On Your Left

There are two kinds of people who use the trail around the lake: the two-footed kind and the two-wheeled kind.

Sure; there’s the occasional rollerblader, but they’re so rare, it’d be impossible to give them their own column. They’re the .03 percent who check “other.” Everyone else on the path is either a walker/jogger or a bicyclist.

Just as with seemingly every other facet of life these days, there’s a sort of tribalism that pits the walkers against the bicyclists on the trail. I mean, we all keep it polite; nod and say our good mornings when we pass each other face-to-face. Most of us, on both sides, fall into a pretty benign category: those, like me, whose hike resembles more of a stroll, and those bicyclists just out to enjoy the weather or traveling in family packs _ mom and dad and a couple of young kids in tow _ moving not much faster than the joggers. 

Then there are the Serious Cyclists. They’re discernible from the rest of us by their spandex body suits, aerodynamic alien-shaped helmets and thin-tired, curled handled bikes. Oh, and their tendency to scream around others on the trail at a blistering speed in their perpetual quest to top last week’s time. The Serious Cyclists are annoyed with walkers and joggers, who could possibly slow what would otherwise surely be the cyclist’s Best Time Ever. Walkers and joggers are equally annoyed by the Serious Cyclist’s sense of entitlement to the trail.

Still _ we keep it civil. But there’s a wariness beneath the surface of our civility. It’s a tacit antipathy born, I suppose, of the very real possibility of someone from either group ending up in a body cast if coexistence on an 8-foot wide path of concrete breaks down.

To keep that from happening, there are rules that must be followed. The rules are posted at various intervals on the trail, reminding walkers to keep to the right side of the path and bicyclists to “announce your presence.”

It seems to me that if I were a cyclist _ which, I want to make clear, I am not _ I would take some liberties with this rule.  You know; have some fun with it. 

“Hear ye; hear ye!” I might shout. “A cyclist doth approach!”

I mean, that’s an announcement.

Alas, I’ve concluded that cyclists have no sense of humor or even whimsy. Because they all announce themselves the same way as they sneak up behind you traveling anywhere from 10 to 30 mph.

“On your left.”

There’s no variation. No mixing it up. No adding a “Good morning” or “Nice day.” Not even throwing an emphasis on one of the words, like “On YOUR left.” 

It’s always just the flat, even pronouncement uttered at least a dozen times on every trip around the lake. An incantation delivered with all the urgency and passion of habit.

“On your left.”

It’s all I can do not to respond, “And also with you.” Or, “Under His eye.”

But I don’t want to be the Trail Kook. So I keep my annoyance and my smart-aleck comments to myself and plod along with a simple nod of acknowledgment.

On a recent trip around the trail, I was stunned to be warned of an approaching cyclist not with the irksome chant, but by someone ringing a bicycle bell. A bell!

It’s the equivalent of snapping one’s fingers or whistling to get a minion’s attention. As though the person whose attention you seek is not a person, but a dog or some animal to be trained. It’s a proclamation that the cyclist now can’t even be bothered with the effort of having to voice his approach.

And then it happened again. And again. And now, a good quarter of the cyclists are delivering their warnings via bell ringing.

There’s no way to even respond to a bell being rung at you.

Are the demands of civility so onerous that we can no longer be burdened to speak to one another? Must our differences mean that common courtesy takes a back seat to expediency? Does indecency know no bounds?

The audacity! The gall! Oh, the humanity! 

I mean, whatever happened to “on your left”?