The Friday Night Alleycat

The paper was soaked in my hand, a soggy rag. I rolled up to the side walk to take shelter from the rain. It was raining hard but hopefully it would not last. I was eager to get on the road but knew from experience that spending a few minutes planning the route can save time later on. I saw Derren and Rebecca there both clutching their wet manifests in their hand as well. At Derrens suggestion we ducked into a laundromat to plan our route. We agreed to attack the city first and then work our way around the northern points after that. It seemed logical at the time. The rain died from a dull roar to a light spatter and we pushed out into the city night. Rebecca’s bike was not built for speed and Derren and I adjusted our speed to account for it. We took the bike path into the city. It was not cold but the rain soaking my arms and legs sent shivers down my spine. The city was heaving with peds and traffic, the buzz of a Friday night. The adrenalin started to pump as we rolled down Murray toward our first location. We scribbled down the sign and rode quickly off. It was thrilling to ride amongst these people. The real thing is still better but as substitutes go the Friday night Alley cat is as good as it gets. You get the traffic, the thrill of the chase and, for a few brief moments, when you’ve warmed up to the task ahead, that Zen moment of cycle messengering, when everything else shuts down, all the noise goes away, and all there is is the cycling, the pedaling, and the traffic. The route you’ve laid out ahead of you and the endless moment as you weave your way through the city traffic.

When I was riding this city for a living it was the drug that dug me out of bed in the mornings, the high I sought with every run and as I learnt the city, over weeks and months it became increasingly harder to find. At first every job would take me somewhere new and thus every job was its own reward. After that every run brought a new way to map the city in my mind, a new way to see the city I lived in. After a while I knew the main routes through the city, I knew a few of the short cuts, a few of the little back alleys and access roads that can shave minutes off a drop. After a while it was the number of jobs I had on, the complexity of the route, the changing nature of that route, rushing east, hiking back up into west, across the tracks and back, 2,3,4 on, more, 5,6,7 on more, more, more! I can get more on, always more. I never wanted to stop, I never wanted to slow down. My goal was to be lost in that moment where every drop off is followed by a pick up or two, or three. I loved it. It wasn’t the speed of the cycling, I am not a fast rider, strong, yes, but not fast, it was the speed of knocking them out. Five minutes per job, four, three if they were locals, more jobs, more money, more riding until 5pm rolled around and you look up, blinking, into the setting sun, wondering where the day has gone.

Like I said an alley cat is a substitute. But we are in the city, three stops down and nine to go. We ride up Beaufort and pull three out quickly. It’s electric now, each point feels like a victory. Alex meets up with us, this alleycat is for him. They call him Quicksilver on account of his apparent similarity to Kevin Bacon. We churn through them but already I am doubting our route. We have William still to do and that runs parralel with Beaufort so we will have to double back on oursleves whichever way we go. We’ve been joined by one more rider and we are loving the ride. The rain comes down again, this time we barely notice. It is hard and fast and the road is slick. I watch Quicksilver bang through a red and disappear past the next check point. It is exciting and the gnawing feeling that we have attacked this all wrong does not spoil that. I think back to Adelaide and the main race there. I fucked that up by going the wrong way too. It is a common mistake. Plenty of riders do it. Riders do it at work too. For some reason I found it easier at work than at play, don’t ask me why, maybe it was the money, always a great motivator, maybe it was the nature of the drop points. Alex skid stops and doubles back as we scribble down the word on the green sticker. I hang back having trouble with my toe clip and afford myself the luxury of belting up Beaufort on the wrong side. The rain against my face and the lights of the oncoming cars energises me and I catch up with the others as we turn left and head toward Lord St. Alex loses us when we slow at a cross roads to regain our group. We ride on toward the check point, four riders, all, unusually, non couriers, although two of us are former couriers.

Courier riding is different to other styles. It is at once faster and slower. Because you are riding for relatively short hops in heavily built up and busy areas you only get up the kind of speeds you would in other cycling disciplines for a short time, if at all. In the daily grind there is as much worth in effective time management off the bike as there is in riding fast. Different people have different ways of approaching it and there are many ways to be an effective courier. I was a steady rider, once my fitness levels were up, I would ride at a reasonably fast pace that pushed me but not excessively so, conscious, as I was, that something had to be kept in reserve. I’d ride with a sense of the full days work rather than from job to job. It may have slowed me down on some stretches but on others it was an advantage. As the afternoon rolled around and the 3pm set runs came up I would always start to push myself that little bit more, partly because it was busy but also because I knew that with only two hours left I could afford to burn the additional energy.
We cross back onto William for the final stretch and that is when I realise just how badly we have screwed up the ride. Starting with the city was all well and good but it meant we rode past two of the first stops on our way in and we now have three stops left two of which are to the south and one of which is to the north. I curse. We split up and two of us head down William street toward Northbridge and two head up into North Perth. It won’t save the race but it is the only way to do it without taking fifteen minutes to double back on ourselves. We ride down William street as fast as we can and head into the busy streets of Northbridge. It is a lot of fun navigating the wet streets and dodging the drunk peds and I quickly forget how badly we have screwed up the race. We ride it out as fast as we can. The last three check points go down fairly quickly and we ride into meet everyone to friendly cheers knowing, by the size of the crowd, that we have not done well.

We came DFL. We screwed it up big time. You win some and you lose some. There are busy days and quiet days. There are days when your legs spend all day waking up and your operator is screaming at you to grab rush jobs from every corner of the city. Days when you have enough energy to pedal forever and yet all you get is city locals. Days when the bike decides to spit every mechanical problem there is at you. And every now and then, every so often, those days when everything is in sync, the work flows, the bike rolls, and the city opens itself up to you in ways that only a scant few have the privilege to really understand. It is something about how we live together, something about how the pieces of this place fit together.. The marriage of man and machine, a physical and emotional understanding of the relationship we have with our technologies. A physical relation with this urban world that affords an understanding of the city environment that many will never be lucky enough to see.

These narratives are vital to our ability to comprehend and cope with our environments. So, in much the same way as a farmer might say of a city dweller, they know nothing of this country life, of the environment, so I would say that none can truly know the city, no one can really understand the urban environment who has not scratched their living from it in one way or another. The existence of the suburban bubble and the bubble that is the office or factory leads to a sort of elimination of that interaction. It denies you your real ability to enjoy the thrill of your world. The city is a thrilling thing, just like the natural world, it is as wild and unpredictable, it is as dangerous and beautiful, and it holds within it, as true a way of life as any and for me riding for a living was a way of accessing that.

Whycycle?

I remember talking to my friend Benee about cycling, about what it represented to us. It was late at night, after a race and we were drunk, of course, on the cheap beer that we we always drink after a race. I said that for me it represented freedom, that it was the feeling of freedom for me. He told me that he had taken his bike down to watch the sky show on the Esplanade and he had cycled past the rows and rows of cars and he had ridden right up to the foreshore and watched the whole sky show, in all its wonderful glory and then, after the show, had ridden home, past all the people trudging slowly back their cars. And I had known what he meant. I’d gone down there in a car that night, I’d parked a long way away, because I’d had to, because that is how it has to work with the cars, and it was hot and we’d walked for half an hour through the afternoon heat to the Esplanade and the girls had complained because it was hot and the walk was long and then, on the way back I had carried my youngest daughter asleep in my arms. My eldest daughter had been tired too, I had wanted to carry her too, but of course I couldn’t, not over that distance. So I knew what he meant because I’d done the other thing and it is freedom, to ride in, past the parking frenzy, past the esky haulers, the drunk teenagers and their sozzled dramas, past the police and the paramedics and right into the heart of the crowd, right into the middle of where you want to be. It is freedom to turn around, after the last firework has blazed its spectacular path across your retina and jump on your bike and ride through the massed humanity in all its post celebratory glory and ride out through all that while we are trapped in the traffic and the confusion.

That is freedom.

And yes freedom, like that, is a form of individualism. You are not one of the herd, you are free to move when others are trapped, in this case specifically trapped, by their adherence to a cultural norm. But it is more also. The bicycle, with its peculiar reliance on human motivation brings far more than that, it extends your potential, it utilises what you are, physically to move you (and others) from A to B. That is a freedom too. It is a machine, like a car or a computer, a fridge or a factory. But it is a machine that exists on a very human scale and interacts with us on a very human level too. You place your faith and energy in its two wheels and it propels you forward to where you want to go. Of course the tyres may tear or the brakes may wear but essentially this machine will take you where you want to go quickly and efficiently. People used to cross the Nullabor using pedal power, they still do occasionally. Yes it is slow compared with the awesome speed of the motor car, and of course it is physically much harder work for its rider, but therein lies the secret. We are animals, physical shapes cut from the same cloth as all the other animals on this planet, what makes us different is not that we are not the same shape, but what we choose to do with it. And the bicycle is, for me, one of the purest lessons in what to do with who and what we are. It is a machine, a part of how we have changed both ourselves and this planet beyond all recognition, but it is the good part of that. It utilises our energy to propel us forward, to take us where we want to go. It is easy to cycle next to someone who is walking and converse, it is easy to stop and chat, to pause to check somebody is okay, to see if another person is in need of help, and yet it also allows us to move between places far quicker and with far less effort than we would without it. It requires infrastructure in much the same way a car does, roads facilitate ease of use and of course the parts are created using industrial methods. But it is not the same. It is not the same because of the scale of the endeavor, because of the scale of the obsession and because we are open to the world (and therefore more a part of it) rather than hidden away from it. It is easy to stop, to look around, to smell the air, to feel the sun on your back, to cool yourself in the wind. Freedom then becomes freedom not just of movement, or even of being an individual as opposed to part of some mass of humanity or other, it becomes freedom to relate to the world on human terms whilst still retaining some of the best and most positive aspects of industrialisation. And the best and most positive aspects of industrialisation are, of course, the best aspects of who and where we are right now.

So I cycle to work and it’s a fair ride and some days I take the train or the bus or some combination of bike and train, sometimes just to mix it up a little, sometimes because my bikes fucked, or I am, and sometimes I don’t ride because I just plain don’t want to. But when I do ride I love it, when I do ride it is like swimming in the ocean for me. It gives me perspective and allows me to move and think at the same time, which is where the best thinking gets done in my head. I am engaged in the journey physically and that is vital, it is as important as engaging with the world emotionally. If you can engage in a thing you gain an understanding that an intellectual analysis simply cannot give. It is hard, perhaps impossible to describe, but cycling is one of the things I use to help remind myself how important and how easy it is to do that, to interact with the world and to give yourself over to it. So why talk about this? Why talk about this feeling I have? Because I have a bad feeling the current trend seems to be an attempt to disengage as much as possible. Why go out there, amongst all those other people, when you can hide in your little bubble, play your Nintendo, drive your 4WD and plug your MP3 into all the moments in between. And before you say it I love all those things, I love all those things and more. I love the cars and the computers, the mobiles and the malls, I like eating burgers from fast food joints whilst yelling into my mobile phone whilst driving on the free way at 150. It is fun to drive yourself into that bubble, it is spectacular and consuming in the same way that it demands you to consume. I don’t think we need to strip it back to some kind of pre-industrial hell hole. I just think that we need to accept ourselves for what we really are, physical beings, who need physical interaction with world on every level. We need to make that work for us, we need to make sure that we interact with our environment on that basic level as well as others. In the industrialised west it can sometimes be easy to forget how good that can make us feel and that is what cycling reminds me, everyday. Oh and I reckon you feel like you’re going faster if you are on a bike at 50km than if you’re in a car at 150km.

This one is for Benee. Brisbane is lucky to have you my friend.