Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  There once existed natural geographical reasons for most towns to come into being: a meeting of rivers, as in Pittsburgh; a river meeting a lake, as in Cleveland or Chicago; a canal meeting a lake, as in Buffalo; a secure and sheltered harbor, as in Baltimore, Houston, and Galveston. Eventually, what was originally a geographical justification for choosing one place over another to settle got cemented down as rail lines reached across the open spaces and connected these cities. As more and more people were attracted to these towns, the density of habitation and attendant business opportunities became additional reasons for even more people to make their homes there. They were drawn to live in proximity to other people, as social animals will tend to do. In many cases the rivers or lakes eventually became irrelevant, and shipping moved elsewhere or shipping by water was replaced by rail and eventually by trucks. As a result the rivers and waterfronts soon became derelict and the industry built alongside them became ugly inconveniences. Nice people shunned those neighborhoods. I sound a bit didactic in this recapitulation of history—bear with me, it’s a way of trying to figure out for myself how we got here.

  There is often a highway along the waterfront in many towns. Before these highways were built, the waterfronts, already dead zones, were seen as the most logical places from which to usurp land for conversion into a concrete artery. Inevitably, little by little, the citizens of these towns become walled off from their own waterfronts, and the waterfronts became dead zones of yet a different kind—concrete dead zones of clean, swooping flyovers and access ramps that soon were filled with whizzing cars. Under these were abandoned shopping carts, homeless people, and piles of toxic waste. Often you couldn’t even access the water as a pedestrian unless you climbed a few fences.

  Most of the time it turns out the cars are merely using these highways not to have easier access to businesses and residences in the nearby city, as might have been originally proposed, but to bypass that city entirely. The highways allowed people to flee the cities and to isolate themselves in bedroom communities, which must have seemed to many like a good thing—one’s own domain, a yard for the kids, safe schools, backyard barbeques, ample parking.

  Years ago it was thought that our cities were not sufficiently car-friendly. People who wanted to move about in a car quickly found the streets frustratingly congested and crowded. So planners suggested that massive freeways and concrete arteries would solve the congestion problem. They didn’t. They quickly filled up with even more cars—maybe because more people thought they could get to and fro faster on an expressway. So even more highways were built.

  In some cases ring roads were added, encircling cities, to enable the motorist to get from one side of town to the other, or from one suburb to another, without even entering the city. When I bike around these places I discover that sometimes the only way to get from point A to point B is via a highway. The smaller roads have atrophied or sometimes they just aren’t there anymore. Often they’ve been cut in two or sliced and diced by the larger arteries so you can’t get from one place to another on surface streets even if you want to. As a cyclist or a pedestrian it makes one feel unwanted, like an interloper, and you end up sort of pissed off. Needless to say, riding a bike along the shoulder of an expressway is no fun. There’s nothing romantic about it either—you’re not a cool outlaw, you’re simply somewhere you don’t belong.

  Niagara Falls

  I wake up in America. The sun is blasting and I am in a tour bus in a huge parking lot in Buffalo—somewhere near the Canadian border. A highway passes alongside the parking lot and cars whoosh by.

  I am in the middle of nowhere. In the middle distance there is an office building and to my left a hotel. Inside the hotel, women in identical suits sit watching a PowerPoint presentation in a glassed-in room. A man is walking to and fro in the lobby loudly explaining a marketing scheme into his cell phone headset. Americans are focused, intent, bent on self-improvement and enlarging their market share. The newspapers in the lobby show the U.S. Army attacking a mosque and the magazines show hooded Iraqis being tortured and abused by U.S. soldiers. The Salvation Army is setting up tables by the conference rooms. The ladies all have giant Burger King cups.

  I have a few hours free so I head off on my bike toward Niagara Falls, which is not that far from Buffalo, though it ends up being farther than I thought. I ride on the shoulder of a road that is lined with chain stores, none of them specific to this area. Everyone who works in them is therefore an employee hired by some anonymous distant corporation. They probably are only allowed to make small decisions and they have almost no stake or investment in the place where they work. Marx called this alienation. Communism may have been a sick dream, but he was right about this aspect. Of course, I can’t see any of the people who work in these places along the shoulder of the highway. There are no people visible anywhere, just cars pulling in and out of parking lots. I pass Hooters, Denny’s, Ponderosa, Fuddruckers, Tops, Red Lobster, the Marriott Hotel, the Red Roof Inn, Wendy’s, IHOP, Olive Garden . . . and roads with names like Commerce, Sweet Home, and Corporate Parkway.

  Now I pass some Niagara Falls information joints. I must be getting closer! Then, farther on, there is motel after motel. Years ago, this area used to be a prime honeymoon spot—though now it’s a little hard to imagine anyone honeymooning here except in an ironic way. An ironic honeymoon? Anyway, who would want to honeymoon on a stretch of highway that looks like it could be anywhere in America?

  Farther down the road—and I’ve gone at least ten miles now—there is evidence of the massive electrical power generated by the still-invisible falls. The sun is beating down and I’m feeling weird, hot, and a little tired . . . this landscape tells a strange story. Somewhere, off in the distance, is an amazing and awe-inspiring natural phenomenon, yet I pass by land that is unfit even to be industrialized, and has therefore been abandoned—an egret stands in a muddy stream among old tires and bits of busted signage. The mostly closed Lockheed plant on a rise looks disturbingly like a contemporary jail.

  I arrive at the town of Niagara itself, which is a peculiar ghetto of black and Italian immigrants. I pass Italian grocery stores, hair salons, and liquor stores. I stop for a sausage sandwich and a Gatorade. A pale woman of maybe seventy sits in front of an ashtray overflowing with butts, leafing through a Country Weekly magazine. I suggest she might get sunburned on a hot day like today. She sniffs and ignores that warning and instead shows me a photo of Alan Jackson in her magazine. He’s her favorite—“this year”—she says.

  The falls are truly amazing. Out of nowhere, one emerges from this crappy town to signs pointing to the bridge to Canada, border guards, and the park. As one approaches the falls one can see a strange mist rising in the distance and the air is now cool, as if one had entered a giant air-conditioned room. I stand at a rail and stare at this mighty weirdness, looking, looking, as if prolonged looking will cement this thing in my brain, and then I turn around and head back.

  The Struggle, the Show

  I saw an amazing video called The Backyard. It’s about backyard wrestling—kids imitating WWF hijinks and then pushing them a bit further, a little more extreme. They use bats covered in barbed wire, jump into pits filled with fluorescent lightbulbs, set one another on fire, and of course hit one another with chairs and ladders, just like they’ve seen on TV, but it’s all more DIY.

  It’s jaw-dropping—hilarious and sometimes horrific. It’s hard to look as a kid slices himself with a razor to make the blood flow so it will all look more real.

  In some cases their parents cheer them on.

  Much of it is all about putting on a good but harmless show, as it is with the WWF, but a good show also seems to demand a certain amount of real blood, genuine risk, and danger. And sometimes these performers seem to get just a little carried away and the border between show and real life starts to get awfully fuzzy.

  I ask myself, are these kids who—to borrow from the Trent Reznor song—need to hurt themselves to see
if they can feel? Are they so feeling-deprived that any sensation, including pain, will do? Pain is a pretty easy feeling to achieve. Those on the receiving end of the punishment at these events often seem to stand there passively, waiting patiently to be smashed over the head with a fluorescent tube or trash can. The “punishment” appears to be accepted and unavoidable, almost wished for. Is it really punishment if one desires it?

  Here then is what’s going on behind the placid suburban houses I’m biking by: wildly over-the-top shows, dangerous dramas, torture, pain, and shrieks of loopy excitement. My friends and I liked to play army in our suburban neighborhood growing up, but we weren’t nearly as creative as this lot—and there was almost never any physical contact.

  Kodak Moments

  I am in Rochester, New York, for an exhibition of my work and a talk at Eastman House, the former home of George Eastman, the founder of Kodak.

  Mr. Eastman, as they refer to him here, never married, lived with his mother, and eventually killed himself with a gun. He left a one-line suicide note, which is on display: “To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?” He did the deed almost immediately after signing an updated will. Ever considerate, efficient, and maybe just a little obsessively neat, he placed a damp cloth across his chest to minimize any splatter before he pulled the trigger. George was physically ill and wanted to avoid further suffering.

  There are clocks placed inconspicuously all over the residence. Most of them are hidden in corners of rooms and alongside paintings so Mr. Eastman could keep his servants punctual. They knew that he could always tell what time it was because, though he might appear to be looking at them, there was likely to be a timepiece somewhere right behind them. Every object and piece of furniture owned by him had an engraved tag (Prop of G Eastman) screwed into it on some hidden surface.

  His mother’s bedroom, which was directly across from his, has two small beds in it placed side by side. George’s bedroom is now empty—only the fireplace remains. It was the scene of the suicide. I sort of suspect that George and his mom actually slept side by side, but maybe I have an overactive imagination.

  In the center of Rochester there is a wonderful waterfall, a smaller but still spectacular Niagara where the Genesee River plummets into a deep gorge.

  I biked by this cataract last time I performed here, sort of stumbling upon it by accident. The falls are pretty spectacular, and why the city hasn’t made them more of a focus is at first a puzzle. The writer Rudy Rucker says that thirty years ago one couldn’t even see the falls as they were so obscured by industrial pollution, so I guess that sort of answers that question.

  I look around the gorge. Dominating one side is the almost abandoned Kodak plant, which doubtless used the river as both a source of power and as a dumping place for lots of photo chemicals. On the other side of the river are more factories and the remnants of a hydroelectric plant. It seems that this boomtown (the first boom was when the Erie Canal connected here, allowing shipping from the Great Lakes and Chicago up and down the Genesee and on down to New York City) happily made industry a priority and it soon dominated the waterfront on all sides. The river was almost hidden from public view throughout most of the town in those days. The mansions of the wealthy were situated well outside that industrial zone. George even had his own cows on his property, as he liked fresh milk.

  A man driving me to Eastman House says that housing projects built in the 1960s now dominate part of the riverfront, that they were built there because it was not prime real estate at that time. Soon the projects became run down, and now developers are hoping to oust the remaining folks who live there, as the riverfront is gradually becoming cool, desirable, and lucrative.

  This area is home not only to Kodak, but also to Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, and, in a nearby small town . . . Jell-O. All of these industries seem to me to be evocative of the last century. Kodak has made some serious layoffs lately, and, curiously, they seem optimistic about their future, as who really believes that film will remain a large industry for long? And who uses a Xerox machine anymore? There’s always room for Jell-O though.

  Biking around one can see that the city is beautifully situated—but the past is holding on for dear life with a viselike grip, a grip that strangles too many of these towns. Not that old buildings and neighborhoods should be torn down, just the opposite, but they probably need to have new functions.

  “He Got What He Wanted but Lost What He Had”

  I arrive in Valencia, a “town” near L.A., in the early evening. I wash up and walk around outside to get my bearings. I seem to be nowhere or maybe on a movie set—there isn’t a soul on the sidewalks and the buildings nearby are all relatively new condos in fake this or that style. Across the street are indoor-outdoor malls that architecturally imitate streets, but their “streets” have no people on them.

  A bronze statue of a couple carrying bags—a mother and daughter, caught in mid-shopping spree—is anchored to the sidewalk. A monument to shopping, or a memorial? I walk on and feel a chill—I am more scared here than in a bad New York neighborhood. It’s as if a neutron bomb exploded here just before I arrived, or as if there was once a bustling civilization here that has just abandoned the place. Am I about to find out why they left so quickly? Everywhere there is lush vegetation fed by hidden sprinklers, and everything is clean. It seems to be a physical manifestation of the Little Richard quote “He got what he wanted but lost what he had.” This place is obviously a dream come true—visually at least. It seems to be everything we say we want—but sometimes when we get what we want it turns out to be a nightmare.

  In the morning I am driven to the combined offices and set of the HBO series Big Love, and I get a short tour of the interior sets of this TV show—sets that represent the homes of the show’s three Mormon wives. I love these artificial places. You’re on the set and it’s completely believable as a suburban home—there are books and magazines lying around that the characters would plausibly read, and here are some of their clothes they’ve apparently tossed aside. And then you look up and there is no ceiling above you and huge air-conditioning ducts loom overhead. Outside the “window” is a massive photo backdrop of the mountains that ring suburban Salt Lake City, where the show is set.

  These jarring juxtapositions are beautiful—in some ways they make our own homes, offices, and bars seem just as hollow and superficial as the sets. What we call home is just a set too. We think of the familiar intimate details in our own spaces—those magazines and books, the tossed-aside articles of clothing—as unique, integral to our lives. In a sense, though, all they are is set dressing for our own narratives. We think of our personal spaces as “real,” and we feel they are filled with the stuff of our lives that’s different than everyone else’s. But especially out here, in Valencia, the “real” built landscape, those places I walk around, are made of structures that are no more real than this movie set. The mental dislocation is a wonderful feeling. The disconnect is somehow thrilling.

  My Hometown

  We travel great distances to gawk at the ruins of once-great civilizations, but where are the contemporary ruins? Where in our world are the ruins in progress? Where are the once-great cities that are now gradually being abandoned and are slowly crumbling, leaving hints of what people from the future will dig up and find a thousand years from now?

  I am on a train passing through Baltimore, where I grew up. I can see vacant lots, charred remains of burned buildings surrounded by rubbish, billboards advertising churches, and other billboards for DNA testing of children’s paternity. Johns Hop-kins Hospital looms out of the squalor. The hospital is on an isolated island situated slightly east of downtown. The downtown area is separated from the hospital complex by a sea of run-down homes, a freeway, and a massive prison complex. Eastern Europe and the Soviet bloc come to mind. Failed industry and failed housing schemes and forced relocation disguised as urban renewal.

  I hear the faint cacophony of many distant cell-phone rings in the train
car—snippets of Mozart and hip-hop, old-school ring tones, and pop-song fragments—all emanating out of miniscule phone speakers. All tinkling away here and there. All incredibly poor reproductions of other music. These ring tones are “signs” for “real” music. This is music not meant to be actually listened to as music, but to remind you of and refer to other, real, music. These are audio road signs that proclaim “I am a Mozart person” or, more often, “I can’t even be bothered to select a ring tone.” A modern symphony of music that is not music but asks that you remember music.

  Two men in the woods by the side of the train tracks are crouching by a small fire on a piece of overgrown, unused land. They share a forty ounce. Urban camping, of a sort. Behind them, beyond the thinning fall foliage, one can see a busy street. Here they are. Huck Finn and Jim. Hidden in plain sight. A parallel invisible world.