The steady creep of crap...

Like rising sea levels, a steady tide of brake fluid, shock oil, and tire sealant laps higher and higher. On it float the carbon fiber fuselages of high-priced industrial flotsam, while the currents of the murky depths carry along the aluminum offerings. Dragged along the bottom is a spreading tangle of cheap steel frames and flimsy mid- and low-end parts. Brand name and no name products jostle in this festering stew.

There never was a dike against it, but if there had been there would be a lone, drowned mechanic with his finger stuck in it. The surge came right over the top. But there was no dike, so there's just me and my finger, which I have been giving to the industry since the early 1990s. I'm still treading water in this great oceanic garbage patch, trying to rescue the few who are not swimming avidly away.

Hey, if you're going to lose anyway, you might as well have some fun with it. I used to find energy in the belief that I could have some wider influence. Fantasy has played an essential role in human survival. It just functions differently under the influence of different eras. We can tap into each other's imaginations like never before in this period of individual social media participation overlapping with professional productions in a range of legacy media and their evolved, evolving forms. As many as a few dozen people might read this essay. That's a bigger crowd than I could draw if I was raving in a public park anywhere within a short bike ride of where I live or work. Good return on my time, says the lazy man.

Bike season is winding down around here. Enthusiasts are still riding, but the frenzy of summer has gone to sleep until next year. By then we will know if we're going to be living in a smog-shrouded theocracy or be zigzagging toward the flickering image of a world where people are trying to get along with each other rather than get on top of one another. Service work still drops in a job or two at a time. The shop converts to ski season as autumn progresses. It's still only cross-country skiing, so we never get mobbed. As long as people can use motors to get them up a hill, that will be their preference. It's true with increasing numbers of two-wheeled "pedalers," too.

A guy in the shop last week said that he was getting an e-bike that would go 50 miles per hour. I figured he was full of sht, so I looked around online. I found quite a few ads for e-bikes that will do 50 mph. It's absolutely not legal, but the police have much more pressing matters to worry about. There are thousands of bikes on the road, and no effective means to keep track of them. This is a good thing in many ways. I don't like the idea of omnipresent surveillance, even if it does permit jackasses on rule-beating motorbikes to pretend they're on a machine that they would ever power by pedaling alone. I figure that they will sort themselves out on their 50 mile per hour mopeds.

Riders with power assistance do present a hazard to path riders, both recreational and transportational. Few act with malice, but insensitivity hits just as hard. Any vehicle operator becomes velocitized. You get used to your flow through the scenery based on the feedback you get through the contact points with the machine. We drive our cars at what seems like a sedate speed, while a pedestrian walking on the side of that road perceives our vehicle as hurtling past them. Riding an analog bike, 15 mph feels pretty zippy. Twenty feels downright godlike. Throw a little power assist in there and you can legally push close to 30 mph. Juice up the moped and you get into survival mode.

Survival mode is sneaky. You are in it before you realize it. You may be within your own reaction time to negotiate the road in front of you as you see it, but have no margin for the unexpected. It happens on an analog bike as well, but almost always on a downhill. The other place you can get into trouble is when larger vehicles are slowed by their own traffic congestion, and a bicyclist is tempted to fly past them or even cut between them at full speed. Filtering is fine, but trying to show off with a power play will get you smacked sooner or later.

As daylight shortens, my bike commuting season comes to an end. I will become flabbier and grouchier (if you can imagine that) as the months progress until next spring releases me to see how much strength my aging body still retains. The problem isn't the darkness, it's the lights. The floodlit behemoths I share the road with blind each other with their headlights and make me disappear. The imperative that motorists have, to pass any cyclist without pausing, means that they will shove through in that tunnel of glare and blackness wherever we encounter it.

There's also a slight uptick in malicious behavior under cover of darkness, but the major issue is insensitivity and impatience.

If I had a good place to park for park-and-ride commuting, I could continue for months, gaining at least some of the advantages of fully car-free transportation. Unfortunately, the local cyclist ghetto, the Cotton Valley Trail, runs off at an angle, so I end up driving almost the whole way to town, or equivalent distance, to intersect it at various points from which to continue by bike. And it's the Cotton Valley Trail: an active rail line masquerading as a multi-use rec path. The rail car hobbyists have the right of way, and some of them can be real pricks about it. Others are kindly ambassadors, but you don't know which is which when you both enter a railed section. On the other end of the speed range, not one single pedestrian is ever glad to see someone on a bike. Add a dog on a leash and your stock drops even further. I'd rather be out on the road with the armored personnel carriers whipping past me. It's much less personal.

Too late this morning as I sit under a cat, but maybe I'll try a few rides from the shopping center three miles out from my house. That cuts off the worst stretch for night riding. But the challenge points up a major issue for anyone with a motor vehicle: where can you leave it? They do lock. They're hard to remove casually. But anyone annoyed at your presence can do a whole lot of inconvenient things short of completely removing your expensive appliance. Pick the right wrong place and you could even lose the catalytic converter. That's become a new hazard at some hiking trailheads in the area.

For now, it's time to displace the cat and finish getting ready to load the car. Driving is so brain-dead easy compared to riding a bike. It's a habit-forming sedative in that way, but side effects include joint pain, stiffness, irritability, inattentiveness, weight gain,... see package insert for full list.

Oops! I forgot my pants!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freeze and thaw cycling

My winter route follows mostly dirt. In the morning, it is usually frozen. With the mild days we've been having, it has been thawed for the evening run.

The tracks on the rail trail indicate that a lot of people (for this time of year) have been waiting until the mild part of the day to take their rides. Why do people choose to slog through inches of glop just so they can wear a bit less clothing? I could understand if the ride was on pavement, but this is all dirt.

You do get quite a workout, even when the soft layer isn't deep. The stickiness and suction of the wet silt drag you down at least a couple of gears. The bike sucks to a halt unless you keep constant power to the pedals.

Some mornings have followed mild, wet nights. My route is basically a 7.5-mile descent in the morning. Some of it is steep enough to push up to 30 miles per hour on firm track. The freeze-thaw cycle might leave frost a couple of inches down, with the sticky layer on top. A longer thaw softens the ground more completely. Either way, you don't have a fast, firm track. And the grind back up at night is as much work as you might imagine.

What strikes me on a frozen morning is how many people went out when it was soft, and how most of them took suicidally shallow lines through the rail crossings that plague the Cotton Valley Trail. The ruts they leave present a special hazard to the hurrying commuter pushing the pace on the downhill run when they freeze overnight. They'll suck a tire in before you can pull out, leading you into the same flat line that the rider took to make them.

Riding requires observation and analysis. That's part of what makes it fun. It's a bummer that frozen ruts might disrupt the fastest line through a particular trail feature, but that's one aspect of public trails. The challenge is to find the best line through conditions as you encounter them.

Saturday night's all right for lighting

The town had turned on the lights along the path on Saturday night when I headed out from work. The wind was still gusting over 20 as the temperature dropped. The deserted path, all brightly lit, looked like a stage set.

It's only lit along a short section. Beyond this corridor I rode in the usual solitary darkness. The wind was mostly behind me, which only mattered in the few stretches where the path is not sheltered by trees.

The wind also carried the smells of two Asian restaurants and some other delicious dinner odors across the path. Since those were concentrated close to town, the rest of the 7-mile grind up to my car seemed extra long.

As darkness falls

Last night I headed out under cloudy skies in summer-like heat to ride the path and back roads back out to my car.

The path is not totally deserted yet, even in the outer reaches, but away from town other users are getting pretty scarce. So I might see the occasional dog walker or I might not.

I saw something. It was way out ahead of me. Dusk was not too deep yet, but against the backdrop of forest this black animal was hard to make out. Ordinarily I see a black animal without a white stripe and I figure it's a bear. They're pretty common. But when I got a profile shot this looked doglike. I thought I could see the downward sweep of a canine tail. But it was a hundred yards away in failing light. It was not near a house. It was not accompanied by a human. When I got to where it had entered the woods there was no trail. It had simply melted into the vegetation.

Here I am, unmauled and not even inconvenienced. But I wondered, not for the first time, what I don't see when I'm riding in full darkness the whole way.

October is spooky because the nights are getting longer while leaves remain on the trees to make the darkness darker under forest cover. Once November gets well established spooky just turns to dismal.

If something does come after you on a rail trail you can only flee in one direction or the other. The Cotton Valley Trail is so narrow in many places you wouldn't be able to reverse course anyway. I'll load up on garlic, silver bullets and whatnot to get through the next few weeks.

Uncivil Twilight

Around here, drivers seem to get more aggressive in September. This year it was a month late, possibly as a result of climate change. The increase in pushiness reinforced the second level of driver misbehavior that comes out after sunset.

When I got really good lights I tried pushing the commuting season into the months of darkness. Immediately I noticed that on certain parts of my route I could not control traffic as well as I do in the summer, even with summer's traditionally recognized heavier traffic and influx of "idiots from away." October brings the ghouls and goblins, the creatures of darkness, I guess. And a lot of them drive pickup trucks.

Fortunately, I can switch to the park and ride option, which uses mostly dirt roads and the rail trail. I've run into one or two off-season trail abusers over the years, but it's nothing like the rudeness on the road.

At different hours the mix of drivers might turn more compliant. I doubt it on the near end of my route, because night time brings out the hot rodders and tire shredders. They seem really attracted to the intersection near my house. It may be the only place for three miles in any direction where there's room to do a doughnut. Then there's a great straightaway in front of my house for the approach and the getaway.

To avoid the attention of violent redneck humorists I have gone night riding a few times around my neighborhood with only a headlight, no tail lights or reflectivity of any kind. At the first hint of an approaching vehicle I would dive for the ditch, snap off the light and freeze. If you can't be seen, acknowledged and respected, don't be seen at all. But when you do that you find out how many vehicles go by you on what seemed like a nearly deserted road. Don't be in a hurry to get anywhere.

An awful lot of human survival in general seems to depend on not meeting a psychopath at the wrong time. No strategy of defense or avoidance is perfect. And there are always the idiots.

Conditions are only slightly better driving a car in all this. You don't get more respect from other road users who are aggressive or inattentive. You just have a bit more armor plating. But the park and ride is better than no ride at all. I know its limitations.

The world's fastest micro-poodles

It's a gray day.  It started kind of light gray, but it's closing in as the clouds thicken. It seemed like a good day to do a park and ride commute to shake down the path bike before autumn really sets in.

On the Cross Check I may ride a lot of dirt, but once I get to Center Street I get back into traffic, even if I rode in the path from North Wolfeboro. The last section of path, along Back Bay, is often full of other users. The street route is more conducive to speed. But the path bike is such a wallowing slug on the pavement that I will stay on the path and be nearly the fastest thing on it rather than waddle down the road as nearly the slowest.

Bombing down the first descents from where I park, the path bike feels solid but maneuverable. Lower down, on the Cotton Valley Trail segment of the route, the wide tires demand a little less precision than the skinnier smooth tires on the Cross Check. But it's no sprinter. Come the frosty time I won't miss the speed. It's a mental and physical transition.

Path Commuter and Cross Check

Zipping along the shore of Back Bay this morning,  I slowed up a little as I approached a guy with a couple of small dogs.  I could hardly see the dogs, but I could tell they were there by the way the man moved.

When the little buggers saw me, they burst into furious yapping.  One launched a charge. I looked down at what appeared to be a rat with a perm, ripping along below my foot.  I mean, these things would need a small step ladder to bite someone's ankle. But the leader in particular was amazingly fast and persistent.

When I saw the mini dog was not going to quit I turned back to lead the chase back to its owner. That did bring me into range of the equally irate but less ambitious other dog, who had broken off pursuit after a few yards, but the responsible human quickly gained control. That's the thing about micro-poodles. You can hold quite an arm load of them.

Not much in the workshop today. One road bike with front derailleur problems. Its chain was a black, dripping mess. Someone must have told the owner,  "be sure to lube your chain." Judging by the rest of the bike, this was apparently interpreted to mean, "and never lube anything else." Everything but the chain is covered with grinding oxidation.

As I arrived at the shop, customers were adding another bike to the repair queue.  It had been on the rear rack of their car when it was hit by another vehicle from behind. It looks amazingly good. The customers already got new parts to replace the bashed ones. The rest of the bike hardly looks like anything happened.  I've seen much worse looking bikes that have never been hit with anything but their owner.

Separate but better

I've been stuck in the car this week because of evening meetings and sketchy weather. It reminds me how much I hate being stuck in the car.

On the bike I use the rail trail to get out of town. For the dark season park-and-ride I use about six miles of the trail. Slouching along in the darkness can be a trifle lonely, but the kind of peer pressure you get when you're in a car among other motorists is not company.

The trail route takes me to quiet roads, mostly dirt, to where I park the car. Then the first part of the drive continues on dirt and minor paved roads, limiting my exposure to the people who always stick to the roads with the highest speed limits. You will get the occasional flaming jerk on a back road, but it's a lot easier to pull off and let them blaze on when you're not flying between the guardrails at 60. If I'm on the fast road it's because I need to go fast anyway, like in the morning when I'm invariably late to work.

If I have to drive the whole commute I will use the highway to go home simply to get the unpleasant task of driving finished as quickly as possible. Sometimes I'll divert to a dirt route, but since driving itself is not all that enjoyable I have to balance the peace of the circuitous route with the extra butt time in the driver's seat. I keep wishing I was on the bike.

If tonight's snowstorm stays well south I should salvage one bike commute out of the week. The night meetings are over for another month, except for music on Thursdays. It all comes down to the weather.

Once my park-and-ride gets shut down I have to figure out how to fit a ride into each driving day. With the great lights and studded tires on my path bike I can ride after dark. We'll see how that goes. It's pretty tempting just to go home and drink beer.

A little laughter, a few moments of terror...

Actually, the terror was a couple of days before the laugh.

On Wednesday I rode the park and ride commute on the Cotton Valley Trail for the first time in a week. A digestive complaint had kept me from eating or sleeping well for several days, so I ventured back out cautiously. The morning ride put me in a good mood for the day. I looked forward to the return trip in the dark.

Still unable to pound down my normal quantities of food and not entirely sure I was completely clear of the intestinal ninjas that had been ambushing me, I rode conservatively, but some sections encourage a little friskiness. There's one bit where the trail crosses a road, goes a few yards level, then hops up and over a small knoll. Coming down the back side of the knoll I always enjoy the acceleration and the way the generator light burns bright white.

The path runs outside the tracks here. Outbound, the tracks are  to the left. Just across them are a couple of houses on wooded lots. I could see lights inside and out on the house that sits closer to the tracks. I heard barking.

No big deal. I hear barking from houses along the trail all the time. This time, the barking went from a questioning woof to deep, aggressive, rapid barking. Crashing sounds in the undergrowth indicated that a large dog was charging me from the blackness to my left.

"Hey, dog," I said in a loud but friendly tone. Then "Hey! HEY! HEYYYYYY!!! GET YER DOG!"

As I bellowed for the dog's owner I was sprinting forward. Outside the light from my headlight all was blackness. Even with a good helmet light anything outside its beam would be in black shadow. I couldn't waste time or attention trying to see the beast that was thrashing after me. All I could do was crank as hard as I could and hope the stupid dog didn't crash into me or chomp down on any part it could grab.

In several years of incorporating that section of path into commutes in all seasons I have never had a problem there. Yesterday and today's rides followed the placid pattern I had come to expect. But now I have to be a little more alert in case the mysterious hound returns.

One day on, one day off: On Thursday I drove to work because that's the day I pay a musician to be my friend. I don't have time to do the bike commute in any of its forms and still get to the string band's meeting place on time.

Yesterday the weather was showery. The morning sleet almost convinced me to skip the ride, but I went for it instead. The dirt road and path were still frozen from the previous cold weather. On the evening ride the top layer had thawed, so it was like riding on flypaper. The tires didn't sink into glop but they stuck stuck stuck, demanding a full grunt from every pedal stroke. It was a real thigh burner.

And so we come to this morning. Things had frozen up again. My digestive system was still behaving itself. I was doing okay on time. The sun was out. Great.

As I started down from my parking point I did not seem to be getting as much speed out of the descent as I usually do. Maybe the road was still a little fly papery. Maybe my first cup of coffee in four or five days was making me tach up a little. I kept pushing, down and down until I got to the path.

Maybe my seat was too low. It felt a little low. It had felt a little high when I started using the mountain bike commuter this fall. Maybe I raised it last winter when I started wearing the Snow Sneakers and needed to raise it again now that I had gone back to them. I pulled one foot out of the toestrap so I could put my heel on the pedal to check leg extension. It seemed okay.

As I brought my foot back around to slip into the toeclip again I heard a weird metallic click as my shoe caught on something projecting from the bike. I discovered that one brake spring had popped out from my rear brake, probably from shoving the bike in the car and dragging it out again in a bit of a rush. A brake pad had been rubbing the rim since I started.

Wow, was I fast after that! At least until I hit the blasting headwind on the causeways where the path goes along the lakes. But headwinds in the morning are often tailwinds on the way home. And so it was.

The evening commute gained a whole lot of atmosphere when a thick snow squall moved in as I was starting from the shop. It was a snow shower at first, steady but light. It thickened after I got out of the downtown area and headed into the darkness. But that wind was behind me. The snowflakes flared in the headlight beam. Occasional big ones in just the right spot flashed brilliantly for an instant. The cone of floodlit snow streamed toward me as the dusting whitened the path. A wild evening.

Twilight commuting benefits

The big, fat moon was coming up over Lake Wentworth when I got to the causeway. You can't see it, but a loon was swimming around in this postcard landscape.

In the last mile of the ride back to where I park, the moon was just clearing a ridge beyond a grassy wetland. The temperature was nice. Not too cool, not too warm. A night to ride slowly enough to look at things.

The all-seeing, all knowing mechanic

This morning on my path commute I came up behind an older man on a hybrid bike. Usually riders and walkers hear me come up behind them. They generally prefer to pull aside. Not this guy. He entered a long stretch where the path runs between the rails. I would not be able to pass him without making a point of inconveniencing him.

I had to laugh, being stuck like a motorist in traffic, or like a driver behind a cyclist where it isn't safe to pass. I had plenty of time to think about it as he made his leisurely way, apparently unaware I was back there at all. I stayed quiet so he wouldn't feel compelled to make room for me in the narrow confines of the rails.

Long minutes passed. I scrutinized the details of his bike. Why was he in that strange gear, on the small chainring up front and the smallest or next smallest cog in back? Were the shifters acting up? I checked his crank to see if it was a crank of death. Tne brakes indicated it was about a 1998 bike, safely past the Crank of Death era.

The tires looked like about 700X35, with no bald spots. I couldn't guess at chain wear, but it looked like it needed lube.

Finally we moved out from between the rails. I gave what I hoped was a cheery greeting as I passed. As soon as I got ahead of his wife I sprinted away. I was late for work.

At the shop I was chatting with my coworker as I unloaded my bike. Up the stairs came the guy from the bike path. He did not have his bike, but I recognized him.

"I want to get a bike tuned," he said. "And I want to know if it will take wider tires."

"Oh yeah, it looks like it probably will," I said.

He looked at me strangely. "How do you know that?" he asked.

"I was behind you on the path," I said. I wish I could have made it more mysterious. At least I had that one moment where he thought I had psychic powers.

The off season

In our area there are really two off seasons, although the demise of winter is blending everything from Labor Day to Memorial Day into one long off season. For the moment, enough people still want to believe in the coming of ski season to keep it gleaming somewhere below the horizon, a mythical land of promise.

We get our odd jobs this time of year. What they are and when they'll arrive is completely unpredictable. This year it's been a handful of repairs, some rentals to people who specialize in vacationing when other people don't, and assembly of three weird tandems for an adaptive sports program.

I get an extra day off during this period, because the shop closes on Sundays. While I love the extra time for my own use it actually crowds the work week when someone does need service. They see how quiet things are and nudge for quick completion, but I have one less day to get parts I need for them and complete their job. It's better than sitting around with nothing to do but sweep the dirt from one side of the floor to the other and try to figure out why our air compressor acts so weird. It's just funny how it's all or nothing.

I made the transition to the park and ride commute a little earlier this year. Things I had to do on various evenings made the full distance inconvenient. Shortening daylight makes me a little concerned riding the highway, even with my great light system. So I've retired to the forest. I'll have to dust off the old helmet cam and take a few videos of the rides as the foliage gets brighter. The file videos I tried to post from last November didn't work for some reason.