Musings of a Drunken Monk: Individual Entry Archive

Back in high school, I took a trip with Raven Adventures and some high school classmates to Costa Rica. Toward the end of our trip, we trekked 28 miles from the Monte Verde Cloud Forest Preserve down to the volcano town of La Fortuna. It was my first (and thus far only) experience with what was affectionately dubbed "Jungle Miles."

You see, "as the crow flies," the trip from Monte Verde to La Fortuna was 28 miles. As the poor high schooler with a breakfast of one slice of watermelon in his belly and a plastic garbage back for a rainjacket trudges, it's more like 48,347.6 miles. What happens is that the rugged terrain causes a great deal of lateral and vertical travel that you can't account for before getting to it. In other words, you do a hell of a lot more walking than you might if you were on a straight road in Kansas.

I hadn't given much thought to Jungle Miles since collapsing into bed that night in La Fortuna. Until yesterday.

Yesterday I discovered Boston Street Miles, a distant but powerful cousin of Jungle Miles. Feel free to make all of the connections between "concrete jungle" and the like. Lately I have been speeding up my daily commute by rollerblading to and from the T in the morning and the evening. Well yesterday was so ungodly beautiful that I figured I would blade the 6 miles home. That is 6 Mapquest miles aka 6 "as the crow flies" miles. In Boston Street miles, it's like a million and one.

Boston streets are notoriously shitty. I remember when I was growing up in Western MA, everyone complained about how Boston sucked up all of the state's resources and surely due to the poor road conditions in Western MA there must be streets of gold in Boston. Fast forward to now, when I live in the Boston area. It is true, that road funds everywhere across the state have been sucked into Boston, like a giant money-sucking vaccum not unlike a gold-digging significant other. Unfortunately, the nexus of aforementioned money-sucking vaccum is the Big Dig, not Boston itself. The roads here suck. Every time I drive out to Western MA I'm astounded at how good the roads are. Nothing compares to driving down Beacon Street in Somerville and having your car bottom out in the Pothole of Doom (tm). This is a phenomenon I expect in a washed-out dirt road in backwoods Hawley in the middle of winter, not "metro" Boston.

What you don't realize while in the comfort of your car and artfully dodging multiple Potholes of Doom (tm) is that there is a whole other level of Boston street suckiness. This is where me and my rollerblades and Boston Street Miles come in. What seems like a perfectly "smooth" road in a car is experienced in a completely different way on a pair of rollerblades. When your feet are essentially connected to the road, you realize just how rough the road is. Your teeth chatter (not from cold) and your entire body is numb from vibration. You dodge potholes and patches and cracks even more vigorously than in a car, all the while hoping you don't get plowed over by some maniac asshole Boston driver. So you go over to the sidewalk, only to discover that every slab is of a different height and texture, and there are more cracks than the world record for a group moon. So you go back to the street ... and so on. You can see how quickly 6 miles might add up to more, with all of this lateral motion.

Now I think I know why people always stare at me when I'm blading in Boston. So few people do it. This isn't California, where the streets are smooth and everyone uses some form of personal transportation involving wheels and muscle-building. No one blades in Boston because it's near-suicidal. If you don't die from the Frogger-esque dodging between cars and pedestrians then you will almost certainly take a huge digger (inevitably in front of a crowd of onlookers) and end up with a nasty scrape on your ass. Yes, this is a personal experience, though thankfully not yesterday.

So next time you're driving on a road other than a backwoods Hawley dirt road in the middle of winter and you give thought to complaining of its quality, make sure to give a thought to my ass schlepping across Boston and racking up more miles than a Frequent Flyer en route to China.

All thanks to Boston Street Miles.