How green is my bike?  That’s a question that came up on one of the randonneuring forums I belong to.  I’d say that the bicycle above, my single speed/fixed wheel is the greenest one I have.  My other two are red and yellow.  There are three frames in the attic, and a black one for a customer in the shop, but this one’s the greenest I have.  Actually, come to think of it, Nina’s bike is blue so if we ride together and I’m on the Yellow Roadie, then I guess we’d be green if we blended.

    I made a 90, but I don’t think that’s quiet fair.  The questions should have been essay questions, but the Sierra Club might not want to grade all our tests by reading our answers so I understand their taking a short cut.  Still, I think I would have done better with essays and I’m going to tell you why I think I deserved a better score.

    The first question was about flat tires and what to do about them.  I patch tubes and that’s the 10 point answer.  I pretty much always carry a tube and a patch kit with me -- along with a frame pump.  The spare tube probably has patches on it already.  When I flat, I replace the popped tube and patch it when I get home; or later on the ride if I get another flat.  When my tubes collect as many patches as a poor hobo’s pants, I discard them.

    The next question has to do with bicycle rides.  Most of my rides might be called running errands.  I used to commute by bicycle, but I don’t have a commute right now so it’s errands.  This is kind of tricky answer from my side since I like to have a place to go when I ride my bike.  I ride to the post office a lot, but not the nearest post office and not because I really have to go to the post office.  I could just stick my letters in the mailbox, but the post office gives me a place to go and the one in Franklinville makes a very nice, hilly, 20 mile ride.  I often ride to church on Sunday -- eleven miles away -- and then come home by a route that takes me till dinner.  I run a lot of legitimate errands on my bicycles, but I do fabricate errands to get me out and on the road.

    At night, I use a generator light.  Ten points there, but there was no place to mention the battery powered blinky light on the back.

    I lost three points for wearing an eclectic mix of synthetic and natural materials.  The Sierra Club says that dressing like a racer is usually more about fashion than function.  I like wool jerseys, knickers, long underware, and gloves, but nylon shells and vests; and lycra shorts, arm, and leg warmers do have a functional legitimacy in my opinion.

    I lost two more points for preferring a deserted country road as my favorite place to ride.  The correct answer is that we should do most of our riding in our own neighborhood.  Well, except for the morning when folks are going to work and the evening when they’re coming home, the road in front of my house is a deserted country road.  A ride around the block for me is measured in miles.  I should have gotten another 10 on that one instead of an 8.

    My big issue with that answer, though, is that the best reason for riding a bicycle is that they are so cool you just ride them for the pure joy of riding them.  That’s a better reason than riding them to be green or fit.  And, if you ride because you have a great bike that you love to ride, you’ll ride enough to be green by accident.

    I lost four more points on chain maintenance.  I answered that I clean my chain with kerosene and that’s true sometimes, but I actually seldom have to go that far and if you let the grit settle out of the kerosene, it will last indefinitely anyway.  This is how I maintain my chains:  I make my own chain lube by mixing paraffin lamp oil and gear oil (1/4 gear oil and 3/4 lamp oil) and when I use it, I drip a drop on each pin, run the chain backwards for a half minute or so, and wipe the chain off with an old sock or piece of rag.  My chains last a long time and so do my sprockets and chain rings.  They’re seldom dirty enough to warrant the kerosene in a bottle shaking method.

    Then I lost a point for not knowing how much my bicycles weigh.  I don’t know what’s wrong with that answer.  They don’t weigh more than they need to.  I don’t take two water bottles when I won’t even drink one.  I think their feeling is that a green bicycle should be a heavy bike with racks and fenders.  Well, I make racks and they don’t weigh much and fenders aren’t heavy either.  The generator hub, that they like, that’s pretty heavy.  Anyway, I lost a point.

    Tap water is my favorite beverage and they like that one too so I earned another 10 points.

    And for food, I usually take kitchen food on rides that are less than 60 or 80 miles.  Past that, I do use convenience stores and I’ve started carrying two or three Cliff bars with me on brevets.  What can you do?  If a brevet control is at a store, it seems fair to buy something for their trouble.  I do think about the fact that I’m eating single serving food and making a lot of trash, but I do it anyway.  I can’t blame it all on our culture so I probably would have lost some points if that question had been an essay question.

    All in, that’s it, my bicycle is 90% green.  Actually, I think my bicycle is greener than that; even the red and yellow ones.  I’m the lackey.   Well, I don’t know about that either.  If someone hauls my bicycle and my body off in the woods someday when I’m done with them, I guess my last trace will go first since, except for my fillings and my one gold cap, I am fully biodegradable.  Maybe it’s better that this was a multiple choice test after all.