Ornoth

One of the world’s most characteristic voices has been silenced. Joseph Hill has died.

Joseph was the heart and soul of the reggae band Culture, who came to prominence in the mid-1970s with a string of popular and influential hits. Throughout the intervening years, Culture continued producing very original, soulful music, and touring widely.

I first saw Culture perform at the Middle East in March 2001, then again at the same venue in 2002. Later that same year, I saw them at the now-destroyed House of Blues in Harvard Square, where I was able to shake the man’s hand. Most recently, I had the good fortune to see him at Harpers Ferry on May 12th, just three months ago.

Even at 57 years of age, Hill continued to perform a hundred concerts each year. But what made Culture special was Hill’s personality. He was an inspirational and charismatic spokesman for reggae music, his island, and his beliefs, and he held audiences rapt with his aura of wisdom, mysticism, and love. When Joseph Hill took the stage, you knew you were in the presence of a wonderful, gentle man with a powerful vision of a world without barriers and free of conflict.

May Jah grant him the peace and rest he so highly deserves.

Puggle is dying.

I brought the little guy in to the vet because for the past few weeks he seemed to be having gradually more and more difficulty breathing. No apparent pain or even much discomfort, which is good. But despite that, the vet’s diagnosis is dire: congestive heart failure.

There aren’t many options to consider. Untreated, he will die within weeks. We could drain the fluid from his chest and put him on a diuretic, which would give him short-term relief, but which isn’t a viable long-term treatment. We could undertake a lengthy, uncomfortable, and expensive sequence of aggressive treatment, with a lot of risk and little guarantee of results. Or we could euthanize him.

What seemed to me to be the most compassionate thing to do was to give him the short-term treatment, see how he responds to it, spend some quality time together, get used to the idea, and let him go when his symptoms return. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to nurse him through to the beginning of January, so that the holidays aren’t an eternal reminder of his passing.

Puggle is my first and only pet, which makes this really hard, and he’s been my constant companion for the past fourteen years. I’ve always known that this day would come, and dreaded it, because the little infestation is a very, very important part of my life. So today has without question been one of the most painful days of my life.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I’m pretty good at resorting to cold logic to subdue my emotions. I have been telling myself that everyone dies sooner or later, and he’s just a cat, after all. But the heart doesn’t agree with that, and my heart and mind seem to be taking turns speaking from the pulpit in a very heated debate taking place inside my skull.

In a way, this is a good ending, though. The diagnosis leaves little room for me to second-guess my decisions. It’s not one of those situations where he’ll need daily shots or an extensive treatment regimen for a long duration. And the Puggle doesn’t appear to be in any pain or much discomfort. So in that sense, it makes saying goodbye a lot easier.

But at the same time, he’s not in respiratory arrest, so I do get some time to say goodbye. The vet said I can feed him “anything he’ll eat”, so I’ll be picking him up some cheese curls, ice cream, bacon, and grass for his enjoyment. And because my company takes the week between Christmas and New Years off, I’ll have that whole week to spend with him, if his health permits.

That might be bad news for you, though, because I expect I’ll be posting a lot about this over the next month. The point isn’t to solicit sympathy, but just to record the things I’m going through. And to hopefully remind you that we all—cats, dogs, and humans—have a very brief time on this earth, and we should express our affection and appreciation of one another while we can, because all too soon, it will be too late.

Andrei Kivilev died today. You probably never heard of him; he was an impressive fourth in the 2001 Tour de France, an attacking climber and a surprise challenger to Lance Armstrong during the three-week stage race. He was riding this year’s Paris-Nice race and apparently got tangled with another cyclist and endo’ed. Fractured skull, coma, death.

Cycling is an inherently dangerous activity. Risks include cyclists’ errors in judgement, oblivious or aggressive auto drivers, poor road conditions, mechanical failure, animals and pedestrians, other cyclists, and poor facilities design. While you might think of cycling as a relaxing, pleasant recreational activity, a wise cyclist’s mind is often more preoccupied with mitigating these risks than with enjoying the scenery.

Every couple months I see an article about a professional cyclist who has been injured on the road, usually on training rides. Bear in mind that these are paid professionals at the height of their mental and physical prowess, who spend four to eight hours a day, every day, on the road. Furthermore, they are usually riding in places where drivers and the whole culture are much more bicycle-aware than here in the US. If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone.

Also every so often I hear about cyclists killed here on the streets of Boston and our surrounding communities. It happens, and in virtually all cases it happens unnecessarily.

Why does it happen? Lots of reasons. One of the biggest is that most cyclists and most auto drivers are dangerously ignorant of the law and safe cycling practices. This leads to unnecessary road use conflicts and fosters a confrontational attitude where drivers view cyclists as unpredictable scofflaws and cyclists view drivers as willing to use their 3000-pound vehicles as weapons to assert their “right to the road”.

This is exacerbated by the complementary problems that a majority of cyclists disregard traffic laws as they apply to bicycles, and the complete lack of enforcement of those laws. Last summer I made an informal study of cyclist behavior at the intersection outside my window. I counted 1039 cyclists. Although it is illegal to run a red light, 93% of the riders who came to a red light went through it. Although it is illegal to ride on the sidewalk, 22% of all riders rode there. Although it is illegal to ride the wrong way down a one-way street, 16% of all riders did it. Fully 60% of all riders were riding illegally at the time I observed them! And these behaviors have a direct impact on safety. Riding against traffic and running lights doesn’t just endanger the rider who does it, but it also puts them in conflict with other cyclists, as well. Here in Boston, being hit by another cyclist who ran a light or who is riding against traffic is a common problem.

As if that weren’t enough, cycling advocates must wage a constant two-front war to ensure that our public ways are designed to be safe for cyclists. On one side are the cash-conscious bureaucracies who design and build roads. Generally, they consider automobiles to be their only clients, and aren’t the least bit concerned with accomodating cycling traffic.

Also a problem are the many well-intentioned roadway designers who want to accomodate bicycle traffic, but who aren’t the least bit familiar with the lessons learned and best practices for designing safe and effective cycling facilities. From these people we get facilities like the bike lanes on Highland Street in Brookline that encourage cyclists to ride in the door zone of parked cars. However well-intentioned, these people create the most ludicrously dangerous facilities, then make them doubly dangerous by marking them as officially-sanctioned bicycle facilities. The danger of promoting this false sense of security was sadly illustrated last year, when Dana Laird rode down a marked bike lane in Central Square that put her into the most dangerous part of the road: the door zone of parked cars. When the door of a parked Honda CRV opened, she clipped it, swerved into traffic, and was crushed to death under the wheels of an MBTA bus.

That same false sense of security also applies to helmet use. Many novices think that wearing a helmet is the single best way to ensure your safety on a bicycle, and many people would no doubt assert that Andrei Kivilev’s death might have been prevented had he been wearing one. However, helmets are only useful in reducing the likelihood of one rather infrequent type of injury, and they’re not guaranteed to even do that. In fact, the overwhelming majority of riders wear helmets improperly, such that they wouldn’t effectively protect them even in the event of an impact to the head! While theoretically any protection may be better than none, a singleminded attachment to helmets as the primary safety precaution just isn’t consistent with the facts.

There’s also an insidious assuption behind people’s attachment to helmets. The underlying presumption is that accidents are an inevitable part of cycling, and that the best way to respond isn’t prevention of accidents, but to accept accidents as part of life and ensure that accidents are “survivable”. Instead of blythely venturing into traffic basing his sense of security on an inert piece of foam, a wise cyclist will put thought and effort into the myriad ways that he can mitigate the risks inherent in riding on the public ways. Prevention will serve any rider a lot better than a $60 piece of foam that they don’t know how to use properly.

That’s the ultimate message here. I don’t mean to be alarmist, but cycling really is beset with risks. People who fail to manage those risks appropriately live in constant fear and often find themselves in accidents. However, the wise cyclist acknowledges those risks, and while riding is constantly assessing them and managing them. By taking appropriate action to minimize those risks, a cyclist is less likely to be involved in accidents. Not only that, but he will enjoy his cycling more, becuase he will have fewer conflicts with other road users, and can ride without fear. The wise cyclist also does his part to mitigate those risks when he’s not on the bike by promoting informed facilities design, cyclist and driver and police education, and enforcement of the traffic laws.

I’ve ridden over 6000 miles and 425 hours in the past 30 months, without a single accident. Yes there are risks, but they’re manageable. Cycling is one of the most rewarding and pleasant activities you can undertake, and it can also be done safely, if you take the time to develop the necessary insights and road skills.

Still, it’s always jarring to hear of a cyclist’s death. Stuff like that always underscores the dangers of cycling, and that no matter how much you try, you can’t completely eliminate the risks.