It’s almost seven p.m. Friday night. It is getting dark as I exit the Red Line at Vermont and Wilshire. I have serious doubts about whether I will make it before the others depart. I grab my newly repaired, basement-junk ten-speed bicycle from the rack on the bus and peddle frantically down Wilshire Boulevard chasing the setting sun to the appointed place for my first ride with “Critical Massâ€, an organization created for the sole purpose of meeting at a predetermined place and time and traveling by self propulsion through city streets en mass.
All around me I can see, feel, and hear the exodus of millions of tons of fossil burning cars and trucks as they choke the narrow corridors of access to the city center. The streets and avenues are insufficient to accommodate the volume of traffic unforeseen by their architects. This domain of fuel burning speeds and heavy metal momentum dwarfs me and I feel afraid and I imagine that I am the annoying and completely un-cool little brother, slowing down the older kids and getting in their way. My “big brothers’†frustration is palpable. They jeer their horns at me. I choke on their smoke and diesel. Finally I arrive at the Western Avenue metro station. I am half an hour late. But the bicyclists are still here.
Tucked into the pedestrian vestibule like so many hanging bats in a cave waiting to disperse, they are fat and skinny, boys and girls, tall and short young and old. Each one sits casually poised upon a two-wheeled, two-peddled traveling machine. No one leads or organizes. Our bicycles connect us. The idea of the bicycle leads us.
A whistle blows and one of the riders starts north on Western. A few bikes follow and I hear a couple of voices crying “let’s goâ€. Our group becomes a single organism and occupies the whole of north-bound Western Avenue. I no longer feel the inferiority which had washed over me when riding solo. I am now a part of a greater whole, a single cell of a larger being, protected in the bosom of our collective. Now it is we who set the pace on the street. Almost no manifest resentment comes from our gas burning brothers and sisters. They seem to submit to our dominant synergy. Horns honk, but not in anger. They sound the ‘beep beep’ of joyfully approving surprise instead.
Some of the more experienced participants “cork†major intersections as we pass. This involves holding the streets open after the light has turned red in order that the entire “critical mass†can make it through together. It is this behavior which has garnered the irritation of some municipal officials who feel strongly that Critical Mass should stop breaking traffic laws as this, they argue, reduces public safety. Critical Mass has no hierarchy and therefore no one available to reply to this criticism. Some participants explain to me, that the act of “corking†civilly disobeys a vehicular infrastructure which exalts the automobile over alternative transportation methods such as cycling. Participants hope to raise awareness by the temporary re-acquisition and occupation of city streets and by acting directly to disobey the very laws which have relegated cycling to a dangerous vehicular afterthought.
Our ride takes us to Sunset Blvd where we co-mingle with the Friday night Hollywood elite. Every twenty something hipster and his emaciated trophy date turns to regard us in awe. ‘What’s going on?†they cry to us in desperate paroxysms of envy. Perhaps they fear being upstaged by such a group of singular nobodies who have morphed into a monster collective celebrity. As we pass the chi-chi clubs, the paparazzi attending the entrances and exits of the Paris Hiltons and Brttany Spears focus their lenses on us. We are so “the happening thingâ€.
The greatest moment comes as we fly past the Chinese and Kodak Theatres on Hollywood Boulevard. The sites of the Oscars and the cemented footprints of stars cannot compete with us. The tourists, stuffed with the artifice and contrivance of Disneyland and Universal Studios applaud and roar with approval….and we are just ordinary mortals riding our ordinary bikes. But as ensemble we are movie stars!
As I ride home on the red line train I meditate on my Friday night with Critical Mass. Again I am alone in a sea of humanity who regard me and my bike with a mixture of indifference and contempt. It seems a strange shunning after an almost universal approval.
Critical Mass is a direct action flash-mob on wheels. We ride to be together and have fun and to remind people that physical stasis is not the inevitable result of being without a car. It teaches community and unity of people and of purpose; even here in L.A. where you are considered to be nobody if you don’t have “wheelsâ€; even here where a walk to the store just a couple of blocks away is considered unthinkable; even here where the geographic city limits stretch for hundreds of square miles in all directions; even here where we once boasted the most efficient and ubiquitous public transportation system anywhere until the likes of General Motors and Firestone Rubber tore up the tracks and consigned us to our four-wheeled coffins.
We are a critical mass of people. We find each other by leveraging the power of cyberspace to meet at a time and place in the physical world to do what we enjoy and to breathe and peddle and to thereby teach peace, community and ecology. It really doesn’t get much better than that.
