Within five minutes of wheeling a little convoy of bicycles on to the Capital Crescent Trail, that lovely, leafy asphalt path that runs from Washington, D.C. through Bethesda, Maryland, there appeared not four horsemen, but three bicyclists of the apocalypse.
The first came in the form of bull-headed, late-middle-aged man. We saw him steaming towards us, pumping his legs and glaring down the trail with unusual ferocity. The path was un-crowded; it had rained earlier in the day and the steely clouds were just giving way to patches of blue.
Just as he passed us, the man suddenly roared – or maybe barked – at the youngest person in our caravan, a seven-year-old. Everyone on the trail jumped with surprise. The child clattered off to the side, dropping her bike in the dirt. Without a backward glance, the man zoomed on, leaving the woods reverberating from his gutteral cry.
“She wasn’t anywhere near him,” said a nice woman with a dog, “What a jerk.”
Everyone paused to console our daughter. She was rattled. “You don’t think a person with white hair will yell at a child for no reason,” she said.
Not four minutes later, along came another irascible cyclist. This time it was a buff grey-haired female on a bike with handlebars designed in such a way that she could bend over and rest her forearms as she pedaled her way to immortality.
While the woman was churning along towards us, a young couple with a dog left the path in such a way that they briefly crossed in front of her. This cyclist too was in no way compromised; she didn’t have to put on her brakes, or swerve, or even stop pedaling.
Yet the potential obstruction posed by two tranquil citizens and a spaniel so enraged her that she hissed and rolled her eyes at them before hurtling onwards, turbo-charged with her own exasperation.
“Wow, what’s the matter with these people?” marveled our 12-year-old, who had seen the woman’s contorted face.
It’s a good question. Honestly: What is eating these people? You, Mr. Bull-Head, what lottery did you win that makes the Capital Crescent Trail your private property, on which you feel free to bully little children who, just like you, are taking in the fresh air?
And you, Mrs. Babyboomer Thigh-Master, why so cranky? Nobody slowed you down. Why sprinkle poison over everyone, including yourself, with your thin-skinned intolerance?
One answer, perhaps, is that the Crescent Trail, like the Internet, brings out a curiously unfiltered aggression in some people. A friend of mine remembers walking on it with her husband and tiny daughter – keeping carefully to the right-hand side, she swears — when a cyclist came up behind them. He could have dinged a bell, or called, “On your left,” but instead he yelled, “Get out of the way or I’ll hit you!”
It’s also true, unfortunately, that amongst Baby Boomers there is an odious subset for whom life’s chief pleasure seems to be finding fault with – and biting the heads off — people younger than themselves.
You see them in restaurants, ostentatiously bristling if children are ushered into the room, their heads swiveling constantly in the hopes of catching young diners in bad acts.
You read their smug and scornful prose in the letters sections of newspapers. And, it seems, they populate dappled woodland paths, where they can be seen barking and hissing at young couples and small children.
Is it so hard to respect others? To live and let live? To exude a little late-life geniality, for Pete’s sake?
Maybe it’s unwise to draw too fine a conclusion from what might have been coincidence. Yet when in the span of a few minutes two grizzled cyclists with no evident connection to each other come blasting down the same path and do basically the same thing, which is treat with contempt people enjoying the public thoroughfare – bellowing and sneering and indicating that other people are in the wrong and ought to get of of the way–well, it’s not just momentarily unpleasant.
I mentioned three cyclists: We met the last shortly after leaving the trail. The road was empty of traffic, so I cut across it with a child in tow. A greybeard on a bike saw us, and shouted across the street at my husband: “Teach your family to obey stop signs!”
Nice, eh?
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
