing about the perfect shade of red lipstick to compliment my shoes and jacket. I even checked out a clothing store for the perfect summer biking dress. I kept being drawn to white cotton numbers with wide shoulder straps, fitted waists and puffy skirts – the bolder the embroidered pattern the better.

I’m usually not one to obsess over outfits, but I do have fun mixing and matching color and patterns in my clothing and jewelry. What fun I’m having now – trying out different combinations of things (in my head) that would look beautiful on me as I ride down the hill in the wind…the lovely long scarf blowing behind me, the beautiful skirt and jacket staying perfectly in place as I glide along. I’m certainly crazy enough about this new feeling I get riding topless that I’d wear a special outfit at work all day just to experience the magical 30 minute ride home in it. Hell, if it’s that good an outfit on the bike it’ll be a good one to prance around in the library all day!

My big challenge is living in the foothills. The morning ride is 45 minutes of Up. I leave at 6:45am, which these days means I’m out there in the dawn, just before the sun comes up, peddling hard and working up a good sweat. I wear grungy clothes for this ride and then clean up and change into work clothes at the library. And very soon the sun will be coming up during the morning ride – blinding me and all the drivers behind me. Is there some way to pimp the uphill ride? If I start wearing fun outfits up the hill and into the sun will the drivers start to pay more attention to me? Not that I need them to, I share the morning commute with very polite drivers. But what if I could influence them simply by having a good time? What if they could see how much fun I was having on my bike in my sweet and cool outfits that they decide to get back on their bikes and join me? After all, aren’t we all looking for a way to add a little fun to our work-week? Why not work it into the daily commute?

Living Carfree Update: Kids at Eleven and Nine

2011-04-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

We’ve been carfree since our children were two and four. I thought it was time to update what goes on in our life and how we get around.

The children still go to the local elementary school. It’s a short, ten-minute walk. Selling the car in 2004 simplified our school choice. Both the children went to a local, Waldorf nursery school. We thought of sending them to the main Waldorf school when it was time, but it is out at the edge of Santa Fe, and, at the time, it would have involved bicycling up a high-speed, two lane road, (Rodeo Rd. for you local Sante Feans), during rush hour. Alternatively, we could have cycled up Old Pecos Trail, but that would have necessitated negotiating the interchange for Interstate 25 at rush hour. Who needs that kind of stress. At this point, the Santa Fe Rail Trail has been extended to Rabbit Road, which would prefer a better route to the Waldorf school, but it would still be a long ride on a cold winter's morning. Local is better.

The local school has been great. The one year it was not great, I homeschooled the kids, and they merged back into the school system no problem the following year. In a low-energy future, if that is indeed what we are headed for, local schools and homeschooling will be increasingly more important. It seems a shame people drive across town to take their children to private school, or that communities are designed in this country where the public schools are at a distance from the suburbs they serve, making it difficult for students to walk or bike to them.

Many students do walk and bike to the local elementary school, but it is still surprising how many are driven.

Our son, Zeb, usually rides his bike or his scooter to school. All winter, he bicycled, but for some reason, he has switched to his scooter for the springtime. Our daughter prefers to walk, and I walk with her, and that is our main time to talk with each other. After I leave her with the crossing guard, I make a wide loop around the neighborhood, sometimes listening to podcasts, sometimes just listening to the birds.

On Wednesday, Zeb goes to an After School Fools circus class. I bicycle him there on either the Bike Friday Tandem, or on the Xtracycle. Sadie has swim practice for her swim team at the same time. This year, she learned to ride the public bus system on her own, and she’s proud of her newfound independence. Beginning the process of letting go is difficult, but I realized, when I thought about it, that we worry about violence in the public space, when, in fact, the great majority of violence takes place in private space. It would seem that, as a culture, we have retreated into a world of hidden darkness. The bus systems, the streets and parks are relatively benign by comparison. Laura picks Sadie up on the Xtracycle on her way home from work.

Sadie does have a bicycle, but she prefers the bus at this point.

On Thursday, I bicycle her on the tandem or Xtracycle to her circus class.

Friday night is Cub Scouts for my son, and that’s just a short bicycle ride away. Sometimes, we accept a ride to Scouting events that are far away, but most of the Scout camping trips we turn into an excuse for a bicycle tour. I’ve been carfree for so long that I feel much less safe when I am in a car, and I worry when the children are in school vans or carpools for school field trips.

My wife rides an Xtracycle up to work every morning, leaving around 6:45 and returning at 4:00.

I use my Xtracycle for grocery shopping, beekeeping, taking honey to the Farmer’s Market (in conjunction with my Bikes-at-Work trailer), and transporting children.

I also use the single speed for shopping trips, loading the front basket when I don’t have a lot to buy, or using the BicycleR Evolution trailer if I’m buying lots of groceries, dog food, or chicken food.

On the weekends, we usually use the two Bike Friday tandems to do things around the town with the kids. Sometimes we take the bus downtown. On very rare occasions we walk from our house to downtown. We like to take the New Mexico Railrunner to Albuquerque on the weekend, but they've truncated the train's operating schedule so that it's almost not worthwhile. We only have a two or three hour window in which to do anything before we have to head back up, so we did not renew our membership with the Explora and with the Biopark this year. Once summer hits, we may join up once again. The weekday schedules are more amenable to family trips.

My Rivendell is pretty much on standby for recreational riding or the rare night time trip to a meeting. I occasionally get out on it for a solo tour. I’m enjoying the Schmidt Dynohub and Edeluxe headlight. My Xtracycle has a twelve volt bottle generator. As I’ve mentioned before, generator lights are the way to go, at least for me. I’m never good about keeping batteries charged.

People often ask those without cars: “What would you do if there was an emergency?”

I always answer, “we would call an ambulance.”

The worst medical issue we have experienced happened when we had taken the train down to Albuquerque to the zoo. My daughter was climbing up the slide in the zoo’s playground, and she slipped and broke off the middle center of her front teeth. She was in serious pain. I didn’t know what to do. Was it an ambulance style emergency? Should I find a dentist down in Albuquerque and get her there right away? I fumbled around in the zoo's offices trying to reach our dentist on the weekend, reaching the answering service, but still not reaching the dentist, pouring over the ABQ phone book. By the time I had reached numerous dead ends, the intensity of the pain had receded, so we just took the train home and went to the dentist Monday morning. We’ve had one ambulance trip. Sadie passed out in school, and they called the paramedics, and I had them take her to the emergency room just to be certain there wasn’t a serious issue. Once, Zeb was running such a high temperature, and he was so lethargic, that I had a friend give us a ride to the doctor, who then sent us to the emergency room. He ended up fine. So that’s what we do in an emergency.

The Xtracycle and the trailer take care of groceries. For some reason, that’s the other big concern for people. “How will you buy groceries?” they ask, as if our ancestors regularly starved before the invention of the automobile for want of grocery transportation technology. There are, of course, numerous ways to carry groceries, from backpacks, to panniers, to trailers.

I’m always happy to answer any questions on the practical aspects of being carfree.

Santa Fe Cycle Chic

2011-03-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

Just for fun, I registered Santa Fe Cycle Chic with blogspot.

I am not, however, much of a photographer of strangers. I'm always afraid I'll look creepy if I go pointing my camera at people I don't know, or even asking people I don't know if I can photograph them.

This spring, I might make the effort to get over that creepiness paranoia and shoot some photos.

In the meantime, I put out a call for any Santa Fe photographers who have photos of people cycling in normal clothes to email them to me. You get full credit and help promote cycling as a normal means of transportation in the City Different.

Fearful Motorists

2011-03-29T07:55:00.001-07:00

I have heard several accounts of motorist complaints that makes them sound not so much hostile towards bicyclists, but confused and frightened. Here’s a letter to the editor that appeared in The New Mexican on March 24. I believe Ann Mills might be the same person I spoke to at a community meeting concerning Santa Fe County’s Bicycle Master Plan. It turns out that the cyclist she almost hit was at fault in the encounter, but it’s created in her an absolute fear that she’s going to hit a cyclist. It’s an interesting letter in that it’s self-contradictory:

As the weather warms, more people are riding bicycles. I want to remind everyone to share the roads, particularly the bicyclists! Lately, I have had near-disastrous encounters with bicyclists who feel as though they own the roads, and I want to remind them that they don’t.

Furthermore, they will never win a challenge with two tons of quick-moving steel, so why try? It’s a nice idea to give bikes five feet of passing space, but downtown drivers often don’t have five feet to give. Bicycles have their place, and it is never down the center of the road. They need to observe signs, laws of the road, and courtesy, just as drivers do. Then we can all be safe and get along.

I agree with Ms. Mills on many of her points. Bicyclists don’t own the roads. Motorists don’t own the roads. Pedestrians don’t own the roads.

Bicyclists do need to follow traffic law and be courteous. However, I am confused, in that she clearly feels bikes are OK on the road that she should state “Bicycles have their place, and it is never down the center of the road.” Maybe her encounter was with someone who was not just taking the lane, but doing something really dangerous, like biking against traffic and weaving onto the centerline. Who knows?

In general, I never hear of bicyclists challenging cars, and I'm not sure what she means by that comment.

The other anecdote I heard, that was very disturbing, came from the late Gail Ryba, (bike activist extraordinaire and good friend, who passed away from liver cancer a little while back). She told me she spoke to a woman at a meeting who was complaining about cyclists on Old Las Vegas Highway past the turnoff for Eldorado. The shoulder ends at that point, and cyclists have to move into the roadway. To paraphrase what I was told: “If I’m driving along at 65 mph, and I see a bicyclist in the road, I might hit him!”

It might look like a hostile remark in print, but the woman was concerned, not hostile. It was almost as if she were having some sort of existential crisis in which she no longer controlled her car. When Gail suggested to the woman that she should slow down until it was safe to pass, she became confused and flustered.

Statistically, of course, crashes in which bicyclists are rear-ended are way down on the list. Those confused drivers must put on their brakes at some point. But there does seem to be a real fear on the part of drivers that they do not have control over their vehicles. It’s almost a case of “the medium is the message.” The car is designed to zoom down the highway. When someone is driving down a highway, they’re not thinking about how their car is also designed to slow down. I can empathize. I can almost get inside a driver’s head, though I drive, on average, every two years. “There’s a bicycle way up there! I’m getting closer to him! I’m getting even closer! He’s right in the way! There’s oncoming traffic! What am I going to do?!”

This situation is one of those in which the more people encounter bicycles on the road and have to slow down for them and wait until it’s safe to pass, the more they’ll be experienced in knowing what to do. Perhaps some information in print, or extra test questions on a driver’s exam, would also help educate motorists about traveling with bicycles.

Bear in mind — some motorists are frightened of their own destructive possibilities. They’re more frightened by your presence than you are of theirs.