Appeal to the stone

A forest outside Strasbourg, France, 2019.

Any student of cycling history knows ‘gravel cycling’ is nothing new. Indeed, road paving predates both the bicycle and the automobile, in the form of cobbles and other chunks of stone arranged into surfaces fit for purpose. If you’ve ever been to Greece you’ll have noted the extensive use of marble for pavements, which are particularly ‘fun’ to tread over in the rain, especially when wearing bike shoes.

The development of smooth paving surfaces, heralded by the mainstreaming of the automobile, replete with its rudimentary suspension and wagon wheels, glossed over many of the world’s ancient roads, whatever their substrate. Dirt, crushed stone, and pave were coated in carbon products, transforming numerous dynamics and cultural phenomena, from hydrology and soundscapes to fashion and vehicle design.

The world’s most iconic bicycle race, Paris-Roubaix, is a living, breathing example of the tension between scales of human labour, mobility, and more broadly, ‘progress.’ Famous for its cobblestone sectors, which are lengths of ancient Roman roads, the race’s identity is centred on the maintenance - both figuratively and literally - of the old in the context of modernization, driven by various imperatives: humanism, technological rationality, capitalism’s perpetual growth model, scientific discovery, etc.

Maintenance of the cobbled sectors of Roubaix has two senses. In one sense, cobbled roads require seasonal work to address the ravages of winter and spring. In another sense, their sheer existence must be actively maintained:

When Paris- Roubaix was created in 1896, cobblestones were hardly quaint. . . . What truly stood out about this race back then was not its cobblestones but its relatively short distance - about 280 kilometers. (Bouvet et al, 40).

Following WW1 and the paving that was part of infrastructure rebuilding in France, 1939 that marked a turning point for the race’s parcours: the first kilometre of cobbles, between Foret-sur-Marque and Hem, was covered over with concrete. This step into the modern era was met with popular support, and the director of Highways and Bridges predicted, “In six years all the roads of Paris-Roubaix will be modernized” (Bouvet et al, 42).

By 1965, only 22 kilometres of cobblestones remained out of the race’s original 60. It would take two decades to begin the process of first maintaining the character of the event, as Jean-Marie Leblanc - who became the race director in 1989 - recounted:

The Northerners reclaimed Paris-Roubaix. They also became attached to their roots and by now they recognized that without Paris-Roubaix, the legacy of the cobblestones would disappear entirely. They became extremely proud of hosting it once a year - so much so that the indifference of the 1970s gave way to passionate commitment (Bouvet et al. 43).

The race’s identity was saved through cessation of paving, and subsequently, annual maintenance undertaken by locals, notably, those organized under the umbrella of the Friends of Paris-Roubaix. Today, Roubaix’s cobbles inspire 4,000 riders to participate in the annual Paris-Roubaix Challenge cyclosportif, which covers up to 172km of the route professionals battle through each April. A race like no other, Roubaix is respected by all, feared by many, and one of the most exciting days of bike one can hope to witness.

KICKING STONES

In The Reality Bubble, Ziya Tong recounts the tale of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in Harwich, England, 1763. As the men walked the city’s cobbled streets, they debated a radical, controversial argument articulated by Charles Berkely (1685 - 1753), an Irish philosopher known for his ‘immaterialism.’

[Berkely] believed that we cannot know things as they truly are; instead, what we know about the world is based on our sensory impression of things. (Tong, 47).

It might be tempting to think Berkely proposed a process of ‘translation’, whereby our sensing apparata and brains convert ‘what is’ into ‘what we can understand’; this is our current understanding of how ‘perception is reality’. But Berkely’s position was more radical. He believed humans are material, but our minds and ideas are immaterial, and the very ‘existence’ of everything that constitutes ‘reality’ is determined by individuals perceiving them. Think of the classic ‘If a tree falls in the forest, but nobody is there to hear it fall, does it make a sound?’ For Berkely, the answers is squarely ‘no,’ which is right, but not for the reason he thinks.

Berkely’s rendering of the human/reality relationship has inspired popular cultural works, like The Matrix, the most similar contemporary instantiation of his immaterialism, the ‘it’s all a simulation’ concept.

Back to Johnson and Boswell, debating Berkely’s argument. Johnson claimed to have cracked the debate, he could prove Berkely wrong, and easily! Wow, how?

Boswell looked on as Johnson kicked a large stone, yelling, “I refute it THUS!'“

With Johnson’s ‘refutation’ was born a logical fallacy: argumentum ad lapidem:

appeal to the stone

Johnson had proven nothing, had contradicted Berkely in no manner, because his new toe pain was only ‘real’ because it was created by/manifested in his mind. It wasn’t ‘external’ to him, and therefore ‘real.’ It was within, and literally constituted by him. All he did was dismiss Berkely’s argument by effectively saying: Ta da, wrong!

This is a fun anecdote, and it got me thinking about appeal to the stone, and appeal to stone., the latter being in reference to the current popularity of ‘gravel’ cycling.

I’d love to draw a tidy linkage between the two elements, but it’s going to be fairly circuitous. Bear with me.

North American culture is struggling with a lack of cultural continuity. The majority of this continent’s inhabitants came here to start over, to create something new, something better for themselves and their children. In so doing, both literally and figuratively, the history and terrain of these lands have been paved over. Smooth surfaces, in the form of narratives and infrastructure, gloss the past and physical spaces that constitute each of our realities.

In contrast, the continuity of human existence and struggle is omnipresent in the European countries I’ve had the good fortune to spend time in, both riding bikes and on foot. Ancient roads, architecture, road names….history isn’t ‘somewhere else, abstract,’ but ‘right here’; it’s part of the fabric of existence in a material way. As such, it’s a reminder of where we’ve come from, a common basis upon which to build a sense of where we’re going.

I’d argue this ‘normal’ is quite unlike that of a child born in North America. Here, we don’t encounter artifice from centuries past with famous stories attached to them. Nothing feels old, there’s little to no continuity linking the majority of us (I think indigenous peoples would have a different perspective) to our ancestors, their struggles, their stories, their ‘why.’

GRAVEL: WHY NOW?

There are many reasons, but I want to focus on ‘the reveal.’

I think bike riders are primed, for numerous cultural reasons, to be exposed to challenge, exposure, vulnerability, variability, and adventure in ways that herald back to the experiences of our ancestors, not least those who came to North America early. Our ancestors struggled to survive in environments foreign to them, and their primary mode of coping was that of domination. The development of mass-scale agriculture and mega transportation infrastructure projects, imposed ‘the will of man’ upon nature, and as generations turned over, we dissociated from that which makes us human: the natural world.

‘Road cycling,’ in its golden era, was very much driven by the ambivalent relationship people were developing with industrialism, modernization, and urbanism. ‘Cyclo-touring’ was a popular hobby in the 1920s and 1930s in France, for example, because people felt the need to escape cities and reconnect with the natural world at the human scale.

Turbie, outside Nice, 2018.

In any given city of age in North America, traces of our past lay hidden beneath the pavement. Cobblestones remain, buried, forgotten, unknown.

‘Gravel is stupid.’

This appeal to the stone fails to take on the ‘argument’ being made for gravel riding, because it says nothing about gravel’s merits. It simply dismisses the very concept as absurd.

No force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo

Somewhere in New England, 2019 - Rapha Gentlemen’s Race Reboot

Call it what you will - gravel, dirt, all-road, all-conditions, groad, VTT, dropgnar - culture is cyclic, and the merits of riding bikes across all manner of surfaces, within the context of modernization swinging the pendulum back to the basic, render the trend far from stupid. Its time has come.

Because it’s fun.

Because it’s exploratory.

Because it’s undefined.

The Col de Tende, July, 2019.

References:

Paris Roubaix: A Journey Through Hell. Philippe Bouvet (Author), Pierre Callewaert (Author), Jean-Luc Gatellier (Author), Serge Laget (Author)

The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our World. Ziya Tong