A Commuter Carol

I was visited by the Ghost of Commuting Future last night.

No shit.

It was a miserable night, gray and wet. A steady rain fell as we stepped off the 5:27 in Hawthorne.

I made my way to my bike, which I’d stashed under the overpass, thinking it might help keep the thing dry.

No such luck. There was a giant moat of a puddle around the bike to boot.

As I unlocked, another man came over to his bike.

I’d seen him just last week, and noticed how the dude rolled up his suit pants to his knees and strapped them down–while still on the train. Both pant legs, before mounting his bike. Walking along the platform, pants rolled up to knees, helmet already on.

A few notes:

1. Your left pant leg couldn’t get caught in your bike’s chain if it wanted to.

2. You can bunch up your pants at the ankle, not the knee.

3. You can do it next to your bike, not on the damn train.

But who knows what his reasons were; maybe he’d had an awful pants-in-bike-chain incident in the past.

He nodded to me in the way that fellow bikers at the station do.

“Hope you got a light for that,” he said.

I said I did, and flipped on the front light for proof.

“It’s the back light that’s the most important,” he said.

“I have that too,” I said, and showed him.

Mentoring over, it fell silent. I was stalling for time, and figuring out whether I wanted to ride home, or walk my soaked bike through the drenched streets.

“You ride far?” I asked.

“Less than a mile,” he said.

“Me too.”

“I’m going to Chelsea….” he said, which I took as an invitation to join him. A Fun Run, through traffic and puddles on the mean streets of Hawthorne.

“I…I’ll probably walk,” I said.

We bid mutual farewell and he was on his way.

As I exited the station, rain streaming through my helmet and down my face, I saw this guy as a ghost from the future. (In fact, he was fairly pale, and seemingly obsessed with chains). This spectre represented what my life would look like if I did not get a car: 50. Tall. Still biking when the rest of the town drives. Impervious to the social mores of our humble burg. Pants bunched up to the no man’s land between the calf and the knee.

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” Scrooge told the Ghost of Christmas Future. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”

In other words, it’s not too late for me.