In endless hope and constant fear

 A road rider lives in endless hope and constant fear. The hope propels us, keeps us going out there because the odds aren't really that bad. The problem is that things can go gruesomely wrong in an instant. Anyone out there who isn't thinking about that stands a greater chance of experiencing it. I can't be the only one listening to a motor vehicle coming up from behind, wondering casually if it will be the last thing I hear. Of course I'm not. The fear has made many riders give up the road.

There's more than hope and fear, of course. We also proceed in exasperation and complete bafflement at times. Those feelings are common to all road users. "Who is this idiot?! And why did they just do that?!?"

Fear keeps you sharp. It doesn't have to be debilitating terror. I'm sure that enthusiastic mountain bikers, safe from motorists on their trail networks, experience fear. You have to look for trouble in a purely recreational context like that, but even at an intermediate level a hazard can ambush you if you forget to respect the possibility.

Hope motivates the transportation cyclist. It was strong in the 1970s, diminishing through the 1980s as the Boomers chased wealth in a wide variety of motor vehicles. It returned with the popularity of mountain bikes in all environments, even those with no mountains, and hardly any woods. But the off-road aspect pulled most riders away from contact with traffic except when driving to where they wanted to ride. The industry abandoned its cheerful suggestion that riders might like to use their bikes a lot more than their cars, and switched to baiting them with more and more expensive, elaborate technology.

My paid writing from the mid 1980s onward tried to use recreation as a gateway to environmental stewardship. Motorized recreation had seemed masochistic to me since the first gas crisis in the early 1970s. At that time, I did not think about transportation cycling as a central part of my life. I liked to ride my English 3-speed, but had no desire to open the rear hub and anger the gods by probing the mysteries of its miraculous functions. But I did see the price of gasoline more than double and continue to rise. It wasn't until I got to university and overcame my derailleur phobia that I also discovered anything like mechanical aptitude in myself. I also discovered the economics of poverty.

It was a safe experiment. I had family. I wasn't going to sink without a trace, the way real poor people do. But I was working within a set budget. I sold my car before the end of senior year because I was happy and confident on my bike, determined to live within my means. A car brought with it fixed expenses in registration and insurance, the need for parking, fuel, and upkeep. I could shelter and maintain a bike in a single room or a small apartment. All I had to do was find jobs I could ride to. Lots of college students in Gainesville managed school and employment without cars. Most cities and towns seemed to have a resident population of bike riders.

Most cities and towns today have resident populations of riders. Cycling survives because bikes are basically good things. This is more true of the ones that are well made, generally older, but the concept is sound no matter what. The riders starting out may have mostly hope and little or no fear. As fear grows, maybe interest dies completely. No one rides for long without finding reasons to give it up. Whether a particular person does depends on their personal equation.

Life will keep trying to knock you off your bike

As an adult cyclist, you are a member of a minority group. It's a voluntary minority, like a religion, rather than one with inescapable physical characteristics, but we still wear varying degrees of identifying garb, and place ourselves in the public eye by propelling ourselves around on our machines.

Road cyclists inspire the most adverse pressure, followed by riders on multi-use paths. Within riding categories, different degrees of orthodoxy breed conflict and contempt among the riders themselves.

Cyclists have the advantage in places where distances and terrain favor our size and maneuverability. But when you leave the bike to proceed on foot, you always run some degree of risk that it won't be there when you get back. And every ride carries some risk of falling. In traffic, you might be brushed or hit hard by a motor vehicle, or be herded into a collision with a solid object. While the vast majority of riders reach their destinations without injury, you can't deny that gravity can be used against you in numerous ways.

For a commuter or a person living car-free, the longer the ride, the more you have to adapt your lifestyle to it. You will find that proper cycling clothes make longer rides more comfortable. A more aerodynamic position makes riding more efficient. You either have to dress and equip more like a racing or touring road rider, or budget even more time in transit to make up for the inefficiency of riding in an upright position.

If you think recumbents are the answer, bear in mind that the trikes tend to sit very low compared to the tall vehicles dominating the roadways, and that their width is at ground level, making them awkward on narrower paths. Recumbent bikes can be very tricky stopping and starting. And even though you are no longer holding your head up the way a cyclist on a road bike has to do, you have to hold it up the other way, like lounging in a chair watching TV. A head rest is only partial help, because you have to keep looking around. Nothing is perfect.

Busy people have to fit their schedules together into complex mosaics of admirable responsibility and social engagement. In my case, with a commute that hovers around 30 miles a day, my time in transit doubles when I ride the bike compared to using a car. I've never been a model of admirable responsibility and social engagement, but connections have accumulated. As soon as you have another person in our life you probably have someone who will put pressure on you to quit riding, or at least skip a day, and maybe another day, and do you really have to do that today, and are you riding again? Add in a few voluntary obligations and the number of normal people looking sideways at you because you insist on pedaling steadily increases. This is more prevalent in a rural area, where nothing is close enough together to give a cyclist a time advantage getting from place to place. You're just a weirdo at that point.

If I was a real responsible individual, I would be driving to work every day now, because so many people want their bikes fixed. I would be working extra days and longer hours so that other people could think about using bikes that they obviously have not paid much attention to in years. Instead, I'm the same selfish jerk I've always been, riding an awkward distance because I was once married to someone who wouldn't be happy until we owned a house, and we ended up buying this one. Then she wasn't happy anyway, and off she went. If I'd been a good normal guy, I would've had a job that paid better, that I drove to, and been more amenable to the desires of the majority.

People can change, but usually they are developing a potential that was always within them. You may now spin off into philosophical musings about how the potential to be absolutely anything lies within each of us. True as that may be, you can look at trends in a person's life and take a reasonable guess. When it comes to riding, every one of us is a potential quitter. That's the handle that life will use to make you think that riding is just too much trouble.

The temptations of Marpril

Today's high temperature was about 62 degrees at my house. In a forecast discussion one day last week on the  National Weather Service site, a meteorologist had written that the pattern looked more like April than March. It's true. The high temperatures have been consistently well above freezing, tagging the 50s on occasion. But 62 -- that's the territory of May.

Freakishly warm days can hit at any time. I've seen it hit 60 in January, and turn warm and wet enough to melt off the snow cover all the way to the highest summits. That was 1995. But the odd warm day or two can pop in and out in any month of winter, with less dramatic consequences. Still, the closer you get to the real end of winter, the more these benedictions make you yearn for more like them.

I yielded to it today. I overdressed, of course, but not so much that I was gasping for breath and pouring with sweat. My route passes through one well-known micro-climate where I was glad of every layer I had on, for the seven seconds that I was in that shaded hollow full of snow and spruce trees.

The temperature drops back to more Aprilish conditions starting tomorrow. Tomorrow's 50s with clouds and developing showers mimics the latter half of next month, while the progressively lower temperature waves take us closer to the beginning of it as the week goes on.

The early meltdown has drawn a few riders out. On Sunday, a woman brought in her thoroughly modern gravel bike to investigate a flat tubeless tire. David diagnosed it as just a dislodged bead due to low air pressure. The rider had been told to run 'em soft because it's faster, and it absorbs shock. Because she works out of town, she goes to an excellent shop in Concord. She described her mechanic there as "hard core." Based on his equipment recommendations, I would add "trendoid." But looking back over my life I realize that I have lost every war I was ever in. The industry sold its soul to planned obsolescence in the 1990s, and the addicts who depend on it live in a world viewed through their perceived need.

You don't have to be hard core to be dedicated.

Clearly almost no one respects my opinion about the technology. I do enjoy riding my archaic shit. I love how it works. I do not yearn for anything more sophisticated. All the gimmicky bullshit has not bought us any more respect on the roads, or recruited sedentary legions from the sidelines. The only technological innovation that has stirred much interest is the addition of an electric motor.

How many times over the years did some smartass look at the price of a high-end bike and say, "For that kind of money, I want a motor!" Well, here you go: put up or shut up, asshole.

You can get hassled or run down just as easily on an e-bike as on one powered by meat alone. Think that a motor enhances safety? Ask a motorcyclist about that.

For today, I made it around a nice little 15-mile route on a fixed gear with no parts on it newer than the late 20th Century, except for the tires. They're more recent, but they may not even be from this decade. Oh, and the chain was new within the last couple of years. I could tell I had no strength, but I had enough. A utility rider doesn't need to maintain 20+ miles per hour for hours. You don't need to be first up the hill. You just need to get up the hill.

One ride leads to another, or so you hope. And so begins a season.

When things go boom

When I stumbled back into the bike business in 1989, the shop was selling a mix of road and mountain bikes. There was a citizen road racing series around New Hampshire and nearby Maine. Mountain bikes were a strong and rapidly rising category. Local riders seemed to be open to both. The last fade of the 1970s bike boom was dwindling away, while the roar of the onrushing mountain bike boom was winding up like a big jet on the runway.

By the early mid 1990s, the citizen road series was basically defunct. Customers would take ridiculously low trade-ins for the road bikes they were dumping. Mountain bike sales amounted to a feeding frenzy. Not everyone dumped their road bike. Some of them just gathered dust in basements, garages, and sheds until their time might come again.

The shift away from mountain biking locally followed a similar pattern approaching the turn of the century. Our local mountain biking ride group had shrunk to about three people. One of our former riders finally sheepishly admitted that he had been riding on the road.

"I just got tired of cleaning my bike all the time," he said. He liked riding on the road, and was afraid that we would harass him because we were all dedicated mountain bikers. We assured him that we loved road riding, and started a weekly road ride. One rider did try to keep the weekly mountain ride going for a couple of seasons, but it ultimately petered out. It recurred in irregular flickers, like a loose wire sparking, until the last year or so, when a mountain bike resurgence of sorts attracted a fairly regular group again.

From the end of the 1990s until the second decade of this century, the mix of bikes on the floor shifted almost completely to road bikes. A sale of a high end mountain bike became rare. But sales volume also fell, year after year. We were having a little road bike boom, as the nation experienced a similar blip. The average price per bike went up, because there was -- and is -- no real low end in road bikes. The real low end still belonged to wide, knobby tires.

Mountain biking didn't die, of course. It has never come back to its former commercial glory, but its devotees will never abandon it.

Bike sales figures overall have been steadily declining from the high marks of the late mountain bike boom. Categorization offers lots of choices, but deprives the industry of high volume in any category. This means that they can't offer as much price range and variety to customers. The number of units sold is down, while the average price goes up.

Electric bikes spark a lot of consumer interest, but their lowest unit price is at or near four figures, and it goes up quickly from there. Worldwide they are viewed as a strong growth category because so many of them are suitable as a car replacement.

When average price goes up it automatically erects a barrier. There will always be a market for used bikes, but the used bike shopper is limited to bikes that someone else already was willing to buy new. And in most places you can't just walk into the used bike store and browse the racks. There's always eBay and Craigslist, but many of us aren't comfortable with that style of commerce. Hunters and gatherers are different from traders. All three qualities might occur in an individual, but it's not a given.

In a bike boom, people buy machines that they have only considered superficially. They're met by bike enthusiasts who have been thinking about little else for years. Some of those enthusiasts are lifers. They got into it young and never left. Others are well-informed, but just passing through. They'll outgrow it and move on to either real adult motor vehicles or completely different interests. Among the incoming wave in any boom, some will get hooked and stick around. Others will become well-informed during their era, but lose interest by the time their first bike wears out. Or maybe their second.

When booms occur now they're more like pops, or premonitory rumbles that go nowhere. There are too many choices, and most of them cost too much. Among the local fat bikers, for instance, perhaps as many as half of them bought their bikes used from someone else who had forked out the coin for it new. This appears to be somewhat less true for three-season mountain bikes. The road category is virtually dead again.

All riders agree that the roads are not much fun to ride anymore. Even in the 1970s it could be intimidating. Now there are about 100 million more drivers on the roads, in actual trucks, or vehicles built on a truck chassis. People are more distracted, more irritable, and generally more hopeless. The lure of separated bike infrastructure of all kinds is strong. But you won't do much riding if you insist on riding only where it's "safe." The answer to that is, "Okay, I won't ride."

The bike industry is not cycling. What's good for the bike business in any given year may be a bad sign for biking overall. The bike industry is perfectly satisfied if you buy a bike, hang it up and never use it. They do like to see actual participation, because it means that people are wearing things out and breaking them, but just from a bean counter perspective, sales are all that matter. Use drives sales, but sales don't drive use. So when new bike sales drop it only means that people aren't buying new bikes right then. You have to dig deeper to find out why. That opens up a whole world of variables. It sounds expensive and open-ended. In the meantime, a bike economist can only look at category sales and extrapolate consumer interest based on who is opening the wallet for what.

Actual census data would be hard to collect. You would have to send a big team to observe every conceivable cycling venue to count users by type. Almost no one cares anyway.

Individual riders might wonder who their allies are, and where they are. For instance, around here I doubt if there are a dozen dedicated bike commuters, especially over longer distances and open roads like the route I run in commuting season. I didn't choose the route, I simply adopted it as the shortest distance between me and a paycheck where I happened to be employed. For many reasons, I would have been better off to buy a house in a different town, closer to where I work. But most of life is improvised. All this simply means that improvements in riding conditions in one area do almost nothing to make riding better in another area, except perhaps to raise public awareness overall.

Anyone in the middle of their bubble will believe that they're in the middle of a boom. People in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont probably feel like the world is being overrun with off-road riders, because their area is being overrun with off-road riders. But by creating a magnet for a certain user group, the popular area draws riders from far, far away. Those riders may travel through long stretches of country where their kind is little known, and not missed.

Certain categories of enthusiast have to be very enthusiastic indeed to keep up with the related expenses of participation. Cycling is at its most affordable when you can throw a leg over the machine outside your own domicile and start pedaling right from there. I kept waiting through all the long years for more people to catch on to the many benefits of that kind of riding, but it seems to have the least appeal. As a result, conditions have deteriorated because too few people have demanded that they improve.

Our accumulated bad decisions will soon force change upon us. The big question now is whether our species is basically terminally ill -- and therefore might as well just focus on pleasure in our swift decline, or whether we are treatable if we accept a stricter regimen than several generations have so far been willing to adopt. In other words, is it worth bothering to try to create that better world?

Transportation is cycling's highest purpose

The first two-wheeled vehicles were made for transportation. They did not inspire a direct and continuous line of evolution to the bicycle of today, but the first pedal-powered two-wheeled machines were basically the old swift walkers with a set of pedals attached to the front wheel, like a kid's tricycle.

While all the attention gets paid to the great races, these were proofs of concept. They were demonstrations of what a human can do with the assistance of the simple machine. Just as musical audiences in the days before cheap and abundant recordings probably had taken some lessons and played an instrument, so did a great many more people in the peak of the bicycle era have personal experience riding their own bikes as part of the practical daily routine. It gave them a greater appreciation of the effort and skill involved in the extremes of competition. I suppose the same could be said of transportation motorists watching auto racing, but when you are both driver and engine you have a lot better idea how you would fare in a race.

The motorized world would bury us if it could. It might have limited patience with big races that are just show biz, because they are contained within a highly motorized caravan, and restricted to a specific place and time. Professional events featuring known stars and their teams manage to hold their place, while amateur competitions attract hostility and derision from the disinterested public inconvenienced by the event.

More than one motorist has described to me encountering a kitted-out cyclist while driving their car or truck. Even years after Lance Armstrong's fall from grace, he's still the insult of choice for contemptuous motorists. "Look at this asshole. Thinks he's Lance Armstrong or something." I was hearing it during the height of the Lance years, and I'm still hearing it, because he was the one racing bicyclist that Americans could identify, and every other cyclist was a pathetic wannabe who should smarten up and get out of the way.

Lance himself reported getting knocked down all the time by rednecks in his home state of Texas. They didn't give a shit who he was. He was just out there on a bike, making himself available to their criticism. What did they say? "Look at that guy, thinking he's Lance Armstrong!" Hey! I think that was Lance Armstrong! Hell sheeyoot! I bagged a celebrity!"

The image of the racer colors the view of non-cyclists looking at riders equipped to ride in a sporty manner. The simple annoyance of having to accommodate a slower road user colors their view of tourists, commuters, and anyone else slowing down traffic on the public street.

Every rider reaches a point where they have to overcome some discouraging factor to continue to ride. If competition is your motivation, you will face the hostile world in order to train. If you have decided to surrender the road and ride trails instead, you will have eliminated traffic hassles and accepted exile. Transportation cycling seems like the least ballsy and noble endeavor, and yet, as the fundamental form of riding it has the longest lineage and the most to offer to the individual and collective civilization. Ten thousand bike commuters will do more good than a hundred professional racers or a dozen fearless stunt riders gyrating through the air. Transportation cycling is much more accessible than sport and competition riding.

When I was attempting to race, commuting was part of my mileage. Whatever else happened on a given day, I knew I was going to ride to work. Since I didn't have a car during most of those years, I knew I was going to ride wherever I went, unless I walked. And I did walk a lot. The town was big enough to be interesting, but small enough to cover quite a bit of it on foot.

Fifty years ago, kids rode their bikes to go places. While transportation design is responsible for some of the decline in transportation cycling among the young, sheer numbers are as much to blame. Roads were not designed with bike riders in mind when I was a kid any more than they are now. You learned how to ride, and motorists almost universally treated you well enough. No one ever passed me uncomfortably closely, even when I was riding on some fairly busy roads. No one ever got ugly with me just for riding a bike until the 1970s. The ten speed boom may have overloaded the system, but so did the surge in motorist numbers as the bulk of the Baby Boomer bike riders got licenses and became drivers. It's only gotten more crowded from there.

One problem in the US is that transportation cycling from just before the mid Twentieth Century was only associated with childhood. It was one of the many things you were expected to outgrow. So when the Baby Boomers took up the ten-speed and pushed the average age into adulthood, the country had no collective memory of large numbers of adults riding on routine daily errands.

Maybe the ability to balance on two wheels is not as universal as I  -- and other cycling devotees -- believe. It seemed like every kid had a bike when I was a kid, but maybe that was because I was immersed in the minority that did. I wasn't observing statistically in those years. No one was. Maybe some group has sales figures or other statistics that might give a fuzzy picture, but bikes have tended to be ubiquitous and overlooked until an individual rider draws attention in some specific way, like needing an ambulance. That might explain the deep hostility a lot of people seem to feel toward riders and bike accommodations.

You don't have to give up the automobile, or some other form of easier transportation, to embrace transportation cycling. Just start fitting it in where you can. You will notice immediate improvement in your sleep, your appetite, how you feel, and how much money you spend on fuel. I enjoyed my car-free years, but during them I borrowed cars from time to time, to make trips that I couldn't have done efficiently on a bike. When I moved to rural New England, being car-free was not an option. But I still save a noticeable amount of money by using the bike as much as I can. If I still lived down south, I might have been able to avoid getting a car at all. It's a decision you have to make for yourself.

The casual relationship of cyclists and underwear

Bike shorts are designed to be worn without anything underneath them. They became popular in the 1970s when the legions of new riders in their cutoff jeans were finding out what happens when you spend long hours in the saddle, grinding the seams of your pants into your tender anatomy.

Without posting links that include lots of pictures of dudes in jockstraps, take my word for it that the support garment was invented in the late 19th Century for bike riders. A key feature was that it had no structure in the contact zones, being designed to hold the floppy parts without creating friction between rider and saddle. Moving forward in history, the ubiquitous black wool bike shorts looked like something out of the 1890s as well. But why mess with something that works? Wool is a versatile fabric. The original liners were made of chamois, a soft suede, to combat chafing, not provide padding. Chamois requires some special handling to keep it nice, so synthetic chamois was developed to make care easier. Then came Lycra, and the image of road cyclists was forever damaged.

Lycra shorts have a couple of advantages over wool. In hot weather they can be a lot more comfortable. They dry quickly after washing or a summer rain shower. They're more streamlined, so the wind -- and adjacent riders -- have less to grab. But I've never liked the shrink-wrap look. Modern baggy shorts go too far the other way, of course. Modern humans are all about extremes instead of sensible navigation of a range of options.

The one common characteristic is the lack of underwear.

In the summer of 1975, when I was working in Miami, more or less living in my car, but spending most of my time on my bike or at a friend's machine shop, I spent a lot of time in bike shorts. I used my underwear to wash my car, because I didn't have any other rags, and the dirt was mostly water soluble. After laundering, the old tighty whiteys were kinda gray, but sanitized. What did I care? No one was going to see them unless they watched me washing my car. Some people I stayed with for a while seemed offended that I didn't respect my skivvies more. I figured that everything had to earn its place.

Over the decades, the life cycle of undershorts has led inevitably to the rag bag. While I do my best not to show them when they are in their active duty phase as actual underwear, once they've moved down to rag status I forget about their former role. Usually I rip the elastic waistbands off of them, but sometimes I forget.

This specimen got pretty oily when I was lubing several bike chains after winter storage. Not wanting to leave it in the house, I put it out in the woodshed and forgot about it. It was lying there when several deliveries were made. Only after several days did I think about how it might have looked. "That's that guy who leaves his underwear lying around." Add it to the list of my other eccentricities.

Thrill seekers and thrill avoiders

Yet another former road rider came in yesterday, looking for a bike to use on dirt roads and mild trails. She doesn't want a sit-up-and-beg path bike, with high handlebars and a bar stool seat, but she doesn't want the current version of a mountain bike, with high-volume, low-pressure tires and lots of suspension travel. She also explicitly said that the "gravel grinder" category hadn't attracted her. We discussed some options and she went off to do more research. What she ends up riding is not as relevant as her motives for buying it. She is surrendering, retreating, and regrouping away from the battle zone that the roads have become. She makes an interesting comparison to a rider who came in about a week ago.

A pleasant, friendly, lean and muscular tattooed dude came in to check the shop out. He asked about trails in the area. I gave him the rundown on local attractions, from the rake-and-ride stuff in Sewall Woods and Abenaki to the professionally built course on Wolfeboro conservation land off the Cotton Valley Trail just beyond Fernald Station. He asked about "features." I directed him to the Wolfeboro Singletrack Alliance website, where he found pictures. He summed up the riders in the photos as "kind of lycraed-out, but okay." He liked what he saw of the features. The designer and builder of the trails has ascended to trail builder heaven in Bentonville, Arkansas, which gives you some idea of his capability.

We moved over to the sales floor. He looked at our modest selection of mountain bikes, priced at only a little over a thousand dollars, and slightly higher. For all of its reputation as a money town, most of the year-round residents in Wolfe City are scraping by like everybody else. Somehow we've all let ourselves grow accustomed to the shrinking dollar, so a thousand dollars doesn't raise an eyebrow the way it used to. Forget whether it should. It doesn't. We do have less expensive bikes, but they wouldn't hold up to much really sporty technical riding. Thanks, bike industry!

As we talked about the bikes on the floor and riding in general, he seemed to be trying to appreciate our similarities more than focus on our differences. He talked about the rush of surviving scary maneuvers on the trail. I talked about holding my line on the commute with a tractor trailer inches from my shoulder. He equated the adrenaline rushes, but he seeks his, whereas I am just as happy not to have any. I've never been much of a thrill seeker, even when I was taking risks. I deal with them when they're sent my way, but I don't miss them when they aren't. If he sees a commonality, it does improve relations. It does no good to belabor the wasteful extravagance of purely recreational riding -- no matter how ballsy -- on a trail to nowhere.

Am I judging? A little bit. But I remind myself that human existence is entirely pointless, so how individuals spend their brief span is up to them. I happen to ask myself what the social costs are, whenever I do anything. That does not mean that I am able to eliminate them from my own activities, merely that I note them and try to balance my personal gratifications with a nebulous concept of the greater good. I've noted before that we tend to compare our pastimes to the whole menu of available gratifications, and find our place based on how bad they are for the public more than how much actual benefit they provide. The recreational riders support their position by saying that they offer more potential bait to get a sedentary species out of its chair and into some physical activity. To that extent they are doing good. I look beyond that, though, to the ghettoization of cycling, chasing us off of the public right of way and onto closed playgrounds, where we can be a good little special interest, rather than a tool of general well-being and the humanization of the developed landscape.

On my initial road rides this season, drivers have been totally mellow. But I have not gone on the worse roads yet.

Years ago I made the choice to expend my aggression and fitness on transportation cycling, regardless of where life took me. It was pretty easy in a small city with commuting distances under eight miles one-way -- sometimes well under. In many ways, my best apartment was the grubby, unheated slum I lived in for a year, less than a mile from where I worked, with no hills in between. I could do my time in the salt mine and then sprint home to eat my unimaginative meals and forage in my imagination for what I hoped would be popular ideas. Now the riding distance is much longer, the terrain vastly more challenging, the meals slightly more sophisticated, and the ideas still elusive. Transportation cycling provided a baseline of riding even if I didn't have time to train for racing or take a tour. I didn't have to make time for a separate activity. I merely got to expand my riding when time and finances allowed.

Road cycling should not be a separate thing. Rider accommodations should be fundamental to road design and driver education. We've let the roads turn into motor speedways. I understand the addictive appeal of driving like an asshole. I don't have to drive for very long to turn into a complete asshole. Mind you I probably have more of a pre-existing tendency that way, but I can tell from the behavior of other drivers that I am not a rare case. It's so easy to punch the throttle. Peer pressure joins the weight of your foot, easing the gas pedal down harder. Time is short, risk is cumulative. Go faster just one more time to get where you need to go. Everyone else is doing it. You have no choice unless you insist on it.

As someone naturally combative -- regardless of whether I am good at it -- I tend to persist. Stick an elbow out. If someone passes you closely, lean in to block the next one. But it's not a war. The car has the clear advantage in actual combat. It's a contest of wills. And it shouldn't even be that.

Mettle fatigue

This was the kind of winter that makes owls starve to death. It was not an epic snow year, but the snow we got was dense, and melts slowly. The weather has not been very cold, but cold enough to make the winter very long. Snow arrived in November and never left. It's still here, more than a week into "spring."

Owls have been unable to reach their prey under snow too solid for their bird-weight to penetrate.

Until a couple of years ago, I would have been out there already, claiming my space on the road. As soon as the ice retreats fully from the pavement, I figure all's fair. At least I did. I needed base miles, and no one was going to stop me.

On my last days off, the temperature was supposed to top out in the mid 30s (F), on sunny, slightly breezy days. That's not inviting, but it's not bad. Dress for it. But on Monday I woke up with a weird digestive ailment that made me cold, depressed, occasionally lightheaded, and reluctant to venture far from the house. The malaise receded overnight, but enough effects lingered on Tuesday to make me stay off the bike then, too.

Each additional day off the bike gives me more time to contemplate the steadily increasing size of pickup trucks. Traffic looks less intimidating when you join its flow, but the big beasts are dangerous nonetheless. I have held my line with my elbow inches from tractor-trailer tires a number of times. It’s all part of the experience. Not a good part, mind you, but it will happen in the traffic criterium. It’s one reason that biking isn’t always a great way to see the sights. You need to concentrate on what’s in front of you while you try to herd what’s around you. You want to see the sights, take a leisurely walk or ride a tour bus.

It could be better. But any time we try to increase our speed using a wheeled conveyance we increase the risk of an unfortunate event. Balancing on two wheels is more precarious than squatting on four. You could stuff it riding on a separated bike path by yourself.

It’s not about the crash. I hate to crash, and I refuse to consider it inevitable, with experience and due care, but I have burned in a number of times, and always gone back to riding as soon as I healed up enough.

Mostly I dislike the public exposure of riding. We remain a minority, a bunch of weirdos who go without engines, on devices most people consider a phase of childhood, or perhaps don’t consider at all. We are simultaneously ridiculous super athletes and ineffectual dorks. Nothing we do will make us respectable. The best we can hope to be is tolerable. I did not understand the terms of this agreement when I committed myself to bicycling at the end of the 1970s. All of the idealistic bike nerds of the day thought that our time was coming. Surely the world had to notice that practicality and fun coexisted perfectly in the bicycle. It was true then and it is still true. Just because we haven’t won doesn’t mean we’re wrong.

The weather warms grudgingly. As usual for this time of year, warmth brings wetness, followed by resurgent cold. It used to be easier to take, when the whole world didn’t seem so cold in general. Funny thing to say in a warming climate, but you know what I mean.

In a perfect world...

Fresh out of college, with fantasies of creative success and a very realistic view of my financial position, I built my lifestyle around transportation cycling and small, sparsely furnished dwellings.

That was the plan, anyway.

Artists are always looking for ways to balance the basic needs of survival with the need to create. You have to be as persistent as a cockroach, and as adept at survival. Unfortunately, you will find yourself often about as welcome.

A brightly lit and prosperous world hung temptingly near in the 1980s. I kept letting myself get dragged into various safe harbors, more stray cat than cockroach. It exposed me to normal people, none of whom fell for my bicycling evangelism and suggestions that one could do a lot with a little, and still leave plenty for others to do the same.

A harsh wind blasts the landscape today. When the bike commute was a fairly short hop across a small and pleasant town, I would have done it without hesitation. In the original plan, I would travel from the town by bike or public transportation -- or even walk -- on journeys limited only by the funds I had accumulated to buy time and supplies. In the beginning, I had congenial friends who avidly joined in the imaginary voyages. Invariably, they fell away well short of actually launching any. As far as I know, nearly everyone with whom I rode in the 1980s rarely rides anymore. A good percentage don't ride at all. They outgrew it.

The potbound plant that is human civilization has outgrown a lot of things that might have saved it from the death by strangulation that its growth has set in motion.

Even here, in the rural North, I have made some heroic commutes by bike. But the darkest dark and iciest, snowiest snow encouraged me to take advantage of my foothold in normality to resort to the car. Bike commuting became seasonal, because I could. But in the perfect world, I never did.

In 1980, envisioning a system that would work for me, I had no urge to live in the country. I liked the country, but I know that it ceases to be rural when it fills up with people who want to be in it. My later move to the woods followed a logical series of steps -- half normal and half half-baked -- in which I rationalized that I could live in an existing building in a mostly undeveloped area, and help to preserve its environment while the rest of the world caught on to the need to do so on a large scale. But the simple bikey life was lost.

A perfect world, in which the residents live in small but comfortable spaces, in compactly developed centers surrounded by large tracts of natural environment, depends on good soundproofing. It depends on a lot of other things that are never going to happen, either. But soundproofing is vital. We can't cheap out on construction.

A perfect world also depends on a stable population. Because humans are like most species, designed to replicate freely and lose a lot to famine, disease, and predation, we will not achieve a stable population by peaceful, pleasant, and well-planned means. So again, the dream shimmers and fades. We are too smart and not smart enough.

We don't live in the perfect world. Things happen in the imperfect world that earn our love. There is no exit ramp to the alternate universe that doesn't require jettisoning things that have become dear. And there's really no such thing as a nice little town. Every Bedford Falls has a Potter. And the soundproofing is woefully inadequate. We don't live in the perfect world. But ideas from it could make this one better. Bike and walk. Adjust development strategies to make best use of existing terrain. The map is flat, but the land is not. We're running out of time anyway, so why not spend it on this?

Naive bike nerds

At lunch one day I was leafing through a book that Specialized put out to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Stumpjumper mountain bike.

The copy in one of their early ads caught my eye. It was pure biketopian dreaming.

See where it says, "...you'll find you're riding more and driving less." Bike nerds still believed that they could entice Americans out of their automobiles. The leaders of the industry had come through the ten-speed boom of the 1970s. A national organization promoting bike touring had sprung up in 1976 under the name Bikecentennial, which lives on today as Adventure Cycling. Bike nerds knew, we just knew, that if we could just get enough people to try riding that they would abandon their cars en masse and join us in the fresh air and sunshine of a cleaner, more humane world.

Oh, and we're all probably faster than you are, but don't let that discourage you. Just ride more!

Each boom did see a rise in cycling participation in the real world. Mountain bikes, ostensibly designed for trail riding, were based on road designs because the early ones were improvised on road frames. They were not racing frames, but all bikes were a product of the roads and roads were a product of bikes. Once the genre was separated, mutation followed, but it took a while. All life traces to a common ancestor, but a giraffe is not a weasel and a fish is not a bird.

The bike nerds were up against sheer population growth and an economy devoted to the pursuit of wealth powered by an internal combustion engine. Even if wealth meant mere survival at a grub job, of course you would drive to it. And when you got a better job, you'd get a better car. Duh! If you couldn't afford a car, you'd take a bus or maybe ride a bike until you could afford a car. It's called being normal.

The Chinese were famous for their herds of thousands of bike commuters before they embraced creeping capitalism and their economy revved up. The first thing they did was ditch the bikes and get cars. Pollution and traffic deaths soared. But people were getting rich.

It's nice to see the Chinese now taking steps to reverse the environmental damage of their surge of industrialization. Bike sharing has become a major social and economic experiment there. We'll see how it plays out. The level of damage, loss, and wear and tear on the share-bike fleets may have people pining to own their own bikes again because they can control the use and care that they get. But then they're back to the problem of theft.

The lack of safe riding routes and secure parking present probably the two biggest deterrents to transportation cycling. You're as free as a bird on your bike, but whole populations of birds have been wiped out by people with shotguns or nest-plundering predators. Or you get sucked into the engine of a jet.

Humans have a tendency to project the future. The ability to imagine consequences has helped us over the eons, but the problems we create demonstrate the limits of those powers of prediction. We might not know for years or decades whether we've made things fundamentally better or worse by doing something that seemed initially helpful. And every generation judges a future it won't live to see by the standards of its past and present. To the extent that humans have hit a plateau in physical evolution and that our mental and emotional responses seem fairly firmly set, perhaps a generation can suggest standards by which its descendants should live. But the descendants are the ones who will actually be living under those standards, so it's really their call.

I still believe that the bike nerd view was a good one, and that our species has suffered by pushing it aside. But no one can control the outcome. The bike industry itself is the aggregate total of mostly bad decisions. It is a microcosm of society in that way. As an industry, it has to try to survive in the reality of its times.

Biking will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no biking

When mountain biking surged in popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States was in a recession for many of those years.

Here in New England, the mid-1980s economic boom faltered by 1988 and was well on the way down by 1989. Construction projects stopped, newly constructed buildings were never fully completed, and many quickly fell into disrepair. Real estate agents who had grown sleek and fat now wore fading clothes and drove the same Mercedes for several years in a row.

I observed at the time that the economic downturn, as tough as it was for people in search of income, was the best thing that could have happened for the environment.

The search for income led me to the job that I still hold today. The shop needed someone who could figure out new equipment as it appeared, but who also understood older bikes. The fact that I thought I could get by on a meager amount of funds didn't hurt my job security, either.

A committed bike commuter since I graduated from college, I used riding to get me through times of chronic income shortage, and to increase my profit margin when money might briefly flow in a little more briskly.

Recessions tend to kill off the weak. But even among people who still seemed to be living pretty well, economic stress seemed to nudge them toward toys that did not require fuel. Around the Wolfeboro area, a lot of young families seemed to be doing well enough to outfit the whole crew with bikes and to ride them enthusiastically. Because the Lakes Region lives on tourism and seasonal residents, we could see that the economy might be in a bit of a rough patch in general, but enough people were making enough money somewhere to want to spend it on both mountain bikes and trips to our area for vacation.

Once the economy revved up again for the rest of the 1990s, mountain biking had become enough of a habit that we saw lots of business until we more or less suddenly didn't. After the downturn in 2000, for reasons both economic and technological, the bike business turned into a tough way to make a living in just a few short years.

Young adults in urban environments seem to be discovering in large numbers what I discovered with few allies way back in 1979: your money goes farther when you pedal rather than drive. The owners of the economy want people spending every dime they have, while at the same time harshly criticizing the average citizen's lack of thrift and austerity. This dishonest double talk makes snappy sound bites and promotes a hardass attitude worthy of the rise of a thousand year reich, but it does little to improve the human condition overall.

The bicycle is a tool and a symbol of self reliance. If you're really a hardass, apply that hard ass to a bicycle seat. You learn very quickly about doing a lot with a little that way.

Farmers aren’t cows

The merchant-customer relationship has a lot in common with farming or hunting. Specialty retail used to be different, because so many of the workers were also users, but it was never purely thus. It has moved steadily away from the fellow enthusiast model since the 1990s. The business model moved from small specialty stores to larger, higher-volume retail outlets, through mail order to the impersonal mechanism of the internet.

The larger and more impersonal the delivery systems become, the more the relationship changes not only from an interpersonal exchange between fellow enthusiasts to a quasi-predatory one, but also from a small scale hunting or farming metaphor to a factory farming analogy. You all are being processed, like a bunch of turkeys.

Granted, the metaphor falters because animals used in various ways for food production don't have any autonomy. As a human, you have your knowledge -- such as it may be -- and your free will, to question what seems questionable, to buy from someone else, or to quit an activity entirely. That last factor guides a lot of marketing thought. Purveyors of specialty stuff understand that many people get in, but few stay. This is dramatically evident in a boom and bust cycle, but goes on all the time in lesser waves.

Your knowledge may not be as comprehensive as you think it is. I've been in the business for about 30 years, and I still forget some things from the historical record, or have to dredge my memory for diagnostic information or procedures I might not have used in awhile. And my immersion in this area has taught me about the interdependence of a civilized society. Primitive hunter-gatherers needed to cooperate, but in the earliest times there was a lot less to know. Because we have eradicated that subsistence world, we have to function in the interconnected web of overlapping technology and customs that has evolved ever more rapidly as our species has invented and interpreted lots and lots of things. Become an expert in your field and you automatically don't have the time or the brain space to master many other fields. You have to trust others to inform and guide you. But can you trust anyone who is selling something?

If you have enough coin to have internet access and a credit card, your circumstances are probably not desperate enough to make a poor buying decision a fatal error. Not when it comes to bikes and parts thereof, anyway. Then again, I have both of those things, and I definitely do not have money to waste. But say you have to live entirely in the real world, obtaining whatever you need from physical locations where money changes hands directly. You have a personal relationship with your guardian and protector, or your hunter and exploiter.

Life is one big gray area. Working in a small shop, I have to balance the needs of the business to exist and support its staff against the desire to outfit every customer with the absolute perfect stuff for each individual. Working in a large shop, I would still run up against the limitations of that business's ability or willingness to stock a lot of variety and cater to anything other than the largest common denominator in any category. "It's good enough," the saying goes. And it's true, up to a point. But if you have the misfortune to buy into technology just before a massive shift, you will be on the wrong side of obsolescence for longer than if you'd stumbled in nearer the launch of a new platform. See much 9-speed Dura Ace these days?

New platforms do not guarantee less trouble from the get-go. Early versions often hit the market with bugs that the industry counts on early adopters to disclose. The first customers for any new marvel are often test pilots, whether they know it or not. That's the predatory angle. Someone has to buy the latest crap so that its real-world failings can be discerned and refined out in later editions. So the smart money waits as much as a whole season. But if everyone held back, it would simply delay the onset of this testing period. They've got you by the components, man.

The bike industry began as a cauldron of innovation. The machines evolved steadily from something with wheels like a wagon to the sleek wonders that you see today...and fat bikes...and 75-pound smokeless mopeds. From the beginning, they were creatures of desire, not need. But luxuries become needs. Transportation on demand found a ready market when "the poor man's horse" came on the scene. That led fairly shortly to motorized vehicles that could carry a person around the countryside without the need to build a railroad. By the late 20th Century, automobiles featured in ads for employment: "must have own transportation," "Reliable transportation a must," and so on. These were not high level jobs, either. The regular grunts were expected to own a car. We went from having a workforce on foot to a workforce using mass transit to a workforce swarming around like the Dunkirk evacuation fleet, only doing it every morning and evening, five or six days a week, year after year.

The needs of mass production slow the pace of change slightly, but the pressures of marketing accelerate it. Bike manufacturers seem to be keeping production runs really low in spite of access to the lower costs in Asia. They know that the pool of people with the wherewithal to buy their trinkets is shrinking, and that within an economic sector not everyone will want to play with those toys. Sell-through is easier if you accept that some customers will miss out. It still frees up each company to pump out a newer and better model about every ten months. This is like dumping piles of old doughnuts out in the woods to attract bears, or putting out apples and a salt lick to be "nice" to the deer. Bait 'em in and pick 'em off. Regulations from state to state may require some variations on the theme to meet strict legality, but the underlying motive to create habits in the prey that make hunting them easier is always the same. Have you seen the latest issue of Bicycling!!?!?!

One sales rep we had in the 1990s listened to me griping and said, "You sound like a consumer!" That's it right there: Industry versus customers. He wasn't facing customers every day, getting chewed on for the shortcomings of the latest mechanical marvel. Indeed, from the very early 1990s to the end of the decade I saw a serious gap open up between the manufacturers and distributors, and the front line retailers. Reps who were friendly and available at the start of the decade disappeared, replaced by increasingly numbers-driven salesmen looking for as big an order as they could write, with as little feedback as possible. We weren't insiders anymore. We became the first rank of suckers. Don't talk back. No one cares. Better minds than you have already decided what will be best for several years in advance.

The vast majority of customers these days do not complain, but I don't think it's because they are satisfied. Maybe they don't know what to ask. Maybe they don't ride enough to break anything. Maybe they don't care enough about function to take issue with something that works haphazardly. Maybe all the years of dealing with tech support for just about everything have finally beaten consumers down to the point where they don't even bother to try.

As someone who has devoted a lifetime to educating people about human powered transportation and environmental issues and the connection between economy, ecology, and quality of life, I can tell you, it's hopeless. Should I have figured this out 40 years ago and gone straight for as big a pile of money as I could amass? Too late now. What I hoped would bear fruit in a couple of decades looks like it might bring about some improvement in two or three generations. Or not. C'est la vie. We still seem to be uncovering deeper and deeper layers of problems even in areas where we seemed to have made considerable progress as of the late 1970s. Are we really going backwards, or simply finding out that we hadn't come forward in the first place?

The best you can do is try to be trustworthy. Is it really all just a metaphorical food chain out there?

Rationing gas since 1979

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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