Essays of a Peripheral Mind: Creative Destruction

It was as if someone else had said the words that had come out of my mouth. There must have been some other idiot, unseen, speaking. I had been only 20 min into an early weekend morning bicycle ride out of town, climbing up away from the river and northeast across the desert piedmont toward the mountains. The driver of an older model sports utility vehicle (SUV) had nearly hit me; he not only failed to change lanes to pass me, a viable option given there was no other traffic on the road, but hadn't even made any effort to at least provide me a little room. These kinds of incidences have become increasingly common as this city has grown tremendously at a steady and incessant rate. Lately, I have taken to racing after the offending driver to try to register objection, only to rapidly lose contact; how ever, that didn't happen on this day. The driver had stopped ahead at a red traffic light, and, winded but determined, I rode up on his right and found the passenger side window slightly and conveniently lowered. Leaning in, I managed to inform him he had nearly hit me and needed to obey the law providing cyclists the right of way. Or, maybe it was a few other words to that effect. Without drawing this out, I will simply recount that the irrational intensity of the dis cussion escalated. Eventually, he resorted to a common hand gesture informing me I was number one, and I abandoned 22 yr of public and private education to employ colloquial isms common from my Irish/Norwegian/Catholic youth, or maybe just the Irish side of that heritage. In the end, I heard myself telling him that he should get out of his car. It was then that I wondered who had actually made this remark, and finally, acknowledging that it was me, thought that was a really idiotic suggestion. Yes, a beautiful fall morning was ei g rapidly spoiled by two idiots at an intersection. My size, at n arly 6 feet 5 inches and 230 pounds (but pretty harmless in truth), the now-green traffic light, or the absur dity of it all caused him to drive on. With a sense of relief, I tur d to the driver of the lone vehicle who had pulled up at the red light behind the SUV during this encounter, smiled, s rugged my shoulders, and said "Sorry." Not sur prisingly, he chose to stay at that green light until I had ridden on. I cycled toward the mountains, again reminded h t the town I first moved to in 1975, and returned to in 1988, had crossed a threshold into being a big city and that I need d to seriously rethink the acceptable limits of my behavio s in this changed environment. Since the 1950s the population of the western United States has grown by more than 46 million people, and is projected to gr w by an additional 20 million or so by 2025. The increased stress on the region's natural resources, especially water (for recent descriptions of this stress see http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2003/aug/ water/ or ht p://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/ 21water-t.html?_r=l&oref=slogin), and the resulting impacts on these l ndscap s and its species are well recognized. H wever, the extent to which this population increase has driven a transition of these regional rangelands from the classic provisioning of food and fiber from livestock grazing to a much more diverse nonagricultural set of goods and services is often not so readily grasped. The extent of this