The Space Ghost, going where none of Fleck’s bicycles have gone before.
It is an accident that my new bicycle is named after a 1960s cartoon superhero who fought supervillains in outer space with a sidekick named Blip. Blip was a monkey.
I was on my own Saturday, no help from Blip, when my Space Ghost led me up a “trail” on the west side of the Rio Grande upstream from the Route 66 bridge. I’ve made several stabs at this stretch of riverside woods on other bikes, but none were up to the task.
It’s a weird place. The trail follows the path of the abandoned Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District Atrisco Heading, which for a time diverted water from the Rio Grande for farmers in Albuquerque’s south valley. The District and the Bureau of Reclamation abandoned the heading in the 1950s (it kept clogging with silt), replacing it with a siphon from the river’s east side.
The trail, such as it is, peters out into a thicket of riverside woods pinned between a bluff and the river that is not, in human terms, well travelled.
The new bike is sorta an All-City Space Horse, but All-City is sorta going out of business, making my bike sorta one of the last of the Space Horses. I think it was Blip the Space Monkey who sorta named it the Space Ghost.
I’d been eyeing the Space Horse for a while. It’s a style the kidz today call a “gravel” bike, with slightly smaller wheels and umpty wider tires – disc brakes leave a lot of room for wider tires. Which is good, I guess, for riding on gravel? Or, more importantly, Rio Grande levees, bosque trails, and valley ditchbanks. And it has all the mounts you could dream of for water bottle cages and racks.
The Surly at Lake Mead.
It’s a replacement for my beloved Surly, which is what the kidz used to call a “cyclocross” bike – also suited for dirt, but with a road bike feel. Its name was “The Surly” to friends, and “The Black Bike” to family. It began its life as a Cross Check, and was one of my two daily drivers – commuting (it has racks) and any rides that included dirt – for a long time. My Strava data, which is not super reliable for tracking which bike I ride but is prolly in the ballpark, says I put 7,000 miles on the Surly. I changed it up a bunch of times – different handlebars, I rode it as a single speed for my commutes for a long time, then back to gears.
It had wide handlebars and gears when I used it for my epic ride along the shorelines of a dwindling Lake Mead back in 2022.
As Matt Philips wrote in Bicycling magazine, the Cross Check was super versatile: “I’ve seen a lot of Cross Checks in the wild, and no two are ever the same.”
At least one, and possibly two of my students rode Cross Checks.
When I first got “The Black Bike” 15 years ago, I described it thus:
One of the new bike’s main purposes, in fact, is to get me down to the river. It’s a hybrid road-dirt machine, so I can ride the five miles of street I need to get to the river, then ride the levees and dirt trails…. I’ve kitted it out with saddle bags to hold binoculars for bird-watching and enough food and water to get lost in my thoughts without incurring significant danger. (emphasis added)
I’ve been riding it that way ever since, but the lure of wider tires finally got me over the decision threshold – that and the MRGCD’s new e-bike rules.
N+1
There’s a bike nerd joke:
Q: What’s the correct number of bikes to own?
A: N+1
A couple of years ago I added an e-bike to the shed. The precipitating incident involved a crash on the Surly on my 63rd birthday ride.
I’ve long celebrated my birthdays by riding my age in miles, or at least trying to. There are gaps in the record, years when I wasn’t riding enough to be in shape enough to pull it off. But I’ve done it many years since I was in my early 40s.
I was perhaps 40 miles into the 63 birthday ride, just up the hill from the Rio Grande Oxbow on Albuquerque’s west side, when my wheel caught in a pavement crack and I went down. I was going slow, so there wasn’t much road rash, but I slammed down hard on my ribs.
Blip the Space Monkey
A nice person in a car stopped to make sure I was OK (This always happens, people are awesome!), and my sidekick Blip the Space Monkey and I sat on the curb for a bit and weighed our options. I could have called home for a ride, or limped to the Route 66 bus line, which wasn’t far. I don’t crash a lot, but I’ve gone down enough times to to know the pattern: You pop up to make sure nothing’s broken, hurt for a couple of minutes, and then feel great. Adrenaline?
And then you say – well I say, anyway – “Fuck it, it’s a bike ride, let’s go!” On my 63rd birthday ride, that meant lunch with Blip at our favorite barbacoa taco truck out on West Central.
I regretted this decision.
While the number of miles I need to ride in this game goes up each year, the inexorability of aging means my ability to recover from those miles goes down in roughly the same proportion, if not greater. Between the crash and the miles (the birthday ride is always the longest ride of the year for me), it took at least a month to recover. Within two-and-a-half months, there was a new pedal-assist e-bike in the shed.
It’s a beast, and I’ve never entirely gotten used to its size and weight. People who study brain stuff have some language for my physical experience with the bike: “tool incorporation” or “extended cognition.” It’s the idea that as we become deeply familiar with a tool, our brain incorporates it as part of our body schema. Think carpenter<->hammer. I’m that way with my daily drivers – my road bike (“the Red-White-and-Blue bike”) and “the Black Bike.” When I’m on them, they are part of me. This is not poetry, or metaphor. It’s brain stuff.
I’ve never quite acquired tool incorporation with the e-bike. I love the range it gives me, and what we call “dog mode.” (As a “pedal assist,” the bike requires me to pedal, like a regular bike, with the motor adding “oomph” – more oomph when you run across one of those clever south valley dogs.) I love the e-bike’s big fat tires, the better to ride on Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District irrigation system access roads. Or so it seemed until, after an impassioned couple of board meetings (the pageant of democracy was especially delightful, no sarcasm, it was a wonderful debate), the places where I could ride the e-beast were restricted.
Full confession. I sometimes ride my bike in places I’m not supposed to. I draw the line at trespassing on Tribal/Pueblo land, but other than that my approach is, umm, flexible. I am fascinated by the notion of “right to roam,” common for example in Nordic countries. But the new MRGCD rules posed a dilemma for me. I’ve just finished writing a book that is in significant part about the District, and in doing that work I’ve become fond of the District and its people. They’re great about acknowledging my “right to roam” on their ditches, a legal thing but more importantly a cultural norm. They just don’t want me to do it on my e-bike!
The Surly was OK for this, but I needed wider tires. N+1.
The Last Space Horse
Space Ghost goes exploring.
All-City, nominally out of Minneapolis but owned by “big bike,” ended with the 2024 model year, but the Wizards at Two Wheel Drive were able to grab one of the last Space Horses for me in January and trick it up with the swag I wanted. I’ve already got more than 300 miles on it since I picked it up Feb. 1. I’ve taken it on a couple of Rail Runner train rides (take the train up the river a ways and ride back home) and dumped it once (“Ride fast and take chances” is not normally my motto, but it’s so snappy!). I keep snagging the pedals on curbs and tree roots, they’re lower to the ground than my other bikes. I don’t quite have the “tool incorporation” brain-body-bike mapping nailed down yet, but it’s close enough to the Surly and the Red White and Blue bike that it was mostly there from the start other than the pedal thing.
It wants to go down the dirt alleys in my neighborhood, like a dog tugging the leash. It loves the ditchbanks and the levee roads.
Here’s the thing about my foray into that thickly wooded bosque Saturday. I could have done that on the old Surly. With the skinny tires, it would have been less pedaling and more walk-a-bike, through places too sandy or littered with downed branches or clogged with doghair thickets to ride. But even with the Space Ghost’s fat tires, there was a ton of walk-a-bike.
It was the spirit of the thing. The Space Ghost really wanted to go.
Sauntering
A friend who delights in wandering introduced me recently to the Situationists, a group of avant garde Europeans in the 1950s and ’60s who sorta just wandered around looking at stuff. Abandoning regular routes and routines allowed them to see their spaces and the cultures that made those spaces in a new way. Embracing that notion, my friend and I went on a walk a couple of weeks ago that repeatedly detoured down alleys and through a construction site in search of graffiti.
The Situationists’ “dérive” (from the French for “drift”) feels a bit like Henry David Thoreau’s walks:
Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.
I do love to walk, but the bicycle adds a layer of playful joy to my sauntering, rooted in that first great bicycle adventure of my childhood, when my friends and I packed lunches and rode out to the end of 23rd street, into the orange groves. We snuck into an old grove barn – trespassing! – to eat.
I have been thus wandering since childhood.
In my late teens, transplanted to college dorm life in a strange new town, friends and I climbed down into the concrete channel into which the creek that flowed through our new home had been confined. Deciding on a downstream direction, we walked until the creek became encased in a tunnel beneath downtown Walla Walla, Washington. We walked slowly and carefully in the dark, keeping our left hands touching the concrete channel’s wall, passing the single place where light from above penetrated before emerging on the far side of downtown, the channel issuing us out into the first of the farm fields that ringed the town.
Cows, standing in a small field, stared at us, their heads tracking us downstream as we disappeared around a bend, then tracking us back upstream as we returned.
Thoreau and I quickly part ways. He found the stuff people build to be an affront to the proper ways of things – “Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape.” For me the whole point of wandering is to see places and spaces as the social constructs that I think they are. But the joys of wandering – Thoreau through his “nature,” me through my urban landscapes – are fundamentally the same.
Space Ghost and the Freeway Bridge
At the upstream end of the segment Space Ghost and I rode Saturday is the Interstate 40 bridge across the Rio Grande.
The bridge is one of Albuquerque’s great graffiti spaces. I first found it five years ago when a friend and I were trying to find a way down to that stretch of the river on foot. There’s an old access road down the hill that used to be open, then was gated but unlocked, now the gate’s locked. I’m not sure how the artists are getting in now, with all their paint cans. Maybe there’s a way along the edge of the freeway. Or maybe they’re just humping it up through the woods like I did.
Public art.
The art covers all the reasonably reachable bits of freeway concrete, a flood control channel, and the bridge pilings. On the other side of the river, The Man recently painted out a bunch of bridge piling art, including a great old Irot bird. But the stuff on the west side of the river remains untouched. Too hard for The Man to get to, I guess.
This is at the core of the way I ride now. As a little kid, exploring was the thing, and bikes were a massive range extender. As an adult, my riding shifted for a time toward speed and fitness – my unfortunate “Lance Armstrong era,” as I think of it. But I’m back to the “dérive,” which is what little kid John was doing sneaking lunch in an old grove barn.
Contra Thoreau, the freeway bridge across the Rio Grande, this incursion of the sweep of humanity into the natural flow of a river, delights me. There is no question that it has changed the form of the landscape, but is Thoreau’s “deform” the right word here? In particular, the way bridges and their abutments and pilings constrict the Rio Grande, the sediment piling up behind in what eventually become vegetated islands, is at root a change in the river’s form. But the connotation of a Thoreau’s linguistic choice, the sense in which “deform” embeds the value of a worsening, I challenge. Bridges across rivers bind community. Artists have humped their backpacks of spray cans and made art, that in the process has made this bridge and this urban river their own.
This is the point of the Space Ghost.
This is why I ride.
