Retrogrouch Stylee

2011 marks the first year I’ve done the Charles River Wheelmen's New Years Day ride since 2005. Being cold-averse, I’ve usually skipped it, but the forecast 50-degree weather inspired me to saddle up and mosey down to the Common, despite roads wet with snow runoff and messy with sand and salt. But it having been six years since my last appearance, I had forgotten just how poorly organized it was.

For some reason, this 20-mile jaunt around town has always attracted a crowd that’s made up primarily of riders that are known as “retro-grouches”. These are usually men in their 50s and 60s who wear layer upon layer of army surplus weather gear, proudly topped off with reflective vests commonly issued to construction workers.

Retrogrouches are often devoted year-round commuters, and most will happily bend your ear for 90 minutes or more as they describe all the benefits they’ve accrued by not owning a car since 1967. Their 50-pound bikes are weighed down with handmade cardboard fenders and cargo racks comprised of plastic milk crates or cardboard fruit boxes picked out of the trash.

Not that I mind retrogrouches that much; they’re just one of many cycling subcultures, and they’re a pretty innocuous group, so long as you don’t encourage them. But when you have a retrogrouch running an organized ride… you must remember that their highest value is self-reliance, and they are going to expect complete self-reliance from everyone who attends their ride.

So with that as introduction, let’s segue into the narrative.

Before the ride, I’d visited the CRW’s web site to download a GPS tracklog of the route. Hmmm… None available. In fact, searching all the common bike mapping sites online, I couldn’t find a single tracklog anywhere.

Okay, I guess I’ll stoop to reading the annoying cue sheet, with its turn-by-turn directions, and manually convert that into a tracklog. But wait… the CRW’s website doesn’t even offer a cue sheet!

It was at this point that I remembered how often people got lost on this particular ride: something that was the central observation of my writeup of the 2005 New Years ride. Oh boy. Here we go again!

The ride begins at Park Street MBTA station, at a corner of Boston Common right by the State House. I arrived a few minutes beforehand and made sure I grabbed a cue sheet from Eric, the ride’s traditional “organizer”.

The cue sheet is a true classic of retrogrouch style. It was printed in nearly illegible type on a 9-pin dot matrix printer: a device which hasn’t been manufactured in 25 years, and which was el-cheapo technology even back then. It was subsequently duplicated by a photocopier onto thin, curling, specialized fax paper. Do you remember fax machines? Do you remember back in the olden days, when fax paper came on a roll and “plain paper faxes” were a new technological breakthrough? Yup. Say it with me: retrogrouch stylee!

Another feature of the 2011 cue sheet that is both “retro” and “grouch” is that it’s a bit out of date. Directions include going underneath Route 3 and the Central Artery, which were both demolished in 2003 (eight years ago!) as part of the Big Dig. Long-since completed Big Dig construction is mentioned four times on the cue sheet, as is the Boston Tea Party ship, which was destroyed by fire four years ago. As you might expect, the cue sheet doesn’t reflect the reconfiguration of surface streets since the completion of the Big Dig.

But that was barely the beginning, folks! While handing me my cue sheet, Eric also offered me a croissant from a big cardboard box he was carrying, proudly proclaiming that he had found them in a dumpster behind a Dunkin Donuts. He made this same offer to everyone who showed up (thankfully, I didn’t see anyone accept one) and made sure to repeat his offer when he addressed the entire crowd of riders at the start. Clearly, this was a retrogrouch alpha male in his native environment!

After a speech in which he made sure to emphasize that he would be obeying all traffic laws and stopping and waiting at all red lights, Eric announced that he would be sweeping: intentionally being the last rider on the course, to make sure everyone finished. With a brush of his hands, he encouraged people to head out. No one moved.

He waved his hands again. Clearly that was sufficient guidance, was it not? Were these people dense? Still no one moved.

After a few awkward moments, it finally dawned on people that there was no one assigned to lead the front of the ride. Like penguins jostling one another toward the edge of an iceberg, the riders slowly made their way onto Tremont Street, with no one having any idea where they were supposed to be going.

The idea that one person could successfully conduct an organized ride is patently stupid, and doubly stupid to think they can do it from the back of a pack of a hundred riders, frequently split by red lights and traffic. At a minimum, you need ride leaders at the front and back, and it’d be nice to have a few people in the middle to take leadership of groups that get split at red lights. But no. According to the CRW, as long as you have a cue sheet, that’s all the support a “real” rider could ever want or need, right?

Have I mentioned that the route isn’t arrowed, either? Most rides, even CRW rides, have arrows spray-painted on the road surface in order to help riders navigate. But not this one. That’d take all the fun out of it!

What evolved was what has happened every year I’ve participated in this ride. People clumped together in packs, vaguely guessing where they were going, sometimes making wrong turns and back-tracking, sometimes getting halfway through a busy intersection before someone in the crowd yells “Turn here!”, invoking a sudden and dangerous swerve of the pack. It was navigation by committee, and god help the impatient riders who set off on their own, thinking they could figure it out themselves. Inevitably, they got eaten by predators and were never seen again.

It was, basically, a complete cluster, just like it is every year.

One more anecdote, just to cap things off. Each year, about one third of the riders take part in a nice little group picture, taken at Charlestown Navy Yard in front of Old Ironsides. Why only one third? Because one third of the riders got lost on course and haven’t arrived yet, and another third got there early and promptly continued on, having no knowledge of the planned group photo because it wasn’t mentioned on the cue sheet nor in the pre-ride speech.

With such negligent organization, you might think I hated the ride, but that’s really not the case. It’s easier to accept and deal with incompetence when you have come to expect it, as I have of most events run by the CRW. Although to be fair, their centuries don’t have as many lapses as the New Years ride.

And it’s hard to argue with an ambling pleasure ride around Boston on a winter’s day that reached a wonderful 54 degrees. It’ll be several months before we see those kinds of temperatures again.