Toward a Cyclocross Ethic

Last week I was crusading on behalf of an ancient common-law precept granting widespread access to God's earthly treasures when a mistimed bunny-hop ruined my rear wheel.

I should have known. Frustration of one sort or another always seems to accompany cyclocross, a bike-riding amalgam of roller derby, steeplechase, mud wrestling, and ballet that I'll later describe in greater detail. I was racing last week in the 10th annual Urban Outlaw Cross Dress Cyclocross series. Its promoters, members of the local Dead Fucking Last bike club, take this 100-year-old fringe sport to the fringes of political thought, purposefully eschewing any attempt to request permission for holding their dirt-ripping races on public and private land.

"It's totally on principle. It's part of DFL and the anarchist spirit we started with," says Dylan Snodgrass, a San Francisco carpenter who organizes the series as the bike club's "president, owner, and king." "We don't want to hassle with that part of it. We don't want to deal with bureaucracy and money."

In the past, I haven't knowingly associated myself with fringe political movements. But this fall is special. Our current and likely next president has declared property-rights zealotry as the driving theme for the next four years of U.S. public policy under the rubric of "Ownership Society." This accelerated program of private greed would be stacked on top of the country's steady race to maximize the benefits of certain people's private property, while diminishing the number and value of things we hold in common.

The Urban Outlaw Cross Dress Cyclocross series may not return public access to these shared resources, known in English common law as "The Commons." But as with any well-crafted performance art piece, this race series provokes new thinking. In this case, it points up just how confining it's been to see the steadily growing assertion of exclusive ownership "rights" -- whether legally defensible or not -- at the expense of common property rights.

Lately it's become even more frustrating to produce the Outlaw series. Snodgrass and his DFL cohorts spend their summers scouting San Francisco for slivers of empty, unattended land that are becoming scarcer by the year. The bicyclists race for an hour, then swiftly slip away before anyone realizes what they're doing.

"Sometimes I feel like this insect clawing away on the edge, trying to find these patches of dirt, trying to enjoy our anarchy thing, so we can enjoy our 45 minutes of exhilaration," Snodgrass says.

Judging from our president's newest rhetorical thrust, exhilaration available to anyone who seeks it will grow harder to come by with time.

On its face, the notion of an Ownership Society, introduced during Bush's address at last month's Republican National Convention, seems to consist of benign, even lofty rhetoric that has long been used to cloak the old GOP objective of shifting some of the Social Security program into individual retirement savings accounts and, now, a less controversial, subsidized home-loan program.

But the conception is grander than that. The Ownership Society -- in Bush's words, "a path to greater opportunity, more freedom, and more control over your own life" -- applies the kind of all-encompassing language that added resonance to the New Deal or the Great Society to the extreme conservative fantasy of shrinking the public realm into nonexistence. It's a (to borrow from columnist Matthew Miller) "let them own cake" society.

"[Bush is] applying themes for a lot of conservative reforms in a way that hasn't been done before," the Los Angeles Times, in a news story analyzing Bush's speech, quoted right-wing economist Kevin Hasset as saying. "It's a big-think, big-idea approach."

Decimating what Americans hold in common, for the benefit of a few "owners," under the cover of misleading rhetoric, is nothing new for this government. The Clear Skies Initiative made it easier for industry to dump mercury and sulfur dioxide into the air; the Healthy Forests Initiative opened wilderness to clear-cutting. What better way than a specious, yet uplifting, creed of individual self-actualization to explain away the most noxious and greedy parts of the Republican agenda?

"From my perspective, the veil is off," says former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach, who now runs an S.F. nonprofit organization, called Common Assets, that is devoted to defending collectively owned natural resources. "This is final proof the Republicans are out to devolve the entire public safety net and the core of common assets our society has sustained since the First World War. It means McMansions instead of national parks. In this model, everyone has their own private space, and the public has nothing."

Another friend is even more despondent: "I can only imagine the number of discouraging things you could wrap into that rubric," he says.

There's almost nothing better to illustrate the peril of exuberantly exercised property rights than to devote oneself to cyclocross. That's because before you can begin a cyclocross race, it's necessary to find an empty field, glen, or forest nobody much cares about. And those spaces are fewer by the day.

Cyclocross is an off-road bicycle-racing sport involving slightly modified, skinny-tired, multispeed bikes that preceded the Marin County mountain-bike fad by three-quarters of a century. (The first cyclocross world championships were held in 1902.) Riders do laps on an off-road course of a mile or so, periodically dismounting with a balletic two-step as they hurdle foot-high artificial barriers or clamber up unridable embankments.

"If it's a wet enough course, it's a real triathlon," explains Bob Leibold, who has been promoting non-outlaw cyclocross races in Northern California since the 1970s. "But it's not like those wimpy triathlons where you get to leave the bike behind during the running and swimming sections."

Even accounting for Leibold's hyperbole -- there's no swimming, really -- it's safe to say a cyclocross race is one of the toughest hours in sport. The U.S. version of cyclocross got started in the 1970s, when a group of Bay Area crazies assembled at places such as Tilden Park in Berkeley and the UC Santa Cruz campus and mapped loops taking them over logs, up cliffs, and through rivers. They slogged over the courses carrying their bikes one-third of the way, then collapsed on the ground after they had clocked an hour. Whoever was ahead after 60 minutes would win.

Twenty years ago cyclocross consumed three of my autumns and winters. It was exhilarating and, as I mentioned earlier, frustrating. As it became ever more difficult to find a place to practice or race, I became more suspicious of the property-rights creed.

During the week, my friend Charlie and I would seek out empty fields with just the right combination of gullies and berms, then ride, hop, and run loops until we'd created a path. My most vivid memories from my high school years are running up a hill in an abandoned Sacramento Valley dump with Charlie sprinting at my heels, or accepting a dare to ride down the steep earthen mound that supported a freeway bridge across the Cosumnes River. We'd each ride and run and crash, and crash, and crash again, until we'd perfected the sort of swift dismount, leap, and remount necessary to jump unridable obstacles at speed.

At that point in time America was already an Ownership Society, in the sense that people were enthusiastic about hoarding exclusive access to things that, it seemed to me, multiple people could enjoy. This created problems for us. Every time Charlie and I would discover a cyclocross path, local off-road motorcycle enthusiasts would spot us and take over our trail. They'd bring rifles and beer to occupy themselves during the moments they weren't running us down. So we had to find yet another unnoticed spot to practice, until they found us again.

I organized one race on the American River Parkway, in Sacramento, complete with a Parks Department permit. Rangers put an end to this once they realized exactly what we were up to.

I called the owner of the abandoned dump to ask if we could organize a race there instead. "A dump? Who'd mind?" I thought. The owner listened quietly to my appeal and weeks later erected an impassable fence. A few years later the dump was a housing subdivision. And later still the area around the Cosumnes River became private housing tracts, too.

About a month ago I was jogging along with my wife and daughter through a wooded part of San Francisco when out of the brush popped a man on a skinny and knobby-tired bicycle, pedaling as though the devil were behind him. He turned onto a dirt path, quickly swung his right leg over his bicycle, swishing it between his left leg and the bike frame, then snapped his left foot with a twist. He hit the ground with a running stride, hopped over two logs, set his bike on the ground as he continued running, then leapt through the air onto his bike seat, all without losing speed. Five more cyclists followed him in exactly the same way. Then five more. I had to stop and watch. The next week I joined them. The following week I chatted with Snodgrass and learned of the secret race series' glorious outlaw creed. To distinguish these races from officially recognized branches of bicycle racing -- which take color-coordinated spandex and $7,000 bicycles very seriously -- Urban Outlaw organizers give special awards for cross-dressing.

"It's taking something that can be considered really serious, where everybody's got fancy bikes and bike undies, and turning it into something that can be seriously competitive and at the same time fun and irreverent, silly and stupid," Snodgrass says.

So about half the men don dresses and camisoles, and the women wear tighty-whities over their cycling shorts -- not as a sexual statement, but as an expression of nonconformism. Particularly fetching last week was a low-backed red-satin prom number worn by a cyclocrossing local fireman.

"'Urban Outlaw' means exactly that. It's in an urban environment: All our races happen in the urban boundaries of San Francisco, because we're a San Francisco team. The outlaw part is there are no permits. We don't ask for permission. We set up the course, do the race, and get out of there. When you don't get permits, and you're not official, you have to do your race on the forgotten parts of the city. You do it in part of the ghetto, or part of the park people don't go to, or in an abandoned lot where people have torn down buildings," says Snodgrass, whose courteous manner and clean-cut appearance belie his renegade avocation.

San Francisco, Snodgrass has found, is already an Ownership Society; individuals and groups vie mightily to lay claim to territories and assets available, at one time, to anyone who wanted access.

"We've had a dwindling amount of places to go. The Presidio, for example, it's changed," says Snodgrass, referring to an office and condo development in northwest San Francisco. "We can't go there anymore because there are now federal police there. We used to be able to slide in there and get in and get out quick. We can't go in there anymore at all."

The city's real estate boom has taken its toll, too.

"We had some races that were more urban, with concrete stairs and things like that in the South of Market. But the Mission Bay development has taken away a lot of that," Snodgrass says, referring to the condominium and medical office buildings going up south of downtown. Even on presumably public lands, Snodgrass says he's run into a sense of protectiveness one might expect from a junkyard owner.

"Within Golden Gate Park, we have to confront a sense of entitlement from the dog people. In the last couple of years, we've had far more conflict with them than we ever had," he says. "The dog walkers are crazy mad at us."

The wooded area behind Golden Gate Park's north windmills has become off-limits as well, he says.

"It's where all the guys meet each other and have sex. That area has kind of been abandoned, but it seems like it's just for them," he says. "We're kind of running out of spots."

There are a few left, however, and I'm not telling you where they are. Last week I joined a few dozen new companions as they rode around in the dust waiting for Snodgrass to lay out the day's course. This was a fast one, mostly flat with about 150 yards of pavement and two-thirds of the circuit in dirt. The DFL boys had fabricated artificial hurdles out of electrical conduit and laid them across the trail every few hundred yards, twisting the course through some grassy dirt trails, past some abandoned piles of rusty wrought iron, and along the edge of the bay, before returning to the pavement stretch.

We lined up behind a wheat-flour line in the dirt. Somebody said, "Go," and we were off like foxhounds. On the first lap I ruined my rim, and it dragged against my bike frame during the rest of the race. I fell once or twice, and missed a jump or three. I momentarily went off course. But there were a couple of times on the straightaways where the motion of my legs felt powerful and smooth. On a couple of hurdles my dismounts and remounts came out just right, and I didn't lose speed. And as I bounded up an embankment as we reapproached the bay, I imagined Charlie from my childhood, sprinting behind me. For a few moments, I felt like I was floating.

It's a feeling you just can't buy.