Priming the Anger Pump

The funny thing about outbursts of anger is that often they aren’t outbursts at all, but rather something more planned and considered, and then presented to appear spontaneous.  In a close call at an intersection, where part of what made it a close call is that you didn’t see the danger coming, you don’t have time to get properly worked up because you’re too busy trying to save your own skin.  It’s only after the encounter where you line up your insults and obscenities, for the next time.

Or let’s say you do see that close call coming a ways off and get all ready to be angry; doesn’t your degree of outrage depend on who the other party is?  Isn’t it less if the culprit vehicle is a huge four-wheel drive pickup with a gun rack, driven by a gorilla and not, say, a hybrid with a ninety-eight pound weakling at the wheel?  If we are selective about our supposed spontaneous outbursts of rage, how spontaneous are they? 

I think people in trafficked spaces dwell on their negative encounters a disproportionate amount of the time.  We could go for most of a week with uneventful travel, but stew the whole time about that one event that set us off.  We don’t even have to be in the right to rehearse being angry about it.  This may be an old survival mechanism, fixing in our minds a dangerous situation so we recognize it the next time around.  Or we could be readying ourselves for verbal exchanges that vindicate us somehow.   

‘Vindicate’ and ‘vindictive’ share the same Latin root word, which means revenge or the act of avenging.  I think that’s what we’re doing when we have that ‘spontaneous’ loss of temper: getting revenge for being put at risk, avenging our vulnerable selves.  But do outbursts of anger, planned or not, make cyclists any safer? 

I don’t think so, but what I do know is that being all ready to lose my temper during traffic encounters takes a lot of the fun out of riding a bike.  Cruising around with a big pannier full of not-really spontaneous outrage is exhausting, and can ruin the 99.9% of a ride that is encounter-free.  I’ve come around to the belief that the sooner I get through the encounter without responding angrily, the better the rest of the day is.  This is not a capitulation to an harmonious, ‘We are the world’ point of view, this is a purely selfish conclusion; how much of my day and my ride am I willing to give over to someone who did something to me in traffic?  If I made it through the encounter, what more can be accomplished at that moment, especially with outrage?  To me, the incident has already cost me enough mental tension to deliberately contribute more.

I actually feel safer now.  I have fewer interactions I would even call encounters, and without my prepackaged spontaneous outburst priming the anger pump, the ones I do have are a lot less tense.  I slip past whatever it was that jolted me out of the joyous experience of riding my bike and think, ‘now where was I?’

Like Gentlemen

I rode past Joe P’s house this weekend on a bike ride and he was outside in his pickup.  I couldn’t help but pull over and say hello.

Two years ago, the last time I remember riding past his house (I’m sure I’ve ridden past it a dozen times since, but this was the last time I remember doing it), his dog came out from the back yard to say hello.  By ‘hello’ I mean he charged me.  And the dog – I never knew his name, I referred to him as ‘Fido’ in my letters to Joe – was no Chihuahua.   I’m not sure what kind of huge, black, hairy dog it was, but it was seventy-five pounds if it was an ounce.  And fast enough so that I caught sight of him just about two seconds before he knocked me over.

Did I mention that Joe lives on a pretty busy street? 

Time seems to slow often during accidents, and that’s lucky; two seconds was enough time for me to calculate that if I tried to turn out and avoid the collision, Fido was going to knock me into the street.  Traffic was coming at me from both directions, a trip to the asphalt was a near-guarantee of severe injury.  I grimaced, said a quiet apology and turned my wheel right into Fido.  He knocked me onto the sidewalk instead, then yelped and bounded back into the back yard. 

I found out later that Fido got a good scare and some bruises but was not seriously injured, and I could say the same for myself: badly scraped knee, hip and elbow, and somehow I cut up my hand pretty good.  It must have gotten caught under the brake lever and sanded smooth by the sidewalk.  I disentangled myself and inspected the damage.  Not me – skin and bones heal on their own.  What about the bike?  Ruined front wheel, torn gloves, scraped up tire, torn handlebar tape … and who knows what else to the carbon fiber frame and forks?  Getting bent wasn’t likely, but what about stress fractures?  The true extent of the damage could be deep and mysterious, and not show up for a long time.

That's when I met Joe.  He came out of his house calmly, in a tip-toe sort of way, asking me how I was.  I only noticed then that a lawn mower wasn’t running any more. 

How was I?  Well, I had just been knocked off my bike by a big dog, so I’d been better.  But I held onto my temper.  Fido was big but not nasty.  I didn’t get the feeling he was allowed to run loose, or that he was trying to hurt me.

Joe nodded.  “He [the dog] has a thing for motorcycles and bikes, I don’t know what it is.  He’ll go after them every time if he gets the chance.  I thought he was locked in the back yard but somehow he must have gotten through the house and outside.”  I have a dog, too.  Maggie finds ways to get where you wouldn’t expect her to be like she's a contortionist.  Here was a responsible pet owner who had been outsmarted by his pet.  Welcome to the club, Joe.

“I understand,” I told Joe, “but we do have some damage here.”  He nodded.  “I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but this is a really expensive bike.”  He winced and nodded again.  Then the kicker, “I have to call the police and report this.”  The implication was clear: I needed compensation and if Joe turned out to be the kind of guy who was going to fight me on it, I needed a record of the incident.  He seemed to understand right away.

“But,” I added, “I will not make a vicious dog report.”  Deal.

As I was calling the police a cruiser pulled up.  The officer got out, all sunglasses and chewing gum and smile.  “I saw you laying there and wondered what was up,” he called out.  Did he, indeed?  He made the report, gave me a reference number and I nursed myself and my bike to the nearest shop.  Three days later I sent a bill off to Joe for a bit under two hundred bucks.  Luck was still spreading itself around; the frame and forks were fine, a new front wheel wasn’t that costly (lucky again: I was riding the cheapo set that day), new gloves, some odds and ends.  I included all the receipts and what I hoped was a nice cover letter and waited. 

A week or so later I got a note from Joe – and a check for more than the amount of the damage.  He explained that he thought the bill was very fair and that I had certainly suffered a little damage and inconvenience on top of those items, and so he felt he should bump up the compensation a little.  I cashed the check, it cleared, end of story.

How many ways could this have gone wrong?  What if I had leapt up ready to swear and fight and threaten?  Or if Joe had charged out of his house yelling at me about hitting his dog, ignoring the circumstances?  Or if the cop decided the paperwork wasn’t worth the trouble (or if the damage didn’t look ‘that bad’ to him) and blew me off?  What if the bike shop smelled deep pockets and inflated the estimate, or if I had jacked up the bill, justified by a belief in some kind of punitive damage for Joe daring to have a dog that acted like a dog?  What if Joe replied that if I wanted any money out of him I could damned well sue him? 

At every turn, the chance for the whole experience going off the rails presented itself.  And every time, the people involved didn’t let it happen.  Joe took full responsibility for his dog.  I limited the damage what damage had actually been caused.  I went out of my way to document the process.  Joe went out of his way to be fair to me.  The professionals acted like professionals.  In the end we didn’t look out for ourselves, we looked out for each other, and the process.

And this is what it takes for the traffic incidents that will inevitably take place to stay small; everyone doing their part at every step, everyone looking out for everyone else.  I didn’t feel so much proud to be part of it as lucky.  All the theories about community members coexisting were right there in action in front of me.  They worked.  (Or rather, this is what it took for them to work.)

Joe and I have nothing in common.  He drives a big pickup, I ride a bike.  We’d never be friends, I don’t think, we would have had no reason to interact were it not for this kind of situation.  But seeing him over the weekend, it felt like I was saying hello to a friend.  He asked me if any other dogs had tried to take a bite out of me.  I laughed and said no and asked how he was doing.  He said he was fine.  I waved and was on my way. 

 

The Fundamental Attribution Error

Or as I like to refer to it, the “I’m always right” theory.  It is a tenet of social psychology that says essentially that we all attribute our shortcomings to mitigating circumstances while attributing the shortcomings of others to basic flaws in their personality.  It works like this:

A pedestrian steps into a crosswalk just before the Walk sign flashes.  A cyclist at the intersection is trying to make a right turn past the pedestrian and into a bike lane without stopping, just as the light for perpendicular traffic is turning red.  A car approaching from the left of the cyclist is speeding to beat the light.  The cyclist cuts the pedestrian off and turns sharply to avoid the car, whose driver hits the brakes and the horn at the same time, and is in turn flipped off by both the cyclist and the pedestrian, who also simultaneously flip each other off.  (Which means, if nothing else, that the cyclist wins the prize for ‘Most Acrobatic.’  It’s really hard to flip the bird accurately in opposite directions at two different people and keep a bike upright.) 

Everyone in this situation gets to yell indignantly at everyone else, sure that their own actions were defensible while those other parties were incomprehensibly outrageous.  Each one indulges in the belief that they – had they been that driver, cyclist, pedestrian – would never do what the other two did! 

Which of course is a load of hooey.  We all skirt (or out-and-out break) the traffic rules all the time.  But in our inventive minds, when we do it we have perfectly good reasons.  But since we can’t or won’t imagine the reasons the others acted the way they did, that can only mean the others are jerks.   As someone completely uneducated in anthropological ways, I imagine this attitude comes from having to eat someone else’s dinner in order to live; it’s a survival instinct to choose our life over that of a stranger, we believe we are inherently more worth saving.  We deserve it more, and we put in the mental hours to explain it to ourselves.

Stopping there, vilifying others in traffic who are actually a lot like ourselves would be bad enough.  However, all of us share those stories of traffic encounters with jerks-who-are-actually-like-us.  We tell our friends and family, our fellow cyclists/pedestrians/drivers, our barbers, bartenders, grocery clerks, produce guys, bus seat companions, whoever will listen.  We build confirmatory stories in which we star as the valiant hero(ine) striving sanely while the world goes crazy around us.  We do this even when we know better.

And the stories we tell are self-reinforcing.  The next time we get into a traffic encounter we’re even more ready to pre-judge, convict and execute all transgressors, even readier tell tales of our encounters, reinforce our self-referential world.  It gets to be a game, where foxhole companions one-up each other with stories of more and more egregious encounters, until it seems really like we should have the right shoot one or two of the worst transgressors as a lesson to the rest of them.  The roots grow deep and the stories become impossible to untangle from who we really are and what really happened.  They become a part of the folklore of our given form of transportation. 

And thus, traffic battle lines are drawn. 

So here’s what we do.  The next time one of us has a negative encounter in traffic, stop and assume full responsibility and apologize, no matter how right you think you were.  Wave to that driver or pedestrian and tap your chest: ‘my fault!’  Every time you want to tell a story of some horrible traffic encounter where you were the innocent victim, you have to follow it with another story in which you were the culprit.  When you hear another's tale of woe, start asking questions.  Ask them how they know what the driver’s/pedestrian’s/cyclist’s intention was?  Speculate on why a person might have done what that transgressor did.  Make the story teller think.  In the long run (or even the short run), the 'other' is as wrong as we say, and we're not as right as we think.

In addition to that dog-eat-dog survivalist mentality, my lousy anthropology also tells me that humans have thrived as well as we have through cooperation, which includes not behaving as if we’re above doing wrong ourselves.  Which includes cutting each other some slack. 

Jamais Vu

Never seen.  A term coined by Frenchman Émile Boirac, along with déjà vu (already seen) and presque vu (almost seen, on the tip of the tongue).  Jamais vu describes a familiar situation that we don’t recognize, like when I pulled a car out into an intersection and obstructed a cyclist’s right of way.  Fortunately, he was far enough away and I was going slow enough, and traffic was light enough that he simply had to check behind him and then weave around me and be on his way.  However, I got the sideways glance of contempt I know so well from giving it to drivers who pull in front of me and then jerk to a halt with surprise as I ride by. 

But this wasn’t some inattentive driver who doesn't think about bikes, it was me!  NO driver out there thinks about bikes more than I do.  I wanted to pull up beside him and explain that really, I knew what I was doing.  Heck, I don’t even own a car, I would tell him, it was either a rental or my daughter’s I was borrowing.  I’d reassure him I'd been doing everything I could to be careful, only he seemed to materialize out of nowhere.  Honest!  I’m sure if I had chased him down to explain all this it would have reassured him that I am not a careless driver, or a lunatic. 

I just didn't see him, and I really was looking.  I’d stopped at the intersection well behind the line of parked cars on my left, then had inched out until I could see around them.  Nothing.  With that I pulled out a bit more and there he was, on top of me.  And there I was, jerking to a halt with a look of surprise while he shook his head at me in passing.  How could I have missed him what I was looking for so closely?  If inattentiveness wasn’t the cause, something else must be. 

Every time I’m forced to use a car for something, I’m reminded that compared to a bicycle, visibility in a car is terrible.  A cyclist sits at approximately the same height at which they stand, and there is nothing obstructing their view of the road ahead.  Sitting down, drivers in most cars are looking a couple feet below the level they stand and have to look around things like roof supports and mirrors and whatnot.*  Almost all cars are made with their engines in front so a driver’s eyes don’t even get to the intersection until the car is already in it.  Also, cars are noisy and by nature pretty insular; it’s common not to pay attention to much going on outside of a car’s interior and the road ahead.

* The seats of some trucks and SUVs are at least as high as one stands, but the size of those vehicles in an intersection introduces their own problems and the obstructions of the vehicle itself are still there.  Plus, read on… 

Even so, after inching into the intersection to look around the line of parked cars on the crossing street, it really felt like the rider came out of nowhere.  How could I have missed that?  I started to pay attention to how we see, and remembered reading some articles on what the eye is good a seeing and what it isn’t.  The eye likes motion, it likes to see things moving across its field of vision, the way antelope might move past a hunter’s view on the savannah.  In a crossing pattern, it’s easy to see what’s moving, and how fast.  Things that approach directly are much harder to see.  For objects moving right at you, the eye can’t figure out what it is or how fast it’s moving.  It looks stationary and the only clue that it’s moving at all is that it gets a little bit bigger as it approaches. 

That’s the only explanation I can come up with for what happened.  The rider was coming right at me, not changing in size as he approached, riding right beside the line of stationary parked cars.  From my perspective he wasn’t moving, he was just an object, and a distant one at that.  Which means that when I drive, I have to investigate an object that seems not to be moving much more carefully before I decide it's not an approaching bicycle.

But it also points out how hard it is for any driver to look down a crossing street and determine that it’s clear for them to proceed.  They simply don’t see any movement.  I used to think that the problem was that drivers weren’t clued into how fast a cyclist can go, and therefore misjudged my speed.  Now I think they may not realize that I’m moving at all, that no matter how apparent it is that to me that I’m moving, I look stationary to them.  That’s why they always look so surprised when they pull out and I’m right on top of them.

It was a lesson in empathy and the limits of human perception. 

The Angry Man

Yesterday I was riding east on the Sellwood bridge when a driver in a pickup truck passed me, honking his horn and flipping me off.  It is true that the Sellwood bridge is quite narrow and a cyclist taking up part of the eastbound lane really slows down the traffic.  It is also true that from the south side of the bridge it's hard to get to the north sidewalk, which is where cyclists usually ride - and it's also true that the sidewalk is really narrow, and even without other bikes and pedestrians present, it's scary and dangerous.  Oregon law allows me to ride in the lane of traffic, and I was staying as far to the right as I could, maintaining what speed I could, giving the traffic behind me as much space as possible without endangering myself. 

What's also true (and kind of funny) is that the pickup driver who flipped me off was traveling westbound, going in the opposite direction.  I wasn't inconveniencing him at all, he was just pissed off that I was there.

The driver reminded me of the self I was for many years: the Angry Man in traffic.  Years ago, I'd look for reasons to get mad at drivers.  From across an intersection I'd let someone have it for something that had nothing to do with me.  I had a hair-trigger when it came to all manner of traffic situations, from mere inconveniences to downright dangerous situations.  My stock response was at the top of my lungs.

Most of the cyclists I knew back then were angry; it was all too common to be ignored, deliberately inconvenienced or even targeted by drivers.  It often felt like they weren't so much sharing the road as wiping it up with us.  Perhaps it was having lived for fewer years, perhaps it was simply earlier days of bikes in traffic, but the outrage and defiance seemed right at the time.  We were out there fending for ourselves.

Now, on the whole, Portland is a pretty amazing city to bicycle in.  There are bike paths as far as the eye can see, special traffic lights, exclusive trails, etc., and amenities keep getting better.  The community as a whole (perhaps excepting some pickup drivers) accepts the existence of cyclists on the road and their right to be there.  It's far more common now for drivers to be courteous to me (sometimes obsequiously so) than it is to flip me off.  I can no longer claim to be out there fending for myself. 


But old habits can die hard.  My inner Angry Man is still there.  When I encounter tricky traffic situations, I feel myself ready to bellow as loudly as ever.  The last times I actually did it, I felt pretty ridiculous afterward.  These days, most of a whole city has my back.  Cycling has even been acknowledged as a moral choice for getting around.  I mean, when it comes to traffic, how much more credible can I get?  I'm longer fighting against the establishment, I'm a part of it.  To retain credibility, I have a role to play.  In the angry old days I had nothing to lose.  Now I do.  


The transition one must make has to do with more than a change in behavior, it has to do with a change of place in society.  What I saw driving past me yesterday in a pickup truck was an earlier version of myself, and a frustrated and somewhat helpless overreaction to a situation out of that person's control.  Now I see myself as out from behind that middle finger, which really feels better, even if sometimes I end up being on the other side of it.