Social Mischief

We moved to Boston shortly before the Marathon Bombing.  The last year, we heard about a small bit of social mischief. The marathon route is closed to most all traffic from midnight onward, the day of the event. One of the local college lads learned about this six years ago, and decided to ride his bike out to Hopkinton, where the race starts.  He rode the whole route, including crossing the finish line.  Word of his exertions spread, and people joined him on the ride.  They started at midnight, and finished a few hours later in downtown Boston.  It grew so quickly that the 11pm train from South Station to Southborough was quickly overwhelmed with bikes and bikers.

Last year (the year following the bombing), the entire population was on edge.  The various authorities said that the ride was an "accident waiting to happen."  Perhaps that was correct; perhaps not. They forbade, and later strongly requested that the organizers not do the ride at all. I'm not sure how people in authority develop such complete tone-deafness to the public attitude, but it's impressive.  With complete predictability, authorities discouraging social activity launched the event into the stratosphere.  Sensitive to the very real possibility that by joining in we might be making the event more dangerous, we stayed home last year.  In the mean time, the Boston Globe got ahold of the story, and authorities got a proper public beating.  Discouraging positive, community-building, harmless, healthy activities was shown to be laziness on the part of authorities.

Last night, at about 10pm, we dropped off our bikes with the moving vans lined up about a half mile from South Station.  Curiously, the site of the Boston Tea Party lies exactly between the vans and the station.  At 11pm, we loaded ourselves onto a packed train.

At midnight, we started out in the pitch black with about 1000 other bikers.  There is a 4-mile (very hilly) trek from the train station to the start in Hopkinton.  The police were in full-force, guarding all the intersections and cheering us on. There was the biker with a disco-ball suspended from his helmet, and music blaring out his stereo.  There were glosticks everywhere; in spokes, on frames, in hair, on helmets.  The scene was a hoot.

Brenda immediately noticed (being an avid runner) that the atmosphere was one of inclusion and collegiality, rather than competitive tension.  I completely understand people who train for years to run the race being in a state of high anxiety.  I also was very pleasantly surprised by the opposite attitude by the bikers.  I stopped briefly to get some peanuts out of my pannier.  I was asked at least a dozen times whether I was okay.  Nice. The guys with 5-gallon buckets duct-taped to their handlebars rode along tapping out a rhythm that was quite enjoyable.  They also were careful to warn everybody about railroad tracks, etc.

It was cold.  It was, in the nomenclature of a family friend, "darker than the inside of a cow."  It was almost entirely silent (modulo the Home-Depot bucket drum line, and Disco Phil).  It was serene in the extreme.

A couple hours later, we coasted into the well-lit finish line.  There were tons of police around, all chuckling at these knuckle-heads and their bikes.

For having no official leaders, and no official sanction, this was a well-oiled machine.  We went from the finish line to Boston Coffee Company, where there was a terrific Pancake Breakfast.  It took about a minute for us to get tickets online for the moving van, and another minute for tickets to the breakfast.  The biggest part of getting those tickets was instructing the recipients what to do with the excess proceeds -- there were a number of choices for the thousands raised in this event.  In order to get a ticket for the moving van, you had to describe your bike.  I said mine was yellow with an enormous seat -- the bike seat, not my seat.

I absolutely love social mischief like this.  I'm grateful that there are very serious people who very seriously planned and staged this world-renowned marathon.  I've run a couple marathons, and they are massive undertakings.  But the cleverness of being involved in a socially positive way in something that is so serious . . . well, that's 100% me.  Destructive stuff is not me. Illegal stuff is not me.  But I encourage everybody, in the strongest possible terms, to seek out and participate in social mischief like this.  And, the very best thing about this event was that there were no organizers -- nobody to complain to.  So people who like to complain simply stayed home.  Wonderful.  We have to figure out more ways to organize things with nobody to complain to.  If we did that enough, people would simply have to stop complaining at all.  I'm sure that somebody probably complained outside my hearing.  Perhaps they complained that there weren't enough pancakes, or that the course was too cold.  They probably stopped complaining, however, when the wheelchair winner rolled across the finish in 1:29:50 (probably half the time of the bikers).  The only thing I like better than social mischief, are events where complaining looks silly and absurd.