Riding my bicycle from work to the theater Friday rush hour, I passed a frail old lady waiting to enter a corsswalk on a multi-lane one way street downtown (SE Market at Park). Two blocks above us, a pack of commuters were held in check by a traffic light. The lady creeped into a crosswalk, and the light changed to green a split second later. She was either unaware of the descending pack of cars, or assuming, as many Portlanders do, that she was enveloped in some sort of force field while in the crosswalk. She was very slight and short, wearing pale colors, and moving very slowly. I thought she might not register on the hurried motorists radars. So I stopped, and stood astride my bike in the middle of Market. I knew they would see a guy on a red bike in a bright yellow long-sleeve t-shirt. I expected traffic to slow, and thankfully it did. What stunned me was that some of these bastards felt justified in leaning on their horns. My first thought was how they were to sound that unjustified protest to the old gal exercising her legal right away. It didn't dawn on me until a few hours later that, they were probably honking at me, and my gut feeling was true - they hadn't even seen her. I can't be sure what actually triggered my intervention. I was rushing, too, and I never was a Boy Scout. But again, in retrospect, I recall reading Nic's entry from 10/7 about the poor old gal in a train station half a world away, suffering not only grievious physical injury, but also the pitiless indifference of a selfish society. I guess that story struck a chord that resonated deeply in my subconscious, because Ive never put myself in harms way like that before.
