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Heroes
Heroes is what we are, we cyclists. That’s what they call folk who save lives. And we save lives everyday.
Sometimes it’s the child who’s toddling along a street too far from their parents to be taken into arms should a car or a bike come round the corner, whose parents panic and send the kid wobbling in random directions. Often it’s a kid of ten or so who wanders into the bike lane without looking. It’s also not uncommon for an octogenarian to do the same.
The zombies staring at their mobiles as they shuffle along aren’t probably really alive, but we save them nonetheless, sometimes just standing on our pedals until they eventually become aware of the proximity of living flesh and look up at us with their hollow eyes, then take a step back in shock allowing us pass on our merry way.
But mostly, we save our own lives. Every single day, when we cross a street and see a car coming whose driver has no idea we’re about to arrive at the asphalt and we prudently pull up to let them pass, because they weren’t going to let us pass. We might get an apologetic wave when they realise their mistake. More often it’s a thank you, because we’ve let them pass as if we’d any other choice.
If we’re with a child, we’ve got to cycle alongside, instructing them to slow and stop, and sometimes having to reach out and hold them back so they don’t keep going out onto the street to their deaths. It’s sometimes line of sight, with cars too big nowadays, and their drivers often elderly and getting smaller all the time so they struggle to see a small bike and rider right in front of them.
On the other hand, even though they see us, they’ll accelerate to get to the crossing before we’re actually in front, so we’d only hit their side panels should we continue at our current speed.
The simple fact is that cars are killing machines driven by many inept to be in charge of such metal monstrosities, and every day they would kill us, regardless of any logical or ethical right we have and their responsibility to yield to us as weaker road users, except we keep ourselves alive.
And we deserve medals, one and all.
Missing things before they’re gone
The Lilacs Have Already Faded
.
We wait as children for Christmas,
The bursting forth of buds, spread of
Poppies along bearding barley fields;
Delighting in drifting aspen down.
.
But if we perchance glance away
During spring’s apotheosis we find
The lilacs have already faded, and
Summer swiftly advances unto autumn.
.
Just as a blink allows the bastards
Take flame and machine to the trees,
Scraping drains in absence of rain,
Leaving shoots shorn dead as winter.
I wrote this last week when I was in my garden, seeing that the patch I didn’t mow the week before now sported a lovely little orchid.
But the lilac I had planted just beyond had lost its one flowerhead, having faded to brown already in the space from one weekend to the next.
And I thought of how quickly the spring passes, as usually, even when we vow not to miss it. It’s too short, even when its only summer on its way, we all know where summer leads….
Then I saw while on a cycle what the local roads authority had done, in May, to the hedges and scrub alongside the roads around the village – gone along with who knows what machinery and razed everything down to the ground. Of course, if they discovered plastic rubbish under that bush, they left that there.
What kind of mindset allows this to happen? Where are the leaders?
The locals just shrugged it off. It seems they think all this can be infinitely replaced, not that it’s a last bastion of such beauty.
Is it not possible to see that we are losing things before they’re lost, or are we doomed to miss only what we have completely exterminated?
The village in the north of Spain is not the only place where such destruction takes place, of course. Just last week a huge swath of Killarney National Park was burned by negligence or intentional malice.
.
On the other hand, I just finished reading Anne Frank’s diary for the second time, after about a 35 year gap… and I was struck by her passages about Nature.
Just like many during the lockdowns we went through, Anne realised that joy and peace can come from looking at the sky and the trees. Of course, even at thirteen and fourteen, Anne Frank was a very self-aware person compared to most around her, even then, never mind now.
I took snaps of the paragraphs. She wonders if her confinement indoors so long has made her so “mad about Nature” which is probably true to some extent, just as it was for many others. But she sees it as a medicine, “which can be shared by rich and poor alike,” and “the one thing for which there is no substitute.”
My question is whether that last line has sunk into our collective consciousness, or it is just that we can’t fathom our existence without Nature – even it if is out there, waiting for when we want it, after we’re released from prison, or our confinement, or we fancy a walk away from our computers? Until it isn’t.
And can we act as if something is lost before it actually is, giving us the chance to save it at the last minute.
Because we’re down to the last minute.