Wrapping up my year and the LA River Path

I had several high school English teachers tell me that writing would be my way of dealing with things as I grew up.   Some told me things as simple as "You're going to get bored with science and math, and need a creative outlet" and others were a little bit darker about it saying things along the lines of "Writing is your therapy--I'll be very concerned about you if you stop."   It's interesting to me how teachers can take a look at a young kid and sometimes nail their personalities on the head.   I haven't been writing recently--but I think I need to start again.  This post is all about the therapy side of it.

Yesterday, I was riding my bike down the LA river path, which is where I have done the majority of training that has made me the better cyclist that I am now.  In Los Angeles, there are very few areas that you can ride for any significant period of time without encountering stoplight after stoplight after stopsign after stoplight.   I've long known that areas of the LA river path are unsafe from the perspective that they run through low income neighborhoods and are claimed as territories by gangs in the city.   My partner was once mugged within a mile of our house while out for a run on this path in broad daylight.  He got away physically okay but was shaken mentally to the point that he'll never run on the path again.  He only rarely rides a bike down the path, and only does that when riding with other people.  You don't get a gun pulled on you without having some lasting imprint placed on your psyche.

I left for my ride at about 2:30 in the afternoon--there was plenty of sunshine and it was a bit cool.  By Los Angeles standards, the 60 degree weather called for most people to break out their parkas and fur-lined boots.  My ride was going normally, and the path wasn't excessively crowded.  About 25 minutes into it, I saw a couple of teenage kids ahead of me and called out to them to signal I'd be passing them--they were riding one behind the other, and the kid in the back turned to look at me and then pulled to the left to let me pass--it's absolutely the wrong thing to do, but I've gotten used to people on this path not knowing what they hell they're doing and I'm often just glad when people do something to open up a pathway, even if it's not moving to the right so I can overtake them correctly.   The kid in the front moved to the left at the same time as the other one, so I proceeded forward.   As I was getting ready to pass the kid in the front, he started veering into me, and I started screaming my head off at him--no expletives at this point--I was just trying to get his attention.   I saw him yank a headphone out of his right ear, and he quickly followed up with "SHUT THE FUCK UP.  I'LL KNOCK YOU OFF THAT BIKE."

Something in my gut told me I needed to respond in-kind, or he might try, and in a split-second decision, I did just that:  I yelled back in a severely mocking tone:  "Yeah, I bet you could.  You SHUT THE FUCK UP."   I cleared his front wheel and accelerated as best I could.   The interchange that happened afterwards could make Andrew Dice Clay look like a good candidate for teaching preschoolers.   I got away physically ok, but realized in the minutes afterward that if my instinct had been wrong and he'd been carrying a gun, it would have likely ended very badly for me.  The simple fact is that when someone comes at you that aggressively for no good reason, there's something else going on--a mental instability?  A severe chip on his shoulder?  Or, what I believe to be the case--a feeling of superiority based on something like ownership of this territory.   This kid will likely go on to be one of the dregs of our society.  If he does not end up in prison, he will doing nothing good as a contributor to our lives in Los Angeles as a whole.

I pedaled on--I had 4 minutes left until the start of my first interval. I was approaching the 105, and as I shifted into gear for this effort, my power meter spiked to 300 watts--I immediately understood this to be an effect of the adrenaline coursing through me from my interchange, and managed to back this off to a much more reasonable 240 watts.   A minute or two into this interval--I saw, up ahead in the distance, a couple of children who were maybe 6 and 8 years old riding down the path.   I once again called ahead, and these kids both turned to look behind them.   The older one got out of the way to the left while the younger one put his foot down and seemed to just stand there, fairly far to the right on the path.   This also happens all the time on the bike path, but what occurred next I didn't expect at all.  

The younger kid decided to push his way across the path to who I assume was his older brother at precisely the instant that I'd committed to going through the fairly significant gap between them.  The gap closed--I would not be able to stop in time.  The two of them effectively blocked the entire span of the bike path, and I veered to the left to avoid smashing directly into them.  The exact words I screamed were "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST MOVE."   The younger kid half whimpered/half screamed.  I would not be surprised if he peed his pants.  The older kid moved his bike out of the way just before I had to make the decision to either smash into him or send myself careening down the incline to the LA river.  I pulled away and finished my 12 minute long interval.    I went on to finish this interval and then stopped my bike to turn around and send Brian a text message that said that I was certain I could not continue living here and riding a bike. 

If I didn't scar that 6-year-old mentally for life about riding bikes, I at least left him with the fear that there would be some monster bearing down on him at 23 mph anytime he's on that bike path.  Brian says it's good that he should learn that sort of thing, because people in the area don't respect cyclists on the bike path.   I don't know what to make of it--but I'm sure it's not the way I would have wanted to learn how to ride a bike as a kid.

Stupid stuff happens on bike paths everywhere--that's a constant rule that applies to every path in every locale in every city of our nation.  The rest of my ride went on with the usual density of getting around people who don't quite understand the rules of the road on a bike, but was without incident.   The problem here is that the violent, aggressive behavior of the first kid I dealt with seems to be unique to the low income/gang territory that the LA River Path travels through.   The second interchange, while completely innocent, may have been averted had those kids' parents taught them the basics of riding on a bike path.  The lower income families that use this path think it's a safe place to let their kids do whatever they want to since it's free of motorized vehicles--they simply do not care about the existence of cyclists on this path.

Whatever the case, the LA River path is not a safe place to ride, and I need to move on from it.  Brian and I have talked about moving to a better neighborhood, and the neighborhoods we've discussed lie closer to the San Gabriel river trail, which seems to suffer less from these issues.   The collapse of the housing market will make this move difficult at this time, so until we can make that happen, it looks like I'm spending a lot of time on my indoor trainer, or driving my bike to a safer place to ride.   I'm two-tenths of a mile from what should be an ideal place to ride, but miles from reality.