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March 1, 2024

What if…

By: Bill Oetinger

Does the name Michael Shermer ring a bell for you? If you’ve been around cycling long enough, it might. He was just one of four competitors, along with Lon Haldeman, John Howard, and John Marino, in the first Great American Bike Race in 1982. The GABR was subsequently rebranded as the Race Across America…RAAM. Shermer is still around and has had a busy and interesting life since his days as an ultramarathon cyclist. Among other things, he currently publishes a magazine called The Skeptic, dedicated to investigating and, usually, debunking pseudoscience and irrational religious beliefs. (I’ll bet they’re having fun with the MAGA/QAnon crowd!) I don’t subscribe to their magazine, although I do subscribe to their skepticism…but recently a friend sent me a copy of one article Shermer had written that really whapped me over the head. Here are the first two paragraphs of that piece…

How do lives turn out as they do? Is it genes or environment or some combination thereof? It is both, of course, but there is something more at work, and that is contingency—a conjuncture of events occurring without design. Contingencies are the sometimes small, apparently insignificant, and usually unexpected events of life that have outsized effects. You zigged instead of zagged. You went left instead of right. You went to the party instead of staying home. You took this job instead of that job. You married this person instead of that person.

After the fact, with the hindsight bias fully engaged, it seems so obvious and postdictable as to how and why one’s life unfolded as it did. But at the decision tree bifurcation point—the garden of forking paths, as Jorge Luis Borges titled his short novel—who knows what is to come next? Such stories of apparently random and unpredictable events are typically presented as rare and exceptional, but in fact I suspect they are so common as to make contingency a force in life as potent as genes and environment, and thus worthy of consideration not only by social scientists, but by biographers, autobiographers, memoirists, and historians.

My desktop dictionary defines “contingency” as “a future event or circumstance which is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty…the absence of certainty in events.” Following along this road soon finds us in the deep philosophical waters of determinism, predestination, free will…the Fickle Finger of Fate, good luck, bad luck, making your own luck…nature versus nurture…playing the cards you’ve been dealt. On and on: a dizzy dive to make your head spin. But as murky as this might seem, I think skeptical Mike is onto something here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but if you cast your mind back over your own cycling adventures, I think you will recall an almost bottomless well of incidents where tiny shifts in time or place made huge differences to you…perhaps even life-or-death differences.

A few cases in point from my own cycling life…

• Five of us had stopped along a country road for a munchie break. We started riding again and five minutes later a large pick-up truck, going way over the speed limit, out of control, flew off the road just 20 feet ahead of us. Had we left that break five or so seconds sooner, we would have been right where the truck careened off the road. We would have all been wiped out…killed or maimed.

• A club ride—20 riders?—had taken a rest stop at a store in Napa. We left together and maybe ten minutes later, an Acura slid across the road towards us, on its roof, at maybe 50 mph. It slid right across both lanes, across the shoulder just in front of us, and ended up on its roof in the ditch. Turns out the driver had been racing a buddy in another car and had lost it in a curve. Had we left that rest stop maybe 15 seconds before we did, this upside-down car would have plowed right through our group.

• On a blustery day, I was riding slowly over the little summit on Martinelli Road, west of Forestville, when, just 20 yards ahead of me, a mature oak tree simply toppled over into the road, smashing down across both lanes, taking all the overhead wires with it on its way down. Never made a sound until it hit the road. Had I been a few seconds further up the hill, it would have nailed me.

I could, without really trying, list another dozen moments where a few yards or a few seconds would have changed everything. We were there—where we were, when we were—and this or that did or did not happen. Or something happened and we just missed it…or we didn’t miss it. Sometimes we dodge the disaster and other times not…

• I had heard there was brand new pavement on Lawndale and Schultz Roads, over by Kenwood. I put together a ride to go out and sample that tasty new tar. I had initially planned to ride south on Hwy 12 into Kenwood and take Warm Springs to the south end of Lawndale. But at the last second, I decided to turn onto the north end of Lawndale, off Hwy 12. Just a few minutes later, I had a head-on collision with a truck on Schultz, coming around a blind corner in my lane. Had I stuck to my original route, I would not have met that truck, with a destroyed bike and several broken bones to show for it.

My only other car-bike wreck was in May, 2012, on Wright Road on the western edge of Santa Rosa. I won’t try to make the case that there was some spooky confluence of events that put me in front of that BMW, although of course there was: all the movements and decisions made by me and by the driver that got us to that spot at the same time. Spooky or not, when I reported on the wreck in one of these columns, I paraphrased the old Dr John song: “I was on the Wright Road, but it must have been the wrong time.” They say timing is everything. It often seems that way.

The world is a vast and messy game board. We roll the dice and hop three or six spots up the way and…what? We land on Go to Jail or we are rewarded with some bonus. When good things happen, we call it serendipity: “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” If things go bad, we might call it Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and often at the worst possible time.” Or we might simply say, Shit Happens!

All of this uncertainty and luck and destiny…it seems somehow especially relevant for cycling. Suppose for a moment you have elected to withdraw from the hurly burly of the world. You have locked yourself into your home. You have enough money so you don’t need to work or venture out. You have your groceries delivered. You watch TV or YouTube or you read books on your Kindle. You live in a small, one-story home (no stairs to fall down). In short, you engage in no activity that might put you in any danger, never mind what a mind-numbing, boring life that might be. But at least your exposure to the vagaries of that jungle out there is minimized as much as possible. In contrast to that, as we so often reflect, the act of cycling gets us out into that real, messy world, with all its presumptive risks and rewards. We are little moving pieces in a vast, complex time-space matrix, dancing around with a zillion other moving pieces, most of them bigger and heavier and harder that we are. 

We do have free will. We do make choices, and some of them ratchet up the risk: pushing the limits on a downhill; dodging through traffic like a bike messenger; checking our phones while riding… But over and above and below and around our choices are other variables which are all beyond our reckoning or control. Depending on how cautious or reckless we each may be, we make what allowances we can for the wild cards out there, from traffic to broken glass to black ice. We choose to leave the rest stop when we do. We choose to turn onto this road instead of that one. But all of our planning and prudence only account for a tiny fraction of all the curve balls that might affect us, or, as folks say today, that might impact us, as in the impact of being hit by a truck. 

So where am I going with this? I’ll tell you this much: I do not believe in some higher power that is orchestrating all this. Remember the woman mountain biker who was attacked by a mountain lion, and then two other riders beat on the lion until it ran off? She said: “I believe Jesus was looking out for me!” Hey, if Jesus was looking out for you, would he have let the lion jump you in the first place? No. I try not to use words like capricious when describing the random nature of events: the tornado that turns one house into matchsticks and leaves the one next door untouched; the landslide that takes out one house and not the one 20 feet away. There is no caprice involved…no sense of malicious or capricious intent. Those are just the uncertain, unexpected contingencies that make our world so…interesting.

Contingency is such a modest, unloaded word for this vast tapestry of chance. We control the few variables we can but, in the end, we have to be reverently humble in acknowledging that most of what goes on out there is beyond us. Staying alert and in the moment is probably the best we can hope for in steering clear of trouble, or steering toward better prospects.

This column has gone on long enough already but I need to pass along one more story. It’s not even a cycling story. But it does bear on those moments when life bends one way or another and what may have seemed insignificant at the time ends up being vitally important. So bear with me. You might enjoy it. There is one line in Shermer’s first paragraph that really jumped out at me: “You went to the party instead of staying home.” Oh yeah…

This story happens in the first weekend of June, 1970, in Bolinas. On Friday, I broke up with someone I’d been living with for over four years. For the first time in all those years, I was single, able to make my own decisions as to where to go and who to see without having to enter into consultation and negotiation with another person. I didn’t get much sleep on Saturday night and on Sunday morning I was a bit foggy and tired.

I had been invited to a Sunday afternoon party at a neighbor’s place. There wasn’t a formal, printed invitation with an RSVP at the bottom. I didn’t really know the people all that well. I think I may have just run into the guy on the street and he said, “Hey, we’re having some folks over on Sunday afternoon…c’mon by if you feel like it.” I wasn’t all that sure that I did feel like it. I was tired. I might have just gone for a walk on the beach. I might have taken my canoe out for a paddle around Bolinas Lagoon. I might have smoked a joint and listened to music. Or, most likely, I might have just flopped down on my bed for a nap, catching up on that lost sleep.

But in the end…what the heck…I got on my bike and rode out to Agate Beach for the party. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw an interesting looking lady sitting at the table: Nancy. I immediately sat down with her and we spent the next hour bonding…drilling into one another. Kismet. Fated to be mated. She was up visiting from Los Angeles and someone had dragged her out to this party, where she knew no one. Later that evening, she flew back to LA, and on the plane sat next to a guy named Barry. They got acquainted and kept up the friendship in LA.

Two weeks later, Nancy came back to Bolinas to visit me. A few months after that, we were married. And then, a few months after the wedding, she was dead, taken out by a sudden and aggressive cancer. But before she became too sick to travel, we had driven down to LA to meet some of her friends and family. These included airplane Barry and his girlfriend, Kathy, a recent graduate of UCSB.

After Nancy died, Kathy and I started writing to each other. We were getting to know and to like one another. Among other news, she let me know she had parted ways with Barry. I urged her to come up to Bolinas for a visit. She did so, 51 years ago this month. I came home from an afternoon of tennis and found her asleep in my bed. We’ve been together ever since.

To say that Kathy has been the best thing that ever happened to me would be a serious understatement. She has made me a better person. We complete one another, and the sum of our lives together is so much greater than each of our lives alone might have been. So…I went to the party instead of staying home. I was soooo close to not going to that party. So close.

I think of our two children, Robyn and Evan. I think of our three granddaughters, Lila, Simone, and Augusta. They owe their very existence to the fact that I did in the end choose to ride my bike out to that party. And that Nancy was brought to the party. And that she met Barry on the plane that same day. And that Barry’s girlfriend was Kathy. And that I was free, for the first time in years, to attend the party without a partner attached to me. All on one weekend in June. When I think about NOT attending the party…staying home, taking a nap, whatever… It absolutely terrifies me: what I would have missed.

Contingencies…little wrinkles in the fabric of life. Forks in the road, some turnings of our choosing and some that are mysteriously chosen for us by whatever that force is we call Fate. I think of Robert Frost’s poem: 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Well, you know what Yogi Berra said about that: “When you come to a fork in the road, pick it up!”

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net


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