a special place in hell for bike thieves
“A Special Place in Hell for Bike Thieves”
Phillip Barron
published in Urban Velo, Issue 8 (download the whole issue or read it online)
A neighbor recently posted a note to the neighborhood listserv that his daughter’s bike was stolen. The bike was unlocked, leaning against another (adult) bike, which was locked. Both were on a semi-enclosed front porch; one could have determined that the kid’s bike was unlocked only if (s)he had seen someone park the bike without securing it, or (s)he walked up on the porch to find out. Either way, this is a pretty bold move for a community where, as my neighbor says, “our neighborhood doesn’t feel to me like the kind of place where…” he needs to lock his bike.
Don’t waste your breath (nor your keystrokes) calling him naive. Regardless how fashionable cynicism is these days, it’s worth lamenting that we live in a world where we can’t leave a bicycle in a front yard without it becoming a target
for thieves.
Nevertheless, bike thievery is a unique moral and criminal transgression. Theft of one’s bike has been known to rile the wrath of even the most otherwise placated pacific souls. Indeed many in the cycling community have noted that there must be a special place in hell for bike thieves.
To know whether there really is a place in hell reserved for bike thieves, you have to turn to Dante Alighieri. Dante is not just the only person who claims (with some authority) to have been to hell and back. He is also famous for relaying that there is a special place in hell for just about every sort of miscreant. And sure enough, according to Dante, between the grafters and the gamblers, there is a circle of the inferno reserved just for people who steal bicycles.
You might have noticed that Dante’s comments on bike thieves didn’t make it into the original edition of The Divine Comedy. Dante’s journal tells us that the omission resulted from his editor’s fascination with more complicated technologies: carts put before horses and what not. Disappointed that mention of his velophilia didn’t make it into his magnum opus, Dante later published the Canto concerning bike thieves independently under the title “Tractatus di Ciclisma.” A rare copy of the Tractatus recently resurfaced during an excavation in Florence.
In an effort to correct his editor’s mistake, we republish the text for the first time in seven hundred years.
Then my guide said to me, “Now it is time to quit the wood; see that you come behind me. The path I shall lead does not burn, and you would do well to follow close behind.”
Once our feet resumed their path, the tormented continued their ancient wail. My guide, the Poet, beseeched me to view the next pit with cautious eyes. I surmised that, like the ones before, this pit’s walls were steep so that climbing out is prohibited by design. In the center there rose a summit with strata of endless undulating paths encircling the conical mount.
The Poet advised that I look more closely at one of the layered paths. On it, a most peculiar sight did move before my eyes. What appeared to be a bicycle was actually a party of five fools bonded together for all eternity.
They formed themselves, two apiece, into the wheels of fleshy bicycles. Hands grasped ankles in a human wheel at the sight of which I might have laughed had not such exultations of pain carried through the air. The fifth and most rigid among them clasped the hands of the wheel-men, whose thrice wound palms and fingers formed axles. Together they rolled. Each wheelman’s spine was repeatedly subjected to the gnash and grind of the rocky path.
I asked my guide, Virgil, what these violators had done to be sentenced as both man and machine, dehumanized and beaten by the weight of their own movement.
My guide said merely that I have not yet looked closely enough. And as I returned my eyes to the tissue and sinew that tore at every revolution, I saw one of the bicycles become unsteady. Rolled away from its lane beside the mountain it did, and an explosion of noise filled the pit. A grand team of one-hundred and eighty horses sped from behind the unstable human bicycle to trample the five punished souls.
On the uneven path pocked with holes, the five wheelmen — although bloody and weak — quickly reassembled their velocipedic form and continued their roll within the narrow confines of their path.
My guide revealed to me subtle tortures which my eyes did not independently perceive. The cyclists’ — if that they can be called — path was one of many unending undulating surfaces, alternating between climb and descent. Both were designed expressly to insure that neither climb nor descent is of such length that a traveler might gather momentum. Instead, the wheelmen are frustrated by the sharp curve of the path in descents.
Whether the onslaught of horses gains mastery over the velocipeds depends upon their position within the path. If their machine of marrow strays away from the mountain to which their path is bound, the horses’ authority is summoned. With no appropriate markings delineating the bicycle’s space, the cyclical men have taken to riding so close as to grind their shoulders against the escarpment solely to prevent an equine trampling.
“Who then dear guide,” I pleaded, “are these sufferers who ride the shoulder of the path to avoid an explosion of horse power?”
And Virgil answered, “the contortions you see before you are the eternal humiliations of those who sought to misappropriate a bicycle from the world of its rider. They did so disrespect the joy and utility of the world’s greatest contrivance that they spend eternity in futile and dispiriting detour.”
short story in Urban Velo
I have a story in the eighth issue of Urban Velo, which is released for download tomorrow. As soon as it’s tomorrow, you can click the image to download the latest edition of bicycle culture on the skids.
Please Don’t Involve Fellow Passengers In Schemes To Extort Disability Funds
I posted a hastily written short story at Helium.com to test their platform. Read it here if you are curious, or download a pdf here.
free hugs
This is not bike related. It’s not very philosophical. It’s not about athletes using drugs or music or traveling or coffee, and it’s not even about photographs I took. But it still belongs on this site. The world needs more people like this guy.
A little more of the story here.
summer days on two wheels
Last week, a co-worker brought in some old pictures to scan. Among them was this photo of her cousins who “used to come down every summer from New York.”
The photo was taken in the Caldwell township, outside Hillsborough, NC (ca. 1970)
under pressure
If every night I go to bed feeling that I have to catch up to someplace I should already be, then how will I ever get there? Not every day of life is preparation for the next day. Reading this book, watching this movie, listening to this song, riding this bike — this is my life. Why should I think that tomorrow is my life and today is dress rehersal?
the ghost of Monsanto haunts me at work…
The Research Triangle Park is a strange place. It feels a little creepy with GlaxoSmithKline’s North American headquarters, a major IBM campus, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, and Eli Lilly all within half a mile of each other. The presence of these companies alone makes RTP feel like the setting of the next Michael Crighton novel, where experimental science goes awry. Add to that, however, the security cameras at every intersection and the guarded checkpoints at the entrances of most campuses.
Rumor has it that somewhere in the Park is where Monsanto developed Agent Orange. Every now and then you can see official looking health inspectors taking soil samples from the woods that lie between campuses. True or not, I wouldn’t plant a food garden anywhere in RTP, if you know what I mean.
Occasionally, when I ride the bike path through the woods to work, I half-expect some strange, genetically mutated monster to confront me on the trail. Between the pharmaceuticals research, the genetics research, the nanotechnology research, and the ghost of Monsanto, such a scientific “accident” is as likely to happen here as anywhere else in the world.
pizza and pain
My brother’s not ready for childbirth.
The other night A and I decided we wanted to make pizza for dinner. We decided this, however, once we were already hungry; we didn’t have the forethought to thaw the frozen dough.
I don’t have a microwave, but we were committed to pizza. So, we had to figure out ways to thaw the pale, oblong block faster. The best we could come up with was to hold the mass of frozen dough (in a plastic bag) against something warm — our bellies. We took turns, passing it on as soon as one of us couldn’t stand the cold any more. Despite noticeable fluctuations in my heart rate, our technique was working. Then A noticed that I was placing the bag directly against my skin to maximize heat transfer; he cringed. He had been keeping a T-shirt between his stomach and the dough, so I wondered why his turns weren’t any longer than mine.
Our experiment in conduction led us to talk about pain and tolerance for pain; this reminded me of my friend’s pain-training exercises. She’s about to have a baby, and she wants to have as natural a childbirth experience as she can. One thing this means for her is that she doesn’t want to use any anesthetic during the procedure. Her doctor prescribed pain-training exercises — little things she can do around the house to prepare psychologically for childbirth with no epidural.
In one exercise she holds an ice cube between her wrists for 5 minutes at a time. It’s supposed to teach you that no matter how intense the pain, it will come to an end. Perspective.
I told A about the ice-cube-on-the-wrists exercise, and he was curious what could be so painful about a little ice cube. He tried it out, and after a few minutes he gladly put the ice cube away and went back to warming the dough.
We had pizza in record time, considering no microwave.
ghost mums
In the front yard are the ghost mums: chrysanthemums I planted two years ago that haven’t died, but they don’t fully come back each year either. Mums are annuals, so it’s unusual that they come back at all. This spring, they sprouted and grew into 2ft-tall bushes; in the summer the stalks dried out (despite rain) and turned brittle enough to break in a strong wind. They’re now dark gray wisps with blooming white flowers. They remind me of zombies, half alive and half dead.
kano
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(circa September 1997) The first time my plane touched the ground in Africa was in a city called Kano. Kano is in the heart of Nigeria, and consistent with what I expected, the military met the plane on the runway. |
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| I wasn’t prepared for the military to board the plane, however. "A routine inspection," we were told. "We’re just looking for anyone trying to enter Nigeria illegally." |
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I silently wondered why anyone would want to enter Nigeria illegally. Leave, I might understand, given the financial and ecological devastation that General Sani Abacha had wreaked on the country. |
| The expressed concern over immigration was a ruse, which became obvious once the soldiers began walking the aisles of the plane. A business man who had traveled this route many times before was sitting next to me. He told me to place anything of value out of sight before the soldiers reached our row of seats. When the soldiers neared our row, I learned why. I could overhear the soldiers asking unsuspecting people, "is that for me?", referring to headphones, nice watches, and cameras. For the most part, they seemed interested in electronic devices. Once each had a "gift" from a traveler, they left the cabin, and the military told the pilot that we could move on. |
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As the plane taxied to the end of the runway, we moved past a graveyard… only this was a graveyard for broken and decaying planes. There was one that looked almost whole; it seemed to be missing only a front wheel. The whole plane leaned forward, giving the discomforting look of a rough landing.When you’re preparing to take off, that’s not exactly what you want to see. |
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| At the end of the taxi lane, when making that sharp turn to enter the runway, I could see from my window a man harvesting something. I thought he might simply be cutting field grass, but the business man sitting next to me told me that the man was actually farming. Since the Kano International Airport is all that many people ever see of Nigeria, the local government thought it would be a good idea to show travelers the products of rich Nigerian soil… never mind the bath of jet fuels leaching into the rows of wheat. I just hope that no one ever ingests whatever crops are grown here. |
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| Before I put my camera away once we were back in the air, I turned to get one last look at Kano. |
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CHANGE
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nicomachus.net is the virtual representation of Phillip Barron, who is responsible for all of the writing and photography, unless otherwise credited. Want to know more?
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