Slowly healing.
Today I saw the surgeon who put my arm back together with plates and screws and considerable skill. Tomorrow I begin a more sadistic physical therapy with pulleys to get more range of motion from my shattered elbow.
Three times during the visit, the doc said I should ride. I have enough range of motion in my arm to ride.
But during my three-mile walk home from the visit I had another moment of the making the contrast between bicycling and walking as exercise. More than half the time I ride, someone in a vehicle--most often a plus-sized redneck in a pickup truck--will swerve at me or just pass too close. Occasionally he will yell faggot (women never do these things, only men). A few times I have been hit with bottles and cans or got a "rollin' coal" cloud of smoke from a diesel pickup.
And I get angry.
Only rarely can I do anything about it. Once more than 15 years ago I got the license plate of a guy who threw tacks in the road because he hated us so much much.
I have walked in hundreds of miles since surgery and no one has swerved at me, thrown tacks in the road, spit, called me a faggot, or any of the other things that have happened to me only in America and mostly on rural roads.
So now I am really thinking about how much I want to ride. I live in a rural area with lots of pickup trucks. Do I want to return to getting pissed off at the pathetic cowards who think bicyclists don't belong on "their" roads?
It's a question I never asked before. I love cycling so much that I thought the anger was part of riding. But knowing that I can walk and challenge myself makes the world look different. What is inner peace worth? I will be asking myself that.
