Bread bag technical support

Bread bags on the feet have their own large category on the internet, but in case you don't have you own experiences or an explanation of the principles, here's mine.

In the 1980s, when I started winter camping, climbing, and mountaineering, vapor barriers were the hip thing. Their advocates acknowledged that vapor barriers would turn anything inside them into a swamp, but the benefits of keeping your body moisture from reaching the cold outer layers apparently outweighed the grode factor of marinading in your own sweat for hours or days.

In my particular circles, we limited it to vapor barrier socks, and, for some, a vapor barrier liner inside the sleeping bag. Basically a basting bag for your whole stinky self. I had one in case of an emergency, but I never used it. But the socks became a standard item.

I actually bought a set of coated nylon vapor barrier socks at one point. The coating wore away in a few uses, leaving me with pointless nylon socks I could use as whimsically shaped stuff sacks. Bread bags held up better.

The layers go like this: thin poly liner sock, plastic bag, thick insulating sock, boot. The boots might be military surplus "mouse" boots, classic leathers, or the new plastic double boots. In any case, the VBL kept your foot sweat from saturating your essential insulation. If we were staying out for days, I would have fresh liners for every day, but I would also plaster wet liner socks to my chest when I got into my sleeping bag, to dry them out as much as possible in case I needed them.

In low-speed applications like mountain climbing, you might encounter ferocious winds, but it's still a simpler problem than riding a bike, where you're flying your feet through the air with a minimum wind velocity of perhaps 15 miles per hour, often higher. Heavy, insulated boots provide the real protection, and the vapor barriers just help that insulation stay at peak efficiency.

A winter bike ride is a calculation of acceptable loss. You will get moist, and your insulators will fail if you stay out long enough. If you dress lightly enough to keep from getting moist, or noticing that you have, you have no margin of safety if you can't complete your route quickly enough.

You could try vapor barrier suits like the plastic-coated heroes of the 1980s, but I don't recommend it. Arctic natives don't use vapor barriers. My father overwintered on Baffin Island in the early 1950s, the heyday of the military mouse boot. He ditched those for native footwear right away. He wasn't dealing with the challenges presented by either ice climbing or winter cycling. There's no good breathable option for winter cycling footwear as far as I know. But he also took up native outerwear as more effective than military issue, and the system there operates on the same principle as my winter cycling outfit with thicker, breathable insulators rather than shell layers that will cause condensation on the inside of them.

All factors influence the success of a given system. It's not just a matter of generic human in generic cold environment. Activity level and type of activity completely determine what has the best chance of working.

As I have previously noted, the winter cycling sock system requires more bags. Bagging the outer sock blocks wind coming through the shoe. Even if you do have a winter cycling shoe, it can use the help.

Overboots are okay if the conditions are dry, but any openings for a cleat put a hole where you really don't want it. You could use flat pedals, as long as any aggressive traction spikes on the pedal won't damage whatever you chose to keep your feet protected. I use traditional toeclips and straps, so there's some wear and tear on anything I use as an overboot in wet conditions, but nothing overtly jagged.

Back in 1980, the shop I worked in sold little toeclip tents: fabric fairings that fit over the toeclips to block the breeze. You could probably make something out of all kinds of everyday objects, like those red Solo cups. Just try to make it as sustainable as possible.

If all goes well, I get weeks of use out of a bread bag before it is ready to head down the waste stream.

If you think riding a bike is slow...

 A transportation cyclist in an urban setting can often travel faster than a motor vehicle. Prudent riders have learned not to go absolutely as much faster as they possibly can, because the trapped audience would love to see you brought down in your arrogance, but even at a sedate pace a rider can thread the jam and take advantage of some shortcuts denied to the prisoners of car culture.

That advantage disappears when the commute gets longer, over open highway. During driving season, if I get lucky with traffic, I can get to work in a little over 20 minutes. If I get stuck behind an obstruction, it could be half an hour or longer. But on the bike these days it's solidly the better part of an hour inbound. Even at my best it was a big day when I made it in 50 to 55 minutes.  What is that in metric time?

Going slower than a motorist doesn't feel slow. I know I'm doing the best I can. A rider acclimates to the pace. You know how you feel, and how the bike feels, rolling over the terrain. I have written before about how the variations in my time on the bike are a much smaller percentage -- barring mechanical or medical crises -- than the variations I routinely encounter in a car. You get a rhythm and flow.

Following my successful ride in the rain and chill on a Sunday, I went out on the same route the next day, under similar but slightly less cold conditions. Eight miles out, I felt the unmistakable squish and waggle of a punctured rear tire. It went down gradually as I looked for a good place to pull well off the road to put in my spare tube.

Find a spot, dismount, remove the wheel, start to work the tire off... damn, this is a tighter fit than I remember. Put my gloves back on to enhance grip on the wet, gritty tire casing. Still not good enough. Try barehanding it again. Nope. Shit. Dig around for tools. All I could find was a 6mm hex key left over from when my seatpost clamp kept loosening up for some reason. Well, the tube was already punctured... I jammed it under the beads and pried. I tried to keep the tube out of the way, but it still made two more holes.

Once the tube was out I used the 30-year-old Silca frame pump to try to put enough air into it to locate the original puncture.

Tech tip: always put the tire label at the valve -- or vice versa -- so that you have a known reference point to help you zero in on where a sharp object might still be in the tire. I mean, feel around the whole casing, but it really speeds things along if you have a rough idea where you're looking.

Two problems frustrated me. Three, really. One, the tube had two significant holes from the hex key. Two, passing vehicles on the wet road made constant hissing noises. Three, I only had my distance glasses with me, so I couldn't see detail up close. And there was another problem I hadn't noticed yet.

Unable to narrow my search area, I felt around the entire casing with bare fingers until I felt the sharp end of a common culprit: a tiny, eyelash-size piece of wire. With wet fingers, I had to use my teeth to pull it out. I deposited it down the hollow center of a rotted fence post. Not as satisfying as dropping the little fucker into Mt. Doom, but then it was hardly as significant an artifact.

The spare tube had been in the pack with no valve cap. It had also been in contact with the rusty old hex key. It had only been in there since a flat I'd had back in April or May, but I worried that it might have chafed through where it vibrated against the metal objects. Oh well. Let's pump it up.

As often happens, the tire went back on somewhat more easily than it came off. I put the old Silca onto the valve and started pumping. I'd tried to put a few breaths into the tube before I stuck it into the casing and had been unable to round it out, but I'd gone ahead because I had no other option. Everything was wet, so even if I had a patch kit and had been able to locate holes in the tube, nothing would stick. I had one shot.

Nothing. The tire remained flaccid. Hissing vehicles paraded past. I hoped that someone I knew might happen by, but if they did they slipped past while I was looking down. I don't know that many people, and the odds of seeing one right there were slim on a day when normal people are at their jobs.

The good news was that my route home would only be seven miles. The bad news was that I had no choice but to walk, pushing the bike. I estimated my time in transit would be an hour and 45 minutes. Best get at it.

Crap like this is why I haven't ridden with cleated shoes in years. Once in a while I'll risk it for the fun of feeling full power, but with stiff-soled touring shoes and toestraps I do well enough.

Funny thing is, this was my second hike home in just a couple of months. On one of my last commutes of the season, I was coming down a fun descent on Route 28 on my way home in the gathering twilight, when passing cars herded me too far to the right. I went through a shoal of gravel that had been kicked out from Old 28, which was being repaved. Pow! Hisssssss. My rear tire, a Gravel King, had taken a terminal hit. Gravel's Bitch, more like.

I pulled off at the bottom of the dip, where I could get well off the road, the usual precautions. In that instance, the spare tube was just plain rotten, because literally years had passed since I had a flat on that bike. With no one at home but a couple of cats, and no one I cared to call, I started trudging. That one was only about 4 miles and change. I put all the bike lights on as night settled on the landscape.

Elm Street is hilly, curvy, and narrow. I veered off into the weeds numerous times on that plod. Finally, when I was a quarter-mile from home, someone in a pickup truck stopped to ask if I needed a ride. Just about the bendiest, narrowest bit lay between me and the relatively wider Green Mountain Road, and I could see the lights of a lot of vehicles slaloming through those bends, so I took him up on it. When I told him where to turn in, he said, "Well, that wasn't much!" I assured him that after my long day at work, a cumulative 26 miles of riding, and a somewhat anxious trudge in my fatigue and hunger for supper it was still welcome, but I got the feeling he thought I was a wimp.

With that in mind, I set very strict limits on the type of aid I would accept this time. I generally do not like to burden anyone with the unfortunate consequences of my stupid decisions.  I wish I could say that was a lifelong habit, but in my adolescence and young adulthood I definitely burdened people with my stupid decisions.

At least the dry slot that I'd seen on the weather radar when I prepared to ride that morning was still holding, although a hypothermic downpour would have put the chef's kiss on the whole fiasco.

After only about a mile, a driver did pull up, in a large gray SUV -- not a windowless white van with a mysteriously stained mattress in the back -- and asked if I need a pump. I assumed tire pump... I reported that both my available tubes were NFG, but thanks. He then offered a lift, but I was just settling into a good swamp of penitent meditation. I thanked him again and excused him. I just wasn't in the mood to make a new friend. Or to drag some stranger 12 miles out of their way, because he had been driving the other way when he looped around to check on me. Was it a lovely gesture of generosity, or did I narrowly escape ending up cut up into several garbage bags distributed across 50 square miles of Maine? Either one is possible.

As I walked, I thought about how the bike manufacturers of the 1880s and '90s found a surprising customer base among working people who scraped up the coin to buy what was at the time an expensive item. From the point of view of someone who had to walk everywhere, the bicycle was a miracle. Sometimes when I ride I think about how I'm flying along above the ground, the "stride" of a pedal stroke multiplied by the gear ratio and laid out on the road by the circumference of the tire according to the result. Steps become circles feeding bigger circles, devouring distance. Even on the fixed gear, where I'm unable to coast, I get to rest on the stretches where the bike drives me. The magic of the gear ratio still works. Until it doesn't, because the cushion of air fails. Fsst!

Looking at the bike computer as I pushed along, I could see that I averaged either side of four miles per hour, usually slightly below. On easy downgrades I could lope along at five-plus. Pushing a bike turns into work really quickly. I considered burying it in the woods somewhere and loping home a little faster, but in the shoes I was wearing it wouldn't have been that much faster. And I would have had to drive back out to retrieve the bike. Keep walking.

No one else even slowed down to look at me for the rest of the seven miles. That's cool. I wasn't looking at them, either. I was just experiencing these roads at this laborious pace and comparing it to the slowest I'd ever felt when riding it. Even when I was "almost there," I had to take every single step to get there. I got my 10,000, I can tell you. Actually the phone says 15,333.

Once I got cleaned up and fed, I put the bike in the work stand to put in a good tube. While I was at it, I checked out the ancient Silca and discovered that the dried out rubber grommet in the pump head didn't come close to sealing on the valve stem. So a tire pump would have gotten me going after all. Of course if what he had was one of those Schrader-only electric compressors I still would've been screwed, because I didn't have a Presta adapter.

The next day, in dry weather, I set out with a significantly beefed-up tool kit and the Lezyne pump off my road bike. All went well, but I assume nothing. Changing a flat in the rain or in a snowbank is still a pain in the ass. We won't see snowbanks for a while, but rain, sleet, and assorted semi-frozen splather are traditional elements of November's repertoire.

You go to ride on the day you have

Only an idiot would go for a bike ride in November rain mixing with snow, with a temperature barely above freezing. So let me tell you what I wore...

Cold weather riding depends on moisture management even in dry conditions. Your body puts it out constantly. Exertion makes you sweat even if the air is cold.

Any outdoor adventurer is advised to wear fabrics that are "warm when wet and fast drying." These fabrics are not as warm when wet as they are when dry. If you expect to get wet, add layers to slow the rate of heat loss through the wet fabric.

Quick review: you lose heat through conduction, convection, evaporation, and radiation. Conduction occurs when you put your warm self in contact with a cold substance -- water, for instance. Or ice. Or cold rocks. Convection is just a fancy word for the wind blowing across you. It could be an annoying cold draft inside your house or a winter gale on a treeless mountain. Or it could be the constant self-created breeze as you pedal through the chilly atmosphere. Evaporation is how your sweat keeps you cool in summer heat, or tries to. It's the body's response to rising internal temperature, so you will perspire when you exert even when you wish you wouldn't. And then radiation is just your precious heat beaming away from you in all directions.

Cold weather cycling is just about the hardest activity to dress for. You can block the wind or mitigate its effect with either shell clothing or more insulating fuzzy layers without a shell. I used to use the second option until I got a particular yellow Sugoi wind jacket that hit the perfect balance of wind blocking and breathability. I wanted something that gave better visibility than my former dark layers, without the full panic mode of hi-viz please-don't-kill-me-yellow. When it was brand new it even repelled water pretty well, but that always fails early in a garment's life. I have never been able to reestablish it in any shell garment, with wash-in or spray-on treatments. But it cuts the wind whether it's wet or not.

For the legs, I used to wear various layering combinations of wool tights with long underwear under and/or wool leg warmers over, with bike shorts as the innermost layer. For sub-freezing temperatures, I would add wind briefs over the shorts. Then I got Sport Hill 3SP fabric XC Pants. They are incredibly effective at blocking wind, while remaining completely breathable. Made of polypropylene, they transport moisture to the surface, where it forms droplets or frost that can be brushed away. So for most cool to mild cold conditions it's bike shorts and 3SP pants. But actual rain adds a factor. Under those conditions I need to turn the outfit into a wetsuit. So I put my lightest polyester riding tights under them.

For the shirt layers, a standard crew neck poly shirt is first.

Followed by a classic wool jersey.

And then a heavyweight (actually pretty light, just thicker) old Craft zip-t

Because the core is critical, I always put a wind vest in the system. Again, Craft. This one with a solid rather than mesh back. The chest pocket is just big enough for my phone.

I led with the shell jacket. No need to repeat. In case I had to stop for a mechanical or other unscheduled delay, I stuffed a Craft warmup jacket with Gore Windstopper panels on the front of it into the rack pack.

Feet just hang down there in the cold wind. For cool rides, I put cut off ends of bread bags over the front of my socks for toe warmers. When the temperature drops to freezing and below, I go to liner socks with full bread bags over them.

If the air is cold and dry, another set of bags goes over the medium-weight wool socks I put over the liners. For wet weather, I put the bags on the outside, over the shoes. Wet shoes take days to dry out. I don't want to ride in wet shoes or go days without a ride while I wait for them to dry. The bags provide better coverage than any of the official cycling shoe covers I've ever had, and I collect tons of bread bags from buying my weekly groceries.

For the challenge of near-freezing wetness I wore these North Face Apex gloves. They are the most wind-blocking gloves I have owned (so far). Not my absolute favorites, because the gauntlet is too tight to pull easily over the jacket sleeve, but top-level protection from cold wind once you've wrestled them into place.

Under the helmet: this old liner from when our shop sold hockey stuff. It's just a simple beanie that pairs nicely with the Cat Ears ear covers on the helmet itself. For really cold rides I use a thin poly balaclava, but usually do not have it pulled down to cover my face. For whatever reason, I have not had problems with frozen face. Maybe it's because I try to do more hiking and skiing than riding when winter is in full force.

Helmet gets taped up over the front vents, leaving the rear vents clear. The headlamp serves as dashboard lighting if I ride at night.

The final accessory is the windshield wiper, a scrap of bandanna for wiping my glasses.

The cold and wet bike: a fixed gear with full fenders. It will keep you warm.

After all that preparation to endure character-building suffering, the rain let up enough that I only had a bit of a chill on the front of my arms once the fabric was thoroughly wet. Seriously nothing debilitating. I looked forward to riding the next day in a similarly wet forecast, but warmer, so without the snowflakes mixing in.

Driving Season

 The vast majority of the time, when I arrive at work by car I'm in a bad mood. It's a rare morning when I haven't been held up by someone oozing along in front of me, often exacerbated by some flame-brain six inches behind me, as if I could somehow get the obvious car or truck in front of both of us to go any faster or get out of the way.

I've written before about how the drivers who ooze along the highway then race into town like they're strafing infantry columns or something. The metaphor I used was attacking the Death Star. Sociopathic in any case. Or someone I finally managed to pass comes flying in behind me, probably gloating about how I didn't get very far, because I don't like to drive that way in the tight confines of streets with pedestrians, random pets, and other drivers compressed into them.

One diversion amuses me once I get into town. It's called Lid Game. It's very simple: try to bypass or straddle every access lid or storm drain. It started when the road was in worse shape, so these features were more prominent, and I drove a car with lower ground clearance and worse suspension. It's become a habit now, a minor challenge and diversion. I thought I was the only idiot entertained by it, but then I saw another driver playing it down in New Jersey when I was on a road trip. It will never be as popular as pickleball, but I appreciate seeing another player anyway.

When I'm on the bike, drivers might kill me, but they don't slow me down. I slow down in town traffic because it's better than sprinting through every gap, hoping nothing goes wrong. That may feel like a flex, but no one is impressed, and most of them just think you're a jerk. I try to inspire more curiosity and whatever respect a habitual motorist might summon for some bonehead who doesn't have the sense to drive. Keep up. Move smoothly. Maneuver predictably.

Over the years I tried various ways to keep doing at least some of the commute by bike. They end up taking as much time, or more, than just riding the whole route, and don't save any car mileage. In Annapolis, Maryland, a network of streets provided alternatives, and the terrain was pretty uniform. Driving was always the worse option in the colonial era roads and streets there. Here in rural New Hampshire, alternate routes diverge widely from the direct route.

Your friend up in the sky

 Fully into glare season now, our definition of a good riding day changes from our hopes for spring and summer.

In short: your best friend when the sun slants in from the south (or north in that other hemisphere) is a high, dry overcast.

I do love the late autumn and winter sun, but not when I'm sharing the road with motor vehicles. I don't like it when I'm trying to ride a trail with it blinding me and casting deep shadows among the rocks and folds of a challenging off-road course either, but I really don't do that anymore. I would rather enjoy the stabbing glare from a beach or a mountaintop, on foot. Either that or a nice window letting that brilliance and warmth slant across the cup of coffee and some baked treat on the table beside me.

If your schedule allows it, ride your glare season rides during what passes for the middle of the day. The sun will still come in low, but not as low. A cloudy day will expand your safer window by blocking the direct blaze. I have nearly hit pedestrians several times when riding in glare. Blinded drivers are even more likely to hook a turn in front of you when they can't see you at all, as opposed to simply ignoring you.

You can dress for most weather, including a cold autumn rain. Build yourself a fixed gear for those crappy days when you don't want to expose your good bike and its many moving parts to the water and grit. Riding fixed also keeps your legs moving, which is great for generating warmth and developing a very smooth, efficient pedal stroke. It limits your speed on the downhills and makes you exert as the cranks force your feet around. You might resist the pedaling force or simply try to keep up.

Purists consider a brake to be cheating. They can kiss my ass. Slap a front brake on there to help you out when you need it. And fenders. There's no great virtue in slathering yourself with grime while a cold, wet spray saturates you from below as well as above.

Outdoor riding is always more fun than abusing yourself and your bike on a trainer. Cold weather riding is the hardest activity to dress for, but it's worth the trouble just to get out there and log some actual miles. You will redefine "comfort," but at your worst you will still not be as grody as Fridtjof Nansen and Fredrik Johansen were after more than a year in the same underwear. So get out there.

More e-bike support shenanigans

 You're pedaling along on your e-bike, going to work or coming home, when the pedal assistance just quits. Now you have to power that tank with only your tired legs.

A customer of ours had this happen, along with the plug connection between the handlebar display and the rest of the wiring harness spontaneously disconnecting, and the display unit failing to recognize a charged battery. He bought the bike in April of this year. He's a restaurant worker who has commuted by bike for years.

In simpler times, back last century, bike companies typically offered a lifetime warranty on their (mostly steel) frames, and a year on the parts. The mountain bike era ended that, as more riders beat on their bikes, destroying them rapidly, and the industry moved into aluminum and carbon fiber. Also, with suspension parts like shocks and forks provided by third party companies, the company whose name is on the bike will always hand you off to the suspension manufacturer for warranty through them.

Now, with smokeless mopeds the dominant form of two-wheeled, semi-human-powered vehicle, bike and moped companies fall back on the warranty offered by the specific electric component suppliers as well. This is true whether they are legacy bike companies or a new, moped-only company.

Investigating our customer's options, I read in the booklet provided with his owner's manual that Bafang warrants the motors they make for 30 months, and the other components like controllers for 18 months from the date they leave Bafang's factory. Who knows how long the interval is between that date and the date the bike was assembled, let alone sold to the customer. What a sleazy move. It puts them behind two firewalls: the bike manufacturer's own warranty obstacle course, plus the record keeping between the bike company and Bafang regarding OEM parts deliveries. The consumer's clock starts running out long before they even know they're going to buy the bike.

Fuji customer service initially quoted us a price for replacement, then redirected me to their third-party warranty page when I asked about that. Bafang isn't even listed anymore. When I explained what I had found in the manual from Bafang, the Fuji warranty rep immediately said that they would send the part no charge. So that's nice.

My life, my fortune, and what shreds of honor I possess

 It's No Kings Day 2.0 today. I had planned to trot down the street on my lunch break, like I did during the  summer edition, but we had at least one more person working here that day, and my wife was attending. The whole town was busier, because it's a summer resort.

I will guarantee that my employer thinks that the little gathering up there at Pickering Corner is silly and pointless. It's just the local hippies playing in imitation of the (hopefully) huge rallies in major cities. Like most conservatives, he wouldn't stick his neck out for anything when he can just vote for hatchet men to chop the necks that other people have stuck out on behalf of the disadvantaged. It's conservative gospel that there are no such people as the disadvantaged, only the lazy. Don't have money? They're always looking for ditch diggers. You should have gone to trade school. Lots of jobs out there. This might not reflect his personal thinking, but it's the broth in which he has simmered for his entire life.

I'm pretty cynical. I could easily rationalize skipping public protest entirely. Such spectacles do turn off some people, even as they inspire others. Nothing in the world inspires a unanimous response, positive or negative. The only time numbers really count is on election day. We've all seen how that turns out. Everything else is just recruiting.

Having built my life around ideals that have definitely cost me thousands of dollars in income never sought, that covers my sacrifice of life and fortune. As an occasional -- and in a certain phase more than occasional -- scumbag, I can't claim much in the way of honor, but my life is driven by ideals, nonetheless. However, if I cut out now, I don't just take a pay cut for myself, I impact my employer's fortune against his own priorities. If he lost business because of my idealistic choice that would be on me for assigning him as collateral damage for the sake of my gesture. It's a matter of consent.

I hope that the action around the country lives up to the hopes of the promoters in the weeks leading up to it. They set a high bar, calling it the biggest single day of protest in US history before it even happened. I hope it doesn't turn out to be a crashing disappointment like the 2024 election was.

As I look out the shop windows I get no sense of abnormality. There aren't a lot of people around since the foliage is past peak. The beer joint beloved of the local mountain bike crowd scheduled a booze cruise on the M/S Mount Washington conflicting with the pro-democracy protest. They obviously consider saving democracy to be an eccentric hobby for a few mostly older people who don't ride with them anyway. The few shoppers who drift through here also reflect no political urgency. It's just a sunny October Saturday.

I did see a few people with signs walking toward the protest venue just before noon. They were already headed back this way not long after 1:00 p.m. I didn't get a chance to step out and even look that way to see whether the center of town was particularly busy. Road traffic isn't. As public visibility goes, Wolfeboro's crowd will barely show up. It's still worth doing, and I'm glad that someone did.

The day isn't over yet. Things could get ugly where opposition is more energetic. Around here, most of the conservatives have learned to just ignore the hippies and keep outvoting them. If you want to understand why so many Democrats keep disappointing their most progressive party members and allies, live in a place like New Hampshire for a while and see what it takes to get elected at all. The messaging -- the education -- has to start a lot earlier and run a lot deeper than just campaign ads to voting age adults. And the information needs to be as factual as predictive philosophy can be. Conservatives hate to experiment. A group can only march as fast as its slowest member if they're going to arrive together. A time trial team hasn't finished until every rider has crossed the line.

Early comes late, late comes early, and the middle disappears

 Autumn is here. All through August we were warned, but could put off recognition. September makes it stick. The sun rises later, sets sooner, and slants in lower. The light goes from morning to afternoon with no long bask in noonday sun.

Very soon, dusk will fall too early for me to complete my full commute safely. Route shortening options all have drawbacks. I could start at the parking lot for Ocean State Job Lot ("The Blot"), but that only gets me a little over three miles. I save a little time, but loading and unloading the bike eats several minutes, nearly eliminating any time I saved by traveling at car speed rather than bike speed for those few miles. That leaves me with about 11 miles each way. Not bad for a week or two, before the darkness closes in while I'm still on Route 28. The highway isn't as bad as Elm Street, because there's a bit of a shoulder and  sight lines are better. But people get dopey in the fall twilight. It's a lot harder to judge peripheral clearance in the darkness, so even a well-lighted cyclist is more at risk, especially if a driver is half lit.

Any options that involve parking closer to town also include driving extra distance off of the direct line to get to them. Now I'm really not saving much gas or wear and tear on the car at all. Most of these options require driving on dirt roads that might be rough. All of them require left turns off of the highway in the morning, with impatient drivers behind me and coming toward me. I might get a quick, clean left turn or I might be hanging there, all tensed up, waiting for a gap so I can clear the pipeline. I know that other drivers are supposed to be responsible and alert, but I hate to depend on them.

Most of the parking options in the woods along the way are awkward in some way. I have arranged parking at the driveways of friends and acquaintances, but it was always a little weird. There's a little parking area at Bryant Road and the Cotton Valley Trail, but particularly since the pandemic it's more heavily used. I might find no space or only a tight squeeze, when I'm on a tight schedule. And I burned out on the trail about that time, too. Tired of getting the stink eye and passive aggressive overtures from pedestrians and dog walkers who insist on more groveling than I'm inclined to do. I'd rather be out on the road where people are just trying to kill me, but it's less personal. So I was taking trail parking, but then riding on the road. I felt guilty about that, on top of the time, hassle, and extra driving involved. It isn't transportation cycling anymore when it doesn't reduce car use.

I feel some fear as the darkness closes in, not for myself when riding so much as for what I will find when I try to get back into full-time riding next spring. Age takes its toll whether you're paying attention or not. It progresses gradually for a couple of decades in which you can grumble about being in your forties or fifties. You know you're losing a little bit all the time. But then you hit a point where you're losing noticeable amounts as soon as you let up. You can't take a few weeks off and hop back in. You need to find ways to stay consistently active, and even then you will need to feel your way back in to see where the new limits have been set. My average speed has been fairly consistent for a couple of years, but a wee bit slower each year, and definitely taking more out of me. "Peak form" is not a summit anymore, it's just a shallower hole.

Your riding area may differ. When I lived in Maryland, I was able to use the bike year-round with only a day here or there when snow or ice made the riding a foolish and selfish indulgence. I had the best lights I could get, which were a feeble glow compared to the lights of today, but even the motor vehicles had dimmer lights, so it averaged out. Also, I rode on city streets much of the time, so the municipal lighting illuminated the general area. When I lived outside the city for a while, the commute traversed a few miles of darker highway, but it worked out. I was younger, the terrain was much easier, and the winters were mild.

There were also about 100 million fewer people in the country overall. Much of the population growth has been concentrated in the eastern megalopolis. I lived in it then, but north of it now. Maryland's population has grown by roughly two million since I settled there after college in 1979. Most of its growth occurred after I left. By comparison, New Hampshire's population has only grown by about 350,000 people since I arrived. On some days it feels like all of them are on my route, smokin' dope and texting, but I know that's an illusion. For the most part, smoking or not, they pass without incident. Back in Maryland I was on the receiving end of honks, swerves, spitting, thrown objects, profanity... all the stuff of a crowded society. It was only the 1970s and early '80s, so weapons were not discharged, and only very rarely shown. Mostly the drivers just used the car or truck itself to express themselves. It happens here as well, but much less often in my immediate area. I hear bad stories from not far away. It only takes one to ruin or end your life, but that's part of how we conduct ourselves on the road in any vehicle.

I have noted that more people seem to give way to their hostility under the cover of darkness. I have also noted, and continue to note, that the self-centered lighting on motor vehicles puts forth a blaze of light for the operator to see down hundreds of feet of darkened roadway, but that same blinding glare is aimed at oncoming vehicles with their own blinding glare, so that no one can see. Stick a cyclist into that, even with the best lights you can mount, and we're all lucky if we get through it without someone getting tagged. Cyclists have their own aggressive lighting, which can do more harm than good if they're not aimed carefully. No point blinding a driver if you actually want them to maneuver safely past you.

Headlights on motor vehicles have gotten weird in general with the high-intensity LEDs that supposedly project plenty of usable light while also forming weird shapes unlike any headlights of the ancient past. Navigation lights on ships and planes are meant to provide instant recognition of size and direction of travel. Lights on road vehicles should be no different, given how we're expected to travel at high speeds in tight formations. We're either operating close to another lane or two full of other speeding vehicles or in a single lane, perhaps with bicyclists and moped riders alongside. We have to make quick, accurate decisions. People drive too fast. Some people drive erratically.

Bike lighting can't equal the options available to boxier vehicles with four or more wheels to define the shape of them. Look at tractor-trailer rigs and even smaller trucks. They have lights all over them that define their shape. Passenger vehicles, even the super modern ones with weird lights, still conform to a general headlight/tail light/parking light configuration. Motorcycles and bicycles just don't have enough surface area to offer a large and definitive array.

Mere brightness is not a virtue. Motorcycles with super bright headlights are actually hurting themselves by blinding motorists. No one needs to see you from half a mile away. They need to see you from a few yards away, and be able to see the clear path to avoid you. This is true whether you have a motor or not. Visibility from further away helps somewhat to allow the driver of a larger vehicle to plan ahead, but not if it's so blinding that the driver loses the line when it matters the most.

Motorcycles with dual headlights run a risk of an oncoming or crossing driver estimating their size and distance wrong, seeing them as a larger vehicle, farther away. And super loud pipes just make people want to kill you. Factor that into your safety calculation.

When the commute ends I have to fit riding into the days when I'm not working, or into the margins of the days when I do. Because the sun comes up later, and motorists are going to work in the mornings, a dawn patrol training ride carries many of the same stresses as a commute, while providing none of the economic benefits. It's easy enough to suit up and get on the bike, but maybe not the best use of the time, since other forms of exercise provide more benefits in overall fitness and bone density. I get a lot more core and upper body exercise when I'm not hurrying out in the morning to make the bike ride to work and arriving home already fried from the ride at that end of the day. The rider is part of the machine. It -- you -- need maintenance just as much.

Preparing for a 3,100-mile tour

 Some people really get out there and do it, and it is my privilege to do what I can to support them. I mean, I get paid, but the stakes seem higher when the rider is going for weeks, especially without a support vehicle.

Back in the 1990s I got to do some work for Roff Smith before he rode around -- and I do mean around -- Australia. We gave him shop water bottles with our logo, but I don't think they made it into any of the National Geographic photos.

Roff was experienced enough to be able to do a lot of his own work. And his bike had bar-end shifters, no index-only brifter nonsense. These are two helpful attributes for anyone who wants to experience the full freedom of bicycling.

Our current customer's Adventure Cycling Southern Tier Route of roughly 3,100 miles falls well short of Smith's 10,000 mile circuit around the smallest continent, but it's hardly trivial. Although the ride is a few months away, he wants some preventive work done on his Surly Disc Trucker. Chain. Cassette. Shift cables. Spare spokes. I suggested he have disc brake pads with him rather than hoping he finds them when or if he needs them. His brakes take a common shape, but you can't count on finding the exact jigsaw puzzle piece you need anywhere you stop.

This bike also has brifters. With only a 9-speed cassette, the shifting isn't as temperamental as with ten and higher, but it still depends on precise adjustment of cable tension and cable movement to line up with each gear. As I have stated tiresomely often, in a mechanical system operated by cables, the best option is to use 5mm housing and 1.1mm slick stainless cables. Shimano's stock cables are 1.2, and come with one of two types of coating: the brown stuff that turns into a lint clog, or the green stuff that breaks up into bits of sand. These are always fitted through 4mm cable housing, which is like deliberately constricting your tendons. Quite often, the ferrules on the ends of the housing have rubber seals or long nozzles on the end of them, ostensibly to eliminate dirt. These add even more friction than the fat cable in the undersized housing already provided. The return springs of the derailleurs have to overcome all the drag of those supposed advantages in order to arrive under the cog of your choice.

Because he was getting new handlebar tape, this was our opportunity to strip out the stock 4mm housing that runs under the tape. In checking the rest of the shifting system, I noticed that the stock derailleur had developed some slop. If he was only riding locally I would have let it go, but I questioned whether it would hold up through the rest of his training and then the tour itself. The Shimano Alivio RD-M3100 derailleur has a lot of plastic parts. The pivots in the main body look like aluminum rivets, but even the ostensibly softer metal wears quickly on the plastic, so the derailleur develops increasing play. The shifters have to pull all that together before the cable can move the derailleur to the next gear. Because the industry keeps trying to pull more money out of its addicts, they keep adding gears to the cassette and messing with compatibility, so that older systems, or systems that hang onto lower cog counts, get stuck with cheaper and cheaper parts. I don't mean affordable quality. I mean plastic junk that wears out rapidly. This is supposed to encourage consumers to buy the fabulously expensive, top of the line new junk, which also wears out rapidly, but is way more fashionable.

We had a different Alivio derailleur in stock that matched the parameters of his drivetrain and had more metal in it, but the specs say that it is compatible with Shimano mountain shifters, not road. It has also been discontinued since we brought it into inventory a couple of years ago. This led to some research and anxiety, because sometimes you can ignore the specs, and sometimes you can't. With ten speeds and up, more often you can't. With nine...maybe. The specs for the OEM derailleur said that it wasn't compatible with road shifters either, and yet there it was, on the other end of the cable from Sora brifters. Details matter: the OEM derailleur had the cable leading straight into it through a short piece of housing on the chainstay, whereas the new one led the cable around to the back of the derailleur. If the new derailleur turned out not to work with these shifters, do we order a new plastic crappy one that will wear out sooner but at least be starting fresh, or try to dig up a better one, leaving the rider either without his bike or cutting the housing to the old derailleur, meaning that we would have to replace both cable and housing as soon as a new, better derailleur came in?

Fortunately, the derailleur we had worked with his brifters. It didn't settle right in, though. I had to find the sweet zone for cable tension to get the full range. All index shifting needs to be dialed in, but some always seems to hover at the edge of neurotic collapse.

The answer as always is friction shifting. Learn the ancient ways, and you can stuff any wheel in there that fits. It demands more and more precision if you're trying to shift manually across a crowded cassette of 12 sheet metal cogs, but in friction you won't need to play any of their drive train games. Go back to ten, nine, eight. Get a chain with a little more metal in it, that lasts longer. Get a front derailleur again, and a double or triple crank. Rediscover why those were actually good. When you shift by feel rather than by click, you're less likely to cut your chain by jamming a front shift, which was a major complaint among ham-fisted and gimmick-dependent consumers nurtured by an industry high on its own cleverness.

Note: none of this freedom applies to the world of racing or to technical mountain biking, in which the very style of the activity demands that you buy and destroy whatever gear is necessary to stay in the game. But these are also not the highest and best uses of bicycle technology. 

While we're on this digression, remember that racers will race on whatever they have. If none of this current crap existed, racer personalities would push their limits on simpler gear. Powerful forces far from the bikes themselves drive the competition in more expensive directions. It's entertainment. It's corporate marketing. Big Race is big business, and it needs flash and excitement.

Surly touring bikes used to come with an XT derailleur, when you could get a 9-speed XT derailleur. That was solid stuff, with little or no plastic in it. Now your choices in index-compatible 9-speed are very limited, and none are as nicely made as the old XT. However, shifting in friction, you can use an older derailleur for 8-speed or a newer derailleur intended for ten, and just shift it to where you need it, clickless. Fewer than 8 speeds might not have the total swing to cover an eight-speed cassette. You might as well have eight, since all the freehub bodies are wide enough to accommodate it, and the rear wheel is dished for it. When 8-speed first came out, there was debate about whether the wheel being dished more would make it less stable. Rims with offset spoke holes came out to address this, but there was no massive epidemic of collapsing rear wheels whether offset rims were used or not.

Disc brakes add a new twist to wheel building. Formerly, front wheels generally had the same spoke length on both sides of the hub, while rear wheels had slightly shorter spokes on the drive side. Sizing spare spokes for this customer, I discovered that the rear wheel has the same spoke length on both sides, because the flanges of the hub are set inward to fit the freehub body on one side and the brake rotor on the other. The front wheel has two different spoke lengths, because the brake rotor on the left takes up space. The flanges on both wheels are set much closer together than on wheels from the last century, or early parts of this one. To minimize the effect, rear axle widths have gone from 130 road and 135 mountain to 142, 148, and up. Through-axles dominate the hub market, fixing the rear wheel position where they tell you is best. Another piece of freedom lost to their claimed efficiency.

Any off-the-rack bike you buy now will have parts from what is currently available OEM new. Thus, Surly had to settle for a plastic facsimile of the solid old XT in order to retain the reliable, durable 9-speed chain and conventional drivetrain they wanted on a reliable, durable touring bike.

Microshift offers some 9-speed derailleur options with more metal in them, but I don't fully trust their quality and function. I would rather find some old Shimano or Suntour, or even Campy, and adapt it. As derailleurs in general get really weird to match the current obsession with huge gear ranges in the back, it's hard to find any new, well made options for someone who wants to refuse that technology. Front derailleurs also become more weird and scarce as an industry dealing with declining revenues weds itself to a particular style that they hope will bait in at least a few new users as well as enticing the old ones.

I'm wicked old, and they haven't enticed me with a damn thing in about 20 years.

Just as in the 1970s people rode across the country on their clunky Schwinns and entry-level ten-speeds from Britain, Europe, and Japan, so do riders today make their journeys on the tailored offerings of the modern industry, with all of its shortcomings. Bike categories are more defined -- I hesitate to say  better defined -- than they were in the 1970s, so "touring" bikes are automatically a step up from the true entry level. Their problems are more intentional than the mere quality control and weight problems that afflicted mass-produced affordable bikes back then.

I'd say you can make up your own mind about any and all of what is marketed to you these days, except that the realities of mass production mean that a lot of it is forced down your throat if you don't choose quickly enough and stock up on things you like while the industry still finds it economical to make them. It's hard to get an industry to back up and start over, resuming large-scale production of things it has grown bored with, and trained consumers to reject.

Every generation looks for improvement in the things that appeal to it. Every generation bases its sense of progress on what it noticed when it first started paying attention. A baby born today won't automatically come with a full understanding of what went before. That's highly inefficient for progress as a species, but it's the reality of our limited perception. We need people to fully understand history at the same time that we keep hyperactively making more of it. 

Citizen Mechanic vs. Commercial Bike Shop

Have you ever heard someone disparage a mechanic by saying they were "just a parts replacer?" Have you ever wondered why your local bike shop replaced something that you saw in a YouTube video could be fixed by what appeared to be a simple and effective procedure? Do you mistakenly assume that a "real professional" always has a speedy and economical solution to problems that you yourself found too intimidating or difficult?

Much of the time, bike repair is a matter of replacing parts. Worn chain? Replace it. Maybe the freewheel or cassette is toast, too. Broken spoke? Replace it. Bent rim? Replace it. Whether you replace just the rim or go for a pre-built replacement wheel depends on the quality of the original and the willingness of the customer to pay for the time and skill of the wheelbuilder.

In the days of mostly cup and cone bearings, purists would replace the loose ball bearings every time they overhauled a hub. If cones were pitted, you might have access to replacements for those as well. In high end hubs like Campagnolo, you could even pop out the cups from the hub shell and put in new ones. Short of all that, you would just clean up all the parts and reassemble with fresh grease.

Bottom brackets and headsets also used the cup and cone format and could be overhauled in the same way.

Steel frames and forks could be repaired by someone skilled with the torch. My old Eisentraut only has five original frame tubes out of eight. The chainstays were replaced in 1985. The seat tube was replaced in 1996. The road frame I use now was salvaged by my torch-wizard friends after an untimely roof rack accident struck it down when it was new. This is parts replacement to a high standard.

Through the 1990s, wily mechanics could often contrive solutions that didn't succumb to the plug-in concept that the major component companies were trying so desperately to establish. The industry has won that war now. The technological enslavement of the consumer is nearly complete. Everything has to match or your gears won't work. You can make some minor substitutions in hydraulic brake systems, but you need to know what you can get away with before you commit yourself to a gnarly downhill on whatever you cobbled together.

Shocks and suspension forks may be serviceable by a qualified technician or a foolhardy amateur. You need tools, and a clean place to work. You will be replacing parts inside there.

Some hydraulic brakes and cheaper shocks are not meant to be serviced. They have to be replaced outright when they fail.

The precision demanded by riders today puts them at the mercy of the industry. The reliable mediocrity of friction shifting and rim brakes was easy to perfect, because it wasn't perfect to begin with. The best of it was beautifully made. Tolerances were precise, but the functional stakes were low. Rider skill mattered much more than perfect integration of the drivetrain. It was like, "Here's your violin! It's up to you to learn to make it sound good."

Service was straightforward. Shops could perform many repairs in a day, because procedures were simple. Services that went deeper, like custom wheelbuilding, rim replacement, framebuilding and repair, or painting would command higher prices and require more time. It all had an artistic quality, right down to the way you could mix all of your componentry to personalize your bike or fit your budget.

Our shop has a reputation as the place to bring your older bike. That's my fault, because I will always try to keep one going. However, our overhead keeps going up, cutting into our ability to provide economical service. For instance: back in April, a customer brought in his old Panasonic road bike for a complete overhaul. Another customer, who lives near him, had recommended us because we had done a lot of work to prepare that rider's old steel road  bike for a tour through Canada a couple of years ago.

The Panasonic turned out to have a lot of problems, including a stem rusted into the fork. I managed to gain access to the headset bearings to do sort of an overhaul, but I couldn't secure the bearing very well because he was using an old reflector bracket as a spacer, and the bracket obscured the wrench flats on the top cup. This was a common flaw in bikes of the era attempting to comply with the pointless and ineffective reflector mandate in the industry. I couldn't remove the stem to replace the bracket with a simple spacer. 

The rider made his tour, but had to stop at a shop en route to get the headset tightened again. As soon as he returned from his trip he contacted us to take drastic action on the stem.

A machinist who helped me with the remnants of a cold-welded seatpost had used sodium hydroxide to dissolve the aluminum. I was going to do that, but before I dove in I consulted my mentor, Diane. She sent me alternative procedures that were less scary than building a science project volcano with lye.

Diane's procedure used PB B'laster, leverage, patience, a hammer, and, potentially, open flames. Still less scary than the bucket of lye. I used a slightly modified version. I also did it at my home lair, rather than tie up the shop and stick the customer with our standard hourly rate. The job would have cost him more than $500 and stood in the way of everything else in the repair queue.

Hard to say if everything I did contributed to eventual success. B'laster alone wasn't doing it, so I aimed a torch up the inside of the steerer tube from the bottom of the fork crown. Still nothing, but it was emotionally satisfying. The next day I went the opposite way and blasted it with Finish Line Chill Zone. On that day I finally felt and heard progress. With a pry bar on the handlebar and the fork crown clamped in a vise, I finally heard a CRACK. Reversing the pry bar I got another CRACK. 

I continued this for half an hour, reversing the direction of the pry bar over and over, while gaining a degree or two of movement. After a few hours I could see a tide line beginning to rise. The whole time, I was hosing the area with alternating B'laster and Chill Zone. I had also put the bike inverted in the workstand and whacked downward on the stem with a sledge hammer hitting a piece of wood.

The stem began to emerge, but still only with continuous effort. There was no sudden release of the grip of rust and friction.

Notice here that even after days of emptying penetrating solvents into the area, some of the rust was still dry. 

The stem came out minus its expander wedge. I had tried earlier to devise an extractor with another stem bolt threaded in from below, through two old crank arms and a stack of washers, to draw the wedge downward. It didn't move at all. And look at the length of that thing. It wasn't quite as long as a Nitto Technomic, but it was nowhere near its minimum insertion. Buried! 

I expected the wedge to look a lot gnarlier than it did when I finally got it to come out.

Here are all the tools used in this multi-day process.

Back at work the next week, a mountain bike with weak rear brakes waited for me. El Queso Grande said "clean the pads and rotor." That's one you can find on the Internet in many versions, including the fun ones that involve fire. Here's the thing, though. Pads cost roughly $20 and up. It takes the better part of an hour to pull the old pads out, solvent clean, sand, solvent clean again, light them on fire (heh heh heh!), and put it all back together so you can test ride it and find out that it didn't cure anything. Repeat a couple of times with some minor variations. Get interrupted for various things like bike rentals or walk-in urgent care. Next thing you know, half the day (or more) is shot. Put in new pads. Still get noise. Replace the rotor, finally everything is working quietly. Coulda gone straight to that in that first hour and been done with it. Sometimes the cleaning thing works, but in my experience it's usually just a way to play with fire a bit before actually fixing the damn thing.

A consumer might have time and inclination to fool with stuff for hours, and maybe settle for a half-assed result for the satisfaction of DIY. But in the commercial shop, time is money, and other riders are impatient for their machines.

In the 1990s we did a lot of improvising because we could and we had to. It paid for itself because we got the reputation as the place that could fix anything. But the industry had already declared war on being able to fix anything. And riders were demanding performance at any cost. They weren't satisfied with an old-fashioned bike, no matter how beautifully crafted. They needed vehicles for the ego, to showcase their risk tolerance and ability to heal.

The thing is, durability really is obsolete. How many riders want to own their bike for decades and ride long distances unsupported? How many are going to do their own work, buying all the tools necessary to do it right? Mountain bikes have evolved to withstand heavy impact forces and to stop more or less quickly on steep, rough descents, but the machinery that does this has lots of moving parts, pressurized gases, and fluids that need to be contained. Suspension linkages have lots of bearings, and bolts to check for torque. Tubeless sealant has a very limited lifespan compared to inner tubes. The bikes that seem so indestructible actually need much more attention than the machines they replaced.

Car dealerships have a sales floor and a service department. In virtually all cases, these have separate staff. This is also true in larger bike shops, but in smaller shops the guy turning wrenches might have to stop that and work the sales floor or set up rental bikes. The service area itself which sufficed for decades is now way too small as we need a hydraulics department, an e-bike department, and an ever-growing parts department.

Some jobs that we've done in the past, like rebuilding a three-speed hub are time-consuming, which makes them costly. As far back as 1980, shops could -- and did -- buy complete replacement three-speed rear wheels for less than it would have cost to have someone open up the old one and replace what was worn. Last time I priced Sturmey Archer parts they weren't all that cheap. And there are a lot of variations, not all of which are supported even if you wanted to tackle it.

Independent mechanics can adjust their overhead and cultivate the patience to dig into mechanisms that the public and the industry have left behind. I keep hearing about people who live right in my own patch of woods who "fix up bikes for people." I have no idea about their tools, work standards, or capability, but they're out there. I also know of two amateur frame builders within a 40-mile radius. One has done a repair or two for us on steel frames. In a sufficiently populated area you might even be able to eke out a living at it.

As service gets more technical, a rider has less and less assurance that they will be able to find it anywhere they need it. Even if you learn how to do a lot of it yourself, what tools are you willing and able to lug around with you? I keep recommending a return to elegant simplicity.

Do we really need billionaires?

 As someone who works in a town where trickle down economics drives most of its economy, I see its benefits and the clear boundary beyond which it never flows.

The luminaries of Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro don't give a crap what happens to Ossipee, Effingham, Brookfield, New Durham... Communities with frontage on Lake Winnipesaukee attract wealthy homebuyers. Some of the families have invested in businesses that exploit the other lakes in surrounding areas. Those water bodies don't attract the A-list. They're just good for cash flow. The real life takes place overlooking The Big Lake.

Subtract the billionaires and millionaires, and what do the lakefront towns have to offer in a reality-based economy? The English monarchy no longer needs masts for its sailing ships. Water-powered mills went out more than a century ago. The stony soil is hard to farm. The roads have to wind over and around steep little mountains, and skirt the shores of numerous lakes. Transporting manufactured goods takes longer than in places with straighter highways and easier grades.

Building up a modern economy would mean destroying the quaintness and natural beauty that attract tourists and seasonal residents. Residential development is already doing that, along with the retail sprawl that follows. The state might build up its intellectual economy, but tech jobs seem to be targets of AI. There won't be much left but retail clerk and food service jobs, and those depend on having a decent amount of people around who can afford to buy things and eat out. Oh, and retail is increasingly conducted online now.

Visitors buy things on impulse and necessity, and locals try to support local businesses, but the local businesses themselves have trouble sourcing their products because online retailers feed upstream from their suppliers, driving costs up and margins down, as well as sometimes cleaning out the supply chain completely. Online retailers have a fraction of the overhead that brick and mortar stores do. Massive giants like WalMart can buy with the budget of a small country, effortlessly outbidding a small country store.

There were seasonal residents before there were billionaires. Indeed, fairly average, upper middle class people used to be able to afford camps and cottages to come and rough it for a few weeks every summer. People generally got along fine without soaring, glass-fronted palaces listing for millions of dollars. The boom in the 1980s that ushered in that era drove most of the modest cottage owners out of the area because they couldn't afford the tax hikes that came along with the spike in real estate valuation. It's only gotten worse from there.

It doesn't help that New Hampshire derives most of its tax revenue from property taxes. It was a good scam when seasonal residents shut down their places in early fall and only needed someone to snowshoe in occasionally to check on them through the off season. The more people who live here year-round the more services they need, including some sort of schooling for the young 'uns. Also, the more elaborate the homes, the more care and feeding they might need when the lords of the manor are absent. It drives municipal costs higher for fire departments among other things.

The real estate boom of the 1980s led to a population boom as new residents flocked in to build and maintain the new homes and condos. While much of the new construction went to seasonal residences, the surge required year-round personnel to make sure that everything was ready when the owners arrived. That meant more families with kids in the schools. That meant higher taxes. A collapsing economy would mean more people moving away if they could.

Already, fewer people visit than we saw in the 1990s. Traffic still gets snarled, because the road system was never designed for this kind of population. New England frugality combined with difficult terrain to produce only as many roads as they absolutely needed. Main Street is a numbered state highway. It's actually two state highways that meet at Pickering Corner and turn north for a few miles as Center Street before separating to their separate terminations. Route 28 comes all the way up from southern New Hampshire. A traveler on it could have been driving for a couple of hours already before getting wedged into South Main Street in little ol' Wolfeboro. Route 109 runs from Maine coast sort of east-west to Sandwich, NH. They will always funnel travelers through the center of town. Maybe some of them give up and park long enough to spend money. Or they just crawl along in their air conditioned capsules, maybe taking in the sights, maybe hating every minute. Who knows?

The town has become a center for retirees who can afford it. I would say rich retirees, but where is the threshold of richness? When everyone rode simple, affordable mountain bikes, I had a better sense of the number and ages of children in the area. They might not all buy their bikes from our shop, but we did have the best service department for miles. I don't know what they do now, because we almost never see them. I saw a dip in the school population in Effingham for a couple of years, but that seems to have rebounded. People move to the more obscure communities of Carroll County for their own reasons, like establishing a sovereign citizen compound or taking a shot at homesteading. As homeschooling has grown, institutional enrollment may not reflect the number of families and their offspring. People are around. I don't know all the ways in which they finance it.

Traditional industries include logging and sand and gravel mining. The area has trees and lots of glacial till. One pit complex has its own rail line directly to Boston. Those piles of sand and gravel you see when you pull into North Station on the Downeaster came from Ossipee. Neat, huh? However, shipping the actual substance of your state to another state is ultimately not sustainable.

One rich person is actually a colony of symbiotic organisms feeding off of the wealth assigned to that individual. This is supposed to be the justification for trickle-down economics as the primary model for the distribution of money, but it only goes as far as the personal interests of the named owner. It might work if rich people were perfectly evenly distributed across the country, but they aren't and they can't be. The rich person's discretionary spending goes to the things they like. Our shop happens to have a few wealthy people, both seasonal and local, who like various aspects of what we offer. As time goes by, succeeding generations feel less affection and obligation, meaning that our time as a favored business will fade. It's already happening. The theme park buyers have much more enthusiasm for the little bakery and the boatyard.

To some extent, that's just life. A business has to evolve with the generations as they come along. We're already so old and creaky that the younger generation of riders writes us off without a second thought. We have no representative among them as we did in the 1990s. Someone might buy the name and the tools, and make the business relevant again, but it won't be the same business. Cross-country skiing is even more endangered than road riding in the age of climate and economic collapse. People need money and motivation to want to do laps on a short course of snowmaking in the increasingly common winters when nature does not provide. I have my gear, but I couldn't afford to update it. I wouldn't trudge around that loop on my back-country gear. Well, maybe I would just for exercise during the work week, but if I'm going to trudge I will more likely just go for a hike on my day off.

The world is changing. The economy is changing. Ordinary people have less money, young people have different ideas how to spend what they have, and there aren't enough handy billionaires to take up the slack. We will never be where we were in the 1990s, feeling confident and well funded and full of unfounded hope. The middle class I grew up in was a sustained illusion. The devices that projected that illusion fell apart as the century ended. Don't look back and fall for the bullshit about how a whole family could be supported on one income in the 1950s and '60s, because that was already based on unsustainable factors. Look at the current data and figure out how to do the best we can for the people alive now, and inevitably joining us.

We will die competing for big shares of it. We will die trying to squeeze profit out of every product and service. I don't mean in the sense that "everybody dies." I mean soon, and nastily. Some people are fine with that. Assholes like that have driven our thinking for far too long. They're the ones promoting fossil fuels, reviving colonialist thinking, and making excuses for wars of territorial expansion. They're the ones who have been stockpiling guns in the United States since the 1980s, and lulling themselves to sleep with fantasies of the glorious civil war they're going to have. Because this country has a surfeit of both assholes and guns, they are a political force to be reckoned with, but that doesn't mean by fighting them on their own terms. It won't go well for them, but it will be bloody and waste a lot of decent people's lives. That's how these wars always go.

Unlimited wealth, unlimited liberty, and unlimited personal armament are not ingredients for a pleasant future. While a majority of people might partake responsibly, we are seeing in our lives right now how a minority can use the leverage of money, the threat of force, and a lack of empathy to put survival at risk and make life difficult for everyone.