Necessary Anger

essay, originally published in Cyclista Zine, 2024

I like a cozy story about the joys of bicycling as much as anyone else, I think. Descriptions of the feeling of confidently winding through city streets, flying through a sea of clogged up traffic, finding all the good shortcuts and making it truly faster to travel by bike than any other mode of transportation, the feeling of legs and lungs burning pleasantly, being free to stop anywhere without a thought. All of those things can make a day so good, even if nothing else feels good in that day. But joy is not the primary emotion that comes up, for me, when biking through my city. The joy is nearly always there, but bubbling up before it is anger. Rage, really.
To bike in a city is to put your body in a uniquely vulnerable position and to have that vulnerability exploited consistently and flagrantly. It’s seeing the details that the city hides away just far enough for the average driver to miss them, seeing what corners of the city cops sweep houseless people around to, seeing the aftermath of a car blowing through a crosswalk, seeing that the city will plow the roads when it snows but not the bike lanes or the sidewalks. It’s knowing that you are going to get hit by a car at some point, it’s just a matter of when and how bad. It’s sewer drain grates and glass scattered over the bike lane, if you’re lucky enough to have a bike lane on the road you need to use, cars going 35mph, passing close enough for you to reach out and grab their side mirror. It’s waiting to cross an intersection at a busy road for three or four minutes, the line of passing cars seeming to have no end, because the lights sync up in such a way as to leave no break for you to cross. It’s sucking on the exhaust pipe of the car that gunned it to pass you only for you both to stop at the same light. It’s getting to the place you’re going to only to find that they have no bike rack out front. It’s someone mentioning that a large e-bike would probably be safer than my road bike, simply because drivers are less likely to hit something if it will actually damage their car.
Rage isn’t a bad thing in my book. Anger can be exactly what’s needed to fuel the correct action that I need to take, but would otherwise be too timid to. I used to get nervous about taking the lane, I missed turns frequently because I didn’t want the drivers behind me to get mad at me, but I eventually learned that the drivers are nearly always mad already! So, take that lane! Your turn is just as important as theirs! My arm, thrust out to signal my left turn, is nearly always accompanied with a mental Fuck you, car!
I don’t tamp down the anger at all, don’t chastise myself for it, but I do channel it. I think people are too quick to write anger off as simply a negative emotion that signals something that needs to be worked through. But anger is our emotional call to action. Oftentimes we’re not quite sure of what to do about a problem until something happens that triggers fury, and then action becomes easy. We have a crosswalk down the road that cars openly ignore, despite the fact that it’s used all day by kids crossing to get to the corner store, and we all know it’s an issue but what can you do? Then a couple of kids were crossing recently and nearly got run down. The kids jumped out of the way, the driver slammed on their brakes, the car behind them rear-ended the car in front. I biked past this all, maybe thirty seconds after it happened, and I saw the guy who works at the store run out to make sure the kids were okay. The next day I went up to the store to buy beer, the same guy was working and was fuming about it all. He had already been on the phone all day, on hold for a good long while before getting through, with the city, demanding they put a light up at the intersection. Sometimes, we need a tangible thing to break the dam of the ever-growing need to do something.
I relish the anger that riding my bike gives me. If I ever stop feeling angry then it means that I stopped noticing the things happening all around me, and there’s no biking without noticing. To bike your city is to smear yourself against it and its people, to remove the layers of separation imposed upon us that keep us apart, to keep us from realizing just how much we are all stuck in this thing together. When I bike through these city streets with my lungs bursting and my heart raging, I begin to believe that things could be different, I balance on the very proof of the possibility. I share a wave with neighbors I pass regularly, shout hello or ring my bell at other cyclists, high-five the kid who sticks his hand out for one in the middle of his street basketball game, see the boxes of free food people put out in their lawns as soon as their gardens start producing too much food, I think about the guy at the corner store who is single-handedly going to be the fire under the ass of whoever has to sign the order to get that crosswalk light put in and the people who shovel sidewalks when it snows and the trash pick-up club that the local bike co-op does every month and bike brigades at protests, and I see cyclists on those busy streets that  scare me that are unwilling to let the lack of infrastructure stop them from using what is ours to use and I believe it! My angry heart believes it is all possible!