Tucked in a back curve of a trailer park off Modesto's South Seventh Street, a small travel trailer houses car-free recycler Bill Foster. A white picket fence sets off his tidy, packed-earth yard from the park's access drive. Pliers in hand, Foster twists at wires that hold wire baskets on either side of his white Raleigh folding bicycle's rear rack. Behind the bicycle, one end of a two-wheeled cart built around a yellow plastic pet transporter leans on the ground.

A graying man with years of laughter etched in his forehead and around his eyes, Foster pulls a steel tongue, attached to the cart, to the Raleigh's seat post, eyeing the bicycle's wire baskets and checking the tongue's clearance. Restoring the cart to its former posture, he resumes his twisting at the anchoring wire loops. Foster dates his carlessness from some 25 years back. Faced with the choice of giving up the bottle or the steering wheel, he let go of the steering wheel. He doesn't complain about low mileage since. "I get about 100 miles to the fifth."

An optimist, Foster registers scarcely a regret for what he lost when he chose to kick the petroleum habit rather than alcohol. "I didn't realize how much you f***ing miss," he said. In the years since, he has found that cycling helps him to maintain connections with his community. When he sees friends along the way, he says, "Instead of just waving, you talk to them a few minutes." He finds that cycling makes him "closer to people."

And the community responds to that closeness. Foster's front-yard workshop on a Sunday afternoon scarcely waits ten minutes between friends who come and go on foot, by bicycle, and by car.

But Foster's sense of community extends beyond human neighbors. A hummingbird feeder hung outside his home's front window tokens this broader appreciation. "I just can't think of why it takes humanity so long to figure out we're s***ting on the world," he said. He believes that in our civilization people are slow to see the potential of our own muscle power because "we're still too affluent."

Foster has thought a great deal about how hooking carts to bicycles can extend muscle-powered mobility for those who, like himself, aren't blinded by affluence. He tells of a friend of his, also named Bill, who pedals in hundreds of pounds of cardboard for recycling using a homemade trailer. His ideas for bicycle trailers include a "U-Haul," for whose use bicyclists could barter, and a camping trailer. He imagines the latter with a light fiberglass chest and a pop-up tent, a miniature version of what more affluent vacationers tow behind their minivans.

Bicycle trailers have played a key role in Foster's life. He's proud of and grateful for his present home. Before occupying it, "I was on the street twelve years," he says. Part of moving in involved removing rubbish on the site and bringing in the salvaged lumber that would become his front fence. His bicycle trailer served him in these tasks, he says. He reflects on pedaling home with such cargo: "I looked like a ... Gypsy."

"I worked till my hands bled," he says, noting the project's ability to "keep me busy."

The result is a modest home with a wide, sheltered porch on one side, where Foster's partner Brenda's bicycle is parked, and a tool shed on the other. A boardwalk whose timbers recall pallet lumber runs across the yard from the gate to the porch.

Foster traces his interest in bicycle trailers to his having seen how his friend Bill uses them to transport heavy loads. He dosn't claim mechanical genius. "If I touch a bicycle it'll turn to s***." Still, he appears to derive great pleasure from constructing bicycle trailers on his own through trial and error. "It took me three years to build the first one," he says. And with that much patience, the price is right. "You can build one for $20."

The pale yellow trailer he's working on today belongs to his neighbor, Dennis, who pulls it behind a moped. Foster believes it to be durable. "Must have 100,000 miles on that," he says. One of his biggest challenges has been how to connect the trailer and bicycle. He demonstrates his present state of the art, a perforated steel strip bent in a U shape. Placing this strip around his Raleigh's seat post, he aligns its two backward prongs with the tongue of Dennis' moped trailer. The collar around the seat post allows for horizontal articulation between cycle and trailer, permitting turns. A pin through the trailer tongue and both ends of the U collar allows for vertical articulation when the cycle and trailer jog separately over irregular road surfaces and ramps.

Cycling contributes substantially to his sense of well being, Foster holds. He finds it usually a better way to get around than waiting for buses that pass infrequently and whose dilatory routes seem to demand at least half an hour's ride to get even short distances. "If you're in a hurry I'd call a cab," he says. But he can scarcely remember having called a cab. Pressed, he says that he lives at an unhurried pace. Cycling balances the influences of his ostensible intake of alcohol and nicotine. "I think bicycles are what's kept me in shape," he says.

Chief among the hazards he faces in negotiating area streets by bicycle, he deems the intersection at Hatch and Herndon at 99 and the northwest tip of Ceres. "They're all watching for cars," he reports of motorists there. "If you're on a bicycle or motorcyle you don't count." Yet, unhurried and uncounted though he may be, Foster's preference for pedaling over motoring serves his needs. Even if he wanted a faster pace, he observes given his location, "The cab never gets here."

With a last few turns of the pliers, Foster fixes the second wire basket back to his Raleigh. Now both baskets' brims are flush with the bicycle's rear rack, clear of Dennis's moped trailer tongue.

ACTION: Sharing your experience, strength, and hope in kicking fossil fuel dependence can help us build communities where pedaling, rather than just a recreational release of frustration at the boss, counts as good work. "Crosswalks ... " is for just such sharing. Contact the author at 523-8871; P. O. Box 4501, Modesto CA 95352; or mcmillan@ainet.com.