Chapter 10
Is This Bum Trip Really Necessary?
Tying up a city like Paris probably does more good than harm to those who make, fuel, or sell automobiles. Pierre Poilane, the baker, got caught in his delivery truck during the demonstration. He burned gas for an hour and a half instead of five minutes. He wore and tore not only his nerves but his crankshaft, clutch lining, spark plugs, fuel pump, camshaft, distributor head, fan belt. That megajam probably took five days of life off the life of his little Citroën truck; it will bring him five days sooner to his Citroën dealer to replace it.
Biking is a much better way than bike-ins to bring down the horsepower structure. Let's take a few figures out of the air, it's the only place I can get them because MIT has not yet done a computer study for me. It seems there are 61 million cyclists in the United States. That's hard to check, I got it from the New York Times. I don't know where they got it, cyclists pay no registration fees, I don't know whether or not they are on the census. Still, I think we can assume that 10 million of them live in suburbs and cities and that they usually use cars. But what if, individually, like humans, not ants, they decided to bike instead of drive tomorrow? Let's say each does 10 miles. I'm not stacking the deck in my favor with that assumption. In The Closing Circle, Barry Commoner quotes traffic studies that show 90 percent of all automobile trips to be 10 miles or less in length. He states that "the mean work-residence travel distance in U.S. metropolitan areas is about five miles for central-city dwellers and about six miles for those living in suburban areas." When our cyclist pedals 10 miles in his day instead of taking his car that gets 20 miles to a gallon, he saves half a gallon of gas. I'll keep the figures round. That's 5 million gallons of gas a day that someone is not selling. How much a gallon? That depends no one's state. Thirty cents? Sold... the offer will never be repeated. That makes $1,500,000 less a day for the oil business and the highway business grubstaked by gasoline taxes. Since our 10 million cyclists ride for business and pleasure 300 days a year (another number I use mainly because it's round), this is going to cost Esso and the highway commissioner $450,000,000 a year.
As a gas-saver, the bicycle is in a class by itself. If oilmen knew its potentialities, they would go around stealing bikes instead of worrying about their depletion allowances. Professor Rice, who did all my homework for me in that article he wrote for Technology Review, has estimated the cyclist's fuel consumption. I will spare the reader the details---I spared myself most of them---but what he has done, basically, is to convert the car's gasoline consumption and the cyclist's calorie intake into the same measure, the British thermal unit used to express energy. He concludes that a cyclist can get over 1,000 passenger-miles per gallon, an estimate based on the 1,800 extra calories of food that a cyclist must burn (whether in steak, ice cream, or pastry, he does not say) to do 72 miles in a 6-hour day. He compares this with the automobile that gets 40 passenger-miles per gallon (figuring 20 miles to a gallon and 2 persons to a car). Like me, he loads the dice against himself so that the other side can't yell "foul" while it bites, gouges, and groin-kicks. He assumes a 40-pound bike, which is a very weighty assumption. In my own experience, I put out the same effort to do 60 miles a day on a Peugeot touring bike, 90 on a semiracer, and 120 on a Peugeot racer with all the trimmings. I don't want to get into an academic argument with Professor Rice, but I think one could double this figure; 2,000 miles a gallon for a cyclist on a racer or its equivalent. Doubling might even be conservative: with a friend of mine, I once did 62 miles in 3 hours and 45 minutes, each taking a turn up front against the wind. That's no great feat of cycling, even for two riders with a combined age of ninety-eight, but it's a pretty efficient use of British thermal units.
I hope Professor Rice agrees with me, I agree with everything he says. He can really make the numbers talk. He has estimated that pipelines, inland waterways, and railroad freight used 5.5 billion gallons of petroleum in 1965 to provide 1,250 billion ton-miles of transportation. They consumed only 7 percent of America's transportation energy to account for 60 percent of all transportation, passenger or freight. It is such cold statistics that should make us aware of the labyrinth into which we have blundered. We are told we have to burn gasoline to keep our living standard flying high. Do we live better when trucks haul our freight instead of trains? The biggest con game of all is worked on the underdeveloped countries. We tell them to get into the act, to follow our lead upward on the consumption graphs. We have the effrontery to say to the Bengalis that they will stop sleeping on the sidewalks of Calcutta some day only if we can continue to drive to work, jet to play, and stuff ourselves over the brim.
Our fairy tale of figures hasn't ended. Let's get back to the cyclist who stops driving 10 miles a day. That means he is putting 3,000 miles less a year on his car (we'll let him sleep late on Sundays), call it a third less than normal use. Or our 10 million newly converted cyclists are adding a third to the lives of the cars they own. They will buy a third fewer cars, that's 3,300,000 cars that won't be made or sold at $2,500 a car (as good a buy as gas at 30 cents a gallon, I'm not cooking the figures), and GM, VW, and BMW are going to be $8,250,000,000 poorer. That's only the start. We're not only going to put the breadwinner on two wheels, we'll do the same for his wife and his teen-agers. Of those 10 million, how many are two-car families? Half? Why not, it's another easy figure, 5 million cars at $2,500 and bang goes another $12,500,000,000.
This is the kind of money that talks. It talks all the more loudly because, in the oil business, the car business, and the highway business, a lot of people are not out just to make a living, they've got to make a killing. They are not going to sit back and accept the kind of return on their money that a savings bank gives. They will fight like hell at first, the way they fought safety glass and safety belts, but what can they do? Amend the Constitution to prohibit the carrying of concealed trouser clips? Decree that no one can ride a bicycle unless preceded by an automobile blowing its horn? Subsidize in-house research by housebroken researchers to prove man was never destined to go more than five miles an hour on fewer than four wheels? Oh, there are some that will, but not the smart ones. They'll put their money elsewhere, they'll get out in time, they always do, perhaps they have already. Be careful, the moneymakers are the taste-makers. Once they place their bets, they fix the race so they won't lose. Is anybody investing in sidewalk cafés, neighborhood bakeries, homemade ice-cream parlors? Who's got a corner on bicycle wrenches? Where are the blueprints for the calfdozers that can clear a trail just wide enough for two bikes to pass through tract housing? What does your broker say?
This does not mean the end of the automobile. It has its place wherever it can stop and go without getting in anyone's way. Henry Ford built his high-slung Model T for rural America, it really hummed on unpaved country roads. I once rode a sturdy GM wagon over Death Pass in Costa Rica on a leg of the Pan-American Highway that had just opened but was still unpaved, like most roads in Central America. Life flowed down that dirt road, it brought farmers within five hours of their market---five hours instead of three days. The car is fine for rural people, they have always had individual transport. They have always needed it; the city dweller never did. Just because Sancho Panza had a burro, not every Madrileño felt obliged to run one. People in the country have the right to run automobiles; that might even be a way to get more people into the country and out of the cities and suburbs.
Then there is the useful car. I would not dream of depriving Pierre Duval of his little Deux-Chevaux truck that lets him work in a furniture factory at Lanvollon, seven miles from Lanloup, and come home for lunch with leftover wood to run my kitchen stove. Until things are straightened out to the point where Pierre and others like him can earn their living closer to home, they have just as much right as the boss to drive to work. He does not congest that road. If I did not know Pierre, I would not even know it existed. The local Michelin map shows it as a faint white trace and he is one of the few drivers on it. No one could run a bus line on such a route. Pierre needs his little truck.
Cities are a different matter. In big cities that have been around a long time, places like New York or London or Paris, there is hardly any transit problem at all once cars are eliminated. Subways exist, population densities are easily large enough to make bus and trolley line worthwhile. As for automobiles, call them what they are: wheelchairs for invalids. Electric cars can be permitted to the helpless and the aged. Such cars will be a sign of mercy, not a symbol of strength, they will carry red crosses fore and aft. Can anyone imagine he-men pulling wires to be classified as wheelchair cases or women clawing to be ranked among the over sixty-fives with the right to exercise an electric-car option? Top speed of the electric car: fifteen miles per hour, same as a bike and well above the average of inner-city traffic today. This is a wise limit as only the unfit will be operating cars (not as at present...). The R&D of half a century of automotive engineering will not be lost. These cars will be equipped with shock-absorbing bumpers (to protect what they hit as well as what they contain), Grand Prix brakes and radial tires to make sure the car stops faster than it goes. Nearly all our present headaches about batteries will go away if the electric car imitates the speed and acceleration of a bicycle, not a Porsche.
As for the young of all ages, they will be able to move around on their city by bicycle. At their feet, they will have seven-league boots giving them the city speed of the automobile and the flexibility of the pedestrian. They will not be bothered by packages; a bicycle can carry almost anything (one of the few good things to be said about a minibike is that the more you load it, the more stable it becomes). Their ability to go anywhere and stop anywhere will rework the face of the city. The little fellow will come back, he will not need an acre of parking lot outside his shop. Small businesses, small workshops, small farms no doubt will be the main source of jobs for those now employed by the automobile industry and all its accessories. After all, those are the places the car factories raided to get their labor in the first place.
Some ex-factory hands may stay in the transportation business, they can open bike shops. Here is a true craft industry. It does not require power tools or capital, just a few sets of wrenches and a pair of skilled hands. Bikes need maintaining, there is always something that requires a bit of fiddling, a chance to go down to a bike shop and talk. The right kind of bike mechanics are like shoemakers, they work with their hands in a quiet place while ideas float through their minds. Their conversation is good, so is their work. Some in Europe not only repair bicycles but make them as well. Little fellows buy various parts the way the big fellows do, then they assemble them in a different way and put their own brand on the frame. Supermarkets also sell bikes but I would hate to ask a check-out clerk to change a gear ratio or take up the play in a chainwheel bearing.
The changeover will be gradual, it will come about as our stock of automobiles dwindles. One great advantage of the cars we build is that they become junk in less than ten years. It is extremely easy to replace them with another system of transportation. During the changeover, our cities and suburbs will still be with us. They cannot be junked as quickly, nor should they be. We will need some way to cover distances on the scale of automobile living. Again, the bike is the answer, it is the taxi to the station or bus stop, where it can be left all day long. Parked bikes take up no room at all. I have counted as many as twenty-two on the ground and hanging from the roof of a small shed outside the town hall of the 12th arrondissement in Paris. They take up less sidewalk space than a subway entrance, they are the equivalent of over a block of parked cars. Keeping an eye on such bike parking lots, perhaps offering services like fixing flats or replacing brake cables, would be a worthwhile occupation for the kind of people fortunate enough to be unfit for the jobs that we are now generating.
Or the commuter can take his bike with him. The old Ninth Avenue El in New York had the right idea. In 1900, it ran bicycle cars with seats on one side and wheel slots on the other. I'm not saying that we should rebuild the Ninth Avenue El, but there is no reason why modern transit systems cannot run the same sort of cars.
Copenhagen has a railroad that serves the city and nearby towns. The doors on the cars are wide enough to let mothers come with baby carriages and park them inside. Passengers can take bicycles aboard, too, there is plenty of open floor space near the doors and away from the seats.
Such cars could be adopted by subways. Maybe they have, for all I know. My son wrote me from New York that he had a flat on his bike way uptown near the Cloisters. He wrecked the tube trying to fix it and he had to take the bike with him in the subway. But not everybody can do that. Carrying present-day bicycles, particularly the forty-pound models sold to Professor Rice and others in the United States, up and down subway stairs could be a heart-stopper. I suggest that we borrow some of that research that got us into space and use it to get us onto cheap lightweight bicycles. A spin-off from the moon landings... the bicycle that you can carry under one arm and forget which arm. It's not all that hard, modern racing bikes come in at around eighteen pounds or so. Let NASA go to work on a fifteen-pound minibike. While they're at it, they might try to get some racing technology into everyday cycling: frames, pedals, cranks that stay rigid so that your feet drive the wheels instead of bending the bicycle; tires as light as a racer's tubular that do not blow out every couple of days at eight dollars a blow. There is something wrong with the present-day bicycle industry that reserves its lightest and most efficient mounts for supermen while ordinary people must push around a bicycle's excess weight as well as their own.
Such a minibike could be carried on subways, buses, trains, planes. I am all for it, I do not hold with well-intentioned fellow travelers who are trying to weatherproof the bicycle. You start with a windshield, you add a body, pretty soon the thing weighs so much you need a motor to drive it, you're back with the Model T and we all know where that will get us. I think the answer to to weatherproof the rider. Again, NASA comes to my rescue. I have seen a ten-ounce jacket advertised, rainproof and windproof, that works like a down-to-earth space suit. It is made of nylon bonded to an aluminized skin, one side is warm and one side is cool. Judging from the ad, it is more practical than fashionable, but wait until Cardin gets around to this new medium.
We are not going to achieve the millennium toting bikes in the subway. That is only another intermediate solution; it will keep the subway busy until we find another use for it, like storing wine or growing mushrooms. Cities like New York or Paris or London have a resource that they once used to the fullest and now neglect: water transport. The bateaux-mouches hauled fourteen million passengers a year in Paris until the Métro drove them out of business around 1905 or so. They are back only as a tourist attraction, but they still prove that the best way to go through a city is to sail through it. New York, too, had a thriving water transit system for commuters. Before the Brooklyn Bridge was opened, ferries were a pleasant way to come to work in downtown Manhattan from pleasant Brooklyn Heights. Even today, a bike and a rider can move within the city on the Staten Island Ferry, the last of the fleet. But why not run boats along the East and Hudson Rivers? They could stop every mile or so and passengers could use their minibikes to go crosstown or to intermediate points. All Manhattan could be covered by a riverboat service, while some stops could serve as junctions for cross-river lines from New Jersey or Brooklyn. Unlike bridges and tunnels, boats offer an almost unlimited number of possible routes for a city laid out like New York.
They have other advantages; they run without frightening children or running over dogs, they're pretty to look at, their big decks are ideal for easy loading and unloading, and they're fast. Hydrofoils, the newest version of the riverboat, skim along at thirty-five miles an hour, hardly making any noise or wake. They are already in use on rivers and coastal seas. I first saw one nearly ten years ago hauling sightseers through Moscow. Waterways are speedways. Some of the Hudson River sidewheelers used to run at twenty miles an hour and I'll bet that the old Alexander Hamilton, now a museum piece on the East River, could still beat you uptown during the rush hour. On top of all that, riverboats give work to the kind of people Mark Twain wrote about... and they give birth to the kind of books that Mark Twain wrote.
I have not forgotten cities without rivers. Most of them already have artificial rivers, their urban expressways, lanes and lanes of stuffed concrete. Once we start driving cars to extinction, we can use their old habitats (just as they use old railroad lines or canal beds). On a six-lane expressway, we have three lanes on each side at our disposal. Four lanes could be used for two trolley tracks in each direction (express and local) and a bike path, leaving the fifth and sixth free for vestigial truck and automobile traffic at first and for growing vegetables later. On a twelve-lane expressway, there would be that much more space for vegetables, apple orchards, strawberry patches, chicken coops, or rabbit hutches. Instead of poisoning Los Angeles, the expressways could feed it. Exit the trucks, enter the truck gardens. And on your right, trolley cars, not Toonervilles, but high-speed porpoises gliding through the cities and the suburbs, the locals coming out at the exits to drop passengers with minibikes, the expresses leapfrogging crossroads on the cloverleafs. Trolleys are not too heavy for roads engineered to accommodate that public benefactor, the forty-ton highway truck. All the work has been done, we only need to put down the tracks, a mile probably won't run into six figures. Urban trolleys won't pollute when they accelerate, they don't jackknife when they stop, even if they are towing one or two extra cars. As in Boston or Bonn, they can be turned into subway trains when they enter the heart of the city.
The trolley car is the little brother of the electric interurban that was running from town to town at seventy miles an hour two generations ago. It would be a shame to let all of our brand-new interstate express highways go to waste. We could start with an interurban track on one lane and go on from here. The railroads won't holler about unfair competition, they got out of the passenger-hauling business long ago in the United States. Even a four-track interurban would not need all the real estate now filled by the motorways. The land could be planted with trees. In no time at all, the electric interurbans would be whizzing through woods the way the Mistral does between Fontainebleau and Melun on its way into Paris. Our highways are an asset once we get the concrete off them, they can reforest the prairies, they can bring chlorophyll into the cities. Grass grows between the ties of abandoned rail lines, it could do a good job of cracking and breaking concrete when we are thru with thruways. But let us give credit where credit is due. The expressways take engines of death off our streets and trails. It would be a shame to throw them away as we have thrown away our railroads and our canals.
The trouble with trolley cars, interurbans, and bicycles is that they exist. No one can go to Washington and come back with a few hundred megabucks to R&D them "something else is needed, anything else as long as it's new,. While I do not think that we should go back to the horse (except for providing safe bar-to-bar transportation for drinkers as it does in Brittany), we must be wary of change for change's sake, the now-classic solution looking for a problem.
The Skybus developed in Pittsburgh is a good case. According to a report by Dr. Joseph Hanlon in the New Scientist, it is an electric, rubber-tired vehicle that can be hooked into trains of as many as ten buses to run automatically on an elevated concrete guideway. Its proponents wanted to build a sixty-mile network of Skybus lines in the Pittsburgh area and the first site they proposed was the roadbed of a high-speed trolley line in wealthy South Hills. The Westinghouse Air Brake Company was asked to survey the situation and came up with a report that really hit the fan. I quote Dr. Hanlon:
Wabco noted that modern trams [trolleys], similar to those used in Europe but not in the US, had all of the performance capabilities of the Skybus: speed, quietness, climbing ability, rush hour capacity, etc. Further, the report showed that by upgrading the South Hills tramline and running trams on improved trackage of several disused rail lines, the entire 60-mile network could be built for less than the cost of the 11-mile South Hills Skybus. Wabco also noted that in the South Hills, the trams could make more frequent stops and have a running time only slightly less than Skybus, which means that most people could reach downtown Pittsburgh more rapidly, by the less expensive system. Finally, Wabco noted, the tramline, too, could be automated at a later date if needed. Thus, one has the difficulty that a traditional wheel on steel rail system is far more appropriate for Pittsburgh than Skybus.
One also has the difficulty that the traditional wheel on steel rail, first used to run carts in coal mines two hundred years ago, can steer a vehicle as effectively as any computerized remote-control-automatic guidance system for rubber-tired vehicles... but we know who makes rubber-tired vehicles.
To explain partially what went wrong in Pittsburgh---and, in my opinion, what is going wrong in a lot more places---Hanlon quotes D. J. Herbert Hollomon, the Provost of MIT:
There are two ways in which new ways of doing things come into being. One is by what is called a push mechanism. You spend a lot of money on new technology and then try to push it into the society and hope, because it is novel or different, that someone will buy the product. It is very seldom that such a system works. It has been very difficult to push nuclear power, for example.
And it would have been a hell of a lot more difficult if the consumer had Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, Hiroshima and Nagasaki added to his electricity bill. But back to Hanlon and Hollomon:
Unfortunately, Hollomon noted: "most of the efforts having to do with urban transportation have been push mechanisms." A pull mechanism results when an expanding market itself demands innovation. "When we first developed the railroad industry in the United States, there was virtually no support by the federal government of the technology involved, and yet there was a period of enormous inventiveness, of enormous developments in the technology of braking and control systems and of motive power, as a result of the expanding market for rail transit. More often than not, necessity is the mother of invention. When one invents without necessity, he is wasting his time," Hollomon concluded.
There is the necessity, nay, the crying need, to make a living and a killing. It crops out in another New Scientist article by Hanlon, in which he describes new PRT (Personal Rapid Transit Systems). Building a PRT runs to $18 million a mile, as expensive as ordinary transit, and not everyone likes the idea of having it outside his window. What it amounts to, really, is an updated rubber-tired Third Avenue El, automated so that small cars can run all night long without added labor costs and, consequently, the company is strikeproof as long as the computer programmers are kept happy. I have seen the thing described as a horizontal automatic elevator, which should augur no good for women traveling alone. There were no law-and-order problems on the unautomated Third Avenue El with a husky guard between every two cars to work the gates and work over hotheads. Unmanned transit would be sheer provocation in the country that has invented airline hijacking.
At the time of the Transpo '72 conference in Washington, two PRT systems were under construction in the United States, one at Morgantown West Virginia and the other at the Dallas Fort Worth Regional Airport, Hollomon commented. Most of the commercial interest in PRT has been expressed by the aerospace companies; Boeing is building the Morgantown system and Vought Aeronautics the Dallas installation. This industry desperately needs new markets for its technology...."
When the aerospace industry looks desperately for new markets, we should start counting the silverware. Ask the airlines trying to fill their 747s or the ones that will soon be the proud owners of a Concorde or two: onwards and upwards to receivership. At the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, the industry has succeeded in creating the congestion that it is trying to clear up. The problem is not how to get around an airport that requires a twelve-mile transit system but how to get around without such an airport.
As for Morgantown, the New Scientist says that a 3.2-mile system has been planned there to connect the three campuses of West Virginia University. "About 1100 students and faculty members transfer from one campus to another for classes by car (and 17 buses) five times a day. They all crowd into a two-lane road the must allow 70 minutes for a 1 1/2 mile trip. The PRT should cut transfer time to less than 20 minutes."
Walking would cut it to thirty, biking to ten. I am ready to admit that the campuses in the West Virginia hills are in a class by themselves. The New Scientist says the site was selected "because it tests a number of important features: it has steep grades and sharp curves and must operate in a wide variety of weather including ice and snow." Bikes can negotiate sharp curves, they can climb hills as long as the road is laid out in graceful bends that offer a view of campus hills, valleys, and coeds. Yes, but there's the weather, all that ice and snow. It costs $18 million a mile to lay out a PRT? Would it cost $18,000 a mile to roof a bike path, even with an infrared heating system for cold days?
This isn't my idea. Someone beat me to it long ago with the arcades on Rue de Rivoli in Paris and in the city of Berne, with the roofed galleries in Milan. In any weather, people can walk, stop, shop, and buy, businessmen love arcades. So let's build more, let's get the desperate void out of the wide avenues of Harlem, let's have all-weather girl-watching on the Champs-Elysées. We can win territory back from widened streets, we can roof them out from the building line, protection first for pedestrians and, further out, for cyclists. If we insist on spending money, we could sunroof streets, we could do a lot for a lot less than $18 million a mile. We won't call them streets, we'll call them RaceWalks for pedestrians who want to travel at three miles an hour and cyclists at ten. Goodyear carries people at 1.5 miles an hour on a conveyor belt that it calls a SpeedWalk.
It's not only aerospace that is infiltrating transit. Ford is one of the companies that are building the driverless rubber-tired vehicles that are called People Movers, apparently to differentiate them from what the automobile industry has been building for seventy years. In the New Scientist, Hanlon explains that "the motor manufacturers are also interested because they hope to apply traditional rubber-tired technology and to study the systems as precursors to a future guided private motor car system." Read those lines closely, then read between them. You will be able to drive your own dual-mode car into the city, then onto a rapid transit system. Once upon a time, the rube came to New York and someone sold him the Brooklyn Bridge, nowadays Ford is trying to get him to buy the Independent Subway. But when he gets title to it, the subway car will really be his. Does anyone remember the last year a subway made money?
I do not know how General Motors now feels about the matter. In February 1970, Fortune remarked that "General Motors shied away from developing dual-mode because the potential damages in case of an accident would be so great that special legislation limiting liability would be needed." Poor GM... can you imagine a guided Corvair going out of control in the Lincoln Tunnel and totaling the New Jersey Turnpike?
Similar efforts are being made to solve urban transit outside the United States. In West Germany, according to David marks in my precious New Scientist, Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (at least one of those names sounds familiar) have come up with a system that works like a roller coaster and "consists of small plastic cabins, each with two or three comfortable seats and a spacious luggage area, which automatically follow a fixed track straight to the destination preselected by the passenger without any stops, crossings or changes."
Another German system, based on containerizing people, has been devised by the Research and Development Institute of Friedrich Krupp (now there's a name that is familiar) in Essen. Writes Marks: "Krup engineers envisage all public transport vehicles made up entirely of closely packed standardized one- or two-seat containers... Once again the passenger need do no more than preselect his destination on entering the cabin. When his train or bus arrives, a completely automatic three-stage process begins. First, cabins due to alight are slid out of the vehicle, while those wishing to get in slide forward onto the platform. Next, a general sideways movement [forgive me, Marks, but this reads like a time-and-motion study of the tango] takes place, during which the alighting cabins move off to the next stage of their journey, the cabins still on the train roll forward to fill the gaps left, and the containers on the platform are slid to the rear of the carriage. Finally, the waiting cabins are rolled forward into the train, and the journey can continue." The man who invented that system knew all there is to know about close-order drill.
The more I read about cabins, containers, PRT's, the more I keep recalling the afternoon when a friend of mine, a freshman medical student at Columbia, showed me the room where the cadavers were kept. They hung on hooks from an overhead monorail, waiting to be rolled out for dissection, chilled and still, smooth as wax. Change the hooks into slings and you have another transit system, the CorpseWay, offering instant removal to the morgue in the event of death en route. Or there are the monorails that the butchers down at the wholesale market on West 14th Street in Manhattan use for sliding sides of beef in and out of trucks. Just one push and half a steer flies over the sidewalk on the MeatWay. Go down there any weekday morning around five o'clock, the butchers will be glad to demonstrate their PRT for you.
I know all this sounds as puerile as I was the day the freshman med student took me through the big freezer at Columbia. Yet it is no more sophomoric than a number of ideas that are getting serious consideration. I ran across a story in the International Herald Tribune about a proposal by Hyman Bress, the Canadian violinist, to put a big vacuum tube into the Atlantic four hundred feet down and send passenger rockets through it, running between the United States and Europe in less than an hour. His plan has a number of strong points: the passenger would see only slightly less than from a center row seat in a 747, there would be no atmospheric pollution and, I cannot help but suspect, people flying as often as concert musicians would be spared those little pangs they get at takeoffs and landings when they think how hard they are bucking probability. Reporting on the Bress tube, the Herald Tribune states that "technologists of the Atomic Energy Commission, NASA, the U.S. Navy, West Germany's Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohn and the U.S. Concrete Pipe Co. agree that, on paper at least, his ideas are sound." The same old Friends of the Environment that we've been meeting all the while, along with some concrete pipe dreamers.
I have filed the Bress plan away with some other ideas for hauling people the way Tom Sawyer whitewashed fences. I have seen moving pavements which, according to their promoters, are limited to only about a mile in range at ten miles per hour because "most people will stand on such a system for six minutes." I have a drawing that shows six lanes of trucks and cars running high above the street and through buildings, the kind of buildings where everyone knows when a neighbor drops an ashtray... or a match into an ashtray. I do not want to mention the names of all the donors to this museum of horrors, I am not too sure what I was writing myself a few years back. I shall confer anonymity upon two fellows who did a systems analysis of city transit and concluded that no conventional subway train could ever average more than thirty-three miles per hour. Shops, they said, cannot be more than a mile apart and passengers cannot stand too much acceleration or braking.
Those poor systems analysts, they never took the E express to Queens, they never changed to a local on their own two feet. They must have grown up in trainless America; they never road the Tokyo-Osaka line where a bullet train runs every twenty minutes with a local in between. They never wandered around Switzerland on trains that make two-minute connections, plenty of time for riders in one-passenger shoeshod containers to cross the platform.
I once went from Tokyo to Fujiyama, using a suburban train, an express, an interurban, a funicular, and an aerial ropeway. I didn't wait more than ten minutes throughout the journey. On another occasion, I grabbed a bullet local out of Tokyo, changed to a branch line and watched in disbelief as trains streamed down that single track, sidestepping each other at every station. On the way out, I rode with three Japanese who, as soon as they saw I was an American, plied me with whiskey and their box lunches. On the way back, I sat next to a schoolgirl who asked me to help her with the pronunciation of a Bizet libretto in French. After she got off, I watched a crowd of golfers and their president who made a speech before he awarded tournament winners their prizes. That was between Yokohama and Tokyo; there is something to be said for travel if one does not do it like a basket case in a mailing tube.
In transportation in and around cities, we have painted ourselves into a corner with the automobile. Most new solutions consist of putting down another coat to land in another corner. Cars have given us ghastly cities, conveyor belts on guided baby carriages are ways to keep them ghastly. Instead of blundering along the same path, let's try a new one. Scrape away the recent veneer of our cities and you discover they are interlinked villages, the courtyards and quarters of Paris, communities that once were self-contained and yet capable of engaging in fruitful commerce with their neighbors, giving and taking rather than consuming. In New York, Chinatown is certainly such a community, Yorktown has the makings of one. The city would become a series of Chinatowns linked by clean transit or bicycles for those who prefer to go their own ways. I don't believe in unique uniform solutions, the history of the automobile need not be repeated. We must adapt our transit systems to our way of life, not our way of life to our transit systems. When the premium is taken off what Lewis Mumford calls the magamachine, our cities will necessarily evolve. This time, the animus for such an evolution must come from the bottom, not from the top.
Our suburbs are different. Many never were communities, they were originally built as pleasant places to live and they still are, at least in the quality of their housing compared to what big cities can offer. Let people keep their houses, let occupations spring up among them. Total planning isn't needed, just some intelligent zoning and tax breaks for the right people instead of the wrong ones. Once suburbia comes out of its fortresses and doffs its gas masks, small stores and workshops would spring up naturally within easy cycling distance, instead of a shopping center in Outer Mongolia.
What is easy cycling distance? That depends on whom you ask. Someone in Paris told me recently he was too old and fat to bike to work, he lives a mile and a half from his office and he's fifty-two. Madame Perrette, a retired nurse who sometimes pinch-hits for my concierge, is certainly older, she reminds me of a grandmother of mine---she rides around Paris with a speedometer on her bike and she tells me that she clocked three thousand miles in eight months.
At Lanloup, as far as I can determine, the oldest of the cyclists on the road is Mme. Léonie Medus. I saw her one Wednesday bucking the north wind on Route National 786 on her way back from market at Plouha three miles away. She is eighty. Or there is Mme. Anaïs Ferlicot, widow of a boatswain who spent his life at sea on a French cablelayer. Madame Anaïs lives a mile and a half outside Lanloup and the nearest shop. She cycles into the village to do some of her buying, she rides two miles to the bigger town of Plehedel for the rest of it. Or she can buy from the grocer and the fisherman's wife who come around the country with their little trucks, selling from the back ends. Here, with a rational use of the internal combustion engine and an instant-starting bicycle, we find an answer to transportation in a community with somewhat the same distances as an American suburb.
Her wheels don't cost Madame Anaïs very much. She is thinking of getting a new bicycle after eight years' use of the old one. A new one would cost her 280 francs, the dealer has offered her 140 francs for the old one. That's $2.80 a year in depreciation. After eight years, she blew out a rear tire and she had to get a new one. I helped her change it and she gave me a fresh head of lettuce for my services. I suppose that the lettuce must be counted in the running costs of the bicycle.
I met a Breton who does better. At seventy-nine, François Marie Richard lives a mile and a half outside the town of Ploezal. He has seen the world, he has been to New York on the France---not this one, the one before, a coal-burner, he stoked her over the ocean from 1911 to 1913. He is an oak of a man, he still rides a Victorine into town. Victorine is not a horse, it's a bicycle that he has had for seventeen years. He ran Victorine's predecessor for thirty-four years.
These old people work their gardens, they raise a few chickens, they fatten up a few rabbits, they are busy from dawn to dusk. Their houses have never changed except for the addition of refrigerators and bottled-gas stoves. Their water comes from outside wells, they heat with wood and coal. Old age is beautiful in the Breton countryside, these cycling people can live in homes, not nursing homes.
Unlike many parts of France, where farmers live in villages and go out to work in their fields, the Bretons build their houses on their land. The villages themselves appear small, they are dwarfed by their churches. Inhabitants are scattered all around the periphery on good single-lane roads that enable women to use bicycles the way American housewives use cars, thereby getting not only transportation but exercise and the beauty treatment of fresh air and clean rain.
Not only do the Breton cyclists live, they live well and enjoy it. About the time I was finishing this chapter, I headed out of Lanloup one morning on the steep hill behind the church. I took it easily on my eight-speed. Two ladies were walking up their one-speeds. I got off and talked to them. One was seventy-two, she had gone back to the bicycle after giving her Velosolex to her niece. The other, who would admit only that she was old enough to be my mother, was riding a bike that weighed in somewhere between a Mack truck and a Sherman tank. It was easy to see why, it had been originally motorized, now the lady was pedaling it. I asked her what had happened to the motor. Did it wear out?
"No," she said, "I just took it off one day because I wanted to see more."
Chapter 11
Flying Blind
Towards the end of my stay in Lanloup, I had to take some friends to an airport at Saint-Brieuc, the nearest town that might go so far as to call itself a city. They missed their plane for Paris, where they had a connection for London and Miami. It was too late to make Paris by train, it was too early to roust out the local air taxi-driver; it was either too early or too late to do anything. A pilot working for a small airline took pity on us. He said he could fly them to Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, only twenty-five minutes away, where they could catch a flight to London. He had time to make the round trip with his little twin-engined plane before going out on his next run. The only trouble was the price. It bothered him because it was too high. He didn't own the plane, he was just the pilot.
My friends calculated the cost of riding to Paris and spending a day there, and decided that the price wasn't all that high. The pilot, who probably wanted to make sure that we got our money's worth, invited me along for the ride to Jersey and back. I ran outside the airport and locked the car, then we were in the plane. The pilot warmed the engines up, we sped down the asphalted runway, probably the safest stretch of road in Brittany on that Saturday morning, and we were airborne. We soared over the hedgerows of the farms next to the airport and tipped a wing at the city of Saint-Brieuc with its three miles of superhighway, its handful of high rises and supermarkets that give its inhabitants the illusion that they are not three hundred miles from Paris.
Then we were above the sea. It ran black under the clouds that had seldom left that Channel coast of Brittany during the time I spend there, the clouds that Merlin the magician sends over his country to keep it as pure as Galahad's heart. The sea looked calm, except for breakers on some offshore shoals, but a green freighter pitched heavily as she made her way west. She seemed to be sitting in a puddle of foam. I started to regret all that sharp air down at the wavetops that we were missing and it was all over. Jersey lay ahead, basking in the sun, the Tahiti of the North, the pilot told us jokingly. He came in so smoothly that we were well on the ground long before I realized we had landed. We taxied up to the terminal, I got out to help unload my friends' bags and to exchange a few words of English with an Englishman, then we were back on the runway and airborne for Saint-Brieuc. In the copilot's seat, I had a choice between the din of the engines and the gibberish on the headphones, first in English, then in French as we neared the mainland. We landed at Saint-Brieuc, drenched as usual, and I drove back to Lanloup.
The adventure was over, yet was it an adventure? It left me numb and weary, I could not work that morning. I had to take a nap. I only started to wake up that afternoon when I took my bike to Paimpol to buy some country bread from a baker near the railroad station. I could breathe the blue sky, the sounds in the hedgerows were not the clatter of propellers, my feet pushed down on the pedals or pulled up on the toe clamps. I did not have to try to keep them out of the way of rudder pedals. I was alive, I wasn't just watching live 3-D television on a panoramic screen. I shall be forever grateful to my friends and the pilot of that little plane for my hop to Jersey, but I traveled so much more on the bike from Lanloup to Paimpol via Plehedel, Kerfot, and Saint-Yves.
I think this is so because airport-to-airport travel and superhighway travel and so much travel today is horizontal. We are always in the same layer. We are like the great fish that, according to some oceanographers, travel from the Arctic to the Antarctic in water that is always of the same temperature, going through the tropics at abyssal depths, never changing their environment despite the thousands of miles they put behind them. We go from Holiday Inn to Hilton, from Hilton to Inter-Continental, we never leave home, we are like the kings of France who traveled from castle to castle with their courts---and we know what happened to the kings of France. Once there was some satisfaction to this, airports were not much bigger than the runway at Saint-Brieuc and planes slipped in and out unobtrusively as we had done on Jersey. But the faster we go as we pursue happiness, the less chance we seem to have to catch it. The Saturday Review once quoted Blaine Cooke, a senior vice-president for marketing services for TWA:
Have you ever gone to Kennedy, stood in the International Arrivals Building, watched people come through from the customs and whatnot out in the concourse areas? Now most of them, like 70 per cent of them or so, are people who have just come back from vacation and what you should expect to see... is a uniform array of smiling happy faces.... But you see a distressingly large number of people who look harassed and sort of overdone, people who look almost as though they were glad the goddamned thing is over, you know.
I once flew from Paris to Helsinki with stops at Amsterdam and Hamburg. I was in a Caravelle without in-flight movies, onboard stereo, or multigowned hostesses to pass the time away. There was nothing to do but read. I sat in the obsolescent bird grinding its way at twenty-nine thousand feet from Hamburg to Helsinki, my knees jammed against my chin. This was the commuter's version, no doubt intended to squeeze the last franc or finmark from the aging craft before it finally gave way to metal fatigue.
I read Farewell Victoria, by T.H. White as the lady next to me took her carton of Marlboros and her flask of Ballantine's from the flaxen-haired Finnish hostess who announced our stops in four languages. I read White wailing how Edward VII had driven a motor car, thereby bursting the bounds of the English country as the limit to daily travel. It was Edward VII who was finally responsible for sending me skittering through the sky from Paris to Helsinki on a long Sunday afternoon. I wished that I had the time to cycle from Paris to Helsinki, to load my wheels onto a schooner that would ferry me across the Baltic. Then I could have learned the way from Paris to Helsinki by the touch of my feet. Then I could have atoned for the crime of Edward VII, I could have made my trip in a chain of days an English county long, stitching them together from Paris to Helsinki.
If we traveled like that, we would get more than the same image moving from one airport to the next. Fifteen minutes in Amsterdam, time to take the Travelator from Gate 26 to Gate 33 and back again, to watch the planes sliding by slowly behind the big glass walls. Amsterdam is a plain, stiff terminal, halfway between the ornateness of Orly---that complex of department stores, boutiques, snack bars, restaurants, art galleries where getting on and off airplanes is only incidental and most of the time inconvenient and where the main source of income comes from the parking and entrance fees paid by the Parisians to see their new Versailles---and the airbus stops of America where air travel is classless travel. Amsterdam was only a water stop for us on the way to Helsinki, fifteen minutes, a chance to drink a Schweppes in Holland and urinate it in Hamburg forty minutes away.
Airports are getting seamier, even in Europe. There was a lady in the men's washroom at Hamburg airport, a little saucer filled with coins on the table in front of her to remind you that someone had to change the towels and fill the soap machines. There was one, too, at Orly airport. Business must be getting better in these ground washrooms now that the jets have speeded flights to the point where there is no time to use their airborne comfort facilities. Soon, no doubt, there will be stand-up urinals on the planes. It must hurt the operators of the commuter Caravelle to see all that space going to waste in the underoccupied johns, to know all the money is going unmade. There must be a better way. One could rotate passengers through the toilets, thereby giving them a chance to move around, to make acquaintances. Or else one could put potties under their seats to dispose of all waste products once the intrepid Phileas Fogg, the latter-day Marco Polo, has been fed from some kind of a pipeline, conveyor belt, over his head. He will never have to move, he will perhaps be transported from aircraft to Travelator to destination all the while keeping his safety belt loosely buckled, occupying the same seat all his life until he arrives at the gates of heaven to be greeted by houris, hostesses flashing their porcelain smiles, catering to his every wish as long as he suppresses every whim while he sits through eternity catching oldies on Channel Infinity.
I know another way to reach heaven. Just stay on the Empress' Road after Marnes-la-Coquette. Follow it all the way to Picardy Hill, cross a main highway and veer left almost at one into a forest lane. It runs past a farmhouse and a few pastures that somehow have been allowed to live almost within sight of the Eiffel Tower but out of sight of drivers on the Autoroute de l'Ouest that runs behind a screen of trees so that nothing can distract the Parisian as he heads a hundred miles out for a glimpse of a farmhouse and a few pastures.
Ideally all traveling should be done as a gradual spread, an apprehension of territory from a starting point, perhaps one's birthplace as it was in the days before the wheel or, to be more accurate, before wheeled transport became available to all. Then one traveled in ever-increasing circles, combing, mowing, cropping everything within the circle like the cows that farmers attach to a stake. Gradually, the radius of the tether was lengthened so that, at the end of a lifetime, one was perhaps ten or twenty miles from home plate, but with no shadow zone inside the perimeter of the circle. Then one knew one's world like the ant and the bumblebee, the sniffing dog or the munching cow.
In those days before nearly everyone was in a chair on wheels destined to put him before his time into a wheelchair, in those days only a few toured. The others could travel by successive states of being in different places, no blur of images melting into each other like Dali's watches. Each journey was a Bayeux tapestry, a detailed canvas of minutiae, some even carved in bas-relief, not a strip of frames flicking through the movie projector faster and faster until Gone With the Wind becomes a ten-second spot, until the Atlantic with its mountain ranges of combers, its fields of foam, is nothing but a whoosh of Concorde riding on its smoke, smell, and sonic bang.
I have worked both sides of this travel street. I have whiffed a cognac in a Constellation between Calcutta and Bangkok and then I was grateful for the capsule of my American civilization that Pan American had provided me after the city of Calcutta, an animated cartoon by Hieronymus Bosch. I can remember a cow trotting purposefully alongside the bus that took us out to the airport, perhaps even the sacred cows had enough of Calcutta, o Calcutta, o sacré vache. I have overflown the Aegean at two thousand feet, I have landed in grass at Skopje; I once flew out of an airstrip next to a Colombian steel mill with the pilot of the company's DC-3 putting on all power and the priest sitting next to me putting on all prayer, both of them getting us over the clump of trees that marked the end of the strip.
There is always that happy moment when the medium has not yet changed the message, when an aircraft got you from one real place to another, when an automobile just went faster than oxen or horses over the same roads. That is a privileged moment, it can never last, the laws of diminishing enjoyment must come into play. Only ships and trains are relatively immune. The sea quickly heals the gash left by a steamer's wake, the night and the silence take over after a train has gone by. If the line is not electrified, then grassy cuts and embankments can join the natural relief for mile after empty mile, the road-bed itself a scar as faint as the ones left by good surgeons. Railroad builders were good surgeons. Unlike the highwaymen, they did not kill the patient by trying to show their skill in unnecessary major operations.
Now that the moment is gone for me, my collection of airline bags gathers dust in closets, mementos of the days when I got a new bag with every flight, the days when the Organization sent me traveling first class. Those days ended when the Kennedys came to Washington and insisted on everyone, particularly kith, kin, and kinlaws, traveling economy on official business for the benefit of photographers. So the bags molder in closets with my memories while I travel by the Nord Express, the Scandinavia Express, the Phocéen, the Night Ferry, the Lake Shore Limited, too. All that's left of the New York Central service between Albany and New York is the names of a few trains. The diner is a stand-up counter, a Nedick's on wheels, a rolling Riker's, the coaches are the same as the ones I knew in my youth and so are the conductors, but both are a little creakier. The roadbed has not been taking all this lying down. It rears on its haunches, it arches its back, the train jumps, the bogies boggle, it's like riding a camel up and down over the dunes. I once rode into the Sahara at seventy miles an hour in a Peugeot 403 over a track of corrugated earth, but it was less like cameling than the Penn Central on the banks of the Hudson between Albany and Poughkeepsie, mist hiding the opposite shore, hangered coats dancing to the music of the diesel's horn.
Not only do European trains run horizontally instead of up and down, but they always have baggage cars and luggage racks that enable you to take a bicycle along. I understand that in West Germany and Holland people rent bikes at stations, leaving them at other stations. I have never tried this but it sounds like a fine idea. I am for all kinds of ideas, a new one for every new situation. All-purpose vehicles lead to no purpose, we take the kids to school in the Old wagon that we drive to Los Angeles. In the old days, no one ever ran the 20th Century Limited on the tracks of the 42nd Street Cross-town, but we had no computers in the old days.
The advantages of using your own bike is that you have a taxi in your pocket when you travel by train. I have gone to Bordeaux and Saarbrücken from Paris, riding down to the station on a folding bike and putting it into the compartment where it sat over my fellow passengers' heads. They did not know that the damn thing weighed thirty-five pounds, but I did, and I sweated blue until I got it strapped into place. I have since traded it in for a take-apart model that is easier to stow and also easier to carry because the load can be shared by two hands.
Once on a New Year's Eve, I took a trip to London on the night ferry from Paris with the photographer. We pedaled up to the wagons-lits at Gare du Nord in Paris. The conductor looked at us, he asked us where we intended to put those bicycles. "In ze pockette," said the photographer, talking English so that he would take her for a foreigner. We did wedge them into the compartment before the train started for Dunkirk, where our sleeping cars would go aboard a ship to Dover. The night ferry is my favorite travel experience. In one night it offers the Orient Express, the Queen Mary, and the Flying Scotsman: French train, Channel crossing, British train, a breakfast at sea, another in England.
On the ferry, the crew had celebrated New Year's Eve on a previous voyage a few hours before. Mistletoe was swaying in the main salon or, perhaps, it stayed still, stabilized, while the ship rolled in the swell, her starboard side bared to the north wind. In the salon, two men were asleep in armchairs, their heads wrapped in their scarves to keep out the light. They might have been decapitated, one had his scarf tied in a giant necktie knot with only thin air above it. Their legs were crossed on the edges of their chairs, their umbrellas were crossed on the edge of their table, on the table two half-empty beer glasses, two cans of Ballantine's, one bottle of perfume, probably, wrapped in green-and-white-striped paper, a bowler hat planted on top of the package. The photographer was planted against the far wall, trying to sketch it all, kicking herself, kicking me, because we had decided not to bring the cameras on this jaunt to London. She had only the human eye and hand to try to recall a scene that needed a Cartier-Bresson.
At Victoria Station, we pedaled off the train and through customs on our two-wheeled luggage carts. We moved up Regent Street to Oxford Circus, then down New Oxford Street at a slow roll, stopping, window-shopping. We went into a Far West shop in the Far West End. The photographer tried on a leather coat, fleece-lined, clear golden-white in color. I wanted to buy it, I had to buy it, it would be the saddest day of my life it I didn't buy it, I could go all over London and never find such a coat at such a price for the lady. A good salesman was working on us. I almost felt like buying the coat to reward him for his performance, it had been so long since I had seen such a salesman. But the amount of folding money one can carry on a folding bike is limited. The photographer had to choose between the leather coat and the secondhand clockwork locomotives in the shop we knew near High Holborn Tube Station. The salesman agreed to put the coat aside for an hour, not a minute more, and we slipped through the traffic on Oxford Street to the shop near High Holborn Tube Station. We never saw the coat or the salesman again.
When we returned to Victoria Station at the end of our stay, I had a great carton on the rack over the front wheel. I could hardly keep abreast of the red double-decker bus whose driver had given us directions to Victoria Station. I clung to the handlebars that just peered over the top of the load while we coasted through the night streets of London, their Christmas-season decorations twinkling at no one in particular, perhaps at us and the bus. The carton was full of locomotives, signals, wooden cars, all of them outsize with that poignant look of old artifacts manufactured from pressed steel and cast iron, an imitation of the artisan rather than today's plastics that imitate what had once been manufactured. The carton and the bikes all got into the wagon-lit with no trouble; the conductors were on strike that night and there was only a student who kept the heating system going so that the radiators would not freeze. Yet the train was jammed, for their airlines were on strike, too. We locked ourselves into our compartment and never came out until we were in the womb of the cross-Channel ferry. Sleeping inside a compartment inside a train inside a ship, one feels like the smallest of Russian dolls.
That was how I once traveled to Copenhagen on a Mission for the Organization. I brought my old blue bike with me in the baggage car of the Nord Express. The bike was expendable, I stripped it before I entrusted it to the railroad to save them the trouble of stripping it. The bike stayed in the baggage car while I slept in a wagon-lit with the bike pump, a spare inner tube, and the luggage straps in my suitcase.
I began my journey in the evening with the roominess of farming France outside my window. I have the porter to understand that if he remembered not to put anyone else in the sleeper compartment that night, I would not forget him the next morning (I can afford to be generous, the Organization pays the fare, it's just the tips that are on me). I cocked my feet up on the table that would lift to reveal a sink, and watched the world whirl by. Stone housed in Ile de France, brick to the north, rickety shaft heads of dying Walloon mines, the fires of the Ruhr, gas burning off at refineries, smoke coming from flat-topped girthy towers I had never seen before. Over the Ruhr, a red-orange polluted sunset almost as glorious as the ones over Hoboken and Secaucus.
Night and the sleep of the just, interrupted only by station stops when the banging, slamming hand on my cradle took a rest and I woke up, surprised by the silence. A short break on the train ferry between Germany and Denmark. Unlike the ship that runs between Dunkirk and Dover, this one did not have a channel of salt water flowing under the wagons-lits to wash away their droppings. Otherwise, much the same. A short sea voyage, a change of money, a cup of coffee, bracing air, a walk to windward, then back to the compartment. The trip from London to Paris is much more nautical than this journey through northern Europe where sea and land yield the same horizon, where there are neither cliffs nor beaches, but only green water turning to green grass.
From the train coming into Copenhagen, I could see wheat flattened by the rain. It was like blond hair that had been wetted, brushed, and parted. The eagles they fly high in Mobile, the trains they fly low in Denmark, just between the clouds impaled on village church steeples and the flat flat country between the villages.
The clouds have steamrollered the land here, ironing it out for trains and cyclists. Training in Denmark really is like flying three feet off the ground at seventy miles an hour. Look at the woods. If the trees are young, their trunks vanish, you rush by a canopy standing on a thin haze. If the trees are thick and the sun is out, watch the treetops. Light comes through in pierces and jabs elongated by the speed of the train, a swim of black-and-light that gives away its true nature of leaves and branches and twigs only if you follow it with a rapid swivel of the head, allowing the eyes to catch it for an instant.
The Danish countryside is a delight to the eye. No suburbs, so slurbs, just fairy cottages, thatched roofs, contented cows, empty roads. Nations that are good at putting together countrysides are less gifted for cities (and vice versa). That must explain Copenhagen, where the authorities have made pornography available because so little else is.
It takes a bit of acclimatization, that porno does. You pick up a Herald-Tribune at the newsstand of a proper hotel and there's a Sexikon or a Sexpedition or a flyer for a Real Live Show next to it, illustrated, in color, glossy. The Danes are prim in appearance, but the porno is everywhere. A grandmother running a stationery store has a wall full of the stuff, covers splashing coitus and genitalia, God knows what the insides must be like. At night when the newsstands are closed, automatic vending shops sell porno next to Treets Bars, frozen shrimp, Tampax, and forty-watt light bulbs. It is a year-round all-round sex fair in the round.
The word is that sex crimes are down in Denmark and I am wont to believe it. No one can eat a steak after visiting a slaughterhouse, no one could be a peeper here in Copenhagen where one must skulk down alleys, slink along deserted lanes, lurk behind corners to get away from the porno press. It is an interesting test, this ignoble experiment by the Danish government. If it works, sex will die, smothered, saturated, satiated, and, perhaps, love will get a chance again.
When I got off the train at Copenhagen Station, I picked up my blue bike at the customs counter and rode off to the Hotel Minerva where the Organization had booked me a room for the duration of the Conference. There I was informed that the Hotel Minerva had overbooked, I had ridden off to the wrong hotel. I had to change deities, from the Hotel Minerva to the Hotel Apollo.
Apollo was halfway to the Copenhagen airport. Three buildings, Horton's Ice Cream sandwiches upended. Except that Horton's Ice Cream used to come in three flavors, vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, while these buildings are tasteless, odorless, not to be taken internally, they must be teratogenic, too, but that is to be proven after a generation has lived in them. The buildings probably will not stand for a generation, they will lie down, each filling the open space of mud and parking lots that separates them. Then they will only be two stories high and my eighth-floor window will look straight into the black morass where a Dutch tour bus was parked. This will be an improvement over the void onto which my window opened, a hinged glass wall, one push and you're over the edge of eternity. In the on-season, the hotel is a student's dormitory. It must have been built this way to keep up Denmark's quota of the Scandinavian suicide rate. You don't need a gloomy Sunday or a blue Monday to sail out the window here, all you have to do is wake up in the middle of the night and fumble for the bathroom door without your glasses.
I used to get away from it early in the morning in the hour or so of life I had before the slow death of a Conference in an airless Conference Hall. First I took the bike to the open-air automatic porno-shop-Tampax-vendor-beverage-dispenser for a cup of black coffee. This got me to a bakery where I soon became well known. Without a word, the baker's wife would bring me out a half-liter of milk, then she started to scoop Danish pastry from her tray in obedience to my pointing finger. I would brush the crumbs from my shirt, mop the milk from my hands, and I was off to the fishing village seaside resort of Dragør. (I like the authenticity of that ø, you pronounce it with pursed lips; in Copenhagen, even the engines shout with an accent).
One morning, about two miles out on the road to Dragør, I saw a Jaguar with British plates coming the other way, headlights full on. Absent-minded, I thought, he must have been driving all night. A moment later, I got into the fog myself. Another first, I had never ridden a bike in early-morning sea fog. My black sweater was coated with a layer of damp gray wool that looked like my poor frizzled grizzled head, my glasses blurred, thickening the fog all the more. I stuck to the cycle path on the side of the road, secure in the knowledge that I could only crash into or be crashed into by another cyclist, nothing heavier than another cyclist. As I neared Dragør and the sea, the harbor foghorns grew louder, twin musical blasts calling to each other. The foghorns blew for me in my myopia, to keep me from going off the end of the road and into the rocks as I floated in the mist. In a fog as in darkness, cycling is almost like riding a broomstick, one's connection to the ground is not clear, the result is extoplasmic or oneiric, all the more so in a place like Dragør that looks like an illustration out of Andersen. The Danes still live in gingerbread houses, they even build new ones by the sea, leaving the glass slabs to foreigners and students.
On the days off that the Conference gave me, I roamed the highways and bikeways around Copenhagen. Once I got to Furesco, a lake north of the city, a public beach in the woods, all lawns, peace, and luxury, a country club for everybody. It was something like the beach on Lake Geneva at Morges in Switzerland, which looks like it was laid out for Bardot but which is yours and mine and ours for one franc fifty Swiss. Everything is bike-sized in Denmark. Dragør is so near to Copenhagen, closer than Harlem to Wall Street, yet so much more remote than Saint-Tropez. It is a lived-in live museum, perhaps a Mystic, Connecticut, without the admission charge and without the sadness of the little houses where there is no life after visiting hours. In Dragør, you can tell the local museum from the other houses. A sign on it says: "MUSEUM."
Back from the lakeside beach, I rode out to Dragør again to put the day to bed. There in the early evening, three or four kids were playing in a big rusty old fishing boat (with grass growing in its hold, don't ask me how). The kids worked winches, leaped from deck to deck, shimmied down the mast, crawled along the boom, long-haired blond little Vikings. More of them were having a wild time with a dockside crane operated by hand cranks. They had lifted one of their number high overhead, dangling him from the hook where he screamed and squealed more in delight than in fear. Later, the kids became still and so did the day. The gray sea and the sky were fused together by an unseemly tropical heat that floated big freighters on its wave, freeing them from the water. The world slowed to the pace of the ships, to my stroll along the pier. Alone, I cycled back to the Apollo.
I had to do my cycling in bits and pieces in Copenhagen. After a day's session at the Conference ended, I hardly had time to do more than ride down to see the mermaid at the harbor entrance. I would lose my sense of time; the sun sets so slowly in Copenhagen in July that it retards one's biological clock. The mermaid reminded me of a girl I knew with her high firm breasts not on speaking terms and her big muscular thighs shaped for swimming. Both the mermaid and that girl were built like seals, they undulate powerfully in the water. Often, I went to look at the rock in the water to see if the girl was still there. Then I would push onward almost to the harbor mouth, wheeling my bicycle, keeping it in check with a pat of my hand on its saddle.
One evening, we went past a yacht basin filled with luxurious craft flying red, yellow, and black flags, all German yachts in fiberglass, stainless steel, plastic foam, and chrome. One Danish boat, and old needle-hulled motor sailor, brought a catch to my throat. Take off the masts, add a stern cabin and she was Annabelle, my father's boat, a rakish randy rakehell out of the 1920s that was brought to life again just when I came home from the wars. I do not remember Annabelle all that well, I have no sentiment for her, but the sight of her contemporary in the Langelinie basin brought me back to the days when my father was alive, so much alive, wearing his yachting cap, giving us his orders, being that leader of men that he should have been, that he could have been were it not for the accidents of geography and history. When he went to Paris, he never failed to visit the tomb of Napoleon, that other runt on whom fortune had smiled more broadly, and that was the only monument in Paris that my father ever visited.
My bicycle and I swam with the mermaid back across the ocean and over the years to Annabelle and my father. It was a fine evening for that sort of traveling. The harbor was calm, the sea stretched fair. I rode along the waterfront. After the yacht basin, I came across a strange ship, white and bulky, sitting squarely on the water. She was American. The pimply sailor at the gangplank told me she was the South Wind, a Coast Guard icebreaker going up to Murmansk, from the mermaid to Murmansk, to do oceanographic work in the Arctic with the Russians. I like to talk to Americans like that, to sailors on ships in Copenhagen or Barcelona, to GIs in cars in Paris. I like to hear their accents innocent of any bilinguistics. I like to listen to them talk about what matters to a sailor from Hempstead, Long Island, on gangplank duty. He wanted to know what there was worth doing in Copenhagen, but he was not all that curious. He had twenty letters from his girl friend to answer and, besides, he couldn't leave the ship. I hope that he never got as far as the porno shop on Nyhaven Quay that I spotted on my way to the mermaid. I didn't have a chance to study the window, I just glimpsed posters of boots, whips, and black garter belts as I rode by. Poor porno, it's so self-defeating. What one seeks is down, deep down at the very roots, below the basement. Porno is the antithesis of all this, it is all surface, it is all conscious, oh so self-conscious, the more you take, the further I am sure it leads you from where you are trying to go.
I saw Copenhagen harbor mainly at sunrise and sunset, before and after the Sessions of the Conference. One morning I was rolling towards the waterfront when I passed a girl cycling in old jeans, older sandals, a shirt half tucked in. She was blond, she looked healthy and simple. I stopped to look at the mermaid, she went by and I passed her again in the little park of Castellet behind the harbor. She smiled, I do not know why, I did not ask, the mermaid was still on my mind. I kept going to the end of the Langelinie dock where the big ships tie up.
The other day, it was the South Wind, today it was the Cabo San Roque, a white Spanish liner from Seville, her lights still on in the early morning. Behind her lay an incredible steam tug, her stack ten times higher than her hull. Her name looked unpronounceably Scandinavian but she came from Split, the rust of all the seas from the Adriatic to the Baltic on her hull. Then I went back to the Cabo San Roque.
It is hard for me to tear my eyes away from the boat deck of a liner. It was there that my father stood when he arrived in New York back from his yearly business trip to Europe. I looked on the boat deck for his black overcoat, his gray hat, his face that exploded into a smile when he saw us. My childhood comes back to me in every seaport; I would hate to be of a generation that will see its childhood in every airport. What filthy places airports are beneath the glass and the soft voices coming from the speakers. Often, I rode past Copenhagen's airport on my way to Dragør and I have an image of silver planes rising on obscene columns of black smoke, their engines and their toilets wide open. They pour smoke taking off, they stream it landing, they generate a pall as they stand at the end of the runway waiting their turn to go. No, I would not want them in my childhood. I could not feel a kinship as I did that morning with the Jens Bang, a sleek black ship that moved into the city along the waterfront at the same pace I was keeping on my blue bicycle.
My time in Copenhagen was drawing to a close, the Conference was reaching the stage where it would discuss its Draft Report. I was able to slip out for a few minutes to replace the bracket holding the headlight on my bicycle. I got a new bracket from an old man who ran a small bicycle repair shop near the Conference Hall. I had to use sign language but he understood. He gave me the bracket, two wrenches, and a screwdriver to install it myself and charged me fifty cents U.S., all without saying a word. While I worked, he had a long conversation with his street sweeper who came by, steering a cart full of leaves and papers. The street sweeper had the look of the man who lives outdoors, who is paid for strolling, a professional boulevardier. He reminded me of the sweeper I saw one morning in the Bois de Vincennes, smoking his pipe, pushing his cart with music coming out of the transistor radio he had hung on the handles.
On the next to the last day, the Conference paused for a break. The delegates were herded into buses to relax, half going north, half going south. I had taken such outings in the past when I had no bicycle, but not this time. I needed the day to restore my aloneness, to get away from the rape of the mind and nerves that occurs in such a Conference. Your head is clamped between earphones as if in a vise, you cannot move, you are held motionless while the words are dumped into your head whether from the original speaker, a disembodied voice whose face is never seen, or from the simultaneous interpreter sewing together the worn tissue of ideas with the same old thread of connective phrases.
I biked away by riding up to Hillerød. I came back through miles of forest with a north wind behind me and no one on any side, no one to look pained as I sang "My country 'tis of thee" to the trees, as I bellowed off-key with the bike skimming past the birches. I scarcely stopped in Copenhagen for smörrebrod and pastry, raspberry tarts and whipped cream. I took on five smörrebrods and three tarts, I couldn't get much mileage out of that old blue bike even with a following wind. Then I was off to Dragør again to watch the sea roll out to meet the sky. This time it was a hard blue sea, light dancing on its ripples, no trouble telling it from the soft shimmering air. Sailboats fluttered from the pier, a blonde reading a paperback on the afterdeck of a big cabin cruiser smiled at me, I smiled back, we were just telling each other how lucky we both were to be on the dock at Dragør that day in the sun. I watched the ferries come and the coasters steam past, then I had to backtrack, pedal back to my room for my last night at the Hotel Apollo. The next time I saw the Dragør, it was the name of the home port of a blue freighter loading potatoes at Tréguier on the coast of Brittany.
I went back to Paris by train, my Mission was over. I have been fortunate, I guess, I have been able to work all over the map. But many can do the same. Let us get back to travel, not tourism, not the ultimate air journey by a converted ABM bursting high over Europe and MIRVing the customers down to their hotels in London, Paris, Palma de Mallorca, Rimini, Estoríl. Travel should become what it was not so long ago, not a way to waste time, not a vacation (the same root as vacate, "f. L vacare be empty"), but as the journeymen moved around, meeting their fellow guildsmen everywhere; as the pilgrims did, watching the great towers of the holy cities rise as they conquered the intervening distances with their staffs and feet. I don't say we should go back to going barefoot. I am all for the so-called soft technology (like the bicycle) that lets us make better use of our own strength or draw on nature's resources without eating up the capital.
Time and circumstances have not enabled me to take any long trips exclusively by bike. But I have ridden with others who have. I once served as a guide through the Chevreuse valley for a young man who was getting into shape to make another summer round trip from Paris to Istanbul. He made light of the whole business, he said his main problem was mailing tires ahead to French consulates along the way.
Only on one occasion have I taken the road for more than a day. A friend drove me a hundred and twenty miles west of Paris with a bike and left me in some woods not far from le Mans. It was early on a Saturday afternoon. On the back rack, I had a toothbrush, a razor, and a pair of jeans so that I could change out of shorts and pass inspection in a hotel. I started back and, after five minutes, I stopped and ducked behind a hedge for the usual reason. Without the movement of the wheels, the accompaniment of the machine that I was energizing myself, I suddenly felt puny. There was nothing but that frame and wheels to get me home. The bike was a semiracer, I could pick it up with one hand, the whole idea seemed idiotic.
That afternoon, I pedaled under a cloud. I ran before a west wind, but I couldn't run fast enough. A steady rain sprayed me all the way, I was under a traveling shower head. I used the most obscure roads I could find on my Michelin map, the kind of roads that have no signs because only the natives are expected to use them. Twice, I took a wrong turning on unmarked intersections and lost two or three miles until I realized something was wrong because I was fighting the wind instead of lazing with it. I was in the Sarthe country that boasts its own version of the Alps. I did not find the hills all that rugged but I toiled on them. There is no ventilation on a bike in a following wind when a hill slows you and you are hunched under a rain cape.
Of the hundred and twenty miles, I planned to do only thirty that afternoon. Around six o'clock, I would have to start looking for a hotel near a main road. The rural lanes on which I rode were so deserted, so depopulated that there wasn't even a café along the way. I knew that if I started room-hunting much later than half past six, everything would be full of travelers tucking in their dinners before tucking in for the night. A car does have one advantage over a bike: as a last resort, you can sleep in it on a rainy night. I lost half an hour looking for a place off the main road. I landed by mistake in a new hotel that had been opened above a gas station but, in the end, I found lodging and a meal in a little market town, where my bicycle spent the night safely in an old stable.
I paid for the room in advance in case I awoke before the hotelkeeper. I did. I was up at six, shaved, toothbrushed, ready for the road at half past six; no, ready to fix a flat front tire. It had not gone all the way flat the night before; with its dying breaths, it had gotten me to a hotel and a bed. Fifteen minutes later, I was on the road, but only until the first bakery, where I coaled on chocolate buns and apple turnovers. You can always enter a country bakery through the back door in the early morning; the baker is pleased to get a little conversation along with a little business. It is not often that he sees others keeping baker's hours.
I got away from the main road and struck east once more, following the thick blue marker pen line on my map. The countryside changed as quickly as if I had Concorded it. The woods, hills, and hedgerows of the Sarthe were gone, so was the rain. I was rolling through the wheatfields of Beauce. I had the road to myself, not a sign of life except for the big hares that I kept starting. A bicycle is a good way to catch animals unawares. It is stealthier than a car, it smells like a human but it moves faster. The hare or the partridge times the cyclist as if he were on foot, he is up to them before they know it. In the wheatfields of Beauce, the hares are big and plentiful. They feed well and you can hear them thump the ground when they run into the fields away from the road. They're smarter than the Breton rabbits near Lanloup that cross in full exposure to get to the other side, right where the fox I saw one morning must be waiting to chase them.
Around Chartres, the wind rose along with the sun, raising my speed and drying me out. At Illiers, the first town, I got hold of a liter of milk, it fueled and cooled me until I cleared the plains and I could take cover from the sun at the outskirts of the forest of Rambouillet. Then my expedition was almost over; I soon got onto roads I had taken on a day's outing. It was all familiar as I returned to Paris through a green tunnel, in leaf almost all the way from the end of Beauce to the end of the Bois de Boulogne. Then I was below the Eiffel Tower and a mile from home, my toothbrush and my razor still strapped to the raincape folded on the back rack of the bicycle.
Chapter 12
Time is on Our Side
The bicycle is a vehicle for revolution. It can destroy the tyranny of the automobile as effectively as the printing press brought down despots of flesh and blood. The revolution will be spontaneous, the sum total of individual revolts like my own. It may have already begun. It will not be organized, the organizers have got us into Organizations, they are responsible for the behavior that Gallup can predict. I want to see a Unites States where a survey of 2,000 people will indicate the hopes, fears, preferences, loves of 2,000 people, not 200 million, and no one will survey them anymore. New converts are being made and new cohorts are being formed by the hour. Some 12 million bicycles are manufactured and sold every year in the United States. The rest of the West is bound to tag along as it did for blue jeans and wraparound windshields. Paris-Match has already featured a little outfit that the Galeries Lafayette suggest for cycling in the Parc de Saint-Cloud. Galeries Lafayette, we are here!
Americans still go around the world spreading the germs of change. Change must come, all the signs point that way. Extinction has overtaken many animals, but no species willingly heads for self-destruction in full awareness of where it is going. We are aware, the canaries are keeling over on all sides. In a New Yorker interview, a young woman named Kahn-Tineta Horn, an Indian activist, made some remarks that I keep remembering.
The Indians are being asked to be white people and they can't be. They can't be two people at once. They're trying to strip the Indian of his identity. The Indian is different. He can't make it in white society.
If the Indian can't have his ancient feeling of community, if he can't "go on the warpath"---that is, do work that suits him---if he can't go through the old rituals that signify to him he has become a man, then he is emasculated. He's a caged animal. That's why he has so much trouble in the city.
Let's not pity the poor Indian, let's pity ourselves. The Indians are getting it in the cities but they're not the only ones. I know Bretons, sons of farmers and seamen, who can no longer do work that suits them. They, too, are being driven away from their old rituals. What is happening to them is happening to full-dimensioned human beings the world over whether in the name of development or because it's good for business.
But it's not good for businessmen, they're not all that far removed from the poor Indians. An article in the Sunday Times of London speaks about the revival of cycling in Paris. "Middle-aged executives, keen to show that they are 'dynamique,' have started trying to improve their health by riding to work. It probably doesn't do them much good, since everybody else's cars pollute the Paris air so much that what they gain on the coronaries they lose on the chest diseases." The Sunday Times doesn't know its Parisians; they didn't become executives to choose between a lung cancer and an infarctus. Executives make their voices heard everywhere. No one cried very much about spilt oil in offshore drilling until tarry black goo started to decorate beachfront property in Santa Barbara, California, much of it bought, no doubt, by oil executives. They cried, their screams are still being heard.
Obviously, we are not all going to be converted overnight. It took twenty years for automobile registrations in the United States to rise from 8,000 in 1900 to 8 million in 1920 against entrenched interests no stronger than blacksmiths and stable boys. Before we start going the other way, we must slow down. In The Gilded Age, Mark Twain tells of one of those made steamboat races, using the most advanced technology of the day, that ended as they often did with one boat shattered by an explosion. Her rival's crew started to douse their boilers with buckets of water, there was no stopping her with the head of steam that she had on. There's no stopping us in our tracks, either, we have got to slow down, perhaps as I have slowed from Manhattan to Lanloup (pop. 250).
We are slowing down. Pedestrian malls are spreading over city centers everywhere from Verona to Tokyo. One town, Norwich in England, discovered the virtues of a "foot street" almost by accident. Back in 1965, London Street had to be closed to traffic for six weeks while repairs were carried out on a sewer. Shopkeepers, to their great surprise, found they were doing more business. Without cars, their street was more attractive, even with a sewer being dug up. Since then, Norwich has decided to keep cars out of London Street without waiting for the next big excavation job. They have learned that it is not necessary to burn one's house down to enjoy roast pork.
In 1972, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD to its friends) did a world survey of traffic-free zones.
In Vienna, shop owners reported a 25 to 50 per cent increase in business in the first week after the traffic ban went into effect last December. In Norwich, all but two shops in the exclusion area did more business. Some increase has been reported to be between 15 and 35 per cent; Rouen, in France, between 10 and 15 per cent.
In Tokyo, of 574 shops surveyed, 21 per cent showed an increase in sales, 60 per cent showed no change and 19 per cent reported a decrease. Seventy-four per cent of the merchants interviewed pronounced themselves in favor of the scheme.
We've got a contradiction here. Pedestrian malls are good for business, but they're bad for the automobile business. Does this mean that the automobile business is bad for business? Does this mean that we are being hoaxed, conned, swindled, and hornswoggled by all of our friends who tell us not to touch a hair on Henry Ford's old gray head if we do not wish to see desolation and depression visited upon us and our grandchildren's grandchildren? Ask the OECD, maybe the merchants it interviews are all running head shops. We get contradictions everywhere. Ban the SST, cut out exhaust smoking, shut down the detergent plants and you do people out of jobs, so we are threatened by more or less the same quarters that are busy devising PRTs to do bus drivers and subway motormen out of theirs. To no one's surprise, the OECD concluded:
In New York City, the closure of Madison Avenue to traffic in the spring of 1971 resulted in a threefold reduction of carbon monoxide concentration levels. The recently introduced ban on cars in the inner city of Vienna has lowered pollution levels by 70 per cent. In Tokyo and Marseilles, results have been equally impressive.
Too bad that the OECD did not query shopkeepers on the edge of the traffic-free zones. What kind of business were they doing, how did they like trying to make a living in a parking lot, did they, too want to be freed of traffic? We can see interesting possibilities here, some kind of a seed has been sown. This may be where we are going away from the shopping center and back to the city center. It's not all that hard, we don't have all that far to go. The foundations of what we have been destroying are still around, we need only build on them anew. The motor city is a big adversary, but it falls hard. It is like the brontosaurus, it wastes all its energy just trying to stand up, it spins its wheels to say in one place, it has nothing left with which to defend itself. It reminds me of a friend of mine who works for an Organization. He spends hours at his desk, he takes papers home, he receives telephone calls only by appointments made a week in advance. One day he told me: "You know, above a certain level here, people spend all their time holding meetings and writing memos to inform each other of what they are doing. There is absolutely no output."
He could have been describing the city of Paris as it appeared to me on my infrequent visits from Lanloup. I did nothing there, I was exhausted. The energy I saved because I did not have to haul water from the village pump was wasted hauling myself around. Most of the power that such a city uses goes to overcome the friction that it generates. Even by bicycle, I lost time dodging traffic jams, getting out of the way of delivery-truck drivers screaming at pleasure drivers. I had to lift my bike from sidewalk to street over the bumper-to-bumper rank of automobiles outside my door. In the case of cities, big isn't beautiful, it's not even practical. One day, I had to meet a train at Guingamp, a town on the northern side of Brittany, a megalopolis of 11,257. I had no bike, I left the car at the station. Inside of twelve minutes, I had bought some bicycle tape, a typewriter ribbon, two pieces of apple tart (ate them, too), and the French translation of an American book written by a fellow I know. I had never shopped in Guingamp before, I did not know my way around. Except for the typewriter ribbon, I made all my purchases in small family-run shops. My only difficult moment came when I had to cross the intersection of the Pontrieux and the Saint-Brieuc highways, where pedestrians must run a gauntlet of zebra crossings. Otherwise, medieval granite Guingamp was functioning pretty well. I understand that it doesn't during the summer, when the Parisians are traveling, but you should know by now how Parisians travel.
One can shop well in a small town like Guingamp or even in a village like Lanloup where the Duvals' general store sells everything from yogurt to rubber soles for wooden shoes. One can work well there, too. I found I was three times more productive in Lanloup than in Paris. This gain in production is not necessarily limited to writers and other parasites. In Denmark, one sees small machine shops in farm country, turning out precision equipment next to the cows and the chickens. Apparently, they do all right against big-city competition. So does a chemist I met on one of my bike sorties around Copenhagen. I ran into him and his family while they were swimming in a woodland pond and he invited me to his house for tea. He was living in a thatched-roof farmhouse, where he did research on new ways to stick molecules together, sticking as many as fourteen Ph.D. heads together on his projects. He was independent of the city, his wife did most of the shopping. Whenever he ran out of shoes, she took an old pair into town for size and came back with a new one. If they fitted, she bought him another pair for a rainy day.
When he wasn't working on his chemistry, he tried to solve the problem of the little bull he had bought to crop his lawn. He was getting his grass cut for nothing, in six months he would be getting his meat, too. The only trouble was that he had second thoughts about getting within range of the bull to move the stake to which it was tethered and he liked it too much to butcher it. He was better as a chemist than as a stockman but, at least, he was trying to do both.
In Brittany, in much of provincial France, there are still people with more than one occupation. A young fisherman at Brehec used to work as a cook in Paimpol, he can always go back to a restaurant if the fishing gets bad. The fishermen at Collioure down near the Spanish border of France grow wine as well, the anchovies they catch will raise a thirst, the Banyuls that they bottle will slake it. The best blood sausage I ever ate in my life was made by a locomotive fireman near Montargis who butchers hogs in his spare time. Serge Vitry, the locomotive engineer who served it to me, grows all the fruit and vegetables needed by himself, his wife, and their three hungry sons. They get their protein from the rabbits he fattens, they can wash it down with cider from his trees, the cider I once saw as fresh apple juice squirting out of the itinerant press that works the countryside around Montargis. When Serge retires in a year or so, he will be able to do any number of things, he knows any number of things. On his obsolete job as a steam locomotive engineer, he managed to escape that breakdown of work into specialized operations that leads to the breakdown of personalities.
I do not know whether to howl with laughter or gnash my teeth with rage when I hear all the cant about how we must choose between the Environment and jobs. Once, there were jobs in Brittany and in the other provinces of France. They were eliminated so that the production lines could be manned and the environment destroyed. It would be so easy for us to change the payoffs so that jobs could be brought back to the countryside and to the sea, so that people could produce once more what they know best, so that their lives would have meaning every day of the year.
I do know that we cannot go all the way back and still take care of the excess population with which we have saddled ourselves. Yields higher than those of traditional farming are needed, bright minds are already working on ways to achieve them without wrecking the land and our lives. Still, I cannot help but think that we should also try to save what we have, to keep countrymen in the country instead of driving them into the city where, twenty years from now, their sons will discover brown rice and grow tomatoes in a backyard. I understand that if manure is properly composted, it will produce enough methane gas to run an automobile. That's a great way to get around; so is riding a horse.
Just how much can we slow down and live well? I've no data, this would be another good research project for some energetic young scientist with, perhaps, a big Ford Foundation grant. Let him try to define "living well"; he could sample people who rent shacks by the beach or who camp on their vacation. Most of us go back to simpler ways when we have a chance to do as we please. That's not enough; we must slow down all year round, not just on Sundays and holidays. It is the automobile that has speeded up our lives, so let's get it out of our lives. The bicycle can get it out of cities, we can let it survive in the country for a while as the Percherons have around Pommerit-le-Vicomte.
Then there is essential traffic. Like trucks. We can't get along without them right away. That means we will have to get along with them for a while. First, let's slow them down to bicycle speed, fifteen miles an hour, wherever a kid can run out in the street. What are more essential, trucks or kids? Then, put in steam engines, put in some kind of silent power, we could even clean up their diesels. In England, diesels are used to haul loads in coal mines without gassing their miners. There is no reason why our streets should be less healthy than coal mines.
In my dream, big trucks would wither away, starting with the ones that haul gasoline to service stations. Then we could go to piggyback and containers, using all that excess railroad capacity we have lying around. I know a double-track line between Chaumont and Saint-Dizier in eastern France where one can take long naps without ever being disturbed. It runs parallel to a two-lane road where the trucks barrel along in an endless train. Those trucks could be hauled by flatcar. They could drive on at Saint-Dizier and drive off at Chaumont. The service could be easily subsidized by money saved on the upkeep of the road.
Such flatcars could keep busy everywhere. Some could also handle electric automobiles used for long trips. When the railroads first began in England, that was how the gentry traveled. They rode in their own carriages on special cars, with the horses in other cars. If some people insist in riding around in containers, then let's handle them that way.
Setting up a rational transportation system would supply jobs for all the automobile workers who may not want to become bicycle dealers. We could build the system tomorrow. I have heard of a young man who has procured maps of all the abandoned rail lines on the east coast of the United States. He has a little gasoline-engined railcar that he hauls around in a big station wagon. He uses it to ride along the old tracks, chugging for miles through wilderness without anyone seeing him. His hobby could come in handy the day we decide once more to move freight around without anyone seeing it.
On that day, we'll still function as we functioned in 1900, with only eight thousand automobiles in the United States, or from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, when we concentrated on creaming people on battlefields in Europe and Asia instead of on highways at home. We can slow down a long way, but we are not going to come to a standstill. That is another of those windmills that we are supposed to be fighting: the choice between all or nothing, Cadillacs or Calcutta. This is computer thinking: yes-no, on-off, no room in between. This is the way the computer runs, it is not the way the world runs.
It is not the way the Third World runs, either. We tend to take its per capita income figures, then to try to stretch them over a European or an American budget. From that point, it is easy to extrapolate all those underpaid hundreds of millions into the equivalent of an army of hunger marchers waiting to engulf us. This just is not so. The Third World is a semantic invention, it contains far more worlds than the other two. Most of its inhabitants are subsistence farmers (which is another way of saying what certain communes are trying to achieve). Many of them make a living, many of them do not. They need help, but they do not need oil refineries and expressways. Certain of their leaders may say that they do. I think that such leaders, perhaps unwittingly, are taking up the white man's burden. They may not have his skin, but they have his education, his living standards, and his values.
I have walked on the sidewalks of Bombay and Calcutta. These cities are shocking, they are the biggest industrial cities in India. Compared to most of the country, they are highly developed. I have also been in rural Ceylon in a region that lacked both development and hunger. I know what Ceylonese of fifty look like in their sarongs and I also know what Long Beach, Long Island, looks like in bathing suits on a Sunday. Long Beach is in trouble, perhaps rural Ceylon could send some experts over. They should be more qualified than the well-meaning experts I saw twenty-odd years ago among the Tarascan Indians on Lake Pàtzcuaro in Mexico. They were trying to convince people to stop sleeping on the floor and to cook on backyard stoves instead of on smoky open fires inside their houses. The polite Indians never told the experts that the fires warmed the floor and made it fine for sleeping on a cold night in the mountains. People in Calcutta have got far worse problems, but the cowboy approach is not going to help those Indians any more than it did any others.
It is true that I dream. I have been too long in Lanloup where there are still sorcerers around, although, so I was told in the village graveyard, they do not practice any more. Perhaps the retired sorcerers have been casting a few spells over me just as the retired seamen cast a few nets from the little boats they sail out of Brehec on a calm sunny day. We need spells and mystery in our lives, the modern city drives them away and replaces them with drugs and neuroses. Just as the automobile allows us to travel without moving our muscles, drugs let us dream without moving our minds.
The motor city can drive mystery away from Lanloup when summer starts and the migrating birds arrive from Paris, pendulous men and women in their mustard-colored Asconas and Taunuses, yachtsmen coming ashore in hip boots, bright yellow slickers, and stocking caps, they look as if they've been clewing up the topgallants off Tierra del Fuego. It's easy to tell the yachtsmen from the fishermen, the fishermen wear coveralls and look like mechanics.
I wonder where Merlin spends his summers. I suspect he comes to Paris as an Augustan. That may be why I can dream in the Paris of August. I coast hands off down Rue d'assas on a Sunday morning, the first batch of newly made air comes fresh to me through the grille of the Luxembourg Gardens. The Seine sparkles like all the seas I have ever known, the sky over the Left Bank is as washed and clear as it is over the English Channel between Saint-Brieuc and Jersey. I dream of a Paris year of twelve Augusts.
I dream of the day when we will travel once more on the little wooden passenger coaches that were turned into sheds and summer houses when the branch line closed down at Brehec. I do not know who will be driving the train, perhaps it will be the man who ran a switch engine I once saw outside the old roundhouse at Nogent-sur-Marne that is now dust. From the track, I admired his engine; from the cab, he admired my racing bike. He told me that he came to work himself on a racing bike all the way from Livry-Gargan. Perhaps it was from Brooklyn Heights, it could have been from Dragør, I am not sure. I saw him only once. All I can remember is that he invited me to come aboard his little steam engine for a fireside chat. Its copper pipes gleamed, he opened the firebox door, threw in a shovelful of coal and closed it, all in the same dancing movement.
Then we talked about bicycles.
Lanloup, June 1972
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http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/12/obituaries/daniel-behrman-66-an-author-and-editor.html
Obituaries
Daniel Behrman, 66, An Author and Editor
Published: May 12, 1990
Daniel S. Behrman, an author of books on science and a former editor for Unesco, died of cancer on Wednesday at his home in Rangeley, Me. He was 66 years old.
Mr. Behrman was a writer and English-language editor for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization from 1950 to 1972. He left to pursue science writing. In 1976, his book ''Solar Energy: The Awakening of Solar Energy'' was published by Little Brown. Earlier he wrote ''The Man Who Loved Bicycles'' and ''The New World of Oceans.''
He contributed to many magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Parade and Catholic Digest. He also wrote English subtitles for French-language films.
A graduate of the University of Michigan, he began his career as a reporter for The Long Island Daily Press in 1945.
He is survived by his wife, the former Madeleine de Sinety; three sons, Daniel Jr. of Glen Ridge, N.J., and Thomas and Peter, both of Rangeley; a sister, Lois Watson of Woodstock, Vt.; a brother, Eugene, of Caogli, Italy, and a granddaughter.
http://obituaries.pressherald.com/obituaries/mainetoday-pressherald/obituary.aspx?n=madeleine-de-sinety-behrman&pid=155230824
Obituary
Madeleine de Sinety Behrman, 77
RANGELEY -- On the first day of winter, Dec. 22, 2011, the photographer, Madeleine de Sinety Behrman died at her home in Rangeley.
She was born in 1934 at the Ch‰teau de Valmer in the Loire Valley in France.
The last quarter century, she has lived in the state of Maine. She did her primary work in France, Uganda and Maine. For a span of 30 years, she photographed the transformations of Poilley, an agricultural community in northwest France, returning many times to share those transformations with the villagers who were not merely her subjects but who became part of her extended family.
Similarly, her work in Uganda depicts the lives of communities close to the land, the births, labors, ceremonials, sicknesses and deaths of people with whom she lived.
In Maine, she was drawn to photographing elemental occupations-woodcutting with horse teams, sculpture, families at work and play, mothers and children.
For the last 25 years she worked indefatigably despite surviving intermittent recurrences of breast cancer. Like any other misfortune or fortune in her life, she stitched it into her photographic oeuvre.
A selection of her work is currently in a major exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art, which has also published a book, Madeleine de Sinety: Photographs. Her work has also been the subject of a solo exhibition at the French National Library in Paris, France, and featured in such publications as Photo District News, The New York Times, and the international poetry annual, Fulcrum.
She was predeceased by her husband, Daniel Behrman, a writer and journalist; son, Thomas Behrman, a poet; and sister, Therese de Sinety Trueba. She is survived by her son, Peter Behrman de Sinety, a writer and teacher at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris; and by her siblings, Chantal de Richemont, Marie de l'Estoile and Bertrand de Sinety.
Family and friends are invited to call at St. Luke's Catholic Church on Wednesday evening, Dec. 28, from 6-8 p.m. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated on Thursday morning, Dec. 29, at 11 a.m., from the St. Luke's Catholic Church, Rangeley, with Fr. Paul Plante officiating. Following Mass, a comfort reception will be held in the church vestry, hosted by the Catholic Women's Club. Condolences and tributes may be shared with her family on her memorial wall at www.wilesrc.com. Arrangements are in the care of the Wiles Remembrance Center, 137 Farmington Falls Rd., (Rtes. 2 & 27) Farmington.
Those who desire may give
remembrance gifts to:
The Rangeley Friends of the Arts Care of Pam Ellis
P.O. Box 227
Rangeley, Maine 04970
Madeleine de Sinety Behrman
Published in Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram on Dec. 28, 2011
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http://www.madeleinedesinety.com/
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