Banana Gallery 2019

2019 has been a good year for bananas--in various stages of decomposition--found on the side of the road.

Riding a bicycle, you can't help but notice that there's tons of these on the shoulders, on bike paths, sometimes even in the middle of the road. How? Why? Could cyclists packing fruit in their back pockets really be responsible for all of these? Do car drivers toss them out the window? It's one of the great mysteries of the universe.

As a kind of random experiment, I decided that this year I would stop at every road banana and take a photo.

At first it was fun, and I found it easy to stick with my banana vow. But after a while, I got weary of interrupting the rhythm and flow again and again for yet another squashed, brown Chiquita. I began to realize that this banana endeavor was a bigger commitment than I anticipated. My cycling partners wondered why I kept stopping to take photos of the ground.

Since about mid-July, I've been more selective with my banana mission, stopping only if an abandoned banana had something extraordinary about it--some weird color, beautiful squash pattern, origami peel formation, or peculiar landing spot.

Here's a selection of favorite road bananas of 2019.

Central Alleyway Trail

I almost don’t want to tell you this. I’m going to share a secret, my gravel-loving friends.

I recently discovered what is quite possibly the coolest gravel road in the greater Edmonton area. And what’s crazy about it is how it’s been right under my nose all this time and I only recently found it. I’ve been riding gravel in these parts for 8 years, and I thought I had a pretty good sense of most of the roads within an hour’s drive of the city. But this one somehow slipped through the cracks.

As many of you know, Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Recreational Area east of Sherwood Park and just south of Elk Island Provincial Park is a terrific network of cross-country ski trails--home of the Canadian Birkebeiner Ski Race, in fact. In the summer, these trails--mostly rolly, grassy double-track--are used by low-key mountain bikers. I’ve ridden them a few times myself. 

But what I didn’t know until recently is that there’s a gravel road that runs a zig-zaggy east-west route right through the middle of the park, from the Waskehegan Staging Area to Range Road 192, with a couple of off-shoots, about 20 km all told. On the satellite map it looks like any other gravel township road, but on the park map it’s labelled as a ski route: Central Alleyway Trail or CAT (though in the route below the name changes a few times). 

First Contact

It finally happened. It took almost eight years, but it did finally happen.

Last Sunday, while out riding gravel northwest of Edmonton, I encountered, for the first time ever, another gravel cyclist in the wild. That is, someone not part of the same organized ride I was participating in. Val and I were heading east on Township Road 534, just west of the intersection with Highway 44. The cyclist came toward us from the paved Meadowview Road. But instead of following pavement north or south, as I assumed he would, he crossed the highway and rode onto the gravel, right past us.

Dusty Lens: Golden Spike Salamander

Almost ran over this fella on Sunday, as we were out riding on Golden Spike Road, west of Edmonton. The tiger salamander was crossing the road and scurried out of the path of my wheel at the last second. We stopped and went back for a second take. He/she was about 8-inches long, prehistoric looking, and feisty. Penn transferred Sal to the ditch, where life is a little more laid back.

Muscle on Wheels

It’s a common claim of cycling historians that women didn’t ride the high-wheel bicycle, the so-called “ordinary” or “pennyfarthing” that was, hands down, the most popular bicycle from the mid 1870s to the late 1880s. The high wheel, so the story goes, required too much athleticism for women and was wholly incompatible with Victorian women’s fashion. So female cyclists rode tricycles until safety bicycles revolutionized the market in the late 1880s. High wheelers, so the theory goes, were the exclusive domain of men.

Edmonton author M. Ann Hall debunks that theory in her latest book, which tells the story of women who not only rode high wheel bicycles but raced them, often against men, more than holding their own. Muscle on Wheels: Louise Armaindo and the High-Wheel Racers of the Nineteenth Century (McGill-Queens UP, 2018) focuses on the exemplary racing career of one woman in particular, French Canadian Louise Brisbois, who competed under the name Louise Armaindo, and who was the first “highly successful woman high-wheel racer.” Armaindo was based in Chicago for a lot of that time and raced all around North America but especially in the midwest.

Advice from The Modern Cyclist, 1923 (Laws and Customs)

LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF THE ROAD

    "Whenever a dubious traffic situation arises, such, for instance, as led horses on the wrong side of the road and two motors approaching from opposite sides, the cyclist is not only wise, but dignified, who stops at once and looks on while the others muddle through.
. . . 
     Whenever you propose to turn to the Right hold out the right arm horizontally and never the left. To hold out the left arm and turn to the right, as I have seen both cyclists and motorists do, is a symptom of imbecility.
. . . 
Although the law requires you to keep to the left when required to by other traffic, you have a legal right to ride on any part of the road at other times. But modern conditions make it very risky to stand on one's legal rights in the matter. It strikes me as bad manners for cyclists to ride more than two abreast at any time or anywhere."

Lanterne Rouge

“[S]uccess, especially your own, is not a good subject; failure is.” --Tim Krabbe

Of the many Tour de France color-based designations (yellow, green, white, and polka dot jerseys; red number for combativity), my favorite is the lanterne rouge, a completely unofficial designation “awarded” to the last place finisher in the General Classification. The term comes from the nineteenth-century tradition of hanging a red lantern on the back end of a train. It was some time in the 1910s, in the second decade of the Tour’s existence, that lanterne rouge also came to refer to the final finisher of the overall race. Riders themselves, or sometimes fans, would give the last place rider a symbolic paper lantern to carry on the final stage.

Tour organizers have never been that crazy about the concept of the lanterne rouge, which could be seen by some (though not by anyone who really understands grand tour cycling) as celebrating failure and distracting attention from the front of the race. But British journalist Max Leonard, author of Lanterne Rouge: The Last Man in the Tour de France (Yellow Jersey, 2014), makes the compelling argument that the front of the race is only one of many stories at any tour, and, in some ways, the story at the back end can be just as fascinating--perhaps even more relatable to most fans. Leonard’s book explores some of the most entertaining stories of this unique sporting tradition. 

Dusty Lens: Self-Portrait with Canola

Near Kaleida, Manitoba

Gull-Sylvan Lakes Loop

Why is it a good idea to drive 1.5 hours to some random part of Alberta and ride a half-day gravel loop? Think of it as a low-stakes micro-adventure. The landscape may not be that different from home but it’s new territory nonetheless and it just might offer a refreshing break from the same old same old.