My turn for The Chimp Report

Big G!

Don't know if you'll see this tonight, but it's too funny to risk forgetting.

The chimps were particularly bangy today. Plus they had something that made a piercing, metallic whine like a Dremel tool working on thin metal or ceramic or somebody's skull. I spent a lot of time with my ear plugs in. But they did not take the edge off the shockwave slams of whatever they would drop or throw at irregular intervals. After lunch I started banging back with an old rack bar. They had quieted down somewhat, so hopefully it startled them as I did it at irregular intervals.

Minutes after Esteban took off for practice, leaving me with the Commander, I was brushing out those hotbox skis when a voice said, "hey there! I have a delivery for you."

Twenty-two Specialized bikes. I went out into the snowy parking lot, leaving the Commander on the bridge. Of course the shop filled up. He sold hats for cash at discount prices to apologize for his ignorance of the computer system. The couple who wanted to rent he turned away. What could I do? Truck dude would have gotten impatient and dumped the remaining bikes in the street.

On one of my trips out from the basement I smelled cigarette smoke. I glanced over to see a grumpy young chimp at the tailgate of a pickup truck. He had a freshly lit cancer stick. Since he'd been sent outside to do a chore, he must have figured it was a great opportunity. The chore? Refueling their space heater. Yes, young Einstein was pouring what smelled like kerosene from a fuel can into their jet-engine heater. I started laughing and pointed him out to the truck driver, who also started laughing. The grumpy kid looked over like, "What?! What's so funny?" Then he LEANED DOWN CLOSER TO SEE HOW FULL THE TANK WAS.

Why did he not erupt into a human torch? Now he's convinced all this bullshit about not smoking while you handle fuel is just more sissy nonsense from people who don't like smoking. Well, the little Bic flicker survived...this time. He walked a lap or two around the building to finish the butt before going back in. Might have been dicey if he'd lit himself on fire, panicked and run around, lit the pickup truck and maybe careened into something else he could ignite.

Ah well...there's always tomorrow. Pleasant dreams!

The strangest debris

The weirdest stuff to tumble out of the insulation in the workshop ceiling during the recent deluge has been these pasta wheels.

I keep finding them, one or two at a time. Right after I picked these off the floor I found another one.

We're guessing mice had concealed them in nests up there. I don't think any of the holes in the floor would have allowed them to pass from the many digestive disturbances we had to hear over the years. Or, for that matter, the ones we would not have heard because they occurred outside business hours.

Best not to think about it.

A mess of unreliable Styrofoam

This morning's park and ride started out promisingly enough. The dirt road had thawed and frozen numerous times, creating such continuous bumps that the video I shot is basically unwatchable. But it was firm and fairly fast.

I figured with heavy snow to end November and a couple of fresheners on top of it that the local snowmobilers would have been up and down the Cotton Valley Trail, packing it to concrete. We've had a lot of warm and wet weather as well, but the snow was so dense and the sun is so weak that the cover is still thick and durable in most places. If past snow seasons were any guide, the motorheads should have been out with the enthusiasm and loud buzzing of the first mosquitoes of springtime.

I figured wrong. The Cotton Valley Trail had one set of ATV tracks on it, making a pair of awkwardly spaced ruts down through the crunchy, collapsible snowpack. The ruts were each too narrow to ride in. Only a little wobble and I would catch the edge. The center wouldn't support my weight,...except when it would. The center was also narrow enough that my waggles as I tried to grunt my way down the unpacked snow would dump me into one of the ruts again.

I dismounted and tried running with the bike for a while, to see if conditions improved. They did not. I turned and ran the bike back to the paved road so I could grind my way back up to the car.

I'm not sure a fat bike would have fared much better. The stiff, crunchy snow would provide plenty of support, but the ATV ruts would be just as much of a nuisance. The fat tires might even make it worse, being more prone to catch the sides. I don't have access to a fat bike to test it, so I have no way to be sure. Because fat bikes have become something of a status symbol, I fear reviews will have at least a bit of bias. I prefer to do my own testing and draw my own conclusion.

I would not commute on anything that did not have lights and fenders. The already bulky fat bike becomes even more cartoonish when you start accessorizing. And then there's the expense, especially for a set of studded tires. It might extend the commuting season considerably, but the big challenge to the park and ride has always been the park more than the ride. If I'm going to ride all the way from home I might as well use one of the bikes I already have.  And I'm not going to ride all the way from home in the dark and the iciness with a bunch of half-hibernating drivers.

The ultimate utility bike would be a fat bike with an alternate set of wheels set up for wide 700c tires. But you'd still have to choose which set to mount that day. You could carry the alternate set along, but that goes way beyond ridiculous.

All the shenanigans on the bike meant that I did not get to work until after the Three Stooges had broken a light fixture in our clothing department and showered more debris down on the workshop as they smashed up a couple of bathtubs with sledgehammers. The rest of the day was pretty quiet.

The aftermath

The workshop looked serene enough after Monday's chaos.

There was this pile of insulation,

This full trash barrel,

This jumble of rental skis, 

The upended rental ski rack, aka the lobster trap,

And the floor looking -- believe it or not -- cleaner than usual.

A faint tinge of a funky brown reek hangs in the air. Much of the wood in this building is more than a century old. The newer stuff has still absorbed grunge for many decades.

The crew from upstairs carried away the pile of insulation and the trash barrel today. They seem thoughtful and chastened.

I'm really glad we don't have gas lines up there. I'm pretty sure we don't, anyway.

Oh man! I always miss the good stuff

A crew has been remodeling the apartment above our shop. My first impression was that I would not want anything constructed by these people, but the units in the building are condos and the owner of that one has made his choice.

Phase one has been demolition. For days we've listened to the sounds of heavy objects being flung, big saws screeching, pounding, prying and heavy boots thumping across the floor. I would swear that they had brought in extra appliances to throw around. The heavy crashes would be accompanied by the light harmony of wire, like oven racks or refrigerator shelves. Maybe they liked the sound, so they threw the same things over and over.

I thought they hit their low point last Wednesday when they dumped over a toilet they were trying to remove, and sent several gallons of water down through the backshop ceiling above one of our fluorescent light fixtures. I leaped for the light switch and bellowed, "Hey! What's DRIPPING!?"

"Sorry! Sorry!" came back through the ceiling, apologetically.

As bad as that seemed, it was a finite amount of water. A couple of carefully placed trash cans caught some of it and we could mop up the rest. As I was checking things out with the stepladder I did discover that the thumping and banging had dislodged a tube in another fixture so it was about to drop to the floor. But the problems had mostly been limited to alarming noise and small bits of dust and debris that would shower down when they got really boisterous.

Last night Big G sent me this email:

"Someone told me looong ago,  there's a calm befooore the storm.

-I know,   its been comin' for sometime."

"I.....wanna knooooow, have you everrrrrr seen it rain?  Comin' down on a sunny day."

The shit storm:

This morning in the backshop I was getting a pair of skis ready for a binding mount when I heard this god awful pounding that shook the building and hurt my ears.  There were clumps of white powdery shit falling everywhere from the rafters.  It sounded like these idiots would be falling on my head real soon.  I grabbed my lunch and jacket and moved them over to the stool in front of your place.  Then I moved to the mail room the see if there were any internet orders.

The flood:

From the mail room I heard the sounds of water dripping on the backshop floor.  Then the sound was more like a hard rain.  And raining it was!  There was a monsoon from wall to bench!  I estimate about 25 gallons!  The "professionals " upstairs managed to cut through a water pipe!  El Capitain was screaming through the ceiling!  -And everybody heard him.  One of the pros came down to us and asked if we knew where the water main was.

It is absolutely amazing how many customers and phone calls there are when shit like this happens!

-I promptly moved my jacket and lunch to the mail room.

El Capitian told the pros that THEY were going to clean up the mess!  -Right after WE make a big pile of rental skis and move the lobster trap.

What IS that fucking stench?:

Is it from all the ladies figure skates with decades of foot sweat and fungus now brought to life after being thoroughly doused?  Is it the saturated insulation now dripping brown fluid?  MY GOD, there IS a fucking bathroom upstairs!  El Capitain and his first mate made it a point to tell me the water was clean.

What IS that fucking stench? 

The pros sent in their grunt equipped with a wet vac.   Their leader, Crazy Woman, told us she called a plumber and he would come over in the morning.  Meanwhile, the entire building has no water.  That's when I posted an "Out of order" sign on our bathroom.

The fix:

Crazy Woman told us SHE capped the pipe.  (Sweat fitting?)  She said it's okay to turn the water back on.  Meanwhile there is more loud pounding and sawing from above.  I removed our sign from the bathroom door.

Flood two:

I heard that heavy rain sound again.  Yep, another twenty gallons.  Vacuum Boy flew out of the back shop and down to the basement.  The fucking pros up above actually cut through a second pipe!  They turned the water off again and I replaced our sign on the bathroom door. 

I figure it's only a question of time when these chimps cut a live wire.  Which reminds me, do you remember were the fire extinguisher is?

This time our agitated leaders demanded the pros call in a plumber at once!

Aftermath:

Right now the rental skis are piled over the ski poles.  (I will check the Skiathlons for water in the morning.)  The lobster trap is on end, the desk is piled with boxes of bindings and customer's boots and your bike stand is moved to one side of the floor.  There is a pile of wet insulation in front of the girls skates.

The pros will return tomorrow morning to remove more insulation and clean up.

What IS that fucking stench?

"I.....wanna knooooow, have you everrrrrr seen it rain?  Comin' down on a sunny day."

 

The crew upstairs has turned our lives into a Three Stooges movie. I never cared for the Stooges, but it sounds like it was more entertaining and less awkward than the carolers.
 

I also feel a bit like the guy who was on R&R when the rest of his unit got hit. Dammit! I shoulda been there! Oh well. I'll be there tomorrow, and maybe they'll come up with something that will make me wish I wasn't.

Experienced Misinformation

I've been watching an idiot riding in shorts through the last weeks of wintry temperatures. He's also mashing big gears, further straining his naked knees. I'm sure his friends know him as a big rider. It got me thinking about the effect of experienced misinformation in any activity.

Years in the bike and cross-country ski business have given me a valuable perspective on inside information compared to the wide variety of uninformed or partially informed speculation.

The first bike shop I worked in had the mechanics in the basement. I left that comfortable lair to try to sell some better bikes up on the sales floor so I wouldn't have to work on so much crap. I always intended to return to the mechanics' cave as soon as I had started the Ride Better Bikes Movement, but instead I moved on from the bike biz for a few years. In my current situation the workshop is accessible from the main shop floor. I get to hear every Loud, Confident and Wrong blowhard who brings his friend in to learn about bikes.

Mind you, just being in the bike business does not automatically confer full and complete understanding of how the machine and rider work. But the retail shop puts you in the center between producers and consumers. Much of their communication channels through you.

Magazines, websites, forums, books, films and gossip throw out clouds of information, knowledge, wisdom and fantasy, often completely undifferentiated. Riders and potential riders come in with opinions already shaped by these influences.

Even with good inputs, the learning rider needs to sift and sort for what applies in the individual case. Do you need to train like a top category racer or load like a transcontinental tourist to enjoy our particular type of riding? On the other hand, can you get away with being a haphazard slob with the amount of mileage you're putting on your bike and body?

The nice thing about human-powered vehicles is that very little is outright wrong, However, misapplication of technique or technology can be very unhelpful and occasionally distinctly harmful.

Big gears at slow cadences can -- but don't necessarily have to -- blow up your knees. If you have sufficient strength, augmented by diligent off-bike training, you can grunt around in the big meat all you want. You should set up your riding position for grunting rather than spinning as well, and accept the fact that you will have no snap and little tolerance for changes in cadence. And if your riding position and preparation aren't right, you will cause joint damage.

Riding in shorts in cold weather will lead to long-term knee damage and short-term muscle injury. You need to keep working muscles and joints warm enough to stay flexible and well lubed. Cyclists generate their own wind chill. Riding 15 miles per hour at 40 degrees you are pushing the old kneecaps through an effective 32 degrees -- freezing. The same speed at 50 degrees only gets you up to 36. A lot of riders in northern climes are tempted to show off their gams at 50 degrees. The venerable CONI manual said a rider should wear tights below 70 degrees. Personally I have pushed that to 60 degrees since I moved north, but I still tend to be more conservative than a lot of the aggressive riders and their uninformed disciples around here.

Aggressive riders may sidestep the consequences of their clothing choices by quitting the activity when they can no longer pursue it aggressively. They put in a few hard years and move on, believing when they finally get arthritic knees and quads that feel like dried-out rubber bands, that these are normal symptoms of aging. The "right" thing to do never would have mattered to them because they were not interested in longevity.

Unfortunately, observers equate speed and competitiveness with overall knowledge. This person must know what they're doing because they can always drop me on a ride. That's right. A V-8 is lots smarter than a 4-cylinder.

You might even see bare legs sticking down below a fairly bundled-up torso and arms. Far better to average out the coverage over the whole rider. I cover the legs first, add layers over the core and finally add sleevage. Since I'm older and more sluggish now the transitions may come much closer together. I admit I overdress more often than I under-dress. Having been caught far from home with too little clothing I don't want to repeat that misery. I can always peel a layer and tie it or tuck it.

Older beginners will suffer the consequences sooner. If you're already on the threshold of age-related frictions, and especially if you came from an abusive sport like running, you need to take care of what you have left if you want to continue to use it.

The unifying quality to all experienced misinformation is oversimplification. In this the misinformed get little help from the bike industry, because in any selling situation if a short distortion will get the buyer to fork over, why waste time with a longer, nuanced education? The only time someone focused on the sale will slow it down to address a point the buyer did not expressly introduce is when the consequences have bitten the seller on the ass enough times to make it worth the trouble to try to prevent it. Otherwise, let the mechanics deal with it down the road.

Humans are great at creating one problem to solve another. To some extent this is just how mutation and evolution work. But we tell ourselves we're better than that. Yeah? Prove it.

All the uncorrected impressions and sloppy explanations ripple outward through the world, crossing and recrossing in waves that wash back into the repair shops or stagnate in the corners of garages and basements.

Any idiot can fix a bike

You don't need special tools. You don't need special knowledge. If you can fix a logging skidder you can fix a bike. Bring that thing over here, son! We don't need to pay those frou frou idiots at the bike shop to chip their nail polish and charge us out the wazoo!

When they finally brought the bike to me because they couldn't get the crank off they had already tried a hammer and a torch. The scorch marks were just amusing, but the bash marks damaged the threads in the crank arm so I could not use a proper puller. I ended up using our "one-way trip" crank puller: a two-pronged chisel that goes behind the crank arm, where it will actually work.

People who find the workings of a bicycle impenetrably mysterious represent one end of a spectrum. The people who sneer at the complexity of anything without a motor are at the other end. The repairs improvised by contemptuous mechanics sometimes exhibit the crude effectiveness of a chunk of stone lashed to a stick with a piece of rawhide, but more often they're just a prelude to a more expensive trip to a real bike mechanic after the dismissive Mr. Fix-it has made the problem worse. You can tell when a tinkerer has made a mistake that will help them do better, more sensitive work in the future and when someone who would rather be doing something else has simply bashed it until it either worked or went away.

I have my days when I would rather be doing something else, but I know enough to try to do good work so when the bike goes away it goes away happy and stays away for longer. I really could spend hours just staring out the window, if I could figure out how to get paid for it.

Being seen

As this blonde New England princess prepared to T-bone me by running a stop sign with her shiny Volvo station wagon full of handsome family, I reflected in the moments left to me how handy it would be if I could burst into flames at will. I guess it's something like the fictional Ghost Rider, although I've never seen more than a movie promo for that.

She added extra bait for me by stopping at the sign and remaining stopped as I approached. Extra points for that.

She wasn't trying hard enough, because she failed to mow me down. She might have thought that shoving herself right up to me as I crossed the intersection -- with the right of way -- was simply an efficient use of space. Maybe in her mind, she never intended to run over me. Unfortunately, lady, I can't read your mind. What there is of it, anyway.

I've previously wished for the ability to throw showy but basically harmless lightning bolts. I still want that. But nothing expresses disdain like bursting into flames in front of someone who has just done something idiotic that put you at risk. Do ya see me NOW?!

It would be great.

The Illusion of Safety

Wolfeboro is like a micro-city. Especially in the summer its downtown area is a churning mass of impatient drivers, determined cyclists and a whole spectrum of pedestrians. Any route along the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee from the downtown area is likely to be crowded with business and pleasure traffic including tractor-trailers, contractors in various size trucks, more landscapers and property care crews than you can believe, boat trailers and cars.

Out in the countryside, some people drive in a more relaxed way, happy to be clear of either the bustle of the lake shore towns or the worse bustle of the places they normally live in the sprawl of Megalopolis. Others race around in the clear running room of uncrowded country roads. Many of those drivers are locals with schedules to keep and no great love of the seasonal hordes, in spite of the money the seasonal business brings to keep them alive here. Keep us alive, I should say, because I depend on it as well.

Many people tell me they wish they could drive less and ride more. When they tell me why they don't, safety may not head every list, but it's in the top five concerns, if not the top two.

Factions of cyclists disagree vigorously about what factors really enhance safety. Believers in separate but equal systems of cycling-only or mixed-use pathways hold that isolation from motor vehicles is the key. Vehicularists represent the opposite view, that cyclists need to be allowed, encouraged and perhaps left no alternative but to take a place in the traffic flow as it exists, asserting their right to pedal in a motor-dominated world. In between lie all shades and gradations mixing pure vehicularism and some level of faith in infrastructure. Lying outside the continuum of law-acknowledging pedalers are the anarchists who ride the shortest route or the most fun whether it's with traffic, against traffic, through red lights and stop signs, up and down sidewalks (and occasionally stairways), through parking lots, parks, alleys -- in short, anywhere they will fit. The anarchists believe that the bike has a natural right to go anywhere the rider can take it.

I can tell you why I had every bike accident I've had. Each has its own story and involves some level of error on my part. That's not to say that stuff doesn't just happen. A prime example is this video of a transportation cyclist being rear-ended on a multi-lane street in Pennsylvania, which I picked up from DFW Point-to-Point. It has a relatively happy ending because a bus driver and another motorist blocked the fleeing driver yards from the scene of the crime so that police could make the arrest. Someone commenting on the video mentioned the dangers of distracted driving, but it looks more like an intentional tag to me. The car that struck the cyclist passed the silver car that later blocked him behind the bus and then pulled into the lane behind the cyclist, made the hit and pulled out. How distracted do you have to be to overlook a massive city bus pulling around a cyclist ahead of you, even with a car between you? Thus, as the author of DFW Point-to-Point states, you can do everything right and still have a collision. This is true in a car or truck as well as on a bike. Driving home a couple of weeks ago I nearly got torpedoed by an idiot who blew through a stop sign without the slightest hesitation where Route 171 crosses Route 28 in Ossipee. If I had been winging through the intersection the way many people seem to consider acceptable, there would have been bloodshed.

People are completely willing to live with the illusion of safety as they drive, but sense massive danger all around when they think about riding a bike. Just as they think more lanes of asphalt will improve traffic flow or that airbags are an adequate substitute for avoiding a collision in the first place, many will believe that a bike lane or a separate path will provide the necessary margin to allow a cyclist a chance to survive in the maelstrom of vehicular flow. So why not give them as many of those illusions as possible, as long as the myths don't impede reality? We're talking about faith here: a belief in things unproven but comforting. People undertake massively dangerous and ill-advised campaigns when bolstered by faith, as well as some very nice and commendable efforts on behalf of fellow humans.

The trap is in the fine print. Any of these talismans must be funded. With that funding comes obligation. Legal guardians of cyclists' rights have to make sure that those obligations don't include coercion of non-believers. Cycling choice falls under the heading of free speech and expression of religion because belief is what ultimately gets a person to push off from the curb and wobble away.

Anything that encourages more people to ride bikes helps cycling. If a law discourages people who would have ridden vehicularly while emboldening a few sidepath and bike lane believers, it has not helped because it has not broadened participation. If people want to believe that paint on the road makes them safer and that belief gets them out on a bike, their presence puts more cyclists out in the public eye. As long as the free-range cyclist has the option to ignore the paint and do what really works, the bike-lane believer can have the painted refuge from which to observe and perhaps venture out as experience proves that the rider, not the paint, is what makes the difference. Meanwhile, some sort of tokens among the many traffic directives plastered on and around the roads put the concept that cycling is a legitimate activity right in front of drivers, lane mile after lane mile.

As a last resort we can just send them all a reverse-911 text message to remind them to glance through the windshield once in a while to be sure that no cyclists are harmed.

It's a bike! It's a rain gauge!

Wait! It's BOTH!

The owner of this bike came up with a clever way to keep his seat dry when the weather is rainy. I've seen other people try the same maneuver, but I haven't managed to grab a picture of them. It always cracks me up.

Another day, another piece of weird, home-built crap

People will try all kinds of sketchy rigs to get their handlebars higher. With quill stems they could raise it way above the maximum height line. Supposedly that increases the risk that the stem might bend or break or that the steerer tube of the fork could crack because the stem no longer reinforced it at the end of the threaded part. Sure, it's possible, but has anyone ever seen it happen? I haven't. I don't advise raising the stem to ridiculous heights. I'm just saying that people who do it seem to avoid any negative consequences.

With threadless headsets, the home hobbyist has to get more creative. We've all seen the bikes with the bar ends sticking straight up. That was the 1990s version of the ten-speed with the drop bars turned upside down.

The owner of this bike assembled his custom handlebar out of PVC. It isn't even fastened together securely. If the rider hits a bump while leaning on that top section it will quickly become the bottom section. If the rider even leans heavily on it, it will move.

This setup takes its place alongside the sheet-metal home-built pant guard a man made for himself, which was basically just a meat-slicer blade going around next to his ankle, and the home-made chopper fork a kid welded and installed on his bike without a headset at all.

You're never alone in your car

Most people need a little time to themselves.

The bike commute serves that vital function for me. It combines transportation to work with healthful exercise and energized thinking. The mind works differently when the body is working too, as opposed to just sitting.

When you're driving, you're never alone, even if you're alone in your car. Everyone is in their tin cans, buzzing along nose to tail, often pissed off at each other for miles of forced company. Whatever they think of me on my bike, the encounter doesn't last long. Mostly they ignore me. Except when I have to control the traffic, I get them past me as quickly as possible. That's a lot harder to do when I'm driving the same size vehicle they are, at roughly the same speed.

For the next couple of months I will not have a fraction of the exercise or the justifiable separate but equal use of the public right of way that make life much more endurable in bike season. Even on a back road I could see the unwelcome glare of lights coming up fast behind me. On the major roads I can count on getting embedded in crazy trains of drivers who learn more from watching close tactics in NASCAR races than from the wisdom of following distance when driving in the real world.

Forget the rules

People who ride their bikes against traffic make me wish I had a grenade launcher. This is just one of several reasons I don't have a grenade launcher, regardless of my Second Amendment rights.

Blame my short index fingers: I have an anger problem. In the course of a single day I drop enough F-bombs to level a small city. Catastrophes leave me unmoved, but petty annoyances hot wire my brain. Sparks fly.

Wednesday morning, when I rode up Main Street to work I met a gray-haired woman on her hybrid riding against traffic. I never know exactly what to do with those people. If I go to the right to shove them into oncoming traffic, I'm closer to parked cars or the debris field in the gutter. I might not want to go farther to the left at that moment. Even if I do, I hate to enable the wrong-way rider.

This morning we had a clear sight line for quite a distance, so I sat up, hands off the bars, and pointed, first at her, then at the proper side of the street, several times.

She just laughed at me and rode by.

"Ha ha ha, ya dumb b#&*^!!" I said in a loud conversational tone. It was a tone appropriate to conversation at, say, a rock concert. Glancing back I thought I saw her swing over to the proper side of the street. I turned my attention back to my own course.

It only occurred to me later that I might know this person. I still don't know for sure, but I did see her riding back to the coffee shop. I reflected glumly on my short fuse and blunt language.

In town traffic I ride in the lane anyway. The wrong-way cyclist is therefore no more trouble for me than for a motorist. The rider will pass my right elbow, no doubt oblivious to my sneer of contempt.

Out on the busy highway it's more of a problem. I have run a wrong-way cyclist into the ditch because I could not shoulder into traffic in the only available lane and I wasn't going to take the ditch myself. Fortunately there WAS a ditch. It would have been much uglier in one of the sections hemmed in by guard rails. The offender, a regular commuter who rides my route in the opposite direction, has not ridden against traffic again, at least not around me.

At the end of the day, riding out Route 28, I heard a strange engine behind me. It turned out to be a fat man on a large ATV. Riding an ATV on the highway is illegal enough. Then he whipped it across the highway and started heading down the throat of oncoming cars. I started cheering, laughing and applauding that display of sheer selfishness and brass balls. The fat man turned his bald head to see where that noise was coming from. Meanwhile, cars flashed their lights and slowed sharply as he turned into his driveway.

I had a revelation in that moment. Who cares which side of the road you ride on? Everyone has a moral obligation to watch out for people doing stupid things. Enough people get away with stupid things to make all the whining and preaching about "proper" behavior seem a little ridiculous. What's the big deal? Any driver who knows what they're doing will see you no matter what direction you're coming from.

Road rage mostly stems from our deceived expectation that other people will do "the right thing" in a given situation. Many of our operating rules are based on the principle of taking turns. It's my turn. It's your turn. Hey! Don't cut in on my turn! Don't take that! It's MINE! You get to go AFTER me! I'm telling!!

If we dump the rules, everyone has to watch out. If you come into an intersection with no idea who will do what, you bet you'll pay attention.

During the transition period, traditionalists will righteously kill other road users. After the initial bloodbath, things will settle down to a new norm.

You're already free to act as if the rules do not exist. Even if you ride legally, if a motorist kills you they will probably face no charges at all. Bicyclists are tolerated at best, never welcomed, as part of the traffic mix. There's an automatic assumption that anyone who ventures out there without massive horsepower and armor plating is simply asking for inevitable catastrophe. When the worst happens it is simply nature's cruel justice. Soft little animals get crushed by larger, harder ones.

Soft little animals proliferated by exploiting niches the large ones could not. They did it by breeding in large numbers to offset large losses. They survive by agility and by appearing in any number of ways unappetizing.

Coincidentally, I finally started reading Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt today. It addresses questions I had been pondering for years. For instance, I wondered if there was buggy rage and competitive driving when conveyances were horse-drawn. The answer is yes. Humans on wheels have always had a tendency to turn into jerks. That includes past and present bicyclists. I knew from other reading that draisine (Laufmaschine) riders had engaged in antics worthy of any rowdy crowd on a weekend night, annoying people with reckless operation. People have many different temperaments, but nearly everyone has been some kind of a jerk at some time while operating a vehicle. I guarantee I have. I've barely started the book. It's fascinating.

Third Week of August

Third week of August
The peak of insanity
before they all leave.

This is the big one. With two triathlons and the Mt. Washington Hill Climb this weekend, plus a bunch of last hurrah vacationers, bikes in need of immediate attention are piled all around the workshop. I wanted to arrange them as anti-personnel barriers. Before long it became obvious I would only have to let them accumulate naturally to form an impenetrable tangle of metal, plastic and carbon fiber.

Featured guests include a hill climb conversion, two tunes on other bikes from the same family for the same event and a guy who broke a spoke and tried to fix his own wheel by loosening all the other spokes before he surrendered and brought the mess to us. He also disassembled his rear brake pads and lost some parts. Late in the day a woman brought in her snazzy Trek full suspension bike. The rear derailleur bore telltale signs that the man in her life had been trying to "fix" things.

Did I mention that this is all urgent?

The wheel I'm building for a touring bike is on its third day of de-stressing and retensioning. For some reason it is taking a ridiculous amount of time to settle in. Another wheel job waits in the queue. I've built many more than usual this year.

Time to get back in there. After this weekend -- probably by Sunday, in fact -- everyone will suddenly disappear. We'll have repair work, but nothing like this.

August with a vengeance

Between my observation on July 28 that traffic seems light this year and my brief last post, everyone seemed to hit town at once.

Not complaining, just observing: even if you love your work, getting a blast of it so strong you can't even do it all is like having your favorite food shoved down your throat with a toilet plunger. The next idiot who says, "but it's great to be busy, right?" is getting a wrench in the teeth.

The quality of drivers dropped noticeably with the coming of August as well. There are more of them and they resist herding. You have to make early, large moves to control them or give it up and dive for the ditch. I've been making the moves.

Even the crotch-rocket riders are making a late bid to reclaim their badass image.

Bursts of gunfire erupt from neighboring properties around my home. Unlicensed dirt bikes were screeching up and down the road on Saturday. It's so peaceful here.

In the midst of all this the cellist and I celebrated our seventh anniversary on 8-9-10, making it 7-8-9-10. The way the festivities evolved I only had to take an extra half-day away from work. We had a mixed group of musicians ranging from professional to complete novice jamming on the deck for a few hours on Saturday evening. Selections ranged from Beethoven and Pachelbel to Irish jigs, drumming, blues, bluegrass and Jimi Hendrix. Take that, screechy dirt bikers.

On Monday the cellist and I went to dinner and a concert by Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyer at Stone Mountain Arts Center, a remarkable little venue in Brownfield, Maine. It's a small place. The performers tend to hang around afterward so you can meet them if you're interested. We certainly were.

Interesting projects wait in the workshop. They're a nice interlude between figuring out snap, crackle pops in expensive carbon fiber road bikes and resurrecting greasy wreckage.

My helmet did its job today

On essentially straight, level road, in full sunshine and dry weather, I was tooling along at 22-ish miles per hour on Route 28 about a mile before the intersection with Trotting Track Road. Suddenly something whacked my helmet. A gray pickup truck was passing.

My first thought was that some nitwit finally had the arm and the aim actually to hit me with a bottle. Then I saw the big curl of flexible PVC piping that had popped out of the truck bed and was now sweeping through the air above the right side of the lane and the shoulder. That had hit me in the back of the head as the truck drove by.

The license plate was a tiny speck as I tried to get the driver's attention. He was either oblivious or too pleased with himself to want to stop. He turned at Trotting Track Road. There's no chance he will be ticketed and fined for his improperly secured load.

The nitwits are out in force today. Further in Center Street, two huge tractor trailers snorted past. Right behind them, I pulled out to the left tire track to cover the lane because it was positively not safe for another motor vehicle to pass. Some idiot in a Volvo wagon pulled all the way into the left lane on a blind curve without slowing down. She popped around the curve grille to grille with a white Crown Vic. Unfortunately it was not a cop. We were also rolling down into a construction area. The cars did not collide. No doubt everyone cursed the road-obstructing cyclist as they sped on into Wolfeboro's summer congestion.