They are roaring over the
scene to my immediate left, and often too close for comfort, in innumerable
vehicles of all description, two lanes accelerating in both directions. Passing
Lincoln Street, I noticed an opportunity to turn left into the Rio Salado
nature preserve
parking lot. I recently discovered this interesting new natural space along the
Rio Salado that looks like a kind of industrial Brownfield reclamation effort.
If I crane my neck to the West, I see the remains and the smokestacks of an
industrial park that is rust colored in my memory and in shadow, embedded in a
dark holding pond next to the river, the color of oil. To the left, I am
pedaling slower now, I see some dirt pedestrian trails below the overpass that
snake along the waterline. Scrub and caramel colored grass cover the dry parts
of the riverbed and patches of verdure, weeds sprouted almost overnight from
the recent rain we have had, with days to make their début, to flower and to go
to seed. The slower I pedaled, the more it dawned on me that there was no way
for the next mile or so that I could see that a bicycle or a pedestrian could
make a left turn into that parking lot. No lights in sight and the relentless 4
lanes of traffic made this an impossibility. I kept pedaling, in fact faster
then, turning my attention to accelerating alongside these glinting machines
shlusshing past my shoulder. It was just a moment, nothing remarkable. I would
have to plan to see the place some other way, later.
This is when I started
thinking about Langdon Winner’s idea again: the idea that technologies
are “forms of life”. In the Whale and the Reactor, Winner describes a similar scene
involving an exchange between a pedestrian and a driver and asserts that a
collision of worlds occurs. He says “a simple gesture, ... is complicated by
the presence of a technological device and its standard operating conditions….
Individual habits, perceptions, concepts of self, ideas of space and time,
social relationships, and moral and political boundaries have all been
powerfully restructured in the course of modern technological development.”
(see p 9). I understand this intellectually, by reading Winner, and I try as
much as I can to notice some of these dominant patterns by getting around on
foot or by bicycle. However, I am uneasy with how quickly I was willing to
forego the left turn in favor of the lane that stretched out ahead, to
immediately orient toward picking up speed. I had my technology with me too.
