You might say that I have this thing about wheels. How they evoke oppressor/oppressed, master/servant, subject/object relationships. Wheels in motion are privileged. The unwheeled are not.
I walk for nearly all of the ordinary business of life . . . to my office at Lakewood City Hall, to the adjacent market, dry cleaners, Target, mall, restaurants, bank, bar, bookstore, church, city park, ophthalmologist, movies. I live in the most usefully walkable part of a thoroughly walkable town. And it has buses (with their attendant indignities) for the necessary reach to scarcer resources – HMO, museums, bigger bookstores, better bars, the big city (Long Beach).
I walk and I defer to wheels . . . on vehicles, on bicycles . . . even the wheels on skateboards. The rider rolling presumes, with the sovereignty of a knight on horseback. The walker stops or steps aside. I feel like I should tug my forelock and mutter “good day to ye, squire” when wheels pass on the sidewalk, turn into the crosswalk, hang over the driveway, fail to stop. Stopping is an intimation of mortality for the wheeled. Privilege evaporates. Stopped, the wheeled are less than pedestrian. Momentum is gone.
Like a said, I have a thing about wheels. You’ll get a better idea from this: Rush.
The image on this page was taken by Flickr user C.P.Storm. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
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Its nice to know that I'm not the only one who walks and takes the bus in this city!