The Day.com: How I Brought Exxon Mobil to its Knees

While crossing the Gold Star bridge one day last week I had to jam on the brakes and swerve to avoid a bicyclist heading straight toward me. Of course, he also had to veer aside to make room for me on my bike. I was pedaling from work in New London to my home in Ledyard. I wasn’t sure where the other bicyclist was going but I did notice, out of the corner of my eye, a cardboard, hand-lettered sign hanging from a wire basket attached to his handlebars.

The only word I could make out on his sign, in the nano-second it took us to pass, our knuckles practically scraping, was “Jesus.”

This was Day Two of my personal crusade to take down the rapacious global oil industry and redirect our conspicuously consumptive national energy policy. I would achieve this by not driving for an entire week. My message would surely send shivers from the Gulf refineries to the halls of Congress.

I wouldn’t just not drive, I wouldn’t even set foot in any plane, train, automobile or other motor vehicle – not even a Prius hybrid en route to an organic food co-op or Earth First! rally.

For those of you keeping score, I made this rash pledge during a rant about fuel prices a few months ago. I said then and feel even more strongly now: Gas is too cheap. The low price enables too many people to drive too many miles in too many cars over too many roads to too many strip malls to buy too many 48-ounce bags of Cheetos.

If fuel were priced more realistically – say, at about 5 bucks a gallon, as it is in Europe and most other countries – then we wouldn’t have such apocalyptic traffic jams, we wouldn’t be spewing as many greenhouse gases and we wouldn’t have as many cars designed to race 90 mph uphill while towing a trailer full of ATVs and Jet-Skis.

Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all the counter-arguments: The economy will grind to a halt, poor people will be hurt because so many goods and services that rely on inexpensive fuel for their manufacture and delivery would be priced beyond their reach, and so on – but I’m not going to enter that debate. In fact, I’m not even going to rhapsodize about the ancillary health benefits of bicycling and walking.

I’m simply going to reflect briefly on my experiences last week and what, if anything, I learned. Here goes.

After edging past the sign-toting cyclist I rolled down the steep ramp to Walker Hill Road in Groton and promptly got stuck for an eternity at the Route 12 light. This is Bicyclists’ Hell, and I found myself wishing the Jesus guy were around, or better yet, Moses, to part the sea of cars.

Eventually, though, a green light, not a Biblical act, did the trick, and I pushed off just as another bicyclist whizzed by. I recognized him as a man I had seen that morning, pedaling a few hundred yards ahead of me on Toll Gate Road in Groton. A fellow two-wheeled commuter!

I sprinted and caught up.

He told me his name, Matt Andel, and said for almost a year he has been riding his bike every day from his home in Groton to his job in New London.

“It’s only two miles,” Andel told me, which explained why he was able to wear office pants instead of lycra: He didn’t ride far enough to work up a sweat.

I, on the other hand, lugged my office duds in a daypack, having had to change in the rest room so I didn’t sit at my desk looking like someone who had fallen off City Pier.

Far from being proud of having pedaled 14 miles each way to the office, though, I’m a little ashamed of living this far from work. It’s an environmental transgression almost akin to using ChemLawn or dumping used crankcase oil in the woods. Even though I don’t go to the office every day and drive a Honda Civic that gets about 35 miles to the gallon, someone like Andel could drive a Lincoln Navigator to work and still burn up less gas commuting than I do.

So to absolve my sin I’ll ride my bike every day, right?

Wrong, if you really want to know.

If I drive every day, I have to pump more gas into my car.

But if I bike, I have to shovel down more food. Fuel is fuel. Even if I eat nothing but bananas, bagels, yogurt and tofu (which isn’t that far from my customary diet) these are all products that consume petroleum, either through shipping the bananas here from South America, baking the bagels or making the plastic containers that hold the yogurt and tofu.

By that line of reasoning, the most eco-friendly thing you could do is stay in bed all day, burning as few calories as possible.

What’s more, if I eat all those healthy foods and exercise regularly the odds are better that I’ll live to a ripe old age. That would be great for me, but toxic to the environment, having to contend with, among other byproducts of my existence, an Everest of discarded yogurt containers.

So in truth my carless week didn’t exactly shrink my carbon footprint, not even from a size 10 to a 9½.

Oh well, back to bicycles, it is too bad we can’t rely on them more for transportation, not just because they don’t pollute and promote healthy lifestyles, but because they’re fun – usually.

I remember several years ago my car was in the shop for a few days and I had to pedal back and forth to work because I was too cheap to take a cab. Oh, I should mention that it was mid-February and I worked the second shift. Bicycling quickly lost its charm then.

I’ve also broken my nose, cracked a few ribs and sustained some road rash in various bicycle-related mishaps over the years. But on balance, the scale still is tipped decidedly in favor of bicycles as far as I’m concerned.

It’s one more example of misplaced priorities that our car-crazed culture doesn’t do more to encourage their use.

Why, for instance, didn’t they build the blankety-blank sidewalk on the Gold Star bridge about 2 feet wider?

Whatever happened to all those bicycle racks you used to see outside buildings?

And what’s the deal with those so-called bike lanes, which consist of little more than white lines painted on the sides of a few roads? Years ago they were envisioned as corridors connecting residential and commercial neighborhoods, but I guess the sprawl has spread so widely they no longer serve that purpose.

These are questions I can contemplate as I pedal merrily down the road. You know, of course, how can you tell a happy bicyclist: By the bugs in his teeth.

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