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Later this afternoon, Portland’s City Council is likely to adopt a far-reaching plan for bike infrastructure—a plan which calls for a dramatic expansion and improvement of the city’s cycling network, with the audacious (for America) goal of boosting bicycle use to about 25 percent of all local trips.

A few major progressive design and planning efforts define Portland’s history. If you’re ever in the mood for some serious nerdishness, we could talk about the 1903 Olmstead parks report or the 1970s decision to kill the Mount Hood Freeway. The 2030 Bike Plan could well join that wonky pantheon as a suitable 21st Century addition, because cycling is on the cusp of a true Golden Age here. You can find all kinds of numbers to document Portland’s bike-love. The Census recently estimated that about 6 percent of locals commute via bike; as Yr Humble Correspondent noted for Good not long ago, other figures suggest that as many as one in five Portlanders consider cycling either their primary or secondary mode of transportation.

Whatever: a lot of people in Portland like to ride bikes, a lot. No surprise, the proposed plan enjoys the fervent support from Portland’s burgeoning cycling community, which is cooking up a rally to precede today’s Council vote. But then there are the opponents—or, as we say in the waffly parlance of journalism, “some critics”—and they make the truly interesting case study.

Our local daily newspaper, The Oregonian, gave voice to qualms about the Plan’s estimated cost (over $600 million over 20 years) in a front-page story yesterday and an editorial today. This coverage manages to be fascinating in several intentional and unintentional ways; I will leave the heavy deconstruction to Sarah Mirk of The Portland Mercury and the ever-excellent BikePortland blog. For present purposes, I’m interested in the front-pager’s choice of spokesman for the nebulous “critics” who fear for the plan’s expense and, of course, its sinister left-social-engineering agenda:

“They want to make bicycling more attractive than driving for all trips of three miles or less,” said John Charles, president of the libertarian Cascade Policy Institute. “Nothing they do is going to make that happen for most people.”

Ah, the Cascade Policy Institute: old friend to Portland journalists who need to fire up the QuickQuotes Quill and get some criticism of local transportation, planning or economic policy to supply the requisite “balance.” This local think-tank is approaching its third decade of plying a very simple gimmick: If Portland is for it, they are against it. The local papers perennially identify the CPI as “libertarian.” And indeed, the Institute itself defines its mission as “foster[ing] individual liberty, personal responsibility and economic opportunity.”

I find a puzzling disconnect between this stated goal and the Institute’s apparent position here.

A man or a woman strides resolutely into his or her garage or basement and unshackles a two-wheeled steed. A brief survey of the vehicle’s mechanical integrity ensues, possibly followed by minor hands-on repairs. A helmet latches over chin. Then, this rider sallies forth into the City, prepared to hazard weather, traffic and the unknowable vicissitudes of life—alone. I could extend this argument at some length—oh, believe me I could—but, in short, what pursuit could better incarnate that “individual liberty” to which the Cascade Policy Institute so manfully dedicates itself? You want to know about “personal responsibility” and the efficacy of Burke’s “little battalions”? Go ride a bike and stake your life on the delicate social contract between drivers and cyclists. Go on.

As for “economic opportunity,” the very modest investment Portland makes in bikes—about 1 percent of its transportation budget—has fostered scores of local businesses, including many, many custom-bike builders, a major components manufacturer, the North American headquarters of a globally renowned apparel company and a proliferation of retail shops. Simply put, cycling is very, very good for business. The $600 million the city may spend over the next two decades to encourage even more bike-related commerce could be seen as a minor economic stimulus plan.

On a more ideological note, any advocate of “small government” should love Portland’s cycling policies and plans, because they are a fine example of what the writer William Langeweishe once characterized as “Government Lite.” Even if the City adopts, funds and builds everything in the 2030 Plan, the price tag of about $30 million a year will forever cower in the shadow of other transportation line items. In cycling, small expenditures and minor improvements go a long way. This morning, I used the bike lane on North Vancouver Avenue, which consists of two white lines painted down the side of the road and a few signs. This infrastructure, austere as it is, serves hundreds of people every day and keeps 99.999 percent of them perfectly safe while facilitating their participation in local commerce and industry.

In contrast, the automobile—beloved by those freewheeling, zany libertarians at the Cascade Policy Institute—is the ultimate Big Government project, cause of billions in pork-ridden expenditure, insurance mandates, heavy-handed central planning initiatives, property seizures (”takings”), metastatic bureaucracy at local, state and federal levels and massive expansions in law enforcement. All this may fit into some kind of libertarian worldview, but not one with which I am familiar.

In journalism terms, perhaps it would be helpful—and add balance!—if local reporters put these peculiar “libertarians” in slightly deeper context. A quick look at CPI’s financials, some of which are available for free at Guidestar.org, shows that the outfit’s little cottage industry of trashing bike funding and whatnot is at least modestly lucrative. According to the institute’s 990s, between 2004 and 2008, CPI took in grants and donations of about $3 million. According to watchdog sites like SourceWatch and MediaMattersAction, the donors responsible for this largess included the Coors family-connected Castle Rock Foundation and the Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation, which also donates to a host of right-wingish causes.

If space is tight, it could suffice to say that the Cascade Policy Institute is “a libertarian think-tank largely funded by conservative donors.” Helpful. It would also be helpful to identify people who make money advocating for cycling in Portland and elsewhere—though I don’t know if I can likewise characterize the description of their efforts as “Orwellian,” as per The Oregonian.

I am sure there is a legitimate and necessary debate about the Bike Plan. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and say that it’s possible the Plan doesn’t go far enough. Should we aspire to end the local influence of foreign oil potentates who harbor eccentric theological views? Should we free our streets for the use of local people rather than multinational auto manufacturers? Would these measures lead to Freedom, or just another word for…

Image by Paul Lowry via Flickr

The New York Times Sunday Magazine’s feature story on ecopsychology provides a fascinating look at an effort to bust the discipline out of its urbane native milieu and drag it into the woods for some Outward Bound-style enlightenment. Daniel B. Smith’s piece finds ecopsychology in an early and emergent phase, in need of many astringent slaps of scientific rigor, but the basic idea is simple and intuitive enough: modern ecological degradation and estrangement from nature can combine to drive people half-way down the road to Crazytown, instilling depression, stoking anxiety and relentlessly grinding the sharp edge off sufferers’ IQ.

As I read the piece, I was not surprised to find Portland portrayed as ecopsychology’s key American incubator. Even though ecopsychology’s inspirations may strike hard-science types as slightly bong-watery (cf. the work of Theodore Roszak, a prime example of the ‘60s breed of zany-minded scholar/genius), this new green therapeutic paradigm is custom-cut for Portland. Local therapist Thomas Doherty, whom Smith quotes at length, runs a pioneering ecopsychology-based practice and publishes the subdiscipline’s first peer reviewed journal; Lewis & Clark College is among the handful of institutions offering relevant courses. In a more general, zeitgeisty sense, even Portlanders who have never heard of ecopsychology consider it perfectly acceptable to go stare at ferns after a tough workday.

I myself am totally simpatico with ecopsych’s inherent Left Coast moss-pondering. I grew up among the dry pines and forbidding mountains of Montana and enthusiastically adopted the sodden maritime Northwest. I don’t know if I’m capable of living in a place where forest management isn’t a major policy issue. The notion that exposure to the natural world—broadly defined—is key to mental health and cognition just seems like common sense. Smith’s article cites the work of U-Michigan researcher Marc Berman, which suggests that immersion in a forest environment improves focus, memory and other cognitive function. For that, we can apparently thank nature’s “soft fascinations”—the babbling brooks, the infinite regress of trees—as opposed to the sharp edges and blaring sounds of urban life. (This brings up an added bonus, because “soft fascinations” sounds like a particularly unfortunate and hilarious soft-porn genre; next time you feel depressed and dull-witted yet can’t make it to a woodland trail, try repeating “soft fascinations…soft fascinations” over and over again.)

Portland likely makes ideal habitat for ecopsychology because—for reasons involving climate and geography, but also decades of nuts-and-bolts local policy decisions—this city is woven through with soft fascinations, and maintains a much closer and more dynamic relationship with its rural and wild hinterlands than most.

Granted, scientists need to do a lot of work on these findings and inclinations. But it all passes the visceral test, doesn’t it? Ecopsychology’s insistence on a link between nature and mental health; Berman’s findings on the environment’s affect on intelligence: both just feel true. At least to me. I just spent three years writing a book about weird participatory sports, and ended up concluding that the “participatory” component is far more crucial and interesting than the “weird.” Contact with the ambient world gives sport (or any outdoor activity) much of its aesthetic value, and the mental and intellectual benefits outweigh the physical. A run, a hike or a bike ride fosters a complex mode of thought at once immediate and abstract, hyper-alert and meditative, linear and non-linear. To quote Turgenev’s classic Sportsman’s Notebook:

…You walk along the forest’s edge, you watch your dog, but all the time images and faces of the beloved…keep coming to mind; impressions that have slumbered for years suddenly spring to life; the imagination hovers and darts hither and thither like a bird, and all the memories it evokes move and stand so vividly before your eyes.

Turgenev addressed this particular passage to “lovers of nature and freedom.” If the ecophyschologists are right, he should have added “sanity,” as well. Our consciousness evolved in nature, and we need to keep it rooted there.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Winter Olympics are nearly upon us. I happen to subscribe to the totally square notion that the Olys remain—in spite of the gargantuan hoo-hah of stupidness that surrounds them—a Great Festival of Sporting Life, but I do dread a number of the tiresome rituals that come along with the Games. Figure skating, for example; soft-focus features on heartbreaking stories of athletic and spiritual fortitude, for another. The most irritating set-pieces of all, however, are the inevitable I Hate the Olympics treatises dusted off by disgruntled (and alleged) sports pundits every time an obscure foreign athlete of yesteryear trots by bearing a torch aloft.

Hating the Olympics is kind of like hating the Holiday Season: you can make a plausible and defensible case for doing so, and maybe this view indicates some kind of cynical, hard-bitten street cred. Peace? Joy? Santa? You can’t fool me, pal—this iron-minded American was NOT born yesterday. I mean, fine, but whatever. In many cases, the polemicists in question rail against that of which they know not. Chuck Klosterman’s contribution to the genre, written for Esquire before the Beijing Games, is a case in point. Now, considered in full, Klosterman’s piece is rather subtle and provocative. Unfortunately, before he spits out the thesis, he has to go and take swipes at a bunch of Olympic sports, most prominently fencing:

We’re all supposed to take inspiration from Sada Jacobson, who (I’m told) is the world’s number-one female saber fencer, which is kind of like being the world’s number-one Real World/ Road Rules Challenge participant.

Nice. I find it both weird and ironic that a piece that argues against thoughtless and unexamined sports fandom looks to score its cheap ha-has through thoughtless and unexamined shots at a sport. Fencing may not be a huge topic of discussion on American sports podcasts but it does, as a matter of fact, have thousands of participants and fans and a history that goes back to, oh, approximately the beginning of time. (On a personal note, I spent about six months trying to learn how to fence and failing miserably. You can read all about this misadventure, if you’re interested. Suffice it to say that the shit is hard, and anyone who takes it lightly should try it some time.)

At least Klosterman has a decent ultimate point to make. Lesser examples of the anti-Olympics line usually boil down to some version of Weird Sports Played By Foreign People Are Dumb. Where is everyone’s sense of adventure, for God’s sake? Is it really so hard to see what’s cool about speed skating, biathlon or any of the other introverted, extraterrestrial nerd-sports that ask nothing but a few minutes of our time every four years? Can any global event that features a charming, sociable, wooly-minded pursuit like curling really be all bad?

Many aspects of the Olympics are galling and silly, but those same elements also tend to be funny and entertaining in their own right. Which team will wear the most hideous Opening Ceremony outfit? Which warm-weather nation will take the most severe hiding in women’s hockey? What kind of bitchy psychodrama will skating offer up this year?

All I know is, if curling is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

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By virtue of nursing a sick two-year-old, I am spending much of my day in the strange universe of Thomas the Tank Engine. This realm appears to consist solely of a quasi-British island known as Sodor (and, as I learn from the indefatigable Wikipedia, derives from a defunct Norse kingdom, no less) and its intricate, sentient railway system. And—let me tell you—Sodor is a sobering place.

Ask just about anyone with kids: Thomas is huge. Kids love Thomas; they devour the vast array of toys, books, movies and other paraphernalia spun off from the original work of the Rev. W. V. Awdry; if my kid is any indication, elaborate fantasy games featuring the little blue engine and his clan of steam-powered accomplices account for a large percentage of pre-K America’s imaginative labor. Narrating the televisual Thomas also seems to carry some cool-factor prestige. The mini-episodes we pull off our cable’s on-demand service feature the vocal stylings of the late George Carlin and the ever-looming Alec Baldwin.

What I don’t understand, as I sit here typing these words and watching the one where Thomas accidentally ingests a bunch of fish and suffers indigestion, is why.

The world of Thomas is dark and somewhat atavistic. The talking trains of Sodor provide transit for a faceless and nameless human population that appears to subsist in some kind of pre-War economy of small trades and manual farm labor with minor sidelines in mining and shipping. These people inhabit small villages and isolated rural hamlets; otherwise, Sodor seems largely empty, a land of lonely horizons, abandoned castles and dangerous viaducts. In some twisted realization of a mass-transit advocate’s dream, these peasants, proletarians and shopkeepers seem completely dependent on the railroad. Individual Sodorites (Sodorians?) seldom distinguish themselves among the herds of passengers—frequently dissatisfied with the level of service—who await Thomas and his comrades on station platforms. The anonymous and interchangeable drivers and workmen who labor alongside the trains epitomize the breed. In fact, Sodor looks to have achieved a uniformity of class and social condition that the German Democratic Republic would envy—with one notable exception.

That exception is Sir Topham Hatt. Jowly, dressed in sinister undertaker’s garb, stentorian and bullying, this Topham Hatt commands the railroads. Thus, he rules all of Sodor as a kind of industrial-feudal dominion. (I have recently learned that Topham Hatt also answers to the icy Orwellian sobriquet “The Fat Controller.”) In the absence of any visible outside governmental structure or other check on his power, the neutral observer must conclude that Topham Hatt is a Cheney-like law unto himself. Certainly, he wields unchecked authority over Thomas and the other trains, enforcing a capricious discipline through verbal abuse, “shunning” and arbitrary changes in work assignment pour encourager les autres.

The thinking of Marx and Engels has not yet reached Sodor, and the trains respond to Topham Hatt’s ironfisted rule in a predictable way: They turn on one another. Indeed, the roundhouse at Sodor’s main trainyard is a festering snakepit of jealousy, backbiting, gossip and one-upmanship. Thomas is forever sniping at Gordon. Gordon is a pretentious old bore. Percy and Thomas are classic “frenemies,” always on the lookout for any loss of face or transgression against the peer-enforced standards of the yard.

A grim scene. To make matters worse, the steam engines live in perpetual fear of technological obsolescence at the hands of the diesel engines, which Topham Hatt uses as a largely off-stage threat to enforce obedience. When diesels do appear, they are invariably portrayed as narcissistic sociopaths with Leninist delusions. (“We diesels know everything. We come to a yard and make it better. We are revolutionary.”) One little Thomas-brand book in our possession, Diesel 10 Means Trouble, has such a nasty edge to it that the wife and I have to expurgate our readings.

The redeeming factor here is that my kid doesn’t seem to notice any of this. Good thing, too, because his Thomas obsession recently went into overdrive. We used to temper his Thomas consumption with liberal doses of the jolly Bob the Builder series, which chronicles the exploits of a group of cheerful eco-constructivists engaged in a cooperative, low-impact takeover of a place called Sunflower Valley. Bob and the gang are forever throwing up solar-powered sunflower oil factories and yurts and chanting “Can we build it! Yes we can!” While these Bob-based affirmations remain in heavy rotation in our household, lately Thomas’s downbeat affairs have assumed much more prominence.

Is this, I ask, any way to run a railroad?

One of our local weeklies, The Portland Mercury, hit the streets with a rarity that should be a commonplace: a meaty excerpt from a local writer’s novel, in this case the estimable Kevin Sampsell’s forthcoming A Common Pornography.

I plucked the free tabloid from the now-traditional coffeeshop stack and boarded the Tri-Met bus. I’ve known Kevin for many years. He is a regular pillar of the Portland literary scene, a restless publisher of chapbooks and pamplets and weird anthologies and the kind of small-scale, off-kilter work that no longer finds a welcoming home among the major houses (so called). In his publishing guise, Kevin is a perfect example of why the Book ain’t going anywhere, no matter what the technophiles say: a nimble, flexible and passionate partisan of the word, willing to hack it out in the underground for as long as it takes.

And as a writer, Sampsell might be of interest to those who fear the modern American male novelist suffers a depressed libido, because he tends to seek out lust’s most awkward and steamy moments. This excerpt, for example, examines the adolescent pornography habits, deflowering and heartbreak of a poor kid in Kennewick, Washington, part of the sprawling miniature high-desert Houston known as the Tri-Cities.

Now, normally I wouldn’t consider Sampsell’s straightforward style, or his lower-lower-lower-middle-class social realism, quite my cup of chai. But my upbringing in the Inland Northwest, that vast, brawny and sparse undeclared province that encompasses both Sampsell’s native Palouse Prairie and my native Western Montana (yes, capital W), makes me part of this selection’s target demographic. I didn’t live a childhood quite so thin-stretched and austere as the one Sampsell portrays, but I certainly knew kids who did. And with parents who scraped by for years in feeble colonial economy of the northern Rockies—working in timber or at the poky local shops or in welding supplies or as a bookkeeper at a diesel repair facility or what have you—I wasn’t far off. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Tri-Cities and places like them—places built up around nuclear power plants or paper mills or coal slag heaps, where astonishing and uncompromising natural beauty grinds up against strip malls and tract housing. In some indefinable way, this outtake captures the particular function of teen sex in those environs: the interaction of mustachioed, Mustang-driving ex-boyfriends, half-cocked fights at the mall and random hook-ups with genuine romantic yearning in the lower socioeconomic divisions of the West.

This is by way of saying that I’m a stone-cold sucker for any story that includes the phrase “Before I moved to Spokane…,” the precise combination of parochial horizons and vaulting aspiration that drives Northwest culture. Portland and Seattle are full of exiles from Montana, Idaho, Alaska, eastern Washington and southern Oregon—native-born Cascadians who couldn’t quite bear the thought of leaving, so opted for the homeland’s own metropolitan options. (Maybe it’s the same in Vancouver, though that made-up international boundary—established by the 1846 Oregon Treaty, as everyone knows—has a way of making Canada a whole other country, so I can’t be sure.) We like to front like we’re all cosmopolitan and forward-looking, but we always carry the old country, where you buy your Carhartts at the feed store next to Target and get the big movies a week late, inside us. We need occasional reminders that we live on the border between the Pacific Rim and the Wild West.

I read the excerpt on the bus, sitting next to a guy who had a baby pitbull in his shoulder bag, behind a hippie kid reading Sustainable Industries Journal. Then I disembarked and went to the new Italophile espresso shop. It was a perfect Northwest moment.