"Not all fat bikers"

 Inconsiderate fat bikers ticked me off recently by flaring up again on the cross-country ski trails. The outbreak was brief, overshadowed by an epidemic of foot traffic. Passive aggressive behavior? Impossible to say.

On Tuesday I had one of the cats at the vet. While we were waiting to pay our bill, motion outside caught my eye. A rider on a fat bike pulled up and plunked his bike into the snow pile beside the walkway. He had come to pick up some pet supplies he had ordered. The front desk crew asked where he had come from. He said he lived on a road about five miles away, but he had ridden down the railroad line that the snowmobiles use in the winter.

That right there is the fat bike's original mission: biking on existing transportation trails to conduct practical business or to pursue challenging tours or races. To use trails that they can't hurt, because the intended use is already a heavier impact than cycling. Admirable, though it still calls for a higher level of disposable income than a lot of riders might be able to justify. If I lived where he did I might ski to the vet for anything that didn't require bringing the actual pet.

Anyway, it was refreshing to see a self-reliant fat biker out there representing.

Fat bikers are an invasive nuisance

 Cross-country skiing is on life support on our local trails. After weeks depending on our kilometer of man-made snow, we finally got a storm that delivered six fluffy inches that packed down to a barely slidable two inches on our network.

Fat bikers consistently underestimate the impact that their tires have on the ski trails. They push constantly for unlimited access. If they are denied permission, their most diplomatic ambassadors just go in anyway, even when a trail is posted. They're doing it now, probably believing that they can't hurt the meager cover because it's not deep enough for them to sink in. They're shredding the cover that we can't replace.

If the cover is so thin that you don't sink in, you don't need a fat bike. Go ride on the rail trail, and leave us alone. Go ride on snow machine trails that no one is using, because the motorized users don't want to tear up their machines.

Fat bikes were developed for intrepid riders doing unsupported rides, sometimes for days. But sport fat bikers are some of the neediest whiners in the off-road demographic. They also consistently overestimate their economic value. For a ski area, they do more harm than good. Someone needs to establish fat bike touring centers to run the complete economic experiment. See how much revenue they actually generate after you have arranged for land, built and maintained the trails, and established a rental fleet for the visitors who don't want to invest in their own bikes.

Fat bikes are like a recurring infection that dies down for a time and flares up. I'd say they were like herpes, but you at least get to have a little fun once to get herpes. Oh, or you could get it as the result of rape. So maybe the analogy does hold up. Fat bikers certainly don't seem to understand consent.

The Culture of Mediocrity

 Vivek Ramaswamy recently annoyed the rank and file of MAGA by saying that the United States has embraced a culture of mediocrity for years. We have to hire immigrants for tech jobs because Americans are just too dumb.

Let's brush past how he is correct and why, because it encompasses too many factors in the conservative attack on public education, various parenting shortcomings that have worsened generation after generation, and the inevitable impact of cramming more and more people into a consumerist economy. At the foundation of his statement is the tech-savvy person's contempt for the majority of people, who don't know what's going on inside of the magic mirrors and boxes that we've been tempted into accepting as indispensable to everyday life.

Remember "user friendly?" It seems so quaint and antiquated. Now every operating system update takes more and more of the power away from the user. You just have to figure out how to communicate with the various clouds on which everything is stored away from your grubby, fumbling hands.

The computerized world can be delightfully convenient except when it is insanely frustrating. It's here to stay, at least until we collapse civilization to the point that we can't generate enough electricity to feed it.

From Ramaswamy's lofty perch, all of the barely human grunts who don't have engineering backgrounds deserve their struggles and serve no real purpose. Maybe he's right. Maybe the future holds only a small number of tech overlords served by entirely robotic retinues. Getting there might even be fun, if the first couple of generations of overlords are willing to let the grunts kill themselves off in pleasurable ways. Party until you drop! No one needs you! No one wants you! Overdose, or die of sexual exhaustion, or pack your arteries with the residues of a tasty but deadly diet.

At the moment, the overlords need at least some of the mediocre masses to do the jobs that haven't been automated. Someone needs to unclog the toilets, with no higher aspiration than to put in a week's work and spend the weekend fishing and drinking beer. The overlords need people proud of their simple skills like construction and maintenance.

Some of the overlords like to ride bikes. I doubt if they maintain and repair those bikes themselves. I suppose the richest of the rich can just buy a new one when they get a flat tire. But they have to have someone assemble it. Who ya gonna call? Your handy mediocre bike person.

Our shop works on bikes for quite a few wealthy patrons, most of whom only show up for a short time in the summer, because they have an obligation to visit all of their estates in the various weather zones of their choice. Some of them are in tech. Others are in industries like hospitality, or the investment sector. None of them are super rich, with only one or two cracking the billion dollar threshold. Are they upper-middle mediocre by Ramaswamy's yardstick, or small-fry oligarchs? They have voted to advance the oligarchy since the project began in 1980 to put it firmly in power. 

As far as wealth and power go, Ramaswamy himself isn't worth a billion. That's got to irritate him, dangling there with 960 million or so, while Elon farts around swapping back and forth between world's richest and second richest.

The real world is a product of the labors of the mediocre. Yes, Americans have preferred recess and phys ed to academics. The Baby Boom grew up with romanticized fiction about the wide open spaces, and quite a few actual wide open spaces in which to live pretty simple lives. Previous waves of plutocracy had left large stretches of places like Appalachia forced to live simple lives because the extractive industries exploiting those regions paid poorly and killed a lot of people. Men died in the forests and the mines. Women died in childbirth. One way or another, rural life figured heavily in both actual history and fantasy.

My generation began immediately after the most destructive, wide-ranging war in human history. It was truly a world war, although the technology at the time allowed certain areas to be difficult or impossible to hit. There was a home front as well as battle fronts. But no area was unaffected. We absorbed stories of war. A theme throughout them was that life becomes pretty basic when you're under fire. You may be operating the best technology that your species has developed, but it can devolve to knives and fists. Although we welcomed the advancements in creature comforts, medicine, and entertainment that came along in the second half of the 20th Century, we were reminded constantly that World War III was inevitable and probably imminent. Anyone not vaporized instantly would be dumped into a world of desperate survival in a matter of hours.

Preppers are mediocre people. They imagine the world unplugged after whatever brings down the house of cards in which we all shelter right now. Poor people are mediocre. I still burn wood in iron boxes to heat my house, although I also have what passes for high speed internet around here. I'm not a prepper, because prepping is expensive and futile, but I could probably function, with a few adjustments, depending on the degree of catastrophe.

I have written before about the superiority of reliable mediocrity in bicycles. When someone tells me that they have an old bike and they wonder if it is worth fixing, I tell them that they are lucky if they have a bike that is old enough still to be fixable. The newest of the new might be supported for a few years, but something ten years old could be tough. Twenty years old, your odds get better. Last century? Excellent.

It's getting harder. The industry offers less and less, but a few companies are hanging in there. You may have to hunt a bit. In bigger cities you might find co-ops where mechanics farm old parts to keep simple bikes in circulation. Eventually we will run out of frames, unless nice steel comes back into fashion for production bikes. There are also a handful of frame builders left, but they deserve to be paid what their work is worth. Those are hardly everyday beater bikes. Even so, simplicity and steel are holding a bit of territory. Maybe it will form the basis for a new civilization when mediocrity inherits the earth.

Support your local pedestrian

 On my bike commutes I was seeing a moderately tall, bearded young man walking toward Wolfeboro along Route 28. Usually I would see him somewhere along the north slope between Route 171 and the crossroads at North Wolfeboro Road and Pork Hill Road, but it might be further north before 171 or a little further along, past North Wolfeboro. It took me a while to notice that he was walking all the way into the town of Wolfeboro and walking to various destinations while he was there. If he also walked back out the way he came in, he had to be logging well over 20 miles a day on foot.

I never saw him hitching a ride. He walked on the correct side, facing traffic. I can't recall if I ever saw him walking back northward toward Ossipee, but I might have forgotten it. Whether you see someone along a route depends entirely on your schedules. Our mornings coincided regularly. In bike season I might be starting toward home anywhere within a span of an hour or more. Going in was much more consistent.

The walker wasn't sauntering, but he wasn't speed-walking or jogging, either. When I would see him through the workshop windows, it was generally a couple of hours after I had arrived. The transportation pedestrian maintains a cruising pace, not a racing pace.

Because I hate driving, particularly with other drivers on the road, I have considered various ways to cover the distance to work in the seasons of darkness and frozen precipitation. The obvious first choice would be cross-country skiing. That depends on snow that will provide grip for the skis and smooth running. In New Hampshire, especially with the changing climate, ungroomed snow is often like soapy porcelain or wet concrete. And the skier would have to stay out of the travel lanes, probably outside of the plow drift.

Native Americans in New England invented the snowshoe, not the ski, because terrain and snow conditions here made the short, wide flotation more practical. I do not know if they experimented with some form of traction device lashed to the bottom of it, for the hard, refrozen conditions. However, when snowshoe hiking was the only way to get around, trails would get packed down to a smooth surface. The system worked for a few thousand years.

That was before cars and snowplows. In our modern world, a transportation snowshoe hiker is rare to nonexistent. I have not seen the summer pedestrian pushing into darkness and snow.

On snowshoes, the pedestrian would not be able to maintain more than about 3 miles per hour at best. Skis glide, but snowshoes give nothing away. Plod, plod, plod, you have to take every step. Along the highway, a walker might consider bare-booting it on the pavement when no vehicles were passing, hopping out of the way as necessary. On the stretches with a guardrail, that would require vaulting over the rail and whatever plow-piled snow was in the way. You wouldn't want to chew up the snowshoes on the pavement. Good luck leaping over the guardrail with them on your feet, too. Because a commuting pedestrian is on the road with commuting drivers, traffic will be heavy, requiring frequent leaps out of the way. Or you square your shoulders and forge ahead, leaving it to drivers to do the right thing.

A skier wouldn't be able to match bike pace. Skiing is generally faster than walking, but even on the downhills you won't hit the speeds that a bike can reach. Uphill skiing speeds are totally comparable to walking. So the trip to work and back would take much longer than a bike commute.

Winter rain screws everything up. Especially now, when torrential rains have become more frequent, crossing ten or fifteen miles without a vehicle, along routes designed for vehicles, would take many dangerous hours. Warmer than average temperatures are still much colder than your body temperature. Wetness saps your heat. You can dress for it, but things still have to go smoothly for you to arrive at a safe, warm destination where you can strip off your wet clothes. Arriving at work, that can be awkward. If you have no place to dry the clothes you wore to hike to work, you'll be putting on that clammy mess to head home.

On my particular route, there is a path option for the last three miles into town. The Cotton Valley Trail follows the old rail line, so it is basically straight and level. But you have to survive to get there. Homebound it only covers the first three miles, leaving you to navigate the highway after that. The trail is used by snow machines, bikes, dog walkers, skiers, and the rail car drivers who have demanded that the rails remain in place. They don't specifically clear the rails for winter use, but if the snow and ice cover is low enough I suppose one of them might give it a try. So, depending on surface conditions and time of day (or night) you might be completely alone or in the middle of a bustling winter scene like Currier and Ives only with more dog poop and attitude.

If I lived close enough to work I would definitely walk most of the time. I lived for nine years without using a car to get to my various jobs in the Annapolis area. Only when I moved to a place with snowier roads and a much longer commute did I get a car and start acting somewhat normal for at least part of the year. I like my spot here, so I can't reduce or alter my commuting route to make human-powered methods work safely for the entire year. Maybe if civilization collapses before the climate does I'll be able to ski the abandoned roads to get to work. Someone will have to start making wooden skis for the winter travelers, while we nurse along the simple bikes that survived from the 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st for the summer travelers.

Like all post-apocalyptic fantasies, that one glosses over the violence and destruction that would precede it. We'll never just flip a switch to the post-apocalyptic utopia. Then again, with consensus, we could flip the switch without the apocalypse. Add a human-powered travel corridor to all travel ways. Not everyone can do without a motor vehicle, but the ones who could do it would be more likely to try it if they had a guaranteed route.

The best thing about a snow-based winter system is that you don't have to pay to plow it down to a bare surface. Grooming snow requires machinery and skilled drivers, but it still takes less time and brute force than pushing snow out of the way. Along my route, a human-powered commuter or transportation cyclist could revert to the regular road when snow season ended. The side path would not have to be maintained for summer use. Most likely, the majority of users would like it year-round. That's a fine option. But a ski and walking path could have somewhat steeper climbs, requiring less massive re-grading to establish the route.

Here I am, planning the practicalities of something that isn't going to happen. I did want to be a fiction writer...

Gig workers come with built-in ADD

 This fall, our shop rat moved on to higher paying gigs. We even upgraded his title to Respected Repair Rodent, but the prestige was not enough to overcome our meager pay scale.

Shop rat also served as lab rat for my grossly amateur sociological observations. Based on a totally random sample of one home-schooled teenager, added to broad generalizations and jumbled recollections of other part time coworkers, I reached the stunningly predictable conclusion that someone working multiple jobs will have trouble paying full attention to any of them.

The type of job makes a difference. Specialty retail means working in a toy store for a certain target clientele. Part time workers who enter that realm probably have some degree of personal interest. In the bike business, intense interest can lead to frustration and a quick departure, if the shop's customer balance doesn't provide enough outlet for the enthusiast's personal satisfaction. For instance, a shop in a nearby town, run by a hard-core mountain biker, had to cater to the full range of bike shop customers, which made it hard for the owner to keep mechanics who only wanted to work on the cool stuff. The majority of repair work in most bike shops does not focus on the cool stuff.

Side note here: the cool stuff is much more time consuming and precise to service than repair work on the contemptibly primitive machines scorned by the technolemmings. Forced to find a balance between an hourly rate that actually covers the overhead and a competitive price that attracts customers, shops probably make a lot less money on high dollar repairs for tech addicts compared to tune-ups and traditional services on simpler machines.

Even a good and interested Respected Repair Rodent is likely to have distractions, since the role often attracts school-age youth in their first jobs. Our previous trainee was a sponsored young racer still in high school. He rated everything on the basis of athletic challenge, but having been in bike racing from a very young age, he also understood and respected the machine itself. After high school he went on to join the Marine Corps because it appeared to offer the most satisfying athletic challenge among the services vying to recruit him. His first choice was rescue swimmer for the Navy, but he just barely failed the eye test. The bureaucracy made it needlessly complicated to retake the test. His distractions from work consisted not only of academic needs as he worked toward graduation, but also his training days, first with the Navy pre-induction group, then preparing for the Marine Corps test. Bike racing does not provide complete fitness.

We do have an unlikely part timer who had only ridden a bike much before he was old enough to drive, and never took an interest by the later forms. His main thing is climbing. Our shop is not a pure bike shop. Cross-country skiing during the Telemark ski craze merged with a lot of mountaineering technique and technology through back-country skiing, and the local tourist economy favors a bit of light hiking merchandise. We have been able to offer the climber access to deals on gear for his primary interest. In return, he has mastered a range of bike skills, and is willing to cover a couple of crucial days of the week reliably.

The masters of the financial universe have decreed that workers shall be insecure, and that many shall stitch together their incomes from multiple sources. As a result, workers don't feel invested in the success of any company, and they pick their favorites to receive anything approaching their full attention. Management has been trying to make labor obsolete since the dawn of industrialization. Labor-saving devices aren't meant to ease the crushing physical burdens on the toiling masses. They're purely meant to reduce payroll expenses. Management may frame your layoff as the gift of free time. "Now you can go find that dream job, or start your own small business! Don't think of this as the terrifying revocation of your financial lifeline! Think of it as an opportunity for self-actualization."

Motherf*ckers who moved your cheese want to give you a cheesy book about adapting to changing times, when the aspiring autocrats haven't evolved their outlook toward the general population for centuries, if not millennia. Their cheese is well aged and fully protected.

Evolution is not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the most adaptable. When it comes to humans, however, that really means survival depends on being able to use intelligence and ingenuity to repair the consequences of massive group stupidity. We have faced mostly self-created problems for centuries. Disease challenges us because pathogens evolve. Weather challenges us, but its intensity has increased because of greed and obstinacy. Our mania for "productivity" keeps us gouging and gashing at the earth in a frenzied grab to exploit resources for profit, when profit exists nowhere in nature. Other than that, interpersonal conflicts at every level are humans creating problems for other humans.

In my own working life, I have tried to maintain space for self expression that I hoped would become marketable. The financial channels that irrigate the creative world have changed drastically over those years. I never managed to put more than a small siphon into the main reservoir at the best of times. Regardless of the near certainty of poverty and obscurity, I haven't been able to reconcile myself to shutting up completely. I can add my own lived experience to the profile of the distracted gig worker. 

Drawing on the example of friends of mine who make things, I did try to take jobs in areas that interested me, so that I could earn while I learn. They had practical skills in mechanics and machining, so they fared better financially. I didn't always manage to score the most interesting part time jobs, and they typically paid as little as an employer could get away with paying. Paying as little as an employer can get away with paying is Payroll 101. Pay as little as possible for any service. That may not mean taking the lowest bid, if a little more money will bring in someone less likely to incur extra costs by making stupid mistakes, but it will always be as little as the employer can be forced to pay.

For a super small business like our shop, the entire pay range is limited by the gross revenues of the business itself. This time of year, with its Small Business Saturday, and admonitions to support small businesses helps very little when the economy remains stacked against small businesses at all. You can't send a flood of customers to a struggling business and expect a miraculous recovery. Look at what happened to the bike industry in the Covid surge: an already struggling industry, further crippled by the pandemic's attack on production and delivery, had nothing to sell to the suddenly interested public until the public had moved on a year later.

There's more insecurity than security in the economy that real people inhabit. People are really good at seeing only what is right in front of them, so an individual who is doing well will not look to the dark precipice just coming into view. A successful person in the moment will scorn the less successful and relegate them to their fates.

E-bikes are the new Muffy

 Two e-bikes were parked by the entrance to the grocery store yesterday at 7:00 p.m. They were black, heavily built, with brand names that had no connection to the traditional bike industry. I usually see them on the road. Their riders wear regular -- non cycling -- clothing, and ride all year.

Lower income people who for various reasons did not use cars would traditionally buy cheap bikes. These were often in the Muffy category. Muffy was bike shop shorthand to describe bikes in the category with Huffy and Murray, two major brands in the degenerated US bike industry. The category also included Columbia, Kent, and any other department store brands. As department stores faded in prominence with the rise of Walmart, the new category of Walgoose emerged. Walgoose refers to the disgraced Mongoose brand, which left the bike shop channel and moved into the big box channel when Brunswick Outdoor Recreation bought them in the 1990s.

When smokeless mopeds first hit the scene, we only saw them in our shop as playthings of the super wealthy. The earliest proponent of them in our orbit would dispute the title of super wealthy, having modestly settled for only a few hundred million dollars. The others are also small fry, barely in the billionaire category at all. We're not talking Musk and Bezos money here, but certainly quite comfortable. The electric bikes were toys. However, e-bikes eventually reached the takeoff point. The craze has attracted more companies than the mountain bike boom ever did. Prices are tumbling, with quality to match. They still cost way more than a Walgoose, but they provide excellent value to a worker who never aspired to be a cyclist. Well, a motorcyclist, maybe.

A smokeless moped is a fantastic transportation tool for someone whose job is already tiring enough, who gets paid as little as society can get away with to do things society definitely wants done. The ones with a throttle option eliminate pedaling entirely. They're low-powered electric motorcycles, neatly protected from the need for licensing, registration, and insurance by the mere presence of a bicycle crankset and a pair of pedals.

Smokeless mopeds aren't cheap compared to a Walgoose, a Muffy, a Toadmaster, or the current incarnation of Schwein. But they offer a much better ride.

Product support for e-bikes can be bad. Because lots of little companies are slapping these things together from the same limited array of parts suppliers, you will find a lot of cheap, no-name parts. I haven't done more than skimming research into the e-bike community online, but I have picked up snippets from forum threads where enthusiasts talk about substitutions, repairs, and upgrades that a knowledgeable person can do. For anyone who doesn't know how all that stuff works, or have a friend who does, electrical problems in particular can be discouraging. But even if you get just three years out of an $800 moped, you made out better than you would with an $800 car, and took it a lot easier than you would with a cheap non-motorized bike.

The e-bikes I see regularly used for practical journeys around here all have onboard lighting systems. They are configured for transportation. Hunting and fishing stores sell versions configured for those activities. You pay more than $1,000 for a solid transportation vehicle, but it has a lot of what you need to have your best chance of survival in the mosh pit that is the American highway system.

Established bike companies offer electrified versions of sport bikes in road and mountain categories. These adaptive aids for the enfeebled are not transportation bikes, although someone might try to graft attachments to them to make them do some actual work. The same companies have their leisure bike versions with varying degrees of adaptability to daily practicality. The more an e-bike tries to look and act like an analog bike, the less useful it is in the broader moped category.

Gas engine mopeds didn't pretend to be bicycles. They knew their place in the hierarchy of motorcycles. In the 1970s, rising gas prices and periodic fuel shortages led to their surge in popularity. They were equipped like motorcycles. Their engine noise and the blue cloud of oil smoke that often surrounded them identified them readily as something that didn't belong on what passed for bike paths at the time. But it was a free-for-all on the streets. Pedalers, drivers, mopedists, all jostled along on the same network.

Classic gas-powered mopeds mostly died out. But the electric version could be around a while. Aside from battery fires, they make better house pets than gas-engine mopeds do. No drippy fuel or engine oil. Quiet running. The only leakage you might have to worry about is brake fluid. They have limitations in cold and wet weather that an internal combustion machine does not, but they still have many advantages for someone who needs cheap transportation.

In endless hope and constant fear

 A road rider lives in endless hope and constant fear. The hope propels us, keeps us going out there because the odds aren't really that bad. The problem is that things can go gruesomely wrong in an instant. Anyone out there who isn't thinking about that stands a greater chance of experiencing it. I can't be the only one listening to a motor vehicle coming up from behind, wondering casually if it will be the last thing I hear. Of course I'm not. The fear has made many riders give up the road.

There's more than hope and fear, of course. We also proceed in exasperation and complete bafflement at times. Those feelings are common to all road users. "Who is this idiot?! And why did they just do that?!?"

Fear keeps you sharp. It doesn't have to be debilitating terror. I'm sure that enthusiastic mountain bikers, safe from motorists on their trail networks, experience fear. You have to look for trouble in a purely recreational context like that, but even at an intermediate level a hazard can ambush you if you forget to respect the possibility.

Hope motivates the transportation cyclist. It was strong in the 1970s, diminishing through the 1980s as the Boomers chased wealth in a wide variety of motor vehicles. It returned with the popularity of mountain bikes in all environments, even those with no mountains, and hardly any woods. But the off-road aspect pulled most riders away from contact with traffic except when driving to where they wanted to ride. The industry abandoned its cheerful suggestion that riders might like to use their bikes a lot more than their cars, and switched to baiting them with more and more expensive, elaborate technology.

My paid writing from the mid 1980s onward tried to use recreation as a gateway to environmental stewardship. Motorized recreation had seemed masochistic to me since the first gas crisis in the early 1970s. At that time, I did not think about transportation cycling as a central part of my life. I liked to ride my English 3-speed, but had no desire to open the rear hub and anger the gods by probing the mysteries of its miraculous functions. But I did see the price of gasoline more than double and continue to rise. It wasn't until I got to university and overcame my derailleur phobia that I also discovered anything like mechanical aptitude in myself. I also discovered the economics of poverty.

It was a safe experiment. I had family. I wasn't going to sink without a trace, the way real poor people do. But I was working within a set budget. I sold my car before the end of senior year because I was happy and confident on my bike, determined to live within my means. A car brought with it fixed expenses in registration and insurance, the need for parking, fuel, and upkeep. I could shelter and maintain a bike in a single room or a small apartment. All I had to do was find jobs I could ride to. Lots of college students in Gainesville managed school and employment without cars. Most cities and towns seemed to have a resident population of bike riders.

Most cities and towns today have resident populations of riders. Cycling survives because bikes are basically good things. This is more true of the ones that are well made, generally older, but the concept is sound no matter what. The riders starting out may have mostly hope and little or no fear. As fear grows, maybe interest dies completely. No one rides for long without finding reasons to give it up. Whether a particular person does depends on their personal equation.