COVID-19: time trial rules in effect

No drafting. No close passing. That's obvious.

Stay out of snot rocket range. Watch where you spit. What was formerly just a gross breach of etiquette or a grossly humorous mishap could now be fatal to a susceptible rider unfortunate enough to intercept your phlegm projectile. At the very least it would be an inconvenient interruption to someone's training schedule. Of course you're not infected. You're fine! But whoever you landed it on might go through a couple of weeks of anxiety watching you for symptoms. And let's not forget asymptomatic carriers. It also invites retaliation. Who's to say that that other joker is fine?

On the road at any time, cyclists are vulnerable to the bodily fluid assaults of disapproving motorists. Indeed, I once got into a roadside punch-up with a car full of teenagers who had clammed on me as they drove by. That was about 40 years ago, when I could be lured into such a confrontation pretty easily. There have been other spitters since then. It usually just blows back on them because of the wind created by our forward motion. But when you have to worry about micro droplets the risk factor goes up.

For now, our noses run because the weather is cold. About the time the weather warms up, our noses will run because of all the pollen. Always assume your nose is loaded and point it in a safe direction.

Commuters are time trialists more than pack riders. Some of that depends on your area and work schedule. Around here, only a handful of people commute by bike, and that includes every direction leading into town. I almost never see any other riders on my commute. Schedule makes a difference too. The other commuters seem to have to arrive earlier. They're already finished before I come through, and they've headed home before I get out at the end of my shift.

For any part on the rail trail I will encounter other riders, but far fewer of them when I head out in the evening than coming into town in the morning. And there's no way you can stay six feet apart when you're trapped between the rails. Even a lot of the path outside the rails is too narrow to keep a safe distance. That will become a factor as the weather warms up and the trail dries out. Walkers would have to step out and down the crumbling banks of the causeways to keep their proper distance from each other. Riders can't do that. Even the most talented mountain bike trickster would find it slow going to hop along the embankment for yards at a time. It's not a realistic option if you have to be somewhere at a particular time.

Summer is not a bell curve

Summer seemed to arrive sooner and last longer around here 20 years ago. It seemed to crank up at Memorial Day and go pretty steadily until Labor Day, with some peaks and valleys, but all on a pretty high plateau. Whatever has contributed to the decline, the shape has been distinctly different since shortly after the turn of the century.

Summer now is Fourth of July weekend, and August. Depending on the year, July might stay a bit active, but August is as close to crazy as we ever get anymore.

This summer, I left for a vacation trip at just about the worst possible time. Because the cellist has limited time at home with her out-of-state employment, we had to schedule the trip when she had the chance. I knew it would put me on the long-term shit list with my employer, but the cellist has limited time in more ways than one. I spend most of my time disappointing someone. I just have to choose who it will be. So I returned from the trip feeling like the guy who sneaked out of the Alamo before things got really bad, to hit the saloon and brothel. In reality my goals were more lofty than that, but the siege mentality of a small shop with inadequate staff leads to high stress and exaggerated emotions.

Because so many schools go back in session before summer technically ends, the crowds should drop right off this week. Because some schools are making a point to start after Labor Day, we might see more residual activity in this period of tapering. After Labor Day we'll get the early September rush of people who make a point to take vacation after the crowds are gone, when hospitality businesses might be offering discounted rates. That's what I used to do, decades ago, when I took vacations.

Has summer travel always been a business? Back 12,000 years ago, or even just three or four centuries, did seasonal travelers interact with fixed populations in ways similar to the economic exploitation of today? Exploitation sounds like price gouging, but it isn't always. It's just a matter of harvesting a resource when the resource is available. I've used the metaphor of hunting migratory herds to describe our handling of regular cycles of tourist business. We don't actually kill and eat them, and wear their hides -- except perhaps in some of the more remote hollows of the mountains -- but we extract as much as we can from them when they're here, knowing that they will be gone in a few weeks.

Celebrities, Networking and Trickle-Down Economics

Summer brings to Wolfeboro cars that cost more than your house, and people who can afford several of them. It also brings the brief visit of a television personality who has developed a strong affection for the place.

I used to check out the Forbes 400 every year, to see how our "locals" were doing, but I haven't checked the scores yet this year. The billionaires list is updated to 2019, but the latest 400 I can find is from 2018. No matter. It's just like bird watching. "Oh look, there's a Yellow Bellied Sapsucker. And there's a Market Manipulating Cash Amasser." You don't really need to know. It's just a hobby.

Earlier this week, a woman from one of the lakefront houses called to ask if we sell electric bicycles. I explained why we don't, and mentioned a couple of people in the Millionaire Motorbike Club that I thought she could call for more information. I assumed that they already knew each other, because, over the years, I have found out that most of the super rich in the summer population go to the same church. Indeed, the founder of the MMC has been an evangelist for e-bikes, and has gradually converted nearly everyone in the congregation who used to get around by muscle power alone. I figured this latest inquiry was inspired by his efforts.

As it happened, the founder of the MMC showed up to have flat tires on a jogging stroller repaired. I asked casually if he had heard from Mrs. E-curious. Turned out he didn't know her. She hadn't told me this when I had suggested that she call him. I always imagined that the Sewall Road crowd and the wider circle of financial heavyweights along the lake must get together for regular summer socials, to talk about how to keep the help docile, and what each of them is paying for congressmen these days. I guess not.

Jimmy Fallon sightings were reported before the Fourth of July. We haven't had a visit from him in more than ten years. His wife has bought socks from us. The bike shop holds no attraction to the celebrity set. So we listen to the rumors and see the selfies posted by businesses that sell coffee, food, and beer. Again, more bird watching. I joke that the closest we come to a celebrity encounter is when Mitt Romney has another flat tire.

Late yesterday afternoon, in comes Mitt Romney with a flat tire. So that box is checked for the summer. He did look at bikes with El Queso Grande while I was knocking out the flat tire repair. So there may be more trickling. Meanwhile, I have to get to work for just another summer day.

More anti-cyclist infrastructure on the Cotton Valley Trail

As if riders didn't have enough to handle at the rail crossings, now they've added these slalom gates. Gossip says that the intent is to guide riders to the exact crossing point. The goofy yellow paint and the "no shit Sherlock" arrows are more unhelpful attempts to deflect liability by belaboring the obvious.

I will say that I have observed riders winging through the crossings at stupidly oblique angles and foolishly high speeds. The ones I saw managed to pull it off, but they obviously had no idea how lucky they were. So the gates prevent a rider from slicing off the corner. But they constrict traffic during heavy use periods, when the path can be a log jam of pedestrians and riders. And any minor error in alignment -- that you might have been able to correct -- risks catching a pedal on those orange posts. They're springy, to reduce the chances of impalement, but not so floppy that you could hook a pedal and just ride through it.

At least one crossing also has the heavy wooden sign post inconveniently -- not to say dangerously -- close to the crossing itself. Cyclists dismount indeed. That crossing is further out, closer to Bryant Road.

The intent is always to get riders to dismount. A rider who isn't riding isn't bothering anyone. That's true on roads or paths. But it isn't really true when a knot of pedestrians and riders tangles up in the confined space of a crossing that was already too small before the addition of the slalom gates.

The drive-to-ride crowd can drive somewhere else. Mountain biking has become entirely drive-to-ride. As dedicated trail networks proliferate for purely recreational forms of cycling, large blocs of the pedaling population are neatly removed from the traffic mix and feel less need to advocate for the freedom to ride everywhere.

Long distance transportation cycling isn't highly practical for the vast majority of people, but infrastructure should still be built to accommodate riders no matter what. A rider might make short hops on a long road, and long distance riders have rights, too. Most attention gets paid to built-up areas with denser populations. This compartmentalized approach is as wrong as wildlife management plans that focus only on one species, or too small a piece of habitat. Any trail that connects two relatively major points of interest needs to be considered from the transportation as well as recreation angle. Any trail that can be connected to the rest of the transportation network is part of that network.

Treading water in brake fluid

The repair shop continues to be busy. Nearly every time-sucking repair has involved hydraulic disc brakes. Even now I don't have time to go into detail, because I have to sprint to town to deal with the backlog. I'm trying to finish a bike for a guy who bought it from Bikes Direct to the Repair Shop. It arrived in many more pieces than he expected. After fumbling with it a bit, he brought it to us. He leaves for vacation this afternoon. It all went together routinely except for the rear SRAM Guide R disc brake, which has multiple issues. The symptoms don't make sense.

The work load would not seem heavy at all with two full-time mechanics, but we have been unable to fill the other full time position. Not enough people share the right balance of intelligence and delusion to want to get into the job. And the presence of another full time mechanic would reveal the underlying weakness in the economy. Most of the activity in Wolfe City is coming from millionaires and their minions, here for their summer getaway.

Our local billionaire stopped by to say hello. He wants to know why we aren't selling ebikes yet.

"I've got a whole garage full of them," he said.

I do not know anyone who owns one who has an income less than six figures.

I pointed out to him that for eight months of the year -- and I should have said ten -- there are 7,000 year-round residents sewing patches on their patches. For four months -- and I should have said two -- there are people with disposable income. And they all buy their stuff where they live, not where they spend their long, leisurely holidays.

Man on vacation buys fried dough

New Hampshire's only television station devoted about 30 seconds to tell the viewing public that comedian Jimmy Fallon had ventured down the lake from Wolfeboro to Weirs Beach, where he purchased fried dough. The hardworking Mr. Fallon has had to singlehandedly support the Lakes Region's summer celebrity needs for the past several years. Everyone has to work harder and take shorter vacations these days.

After 20 years in Wolfeboro, former Massachusetts governor and unsuccessful Presidential candidate Mitt Romney finally found his way into our shop this week, to have a flat tire repaired. The day before that, the shop owner had found himself behind Mr. Romney in the line at the Rite Aid pharmacy. He said that Romney looked comfortable and relaxed, dressed for lakeside recreation, and casually groomed. He did not think it was funny when I suggested that one could say, "Eye witness reports unshaven and disheveled Mitt Romney seen buying drugs!"

When Romney dropped the bike off, I was talking to another customer about building up some wheels. I was all too happy to let upper management handle that check-in. At first glance -- as so often happens -- I wasn't even sure the man was actually The Man. I just thought, "hey, that skinny guy looks kind of like Mitt Romney."

The next morning, Jumper Dude fixed Romney's flat tire and did a few other adjustments before leaving to work on the mountain bike trail he's building on Wolfeboro Conservation Commission land adjacent to the Cotton Valley Trail. He reported that, late in the afternoon, he met Romney on the Cotton Valley Trail. I guess that's that for another 20 years.

I had been totally unaware of the Wolfeboro mystique before I accidentally ended up here in 1988. You really never know who might drift through. Sometimes they do it in groups or close enough succession to make it seem like a regular thing. So it becomes part of the economy, while still not solidly reliable enough to lead to motor coach tours and paparazzi. People walk around with one eye out for possible sightings.

Celebrities have a big responsibility to venture into unlikely places to give as many people as possible the chance to act unimpressed by their presence.

Because so few of the A, B, C, D, E and F lists ride bicycles, my reflexes go mostly untested. And I always wonder whether a public figure is relieved or disappointed when they get treated like anyone else in line. I'm sure it varies from figure to figure and day to day. If they catch me at the right point in the afternoon I'm grumpy and semi-dormant anyway.

It's showtime

Wolfeboro's Hollywood heyday is long gone, and the rockin' party of the 1980s and '90s has dispersed. But any summer resort has to put on its act when the season arrives.

The bike shop is a lot like a Disney attraction based on a movie most people have forgotten. When I worked at Walt Disney World in 1977, I was assigned to the Enchanted Tiki Room. The audience consisted of people who didn't know what else to do with a D ticket, grandparents, and couples looking for a dark, air-conditioned place to make out. It was also  -- based on analysis of the evidence left behind -- a pretty good place to change the baby's diaper and leave the turd burrito for the servants to pick up. The bike shop, while we have adapted, has a similar feeling of being left behind in a dusty past.

I will admit that segments of the bicycling economy do seem to be proliferating in their separate subcultures. Instead of a single invasion riding on hundreds of muddy beasts, riders arrive on a weird array of machines related only by having pedals attached to a crank. The general configuration is still based on the "safety bicycle" of the 1890s, but from there it can go anywhere. Since Friday we've had a gravel bike with electronic shifting, two smokeless mopeds that crashed on the rail trail, one while-you-wait hydraulic caliper overhaul, and close to 20 rentals. It is still far below the flat-out pace of the 1990s, but on most days we only have two people on duty.

Our new trainee seems to be more of a body shop guy than a mechanic. You know body shop guys, whose cars look stunning and run like shit. He did a restoration-quality cleanup job on an old Schwein, but can't seem to get the hang of basic adjustments to shifting, or the plodding attention to details like tight stem bolts. And he has two or three other endeavors in full swing, so he keeps having to go to another job. Mechanical skill is part nature, part nurture. His nature is hard to assess when his nurture keeps getting interrupted.

The summer to this point has been mediocre. The town seems busy for the Fourth of July weekend. No telling where it will go from there. Wolfeboro's slogan, "The Oldest Summer Resort in America," used to refer to its historical roots as a summer retreat for a colonial governor. Now it aptly describes the graying demographic as the town becomes a big retirement community. Tourists come and do whatever it is that tourists do. We put on our outfits and play our roles, happy that anyone shows up at all.

Places, everyone!

Commuting like your life depended on it

As a person ages, regular exercise becomes more important to keep the body moving and the mind engaged. Well before you reach the point where someone is holding your elbow and guiding you gently across the carpeted floor of the nice facility in which you spend your last days, you'll get around better if you do as much as you can under your own power.

Wolfeboro is full of old people. The median age in New Hampshire is rising in general, but certain towns attract retirees, meaning that the population is not only aging in place, it's recruiting people who have left the work force. This provides a lot of subjects to observe.

As I watch the retirees through the years, I see that the active ones  -- not surprisingly -- do better than the inactive ones. The local working-age commuters also enjoy an automatically better fitness base. Because of my foolish life choices, I'll be in the work force until they dump my body in an unmarked grave. So it's vitally important to me to stay in shape and save money. Transportation cycling, even for half the year, makes a critical difference.

The bike path system in town draws the largest percentage of locals who pedal. Anyone not fortunate enough to live within a half-mile or less of an access point is very likely to drive to the trail, unload the bikes, perform their obligatory exercise, and drive off to whatever is next. This is also true of many riders who are not yet retired, especially in tourist season. The Cotton Valley Trail is about to be completed all the way from Wolfeboro to Wakefield, fulfilling a plan published back in the 1990s. This makes it a destination journey for people who like to drive around, sampling different paths and trails.

The trails also attract walkers, some with dogs, some with strollers. During peak usage periods, riders have to negotiate this crowd, and the non-riders have to put up with the cyclists.

Walking is actually the best way to get around the tight center of Wolfeboro. I use the bike to get to town, but for any errands right in downtown I will walk, making better time than anyone on wheels when the traffic is at its height. Even when traffic is sparse, a cyclist will have to negotiate left turns and hills, and then find a secure place to park. If the distance is a half-mile or less, hoof it.

On trails or on the road, the vast majority of riding is done for recreation and exercise, separate from the utilitarian needs of daily life. A tiny handful of people use bikes for transportation. Most of them have an athletic background of some kind. We slip through Wolfeboro's legendary summer traffic with ease, but the prisoners of internal combustion all have their reasons to stay sealed in the can, barely moving on a really bad day. They're right: the blockage only lasts for a little over two miles at its worst. Then they can rip along, formation flying with their fellow motorists, far faster than some sweaty idiot pushing on bike pedals.

In the winter, I do not push bike pedals. With access to the cross-country ski trails, and a love of winter hiking and mountaineering, I have always set aside the bike when icy roads and encroaching snowbanks made it an unfair imposition on the road users who really truly can't get around any other way. Loggers and tradesmen need trucks. People who have to cover a lot of distance need to go faster than 15-20 miles per hour. We're all in this together. Yes, many road users could benefit physically and economically if they left the car home and pedaled on the errands on which you see them out there, but a lot needs to be done to make that easy and inviting. Right now it intimidates them.

In winters with little or no snow, the roads are as clear as in summer. Then I will ride, because I am not fenced in by a snowbank.

At some point, even a fit and healthy person starts to get physical problems. A slowing metabolism means that the pounds pile on much more quickly when the exercising stops. If people have walkable and bikeable routes to routine destinations, they have the option to leave the armored wheelchair in the garage, and get a little more conditioning without having to think about it. They'll never believe that they could change the traffic mix in their favor if they all just went for it. They stay in their vehicles, scaring themselves and each other so that only a few at a time ever give it a shot. And then it scares them, so they go back into the car.

Some people love their cars and would never consider getting around by bike. And they don't automatically rot away after age 70 as a stark warning of the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle. Some people manage to live long lives of happy smoking. There's no guaranteed formula. But the odds favor someone who remains active. I feel decrepitude eagerly hook its claws into me when I'm forced to be inactive. Even though the commute sometimes just feels like a treadmill grinding me toward my anonymous death, I know that it is helping me.

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

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

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

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

One day, a hawk landed on the trash hut.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mountain groan coffee

The friend who started me roasting my own coffee beans put together a little group to buy beans in bulk. She lives at the top of a hill with only steep and steeper approaches. When the latest shipment came in, I had to figure out which of these I wanted to take.

The most direct route had always seemed like the steepest, so I had avoided it. But that straight line on the map finally convinced me to tackle it.

Haines Hill Road leaves Route 28 to the right as the highway bends to the left. You turn right by going straight instead of going straight by curving to the left. The climbing begins almost immediately, but not drastically. The forest looks like some place further north and further from civilization, though not uninhabited.

The pavement ends in a couple of miles and the road starts to descend. You think it might not be so bad, even when the unpaved part climbs again. Then you see it.

Beyond the screening trees, pavement angles up like a rocky ledge. In the car it had seemed parabolic, a brutal challenge. I paused to take the picture, hoping to capture the contrast between the approach and the initial slope.

To complicate matters, there is occasionally a psycho dog running loose at the farm at the bottom of the hill. The driveway is on the left. If that monster was out, I would be trying to start this climb with about 90 pounds of furry death snapping at my tendons.

The things we do for coffee.

Head on a swivel, ears straining for the sound of dog claws scrabbling for traction, I rode beneath the concealing foliage to view the whole climb.

It's not that bad. It's steep and continuous, but not as steep as the wall on Stoddard Road that I had done many times, even on a fixed gear. Barring attacks by the psycho dog, this could be the elusive quiet alternative to Route 28 that I've been pining for since about 1990. Funny how an impression can change when you look over the handlebars instead of through a windshield. I'm embarrassed to have waited so long to give it a shot. In my defense, it is a little longer than the Route 28 direct route home.

Bear in mind that I was fresh after two days off the bike. I don't think I would tackle this route every day. On the other hand, if it really has as little traffic as I encountered, it makes up for its gravitational challenges with the peace and quiet.

After a nice visit with my friend, I headed downhill with my seven pounds of coffee beans. The compensation for any of the North Wolfeboro routes is that the rest of my ride home is basically downhill. The few little nuisance climbs are trivial.

Customer Appreciation

Humans are wired to remember the negative more than the positive. This characteristic probably began as a survival-enhancing trait, because our ancestors who catalogued and avoided negative experiences had a better chance of reproducing and bringing their next generation to breeding age.

As the eons have passed, the survival value of a negative focus has diminished, particularly as our technological society puts out crash pads around every sharp object and nurtures helplessness, but it remains vestigially. Any of us can notice things and connect dots to make small or large patterns that alarm, anger, or depress us.

I riff on customer behavior a lot, because I have absorbed so much of it over the decades. We in the theme park/specialty retail business should wear dosimeters to indicate how many assholes have irradiated us in the course of our careers. Given the bias toward retaining negative impressions, the collection of crap rays builds up and hangs around with more force than the accumulation of happy nice rays. I'm not excusing, just explaining.

Some people have higher susceptibility than others. You'll meet career sweeties in service positions. You'll meet people who have enough self control to contain an appropriate but ill advised response to a customer's radiation. You'll meet snarling burnouts who should change jobs, and would if they could. You'll meet people who are learning that they don't have what it takes to put up with the demands of an unfiltered public surging in with their needs, wants, and attitudes.

The seasonal fluctuation in our particular businesses, bike and ski, create high work loads and deep lulls. Each of these brings a specific kind of stress. And the devotees of one season consider the peak of our other season to be down time, so they come in to chisel and waste time when we are most busy with the other half of the clientele.

Specialty retail has its own challenges. We get chiseled during cross country ski season, because cross country skiers are basically cheapskates. I am one of you. Cross country skiing appealed to me because I could use skis for their ancestral purpose, to go from place to place, and because I could ski for free, limited only by available snow and my own skills. So I share the desire to pay less and ski more, compared to lift served skiing. Bicyclists cover a much broader spectrum, because bicycling can be done over a vastly greater range of conditions. But, because machinery is involved along with physical exertion, bicyclists not only encompass pathological bargain hunters, but mechanical and athletic arrogance in the spectrum of behavior. There's a little of that in cross-country skiing, but among skiers the chiseling dominates.

What does all this mean to customers and shop staff? Last week, with a staff chronically one person short for the workload on any given day, we had bored skiers, tired of summer, coming in for the off season deals, deals, deals. This draws a qualified staff member to sell stuff at suicide margins while in-season repair work continues to pile up. We should make them hold a gold-plated chisel as their emblem. At the same time, we got the out-of-town smart shoppers who will loudly tell their friends not to buy anything from us because they know some place down home that is going out of business and is basically throwing stuff out. That guy should wear a headdress made out of a dead vulture, to proclaim his devotion to feeding on the death of others.

I see from the condition of things people finally bring in for repair that they don't care whether it was properly set up the first place. The things they manage to survive make me wonder why I ever cared so darn much about doing a good job myself. Gone are the 1990s, when thousands of people took to the trails and actually tested products and our workmanship.

Weirdly, the current trend to know nothing and shop entirely by price manages to coexist with a culture of helplessness in which customers depend more than ever on products not only meeting but exceeding their specifications. Take that guy who rode the Mount Washington Century on a 23-22-21-20 spoke front wheel and did not end up in some hospital with his spine pinned together and his whole face in a cast.

When the shop fills up with loud, confident, and wrong experts explaining our products to their friends, while I scrub away at some greasy, rusty, neglected and abused piece of disrespected equipment, it can be hard to summon a feeling of noble justification for my occupation. We in the back shop turn to dark comedy. Occasionally we indulge one or two of those appropriate inappropriate responses.

All this is what we have to survive to be there for the truly interested, interesting, and appreciative riders. It's no one's fault that the pleasant lift from them can be eradicated in the next ten minutes by some behavioral fart. It's just people being people. And we are people laughing at people being people. We'd miss the jerks if they went away. It's fun to come up with ways to bitch about them. With negativity bred into us, our choice is to take it too seriously or to mock it.

How competition helped us in the 1990s

Wolfeboro has been in a bicycling recession since the early part of the 21st Century. Cycling numbers appear stable, but definitely well below their height through the 1990s and the first part of the road bike wave that rose up around the turn of the century.

These days, we only manage to feel overwhelmingly busy by having only a couple of people on the schedule on most days. But with that short roster, if anyone goes away, the others have to put in more time to make sure we have minimal coverage on every day we're open.

Boom times don't last. The bustle of the 1990s seemed like it would never end, but it was based on temporary conditions. The surge in the bike business coincided with popular interest in small-town New England. In Wolfeboro, an existing summer home tradition brought multiple generations of prosperous families, while proximity to jobs in southern New Hampshire and nearby Massachusetts brought super-commuters who wanted to situate their families in idyllic small towns while they did the heroic highway haul to bring home the paycheck. To service all this, contractors and land pimps gathered like flies on a big corpse. Good times!

The spike in year-round population meant the schools had to expand. That meant more building, more maintenance, more buses, more bus drivers, more teachers, more administrators. More kids meant more toys. And the 1980s had already seriously promoted the idea of adults playing outside, with slogans like "he who dies with the most toys wins."

It was a great time to be selling the toy everyone wanted. But we know how that goes.

The competition between bike shops in this pre-Internet age could be vicious. The business values of the 1980s met the influx of cash to produce things like Zane's in Connecticut, and a corrosive climate of slander as shops battled to gain market share. In Wolfe City, with a year-round population of about 7,000 people, three shops tried to operate year-round.

We were there first. We're the last one left.

While we bemoaned the loss of sales revenue, and the sleazy gossip people told us they heard about us in the other shops, our repair business kept us alive. Those other shops couldn't seem to find a good mechanic, no matter how many rocks they turned over, offering minimum wage and an employee discount on all the shiny trinkets. But that wasn't the only way competition helped us. It also kept us from having to grow large enough to feed the voracious market all by ourselves.

When things went down, it was like that pinhole puncture you can't quite feel at first. Then things get squishy. Then, after several miles, you definitely feel the bump of the valve stem. But, unlike a puncture, we couldn't just put a new tube in and wail it up to full pressure again. To push the metaphor a bit further, we could only do as well as our frame pump would allow. You know what I mean: you will probably never get it up to race pressure again, and it will take hours of tedious labor even to get close.

If we had become the giant powerhouse of a regional shop, we would have to feed that beast now on the scraps that come to us. Mountain biking has become a destination resort activity, not a daily dose of fun. Road bikers are fed a steady diet of newer and more complicated parts by an industry that hopes their customers become addicted to buying things and discarding them. The industry categorizes riders and tries to feed them tailored products, rather than capitalizing on the kind of rational anarchy that thrived through the 1970s and '80s, and that held on through the 1990s while the "innovators" of mountain biking repeatedly shot themselves in the foot.

Shop staff in the age of Big Bicycle are expected to wear the company shirt and spout the company line. Expertise means being expert in the company's products and the proper care, feeding and euthanasia thereof, on a steady schedule of obsolescence.

Our little outpost on the banks of the Big Lake will never be that shop. We don't have the year-round revenue stream to make us big enough to look attractive to Big Bicycle's bean counters. We have to rely on our ingenuity to be able to deal with whatever comes through our doors, including nothing at all. We have to pay full freight, get the crappiest terms, and deal with our handful of customers who still believe in the old idea that you could buy a nice bike and enjoy it for years. And by that they mean decades.

Our mechanics take a perverse pride in figuring out how to fix what the industry wants us to throw away. It is born of necessity. We can't always just order a new part, even if one is still made. Especially during summer visitor season, we get thrown these challenges with short deadlines. They're more fun than the routine, boring bullshit that makes up the bulk of our repair income. We can't always win, but we always try.

I'm getting too old for this

The bike business does not respect age. Not surprising when you consider that a young adult can propel and maneuver the vehicle to its greatest potential. Not too young; the best riders need seasoned muscles and honed skills. But at a certain point a rider can no longer keep up.

Bicycling in general encompasses an array of machinery and techniques suitable for all ages. Bikes for children are mostly toys, or perhaps prepare them for what they might some day achieve in bicycling's real theater. Bikes for older riders reflect what people past their prime can still manage to be.

Certain elders achieve the status of wise men. Owners of companies, famous innovators, retired racers all can manage to make the young pups shut up for at least a minute. But put one of these silver-tops in a greasy apron in a little shop in some nowhere town and the young guns would not know to be impressed. And if the greasy old geezer turning wrenches has never been one of those luminaries in the first place, the world really passes them by.

In what passed for the glory days, my physical prime happened to coincide with the mountain bike boom and my skills and style happened to be slightly better than average. This is no modest understatement. My edge was very slim. Mechanical skills and analytical ability made up the rest of my powers, but these were certainly enhanced by the number of people I could leave puking behind me on a long climb. The fact that I was puking to stay in front of them, and chasing faster riders, was excused by the fact that nearly all of us were chasing someone faster. If I could stay ahead of two thirds or three quarters of a ride group, that was solid enough. I knew that all the riders ahead of me were puking to stay out there.

There's a lot of puking, actual or metaphorical, in the prime of cycling. And a lot of acid reflux in your declining years.

Briefly, the local mountain bike crowd shifted to road riding before succumbing to the various ailments of aging athletes. Mountain biking itself went off a cliff, literally. Even if I was in my prime, I would not want to ride in the modern style, on the modern arthropod.

The fragmented bike market does not need hard-driving, monomaniacal riders as much as it needs experienced observers and interpreters. But some of its segments still feed on the intensity of the competitor. Lots of riders claim to understand their lower place in the hierarchy, but when they ride you know they're listening to the narration of their private video, or at least feeling the savage satisfaction of chasing down their quarry, real or imagined. An awful lot of people who come into a shop look at the people who work there and mentally assess whether they would be the chasers or the chased.

Actually, an awful lot of people don't come into bike shops anymore. Not in Resort Town, anyway. Even when there was money to be made, it was not easy because it attracted a lot of competition. We left all of them in the dust eventually, but now the dust settles on us, on a course nearly deserted. The segmented market seeks asylum in enclaves of its own disciples. You're either a big shop or a specialty shop.

We're an outpost, in Resort Town. We're that palisade far from civilization where a traveler hopes the blacksmith can knock together something to keep the wagon going long enough to get them home. We'll never be a big shop, because we've chosen to live beyond the edge of big civilization. The place is hardly remote. The lifestyle has evolved from north country lite to rural suburban. But the rough and rocky land refuses to support much of an economy. When people no longer come from away, the locals can only do so much to keep each other afloat.

The model for New England -- particularly northern New England -- is the subsistence farm. Now that the party is over for cycling, our shop is a subsistence farm. The woods are full of the weathered stone foundations of subsistence farms. The inhabitants of them gleaned whatever sustenance they could before they gave up and moved on, or simply dropped.

In the bustle of civilization, life is less of a struggle against indifferent nature and more of a brawl. There may be more activity in the lands of urbanization and sprawl, but it's no less strenuous. The specialty shop is only as good as its reputation. The big shop has to find the right size for its economy, and maintain a staff that will help it flourish, or at least not embarrass it too badly. If a specialty wanes, the little boutique must shift its focus or wither. The big shop or small chain can grow or shrink categories as long as the staff can keep up with the technology.

Technology is driven by desire. Perceived necessity is the mother of invention. Desire breeds an image. An image is an emotional construct. Emotion responds to first impressions. First impressions can be shaped by prejudicial beliefs. We look for what we hope to see, and often see what we have told ourselves to expect. Does this slightly limping, unkempt mumbler really know what he's doing? Why is someone that age still doing this job?

Because I can. Because the craft needs people who respect the craft. Why waste all that experience?

Like any writer, I console myself with the idea that I may yet figure out how to produce and sell something popular, or at least be discovered after my death and become influential then. Beyond that it's probably better not to pick at things too much. You can't do much more than what seems like a good idea at the time, whatever you're into. Good luck out there. If you need your bike worked on, you know where to find me.

All or Nothing Town

Summer resort towns survive on the frantic seasonal surge. The residents hope that the blur of activity leaves enough cash behind to weather the many months in which the whole outside world forgets we exist, except for the occasional mention on the Tonight Show.

Wolfeboro squeezes a bit more income out of fall foliage and winter tourism, but summer is the big money maker. All. Then nothing.

We're teetering at the edge of that drop into nothing right now. The only reason the shop has seemed busy is that we are running with two people most of the time, and never more than three. We used to need a daily staff of three, with four or five on busy weekends and holidays.

Why do people ask, "How's business?" When I start to tell them, their eyes glaze, they fidget, and they change the subject.

Your obvious capitalist high roller types look delightfully uneasy when some shop clerk starts to lay out detailed observations about the vanishing middle class.

From now on, when someone asks, "How's business?" I'm going to say, "What are you, an economist?" Or I'll just say "F#&k off!"

When Wolfeboro was really booming, in the 1980s and '90s, the resident middle class was mostly land pimps and contractors. It was filled out by school district employees, some professionals, and the few small business owners who were actually generating some profit. There was also a smattering of super-commuters driving to Concord, southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts every work day. All this so their children could be raised in the small town fantasy of a cultural backwater devoid of real opportunity. But it's pretty, and there's virtually no street crime.

Young adults drive any economy, and they can't thrive here. When the boom was big, young adults were servicing it. They raised their families and spent optimistically. But now the kids are grown, the young adults are aging and the money seems harder to get, and wiser to hold, if you can.

The same aging has taken down the seasonal residents. Extended families used to come here for weeks. They might come and go during the summer, but there always seemed to be a contingent around. As age and economics attack those numbers, fewer people come. Some families even sell the lake place. The new buyers don't seem to have the mindset or the finances to fill the region with hustle and bustle from the end of May to early September. The town is turning more and more into a retirement area. The third world economics of the region help a little, just as they do in foreign countries renowned for affordable retirement fortresses. Just keep the poor folks outside the compound and you'll be fine. New Hampshire may cost a little more money, but you're still a tad less likely to get carjacked or invaded here than in some banana republic. Between the residents who remain unwilling to give up basic courtesy, and the ones who still believe in "job creators," most of them will touch a forelock or at least nod pleasantly to the silver-haired benefactors who dribble out a bit of their investment income in return for a secure place to lay their heads.

Even Jimmy Fallon, for all his enthusiastic lip service, really only shows up for Fourth of July weekend. This year he didn't even do that, because he was having his finger sewn back on. I'm not sure if Mitt was around. They're not where the money is made, anyway. The rare birds just provide some color and excitement for those inclined to be excited by such things. The anonymous masses with moderate means used to bring the real lifeblood. Big flocks of quail provide more meat than a handful of eagles. A lot more.

If you're capable of intellectual detachment about your plight, you can see that the rich -- who really are better than the rest of us -- only need so many flunkies. Everyone else is just a drain on society's resources. I have operated under the hope that the culling will be gradual rather than cataclysmic, and that I can continue my modest, comfortable life of genteel poverty by scurrying along the baseboards to fetch my crumbs unnoticed. Writing inflammatory crap like this might seem to run counter to that philosophy, but I hardly expect anything I write to go viral. I have the sense not to blow the gig by getting into any pointless arguments with visiting plutocrats. Even though most of our summer plutocrats have taken up the smokeless moped, they still come in and trickle, and their machinery is amusing. I just have to avoid getting a hernia, lifting one of those behemoths onto the work stand. I would rather work on an e-bike than a gasoline-powered moped, so that's something to be thankful for.

Busy, crazy, hazy days of summer

Your handlebar tape should not smell like a sweaty sock. And maybe you should see your dermatologist if it does. At the very least, burn your cycling gloves and get some new ones, because they're beyond washing at this point.

I did not say this to the customer who came in with a sudden case of skippy gears on Saturday. I think he'd already headed off to drink and snack in a nearby cafe while we performed whatever instant miracle we could devise. I doused the tape with Lysol before getting near it again. It was white tape, a little grubby but not outright grimy. Something must have been fermenting under the brifter hoods, though. I resisted the urge to set the Lysol on fire.

That rider's gears skipped in the mid range because the rear derailleur pivot was corroded, so the derailleur stuck in the fully-extended position when he rode in the Ned gear. The Ned, named for its most famous proponent, Ned Overend, is the full cross from big chain ring to biggest rear cog. Here was yet another newish road bike suffering from abuse and neglect. The left crank arm had a coating of orange rust all over it because of the rusty water oozing out of the bottom bracket bearings.

Fancy-zoot modern frames with internal cable routing and inset headsets and whatnot have all these entry points for water. It checks in and it doesn't check out. It flows to the lowest point. It gets in from riding in the rain. It gets blasted in from driving in the rain with the bike on a rack. It forms inside from condensation when a bike is stored in a space with wide swings of temperature and humidity. Because no one has to do overhauls anymore, it remains undisturbed for months and years.

I was able to flush out the crud with floods of spray lube and restore full function to that derailleur. The customer was laudably appreciative. He did not say anything about the disinfectant odor hanging over his slightly damp bar tape. Perhaps his pungent gloves kept him from feeling or smelling that anything was afoot. Or no longer quite so much like a foot, anyway.

Some time after that I was doing a "tune up, rear brake pads, call if anything else" repair. I had knocked off the major points when I noticed one pedal seemed to be unthreading from the crank arm. This sometimes happens. If you're lucky, you can thread it in and it will stay. If not, the wiggling pedal has gouged out the threads in the crank arm.

Closer examination revealed that the other pedal was also protruding. Even closer examination revealed that someone had managed to thread the left pedal into the right arm, and the right pedal into the left arm. Things had jammed up about five-eighths of the way in, so they called it good enough.

I was able to extract the pedals. Then I had to run taps through the threads from the back side, starting in the undamaged threads, to establish the proper angle. I should have added to the charges for this, but I did not want to play phone tag and try to explain a weird problem to a customer who wouldn't understand it anyway, so I got through it as quickly as possible and ate the labor on it.

Mid-week a woman rented a road bike. She had brought her shoes and helmet, but forgot her jersey with the handy pockets in the back. When she left the shop she had all her little items stuffed in her bra and the waistband of her cycling shorts. She was a humorous person, and obviously practical in a quirky way. She rode off, oddly bulgy.  When she returned the bike on Sunday morning, she had what looked like a nice piece of banana bread in a plastic bag, stuffed into her cleavage.

In a companion to Bike Shop Gynecology, I had male customer looking for a saddle that would not only support his pelvic bones properly, but also keep his genitalia from "flopping around." I asked if he wore proper cycling shorts, whose constrictive fabric famously inhibits "flop." He said he did. Fortunately, he did not try to show me the problem. I tried not to imagine what sort of hefty, flaccid apparatus could still manage to flop when constrained by the well-constructed 'nad prison of proper bike shorts. I urged him to pursue his own research program.

About an hour into Sunday morning, a rider came in from the road, with the bike in one hand and the chain in the other. His rear derailleur had been yanked around to the top of the dropout when the chain jammed in it after it parted at the "speshul pin," as they so often do. Because he had the chain, I was able to gauge it and determine that it had been worn past the end of the scale before the pin popped. That meant the cassette was toasted. The middle and outer rings were also worn to where they would not properly engage the chain. The rider agreed to a full drivetrainectomy and replacement, if I could dig up the parts from what we had in stock. He did not want to wait for anything to be ordered.

Of course it turned into a scavenger hunt. To duplicate the gearing he had, I was going to have to take apart a 10-speed cassette and re-space it to make a tighter 9-speed than what we had on the shelf. The rear derailleur had to be scavenged from a trade-in road bike we'd put on rental. We had no new chainrings to match his old ones. We'd have to hope the old ones would last the week so he could get home and get new ones. The used rings I found did not seem worth the trouble and expense to install if we did not absolutely have to.

When I called to explain his options, the customer liked the sound of the even easier gearing he would get with the 9-speed cassettes we had on the shelf. He'd had a 12-24. The cassette I was going to improvise would have been a 12-25. Our stock offerings were 11-28. Since we were putting on a new chain, the 11-28 was no problem. So that saved some time and fiddling.

With about 20 minutes before the shop closed, I had the bike back together. On my test ride it functioned well. I called the customer. He came right down, paid and rode off.

Minutes later, he rode back. The chain was slipping on the chain rings. I ride pretty lightly, so I had not gotten it to do that. He was misidentifying it as skipping in the rear. It was pretty dramatically slipping in the front when I rode it after he brought it back.

The chainrings I dug up were going to give him problems shifting, but they would at least hold the chain once it was on there. The middle ring was stamped steel, so it needed those annoying spacers that Shimano used in the 1990s when they were making thin chainrings. The crank was an FSA, so it had those annoying Torx chainring bolts. I didn't want to open any more Pandora's boxes by pulling the crank to replace the rings, so I was trying to do it with the crankset on the bike and the inner ring only loosened, not removed. The spacers I had were a little too thick to put the rings at the optimal distance apart. The drop to the middle was a little wide and from middle to little was a trifle skinny. I showed him all this on the work stand before turning him loose. We had to charge something for the fix, but I kept it as low as I could.

To add interest, increasingly frequent, increasingly strong thunderstorms were moving through the area. The customer had to wait for a gap after I finished installing the chainrings, while a downpour played out.

I'm sure there has been more, but I can't seem to find all my scribbled little notes to jog my scrambled little memory by the time I get to the end of a week. There's no time to post anything from work these days. As the work load shrinks so we can't afford ample staff, what remains is still more than enough to string out the couple of people who work on any given day. Even our crew of three on weekend days is fully occupied with the backlog and the walk-ins. So funny stuff happens, but it rushes downstream and is lost in the river mist.

A time to herd, a time to let 'em run

Even with a massive investment in road improvements, a lot of places in this country will still have narrow roads shared by all users. Terrain, geology and well-established land uses encroach on rights-of-way.

On my commute, Route 28 gets narrow and bendy as it comes into Wolfeboro. The token shoulder disappears. In theory, no motorist can safely pass a cyclist without putting themselves and oncoming traffic at risk.

As I developed my own theories about traffic management a couple of decades ago, I started taking a position further and further into the lane. When the law in New Hampshire made that formally legitimate I experimented with strict herding in that twisty section.

After a couple of seasons I abandoned that method. It made impatient motorists do hideously dangerous things and cranked up the flame under hotheads. Now I ride to the far right through there. It's as close to serene as it will ever be. Granted, I've had some big stuff breeze past my elbow. But when I herded I still had some big stuff go by my elbow, and they weren't breezing.

I would rather have a driver skinny past me, knowing that they don't want to waste time on an accident, than have them seething behind me, wanting more and more to kill me. In nearly every case, I get a bit more room when I let them slide. Because the road is twisty, they aren't screwing around with their phones or other distractions. I figure my odds are about as good as they're going to get.

Further in, where the road straightens and is further constrained by curbs, I move back out into the lane to inhibit stupid passing behavior. The pitch of the road allows me to maintain a speed around 20 mph -- faster when I'm fresher -- so I don't feel like I'm imposing quite so much. Mind you, 20 mph in a car feels wretchedly slow, but soon enough we get to a wide place where I can release the herd to run freely again -- as freely as anything gets to run in Wolfeboro in the summer, anyway. What really happens is that I let them go and then hop in behind them as we all tool along at a very bikeable pace, with them happily in front of the "slower" vehicle.

In a region of narrow, country roads, I ride nearer the right than the center most of the time. I want to be in the forward field of view, even for someone with windshield-induced tunnel vision, with a little wiggle room to the right to ease a squeeze. That one's tricky, though. One squeezer at or near the head of a line can open the space for a convoy to come through in a flying wedge. Even with a rear-view mirror you can't always tell how many vehicles are building up back there. You have to watch the road ahead more than the reflected view. You also have to make some psychological assessments before you open -- or close -- the gate.

The simpler method is to hold that right-of-center, left-of-right position tenaciously. If a driver really pushes the point, use your wiggle room and look for a place to slingshot as many followers around you as you can.

When you get swept aside you may have to slow down a lot. In congested areas with driveways, intersections and parked cars, if you can't stay out in the flow you have to go slowly enough to be ready for ambushes from the side. I hardly encounter urban congestion at all. Where I do, I can keep up with the motor vehicles well enough to stay in the lane. In Wolfe City it's only for a few blocks. In the height of summer's crowds, a bike rider needs to be ready to stop in an instant anyway, because the next bonehead could come from any direction, on two wheels, four wheels, or walking.

Exploding Spokes

The season of urgent repairs has arrived. People come to town for the weekend. Something goes wrong with the bike. They plead for emergency care.

Last Thursday it was two guys carrying a Specialized Secteur. It was 4:30 p.m. The shop would close in one hour.

"The bike was hanging in storage all winter," said the owner. "When I brought it out, a bunch of spokes were broken in the rear wheel."

I asked about the usual things: could a car have hit it, could a heavy object have fallen against it, do any people have access to the storage area who might be pissed off at him? He dismissed each of those possibilities. That left us with four broken spokes on the drive side, cause unknown.

The owner said that the bike had been hanging by the front wheel from a storage hook, in an unheated space during last winter's phenomenal cold spell in Boston. I had never encountered spoke failure due to cold, but there's a lot I haven't encountered. Still, I would have expected the rim to fail before the spokes. Or, more likely, the rim would contract more than the spokes, relieving tension on them.

I said I could not adequately investigate this mystery in what remained of the day. I would need a few hours to see if this thing would be safe to fly, even with the broken spokes replaced.

The spokes were all in a row. The rim is DT. The spokes are DT. The hub is one of those Specialized-labeled ones that look like they say SIXE if you read them upside down. It's "Axis." They've fixed the font now, but I liked it the old way. I can't remember what I read about those hubs, whether they're DT or Formula or some other generic maker. No matter.

The spokes had not broken at the bend or the threads. They had snapped somewhere in the middle. The edges of the breaks showed no pinching, as they would if a cutter had been used.

A cruise through the Internet turned up some forum posts about bad OEM spokes of Asian origin a few years ago. I had seen failure of various OEM spokes myself, but never DTs. Another forum thread mentioned corrosive environments that weakened spokes. The spokes on this bike did show signs of that. They had a black finish. On close examination you could see cracks in that, and some crusty residue. I sanded away the black around one, carefully and gradually, to see if the crack extended into the metal beneath. In my test area it did not appear to.

I determined the proper length for replacement spokes and installed four. Put the wheel on the stand and tensioned the new spokes. Straight, smooth, round, the wheel looked good. I stepped away to work on something else before I put the bike back together.

BANG! A black spoke snapped, sending the nipple-end across the room.

That's annoying. Glad I didn't have my eyeball down there, sighting along the truing stand calipers.

To me, that was the end of any stop-gap repair. This wheel needs to be rebuilt. To complicate the problem further, the non-drive-side spoke holes in the rim all showed little stress bulges. Nothing had cracked yet, but it made the rim a questionable candidate for the investment of parts and labor to respoke it. I don't know why the non-drive side would show stress that the drive side did not, but this wheel was clearly weird.

BANG! Another spoke fired off. That's it. This thing is dead. I took our spokes back out of it and set the remains by the rest of the bike, with some cloth draped over it as blast matting in case any other spokes decided to blow. It was less likely now that the tension had been reduced. Still, I didn't want any of us to have to dig a spoke fragment out of our leg.

While the front wheel had not misbehaved at all, its spokes had been in the same environment as the rear ones, and there are only 24 of them between the rider and a screaming face plant. Low spoke count wheels are technically strong enough for the stresses of performance riding, but they sacrifice most of their margin of safety by putting more and more load on fewer and fewer parts. When one part fails, the structure deviates much more than it would if more parts were carrying the load to begin with. Are you really going to rip down some exhilarating descent, congratulating yourself on the money you saved by not rebuilding or replacing that front wheel?

Not my decision. I did advise the owner to think about getting both wheels redone or replaced. Because he claimed -- as do they all -- that the bike barely had any miles on it, he was going to take up the matter with the shop where he bought it.

Barely any miles. Not that old. We hear that all the time. Your average ten-year-old bike is between fifteen and twenty years old. A guy brought us his 15-year-old Cannondales on Sunday, and they are 23 years old. Bikes we "just tuned up" show up in the repair records from two years ago.

Sunday started with barely enough work for the number of people on the schedule. We did not get a wave of check-ins, but the couple we did get kept us turning wrenches and looking useful until closing time. Summer has shrunk from the cheerful chaos of the 1990s and early 2000s to a brittle, somewhat desperate couple of months at best, starting on the Fourth of July weekend and not quite making it to Labor Day. But the warm weather can bring us little waves of business any time from now until the fall foliage fades.

Something's up

My employer had one of his periodic foaming shit fits yesterday. I heard his words, what he said he was absolutely shaking with rage about, but I also know from long experience that he only goes off like this when other stressors have put a bigger squeeze on him than the issue that hits the detonator.

Memorial Day Weekend appears to be a snooze this year. I was actually given the day off today -- Sunday -- because the register wasn't ringing lustily enough to justify full staff. The frigid Saturday could have suppressed customer activity, although we sold hats and socks in the morning. The afternoon was pretty dead in the whole neighborhood.

Today is supposed to be much warmer, with summer-like temperatures moving in tomorrow. I can't imagine that the one cold day kept people from scheduling a weekend getaway if they really wanted one. The deeper chill in people's finances is probably nipping most of that crop. We see a few people with smiles and money, but nowhere near as many of them as we saw ten and twenty years ago. It was a gradual and then a precipitous decline. The town never bustles the way it did in the '80s and '90s. We have our little surges, but no sustained festivity and merriment.

The surge of repairs has died out. The torrent of check-ins didn't dwindle. It just stopped. Another will come, but the shrinkage of repair requests puts us in a nervous, depressive holding pattern while we wait.

The collapse of the Sunday road ride group may not represent a huge financial loss, although it did spawn a lot of steady maintenance -- chains, cables, minor adjustments, creaking frames. It signals a loss in the local road biking community that shifts our business even more to the out-of-town visitor, who may arrive at any time or not at all. Our local riders mostly come from the rail trail crowd. We have to adapt our stock of repair parts to reflect the most likely needs, while still trying to stay prepared for the more technically oriented riders in other categories. You never know for sure who will come to the area to do what.

Our seasonal billionaire who used to pedal has now gone over completely to e-bikes. These two-ton behemoths arrive in huge boxes. "Assembly" is usually pretty simple, unless something arrives broken. But any subsequent service call requires a bunch of heavy lifting for our aging staff, as the octogenarian billionaire can only lend so much of a hand. He's willing, but limited. And the whole process of dealing with Stromer and chasing down electronic or hydraulic issues eats a fair amount of time for distinctly limited financial returns. Even those vanish if nothing goes wrong on the battery-powered marvels.

With unexpected time at home, I can do a few more fix-it projects. For instance, I got tired of the toilet roll holder coming apart, so I fixed that today:

It's classy work. That's a Campy skewer. Now to vacuum up a couple of bushels of cat hair, hang some laundry and head out to the grocery store. One thing about a lackluster holiday weekend: the store shelves won't be as devastated as usual.

Routine chaos

I don't know...does this look crooked to you? One of our seasonal customers backed into a tree with his bikes on the rack. This one not only has a severely dislocated fork; it also has a slightly twisted main frame. The head tube is no longer in alignment with the seat tube. The bike is an undistinguished Peugeot from the late 1980s or so. It's not worth dumping a whole bunch of money into.

Here's a Schwein Sierra Al. Is that like Yosemite Sam? Continental Divide Clyde? Yukon Jack?

Friday was Bike to Work Day. In Wolfeboro, I think two people did it. I did, and the town planner.

The Sunday road ride group is falling apart as its aging participants do the same. But recreational path riding continues to be popular, as well as benefit rides.

Fundraising for the Climate Ride has begun around here. Local riders have signed up for the one from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Boston. Each rider is trying to raise $2,800.00 as the minimum buy-in. With seven riders taking part, that comes to $19,600.00 in donations they're trying to extract from our little rural area. Of course they will cast their net much wider through the Internet and their circles of friends and acquaintances. Then they all drive to Bar Harbor for the ride. From there they tour, unladen, while baggage wagons carry their stuff from stop to stop. At the end they drive home from Boston. Um...yeah.

The repairs have been interesting this year. The work no longer seems significant, but it gives the mind something to sort out and the hands something to do.

26 years in Grease

In March, 1989, I took a part time job assembling bikes to supplement my other part time job as a copy editor for the local newspaper. Three years later, mountain bikes were booming and newspapers were not. I ended up here in the shop full time. More or less.

The early 1990s were a really fun time to be in the bike business. When Shimano rammed Rapidfire down everyone's throat in 1990 it showed how things were going to go, but things stayed pretty adaptable for a couple or three years. Even as the technological avalanche built up, the rebel mechanic could still figure out how to resist assimilation.

I stand on the same spot where I stood in 1989, beginning to assemble bikes for 2015. It prompts a sort of annual review.

I still resist assimilation. I swill coffee and decline Kool Aid.

Ya gotta be somewhere. I happen to be here.