Across the Great Divide

Getting There is Also Being There.

Now that I'm committed to driving the speed limit, a round trip to Door County, Wisconsin — which has great country-road biking — is just about the right length for listening to an entire book on CD.

Only one problem. The novel we found available at the library was overwritten, the main character was most unsympathetic and self-centered, and there were entirely too many romance-novel adorations of strong, muscular withers.

But since I was already doing one unfavorite thing — driving to get from point A to point B —  I challenged myself to find ways to enjoy the experience. Based on this trip and an earlier one, I've come to this realization: I'd rather listen to a bad book than ponderous one.

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The Metropolitan Council, which sets transit policy for the Twin Cities, has announced a fare increase to help cover increased fuel costs. To State Senator John Marty, that's exactly the wrong approach when the public should be encouraged to take buses and light rail.

He proposes dropping the fare to increase ridership and stimulate demand for new routes and greater frequency.

The Met Council is being timid when it should be visionary, says Marty.

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Bill Lindeke of Twin City Sidewalks is now contributing to Twin Cities Streets for People, which compiles links to stories about "people-centered mobility" and welcomes reader contributions about local placemaking, biking, walking and urban living. Let's hope he brings the site more of his visual approach to city appreciation.

Here's a link to a story in the Park Bugle that profiles two St. Anthony Park bike commuters. Advice from one:

Start slowly. Don’t assume that you can start out commuting both ways, five days a week, blizzard or shine. Don’t tell yourself when you start that you’re going to do the whole thing at full speed every single day. Try taking the bus to work (with your bike on the front rack), then riding home. Do practice commutes so you know how long it takes and whether you’ll need a change of clothes or a shower when you get there. Don’t expect a quick and easy transition. After a lifetime of getting in a car every morning, it was hard for me to make this change, so go easy on yourself and work up to your goal gradually. A slow start is better than a quick burnout. But most of all, enjoy it! There is so much to see when you’re riding your bicycle.

I've been planning to add profiles as a regular feature here  to show the diversity of riders and to demystify commuting a bit.

In fact, if you're a cycling commuter willing to submit to a Q&A about your ride, you can download this questionnaire  and send it to me. Look for the first profile in a day or so.

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Speaking of Twin City Sidewalks, Bill posted an empty sign awhile back and quizzed readers about its location. This one will be easy to ID for at least one blogger I know, but for others, its stainless steel blankness raises the question — who will step in to fill this void?

Bridge Congestion Worsens.

Heading across the Stone Arch Bridge today, I caught the newly connected I-35W bridge reflected in one of those giant photo cubes promoting Red Bull that fill the middle span of the old bridge.

Crossing from west to east banks, you hit about a dozen annoying speed bumps that cover the power cables needed to illuminate the cubes at night.

Here's how you can save yourself the trip.

Heading from east to west, you may have to pass through the T3 mounted police checkpoint. When I was there, though, they were only stopping cute women in uniform, confirming that Minneapolis police officers do not need to go to St. Paul if they have a cool ride.

Presumably the backpack placed on the bridge was not left by an anti-energy-drink terrorist.

Too Bad for America: Plymouth is No. 1 Small City.

When Money magazine published its annual list of Best Places to Live and the No.1 Small City in the whole US of A turned up just miles away, I had to take a photo ride!

I waffle between ridiculing, deconstructing and ignoring these rankings. Bob Collins has already covered the preponderance of bland suburban settlements in this list under the category Surveys That Don't Mean Anything. He lives in Woodbury, and he asked only half seriously: What's Plymouth got that Woodbury doesn't?

The answer is available on the site: Higher income, taxes, home values, math test scores and rates of kids in public schools; lower job growth and reading test scores; worse air quality, more libraries and movie theaters, fewer bars...

Wait. Why am I doing Collins' work for him? Let him demand the recount. This is about honoring the winner.

I regularly bike through No.1 Plymouth, Minnesota, and when I saw the magazine's ludicrously sanitized Ralph Lauren version of the good life in Plymouth, I also considered lampooning all of suburbia and the entire Money methodology.

But after 11 years or so in Golden Valley, I've mellowed on the 'burbs.

True, without real cities nearby, none of the top 10, except for Ft. Collins, Colorado, would amount to much. These places are seriously deficient in public spaces and lack any architectural distinction beyond the private home. If you are seeking a foodstuff, article of clothing, houseware or entertainment experience that is only available in your town, good luck.

Speaking of cultural life, Money cited the Hilde Performance Center and the Fire & Ice Festival as amenities, to which, as a next-door neighbor, I can only say, Wha-a-a-a?

I suspect Plymouth's biggest boost comes from simply being in Minnesota, because of our state's higher than average incomes and below the median cost of living. A relatively prosperous suburb like Plymouth scores a $25k+ family purchasing power premium over the average for the Best Places.

Plymouth has been adding affordable housing, yet when I searched for property foreclosures in this third  largest Twin Cities suburb — I found:

Does that even register? The whole rating system seems flukey. Eden Prairie, MN, was ranked in the top 10 in 2006, and though it looks even better on some scores now, it's No. 40 today. 

Plymouth residents seem to like the schools and not mind sitting next to a four-acre parking lot as they enjoy their Starbuck's. There's a mix of large and small employers representing a variety of industries. You can find plentiful open space, though it's challenging to find any sign of Plymouth's origins back to 1858.

For all its similarity to Anywheresville, Plymouth has plenty of good points. But if it's No. 1, that's too bad for America.

[As always, you can run the slide show manually by clicking for the control panel. Click the Picasa logo in the right corner or double-click the screen, and you can run the slide show larger from the Picasa site.]

Pregnancy: Another Meaning for "Country Jam."

Over the years, I got to know some of my brother-in-law's least favorite law enforcement activities during his time in the Mesa County Sheriff's Department. At the top (bottom?) of the list was pulling duty at Country Jam, an annual music festival and camp out held west of my hometown.

Now this information:

[Nurse-Family Partnership supervisor Wanda] Scott said on average the health clinic sees between 25 to 30 pregnancies a month. She says five weeks after the festival that number jumps to almost 80 a month.

The festival ran from June 26-29. Performers included Tim McGraw, Clay Walker and Sugarland.    

"That's our Grand Junction Woodstock," Scott said, referring to the 1969 counterculture rock festival in Bethel, N.Y., featuring such acts as Jimi Hendricks and Janis Joplin.

[...]

Commissioner Janet Rowland said education could help prevent unwanted teen pregnancies but didn't know what else could be done to stop them "short of putting birth control in the water at Country Jam."

Um, that's another reason why you don't want to take lifestyle advice from Rowland. To make any kind of dent at all, you'd have to put "birth control" in the Bud Lite.

 

Glittering Signs of the Times.

The souring condo market isn't the only blow to strike the corner of Hennepin and Washington, where a few years ago, a Whole Foods and condo tower were planned to replace the Downtown Jaguar dealership on the block.

In February, the Minneapolis Planning Commission voted to delay approval of a scaled-down development proposed.

Since Jaguar moved to a location along I-394, its former building stayed vacant, though with three floors of indoor parking, the building might've produced some revenue for its owners. Instead, it produced revenue for someone else.

Copper thieves got inside, according to a dealership employee, and stripped it. The theft went unnoticed until the City of Minneapolis investigated a mysterious drop in water pressure downtown. Inspectors found a flooded basement level that likely will guarantee the building's subfloor boiler can't be put back into service.

From selling Jaguars and Ferraris to blighted block in one year. If you want a symbol of our economy, look no further.

Meanwhile, via The Deets, Johnny Northside continues his innovative campaign to reclaim housing in his neighborhood, which is plagued by the copper bandits.

"We need to do this."

One of my favorite all-time clients got married this week.

Though I liked all the clients I worked for more than once, Tom had a special place because he only called me when he wanted something new. Having interesting problems to solve is half of being a great client and trusting you to solve them is most of the other half.

Although he was always working hard himself, it seemed, he wanted my mind instead of just an extra pair of hands, and he never failed to show his appreciation. Mutual respect, I'd say.

So when I read about Tom's and Kelly's wedding today, I admit, I shed a couple tears.

Here's their blog created to commemorate the decision and the event.

Front Outdoor Rooms: A Suburban Microtrend?

This morning, I noticed our neighbors across the street having coffee on their front stoop, blankets in laps. Last weekend, I chatted with Steve and Stan as they ate lunch on the expanded front porch of the house where they've made extensive changes. Here's another house nearby where the front yard has been reclaimed as an outdoor room.

As you can see, these early-60s-vintage ramblers weren't built with classic midwestern front porches originally designed for escaping summer heat. The front steps are often perfunctory slabs that simply make up the difference between the grade and the front door. There's no room for porch swings or receiving neighbors outside.

The main entry in these houses is through the garage. The front door has no processional; visitors are assumed to enter from a car in the driveway, not walking up the street.

The front yard is a buffer or frame for the house, not a gathering place. The back yard is the private sanctum where suburbanites congregate, two-by-two or family-by-family.

Like our neighbors, we've been more focused on the rear of the house, where we have a screened porch projecting into a woodsy lot overlooking Basset Creek. It's a great rural-feeling oasis in the city, but a true oasis is a public space that brings people together, not a retreat from company. 

After finishing some new landscaping, mostly to correct drainage issues,  we moved our pile of firewood from the entry of house — where it was easy to unload and retrieve — to the side of the garage. Other detritus — including a chair that was used for... okay, it wasn't really used — has been removed and generations of sow bugs and grit have been swept away.

Now, we too look upon the quiet street, with two unused chairs brought around front. I predict coffee in the morning. And connection.

Holiday Weekend Snips and Snipes.

Posting may be lighter and less fluent from here in the coming weeks, More like this...

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I noted the blog of Johnny Northside shortly after it launched. He's a grad student who bought a bargain/abandoned/abused property in North Minneapolis and has been very active in trying to help turn the neighborhood around. Naturally, I thought of him when I read this Star Tribune story about evictions at a problem building and figured he'd have a somewhat different point of view. He did.

Liberals (it's the system) and conservatives (it's criminals) alike could use a more nuanced and granular view of issues involved in Northside living. Johnny delivers, with stories like this.

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Mississippifarian metaphorically looks down an aisle of Wal-Mart, and doesn't see the same benign effect of cheap consumer goods that Steven "Freakanomics" Leavitt claims helps moderate the growing income gap between rich and poor.

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I keep hoping to see a Minneapolis cop riding one of those neeto-keeno T3 personal mobility vehicles that the Strib announced with a rewritten product datasheet. Jalopnik has the more appropriate
story, I think.

We've seen the T3 Motion before, and the law enforcement version may look cool in this video, but we assure you it's impossible to not look like a dork on one. So if you live in Minneapolis and are a police officer, prepare to look like a dork. Sure you'll be able to drive up to 25 MPH and run all day on just 11 cents of juice, tower over crowds, and get into tight spots a cruiser never could, but even bike cops will laugh at you. Plus it costs the city $10,000 so you're even going to out-nerd the Segway drivers.

If you want to be cool, fast and intimidating, bag the chariot and keep the horses.

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Charles R. Black Jr., the senior adviser to Republican John McCain whose work for foreign dictators has led Democrats to call for his ouster, is not the only lobbyist in the family volunteering on the senator from Arizona's presidential campaign.

His wife, Judy Black, is a national co-chair of the fundraising group "Women for McCain," and she has a vibrant lobbying practice that includes a foreign client and several companies with business before the Senate Commerce Committee, where McCain is a senior member.

— Washington Post

Judy Bergman Black was a high school classmate of mine. She and Charlie came to our 40th reunion last year. We didn't get a chance to talk, as they only attended the dinner and hung at the back while I announced a newly discovered set of class prophecies that had projected 40 years in the future.

Black, who was named Biggest Brown-noser by the Class of 1967, was "predicted" to hold the same honor in 2007. In some quarters, I guess that could also be interpreted as Most Likely to Succeed.

And, no, I wasn't forecast as Most Likely to be an Asshole.

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And the New York Times soothes my fevered brain.

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

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Finally, here's a workout video for candidates who need to disavow knowledge of inconvenient associations with lobbyists and their clients.

 

Photo Riddle.

Taken on today's Twin Cities ride. Can you identify the scene?

Of Fat Tires and Futility.

Yesterday we rode to Fruita for the Fat Tire Festival to watch the "Clunker Crit," a series of round-the-block races on aged and modified bicycles for all ages. Well, not races, exactly. More like self-propelled improvisational chaos on two or three wheels.

An uncharged battery — which I discovered only when trying to shoot the stars machined through the front sprocket of a Western Flyer — means no pics of the event, but photos wouldn't quite capture it anyway. The Crit takes the place of the parade that's part of any small town festival, except this parade changes direction at random intervals, participants may be required to exchange clothing, spectators may be spanked, and the races are handicapped on the fly so anyone trying too hard is guaranteed to lose.

In other words, the Fat Tire Festival is pretty much like any festival would be if it were run by stoners who love their community, drink copious amounts of beer and can ride trails that would cause arrhythmias in most Americans if they were walking.

When I grew up out here, Fruita was a tumbleweed farm and ranch town notable only for its wrestling team. It had so dominated the smaller high school class, it moved up to compete with the big boys, where it remained a force.

Today, the town is a work in progress, which is nevertheless a considerable advance over the old days. Suburban-style housing developments rise on alkali flats across from trailers and tin sheds. A new Walgreen's is going in downtown, but a refurbished brew pub shut down after a couple of tries. One storefront has been spruced up considerably from its days as an antique-cum-junk store, but the new occupant appears to be in the saving souls business, the second such establishment in that block.

Around the corner, the dry cleaners has closed for good, two outfits still bagged inside and all the fixtures left behind by a retiring owner who has no more illusions of a buyer coming along. The future for the sewing and alterations shop next door doesn't look much more hopeful; the proprietor was out having eye surgery.

Festival sponsor Over the Edge — about which I overheard one customer say, "This has got to be the coolest bike shop in the world" — is full of people today, but the cheapest bike with a price tag was on sale for $1899. Mountain biking has put Fruita on the map, but it is the map of Towns Where People Come to Look Without Spending Any Money.

Mingling in the friendly, tattooed and flat-bellied Fat Tire crowd, it was impossible not to harbor a little hope that we'll work our way out of this latest economic mess. How bad can it be if multi-generations can come together to eat ice cream, drink beer and watch renegade silliness on a Saturday afternoon? Perhaps the future does belong to smaller-scale life and counter-cultural, back-country boosterism.

But the ride back and the books awaiting reminded me of a larger landscape. It's the leading western edge of Obama's bitter midwest, a dry husk place where even the cheap suburban houses will never sprout, a place the kids with even half a mind will desert, not necessarily for anything better but for some place, any place, no so obviously on its last legs.

On the western slope, we're much better off than the High Plains towns on the other side of the state depicted in the recently published West of Last Chance, by Kent Haruf and Peter Brown. A week ago, the town of Ordway was nearly decimated by a wildfire that authorities said escalated because of high winds and dried-out farm fields fallowed because the owners could do better selling their water to flush city toilets than to irrigate their land.

Obama got in trouble for speaking a small truth about these places while trying to avoid the much larger one about the country. As Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, put it in a recent essay, "The Audacity of Depression":

And like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the "American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the entertainment branch of industry."

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned "Hope" of course — that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition — will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

[...]

Naturally, the bunny and cupcake set of Americans are still oblivious, or at least pretend to be, but even at the more inchoate and private level, there is a growing awareness that things are going very wrong, and doing so on an incomprehensively massive and complex scale. There is the feeling that even if what is happening could be made comprehensible to the majority of humanity, to all those people just trying to keep afloat on the planet, from Zimbabwe to Flint, Michigan, overall it is unstoppable. Unfixable except in the fleeting media/politics Band-Aid sense, and then only in locales rich enough to afford the illusionary Band-Aid fixes politicians dream up when they write their campaign "plans for change." 

All of which is horseshit, of course, since real change would entail undoing most of the machinery of planetary destruction and extreme pressure to standardize humanity that we have come to know as modern civilization and mass society — halting, then reversing the momentum this monolith has achieved.

Okay, now I'm depressed. So today, it's read first, then bike.