On Friday, a group of us traveled into Kirksville for a Critical Mass bike ride. A few Dancing Rabbit people started organizing rides with some Kirksville locals a couple months ago in April. The whole concept of Critical Mass is unstated yet somewhat obvious at the same time - there is no official mission or purpose of doing the rides, there is no leader of the movement, and yet they are held in many major cities across the globe and they attract many cyclists and activists.
The idea (or perhaps an accepted interpretation, at least) of Critical Mass is to bring attention to human-powered forms of transportation, to poke at car culture, and to simply promote cycling. Kirksville has a population of something like 17,000 (sans students), and it is not a major city by any stretch of the definition, but it’s the closest “big” city to Dancing Rabbit. This most recent ride only attracted about 20 people, but that number is bound to increase once students are back in town later in the summer.
It was a nice ride and it was interesting to bike through Kirksville and get a feel for the city. I also never realized how fun it is to bike around with a bunch of people. But anyway, I think that it’s easy to generalize and stereotype the mid-west (in general), but I’ve come to appreciate that there are progressive-type folks inhabiting the greater center of the country. I think that’s encouraging. It felt good to come into contact with these people, and I became disappointed to think that I could have been doing more of this stuff while I was back in school in NJ. So it goes, I guess.
But yea… the best part of the ride was the finale, leaving the streets and then biking down a dirt trail lined with clovers to find a big, beautiful, and secluded pond to jump in:
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