It’s national Occa Day! A day to celebrate the dumping of convicts on a coastline that’s now the most expensive real estate in the country. It’s also the day to celebrate the big invasion of an ecology hitherto relatively untroubled by far too many people. But that’s all OK. Boot scooting in Tamworth’s Country Yokel festival aside…

I have nothing against the place where I live. I don’t want to live anywhere else and I have seen many of those someplace-else places where other people live (I like the region of Provence in France almost as much as here). Nothing against Aussies either; but I am a global citizen rather than an adulator of human culturally constructed boundary making; especially when most Aussies persist in pretending they are Americans to a degree that would indicate pathological cultural insecurity. Folk here are like folk anywhere else. No better or worse. They are all folk; many of whom drive cars which makes them lesser folk to me. If you are going to claim nationalistic individuality, at least tie that individuality to the ecological realities to which you deign to attach yourself. Flowing robes for desert places, floral shorts for tropical islands. But where-oh-where do polyester-suited tie-wearers and grunge kitted ‘hey dude’ high-fivers fit into this big brown land? And who said ‘we’ own it anyway? I am universally pleased that there are still more kangaroos than people jumping about the place just to remind us that the reality of the non-human world persists outside the city gates.

No, the true identity mark of a man, or of a woman, is not the place they occupy but the bicycling they do. I’m not prejudiced. I just don’t like non-cyclists…

But, even that’s getting a touch tenuous these days. Via my ride out to a local dam on this day of way too many degrees on the Centrigrade scale, I managed an epiphany. Something occurred to me that never occurred to me before. It’s a simple observation, probably overly apparent to every one else but me. But that’s what epiphany’s are for. They power the old light bulb moments that linger in the memory and inject our world views with added layers of peripheral vision.

The setting for my illumination was this long hot road out to that scenically splendid, though caravan infested dam. I ride this ride every Tuesday. 80km of nice fast pace making with a few good hills thrown in to wake me up. Today, being Occa Day, there were lots of Aussies out driving their cars with flags waving from roof racks and bumper grills. And there were lots of mountain bikers out for a ride. They were the source of my inspiration.

You see, anyone can buy a mountain bike. Some even take them off road! But most don’t. And most of those only ride a few times a year. But good on them I say! Better to be out on a bicycle vastly unsuited by design to the application to which it is being applied than to never ride a bike at all. But with this many sandshoe-teeshirted-hydration packed riders out all at once, it’s only natural that they’d end up collating into tribal packs. And that’s where things were coming unstuck.

Riding up behind, it was more than a little disconcerting to notice that these distant relatives of the cycling tribe were riding like wheat farmers topping up on a two-day end of harvest binge drinking spree. Someone had the idea that they should ride in the formation of a peloton. Two abreast and lined out down the road. Except that no one had the vaguest idea of how a peloton might actually work. Except as a strategy devised to totally infuriate every car driver who might come up behind. On every hill, they were weaving around from one side of the road to the other. On hills or the flats, they filled the whole road, to the overheated chagrin of all the caravan toting motorists also out for a visit to the dam. Overtaking them is exciting. Get in close and they loose their brains; it’s like playing Russian Roulette. Maybe they will hold a line so you can pass. But maybe not. My ride became like riding a needle through a dizzy drunken basket weaving frenzy. I’ve never encountered such dangerous road skills from any kind of road user before.

And here’s my point. What do you think the average car driver is going to perceive when they come across riders such as these? Confirmation for their anti-cycling biases for sure. But shock and awe as well. Shock at the scare their random riding reactions invoke. Awe that they’d be allowed on the road at all. But here’s the thing. To the general motorist, these folk are perceived to be cyclists! To their simple car driving minds (how else could they accede to belong to that particular tribe?), these are cyclists, I am a cyclist, I am like them! No wonder I keep getting shouted at by the car tribe as they pass me by. No wonder we roadies keep getting road raged by those coffin-boxed jockeys of fuming tin.

Honestly, to my mind, our causal mountain biking counterparts are more like car drivers forced into penitence served out on two wheels. It’s a forced fit that really does not work. Some might progress to better things; but most will not. But it suddenly occurred to me that these are the folk for whom all this suddenly politically prioritised cycling infrastructure is being constructed wherever we look. I can now see why car drivers want cyclists off the road! I can see why they advocate the construction of cycling paths and the like. And I can see that if, to their eyes, I am a member of that same fraternity, that they’d expect me to cycle in those places too. My source of anger is not directed at these casual bikers, but at the incapacity of car drivers to apply the same nuance of difference and distinction that they apply to their own world of cars. In that world, there’s little cars, big cars, SUV’s, busses, trucks, sports cars and motorised shopping carts; all different and recognised for their various distinctive needs and capabilities. Why can’t we cyclists be given the same rights to distinctive difference? On this day of nationalistic fervour, I demand the right to be called a citizen of the road cycling fraternity. I demand the right to be treated as such. And not lumped into that camp of misplaced car drivers experimenting with chain store mountain bikes on public roads. I demand the right to ride on the road and be given my space. Let it be known that folk in my tribe travel as fast as cars in town. Let it be known that we can descend hills at near the posted legal limits. And spare us from those horrendous cycle paths! I want my own flag! A full-on Caisse D’Epargne kit would be just perfect for the identity I’d be keen to proclaim!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.