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Bikes Not Bombs "The World Trade Center sits like a postcard at the end of her block." --bicyclewire Interview, August 30, 2001 I was at the computer working on bicyclewire.com when a friend called with the news that the World Trade Center had been attacked. It's taken me almost a week to get back to it. Just when I think I've grasped the enormity of it, when I think I've come to some sort of terms with that wounded skyline, it's like I get amnesia and my brain starts back yet again at square one, with the black silhouette of jetliner streaking toward the unbroken glass and steel. On Sunday I tried to get away from the constant news coverage and found myself watching a special about Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic in May of 1927. To make it across, Lindbergh stripped his single-engine plane down so that it was little more than a flying gas tank. He flew without a parachute, figuring if he went down in the icy Atlantic he was doomed anyway. Weight saved: about 25 pounds. The plane's seat was made of wicker. To further reduce weight, he trimmed the margins from his maps. (And you thought Eddy Merckx was a weight-savings fanatic.) He took off from Roosevelt Field in New York. When his plane was spotted over Ireland, hundreds of thousands spontaneously began to make their way to Le Bourget, the airfield outside of Paris where he would land. In the United States, people were huddled around radios, hanging on every report. Dancing broke out in the streets when news came of his success, after 33 hours and 32 minutes in the air. The ticker tape parade he received in New York City has never been equaled. It really wasn't all that long ago. There are people who witnessed that day who are still alive today. Have we become fundamentally less innocent in that short time? More evil? Or is technology just giving greater expression to the atrocities humans are capable of? One of the scariest things about last Tuesday's attack is the way it continues to reverberate through every aspect of our lives, reminding us just how complex the infrastructure of modern life is, and how we must continue to feed the never sated, never satisfied engines of commerce to keep it all standing. While it is hard to get back to bicycles in a time of jets and skyscrapers and death and destruction, it seems to be about the only thing I can contribute right now, to get back to the daily tasks of life, back to a more human scale. The Scorcher 9.17.01
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