Kickin' taillights and callin' names?

 Does hostility in American society originate in driving, or does aggression on the road originate in the essential competitiveness and hostility of American society?

Whether I'm in my car or on my bicycle, any journey on the public right of way involves a running critique of the road users around me. It is usually profane. Sealed in my car, I know the other parties can't hear me, nor do I want them to. On my bike, I mostly mutter to myself, while the targets of my ire speed past, sealed in their sensory deprivation tanks. I wonder all the while what they must be saying about me. No hard feelings. It's just how we are. 

When I first heard about the damning video of Alex Pretti behaving less than angelically in an encounter with federal goons days before his street execution by the same or similar goons, I thought that cursing and kicking taillights is such an angry cyclist thing to do. Pretti was an avid rider, well known and liked in the bike scene.

Nearly every road rider has had an incident in which we fought back against motorist aggression in a running skirmish. One guy I met used a penny-farthing as his daily ride, so his favorite move was to ride up to an antagonist stuck in traffic and kick the side mirror off the vehicle. I smashed a frame pump over the trunk lid of a punk kid's car after two of his passengers clammed on me after ordering me off the road. These are things that riders generally do in young adulthood, the prime years for heroics in wars both official and unofficial. But I've known riders as old as 60 who would pop off, yell obscenities, and wave vulgar gestures at offending motorists. As a cyclist, however, he was "young." He had only taken up serious road riding a couple of years earlier. And he was exceptionally spirited. A few years later he got bored with it all, sold his whole fleet, and we haven't seen him since, but he ran hot and hard while he ran at all.

As cyclists, we develop underdog spirit that drives us to keep pedaling in the face of the motorist majority. For most of us it leads to some shouting, some gestures, maybe a fistfight or two. But some riders get more serious about the disparity in deadly potential between massive vehicles that weigh up to several tons, and squishy little humans on conveyances that weigh somewhere between 19 and 30 pounds on average. They actually pack heat. 

I vaguely recall an incident a number of years ago, within this century and possibly within this decade, in which a cyclist caught up to a motorist that had wronged him, and shot the driver, before pedaling away. Bad show, but an understandable temptation. That very temptation is a great reason not to pack heat.

A rider I knew in the mid 1980s carried a .380 in his jersey pocket. I always worried that he might decide to use it. In my own consideration of whether to be that seriously armed, I think about when it would be appropriate. Best I can figure, you only know it's justified at the moment that it becomes too late to use it effectively. Most motorists who are going to kill you on purpose with their car will do it from behind, because they are cowards and bullies as well as homicidal psychopaths. Even with a mirror or a rear-facing camera, how can you be sure that the vehicle setting up to brush you isn't just trying to throw a high inside pitch, rather than eliminate you entirely?

I've had guns shown to me by motorists while we were both still moving. None of them ever got around to actually pointing it at me. In the one or two incidents that led to conversations on the side of the road, no weapons were used at all. If it escalated beyond words, it was just good old traditional playground bully shoving, punching, and wrestling. A gun would not have made my point any better than the foolish fisticuffs did.

Pretti's armament was supposedly visible in his earlier incident, which did not lead to deadly force or charges filed against him, so it seems like carrying was a habit. I haven't seen anything about whether he would do it on rides. But carrying a gun is like buying a lottery ticket. You don't want this to be the day you didn't do either one, in case your number comes up.

When his number did come up, he deemed that it was not an appropriate time to respond in that way. That is so often the answer when it comes to deadly force. It's a risk/benefit calculation every time. The federal goons calculated that they faced no risk in filling him full of lead, so they assuaged their emotions with massive overkill. It's a textbook example of irresponsible gun use. 

The signature vehicle of federal agents is a big SUV. So is the signature vehicle of egregious assholes who like to pick on cyclists, though any motor vehicle will do. We just tend to go with the stereotype of the monster truck as the ultimate emblem of Earth-raping, road-hogging, selfish bastards. Any unprotected human seems weak and puny with nothing but the moral high ground as we face the armored cavalry. Taking a piece off of one of them seems like a righteous blow. We live in that curious space between a nation of laws and the reality that any individual temporarily annoyed could smash us and make a plausible case for why it wasn't their fault. When we do retaliate, we're just as likely to be prosecuted for striking a blow against the sacred property of a driver who threatens us.

At the moment, every citizen opposed to how the regime is conducting both foreign and domestic relations stands in that gap. As with cycling itself, some venues expose you to more constant danger than others. I don't mean side paths and bike parks representing safety. I mean that some places are much worse than others for traffic crowding, social and legal support, and driver hostility. Likewise, if you live where the regime currently sees no value in putting the squeeze on you, it's all theoretical, and perhaps unbelievable. If you're in one of the hot zones, you're under virtual occupation.

In places offering resistance to high pressure from the regime's agents, citizens have an advantage that cyclists do not. They're essentially doing Critical Mass, mobbing the agents with observers and sentinels who record proceedings and warn residents when the goons pull into a neighborhood. It reminds me of songbirds mobbing a bird of prey. Where cyclists draw massive ire with mass demonstrations that slow traffic, mobs of citizens defending their constitutional rights and those of their neighbors draw well deserved praise. It's the same principle of strength in numbers. We need that now. We'll need it for a long time. We'll need to bring it to the ballot box in November.

We'll see what happens. 

Last rides of 2025

 "Second prize is two weeks in Philadelphia." It's an old punchline. I just spent three weeks there, while the cellist underwent a medical procedure at Penn Medicine's facilities.

In matters medical, some things can't be scheduled at your convenience. Thus I got the call to drop everything and get my ass down there at the end of November, to care for her in recovery from a surgery on December second. She would need to go to follow up appointments, lab visits, and any unscheduled turbulence that might hit us as a result of a major procedure.

My annual mileage total is nothing impressive, but it stood tantalizingly close to 3,000 miles when I headed down. With less than a hundred miles to go, I would have nailed it easily. I thought I might sneak in a ride or two while I was down there, because I keep a bike on site, but that didn't work out. I didn't want to stray far from the patient, even though she was making a relatively stellar recovery.

What I did do was drive a pretty vicious stretch of Interstate 95 between Wilmington, Delaware, and Philly, over and over.

I left Megalopolis in the late mid 1980s with no regrets at all. I've devoted my life to quietly advocating against the concept of Megalopolis since I first learned about it in school in the 1960s. I was always a kid who found a patch of woods to play in. I saw early on that they were an endangered habitat. I can do highway driving, but I would rather not.

It's like the line that comes up in various gun oriented movies, where the protagonist declares his antipathy to gunplay. Later on he's forced into it by the triumphant bad guy who assumes that it'll be an easy win. The reluctant good guy nails the baddie with one perfect shot and says, "I didn't say I couldn't, only that I didn't like to."

Drivers between Wilmington and Philly are some of the most aggressive assholes you will encounter anywhere. The worst of them specialize in a maneuver I call "The Delaware Shoot-a-Gap." General traffic may be romping along at 70-75mph, and one of these road heroes will come shooting up out of nowhere, weaving sinuously through the shifting crowd. No doubt they feel proud of their skill at getting ahead of the dubs.

I had to drive the stretch each way multiple times. All of the runs northward were between mid morning and mid afternoon, but the return trips were at night several times. For instance, on the night of her surgery, which was scheduled in early evening, I drove back down close to midnight. The day I visited her during her post-op hospital confinement, it was after 8 p.m. Later, she had a crisis that had us in the emergency room at Penn, and I was driving back around four in the morning, after sitting with her for twelve hours, waiting for her to be officially admitted. One of my jobs was taking care of her cats, so I did have to get back down to her work-season apartment.

I looked like this a lot:

This picture is from the morning after her actual surgery. She texted me at 7:00 a.m. She'd been awake since 5:00 a.m. And she'd had the advantage, despite having a surgical team remodeling her insides, of being under heavy anesthesia, whereas I had been languishing somewhat anxiously in the waiting "lounge" for hours. Then I had to drive on 95. I got to bed after 1:00 a.m.

I figured out within a couple of these trips that the secret to 95 was to merge onto it like you're throwing yourself into a bar brawl, work your way to the left lane to cozy up to the center barrier, and floor it. Do whatever it takes to hold your place. Sometimes you have to wedge into the middle lane to slingshot some terminal asshole who can't find a hole to weave through, but for the most part the southbound key is that left lane, and 75-80mph.

It's fucking insane, but it's their normal routine. Pieces of car and truck bear mute witness to the calamities that their haste brings them from time to time, but in the three weeks I navigated the area I only saw one, on my transit north as I began the trip home. Some idiot in a flashy Porsche with race numbers and shit had gotten tangled with a bland family minivan as we all navigated a heavy rain with gale force winds during the latter part of rush hour. No one appeared to be injured, but the sporty car was badly dented front, rear, and on  the one side I could see. Other than that it was just a daily series of miracles in which I nearly got clipped or nearly nailed someone hovering in my blind spot several times, but made no contact.

The northbound run was trickier, because we had to exit on the right, but needed to avoid getting sucked into a lane that then peeled off entirely. Hugging the left wall could get you trapped over there, but the middle lane makes you everybody's punching bag.

I hate that shit.

Eventually, the cellist was ready to send me back north and rely on her local support team of excellent work colleagues. I had missed a moderate snowfall and some temperature swings that meant my driveway will be a chunked-up mess of frozen ridges until spring, but what can you do?

The best part is that the roads were clear and dry on a day when I could actually get out on them.

Yesterday was sunny and I had a couple of items to take to the post office. Pump up the tires and suit up. Temperature 18 degrees F. Light westerly winds. What would I find after three weeks of basically no exercise? Fortunately, with the air that cold I had no urge to push for high speed.

Snow was forecast for today, but the forecast had it starting later in the morning. Today's conditions were more demanding, with colder air and fully gray skies. The sun isn't strong this time of year, but when it's bright it imparts emotional warmth, and some actual warmth on darker clothing. Still, I managed to push my sore legs around one more time. The storm forecast has gotten bigger and bigger, and I will be pulling more hours at work than I have since the 1990s, so probably no rides until spring arrives. I'll just run the stairs in my house every day. Weight-bearing exercise!

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.

Consistency, fitness, and junk food

 As Driving Season winds down for this winter, I endure the last few commutes in which I am completely at the mercy of whoever is in front of me. It will probably be more than a few, given our typical weather, but the trend is clear. Daylight Relocating Time has started.

Bike commuting time in transit is much more consistent than driving time. I've written about this before. My average speed follows a predictable curve, increasing to a peak in July before tapering as the summer drains away again into autumn. As age takes its toll, I don't know from one season to the next whether I will make it to the previous year's high range. Just feel it out carefully and settle into a moderate, steady pace. Don't stress the cardiovascular system or the joints. Whatever the average turns out to be, I can set my starting time to get me to work more or less on time. Usually less, but that's not the fault of biking. I can have just as little enthusiasm for punctuality when I'm trapped in the car.

Bike commuting was part of a long-term, open-ended strategy to provide consistent exercise around scheduled employment while saving lots of money and burning off my consumption of snack food. Lots of money is a relative term. I've never earned lots of money in my life. But I haven't pissed away a lot of it on motorized activities, particularly getting to my various jobs. Having my winter job at a cross-country skiing shop and touring center has helped somewhat with the winter interruption to cycling, but I can't count on getting out there as regularly as bike commuting. I even wrote a song titled Snacking out of Boredom and Depression about the toll that the dark and frozen -- or inadequately frozen -- months can take.

Learning to bake has given me greater control over the ingredients in what I make, but it has also made it a lot easier to slap together sweet comfort carbs. And I'm not quitting. I built a whole lifestyle and career around not having food discipline, dammit! At some point, your consciousness ends as your energy is recycled into the universe. Have a damn brownie. Have two. Then go run or ride around.

The rest of my diet is generally pretty healthy: meals made with few ingredients, a high proportion of non-meat items. It looks even better if you count maple syrup and coffee as fruit juices. Oh yeah, and chocolate is from plants, too. I just need to get out there and burn it off. It's all fuel.

Passing Cyclists

 A few days ago, I drove from my little town on the eastern border of New Hampshire, to Middlebury, on the west side of Vermont. The next day, I drove back. The trip required two mountain crossings in Vermont, on roads enjoyed by cyclists.

I don't enjoy passing cyclists when I'm driving. I can't always give a whole lane any more than I expect and demand that motorists always give me a whole lane. I would much rather have less space and keep motorists flowing past me and out of my life than be a stickler for the perfect pass.

The most challenging places to pass were on the two gaps, Middlebury Gap on 125 and Rochester Gap to the east. Coming west over Rochester Gap had been especially annoying. I had a parade of drivers behind me who would have loved to rip down it at unbelievable speeds, while I was toddling along with three adults, a cello, suitcases, and snacks for an estimated total load of about 700 pounds, in a vehicle  not designed for agility on a mountain road so rough and narrow that our whole train had an ambulance trapped behind us for more than five miles before the weedy ditch appeared to fill in enough for me to pull into it. None of the flamebrains behind me darted around after the ambulance passed. I had to scrape them off at the first opportunity on the wider and more accommodating roadway over Middlebury Gap. That was Friday afternoon.

On Saturday, as we reversed our route, there was almost no motor traffic. It was the weekend. Intrepid cyclists tackled the hills on a beautiful New England summer day that was not too hot, after a night that had been comfortably cool.

The lack of motor traffic helped a lot, but I still kept catching up to riders approaching blind drops. Any normal motorist would just go for it and hope for the best. I waited until I had a clear view before punching it to get clear ahead before I had to scrub speed for the next tight bend. I imagined driving a team car for one of the major European tours.

Murphy's Law of Meeting Traffic states that any time a motorist wants to pass a cyclist and there is an oncoming vehicle, the motorists will synchronize their speeds so that everyone gets wedged into the same space at the same time. It takes noticeable action by the overtaking driver to make sure that doesn't happen. A cyclist who does not expect it may be confused and a bit alarmed by a vehicle hovering back there. Other motorists trapped behind me might fume. But especially on a mountain road when either motorist might have trouble braking and steering if they're going too fast, it's important to anticipate what could go wrong and avoid it.

When the roads are crowded, it's impossible to ensure safe passing all the time. I will pass safely, but other motorists in the line are just as likely to keep barging through. This is why riding around the most scenic lakes of the Lakes Region in full tourist season is so stressful and unpleasant. Since the 1990s, when I would do multiple centuries in a season, there must be a solid million more drivers on the roads around here, adding visitors to new residents who have moved in.

It's getting worse as climate refugees who had second homes are preparing them as refuges for when their old places get too hot and run out of water completely. It'll still be hot here, just not quite as hot as where they were. And when we figure out how to manage the new style of torrential rainfall we will have less devastating flood damage and more facilities to collect the overabundance when it hits. For now, though, we just see more of our summer folk in what used to be the off season. I wonder if enough of them will move here during their child-bearing years to upgrade the schools significantly... The area was already attracting new residents, and the old ones were breeding new drivers, most of whom had no road cycling experience as kids. We see more and more hot rods and trucks, driven with the bravado of teenagers.

If gas prices had only increased at the rate of inflation, fuel would be $2.17 a gallon. Quit wasting your money, kids! Find ways to have fun that don't enslave you to quite as many corporations.

"Road Biking is so dangerous!"

The road is the least popular place to ride a bicycle. We don't bother to stock road bikes anymore. I am the last person associated with our shop who does ride on the road. This may include former employees as well as the current staff. Among our clientele, road riders are a minority. Some converted to gravel. Some shifted their concentration to mountain biking. Many only ever mountain biked. And we have lots of path riders. Some of the path riders used to ride the road and gave it up because of age-related deterioration, or traffic fear.

I've said before that Wolfeboro is not a nice place to ride a road bike. When the summer people aren't here, some of the local drivers like to be reckless with the clear running room. The major arteries of the town are state highways, so there's some amount of through traffic all year. Lake season adds thousands of seasonal residents and visitors, some of whom arrive already hostile to cyclists. You can sneak past some of this to escape to the north and west, but you have to go farther and farther to get to a bit of peace before you head back into it. I'm sure that lots of towns have their own discouraging aspects.

Road riding is somewhat dangerous, though not as dangerous as it seems. We are "vulnerable road users," at the mercy of the drivers around us. But those drivers present a far more gruesome hazard to each other.

Last week, a northbound driver on Route 16 over in Wakefield crossed the center line and hit a southbound vehicle, killing the driver and sending the passenger to the hospital. The offending driver also ended up in the hospital, but has not died. The accident is under investigation. State police have asked for witnesses and any dashcam footage that someone might have caught. It sounds pretty forlorn. Did anyone see? Did anyone happen to capture the grim event on camera? What could any of that tell us about why some numbnut crossed the centerline at highway speed and smashed into some poor idiot just driving along? Route 16 is notorious for this type of crash. One back in the 1980s was attributed to a yellowjacket that flew in through the driver's open window and stung him in the crotch. That grim bit of slapstick cost several lives.

Crumple zones, air bags, passenger compartment reinforcement and restraints all improve the survivability of a motorist blunder, but the death toll is still in the tens of thousands every year. It's really easy to hit combined impact speeds of 80, 100, 120 mph when vehicles collide on two-lane roads, or someone ploughs through the median on a divided highway to visit the opposite lanes. In the course of a normal day of driving you pass thousands of people. Any one of them could be The One.

Then there are motorcycles. I thought about getting one back in the late 1990s, when a friend was selling a nice vintage BMW. It might be nice for those days when I was too tired to pedal, but I didn't want to be stuck in a car and have to take up a full parking space at work. But that got me thinking about what I was really gaining. Not much, actually. On a motor vehicle I would be obligated to keep up with the other traffic, without the easy option to pull off and get out of the way, the way a bicyclist can. It seemed like all of the vulnerability with none of the best advantages.

Lots of people love riding motorcycles. Everyone acknowledges the danger compared to being in a car, but I'll bet that most people think that a motorcycle conscientiously operated by a properly dressed and helmeted rider is safer than a bicycle in traffic. Maybe yes, maybe no. In stop and go traffic where the vehicles can accelerate to 30 mph or more between slowdowns or stops, the motorized cycle will be able to keep up, while the bicyclist will have to deal with motorists who are probably already impatient squeezing past in the faster sections. But just in the general run of things, the motorcyclist is exposed to impacts at higher speeds, and is in danger not only from the mass of other vehicles, but from the mass of the motorcycle itself.

A lot of road bike safety depends on traffic volume and speed, topography, and the design of the road itself. I don't think that heavily urban areas offer road biking as such. Streets call for different strategy and tactics. It's the difference between a road race and a criterium, only with a full-on tank battle superimposed on it. There are definitely places I would avoid on my bike, but I would also look for ways to circumvent them so that I could continue riding.

If nothing else, when I'm pedaling along the highway on my way to work, if someone wants to come across the centerline and peen me, they're going to have to come a lot further to reach me than if they come at me when I'm trapped in the lane in my car, winging along at 60.

TIT

Driving season always gets me thinking about Time In Transit. I've written about it a number of times before, but a new entry puts it back on top of the pile.

The recent vacation week marathon required that I not only arrive on time, but early, to prepare the rental area for the coming day. A lot cannot be done the night before, because rental gear is being returned wet right up to closing time. The boots in particular have to be laid out with air space around them, so they can dry, before being tucked back into the close confines of the boot shelves. This could be a few pairs or 30. Or more, if we had a phenomenally big day. Thus, I am shooting to arrive a half-hour early to brush off the dried mud and rack the boots. After the boots I hang the ski poles. They are hung on pegs close set to fit as many as possible into the rack. I try to rotate them so that the same few aren't always going out. Then there might be snowshoes to brush off and hang, as well.

On a good day I can drive to town from home in 20 minutes. On a really good day, I might shave that down with a bit of sociopathic speeding on the highway stretch. That in itself demonstrates the creeping sociopathy bred by driving all the time. I will ask myself whether I am behaving like someone I would want to share the road with on my bike. The answer is a conditional yes. If there are cyclists, I amend my driving to cooperative mode. But absent any fellow pedalers I am easily lured into speeding, and playing the entire paved surface for cornering lines. I drive the way I ride.

On a bad day -- the more typical circumstance -- I get behind someone driving slowly, perhaps erratically, and the oncoming traffic eliminates any chance to pass legally and safely. I do not pass illegally and unsafely, though I do admit to the temptation. The highway department has eliminated two or three passing zones, all of which I had used over the years. I miss them.

The difference in transit time is considerable when I get behind someone pokey. If you take 20 minutes as the benchmark average for an unobstructed run, 30 minutes is 50% slower. I always have trouble with calculations like this, because 10 minutes is 33.33333% of 30 minutes. And 30 minutes is not an unreasonable transit time. When cycling, I prefer to be passed by someone going for 30 minutes rather than 20. On the other hand, if the road is clear enough for a clean 20-minute trip, the faster driver has plenty of room to give me space, and most of them do. It only gets ugly when traffic is tight and a speeder is still trying to push it. That's when people pull out to pass coming right at me, or try to pass in gaps that they should have declined. I will say that such shenanigans are fairly rare.

So there I am in bike season, riding along the highway at a steady speed. My time in transit varies very little. A major delay, like a flat tire, will blow the average completely, but if all goes well I can count on completing the inbound run in less than an hour. Even a ten-minute variation from a 55-minute average TiT is only about 18%. Most of the time, my longer times in transit are from route variations.

Weather can make a difference to drive time. This has been a somewhat snowy winter for commuting. But the difference still hinges more on traffic than on absolute driving conditions.
With a decent set of snow tires and years of experience, a driver can move along pretty well with no one else on the road. It's definitely below the dry pavement average, but still satisfactory. I've pushed through some pretty deep unplowed fluff with only front wheel drive, given a decent set of tires. But get behind someone handicapped by bad rubber and anxiety, and the drive turns into a slog. And not all snow is created equal. When the plow trucks have been on it, they may leave behind a fairly well scraped surface with exposed pavement or they may pack it into a skating rink worse than it was before they attended to it.

Winter conditions would have a big effect on bike time in transit. In years past I have made a few winter commutes, when the weather was not snowy, so the only obstacles were cold and darkness. You can dress for cold and light for night. I would also only ride on work days when my schedule allowed me to complete the whole route before nightfall. My interpretation of "nightfall" was loose enough to put me into dangerous dusk, but I was inexperienced and thoughtless enough to go for it. But the game changes when you add snow, ice, slush, and wide, deep puddles of brine. Whatever your legal rights to the road may be, when you force the interaction between motor vehicles and bicycles you will arouse feelings not easily addressed in the time you will have available to debate them with a steamed motorist.

Pushing the beginning of the season, I have set out in adequate conditions from home, only to find the highway coated with ice on the height of land on Route 28 coming into North Wolfeboro. Even worse, the shoulder might be coated, but the travel lane clear, forcing me to squeeze in with the flow of commuters driving to work, or risk falling beneath their wheels if I stay to the right. There's no good place to be in a situation like that. I reiterate that in some circumstances the assertion of legal rights will create more ill will than acceptance among the motoring public.

Studded tires are a limited answer. The metal provides sketchy traction on pavement, and wears down, so you might not have as much of it as you would like when you finally get to ice. The tires are heavy because of all the metal, and they're not cheap. And if you've ever had to fix a flat tire that's stiff, cold, wet, and studded with metal spikes, while hunkered down in a snow drift, as passing motor vehicles spray you with salty splather, you're not eager to repeat the experience. All the while, the clock ticks on your time in transit to work.

I've used studs on my park-n-ride path commute, but in virtually every year the snow has arrived deep and soft, and hung around until mud season. And the "park" portion becomes very difficult because many path entry points are not plowed out.

In full-on bike season, I run into traffic delays when I use the rail trail inbound. I run into some delays outbound as well, but I'm not shooting for a fixed arrival time. Because the path is very badly designed, improvised around the strictures of an active rail line, all users are crammed between the rails for much of its length. I have written a lot about its disappointing shortcomings, to no avail. The rail car club has disproportionate leverage, and bikes are at the bottom of everyone's priority list. Inbound on the path I can be forced to a walking pace as I accommodate pedestrians who all give me the stink eye anyway.

On wider paths, a rider can still encounter pedestrian volumes that fill the available space, as well as slower riders. Is the answer more lanes?

In urban and suburban areas where the majority of people drive to work, commuters allow for traffic by leaving earlier. More traffic? Leave even earlier. Super commuters living more than an hour by car from their place of employment have to pad their expected time in transit to allow for the time they know they will spend at a steaming standstill in normal morning gridlock. If by chance they get all the breaks and arrive at work early, congratulations! They've just flushed that free time down the toilet of gainful employment. I speak from the point of view of someone who wanted to have a life, not just a job and possessions. So time means different things to me than it might mean to them. From a purely biological standpoint, we all need only to reach maturity, find a mate, reproduce ourselves, and die. That makes everything else a luxury. It sounds pretty grim, though. If we're going to be that simple, I say we just go all the way back to photosynthesis. It's self-contained and solar powered. We wouldn't be bothering anyone. Make the world safe for stromatolites again.

Motorist Logic in Action

Conflicts with bicyclists and pedestrians are just symptoms of the selfishness and poor judgment motorists routinely exhibit toward each other. In addition to being a means of conveying people and their stuff from place to place, motor vehicles also serve a function like the pads worn by American football players, or ice hockey players. Motoring is a contact sport.

In the past two days I have gotten to witness two classic examples of motorist logic on my morning drive to work.

On Thursday, the weather was warm and wet. The landscape was shrouded in fog as the snow pack sublimated into vapor. Along with perhaps eight or ten other drivers, I came up behind a state highway truck winging back the plow drift along Route 28. The speed limit for most of that part of 28 is 55 miles per hour. In good weather, that means most of the locals are doing 60-65. Because the weather has not been good, the road surface was a mix of chunked-up wet ice, slush, and bits of exposed pavement, slathered with sand and brine. Average speed had been about 45 until we all caught up to the state truck. That vehicle was going about 18-25 mph. Its bulk filled the lane as its side blade bounced along the shoulder, shoving the snow further back to make room for whatever else the winter might deliver.

We were on a long, steady climb. The center line is double yellow. The height of land is a narrow crest, so the approach is blind from both sides. In spite of fog, unsteady traction, and the blind hill crest, impatient drivers went one after another out around the plow truck. There was no skill involved. The drivers had no way to judge whether it was safe to pass. It was a complete gamble. But these suicidal lemmings weren't just gambling with their own lives. They were also betting the lives of anyone who might be coming the other way.

No one happened to be coming the other way just then, but 28 is a busy road, especially on a workday morning. Passing there and then was a selfish and stupid move. Unfortunately, those traits are common.

Today, on a different part of 28, we were all moving along much better on mostly dry roads, when I saw a big work truck pull partway off the travel lane and throw it in reverse. A plastic container had blown out of the truck bed. The driver's automatic reflex was not to pull safely off the road and walk back, it was to back up against traffic. Driver's ed was a lot of years ago, but I definitely remember being told quite emphatically that you do not put it in reverse and back up on a highway. But we are a motoring culture. We drive as close as possible to our destination, and walk as little as possible. Of course you stay in your truck and back up against oncoming traffic to try to rescue your unsecured property from the center line of the road. No other driver will fault you for behaving completely normally. What else is a driver supposed to do?

The driver's selfish and dangerous maneuver increased the chances that another driver would hit the item that he was hoping to rescue, as we all tried to work around truck and its lost cargo.

In both cases, drivers were doing things that they shouldn't have done, that lots of people do anyway, and that most people get away with. It only reinforces the custom, because drivers so seldom suffer any consequences.

A motorist in free flight will react negatively to any obstacle that breaks the flow. The same fixation on forward motion prompts a driver squeezing past a cyclist or blazing around a plow truck on a blind hill crest in the fog.

Interestingly, the driver backing up on the highway to suit his own convenience has a philosophical kinship to the cyclist who rides against traffic and ignores one-way streets. It's the same kind of personal relationship with the law and right of way in either case. "It's only me, it's only here, it's only now." If everyone else would lighten up -- and adapt to my personal wants -- everything would be fine. A chunky truck going backwards on a highway has a bit more leverage, but the self-centeredness is spot on.

The cyclist who rides on the sidewalk is analogous to the driver who pulls into a designated cycle lane to get ahead in traffic or to park. These equivalencies are not meant to excuse the behavior of either side, only to emphasize that the problems are not motorist or pedaler problems but human problems. Wrapping the human in a motor vehicle makes the offenses worse because of the damage that the hard outer coating can inflict on softer opponents, but it's pilot error in either case.

We all want to flow smoothly to our chosen destination. Cyclists like to maintain speed. We take advantage of our small size and maneuverability to bend traffic rules in ways that actually enhance our safety and make traffic flow better. But some of us abuse the power and commit gross infractions that don't end well. If the result isn't an outright crash with injuries or death, it is at least a bad public relations move, with far-reaching consequences in the bike-hating community. Everyone bears some responsibility for making a multi-mode transportation culture work. However, the bigger the vehicle, the greater the responsibility.

Rationing gas since 1979

As the human species bumbles toward the ugly end of the petroleum era, the slower students in the class are working harder and harder to extract and transport the remaining reserves of something we should have cut back on using about 40 years ago.

I did start cutting back almost 40 years ago. It was mostly an economic move, but I considered broader benefits as well. The 1973 gas crisis hit about four months after I got my driver's license. I got to enjoy just that brief time of 28 cents a gallon regular and 70 mile per hour highway speeds, and then bam: gas prices doubling, lines around the block, rationing. It was the future we'd been told was coming when the finite oil reserves finally ran out. Sure, it was an artificial preview, but I had read enough about non-renewable resources to get the idea that a love affair with the automobile might not be a long-term relationship. By 1979, I was well prepared to go car free to maximize whatever meager income I could garner with a brand-new degree in creative writing.

The writing degree was starting to pay off by the mid 1980s. At that time, I married into a car, but it was obvious that the average wordsmith was not going to be rolling in dough, and I had yet to establish myself as above average. I still used the bike to get around as much as possible. What driving I did looked like part of recreational activity but actually supported my work as an outdoor writer.

I never cracked the middle ranks, let alone the top ranks, of outdoor writers, because I never took the kind of cool trips anyone wants to read about. I drove less and less. You need a car in rural New England, but you don't need it all the time. In driving season, I go to work, I go to music class, and I run whatever errands I need to on my days off. In bike commuting season, the car sits for days at a time. Rationing. Whenever I have considered working somewhere far from home, I calculate the cost of having the job against what I would expect it to pay. I factor in the time spent sitting in the car, not getting to ride at all, buying gas, pumping out fumes, getting weaker by the day.

I'm always considering how I can avoid driving. It's bad, in a way, because I'll find that I haven't left my house in a couple of days if I don't have a pressing reason to go out. It reinforces an unhealthy tendency to avoid people, even when I like them. That, and I continue to try to hold space open for my creative ideas, as the odds grow worse and worse that any of them will ever amount to crap. I don't know what to call most of what I do, or where to send it for consideration. There are millions of other people shopping their opinions around. Maybe I'll make some more coffee, have a snack...and will you look at the time? I have to get laundry done before my work week starts again. And the cats need to be fed.

In the old 28 cents a gallon days, my father used to like to go for a drive in the evening. He'd call me like a beloved pet, and we'd tool around for an hour or more, talking. It was like stoner chat without the weed, philosophical rambling and chance observation. When I was in my early 20s, my bike rides with a close friend were that sort of unplanned exploration. We rode around for a couple of years before we ever started mapping out routes beforehand. We'd just ride and talk and see what was down this road or that, and eventually figure out how to bend it back toward our starting point.

I find it is less fun completely alone. Some people glorify solitude and their undiluted enjoyment without the demands of a companion. It can be a good way to think, if you have something you want to think about. But it can also be rather bleak.

Commuting is okay alone. It's utilitarian. I hardly ever see other riders during that time, because most other riders drive to work around here. The few who commute by bike come in on different vectors, and at different times. If someone is out for an evening training ride, they're usually going the other way or hammering. By evening, I'm in no mood to hammer.

The gift of car trouble

Just as some customers drive a considerable distance to have me work on their bikes, I drive a considerable distance to have a particular mechanic work on my car. He's been worth the trip since 1988.

The route to his shop is a long and challenging bike ride. Any route from my place in Effingham to his shop in Gilford has to get past a mountain range and a big lake. Winnipesaukee is actually known as "The Big Lake" in New Hampshire, because it is the state's largest. The mountain range, the Ossipees, is roadless. It's an ancient volcanic ring dike, nearly circular.

When I have to deliver and pick up by myself, I ride a bike rather than bother anyone to drive more than 80 miles to indulge my customer loyalty. Every route has some terrifying nasty sections. The one with the fewest of them runs along the south shore of the big lake, down around the pointy end of Alton Bay. Going up the other side, a rider can use back roads to reduce the time spent on Route 28. The shortest version is 42 miles.

Because I now know someone who works near the mechanic's place in Gilford, I can sometimes hitch a lift to pick up the car. If that doesn't work out, I'm back to my own resources.

When I was young and immune to fatigue, I would hit the road at 5 a.m. and ride all the way to Gilford to get the car before work. When daylight gets a little shorter, an early start means riding in the dark. It works out better to ride to work, work the day, and crank out the last 27 miles after quitting time. Since my mechanic is self-employed and basically nocturnal, he'll still be there at 7 p.m. or later. Don't look for him early in the morning, however.

A Gilford run by bike is an expedition. I only plan on a couple a year for specific things in spring and summer. The distance isn't so bad, but the narrow parts are very stressful and there are a couple of nasty climbs.

This spring, after getting almost no exercise all winter, I had to pull off a Gilford run with less than 200 miles on me. The muffler fell off the car. The stub of the exhaust was up under the car, gassing me at every stop. So off I went, at a steady plod.

Two weeks later, I rode it again, when the rear brakes jammed up. The car is 14 years old and has spent the last 8 or 9 years dealing with New Hampshire road salt.

Okay, we're good to go now, right?

No.

Last Thursday, the front brakes got jealous and seized up hard. On Friday I limped the car to Wolfe City because the weather was nasty and I hoped to avoid riding. By the time I got there I knew I wasn't going to take the vehicle home. As luck would have it, the boss had his truck in Laconia, next town over from Gilford, and agreed to take his loaner back over during the afternoon, so I could drop my smoking hulk and hitch back to Wolfeboro with him.

Halfway to Gilford, my car blew a radiator hose, so I left it for AAA to drag the rest of the way. So now I have to retrieve it. Meanwhile, I went into Memorial Day weekend without a motor vehicle. Sweet!

I love getting in and out of Wolfeboro without a car, especially in summer. Motor vehicle traffic typically backs up for a couple of miles on any road through town. Then you have to find a place to park. As the middle class dwindles and no one has as much disposable income as they used to, the traffic and parking jams don't last all day, every day, from May to September the way they used to, but the busy parts are as busy as ever. And I've always gotten a strange good feeling from getting around without a car. So when circumstances "force" me to rely on pedal power, it's more like extra permission than an extra burden.

On Sunday, I hit the grocery store for a few necessities before heading home by a quiet route avoiding the highway most of the way.

Stoddard Road has some well-established colonies of lady's slipper orchids.

It's easy to stay home when I am home. Evening will come and I will realize that I have not gone outside for more than a few minutes, and I might not have spoken to another human being. While I don't prefer it that way, I've ended up that way. The cats are happy to have me around.  I get to observe the life of the woods.

Phoebes are nesting on a shelf on the side of the house.

Hummingbirds nest in the dense pine forest. That's a phoebe sitting on the hook above the hummingbird feeder. Phoebes are flycatchers, constantly snatching insects wherever they spot them.

Today I wanted to get some produce I had not found in Wolfe City, so I took the fixed gear out to the grocery store nearest to my house, about 3.5 miles away.

Hannaford has added this official bike rack as part of their renovation over the past year. It's even under cover, which was nice when the drizzle started up while I was in the store.

Exercise is not only an effective antidepressant, it may be the only truly effective antidepressant. Despite two gray days and a moroseness that has only increased since the turn of the century, a stupid little errand by bike felt really good. I have a huge amount of difficulty getting myself to exercise as a separate activity, so whenever I can work it into the practical needs of life it is all the more gratifying.

I need the car, as any rural resident does. But being without it can be a real gift.

Recreation Nation

I can only take my best guess what the human species will need - aside from mass sterilization -- to enjoy life in  *The Future*. I gave it my best shot, focusing on non-motorized recreation, because we were a recreation nation, for all our protestations of industrious work addiction. People worked hard to play hard. Buy a speedboat, a jet ski, an RV, a dirt bike. Get tickets to a professional sports event.

The alternative energy folks and the neo-agriculturalists offer lifestyle solutions that do not directly attack the motor mentality. You can kill cyclists on the road just as effectively with a hybrid or full electric vehicle, and still have a modest carbon footprint. Indeed, kill enough people with your electric vehicle and you will be carbon-negative, because you've reduced the population while avoiding your own fossil fuel use.

All motorized transportation and entertainment can be greened up. Electricity is the rage right now. It still has to be generated, but we'll get that tidied up, too. Try an electric speedboat!

I have a feeling that recreation may be at the top of a declining slope. In fact, it has probably started down it. I see fewer people at play at the theme park I think of as Wolfe Disney World. It's not just traffic in our store. The surges are shorter and smaller in every activity.

Even the annual herd migration known as Motorcycle Week seems to have been shrinking steadily. This year, most of the participants I saw made me think, "born to be wild...a looooong time ago." Now their tune is "Born to be Wide."

We could never have maintained the pace we set in the 1980s and '90s. I rode that wave, but it scared me then, because I knew it had to crash on the shore eventually. The lifestyle I envisioned when I was inexperienced enough to believe society's problems were not only soluble, but on the way to being solved, used pedal power extensively. Pedal to work. Pedal on errands. Pedal on vacation. A few years of it showed me how much nearly everyone else hated that idea, and hated people like me for being out there in the way. But maybe its time will come. More likely we'll go straight from the explosive end of the machine age right back into the stone age, but I'll be out there riding in any case.

I have a lot of trouble getting myself just to play. The commute serves multiple purposes: exercise, recreation of a sort, and cheap transportation. Meanwhile, my livelihood depends on other people recreating, since that makes up the vast majority of bike use, and all cross-country skiing.

Dying on the Highway

I just got back from burying my sister's husband in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It's okay, he was already dead.

The deceased was a more complicated person than most. That being the case I will not try to sum him up to a world that mostly did not know him. He did classified work for the government as a Russian and Arabic linguist, so he might have affected all our lives without having an obvious connection individually, but he was one of the numerous functionaries well below the newspaper headlines. He had been retired from the Navy and from private work for several years when he suffered his fatal heart attack on the eve of receiving bypass surgery at age 57 this February, leaving my sister in their home, in his boyhood home town, hundreds of miles from her nearest blood relative.

For the memorial service, we -- her kin -- arranged to gather from New Hampshire, Connecticut, Oregon, and Virginia.

I had assumed I would shepherd our parents through airports or train stations on a journey tightly focused on the memorial service itself. Instead I learned that they wanted to go by car. Oh joy. My favorite. They had their reasons, based on Chattanooga's surprising isolation from airline and rail connections. You can't take the choo-choo to Chattanooga.

I quit enjoying road trips by car 30 years ago. I do what I have to do, but the craziness of pouring ourselves through pipelines under high pressure had become obvious to me. Every year, thousands of new drivers take to the streets and highways, all intent on making their best time from place to place.

My father will be 89 this year. My mother will be 87. They don't walk very fast. They don't bend and unbend very well. They are tough and determined, but the body forces issues that add another layer of stress to the already high level of alert required to rip down the average Interstate at the average speed dictated by the cumulative haste of thousands of people. And none of us felt like we could withstand the kind of 14- and 18-hour days behind the wheel that we used to pull in our peak years. So that meant breaking the trip over at least one night each way.

Stopping for a night adds a day to the trip. The days are still long, incarcerated in the car, dealing with whatever your fellow motorists dish out. After we arrived in Chattanooga, we drove some more. We helped the widow with whatever we could, even if it was just presence. We ate a lot, because it's what people do when they don't have time to settle in and have an actual life. We sat, because the gathering included a number of people who were not mobile. We've come to be together. What can everyone do? We can sit.

There was a little walking, but mostly as an offshoot of a motor tour of the area. Chattanooga has a strong cycling culture, apparently, but mostly I saw only road signs, and one solitary racing cyclist reaching the summit of Lookout Mountain while a party of us was there in the car. I wasn't about to go splintering off on a personal errand of athletic tokenism when our mission was to be together.

After a couple of days, the northeast Yankees squeezed back into the capsule to launch back onto the Interstate. I had not had a good night's sleep in seven days. I did have a hilarious night of laughter and cheap Scotch with my brothers and my nephew. Just as well to spend the time that way, if I wasn't going to be able to melt into the mattress of a hotel bed anyway. There's apparently a natural reason for this, according to a recently publicized study. On the road, every night in a hotel is the first night.

Now thoroughly a creature of caffeine and endurance, I noticed for the first time that the people I saw along the way, at rest areas, gas stations, convenient restaurants, and in the highway hotels almost all looked sick and lame. Overweight, with skins of various unhealthy tones, we all limped or wobbled to some degree from the high-speed armchairs we ride down the road to the restroom or the service counter or the hotel lobby or, eventually, to our own front doors. This is the world we have designed for ourselves. Even using faster modes of transportation can blow most of a day getting to and aboard the bigger, faster conveyance at its base of operations. And while aboard, you sit. You sit and sit and sit. The gory smash-ups get the headlines, but anyone who spends the majority of their time piloting motor vehicles in multi-hour stretches is dying of it in slow, inexorable motion.

Our bodies were not designed to sit for hours. Our bodies evolved through walking for hours. I grant you the convenience of modern transportation, but it insidiously leads us to sit and sit and sit while we make our way to the places where we sit some more.

The time pressure of a long road trip magnifies some of the unhealthy effects, because we want to process ourselves through things like food and fuel stops with the shortest interruption of progress toward our destination. That influences food choice, favoring things that are served quickly, in easily ingestible lumps, that will stave off the pangs of hunger for another few hours of sitting.

Dehydration staves off urination. You hope to combine things at stops, so you can "make good time" when you get back on the highway. You don't get where you're going by stopping every couple of miles. Synchronize your bladders, people. When the youngest bladder in the car is almost 60, you know you won't reel off the miles the way you did when you were 25 or 30, but you do your best.

Getting there is most definitely not half the fun, even if you are not going "there" to bury a family member.

I'm pretty sure I was working up a kidney stone by the time I got back to my shack in the woods. Of nine days away, six were spent on the highway. I poured out the last of my trip coffee and started guzzling water as soon as I walked into the house.

People I know who live in urbanized areas where driving is the norm and a lot of it is high-speed, aggressive driving show the symptoms of road fatigue all the time. They get used to it, but few of them seem to get to like it. The on-the-go syndrome leads them to the same rushed food choices and marginalization of exercise that the long-distance highway haulers manifest. Destination fever dominates their lives. Get to the next place, do the next thing that needs to be done. Try to get to a specific venue for a specific type of exercise if the schedule permits, but that's only if you want to do that in the first place. I guarantee it is just as easy to decide to find a comfortable place to sit and ingest something, after a few hours of thrashing around among your fellow motorists.

When I left New Hampshire, we were enjoying daytime highs in the 50s. Trees were flowering, ground plants were sprouting. The weather seemed to have committed itself to springtime. In Tennessee, of course, everything was in full leaf. We drove through the transition north to south and south to north. But the weather will have its little jokes. I came home to 34 degree temperatures and full snow cover. It looked like I was arriving home before I had left. Drove off in mid April and came home in March.

Now I get to see what has brewed at work in my absence.