Driving Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

 The problem with bike commuting into my golden years is that I can't be sure from day to day whether I feel slow and weak because I just needed more sleep or if I just broke through one more rotted floorboard on the way to the grave. I can check my stats, which I have logged faithfully since 1988. They already show an unsurprising decline from when I was 32 to my present advanced state of decrepitude. But within that steady descending staircase are shorter and longer plateaus. The drops are not uniform. Sometimes I experience a bit of rejuvenation.

Twinges in my chest could be from my remaining feeble attempts at upper body conditioning, or from stacking three cords of hardwood in 90-degree temperatures. Or it could be gas. Cramming down breakfast before hurrying out the door leads to re-swallowing the last mouthful for the next 14 miles.

This time of year, riders around here get to sample the traffic of more populated places, as the summer influx makes this area one of them. It demands more combat readiness to be able to claim space and manage motorists where things get thick and fast.

The worst hill on my route home is the traffic circle at Route 171. On the way to work in the morning, I get a little boost from gravity to speed me around and out the bottom. On the way home I pay for that. The grade is mild. As just a hill it would present no more than an annoyance. But with motorists squeezing past me it demands an explosive effort to stomp through it.

The entry/exit chutes to the circle on Route 28 are curb-lined, narrow lanes. By law, I should be free to ride through them in my rightful place in line. By normal motorist custom, I get passed wherever I am. If I want my place I have to race for it. I try to get as many of them ahead of me as I can before we're committed to the tight space, but they can really jam me up when we get to the circle itself and have to either defer or play chicken with other vehicles coming through from 171 or 28 southbound. It's worse if I have to slow to a crawl or do a track stand while drivers either bull through or screw up the traffic flow by trying to be nice to me. Sprinting from a near stop will give me sore legs the next morning. Pushing a big gear brings those hints of a chest pain and the feeling of trying to accelerate an old car with bad compression. You can almost see the cloud of oil smoke behind me as the engine grumbles impotently.

Breath control is critical to quell those alarming coronary symptoms. Breathe freely. Gear down enough to keep from grunting. Old people die on the toilet because they hold their breath and strain. The same hazard stalks the aging rider who tries to push the anaerobic threshold. I suppose my daily overdoses of caffeine don't help. The circle requires a near-anaerobic sprint to make sure that I clear it without some pushy bastard who zoomed up behind me crashing on through because I don't belong on his road. It's only a dozen pedal strokes, maybe 20, to get to the exit chute and a widening shoulder. Breathe. Breathe. Keep just the right amount of load on, so the heart doesn't backfire like a clapped-out sports car that's seen its best day. Ease back up to speed because the next stretch is unaccountably fast. Enjoy all this while it lasts.

Cadence signals to the motorists whether you are a healthy beast they should respect and avoid or a wounded creature caught out in the open. I imagine Phil Liggett describing my condition: "He can't push a big gear anymore. Notice how his shoulders are rolling and he can't hold his line." Maybe he'd say something about a valiant effort by a rider who has had a long career. That would be nice.

A smart cyclist uses terrain at any age or stage of fitness. The older you get, the more it matters. I know my commuting route very well. Don't push the climbs too hard. Recover on the descents, or use them to accelerate into the traffic flow. Save energy for the places where you know you'll need it. That's the same at any age, just at a different average speed. My commute is a road race, not a criterium, but it has its urban element in Wolfe City. I need the ten or eleven miles of warmup to feel fully ready for whatever traffic is going to throw at me that day.

On the way out of town, I get one good bit of gravitational assistance from the parking lot down a hundred yards or so to the sharp bend in Mill Street. I need to control the lane on Mill Street, because it's too narrow for a car to pass me safely with oncoming traffic. Of course this never prevents any motorist from passing me anyway. So it's a sprint out of the gate to get to Bay Street, where I can fall back to a better pace to warm up properly. The route out to the highway starts with a series of climbs, often with motorists pushing past. They need a whack on the snout in a couple of places, but for the most part I can just let them run.

E-bike riders have been leaning forward in their chairs through this whole essay, raising their hands and going "Ooh! Ooh!" The thing is, once you accept the assistance you become dependent on it. I don't mean surrendering to the atrophy already consuming you. I mean the bike itself will be miserable to pedal without assistance. I have considered an e-bike since way before they were fashionable. I've watched the technology evolve. If I did get one, it would be a mid-drive cargo bike. Might as well make it worth its weight. But I can't afford one. It's old muscle or nothing. Just hoping to get away with it one more time.

Is bike commuting "ableist?"

 46 years ago, when I started my life as a full time member of the workforce, rather than a student, I did it as a bike commuter. I have used the bike for transportation to work at least some of every year since then.

At the start, the motives were economic and physical. I knew I couldn't count on a high income, or necessarily a steady one. I also knew that I like to eat tasty food, and that my family had a tendency to run to fat. Throughout my childhood I listened to my parents complain about their need to diet. Exercise wasn't part of any adult's normal life in the white-collar middle class. Every one of them faced a physical decline considered inevitable. Might as well joke about it, and keep buying bigger pants.

As the 1960s rolled on into the 1970s, exercise for adults became a mainstream thing. Jogging and running emerged as respectable, even cool, pastimes. By the 1980s, fitness centers had become an industry. Rolling parallel to that rode the ten-speed boom, which merged into the mountain bike boom.

During the ten-speed boom, bike touring and transportation cycling offered ways to beat the shocking rise of gasoline prices as they rocketed toward a whole dollar a gallon. We'd flip a U-turn in the middle of a busy six-lane arterial roadway now to get into a gas station selling for a dollar a gallon, but after decades of regular gas at 30 cents a gallon or less, a dollar a gallon seemed like onrushing doom. Even so, biking to work was always a fringe activity.

I'm sure that the petroleum industry has not noticed my absence, despite a lifetime commitment to limit my consumption. I can attest that it has saved me thousands of dollars, but admit that it has limited my returns from the economy that every other human voted to pursue instead.

The stubbornness of motor vehicle culture used to arouse my annoyance and contempt. These are not helpful emotions for advocacy. They're a response to the annoyance and contempt directed at me as a cyclist. They're mostly dulled now, worn out from overstimulation, but also tempered by a broader understanding of the complexity of people's transportation needs. Yes, a vast number of people could use something other than a full-size motor vehicle to move themselves and their stuff around, but that leaves many more whose lives would be much more complicated if they tried to rely entirely on walking, biking, and public transportation.

I love the simplicity of using my car when I need the load capacity, speed, and effortless range that it provides. I just dump my crap in the back and head out, in normal clothes, to zip around 80 or a hundred miles of accumulated errands in a few hours. The same circuit on a bike would take a couple of days. And there is no public transportation where I live.

I still roll my eyes at the pickup truck craze. "Gas is sooo expensive! I need a bigger truck!" I don't want to hear the bitching. Plus I have to fit in the lane with these behemoths. But they do pull a nice draft when they go by.

I don't even know what the proper term is for the disabled now. In my lifetime I have seen their emergence from shut-in and shunned to just another category in the workforce. Lots still to be done, but the debate has now taken the dark turn of almost officially discussing euthanasia. Just kill the wounded and put them out of their misery. Pretty dark. Leaning instead toward accommodation, what's the balance between meatheads like me who are willing to live at least part of the year like it's an extended bike tour or stage race, and people who physically can't?

We debate how to spend public money in a rich country that pretends to be a poor one. 

You can't plan for every detail. Some things just have to evolve and adapt as experience accumulates. For the most part, around here, drivers seem to be willing to make the minimal effort to go around rather than over me. Other riders tell me about being hit by a car. I have no answer for that. Riders can make mistakes that put themselves more at risk, but drivers can also either space it or make a malicious choice. As riders, we count on drivers making the choice to steer around us as they overtake. Coming from any other direction than behind us, drivers will be in our field of view. We have tactical options.

Fear of collision has driven many riders to quit using the public roads. There are roads I avoid because of traffic speed and density. Any built up area will have greater traffic density and potentially dangerous speeds. In those circumstances, drivers have less attention and patience for pedalers. Pedalers have less acceleration and speed to work within the traffic flow. Maybe they have route alternatives. Maybe not.

Mountain bikers have to worry about losing access to trails because land owners don't want them around anymore. Road riders don't have to worry about losing access to the public right of way. We just have to worry about encountering the wrong nut job who doesn't want us around anymore.

Road riding has weathered legal challenges, like a Maryland legislative push in the early 1980s that would have cut us off from anything with a speed limit above 30 miles per hour, as I recall. Something crazy like that. These are bound to crop up again. But for the most part the laws seem pretty permissive. They leave it to natural predation to keep our numbers in check. "You don't pay road taxes! I'm going to kill you!"

Transportation cycling can be a beneficial element in the traffic mix. I'm a lot easier to pass when I'm riding my bike than when I'm in my car, stuck in the lane in front of you. Drivers have contempt for cyclists, but real hatred for each other. So, because I am able to ride a bike, I actually help lower the emotional temperature out there. This does change with the number of cyclists and their behavior. Lots of riders give us a bad name with antics that either just look bad to motorists or are outright dangerous. 

The "looks bad but is actually good" category presents a challenge, because it includes running stop signs. This doesn't apply to all stop signs all the time. But it's generally better for a rider to be passed on a flowing stretch of road than to have a motorist decide on their own that they can and should squeeze past at an intersection.

Red lights are a different story. Rarely will I run one because I can't be sure that I won't overlook a hazard in my push to flow through. Also, it sets you up to be passed by the same motorists over and over. They get more and more steamed at having not only to stop and go and stop and go, but to accommodate the rider block after block. Cycling fundamentalists will say fuck 'em for being motorists, but fundamentalists at anything only make life worse. You need empathy and flexibility, even if you don't feel like you're getting it in return most of the time. I'll actually fall back a bit at a red light, to get more vehicles past me when they're stopped or moving slowly. At the very least I hold my place so that the ones who have "beaten" me get to keep their medals.

So: If you're able to use a bike some or most of the time, try it. If you're not sure, try it a few times in different contexts to see if you can start to fit it in. If you can't, you can't. 

Support your local pedestrian

 On my bike commutes I was seeing a moderately tall, bearded young man walking toward Wolfeboro along Route 28. Usually I would see him somewhere along the north slope between Route 171 and the crossroads at North Wolfeboro Road and Pork Hill Road, but it might be further north before 171 or a little further along, past North Wolfeboro. It took me a while to notice that he was walking all the way into the town of Wolfeboro and walking to various destinations while he was there. If he also walked back out the way he came in, he had to be logging well over 20 miles a day on foot.

I never saw him hitching a ride. He walked on the correct side, facing traffic. I can't recall if I ever saw him walking back northward toward Ossipee, but I might have forgotten it. Whether you see someone along a route depends entirely on your schedules. Our mornings coincided regularly. In bike season I might be starting toward home anywhere within a span of an hour or more. Going in was much more consistent.

The walker wasn't sauntering, but he wasn't speed-walking or jogging, either. When I would see him through the workshop windows, it was generally a couple of hours after I had arrived. The transportation pedestrian maintains a cruising pace, not a racing pace.

Because I hate driving, particularly with other drivers on the road, I have considered various ways to cover the distance to work in the seasons of darkness and frozen precipitation. The obvious first choice would be cross-country skiing. That depends on snow that will provide grip for the skis and smooth running. In New Hampshire, especially with the changing climate, ungroomed snow is often like soapy porcelain or wet concrete. And the skier would have to stay out of the travel lanes, probably outside of the plow drift.

Native Americans in New England invented the snowshoe, not the ski, because terrain and snow conditions here made the short, wide flotation more practical. I do not know if they experimented with some form of traction device lashed to the bottom of it, for the hard, refrozen conditions. However, when snowshoe hiking was the only way to get around, trails would get packed down to a smooth surface. The system worked for a few thousand years.

That was before cars and snowplows. In our modern world, a transportation snowshoe hiker is rare to nonexistent. I have not seen the summer pedestrian pushing into darkness and snow.

On snowshoes, the pedestrian would not be able to maintain more than about 3 miles per hour at best. Skis glide, but snowshoes give nothing away. Plod, plod, plod, you have to take every step. Along the highway, a walker might consider bare-booting it on the pavement when no vehicles were passing, hopping out of the way as necessary. On the stretches with a guardrail, that would require vaulting over the rail and whatever plow-piled snow was in the way. You wouldn't want to chew up the snowshoes on the pavement. Good luck leaping over the guardrail with them on your feet, too. Because a commuting pedestrian is on the road with commuting drivers, traffic will be heavy, requiring frequent leaps out of the way. Or you square your shoulders and forge ahead, leaving it to drivers to do the right thing.

A skier wouldn't be able to match bike pace. Skiing is generally faster than walking, but even on the downhills you won't hit the speeds that a bike can reach. Uphill skiing speeds are totally comparable to walking. So the trip to work and back would take much longer than a bike commute.

Winter rain screws everything up. Especially now, when torrential rains have become more frequent, crossing ten or fifteen miles without a vehicle, along routes designed for vehicles, would take many dangerous hours. Warmer than average temperatures are still much colder than your body temperature. Wetness saps your heat. You can dress for it, but things still have to go smoothly for you to arrive at a safe, warm destination where you can strip off your wet clothes. Arriving at work, that can be awkward. If you have no place to dry the clothes you wore to hike to work, you'll be putting on that clammy mess to head home.

On my particular route, there is a path option for the last three miles into town. The Cotton Valley Trail follows the old rail line, so it is basically straight and level. But you have to survive to get there. Homebound it only covers the first three miles, leaving you to navigate the highway after that. The trail is used by snow machines, bikes, dog walkers, skiers, and the rail car drivers who have demanded that the rails remain in place. They don't specifically clear the rails for winter use, but if the snow and ice cover is low enough I suppose one of them might give it a try. So, depending on surface conditions and time of day (or night) you might be completely alone or in the middle of a bustling winter scene like Currier and Ives only with more dog poop and attitude.

If I lived close enough to work I would definitely walk most of the time. I lived for nine years without using a car to get to my various jobs in the Annapolis area. Only when I moved to a place with snowier roads and a much longer commute did I get a car and start acting somewhat normal for at least part of the year. I like my spot here, so I can't reduce or alter my commuting route to make human-powered methods work safely for the entire year. Maybe if civilization collapses before the climate does I'll be able to ski the abandoned roads to get to work. Someone will have to start making wooden skis for the winter travelers, while we nurse along the simple bikes that survived from the 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st for the summer travelers.

Like all post-apocalyptic fantasies, that one glosses over the violence and destruction that would precede it. We'll never just flip a switch to the post-apocalyptic utopia. Then again, with consensus, we could flip the switch without the apocalypse. Add a human-powered travel corridor to all travel ways. Not everyone can do without a motor vehicle, but the ones who could do it would be more likely to try it if they had a guaranteed route.

The best thing about a snow-based winter system is that you don't have to pay to plow it down to a bare surface. Grooming snow requires machinery and skilled drivers, but it still takes less time and brute force than pushing snow out of the way. Along my route, a human-powered commuter or transportation cyclist could revert to the regular road when snow season ended. The side path would not have to be maintained for summer use. Most likely, the majority of users would like it year-round. That's a fine option. But a ski and walking path could have somewhat steeper climbs, requiring less massive re-grading to establish the route.

Here I am, planning the practicalities of something that isn't going to happen. I did want to be a fiction writer...

My love of winter is synthetic

 An ad popped up on some social media site I was perusing, that said, "Goodbye goosebumps, hello, merino," or something like that. I thought to myself, "Goodbye goosebumps, hello hives."

I've tried to be a wool guy. In 1980 I got a Protogs Superwash wool bike jersey and wore it with confidence in the itchless experience promised in the advertising. It was ...okay. I acquired a couple more over the years. But I also rejoiced when a sponsored US team rider I rode with occasionally said that he always wore a tee shirt under his wool jerseys, because it actually enhanced their efficiency. He might just have been playing the expert card to justify his own preference for a barrier layer, but it didn't do any harm to wear the tee shirt.

Protogs offered other garments in miraculous merino. One I bought for backpacking was long-sleeved with a three-button style variously referred to in advertising from different manufacturers as a Wallace Beery, a river driver, or a Henley. I actually tried using it without an undershirt on one trip. The weather was chilly, so I figured out how to ignore it, but as soon as I got back to civilization and had other options I peeled that thing off.

This morning's near-freezing temperatures at dawn got me thinking about winter clothing, and reaching for some of it for the morning bike ride to work.

In the early 1980s, surplus military wool pants were the standard trousers for cold weather adventuring. For cross-country skiers, wool knickers. Not the British knickers, mind you. I also inherited a nicely tailored true navy blue wool shirt from my father's old service kit, and a plaid Pendleton from my grandfather. Those things never got next to my skin.

Wool bike shorts didn't bother me, and I loved my Gianni wool tights. But I warmly embraced polypro and other synthetic long underwear, and each evolution of synthetic outerwear. Fleece pants, fleece vests, pile jackets, each added layering options no longer utterly dependent on a next-to-skin layer of protection, or somehow turning off all of the nerve endings in my skin.

Now, of course, we know that these comfy fabrics are completely evil, sprinkling the earth with nanofibers that are spreading from pole to pole. So now my comfort can be tinged with guilt.

For winter riding, I use a lot of clothing and accessories from cross-country skiing and winter mountain travel. My go-to pant is the Sport Hill XC Pant. It's a great balance of wind blocking and breathability. Wind-front tights make no accommodation for a frigid tailwind. The 3SP fabric in the Sport Hill pants provides uniform protection. The polypropylene fabric also repels water to some extent. The cut is close but not shrink-wrap. Zippered ankles help when layering socks.

I don't ride much in the winter, because I can't count on doing it consistently enough to stay acclimated to the saddle. Hiking and cross-country skiing provide better exercise. A bike is the best machine for translating human effort into forward motion on an appropriate surface like a road or a smooth trail. That's what makes it my preferred personal transportation option in-season. But I've said many times -- and still do -- that it isn't enough by itself. So I welcome the opportunity to explore by other methods in the winter, when I cede the roads to the motoring public. I might bust out for the odd fixed gear ride here and there, but it's fun to get out into places where a bike couldn't go.

I do see the tracks of bikes where bikes couldn't go. You pretty much have to hit a mid- or high-grade rock or ice climb if you want to be completely sure you won't meet up with a downhiller. But steeper hiking trails weed out all but the most foolhardy workaholics who grunt a bike up there somehow so they can launch it back down. The things we do to say we did...

Speaking of layering socks, I get a lot of use out of bread bags in cool to cold weather. I gave up on buying toe covers and overboots that cost a lot of money and wear out far too quickly. For toe warmers, I cut an appropriate size end of a bread bag to put over the front of my sock before putting my shoe on. For really cold rides, I wear a thin synthetic liner with a full bread bag over it, a wool outer sock, and a closed-toe shoe. Sometimes I even double bag, adding another bread bag over the outer sock. The inner vapor barrier keeps sweat from dampening the sock layers. Moisture increases heat loss through conduction and evaporation if it can get out far enough to evaporate. The vapor barrier turns your liner sock into a wetsuit for your foot. Don't waste your time on dreams of perfectly dry warmth. You won't find it.

Winter cycling is the hardest activity to dress for. Riders automatically produce their own wind chill. Exertion on a freewheel-equipped bike ranges from strenuous on a climb to nil on a descent, when wind chill can increase to more than 40 mph (64 kph). You will sweat. Moisture management is up to you.

Some people wear shell jackets. I never used to, preferring multiple fuzzy layers instead. The thickness of the front coverage took the edge off of the incoming frigidity, while moisture could move freely outward to evaporate from the surface, away from my skin. Then I got a Sugoi jacket that Sugoi, of course, stopped making. It had a nice balance of breathability and wind protection, and is a pleasant but visible yellow. It does trap more moisture than the all-fuzzy option did, but all of my fuzzy layers were in muted colors. I vastly prefer muted colors, but I bow to the reality that motorists need all the help they can get to notice and avoid a bike rider. There's a slight risk that a bright, target gives a bad actor a better aiming point, but inattention is more common than actual malice.

This isn't a complete list and discussion of all of the many variations in my wardrobe for cycling. I draw from at least five options just in gloves and mittens. Head covering also draws from a selection of fabrics and accessories. Well. I say accessories, but mostly I mean varying amounts of tape over the helmet vents, and a light mounted on the front of it.

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.

Who is this dirtbag?

 We see them all the time, even in our affluent resort town. A sketchy character brings in a bike that no collecting hobbyist or trendy technolemming would ever want, and bargains for the least amount of work we can do to get the machine operational again. It doesn't even have to be safe. Just get it so that the pedals pull the chain around and the bike moves forward. Some of them don't even have brakes. A scuffed work boot or blown out sneaker will suffice.

Then there are the eccentrics with limited finances and one oar in the water. They come in all ages, genders, races. Some are born with challenges that hinder their pursuit of income and housing. Others suffer head injuries, or battle addictions. Some are just on their own track, seeing the world in their own way. Somehow, they have all come to the bicycle, and the bicycle has welcomed them.

Life already wasn't fair when I was a kid, and it has only gotten less fair since then. There are more and more people, many in unstable family settings, or no family setting at all. It's comforting to embrace the lie that they would all be fine if their families were miraculously transformed into the mythical models of the 1950s and '60s, but the cracks were just plastered over back then. The simple fact that we keep cramming more and more people onto the planet while wondering why ecosystems are failing and the climate itself has been buggered never seems to influence the idea that social failure is solely the result of flawed character in at least two generations of strivers.

We deal with riders in each of those categories just in our dinky town. In my previous bike shop job, in 1980-'81 in Alexandria, Virginia, customers ranged from a family who could afford custom built little Eisentrauts for the kids, down to Moped David, who loved his yellow Motobecane "Yellow Bird." Location matters, so we had more from the affluent end of the scale back then, but in Annapolis I saw the bike hierarchy laid out as well. I only worked in a backpacking and mountaineering store there, but we had one customer who had lost his marriage and home and pickup truck to alcoholism, and now went everywhere on his bike. Two of the town's bike shops were on West Street, an artery that stretched from the heart of downtown at Church Circle all the way out to the edge of town at Parole, where it split into several two-lane highways (at that time) headed generally westward. There were many riders and few cyclists among the commuters along that corridor.

Annapolis was mutilated  through the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st Century by car-centric transportation decisions that made cycling much more dangerous and unpleasant, and didn't really do all that much for motorists either. The areas that grew large buildings and sprawling parking lots drove the development. Road builders just did what they could to throw down pavement in straight lines to connect everything. Some of it reamed out existing roads, adding lanes and traffic lights. Some of it added roads to slam traffic into the existing corridors whether they were ready for it or not. Don't even ask whether they ever really could have been ready for it. All this makes life less pleasant for the recreational rider, and exponentially more dangerous for the cyclist of necessity.

One customer in Wolfeboro now, whose backstory and physical appearance indicate that he may have native Alaskan ancestry, bought a used bike from us to commute to his kitchen job at a local restaurant. A little while later he said that he had gotten a construction job for more money. But then he showed up again at the restaurant job, because the contractor he worked for required him to have a motor vehicle, but his income -- increased though it was -- wouldn't support the purchase and routine expenses of car ownership. Economically, the restaurant job was a better deal, because he could continue to use the affordable bicycle. It's not a great deal, but it's more survivable.

I ran the same calculation numerous times in my own life. I might have made a fraction more money in various editing jobs during the decline and fall of print media, but it would have required owning and using a car every working day, driving as much as a hundred commuting miles each day. The little bit more money would be absorbed and then some by the expenses required to go fetch it. Or I could sell out where I was living and go rent in the more expensive area where the jobs were, probably never able to scrape together the funds to buy back into the real estate market. The real estate market itself is a problem: I don't think I'm unique because I bought a house as a place to live, not as an investment. I didn't -- and don't -- care whether it appreciates in value. I just want it to shelter me. The built-in inflation of a capitalist mindset screws the lower end of the income scale even as it devours their lives for necessities they provide. The same is true of any growth mindset rather than a maintenance mindset.

Transportation riders who have to wait weeks to have worn out tires replaced don't get any help except from a charitable friend if they happen to have one. No one gets "bike stamps" to help them keep rolling. The people who get any subsidy have been in jobs where the company health plan pays them to buy fitness equipment so that their prosperity doesn't make them sick with the expensive ailments brought on by forced sitting and boredom snacking. The HMO reasons that subsidizing equipment now will mean that they don't have to fork out for costly medical care later. It's not benevolence, it's cost accounting.

The rise of e-bikes has led many cyclists of necessity to choose the motor vehicle over one powered by meat alone. It makes sense: they didn't want to be pedalers in the first place. We fix what we can for those riders as well, just as the shop in Virginia fixed The Yellow Bird. 1980 was the waning days of the 1970s moped boom that accompanied the bike boom. That shop had a dedicated moped department with its own mechanics, who enjoyed the motorized aspects. Now, as the smokeless moped has slipped in through the side door solely by forgoing internal combustion, bike shops are expected to embrace and understand them. And the worker bees who choose them don't even give them that much thought. It's just a bicycle, right? But with a motor! How cool is that? It's - like - perfect!

People are accustomed to the failure of their devices. The steady reduction of quality in every appliance has led to a culture that replaces rather than repairs. The "right to repair" movement runs hard into the fact that most things haven't been made to be fixed. Assemblies snap together in ways that break when you try to open them. The people who do fix things have to charge an amount of money that will support them, making the services too expensive for many of the people who need them the most: consumers of used equipment, nursing it through its declining years -- or months -- because it was all they could afford.

The bike industry embraced the disposable model within the first decade of this century.  Parts are gradually being withdrawn for what had been ubiquitous standards throughout the 1980s and '90s. Up until the past couple of years I could confidently tell a rider that an older bike could be maintained and modified relatively easily to suit individual tastes and needs. It's still true, but the options are narrowing. As a low-budget rider my whole life, I appreciated the fact that I could put together a high-quality, nice handling bike from scrounged parts. They might be scrounged new, but they were not bound to any other parts so closely that I had to buy an entire drivetrain to match. Working in a bike shop has given me the advantage of buying things at cost, but the disadvantage of a meager income. But even when I worked outside the bike industry I could shop sales, buy used items, and make targeted purchases of new stuff. The incremental upgrades to my primary bike led to the parts stash that would adorn the next bike. Tools and knowledge put me in a position to help other riders to put together and maintain their bikes for as long as they were interested. That wasn't usually very long.

The bike industry of the 1970s and most of the 1980s built bikes for the long term. Twenty years was a goal. It was a selling point. Same was true in backpacking and hiking gear. Buy good boots, take good care of them, and you could resole them for decades. It offset the discomforts some people experienced when breaking in a sturdy pair of leather boots. But industry observers figured out that most people don't stick with anything for that long. Products can be flashy and flimsier, sell better in the short term and head straight to the landfill. It clears the way for more products to roll out to enthusiasts who decide to reenlist, and newbies looking for the state of the art. Old gear doesn't mark you as a veteran, it stains you as a cheap old geezer too dumb to evolve with the times.

Sometimes, change really does represent improvement. This is certainly true in both cycling and outdoor gear. But in both cases the majority of change seems to be driven by the marketing and accounting departments more than by long-term users who want to spend more time out doing the thing rather than shopping to replace whatever just wore out or broke after a few months or a year. It puts us all on the conveyor belt of expensive replacement, not just the poor idiots who can't afford good boots. The upper echelons of consumers can still support the expense of replacement better than anyone struggling to stay equipped at all.

Without a car, I depended on my bike to get to whatever job I had. Even now, with a car, I depend on the significant amount of money I save by not using it. I have the car when I absolutely need it. And my life has been propped up by several lucky breaks. See earlier reference to how life isn't fair. The person who presents as a dirtbag or a weirdo and doesn't have the backstop of a few strokes of luck is not a lesser person solely based on that.

Assholes inhabit every level of socioeconomic status. This is why I don't embrace any automatic standards of brotherhood on that basis. And, oftentimes, the downtrodden are scarier people because of the ways in which they might act out their frustrations. The psychopathy of the rich tends to be more impersonal, perhaps even unconscious, in perpetuating the systems that create and maintain an underclass that might drag a beat up bike into a shop in search of aid. That "underclass" rider might not expect brotherhood from a place that serves an activity forced more and more into recreational areas, using ridiculously expensive machines to go stupidly slowly compared to motorcycles and ATVs.

We've had a few young guys put full suspension mountain bikes on layaway after they worked with a cheerful trail builder who tried and failed around here before packing up and moving on. He presented a welcoming and hopeful scenario to the kids who helped him lay out the first professionally designed and meticulously built trails in the area. But his business acumen didn't match his cheerful personality and artistic standards. The young guys failed to complete their layaways, and have not returned to try again. Perhaps they have been lured to other attractions. Perhaps they would come back if they could scrape up what it costs for a trailworthy bike.

Back in those 1950s and '60s of golden memory, even through the '70s, kids rode bikes until they could qualify for motor vehicles. The surge of adult cycling in the 1970s recast bike riding as potentially a lifetime activity for more people than the enthusiast base that existed before then. Changes in development through the 1980s progressively reduced the habitat of youth cyclists whose parents were being fed increasingly scary possibilities by media coverage of crimes both real and imagined.

I rode my bike on the streets wherever we lived, from about the age of six or seven. I was never hit by a car or even seriously honked at, from central Maryland to Rhode Island to mid-coast Maine and back to Maryland. The Miami area was a little hairier, but still overrun with riders. It wasn't until the later '70s that motorist hostility went from startling to expected. Others had worse luck. One of my cousins reported getting drilled in the back with a full beer can while riding in the Philadelphia area in the late '60s or early '70s. There were more than 100,000,000 fewer people in the country when I was a kid, and kids riding their bike to get around were a common feature.

We were supposed to outgrow it. That was the accepted model. Then grownups started filling the streets that were increasingly filling with the mere mass of assembled humanity. We were bound to piss each other off.This is the environment that riders of necessity are thrust into and that idiots like me choose to stay in. We may not share a common love of the machine and its simulation of flight, but we do share a common hope to survive each trip.

Buttery smooth

 

Buttery smooth. Those words kept forming in my mind as I rode this bike on its shakedown, on the grueling and not altogether enjoyable Gilford run after dropping my car off for spring service. The route is tediously familiar, with its hills and its tight, narrow stretches shoulder to fender with drivers indifferent to your survival, but it's also peaceful and beautiful for quite long portions. And, being so familiar, it was a perfect proving ground to test out this bike.

I figured it would be great, because the frame is a version of  the Surly Cross Check. If I could only own one bike, it would be a Surly Cross Check. Agile on pavement, but sure-footed on dirt, built of reliable steel and configured so that it can be adapted to many options, it's not a bike to take out with the local hammerheads on a take-no-prisoners road ride, but it will definitely get you most places you want to go if there's a mapped public right of way to get there. I built my first one to make the dirt variations of my commuting route more pleasant. It has evolved into a practical beast, with generator lighting. In the process it became a little hefty. Surly bikes aren't for weight weenies anyway. Add a few pounds of practical accessories and the package bulks up even more. 

The Traveler's Check frame on which today's bike was built has S&S couplers so that the bike can be taken apart and fit into a checkable standard size piece of luggage. I bought it when I had delusions of traveling. The first build was kind of slapped together: hence that saddle. That thing came off the bike as soon as I got home. Blue Version 1 was a fixed gear, the simplest to take apart and reassemble in a train station or airline terminal for short hops around a destination city. But that never happened, and now it won't. So I had a frame ready to build up without some of the heavy add-ons that encumber my daily commuter, to recapture some of the comfortable nimbleness of the original 'Check.

Buttery smooth. The bike rode like an extension of my body. I shouldn't be surprised, since I had built it to the same dimensions as its older sibling, but I had set the bars a little higher by leaving the fork a little longer. I was looking ahead to its touring configuration, where I might want to sit up just a little more, to take in the scenery. Fortunately, it's not so high that it kills the handling. In fact, the stem attaches higher, but drops more than on the other bike, so the bar height nets out about the same.

The first thing I noticed was that the bike seemed twitchier. But twitchier soon settled down to "more responsive." The commuter has a heavy dynamo front wheel. The SRAM dyno hub wasn't the slickest on the market to begin with, and now it's probably pushing ten years old. If I could scrape up the coin for a Schmidt I would. A generator hub has some rolling resistance all the time from the magnets. This increases slightly when the lights are switched on. You get used to that, but notice the difference on a bike that doesn't have it. Hence the impression of twitchiness on the bike with the plain front hub.

I use the lights in daylight in certain situations to enhance visibility in a few intersections where the sight lines make it worthwhile. Not having them felt like a bit of a loss. I had blinky lights for front and rear, but I like being able to pair those up with a full-size, solid beam headlight to present a more vehicular impression as I bomb into a crossroads or shoot a stretch of town traffic where drivers like to pop out of parking lot exits when they don't think anyone who can hurt them is coming. So maybe I get a more aggressive battery light for the handlebars of Blue 2.0.

I feel my age. I'm in some kind of pain most of the time. That made the performance of Blue 2.0 all the more impressive. I felt pretty crappy, but still peppy because the geometry and setup of the bike supported me so well.

The gearing is mostly the same between the two bikes. On the commuter -- code named Green now -- I have 30-36-48 for chainrings and a Frankencogged 8-speed cassette of 13-15-17-19-21-24-27-30. On Blue it's 28-36-48 in the front and a Frankencogged 8-speed cassette with the same cogs from 13 to 24, leading up to a 28 and a 32. I anticipated riding with a touring load, which could still happen. So the mid-range cruising gears were the same. Shift points didn't change, cadence wasn't thrown off. I might re-gear Green a little bit, though maybe not exactly the same. The great thing about friction shifting and separate cogs is that you can really customize your gearing to your specific physical and riding conditions. This adaptability has been largely eliminated by the industry. Many technolemmings have never experienced it.

The car is taking longer than planned. I'm living without it for a couple of days. That's not as casual an undertaking as it was, but you do what you have to do. I wish I still believed in pain relievers. Today's ride is Green, the fully lighted commuter, because -- hopefully -- I'll be heading out on the hell run to Gilford after work, and the sun could be setting by the time I get to the garage to retrieve my motor vehicle.

The towel is thrown

The Wolfeboro Cross-country Ski Association picked a good year to institute snowmaking. But it wasn't a great year. Atmospheric conditions were so poor for snowmaking during December that we had nothing to offer during the Christmas vacation period, which is one of two major blocs of income for the ski business in the northeast US. Downhill areas fared somewhat better, particularly ones a bit farther north, with more elevation to augment the less than ideal temperature and humidity. And then we had record-setting rains in January that caused flood damage to trails for every winter activity.

By February we had the snowmaking loop up and running, but it hasn't survived the first week of March. Snowmaking isn't magic, and key sections of it lost cover in the warm weather that has dominated the winter. The trails are closed and the shop has gone to spring hours. Even if we get a late March blizzard, it will be falling onto bare, saturated ground in many areas.

In a strange twist, I had more opportunities to get out for a concentrated workout in prime time this winter because of the wretched conditions. I haven't come into a bike commuting season with this good a fitness base since we shut down the shop at Jackson Ski Touring in 2009. Up there, with trails right outside the door and a narrower scope of operations, it was much more convenient to rotate each of us out on many days to get that beneficial shot of conditioning. It enhanced our efficiency and kept our credentials fresh, while also providing a great launching pad for the next season's riding.

The ski/bike alternation changes muscle use in ways that help the cyclist more than a year-round cycling routine would. But in the transition from one to the other, you notice what you're missing. At the start of skiing I would have to build upper body strength and all of the steering and stability muscles that take the rest of the year off. At the other end, going back to the bike, I find myself in the lower portions of a hill climb with only my legs to propel the machine, carrying all of the muscles used to push the ski poles now providing mostly non-functional weight.

In addition to the ski sessions, I got out once or twice a week to climb the neighborhood mountain. The trail is listed in an old Appalachian Mountain Club guidebook as 1.4 miles to the summit. Elevation gain is 1,144 feet. The trail climbs gently for about the first third, and then steepens. A preliminary effort brings you to a traverse of a couple of hundred yards along a contour to reach the base of the most rugged section. Above that the grade lets up slightly on the way to a more or less level few yards approaching the summit. There's a fire tower that is not abandoned, but is usually unoccupied. During the winter there is never an observer. The trail is popular enough that the footway is reliably packed down. People do it in a variety of inappropriate footwear, but so far none of them have had to be evacuated by emergency responders. 

From the first hike in late January until the most recent one yesterday, the surface has been different each time. The first time it was a well packed snowshoe trail firm enough to go up without wearing the snowshoes. It's very rude to posthole a trail, stomping deep footprints into it because you don't bother to bring snowshoes. Going up it's easy to place your feet lightly and commit your weight gradually. I wore snowshoes to descend, because your body weight always arrives with more force as you step down. 

Snow fell before I got out on the second hike, but other hikers had a few days to pack it down before I got there. From that point on, no new snow was added. When the weather stayed somewhat cold, the trail changed only a little. I did see the tracks of one intrepid skier one day, and on another the unbelievable signs that someone had ridden a bike down it. I didn't see clear signs that they had ridden up it. And the tires didn't look super wide, almost like plus-size, 3-inch rather than full fat. Mixed in with tracks from snowshoes, hiking boots, and ice creepers were the prints of street shoes and sneakers. 

I was going to begin riding this week, but the forecast indicated that I won't be able to be consistent enough with it to make the initial discomfort worth it. I banged out one more tower hike instead. This is prime hypothermia season. Temperatures above freezing, ranging either side of 50°F (10°C) fool a lot of active people because we need very light layers while exerting, and may feel comfortably warm for a few minutes after stopping. The temperature on the summit that cloudy day was solidly mid 40s. I felt quite comfortable on arrival. I put on a fleece jacket because I knew I would want it soon. Indeed, with a fairly light but persistent breeze I soon felt like I wanted more clothing than the fleece. Rather than dig out the extra gear, I gathered up my stuff to head down. But I had the layers if I needed them.

Hypothermia gets you when you don't expect it. You get cold on a winter hike, it makes sense. We do hear about poorly prepared people who get into trouble and even die out there in the winter. But most people have some idea that they should bundle up a bit at the height of winter. It's in the transition time, into early spring, when acclimated outdoor types might overestimate the mildness. It happened to me one April day decades ago, on a cloudy afternoon with some showers in the forecast. I set out around the mountain on the fixed-gear, wearing sufficient clothing for the best of predicted conditions, but with nothing extra in case things deteriorated. They deteriorated. Sprinkles began before I has half a mile down the road. Those turned to a steady rain. I kept going. The route is all or nothing. There is no way to cut it off. Once you reach the halfway point on the far side of the mountain you need to keep going the rest of the way.

Theoretically I could have gone up to one of the sparsely distributed houses along the route and asked for shelter, but apparently I would literally rather die than bother anyone to bail me out for my stupid decision. I don't know what kind of shape I would have been in if my spouse at the time had not thought to go out and collect me. She correctly guessed my route and drove it the opposite direction to intercept me. These days I am alone most of the time, so I have to pay closer attention to the list of essentials any solo traveler should have.

The roads will now present the best venue for consistent activity for maybe as much as a couple of months. Back when mountain bikes were relatively cheap and definitely simple, we rode on found trails rather than courses designed and constructed at great and ongoing expense. We would charge out on the rotting ice of snow machine trails and woods roads, crashing into icy water, grunting though deep mud, and laughing about it. Not anymore, though. You don't put in hours of labor on loamers, or thousands of dollars on more elaborate trails and then go ride them when they're wet and soft! Horrors! And the bikes themselves demand such loving care to keep them ready to throw off of 9-foot drops that you don't want to crap them all up with a bunch of abrasive silt on mere dirt roads. The gravel demographic might be a tad more open to muddy roads. Fat bikers might try their flotation on some of them as well. My fixed-gear is still coated with adobe from my ride on New Year's Day, when the dirt part my favorite local loop was sloppy from the rain we'd gotten during Christmas week. Mud season has to come sometime, but I try to avoid having to do too much cleaning over and over again.

If I can get straight into commuting, I won't have to ride the muddy dirt roads or stick to the entirely paved options to get base miles before undertaking the more serious effort of lugging my tired old ass and my day's load of crap to work and back. My 30-mile daily commuting distance puts the day's effort into the realm of a real ride, even though it's split roughly evenly into 15 miles morning and evening. That work day in the middle keeps me on my feet. The rides are also in what passes for rush hour around here, so I'm dealing with hurrying drivers on all sections of the route. I need to be combat ready.

Fortunately, most motorists just want to get past a cyclist with the least delay. A honk, a yell, a thrown object -- these are impulsive acts not meant to delay overall progress. If a rider is careful to offer no greater offense than the mere audacity of claiming some space on the road, the vast majority of drivers just want to go by and get on with their lives. Only their fellow motorists inspire the urge to have a tank battle right then and there. But that's a story for another day.

Challenges to transportation cycling

 Yesterday I had an appointment to drop my car off for service. The mechanic I'd been going to for more than 30 years has been facing the same challenges in his line of work that I face in mine: keeping up with the expense of buying tools makes his life harder and more expensive, even as he watches the overall quality of vehicles get worse and worse. Disposable transportation afflicts almost every mode. When he told me that he couldn't fix an air conditioning problem because of the newest refrigerant, he also scouted around his area to find someone whose ethics he respected, who could do it.

For a person of limited means, every choice is critical. I don't have money to waste on either a sleaze or a well-meaning fumbler. So Rich's endorsement carried a lot of weight. In about 34 years, he's never diagnosed my vehicle's problems incorrectly or wasted my money on a repair that didn't work. Hence my willingness to drag my aging body across 40 miles of New Hampshire hills to leave the car with him when it needs service.

On the plus side, the mechanic who could do the AC was in Alton, less than half the distance to Gilford. However, Alton's terrain is a challenge to a bicyclist, even fit and young. I am fairly fit, but only for someone who is no longer young. Route 28 goes over a series of large rolling hills south of where I usually leave it. Those features stood between me and my objective going either direction.

If I was going to Gilford, I would ride on Route 28A and Chestnut Cove Road to avoid as much of Route 28 as possible. But Google Maps showed the bike route from the mechanic in Alton should follow Old Wolfeboro Road to avoid Route 28 on the other side, away from the lake shore. Sometimes the old roads avoid terrain that the new route tackles. Sometimes they're worse.

Heading from Alton to Wolfeboro in the morning, after I had left the car, I faced more than a mile and a half of steady climbing, some of it rather steep for an old fart on a heavy bike, laden with lunch and water and the other items I carry on a routine ride to work. Almost no cars passed me, which was nice, but I climbed higher than I would have on the highway. I appreciated the quiet, and the fact that I held the elevation rather than plunging down and climbing again, the way Route 28 does. However, the quiet road dumped me back onto 28 about a mile sooner than Chestnut Cove Road does. The highway isn't bad from there, but it's more tedious on a wide road with flying motor vehicles to remind me of my plodding speed.

During the day at work I tweaked something in my right pectoral muscle that I had previously injured the week before. That escalated gradually through the day until I could not draw a deep breath without pain. This would be a problem when I had to ride back out of Wolfeboro to the south, up a notorious wall.

I kept looking at Google Maps recommendations for the route back to Alton. They mostly favored a very direct route, using even more highway than their recommended route in the morning. But I also saw, grayed out to the side, Chestnut Cove Road and Route 28A. The route was less than a mile longer and completely avoided the unnecessary climb and descent of those nasty rollers. It was by far the better route for a rider. The only possible problem was a sign I'd seen in the morning as I passed the intersection of 28 and 28A, that said "Road Closed September 20." I looked up the actual work on the Alton Public Works Facebook page and saw that it was just one culvert repair, way down near the end, about two miles from my destination. I wasn't leaving until 5 p.m. They would probably have knocked off by then. Even if motor traffic was barricaded, I could probably slip through with the bike.

The ride out of Wolfeboro was absolutely as painful as I expected, with rush hour drivers at my elbow, because South Main Street so completely sucks for road cyclists. Most of them were as kind as they know how to be, so of course there were a lot of close passes, but nothing malicious. Once I hit the wall climbing out of South Wolfeboro, a pickup truck that had been stuck behind me as I wailed through the corners and descent leading into it made a big time about revving noisily on the way past me, but the driver left plenty of room. I was too busy trying to get enough oxygen past the stabbing pain in my chest to worry about macho posturing.

Once at the top of the wall, I knew I faced no more serious climbs. That was nice, although the pain continued not only from breathing but from how I held myself. There seems to be nerve involvement. Something pops occasionally, and the pain fluctuates, sometimes going away completely for a few minutes before I piss it off again somehow. It gave me something to think about as the sun fed the metaphor by sinking toward the mountains to the west. 

Chestnut Cove Road had been chip sealed, but it had settled nicely. It starts with a ripping little descent, which is nice. Then it climbs and drops a little, basically descending all the way to 28A.

The intersection with 28A had no signs forbidding passage. I turned right and continued to descend. Again there are climbs, but the trend is generally downward toward lake level. Eventually I came to the sign saying "Road Closed. Local Traffic Only." Cool, cool. I'm local. Don't mind me.

Next came a sign that just said "Closed." It adorned a more comprehensive barricade. Yeah, fine, but I'm on a bike here. I only need a few inches of space according to most highway planners. But then...

The crew was still at work after 6 p.m. A friendly workman said, "Not quite yet."

"I thought you guys might've knocked off at 5," I said.

"We would, but we're really trying to get this finished," he said. It was a cheerful exchange. I knew that they'd been working on this road since flash flooding ripped it to pieces in July. I said I totally understood, and settled in to wait. I could spend the time working on my breathing and trying to figure out what exactly was tangled up in the muscles and cartilage of my ribs there. The sun continued to sink. The excavators continued to dig and swing. The skill of the operators was impressive. Our machines become extensions of our bodies.

The light lost its last gold and turned silver. I dug out and put on my reflector ankle bands, preparing for the dusk. Finally, the work crew waved me through. I had just two miles left to cover. I put on the lights and pedaled away. It was still more light than dark out. I was still glad that I had chosen this route rather than the nasty climbs with the shorter mileage. Once I had committed to the route, I wasn't going to make the long detour to ride harder terrain in the dark anyway. You make your choice and you make it work.

Quitters

 "I don't feel safe out there."

"The roads are so narrow."

"People are all on their phones."

"Someone I know was killed."

These are just a few of the lines I hear from the quitters: the people who are getting rid of their road bikes because they don't enjoy being out there on the travel ways that we all pay for with our taxes and have every right to use. If they're in the shop, these quitters aren't quitting cycling outright. They're just being intimidated into leaving the public right of way to go play on various closed courses, or highly limited corridors like what passes for a rail trail around here.

Most of the time, I overhear the conversation between the quitter and a salesperson on the retail floor while I toil away in the repair shop. It makes a weary day wearier.

To be fair, if I lived in Wolfeboro I would probably come to dislike road riding, too. Every time I think about moving closer to work I think about the severe limitations on riding, imposed by the hills and water bodies that have shaped the road system since colonial times. The typical New England road has a white line and a ditch. Combining that with resort-area traffic in the summer makes road riding increasingly stressful as what used to be a rural area gets overrun by creeping suburbia. We're not seeing too many cookie-cutter housing tracts yet, but the attitude of drivers, and their numbers, make the roads busier in all seasons, compared to how they were in the end of the 20th Century.

Creeping suburbia extends to my area as well, but the terrain of the glacial plains allows for longer sight lines and some degree of wider roads, and the lack of particular geographical attractions, like top-tier lakes or brag-worthy mountains means that most people on the roads are just passing through. But we do have our dinky rush hours. And GPS has turned the road in front of my house into some kind of "secret" escape route for southbound motorists when Route 16 is choked with traffic.

One quitter this week said that a friend of hers "passed away while riding on the road." Passing away is something you do in your sleep. Even if you die from natural causes rather than the smashing trauma of a motor vehicle impact, if you're mounted on a bike when you have your stroke or heart attack you're going to hit the ground hard. People are funny about death. If your friend's terminal experience was horrendous enough to get you to give up a form of cycling that you say you loved, say "killed." Give it the full horror and outrage that it deserves. Highlight this side effect of humanity's bad decision to prioritize the passage of motor vehicles over the health and safety of nearly everyone and everything else.

Other riders quit the road because of physical limitations that accumulate with age and injury. Some retreat gradually through upright bikes that replace their drop-bar models. Some go straight to the e-bike. Some try mountain biking. Some head straight for the path.

There are very few transportation cyclists around here. I'm pretty sure I'm one of the most persistent, and I ain't shit compared to real dedicated car-free people in areas and occupations more conducive to it. My occupation has been quite supportive of my cycling fixation. It just pays so horribly that I can't recommend it to anyone as a long-term program. But other people, better people, in generally more populated places, manage the synergy of a decent-paying career and a bike for transportation, to demonstrate how the world could be a better place for productive citizens, not just dilettante fuckoffs with silly dreams.

Transportation cyclists seem less inclined to quit than recreational riders. When you just do something for fun, you stop as soon as it is no longer fun. There are days when transporting myself across the necessary miles isn't a lot of fun. A couple of days ago as I rode down Route 28 I tried to estimate how many miles I've logged on just this route. I'm sure it's more than 40,000, possibly as high as 60,000. That may seem like a lot, but it's over 32 years. My average annual mileage wouldn't even make the charts among real year-round transporters, long-distance tourists, or anyone training to race. It's just the result of stubborn, stupid persistence. My total mileage in that time is far higher. I used to ride more for fun. And I didn't include the training miles I log to get ready for the commute or to stay in some kind of shape transitioning into winter. The 40-60 figure was just on the principal commuting route. 

I don't push myself as hard as I used to. When I pushed myself harder, it didn't feel as hard. I was younger. The key to longevity as a road cyclist -- aside from not getting crushed by a motor vehicle -- is avoiding debilitating injury. Especially with a somewhat long route, a dedicated bike commuter is an athlete with more than just the riding career depending on completing the course, day after day. So I go ahead and take the car on the grossest days. Recovery is key, and an aging body doesn't recover as well over a single night, especially if the aging rider has gotten too frisky the day before. Commuting turns into a time trial. Oops! How did it get to be so late?! Oh well. I'll sprint this one as hard as I can and promise to do better tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, stomps in this hectic pace to the last syllable of yet another work week.

The rides are frantic, sandwiched around days so incredibly tedious for the most part. But you go from moment to moment of reward, finding something of value in the neck-deep mud of your own created predicament. And be glad because the mud so far remains below your face. If I could have imagined anything else in sufficient detail, while there was still time to implement it, I would have done it. So without real complaint -- just a continuous profane grumbling and self reproach -- I get on the bike for another day.

Cold, Clear Water, Thawing Manure

 Here in the southern part of northern New England, April weather notoriously bounces between occasional pleasant days and raw, wet ones that can bring rain or snow. This gradually transitions to the somewhat milder promise of May, before giving way to the tepid disappointment we call June.

Yesterday was one of the mild ones. The wind was light, the sky was clear. I needed a ride to continue my recovery program from a sedentary winter. The commute doesn't feel any longer than it used to, but it takes a little longer, and I feel its effects longer afterward.

During my first spring in New Hampshire, in 1988, I was training for an epic ride that I hoped would form the basis for one or more magazine articles. Starting in March, I went out on a set of training routes through the rural landscape just to the south of the eastern Sandwich Range. I watched the snow recede, the brooks and wetlands fill to flood, the brown and tan dead vegetation pressed flat by the weight of winter slowly rebound, pushed up by the green growth seeking the sun. It was a time of creativity and hope.

Every spring has its version of this, enriching spring training rides with actual and remembered rejuvenation. Where I live now, I pass several places where they keep livestock. First is the draft horses, less than a mile down the road. Their manure pile is well thawed now. On the opposite side of the road, a brook rushes with clear, cold runoff, that started as snow melt from our meager winter, and now conveys the rains that follow. Wood frogs and peepers have begun to sound, when the air is warm enough.

A cold snap shuts them up. I imagine their annoyance.

Around the route I pass several other places where the smell of animal dung dominates the atmosphere. It reminds me of a race I used to do in Carlisle, PA, when I lived in Maryland. It was a 50-mile race in April. For some reason I believed that the other competitors would be in a similar state of early season development as I was. I thought I trained over the winters: commuting, riding rollers, sneaking in a road ride or some fixed-gear training as it fit with weather, daylight, and a full-time -- albeit low-paying -- job. Hey, it's April. We should be easing into our season. Right?

Invariably, I ended up chasing the breakaways from somewhere in a splintering field torn apart by the riders who had gone south for their early miles, or perhaps for the entire winter, or who had pounded their bodies with high-intensity alternative training during what passed for winter in the Mid Atlantic coastal and Piedmont region. Any longer race -- more than 30 miles -- was open to Cat. 2,3, and maybe 4, in the years before Cat. 5 was anything but a joke we would make about novice riders. The difference between the categories is not subtle, it's exponential. The top category sets the tone, chased by the most ambitious of the category below them.

Once the field breaks up, you may find yourself alone or with a group of riders sizable enough to create the illusion that it's the main field or a significant chase group. Thus I would hammer through the early spring landscape of central Pennsylvania, sucking in oxygen with whatever other freight it carried. A lot of that air smelled like a large farm, because a lot of large farms lined the 50-mile loop of the Tour of Cumberland Valley. Except for the part of the course that crossed the Appalachian Trail, we rode through a landscape dominated by agriculture.

Regardless of the annual rebuke the race always provided, it still felt good in its weird way to be out there, immersed in the almost inescapable hopefulness of spring.

Every brook and stream, every vernal pool, marsh, and wetland is about as full as it's going to get, unless we have a summer of floods. Yesterday's route was calculated to mix steady cruising with some climbing. The fixed-gear forces continual effort and smoothness. Every pedal stroke moves you the exact same distance forward, regardless of the slope or wind. Slope and wind determine the effort demanded from the rider. Grunt harder or spin faster. Look to the scenery for distraction and inspiration, or just to enjoy it. Each year adds to the fund of similar memories to deepen the connection to grateful observance.

Train like a pro

 In 1980 I was somewhat sketchily employed and had a chance to ride regularly with a sponsored "amateur" bike racer. While he did not receive a direct salary for riding, he had reached a high enough level that he was able to ride as if it was his job.

During the spring and summer he was often around Annapolis. He welcomed company on his long, easy days, and on many of his interval training days, the pattern of effort and recovery allowed a few riders far below his level to play along anyway. When he had something really serious to do, he generally did it somewhere else, with riders in his category.

Because he had to ride, but he had complete control over his schedule, he mostly rode in the nicest part of every day, if the day actually had a nice part. I did go with him on one rainy day, for hours, getting steadily more soaked and gritty, but for the most part we went when the air was mild, and the gentle sun shone just enough through perfect puffy clouds -- or so it seems in memory. He did say that he preferred to train during his highest energy level, which was the heart of the day. It was a pretty seductive life. Eat well, sleep well, ride a lot, tune your bike...

He did have an obligation to perform in return for this indulgence. I got a small closeup of it one day when the group wanted to go long and mellow, but he needed to do a time trial effort to prepare for a race. I went with him when he peeled off to do this on the way back to Annapolis from south of town. We were on Route 2, for anyone who remembers what that was like in 1980, with the classic Chesapeake southerly wind behind us. He accelerated steadily to top gear as I stayed an inch off his wheel, as he had taught us. Then he pulled left so that I could ride through on the inside to take a turn at the front.

I felt like a flag in a gale. I clawed my way past him, with a bit of shelter as he dropped back. He looked down at my bike.

"You've got two bigger gears," he said.

I knew that, but I was finding out that they were mostly decorative. I shifted into them and promptly roasted my legs. I lasted about seven seconds out there before he pulled through. We tried to switch off a couple of times after that before he just told me to stay back and hang on.

There's a reason that the time trial is called "The Race of Truth."

That day offered a rare chance to see a tougher part of the process. When I was in an actual race with him, the district road championships, I saw him depart on his breakaway with a couple of other riders, and saw him no more until we were back at the parking lot when it was over. He had a job to do. I was just playing.

I think of those days now as I try to train up for commuting season more than 500 miles north of central Maryland. I try to ride in the nicest part of the day, but with a regular job, and with early season niceness often less nice, for shorter periods, I'm out there with a cold wind leaning on me on the few days when I have the option to ride when it suits me. Even so, I find it easier to dress for a slog in the frigid gale than for stationary riding in a room that is too warm and too cold at the same time.

After a lackluster winter, we're told to expect a cold spring. Once I get into the commute, the ride time is set and the weather just comes along with it. The nicest part of the day often takes place outside the shop windows in the middle of the work day and is gone by the time I head out into the chilling evening.

Bike riding is seen as a hobby and an indulgence in this country, but for me it has been a vital part of a life less reliant on fossil fuels, and more conducive to physical fitness -- not for vanity, but for the ability to live more economically within humanity's global family budget. It has also helped me to survive on really pathetic paychecks by reducing my transportation expenses. If I could go back to living without a car, I would. However, by the time our urban areas are redesigned actually to support the workforce, I will be a very old man, or the decomposing remains of one. So for now I indulge myself in rural surroundings, and push my rusty old car through the seasons when transportation cycling is not practical in this climate.

The only thing we have to fear is each other

 As the season of darkness settles on us in the northern hemisphere, bike commuters have to decide whether to continue or suspend their activities until the sun returns again. The biggest danger in night riding is the same as the biggest danger in daylight: motor vehicles.

Cycling is scary enough in full daylight. We hear all the time about riders injured or killed, often by drivers who evade prosecution by leaving the scene. Even if the offender is tracked down, the penalties for ending a cyclist or pedestrian's life are usually laughably mild. If you want to be reminded over and over again how cheap life is, just try to get around without an armored vehicle.

Just recently, a rider here in New Hampshire was killed by a hit-and-run driver. She was a retired police officer training for a benefit ride. As luck would have it, there was enough information from the scene for police to track down the driver and start putting together a case against him. The assault occurred around 10:30 in the morning. That should be prime time for drivers to be awake, aware, and observant. Last I saw, the maximum time he could serve in prison for killing someone in this way was seven years for negligent homicide. And who ever gets the maximum sentence? Maybe a cop killer will, but it still seems like way too little. And if she'd lived, paralyzed and incapacitated, the penalty would be less, because "thank God no one was killed."

Crashes occur. For the most part, operator error is to blame. Even if the cause is defective equipment, it's probably because someone wasn't maintaining the vehicle properly. Look at you own life and think about how many risks you have gotten away with over the years. I most definitely include myself. You get going, driven by a real or imagined sense of urgency, and your visual field narrows as your speed increases. We are remarkably good at making quick ballistic calculations on the fly, but when it fails it can fail spectacularly, as the accumulated risks all converge at once. The unintended consequence could be as mild as a bent fender or as grotesque as a pile of crushed and shattered vehicles, with brains and entrails splashed across the highway. Oopsie.

A bicyclist has no shell of metal, plastic, and glass to take the impact. Any contact tends to be a serious one for the cyclist, simply because of the size and mass of the vehicles involved. Even when cyclists hit each other, the ground is the next stop. There have been fatal crashes where only cyclists and their surrounding environment were involved. Cyclists have struck and killed pedestrians. On popular paths, conflicts are common, because the bicyclists and pedestrians directed there are not a placid herd of grateful plodders. They exhibit the full range of personalities, including the aggressive and the oblivious.

When I lived in a more urban environment, 1979 to 1987, I commuted by bike exclusively, because I did not have a car. The season of darkness is not as long and deep in Annapolis, Maryland, as it is in central New Hampshire, but I did have to ride in the dark a lot. I equipped the bike with the best lights I could get at the time, and I had no problems. But the built environment has a lot more ambient light at night. My commuting route changed as my residence and workplace shifted to different cross-sections of the general area, so sometimes I had short stretches of unlighted road, but they were also not busy at the time. Now all the roads are busy down there, and what were dark and empty stretches are obliterated by lighted sprawl.

Up here, my route is much longer and follows roads that are almost entirely unlighted. The longest part is on a two-lane rural highway with a narrow shoulder. Where it enters Wolfeboro it is narrower, with more bends, and no shoulder. I'm fortunate to live north of town. The route in and out of Wolfe City from the south is much nastier.

Coming out of town, when I will be in the dark in the fall and winter, I could use the Cotton Valley Trail for part of it, and I did, for several years. Before that was an option, and recently, since the pandemic made the trail crowded, I have ridden an indirect but safer route out of town, that bypasses the bendy bit of Center Street. Inbound on Center Street, drivers are compressing and slowing, which makes them more attentive to obstructions like a bike rider. Headed out of town, they're decompressing, speeding up, and have far less patience with some sweaty idiot interrupting their flow. Yes, they need some character education, but since it's unlikely to work, I choose not to do it with my flesh. I evade. However, I have to rejoin the route out where Route 28 assumes its highway configuration, with longer sight lines and a bit of shoulder. The only way I can completely evade the motoring public is to quit riding.

Park and ride options are contrived, because the only places to hang a car are off my direct route. Competition for parking increased when the pandemic sparked the boom in outdoor activities like biking and walking. And as winter deepens the parking places are not plowed out.  That may change as winter activities on the trail system developing around the Cotton Valley Trail expand, but then competition for parking increases even more. And an unattended vehicle may invite theft.

If the only challenges were weather and darkness, I would not hesitate to ride the whole route through much of the winter. Snow and ice make wheels impractical, but most winters are not completely snow covered from end to end, especially in recent years. I have studded tires for one of the bikes rigged for commuting. Without motorists, would there be any incentive to keep the roads clear? Maybe if bike transportation was the norm, or at least much more common, some sort of taxation method would fund road maintenance. Extra points if it didn't involve tons of corrosive substances to melt the ice. Cyclists already pay taxes, but if we were more major beneficiaries of the road network it would be reasonable to make sure that we paid an amount that addressed our actual strain on resources. And just rolling the snow to a firm, frozen surface would give non-fat studded tires a good enough grip. If it's softer than that I'd ski to work.

I've noted before that drivers seem to become more aggressive when cloaked by darkness. It didn't seem that way in Maryland, but it certainly seems that way here. The highway stretch is actually not as scary as Elm Street, which has some tight turns and undulating hills. Traversing the glacial plains, the topography isn't rugged, but it's not flat, either. The road makes a convenient connection to Route 16, so it funnels traffic from as far away as Maine. It's not bumper to bumper busy except on holiday weekends, when it seems to have become a popular bypass for drivers trying to get around backups on Route 16 southbound. Then they all jam up trying to get back out of Elm Street into the crawling southbound flow. At the hours that I use it, I only have the normal local traffic to deal with. But the sparse traffic contributes to the problem of motorist impatience.

In the darkness, motorists are blinding each other with their headlights as they charge toward each other in the narrow space. If it's only a couple of vehicles in each direction, they will endure a moment of tension as they try to negotiate the gap in the radiance of their dueling floodlights. Add a bike rider, and it's just too much to ask of poor drivers who have to put up with so much frustration in their lives.

Day or night, my riding style is heavily influenced by the competition for space on the road. I have never ridden in a place where motorists would peacefully accept a cyclist claiming lane space at a comfortable, relaxed pace. Years of riding will make you smoother, more efficient, and generally faster, but age takes its toll. In nature, you'd be the gazelle that gets dropped by the herd and provides dinner for the lions. Until that time, you develop your own style to keep friction at a manageable level. Riders who are scrappy and enjoy friction will ride in a way that they know will antagonize the motoring public. Or they might ride without regard to laws and conventions because they consider it a right of sorts, and accept the friction as part of the cost. I prefer to try to facilitate everyone's flow as much as I can without subordinating myself -- or cyclists in general -- to the motoring majority. There's a certain bending of the law that helps everyone to keep moving. It's not a zero-sum game. It's a negotiation.

Not everyone deals reasonably. The motorists hold the upper hand in a contest of force. A cyclist has no defense against someone unreasonable. Every driver around you has a personal set of rules that they're applying to you. It seems to me that one limit that some of them set is sunset. When I was much younger and faster, I would routinely ride the commute into October, with only marginal lights. I detected few hassles beyond the normal ones that come with riding on the roads. I carried less back then, and rode a lighter bike. But even then I shut the game down before mid October. I would push it until I could no longer pretend that I'd made it home before dark. Now, with really functional lights, but an older engine and a heavier bike, I would ride happily in the darkness, but it puts me into forbidden territory with these few but regular fellow road users on my route who have decided that I don't belong there after sundown. No alternate route avoids the worst part without a long detour. Is the living free worth the increased risk of dying? Any road cyclist who tells you that they don't think about the possibility of getting maimed or killed every time they go out is either lying or has no imagination at all.