I Love Riding in the City

NAME: Phillip Barron
LOCATION: Durham, NC
OCCUPATION: Writer, digital media artist

Where do you live, and what’s it like riding in your city?
Durham, NC is a post-industrial town trying to figure out how to keep being democratic, open, and inclusive while moving forward with a capitalist understanding of progress. It’s the city that tobacco built. Along with sales of the famous “bright leaf” tobacco came storage warehouses, drying/re-drying plants, hosiery mills funded by and aimed at serving the tobacco industry, and even schools endowed by tobacco magnates like the Dukes. Now, Durham is the City of Medicine—go figure.

What’s your favorite or most exotic city you’ve ridden in, and what made it special or memorable?
I rented a mountain bike in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2005 to ride through its streets. Traffic flows in the streets like a swift river. Oaxaca is, like most developed areas, an auto-centric place. But bicycles fit right in with traffic there, and I felt oddly comfortable riding with the buses, trucks, and taxis swirling around me. From Monte Alban, a Zapotec city that dates back to 100 AD, to the glossy, new medical facilities off Chapultepec Highway, I realized that drivers seemed to be more aware and respectful of bicyclists than I am used to. You know how we cyclists talk about our bikes becoming extensions of us, about how perceptive and intuitive we can be when we ride every day? Oaxaca is the only place I’ve been where I believed that drivers of cars had those same intuitions and feelings of corporeal extension.

Why do you love riding in the city?
Exploration. Not knowing what you will find around the corner, and when you round the corner, not really knowing what you’ve found until you know the history.

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