We Ride Fat Bikes In Unity

This weekend, there were more than 200 rides in at least 12 countries in remembrance of Alex Pretti. I took part in a local fat bike unity ride organized by Ian Finch of The Whistle Punk Craft Beer and Coffee Bar. About 40 people met at New Moon Ski & Bike in Hayward, WI and then headed over to the CAMBA (Chequamegon Area Mountain Bike Association) Hospital trails. A smaller group waited at the trailhead to join us, so around 50 people participated in the casual 8-mile ride.

CAMBA Hayward Cluster on Trailforks.com

There was another smaller ride at the CAMBA OO Trailhead closer to my home in Seeley, but most of my friends planned to join the New Moon ride, so I did too. Hayward, WI has a population of about 2,600 people, and Cable (the next incorporated town to the north) has about 825, so we had a pretty decent turnout on a bluebird day. A light dusting of dry powder the night before added some sparkle to the well-groomed trails.

As you can see by the map, CAMBA’s Hospital Trails are dense and twisty. They were built to be fun beginner-friendly “gateway” trails, and they are just that. The flowy, machine-built trails have just enough topography to rip a bit, but nothing too challenging. The forested trails, marsh and small lake make for a very scenic ride, right in town.

Readers may notice that I have not posted anything on Fat-Bike.com for some time. My LifeAboveEight.com website and Northwoods Ramble podcast on my YouTube channel and Spotify have been dormant as well, and friends will have noticed I have been mostly absent from other social media. That was because I’d lost my faith in the future. Between the constant chaos and performative cruelty of the current US administration and the world accelerating toward an irreversible environmental tipping point, I decided to drop out.

I’ve spent my entire career salmoning upstream either as a journalist or a bike advocate. My first job was working for a Sandinista newspaper in Bluefields, Nicaragua in 1987 as Ronnie Reagan and Ollie North bypassed Congress to sell US missiles to Iran, using the funds to support the Contra rebels fight the Sandinistas. Presidential overreach and regime change sound familiar? Since then, time has proved the Sandinistas to be just as repressive as Samosa, the dictator they replaced.

For that and other reasons, I eventually grew disenchanted with journalism’s ability to expose injustice and effect change, so I quit and became a bike advocate at the Wisconsin Bike Fed and as Milwaukee’s first Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator. My hope was to try to make walking and cycling safer and more convenient by building more trails and improving on-street bikie/ped facilities, and to promote how cycling was a fun, healthy way to solve so many of the world’s problems.

While I am proud of the work I have done, the world today doesn’t seem any better than it was when I started swimming upstream. So what did I accomplish?

That my fellow Americans could vote in Trump for a second term was disappointing, but I saw it coming. That the DNC shunned Bernie, who could have beaten him the first time and then ignored Biden’s unpopularity the second time was maddening. That they also failed to address issues like affordability and illegal immigration at our southern border, which so many Americans were complaining about, and lost a second election they could have won, pushed me over the edge. I lost all hope and decided to focus on living my own life as kindly as I could and spend as much time in the woods as possible. No more advocacy, no more activism; I was just going to live my best life since the world is doomed.

Then I watched Renee Good shot dead by a masked federal goonsquad. Then I watched those same goons strip Alex Pretti of his holstered, legally permitted pistol and murder the unarmed man after they beat him. I didn’t know Alex, but the cycling community is small and tightknit. Some of his Riverwest24 “Buddy System” teammates are friends of mine, as well as former coworkers at the Bike Fed, and one was a neighbor in Milwaukee.

After the horror and shock had time to sink in, I decided I had to get back in the fight for what is right. Even if I am ineffective, I could no longer hide out in the woods.

I’m not sure what I can really do, but I can’t be silent. I have almost no faith in our current elected leadership, but I am emailing and calling their offices to demand they stand up for the constitutional rights they took an oath to protect. I am joining rides and protests. I am back online expressing my feelings. I am thinking hard about what else I can do and how to be a more effective force for positive change. I still have my chicken costume…

I still don’t have much hope. I am not sure my voice will be heard, but I feel compelled to add it to the clarion call for justice. I’m back in the paceline for good.