A beautiful place.... for the Fiat and its many uses

In Italy, panorama viewing counted as a bonafide activity, as much as going to the theater or out to dinner. In fact, the question, "Vuoi andare a un bel posto?" -- Do you want to go to a beautiful place? -- was the Italian equivalent of the American boy's invitation to a drive-in movie.

No viewpoint was left unmobbed by groups of friends and pairs of lovers, especially on summer nights. Whereas the average American viewpoint might be surrounded by safety railings and interrupted with signs warning you not to get too close to the edge, and etched display boards narrating the view, the Italian scene featured clumps of viewers perched on a low parapet gesturing wildly while talking amongst themselves, and passionate couples on the verge of writhing themselves right over the wall.

On any night of the summer, the road up to a viewpoint was lined with cars. You had to park way down at the bottom of the hill and walk up. The first time I was walking up to one of these viewpoints with a group of friends past all the lined up Fiats, I noticed that many of the Fiats were wiggling. I mean visibly, unmistakably, hilariously wiggling. "Ragazzi. Ma queste macchine si muovono." (Hey look you guys. These cars are wiggling.)

Then I noticed that many of them had newspers taped over the windows. It turned out that even up here the scugnizzi had found a way to reel in a few lire. The scugnizzi (the gn is pronounced as in lasagne) were the street urchins of Naples, unschooled and uncorralled, running around everywhere fulfilling invented needs and holding out a dirty hand for coins. You could barely turn your head around Naples without seeing one. A tram would go by and there'd be one attached to the back of it like a tree frog, for a free ride. Out here on the hilltops they approached occupied parked cars with newspapers and tape in hand, selling the scarce commodity of privacy. In a culture where an apartment of one's own was hard to come by, people had to make do.

So those were the entrepreneurial scugnizzi. But then there were the bad scugnizzi -- doesn't every population have its rotten apples? A favorite stunt of the evil ones was to slink by in the darkness and light a match to the newspapers covering one of the wiggling Fiats -- causing the occupants, no doubt at the zenith of their wiggling, to come bursting out of their car in a semi-clothed panic to attack the flames with their cast off apparel or whatever was at hand.

Seat Belt Usage in Italy, Part 2

In the early eighties some nebulous Italian entity got it into its head to impose seat belt laws.

Some of you may be familiar with the rules-are-made-to-be-broken mentality that permeates the Italian culture. You sophisticated ones will recognize that I am not just spreading slander about a whole population of people. I am merely addressing a well established phenomenon. I can't explain where it comes from. If you look at one Italian at a time, you find the whole range of people types, just like any other population. But for some reason, when you put them all together on a long skinny peninsula, you get mayhem. The Italians discuss this endlessly amongst themselves, and they can't explain it either.

At first, the seat belt laws were taken no more seriously than other laws. Another opporunity to break a rule sent the whole population into squeals of hilarity. But then something happened -- something so freakish it was almost creepy. The authorities had the audacity to actually enforce the seat belt laws.

Rumors spread wildly about people being pulled over and fined horrendous amounts of money for lack of a visible black band stretching diagonally across their bodies. More and more people had a story of their own to tell. It wasn't long before it had happened to someone you knew.

The people were outraged. The further south you went, the more outraged you found them. All over you could overhear animated conversations about how ridiculous it was. On people who drove an older car, namely everyone, it placed the enormous burden of having seatbelts newly installed. In Naples, they wouldn't hear of it.

Leave it to the Neapolitans to come up with a solution. A cottage industry sprang up there that produced knitted sweaters with a black diagonal band across the front. You could buy a sweater for each side of the car, the driver sweater with the band going one way, the passenger sweater with the band going the other.

You and I might wonder: "Wouldn't it be more hassle to put on a certain sweater every time you got in the car than to just put on the seat belt?" But you and I would be missing the point -- the micromanagement, keep-your-laws-off-my-body, don't-tell-me-what-to-do, POINT. So there.

I'm not sure how Italians today, almost thirty years later, feel about wearing seat belts. Perhaps they've come around; maybe they put them on automatically, without even thinking about it. Maybe an Italian will write in and let us know...

Meanwhile, think about whether you want to keep hearing about Italy in the seventies. I could cover:
Other uses of the Fiat 500.
or:
The search for privacy in an overcrowded nation.
or:
Lines used by Italian boys to lure girls to secluded areas.

On the other hand, if you're bored with all that, you could ridemyhandlebars back onto the MAX train for a peek at my longitudinal study on:
Heterosexual Mating Rituals on Public Transportation

You decide.

The History of Seat Belt Usage in Italy, Part 1

I know that among those of you who are American, the thought at the forefront of your minds as you've been reading these last few posts has been: "Are they wearing their seat belts?"

The answer, as you might guess, is: Not.
Or, more accurately: What seat belts?

Did those cars even come with seat belts? I'm not sure what Fiat was doing in those days. But if cars did in fact emerge from the factory with seat belts, the belts were so unused that they withdrew into the recesses of the seat's crack within a few weeks of purchase, never to be seen again. Until.

(more later...)

Cliff Driving, continued...

While the Italians are famous for slowing way down at the table, that doesn't happen on the open road. Is it a backlash from having to drive bumpety-whippety-jerky style the entire time they're in the city? Maybe. The reason hardly matters -- the effect is an insane level of risk.

Are the Italians afraid on the little mountain cliff roads? No they are not. Why not? because on each curve there's a convex mirror mounted on a pole, making it possible to see what's coming around the corner. Why worry? What more could you need?

Since the way to Roccaraso was uphill and we were riding in a Fiat 500 washing machine, we didn't go horribly fast on the way there. That gave me plenty of time to gaze out the windows and take in the stupendous views of the terrain we might land in if we or the opposing drivers failed to make one of the curves. Against a foreground of crosses and memorial shrines marking the departure points of previous travellers, the expansive panorama was made fleetingly more expansive at periodic breaks in the masonry guard rails.

Next: the down side of the trip

Crazy but not stupid

The one precaution we took was for Elvio to park the motorcycle down the road by the church when he came to pick me up. We may have been born yesterday, but not the day before yesterday. We could safely hypothesize (see? safety wasn't the absolute furthest thing from our minds) that for him to come roaring into the courtyard of our building on that thing would be unpopular with my parents.

They weren't microparenting enough to notice that on some dates we strolled out of the courtyard on foot instead of puttering out in the little Fiat. My parents had way too many kids, most of whom were misbehaving horridly, to focus in on any of my innocuous details. They were much too other-preoccupied to wonder, Hm, where's Elvio's car? Why would he choose to park out on the street where it's impossible to find a spot when he can be guaranteed a spot in the courtyard?

I'm lucky that since we usually went out in groups, the motorcycle wasn't the default mode of transportation. I'm lucky that he probably shared that thing with his two brothers, so it wasn't available as much as it could have been. I'm lucky that when we went up to the mountains to go skiing, the vehicle of choice was the Fiat.

Up in the mountains, quite another kind of safety challenge was underway. While far away in another hemisphere tourists were flocking to Acapulco to witness the famed cliff diving, Italians were engaged in an even more extreme sport, known only to themselves and the occasional scared witless American.

Come with me to the cliffside roads of Italy and experience the chilling wonders of Italian cliff driving.

The other vehicle

The thing I loved fourth most about Elvio was that he was not unduly preoccupied with being a man-man. Gender roles were all a big joke to him. He was prone to burst into song, usually mock opera, changing the words from Joe Green's Rigoletto, "La donna é mobile," which meant basically women change their minds at the drop of a hat, to "La donna é un mobile," which meant woman is a piece of furniture. Everything was lampoon material, including trends, social mores, male competitiveness -- and the like.

That's why I found it so peculiar to discover how crucially important it was to him to own a motorcycle the size of a horse. Equally perplexing was how he could've afforded such a thing in his sketchy state of employment. Somehow he acquired the thing and began showing up with it when we went out by ourselves. It took every ounce of his strength just to push it off the kickstand, but once he got it rolling, he was in hog heaven. There was no mention of helmets. What was the use of being on a motorcycle if your friends wouldn't recognize you roaring by with your hair flying in the wind and a girl on the back?

In reviewing my mental strategy for consenting to passenger-hood during my Italy years, I now recognize that it's exactly the same attitude one adopts when climbing into the buggy of an amusement park ride. Does one say, Where's my helmet? Does one say Do you have a license for this? Does one say Have you had safety training for this? No. One hops in willy-nilly with the unquestioned assumption that if this thing weren't safe, it wouldn't be allowed to operate.

So that's what I did. I hopped on, willy-nilly. I trusted the Italian driver to know how to drive like an Italian. Today I wouldn't. Today my mature mind would go further, and notice that Italians have ambulances and hospitals and graveyards just like everybody else, and that would be an indication of something.

We did take one small precaution, however.....

Elvio and his vehicles

Elvio was my buddy during the Naples years. The thing I loved most about Elvio was that though everyone thought he was My Boyfriend, he was in reality: Not My Boyfriend. The thing I loved second most was that as long as everybody thought he was My Boyfriend, he had the decency to be handsome, molto simpatico, and hilariously funny. He was thin, but not in an anorexic kind of way. He wore a perpetual look of amusement on his face, had thick wavy black hair, and a compulsion to twirl the corners of his mustache between his thumb and forefinger.

Grazie, Elvio, for being there next to me so that all those tiresome other boys would look elsewhere.

The thing I love third most about Elvio was that having him made it possible to go out with the person I really wanted to be with, namely Lucia. Lucia had become horribly unavailable to me since she'd started going out with the loathsome Paolo.
This way I got to hang out with my two favorite people, Lucia and Elvio -- though unfortunately nothing could be done about having to endure Paolo.

Elvio had the car that most other Italians had then, which was a Fiat 500. Though these Fiats were the size of washing machines, there was no limit to how may Italians could stuff themselves into one -- at which point they would roll up all the windows to protect against la corrente, and light their cigarettes.

Later I can explain how it is that half the population of Italy was conceived in these cars. Remind me. But at the moment the topic is vehicular safety -- which I would gladly continue with presently if not for the fact that I've run out of time.

Cultural Attitudes toward safety equipment in Italy

My friend Carla was visiting a few years ago. She stayed at my apartment and used Portland for a base to travel out from, usually by herself, which was gutsy of her since she doesn't speak a word of English. For a few days she went up to Seattle and took the obligatory ferry ride. While waiting for departure, she stood on the deck watching the scene on the dock. She saw a hefty woman ferry worker standing there, holding a line, getting ready to push off. When she got back to Portland, Carla made a great show of itemizing the safety equipment that bedecked this ferry worker: Hardhat! Life vest! Flashlight! Whistle! Construction boots! Radio! etc. "If this were Italy," said Carla, "if the passengers on an Italian ferry saw someone that prepared for disaster, they would stampede off that boat so fast!"

To the Italian way of thinking, what could it mean but that the dock workers knew something they weren't telling?

I often think of the Italians as I'm layering on my gear, and I can hear them laughing from across the big water. For more about Italians on safety, I could tell you about Elvio.

The Queen of Practical

The other day on my way across town I met Marsha. We were riding along one of the bike boulevards at the same speed, so we got to talking. That's the way biking is -- you're not all closed in from other humans, you're right out there.

For those of you not from Portland, bike boulevards are just the smaller streets through residential areas that are not major arterials and therefore are not highly traveled by cars. Cars don't like the stop signs every two blocks, they prefer the big noisy streets with the more infrequently placed stop lights. Certain of these residential streets, quite a number of them actually, have been designated as bike boulevards. Maps have been made showing these streets as having been designated for bikes. You can cross town on these, with minimal contact with the big hairy scary streets. Little arrows topping round discs with bike symbols are painted onto the surfaces of these streets. There are very few cars to contend with.

Anyway I was complimenting Martha on all her weather proof bike clothing, and she said she got it all at a construction supply store. We stopped in the middle of a street and she pulled a couple of other items out of her basket to show me -- most notably an orange construction vest. Much sturdier than most of the flimsy ones I've seen (and bought) at bike shops, and according to Marsha, much, much cheaper. She had protective safety glasses she got there for a dollar thirty nine, as opposed to the 37 dollars you might pay for them if they were labeled bike glasses and sold in a bike shop.

She has a major point there. I'm definitely going to go have a look. The store she named started with an S. I wrote it on my hand, but unfortunately have bathed since, and now I can't read it.

As for safety glasses, I don't need them....... since I am reputed to have emerged from the womb wearing a little pair of lizard specs. Meaning that as a lucky glasses wearer, I don't need yet another pair of glasses to keep debris from flying into my eyes. As for the other supplies, though, I use everything, and I'd love to know of a cheap source.

Next I have to tell you about the use or non-use of safety equipment in Italy.

OK, Car-Heads -- Watch THIS!

The link below has got to be the best ad out there for bike safety awareness. It's a commercial that is running in the UK right now.

http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

the scene of the accident

Just to show how easy it is to wipe out, I went back and snapped a picture of the seemingly insignificant patch of dirt I slipped on last week. It was mud at the time, after a day of heavy rain.

Here’s my technique: I approach the end of the cul-de-sac and whip left up this curb-cut, then immediately make a fun-filled, sharp flip to the right, proceed straight ahead and down the next curb-cut, then curve to the left and I'm there, on that next street – a shortcut limited to bikes and peds. Only this time I didn't get further than my first left turn because of that mudpatch.

This is a route I’ve taken hundreds of times, so take note: don’t get overconfident. You know what they say: “Most accidents happen within three miles of home.”

Vesting in our future

OK, here’s the super glow in the dark&light vest of which I spoke yesterday. I forgot to bring the product ID information with me to my hideout today, but when I get back home I’ll fill that in. I bought it at Bike Gallery.

Notice how the back comes down much lower than the front. That’s so when you’re leaning over slightly, as one is wont to do when riding, the thing still shows up. Brilliant. The last vest I had was as short in the back as it was in the front, and it wasn’t nearly as visible from the back because most of it disappeared when you were leaned over.
Also, this one is a snap to take on and off, made easier by having a little belt that buckles in front. That way you can adjust it according to how many layers you’re wearing – instead of trying to wrestle with the “one-size-fits-all” mythology of many products.

I had to pay this model a ton of money to pose for these pictures so I hope you appreciate it and go out and get one of these. I’m not getting paid for this. And why aren’t I, anyway? If the luminescent vest makers want to give me money for blogging about them, I won’t turn it down. But even without the money, my interest in promoting these is completely selfish. As a bicyclist, I don’t want to get hit by a car, and as a driver, I don’t want to hit a bicyclist. So there.

Rain bad, Sun worse – don’t be lulled into complacency

Ok, boys and girls, I know you’re all as happy as clams out there with all this glorious weather. So what do people do? Immediately dump the perpetual load of rain gear -- and with it goes the luminescent rain jacket / windbreaker. Aren’t we all ecstatic to be able to hop on the bike with 50% less junk? Because isn’t that the Number One complaint about biking – that there’s too much STUFF you have to schlep around with you?

HOWEVER – all is not perfect in P-town -- or anywhere else where the sun is shining brightly. What happens (especially in a car) when you pass abruptly from a brightly sunlit area into the dark shade of a row of trees? Ever notice? You’re temporarily struck blind, that’s what. Isn’t it true? For a few seconds you can’t see a durned thing and you’re operating entirely on guesswork. This effect is much less dramatic when you’re on a bike because you’ve got the whole dome in your visual field, filled with an array of light and shadow happening in all the 360 degrees around you, providing for gradual adjustments from light to dark and vice versa. In a car, however, you’re all closed in, making the light more glary and the dark mo darker. And having all that glass reflection to contend with further compounds the problem. Once again the cyclist has the advantage of better vision BUT, ironically, is at the mercy of the impaired vision of the bigger and much heavier Moving Metal Deathtraps.

Conclusion? In sunny times, that luminescent garment is just as crucial as it is in rainy times. That could be the ONLY thing the driver sees once you enter a shadowed area. I have for that reason been enduring my caution-yellow rain shell throughout the sunshine so far. People look at me weirdly, but at least they look at me. Finally I’ve bought myself a simple VEST which is a lot cooler. Later I’ll post a photo and brand information and tell you why I think this one is so much better than the last one I had.

Tinted side windows big safety problem

I’m seeing more and more of them, so I looked it up online, and it seems that tinted side-front car windows are legal in Oregon. How dumb is that? Tinted windows completely obliterate any hope of eye contact with a driver.

There are so many situations in which we need to know if someone is seeing us or not. You can save your own behind if you’re lucky enough to be able to see that a driver is looking the other way, yakking away on a cell phone, or just not paying attention.

Even without window tinting it’s hard enough to see the driver because of reflection on the glass. We can’t do anything about that, but why make it worse by allowing tinted windows? As pedestrians, cyclists, and even as drivers, we all benefit hugely from eye contact when it's possible.

Note to drivers: Don’t assume that anyone outside your car can see your gesturing. Chances are, the reflection is such that they can’t see through your window glass. While you’re gesturing wildly away, they many have no idea you’re even looking in their direction.

When I’m driving, I’ll often roll down windows that I’m looking through, to make it easier for other drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists to see me-the-driver rather than just me-the-car. A lot of communication can occur by eye contact alone.

Another reason to wear a helmet

This week's Newsweek quotes a bicyclist who got his head run over by a delivery truck. He said, “I didn’t see it coming but I sure felt it roll over my head. It feels really strange to have a truck run over your head.”

I’ve often thought that if you somehow fell over in a bike lane or from a sidewalk on a busy street, you could easily land in the path of an oncoming car. That’s why I avoid these shared arteries like Broadway. In my opinion, that was not the brainiest traffic planning idea in the world. I use the little residential side streets as much as possible.

The guy’s name was Ryan Lipscomb. He suffered only a concussion. It didn’t say what brand of helmet he wore, but his story would make good ad copy for the helmet maker -- like those luggage ads that showed the suitcases falling off the top of a car on the freeway and surviving.

That actually happened to me, about 20 years ago – same brand of suitcase, fell off top of car on I-5, no lie, run over by a semi. My parents still have it in their basement. One of these days I’m going to send it back to the company for a refund. The ad claimed it wouldn’t be squished, and it is too squished. It didn’t open and spill my stuff all over the road, though, which really impressed me. I think that’s what’s holding me up. I’m conflicted about whether my experience differs from the ad enough to warrant a false advertising claim. I can’t decide. Maybe a lawyer could help me.

Ear damage while biking

One thing about riding a bike is that your poor ears are exposed to all the construction noise you pass. I try to hold a finger in my closest ear, but I always wonder if the reverberation off the buildings hitting my other ear are actually louder. I’ll have to ask someone who knows about sound waves.
Here’s a photo I took while riding through the famous Pearl District, which is supposed to be the greatest thing that ever happened to Portland. See that black thing in the middle that looks kind of like a crane but isn’t? That’s a pile driver. The thing’s hammering away every single day when I ride by, and it’s so loud it hurts. I’ve got my finger in my ear the whole time I’m near it. I don’t see anyone else doing this, which makes me wonder. Am I just ridiculously sensitive? I mean, ow! Once I saw a mother standing casually at a stop light with a baby in a stroller right next to where this is, and I wanted to jump off my bike and stick my finger in the baby’s ears. I didn’t, though. But it was hard. "Move the baby!" I pleaded silently in my mind.

This site is smack in the middle of a whole bunch of those new condos that cost $350,000 and up. In fact I bet there aren’t even any that low by now. If I had just bought one of those and found out I was going to have to listen to a pile driver every day for the next three or four years, I’d be mad as a hornet. I’d be furious. But that would be dumb, wouldn’t it?

People buy those places because they want to be right in the thick of the city and then they spend the rest of their life trying to get it to be less noisy and less like a city. The building and road re-paving is endless and the noise of the garbage trucks reverberates horribly on the sides of the tall close-together buildings, and the train goes right through there – what did they expect? Please make the garbage trucks come later, please make the train stop blowing its loud horn, please make the panhandlers go away, please make them quit building all those other condos like mine, they moan pitifully. What’s slightly amusing is that they’ve paid top dollar to be right on TOP of the train tracks and other city characteristics that used to define a low-rent district. Ha. Ha.

84 year old Alzeimer’s patient receives driver’s license

The other day my mother was driving around doing errands. She took my father with her. She often does that, even though it makes her errands a lot harder, because my father really likes to go out for a ride in the car every day. My father has Alzeimers, and though he can remember lots of questions, he can’t remember the answers. So he keeps asking the questions. He'll get stuck on one or two questions for a couple of days, then move on to another one. That is one of several things he does which can drive you nuts if you’re around him for more than a few hours in a row. Which I rarely am, so I don’t mind it. My mother minds it.

One of the errands was to go get Pop a current ID card, so they went to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Mom handed them his old driver’s license which is many years out of date. The guy said, “You want this renewed?” My mother said, “No, he doesn’t drive any more and hasn’t driven for years. We just want an ID card instead.” So the man handed her a bunch of forms to fill out.

By this point, my mother had already been driving Pop around doing errands for quite some time. On top of that, they’d been waiting in the waiting room at the DMV, which sounds easy unless you’re in your third hour of answering the same question. So my mother, totally exhausted, said to the man, “Is there some way I can get out of here quickly without filling out a lot of forms?” And the man said, “Here, I’ll just renew it.” Renewing it costs more than getting an ID card, but it’s a lot quicker, and by this time all my mother cared about was quickness.

According to my mother’s description, they asked my father about three questions. Then they took him over to some kind of screen or viewing device and asked him whether he could see this or that. Then they took his picture, and in a few minutes he had his license.

Obviously, he’s not going to be driving. There’s no danger of that. Even if he did get a hold of the keys, it's unlikely he'd find his way to the garage. If he did, and even if he got into the driver’s seat, he wouldn’t be able to figure out what to do.

I just think it’s noteworthy that someone in this condition can end up with a driver’s license at all. Of course he wouldn’t have been able to without my mother taking him there, plus she knows he’s not going to end up in the driver’s seat of any car. The point is, what does this say about the way they check people out at the DMV?

Think of that when you’re out there riding your bike.