Open Journal Montreal

A response to a response to the following letter, published this month in Now Magazine.
by Neil Balan.

Ryan Carriere died heading home to help his daughters with Halloween costumes.

1: Dying to ride
By LESLEY MCALLISTER
Local artist in tragic Queen West accident yet another casualty of city’s neglect of cyclists

The group gathering on the corner outside the Gladstone Hotel is swelling by the minute. Candles are being lit, blowing out in the evening breeze and being lit again. It looks like the whole neighbourhood’s come out to honour Ryan Carriere, the cyclist killed here a week ago today when he was struck by a truck making a right turn and dragged under the wheels. I knew Carriere for seven years as my neighbour, the way you do when you share a walkway and a fence in need of repair. I didn’t know he was a gifted comic book artist, that he made wonderful little books based on the natural world he came across in the backyards and laneways of Parkdale. The day before he was killed, he’d been here at the Gladstone, selling his work at Canzine. We’re waiting on the cyclists coming over from City Hall so the vigil can begin. They arrive in good form with a clanging of bells, lay their bikes down on the spot where the accident happened and once again unroll the banner: A Cyclist Was Killed Here. We number in the hundreds by now and spill onto Queen, closing down the intersection. It’s pretty amazing. I didn’t feel much like cycling across Queen in rush hour in the dark. I’m sad, scared and really, really angry. Our city has failed absolutely to make our streets safe for cyclists. Our bike lanes are ineffectual. Stopping lines at intersections aren’t clearly marked. And we’re still waiting for the city to act on the coroner’s recommendation for safety skirts on trucks, a recommendation that came out of the death of another young cyclist a year and a half ago. Carriere made the ride along Queen every day to and from his job as a letter carrier at the Dovercourt postal station. It’s four blocks, five minutes at most. It was a clear afternoon, and he was heading home to help his daughters Minnow, eight, and Plum, five, get ready for Halloween. He cycled because he cared about the planet. He was a tree planter and an enthusiastic grower of luscious-looking green beans. One time he and the girls came over to my yard to help free a possum that had a grocery bag wrapped around its neck. The possum ended up in his book Animals We Have Known. Cyclists in Toronto are also becoming an endangered species. And until we’re willing to give up the automobile as our sacred cow and build dedicated bike paths along major streets, they’re going to keep getting killed. And we’re going to have to keep meeting like this. “Ryan! Ryan! Ryan!” we call out to the ringing of bicycle bells. “We’ll miss you!”

ii.)
“Cyclists make good hood art”, Letters, Now Magazine, November 17-23, 2005, 10

Despite your furry-headed sense of entitlement, city roads were not made for cyclists, but for a little invention we call the automobile. If you want to play with your bicycle, go to the park, ride along a bike path and ring your little bell. Have fun—just leave the streets to people engaged in adult pursuits such as earning a living. Bicycle Luddites at play in the 21st century are destined, nay, begging, to become hood ornaments. Dingaling.

Andrew Matheson
Toronto

iii.)

To Andrew Matheson,

Andrew: wow. Very clever. “Dingaling.” Nice stuff, the automatopoeia, itself tastelessly verging on “malicious”. No doubt the mailbag will be full next week on account of your diatribe. Incendiary mission accomplished.

First, I thought you were being ironic, which is admittedly dubious given the context of your remarks—though not altogether unexpected. It’s reassuring to see people willingly resort without qualm to cheapened remarks at the expense of someone’s untimely death. Smooth. I suspect you think I take the same opportunity. Well, read on and see for yourself.

Regardless of initial reactions, I still thought that I could redeem you, thinking, “Maybe this guy is ‘really committed’ to whatever anti-something scene or lifestyle he envisions for himself. Maybe he’s just scared and has no sense of decorum or sympathy, which he believes to be ideological and bourgeois and petty.”

I wanted to believe that that was what you thought, even if your commentary was a callous and malicious expression of caustic cynicism, which for you is some sort affirmation of your life. There seemed to be some (small) point of rupture where your façade was penetrable; I hoped to hear in the distance your laughing at yourself as you rattled off, with flair, your triumphant vision for the 21st century.

In this vein, I thought that responding was simply an exercise in entertaining your opportunistic whims and your tactless discursive and rhetorical gamesmanship, exercised for whatever self-serving reasons.

Then, as I considered things further, I thought, “This guy is serious,” and then I paused. Then I wondered where you lived, where you travelled, what sorts of things you did during your daily routine, figuring it would be worth confronting you or calling you out. I wished some pain your way.

Then I stopped thinking along that trajectory. I realized that you’re a small, feeble, sad infant of a person who equates wisdom with consumption and maturity with possessing and operating a motor vehicle. Seems your sense of driving and its discontents are things that are exactly vehicular—linear, aligned, no regard for what happens outside that line of flight. You’re bent on attaching so much significance to your car, your capital-intensive signifier par excellence.

Hearing you issue comments like “Luddite” is problematic: did you take no notice of the smog warnings this summer? Is making a living via driving your mobile furnace—to earn cash only to feed back into the maintenance and cost of your vehicle—really that efficient? I guess you don’t take much notice of it outside the “earning a living” aspect that drives drivers like yourself, with whom you identify. Anyway, I’m probably wrong: you’ve probably calculated that cost and extended yourself well beyond your limits to maintain that habitual pattern because, after all, that’s the basis of one’s adult pursuits, right?

Funny, though: Ryan Carriere was riding home. From work. After a summer of working as a treeplanter, most likely to augment his income to help his family. The day he was—let’s not mistake it for a neutral “death”—killed, he was riding home from work. To his family. To help his kids get ready for a night out.

Though I contend that any accident is by no means an anomaly—it’s an emergent part of any successful system that exists prior to success—there is certainly something to be said about the object of risk and the lurking supplement of threat that affixes itself to any of our everyday endeavours. Or maybe not yours, Andrew, as you’re an adult who makes good decisions and drives his car to work. You protect yourself; you’ve got no time for the park. You equate work with your car and your lifestyle and the things that are really important.

Unfortunately, riding in the city—or rather, in a city populated by ignorant and indifferent people such as yourself—is often fraught with risk, though it ought not to be. Ryan Carriere’s death provided a relay for the sort of environment with which we all contend: a territory laden with threats and dangers that we take for granted, threats we defer and deny because we treat them as if they are and remain natural.

I wonder, Andrew, what you make of automobile accidents? Vehicle-related deaths? Should we mourn them any more—or at all—because they involve your so-called adults who cruise around inside of a secure, fibreglass carapace while claiming they didn’t have choices about their own locomotion?

Cars aren’t natural; at least, their use need not be inevitable. They’re products of an industrialized drive for profit, the sign of commodity and incorporated interest intent on producing need and prioritizing desire at the behest of all else, namely your lungs, your health, and all the cellular membranes in your body. Make no mistake: this connects to things that are happening thousands of miles away and deep inside places you can’t even see or sense. Toxic.

In the simple act of choosing to ride—a choice you ignore and erase from consideration—Ryan Carriere encountered an assembled set of forces—car-driven, time-binding, rush-prone, remorseless—exerted in an environment within which little respect is given for those who attempt, even in minute ways, to alter the things taken for granted. That, Andrew, is the basis of invention: questioning assumptions, those depoliticized nuggets of “common sense”.

That is what’s foreign to you, and what Ryan Carriere had in spades: inventiveness, awareness, and responsibility. In a word, an ethic. The ethic exacted his life. Sound grand and pathetic to you? Probably. Really, it is so simple. I drive a wedge between us but I maintain I can teach you.

I wish you could have seen and heard the vigil for Ryan Carriere. It was a lesson in efficacy, in recognition, and in community affect. A singular moment of the wealth of the poverty of the bike-riding multitude in mourning, very much unlike the solidarity of the multitude that trades in alienation and frustration induced by traffick-heavy commutes, the occupied bounds of the mobilized bubble, and the road-borne vectors traced daily.

I hope some sympathy comes your way via something less severe than your own maligned injury or demise; though I fear that, given the choice you make daily (whether you consciously make it or not), it may take massive and monumental trauma to move you to a massive shift in conception. That’s the real irony, Andrew: the trauma is all around but for you, it’s not legible. You’re too busy bounding your world with “us and them”. You lack the grounds for the kind of perception required, which is what saddens me most. Dingaling indeed.

Sincerely,
Neil Balan

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[ originally posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 11:44 am and is filed under Everything, Neil, On Places and Identities. ]