Asshole Dog, Sit Up Guy, Jumper Dude...

For hours a day, the world is defined by the frame of the workshop windows. They look out over the back parking lot.

We call the desk where we take turns eating lunch the Bayview Cafe.

This was the view yesterday afternoon. You could get a clearer shot of the actual scenery and dramatic light by going down into the parking lot to avoid the clutter of window dirt and power lines, but this shot illustrates the view through the actual windows: what we can see without stopping what we're doing.

One day, a hawk landed on the trash hut.

I don't have a camera with a long lens anymore. But you can see it if you click on the picture.

The parking lot also serves the very popular Full Belli Deli. During a busy lunch service, cars might fill the lot, with some double parked in the center, and more circling. It's an overflowing buffet of people watching.

Asshole Dog is a magnificent German shepherd, who rides in his owner's truck. He likes to explode in ferocious barking if anyone walks within 20 feet. When the lot is crowded, unsuspecting walkers come into range quickly. Almost invariably, they are too cool to flinch or jump when the dog's muzzle thrusts out the gap at the top of the window.

Sit Up Guy does not show up every day. He looks like an aging athlete, perhaps a coach now, of something that involves cleats and slamming into each other. He goes in, orders his sandwich, and then comes back out to do crunches on the ground next to his car.

Jumper Dude isn't a deli customer, but he will occasionally flash through during lunch rush to launch his bike off the bank at the edge of the lot.

The route goes just to the left of the tree. Jumper Dude was a mountain biking instructor. His age is indeterminate. He tells many tales of good and bad landings. He's graying, but still lean and fast. For a long time we did not know who he was. We just saw him on the part of his lunch time route that came through our field of view. His skills speak for themselves. He has since become a customer, with an actual name, but Jumper Dude will always be his middle name and shorthand designator. We should probably tell him that.

One afternoon we saw Assault Weapon Kid. A nondescript car pulled in during a not-too-busy time. The first person out was a teenage boy wearing some sort of tactical gear and carrying an assault rifle. I had a moment to wonder if we were going to be on the evening news, but the next people out of the car were a dad-like adult and a younger kid. Everybody went trooping off stage left. We heard no shots or screams. Just another day. Assault Weapon Kid has never reappeared. The weapon itself was probably a super-realistic paintball gun, or they could have just come back from a fun morning at the range.

A guy we dubbed Go Kart Dude was showing up at lunch time almost every day this summer. Last we checked, go karts weren't street legal, but somehow he never got bagged. Of course we don't know whether he has now vanished because of the cooler weather, a seasonal change of residence, or an arrest.

Sometimes the parking lot characters' fame precedes them. Mitt Romney appears to have picked up lunch at the deli on Monday or Tuesday. Back before he was Somebody, Jimmy Fallon used to show up fairly regularly out there during summer visits to his future in-laws. Since we're pretty unhip, other celebs could pass right under our noses unrecognized, but Wolfeboro isn't the magnet for them that it used to be. And then there are the titans of finance and industry whose names are not familiar, who each, from time to time -- sometimes quite a few times -- home in on the beacon of the Full Belli Deli.

Even at our height of popularity, our shop was never a celebrity magnet. At best, one might occasionally drift through so they can say they left no stone unturned. When finished, though, they drop it back on top of us, curiosity satisfied. And I think they tell their friends not to bother.

No hard feelings. People are into what they're into.

The exception is Estelle Parsons, who usually needs us at least once a summer for some sort of bike issue. She and her husband fall into the category of regular customer, since they have a summer home on the lake, and spend at least a couple of weeks there.  They have a couple of hybrids. Before that she had a sweet little European mixte from the 1970s. Nothing super exotic, but a nice example of mid-grade riding stock of the period. In her case, her occupation is incidental. She's a born and raised New Englander. More of a native species than a visiting exotic.

I often wonder how people with multiple homes decide to allocate their time among them. I know the Mittster has several. I would always be stressed, trying to make sure that I got enough use out of a place to justify possession. But I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about stupid shit like fairness and the greater good. Life is actually just a fight to the death, which may be more or less active at any given time. May your luck always hold.

For Steve A

Tubes of Mystery, 2016

Every bike season, we accumulate a bunch of tubes that won't stay inflated in a tire, but remain pumped up for months after we remove them. We are never able to detect a puncture in any of them.

This season brought us relatively few of them. The bike biz wasn't exactly bustling around here, in sales or service.

I added 2016's haul to our weird collection in the basement, still holding air after a couple of years.

No regrets

As I cleaned up tops and slash on Sunday, I kept waiting for Ed Begley Jr. to fly over in a solar powered plane and shit on my head. But I stand by my reasoning in cutting at all, and then in cutting so much. Since the very best thing you can do for the environment is kill yourself, most of us settle for second and third best and call it exemplary.

Around 2002, this is how it looked. As of last Wednesday morning, it looked pretty similar, except that we built a sunroom/music studio off the front of the house in 2012 in a final effort to give the cellist's teaching program a base of operations.

This is the music room when it was brand new. Note the shadows. This darkness bracketed the day, day after day. I would look at the aerial photo of the place on Google Maps and realize what a tiny slice of sky we had.

The trees won't protect you from the government satellites and the black helicopters. They've got thermal imaging and all kinds of weird heinous classified stuff we can barely imagine.

By the end of Thursday, this had happened. Ain't no point in buyer's remorse now. It's barely an eighth of an acre, if that, but it's still a hell of a jolt after 27 years in the shade of forest giants.

White pines are a very assertive species. They thrive where the cycle of fire has been interrupted, overspreading the pitch and red pines that need fire to propagate. I've been tempted to torch a few yards of another part of the property to give those other pines a new generation. In the meantime, taking out this stand seems to have excited a lot of the bird life. Insects, too: because we have not had a real frost yet this fall, dragonflies were patrolling today, and cicadas buzzed in the remaining treetops. But for the sun angle and the color of the leaves, it could have been a summer afternoon. It isn't right, but it's how things are.

Pushing the edge as far back as I did, I can put in a margin of spruce to create thick, low screening from the neighbors, whose logging activities precipitated this whole upheaval. The property line shaves surprisingly closely, within the margin of the trees that are still standing. I want to make damn sure we are not looking at each other's stuff when this is all over. I did not move to a place like this just to stare into my neighbor's back yard. If I could put up with that, I could do it someplace that actually has an economy.

Living in a place like this and caring enough about a bunch of stupid trees to shed a tear over them relates directly to my bicycling activities. I hoped to inspire interest in non-motorized transportation and recreation, starting way back in the 1980s, when you actually had to get your stuff printed on paper and physically distributed to readers. The sprawled-on world I left behind has continued to fester, spawning more and more land rape as the human population burgeons. Even here, things are way more built up than they were when I moved into the little shack from which this house has grown. Fortunately, we have few resources for outside interests to extract, and we're not near enough to anywhere for industry to locate here. Unfortunately, we have to trade on our illusion of wildness, combined with our convenient proximity to the northern margins of sprawl. It's a constant battle between commercial interests that want to rape a little more and a little more to bring in more chumps, and the good stewards who have to remind residents over and over that we lose it all a little at a time.

New Hampshire is among the most forested states in the country. However, the reversion of farmland to forest has been offset by heavy development in the more urbanized southern part of the state. When it comes to wildlife management, clearings and fields have an important role alongside forest stands in various stages of succession. It's all part of the big mosaic. The hard part is waiting for stuff to grow, which it won't start to do until next April.

It would be ironic if Hurricane Matthew blasted in here in a few days and took out a bunch of trees. On the plus side, fewer of them are located within falling distance of the house. If the wind diminishes, we could definitely use the rain. But it would wipe out a holiday weekend's tourist influx.

Oops! I forgot my pants!

Once in a while, on a summer day, with a pair of shorts that is near the end of its useful life, I'll have a momentary stab of anxiety a few seconds after I start to ride, because I can't really feel my shorts and have no distinct memory of putting them on. We do so much by reflex, without focused attention, that I wonder if the right distraction could lead me to forget them.

If it ever did happen, they would send large people with big nets to whisk me away to a nice facility, where I would not disturb the public.

I was distracted this week, because I actually brought one of my own nightmares to life. Ever since I moved to my little shack in the woods, I have had regular nightmares about neighbors doing destructive things that spill over onto my land. These dreams often involve bulldozers, skidders, chainsaws, excavation, deforestation, and utter disdain for property lines.

About three weeks ago, whoever now owns the little cabin next door turned loose a logger on a lot that has been peacefully forested since before I moved here 27 years ago. I heard the chainsaws,  the skidders. I ran out several times to check the property lines. They were unviolated.

A little over a week ago, I got a note. The logger working the neighboring land was someone I had talked to about removing some trees that threatened the house and garage. The Eastern White Pine is the tree most likely to drop something on you. With a height of 80 feet easily in reach, these lovely forest monarchs  are basically a time bomb near your house. I had two actually leaning toward the house from about 20 feet away. They'd been good -- more or less -- since I'd lived there, but one of them had shed a couple of major limbs during snowstorms.

Pine trees can develop majestic structures when they have plenty of space around them. When they don't, they form an interdependent grove. The two leaners near the house were the outliers of a group of four. Cut two and you'd be well advised to cut them all.

I started scrutinizing all the trees in that area and realized that one was falling to pieces, and another pair were immensely tall. Not record setting, mind you, but the taller of the two would easily hit the house from more than 50 feet away. Even if it didn't, it could drop a major chunk on things that would suffer for the impact, such as the leach field.

In a natural forest, clearings occur by cataclysm: fire, hurricane, tornado, major ice storm. These are notoriously hard to schedule and direct. Trained people do controlled burns in managed forests, but not when the stand of trees comes within twenty feet of a house. And the burns are to control undergrowth, not remove full-sized trees.

I realized as I surveyed the grove that I had managed this area like a timber stand, not a yard. When I moved here, I quickly developed a New Englander's clinical practicality. When I had to clear a bit of space for various things over the years, I thinned the stand to favor larger trees. Ultimately, those have to be removed before they start to age and really fall apart.

If I had it to do over, I would have cut more 20 years ago, and started managing it for hardwood trees that hold together better and don't get as tall. It would have made the change less wrenching.

Somehow in the years after 1999, I lost more and more of the hard practicality that survival in northern New England requires. The big pines became familiar. I knew they could literally break bad on me at any time, but they were also soaring and majestic and made that beautiful sighing sound in the wind. That's why I wished I had dealt with them decades back, when I was more human.

On the eve of the logging, I cried. I sat in my dark house and felt waves of loss. I had unleashed the Death Star. Each of these trees is a natural community. I've seen the interdependent plants, birds, and animals that work with the tree throughout its lifespan. Who was I, an ephemeral creature that would be lucky to surpass a century on this Earth to kill off something that could live four times that long? If I truly love nature, I should burn down my own house and live in a little hut of cast-off branches.

True as that may be, I remain too much of a child of civilization to take that drastic a step.

Twenty-seven years ago some of the trees were already quite large. Others gained in stature, subtly enlarging until I looked up in astonishment last week at the potential energy hanging over me. They were the scenery to all that was good and bad in my life here. Even though the practical New Englander in me knew not only that they had to be pushed back but that the space could be managed to nature's advantage as well as my own, the actual destruction filled me with an ache that replaced my appetite and my ability to sleep for several days. I replayed the reasoning over and over.

The logger had said it would only take a day. It took three. He may have done this on purpose. He'd told me that he had stopped short on the neighbor's land, so that the guy could see it and call a halt or permit it to continue. His first break point let me see the grove half cut. I could see that my reasoning had been sound. Saving the remaining trees would not leave a strong stand, nor would it allow light in to promote successional growth. We had to continue.

It was the morning of the third day when I forgot my pants. The clearing that had been a tall forest was a raw cut, sweet with the smell of pitch and scarred by the passage of skidders. This was a logging operation, not the surgical ministrations of an arborist. And the trickiest cuts were yet to come. Trees, commercial size trees, next to and behind a building and overhanging a power line still had to be cut. This was the ultimate trust.

I had been getting up around 5 a.m. and bolting out of the house as close to 7:00 or 7:30 as I could manage. With the shortening days and the fact that I didn't want the loggers dropping a tree on my car, I've been doing park and ride commutes. That meant loading the bike and driving away.

For a normal park and ride, I'll wear my bike clothes to drive to where I park. Even the shoes, uncleated, are fine for driving. But there's no one to see me on a normal day.

I'm a reasonably secure person, but I just couldn't bring myself to wear lycra in front of a bunch of loggers. So I would put cargo pants over my shorts, stuffing the other bike clothes in the car to put on when I parked to begin the ride.

By day three, jangled by all the stresses, my system broke down just enough for me to forget the tights on the coldest morning of the week. I had the shorts, just not the warm tights to put over the shorts.

I briefly considered wearing the rugged cargo pants for the ride, but I knew the climb back up from Wolfe City in the evening would be a chore. I went ahead and chilled my kneecaps, and picked up a new pair of tights when I got to work. There was no exciting indecent exposure.

I got home to find that the precision cutting had turned out perfectly. Precision with chainsaws, skidders, and trees that probably weigh couple of tons apiece still leaves a pile of debris, but that was never in doubt. This happens when you hire someone to be a tornado for you.

The vast majority of the 13 acres under my control will remain undisturbed -- at least by me. Natural cataclysms are nature's business. In the new clearing, we hope to encourage some berry bushes of various types that had been working the margins. And the sky is a welcome sight.