Subject: Best bike in a blackout?
Author: David Washburn
Date: Aug 15, 2003, 6:08 PM
Post ID: 1714164170
A loopframe, but you knew that...
We had a little power outage here in the baked apple, 50 million
consumers affected. The lights went out at aproximately 4:15 p.m. and I
was on the Queensboro Bridge putting along on the Eldo/SP. When I
reached the Queens side of the East river it became obvious something
was amiss, no stop lights!
I always found them to be a nuisance anyway. I got home a little faster
as a result but what is a home without a significant other to cook your
dinner? The Bonster(She Who Must Be Obeyed) was trapped in lower
Manhattan. She had to borrow a cell phone from a colleague to give me
her location: The vortex of NYC traffic insanity.
Forty minutes of lanesplitting, curb-hopping and pleading with cagers
got me to the Five Points. (See Gangs of New York for historical
significance). There traffic stopped inching and came to a halt. My
bike was showing signs of heat prostration so I shut it down and turned
pedestrian, pushing my bike on the sidewalk until I could fire it up
again. I cut though a reeking alley, past some police barricades and
made my way to my rendezvous outside a Chinese funeral parlor off Mott
street.
My wife ditched her corporate suit, slipped on her denims, boots, gloves
and helmet and we weaved our way out of Chinatown by ignoring one way
signs and scraping past cars in the gutter or passing them using curb
cuts to ride the sidewalk.
Once on the Manhattan bridge headed to Brooklyn we were O.K. The river
breeze was cooling and we had a fantastic view of the crowds of
pedestrians thronging the Brooklyn Bridge to our right. The inbound
lanes had become the worlds largest pedestrian arcade. The Brooklyn
Queens Expressway was another 30 minutes of lanesplitting as every exit
spilled back onto the highway. With no traffic lights the local streets
were pandemonium.
When we made it home I cooked dinner on the grill and we had a nice
candlelit meal in the backyard. No planes overhead, no rap n' salsa
serenades from the neighbors, just a big yellow moon and crickets and
fireflies for company. The power came back on this morning at 8:00 AM
and the Eldo got an oil change and a wash and wax as a reward for a job
well done.
David in NYC