back in action

That's right. After a year in the basement collecting dust and growing mold on its plywood deck, the bike trailer is back. Made by Bikes At Work in Ames, Iowa, I bought this beauty back when we lived in Berkeley to haul my gardening tools around the neighborhoods of the east bay area. Since we moved to less-bike-friendly-but-getting-there-Chattanooga, I haven't felt all that motivated to take it to the streets, but today was the day. I took off one section of the trailer so that it is lighter to haul on the hills and ridges around town, and then headed over to Crabtree Farms to pick up our produce.

Was I partly doing this for attention? Absolutely.

And also, as it is Independence Day, to commemorate the Boston Tea Party, who chucked a bunch of boxes of British Tea overboard into the sea in order to tell the British, "We don't need your stinking caffeinated beverages." And lo and behold, to this day, 9 out of 10 Americans, when asked if they would like coffee or tea, they'll choose coffee. So my one-man-bike-trailer-parade-with-no-official-audience today was my only mildly serious way of saying, "We don't need your stinking foreign oil."

from Wendell Berry...

"Judging from our epidemic of obesity and other diseases of sedentary life and from the popularity of the various strenuous employments of the 'physical fitness movement,' the greatest untapped source of usable energy may now be in human bodies. It may become the task of a future economy to give worthy employment to this energy and to reward its use."