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.

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.

The new winter

Looking at long range forecasts as autumn arrived, I saw what had become a familiar profile for northern New England: above average temperatures, with an equal chance of above average, normal, or below average precipitation.

Precipitation is the hardest to nail down, followed by specific temperature. Everyone laughs at the weather forecaster, or complains about inaccurate information. A lot of variables influence the amount and type of precipitation. This is much more true when the temperature fluctuates above and below freezing. Long term averages behave more tractably. All you need is the trend.

As the actual season grew nearer, the shorter long term projections turned colder and wetter. This seemed to track with the La Nina situation in the Pacific, and the injection of volcanic dust into the upper atmosphere. Those had been ingredients for serious cold in the past. Now, superimposed on the overall warming trend, their influences seem restrained. The cold has not been as deep, for as long, and precipitation type covers a range that includes rain much more of the time. Even when storms stay all snow, it is wet, clumpy snow.

The phenomenon popularly called the Polar Vortex has become unstable, shifting so that bitter cold can drop in and hang around, particularly late in the winter when people might be looking forward to busting out into the growing sunshine. This is especially true of cyclists who may have some serious trainer fatigue, or be looking forward to using the car less, and the bike more. Completely car-free citizens will really welcome more benign conditions.

A rider who has taken advantage of winter conditions that allow for cross-training may have trouble finding them. Cross-country skiing doesn't require deep snow if there's smooth ground to hold a few inches on which to slither. Then you just have to find the time to get there on a regular basis. Runners adapt in various ways, to continue their program through snow and ice. At shallow snow depths, these user groups may be sharing space.

One winter, when I still lived in Maryland, I went out on a fresh snowfall of about five inches. You could enter the Naval Academy grounds quite freely then, so I skied from my neighborhood to the Academy, where they have a lot of well-mowed grassy fields and lawns. As I slid across one smooth, white parade ground, I noticed a runner high-stepping through the white stuff on a roughly parallel course. Without directly acknowledging each other, we each tried to make sure that we did not look like the silly one. I came out the winner by a slim margin.

Proper ski conditions were rare in tidewater Maryland. In New England I expected that they would occur more regularly. That was somewhat true. It's significant that the indigenous people of North America invented the frame-and-lacing snowshoe rather than the sliding boards devised by the natives of Asia and northern Europe. Terrain and snow type here initially favored the snowshoe. Skis immigrated here with Europeans and have needed help to assimilate. The most popular form requires constructed facilities and uses machine power to carry sliders to the top of a hill. Cross-country skiing  became a sideshow.

When I started working in the ski and bike business, it was a good way to be a professional athlete of sorts. It enhanced the business if I rode a lot and skied a lot. I was never the kind of uber-consumer that industries love, so I always had a frugal angle, but as gear improved I could help customers justify the purchase of it, and help them keep it operating, because I had tried it out myself. The conveyor belts got out of control in both ski and bike industries as the century turned. It's gotten harder to find good long-term investments in equipment, but it's not impossible. The growing trend toward a less throwaway society helps. We'll see how long it takes industry to notice and accept it rather than try to undermine it.

Because the basis of my riding was commuting and transportation, I look for ways to escape from the constant financial drain represented by car culture and consumerist entertainment. The lifeblood of an economy is cash flow, but you can't flow what you don't have.

Tuning and maintaining the human engine calls for balanced use. Pure cycling does not provide that. In pure bike commuting season I miss regular opportunities to walk. My commute is long enough to take up all the slack time in my day and then some. I used to change to a mix of activities in the fall and winter, but those have gotten harder to piece together as I have less energy overall. Opportunities to ski on workdays have vanished. At either end of the work day, conditions are often unsatisfactory or even downright dangerous, as temperatures rise above freezing during the day and set up hard at sunset. Indoor training seems convenient, but you have to set up, suit up, and clean up, turning a scanty half-hour workout into a full hour project. Subtract that hour from the necessary routines of meal preparation, housekeeping, and transportation. And you still need to stretch. Every option costs money and time.

Back in 1979, I set out to see how good a life a person could have on a modest income. This meant eating well, getting beneficial exercise, and enjoying some sort of intellectual stimulation and creative outlet. Eating well does not mean gorging on rich food It means being tastily but properly nourished based on whatever you can learn about what those terms mean. My financial status, tenuous and doomed as it is, is still better than it was when I started. In 1979, I would have been jacked to get $5 an hour, and could barely imagine the wealth of $10. I nursed the fantasy that I would produce creative works that would earn me more money to finance some travel and greater adventures, but the quest was never a straight-up pursuit of money for the sake of money. It was about a balanced life that anyone could achieve.

Of course anyone can live a balanced life, if one accepts an early death. Old age is expensive. But what do you do if you fail to kill yourself in pursuit of your dreams? Then you have to choose a voluntary death based on your principles and your taste. With a normal human predilection to survive, it's hard to kill yourself outright, even if you know it's the best thing for the species and the economy. And a lot of the shortcuts, like cancer and other diseases, are painful and creepy and sad, as you feel your body rot out from within while parts of it are still vibrant and viable. How do you know when you've had the last piece of fun you will ever have, and that this is the perfect time to leave?

Thoughts like this make hitting the weight bench and jumping on the treadmill seem pretty pointless and stupid. We're constantly shown propaganda that makes us question whether we deserve to live. If you're not working three jobs and filling every day with either billable hours or transit time from one job to the next, you're a slacker and a drain on society. In the anthill or the beehive, you work until you die. They don't have weekends and vacation. They have jobs. Even cartoonists brag about their workaholic habits. Partly they make a virtue of necessity, constantly producing work and sending it around because the returns tend to be small compared to the time invested. Take a vacation and some other scribbler will get one of the dwindling number of paying gigs.

The arts in general work on slim margins. Musicians have to practice to remain good. Visual artists have to make the art. Writers spend hours alone, going nuts in ways that they hope readers will enjoy. Performers need something to perform, an audience, and a venue. When work is commissioned, you have a payoff to look forward to...or an advance you've already spent. Otherwise, it's all on spec.

It's snowing steadily right now. I have go out and get a few thousand steps while I can. It's medicine.

A (blank) is a hole in the (blank) into which you pour money

The phrase is applied to boats (a hole in the water into which you pour money), aircraft (a hole in the sky into which you pour money), horses (a hole in the field into which you pour money), and pretty much anything else you can think of.

This week, for me, a car is a hole in the road into which you pour money. My mechanic had already told me we should schedule a timing belt pretty soon, and there was a little piece of exhaust system basically right off the manifold that hadn't gotten changed during the last exhaust system project in the spring, when the older exhaust system had failed prematurely and been replaced under warranty. The car was sounding sportier and sportier as I tried to find time to schedule the repairs.

Thursday night, on the way home from music class, I was buzzing up Route 16 at the mode average speed of 60+ when the car suddenly got much louder. Beneath the roar of the engine was another component that I couldn't identify.

I had to stop for a few groceries, so I slowed when I got to the shopping center. At that point I could hear that the undertone was scraping metal. The exhaust pipe was dragging on the road. One big plus: people don't tend to tailgate you when you have a fountain of sparks billowing out from under the rear of the car. Big minus: you have a fountain of sparks billowing out from under the rear of the car. Actually, I don't know how showy it might have been. I saw nothing in my mirrors to tip me off.

I scraped my way to a parking spot and peered beneath the car. Then I called my mechanic. That's the advantage of going to a guy who is basically nocturnal. I can call him from a supermarket parking lot at 8 p.m. to discuss the situation. Of course I am totally out of luck if I have a problem before lunch time...

On the drive from the supermarket to the house, I discovered that the Ossipee road crew had spent the day dumping tons of chip stone on Elm Street. It looked like a gravel road. I had to assume there was some sort of tar sealant under several inches of loose rock, but you couldn't detect it. I crawled along, listening to the loose pipe bounce around, hitting various things on the undercarriage. I waited for it to take out a tire, a brake line, or the gas tank. With both a bike and my fiddle in the car, I would have had to move fast if the vehicle burst into flames. But it didn't.

I pulled into the driveway in an arc, so that I could pull out again without backing up, but I wasn't about to take the car back out on the road without securing or removing the dangling 4 feet of muffler pipe. It had detached just ahead of the muffler.

The next evening after work I devised a rig with a pipe and wire, some toe straps and duct tape, to hold the loose section up while I piloted the car to Gilford. Then I went to bed early so I could get up and out of the house by 6:30 in the morning. That was the plan, anyway.

The jury rig on the exhaust pipe held up perfectly. Traffic was a little slow in a couple of critical places. I got to Gilford knowing I couldn't sprint the 27 miles to Wolfe City by 9 a.m., but at least the car was there for the mechanic to examine as soon as he got the chance. I don't really need it until September 6, but it might come in handy before then. The mechanic works alone, and he was buried in big jobs that had come in ahead of mine.

I slammed my remaining 12 ounces of morning coffee and started down the road. After a hundred yards or so , I realized that I'd locked the car with the spare keys inside it, so I whipped around to unlock it with the key fob on my own set. I heard the locks click open, and started off again. I'd forgotten that the doors would automatically re-lock if I didn't open one of them within about 30 seconds. I was well out of earshot when the car made that noise.

For some weird reason, I felt really strong and did not have to stop for a whiz every four miles. I'd worried about that when I guzzled the coffee, but it was a good cup. Now I was finding out how good. On my hefty Surly, with lights, fenders, and the day's supplies of clothing and food, I was pushing 19-20 mph quite a bit of the time. Purely unintentional I assure you. I let any climb slow me down as much as it wanted.

Despite a pretty sporty performance for an old fart on a heavy bike, my average was not good enough to get me to work anywhere near on time. But my shame-fueled efforts on arrival were good enough to mollify the high command, after a bit of scratchiness.

The mechanic called around 1 p.m. to ask where I'd left the key, because the car was locked. I cursed the automatic security feature, but I appreciated the sitcom aspect. The audience would have gotten to see and hear the car re-lock itself after I rode away. I asked if he needed me to call AAA.

"No," he said. "I can get in."

"With a brick?" I asked. He knew I was kidding. I was ready to wing a brick at the car just for that automatic locking trick.

"No, I have a real lock-out kit." He also told me where he stashes the key on cars of this type, to avoid such problems in the future.

The riding season began with a couple of periods of forced carlessness. Now another one puts a closing bracket around at least the summer. As usual, I will keep riding as long as I can into the cold and darkness.

The chip-stone on Elm Street improved only gradually over the next couple of days. I rode out on Monday on a fixed gear with panniers to get more grocery items. Drifts of stone at the right edges made it dicey when traffic forced me over there. I've mostly quit trying to herd them. The ones who will be safe will be safe, and the ones who will be assholes turn into even bigger assholes when you try to force them to be safe.

On the way home from the grocery store I saw the Ossipee road crew with a street sweeper and a couple of dump trucks, trying to tame the mess a bit. I'm sure residents along the road have been screaming. Parked cars are covered with an inch of dust. The clouds of grit have settled on lawns, shrubbery, and buildings close to the road.

The horseless carriage was an improvement over the horse because it was durable, repairable, and did not need to be fed while it was idle. But cars now are not durable or repairable, and they rot and harbor vermin when they're left idle for very long. We shell out thousands of dollars every few years to buy new ones, and spend millions on roads and shelters for them. The horse starts to make economical sense again.

The bicycle is what really makes sense. Called "the poor man's horse" in the late 19th Century, when sales of the relatively expensive machines were surprisingly strong among people below the luxury class, bicycles represented transportation independence and increased cruising range that made them worth the investment. They were simple, durable, easily repairable, and did not eat when idle. They could fit in a shelter much smaller than a barn.

We can't have the lower classes living well on modest incomes, now can we? Goodness knows it's hard enough to get the lazy sluggards to put in an honest day's work for their pittance, and keep striving for more. Who knows what mischief they'll get up to if they aren't constantly toiling to purchase expensive necessities from companies owned by their employers and social superiors? We can't do company towns and stores anymore, at least not overtly, but we can certainly build infrastructure that serves only a certain size and speed of vehicle really well.

This trap was not planned. It grew from the prosperity of industrial societies. The fact that this prosperity was digging industrial society into a hole was talked about very little as life just seemed to be getting better and better among the demographic sectors attractive to advertisers. Screw the rest of the world. Right here in Happyville, things are going great, and they're only getting better.

Holes seem to be a theme here. Consumer society is a hole in the planet that you pour money into. Unfortunately, it grows from natural instincts to devour, trample, shit, and walk away. Because our salvation depends on being smarter and better than that, what we will get instead is a Malthusian collapse, and a species reduced in numbers and destructive powers, but probably no wiser. We can and will rebuild our numbers and destructive powers. It's what we do.

I can imagine instead a rational civilization in which motor vehicle use is limited to necessities like maintenance of the non-motorized transportation system, emergency vehicles, and not much else. Hell, I can imagine a lot of nice things. And I like to. I just know better than to hope or expect. I'll keep the idea alive for whoever might find it before the beacon goes out.

The gift of car trouble

Just as some customers drive a considerable distance to have me work on their bikes, I drive a considerable distance to have a particular mechanic work on my car. He's been worth the trip since 1988.

The route to his shop is a long and challenging bike ride. Any route from my place in Effingham to his shop in Gilford has to get past a mountain range and a big lake. Winnipesaukee is actually known as "The Big Lake" in New Hampshire, because it is the state's largest. The mountain range, the Ossipees, is roadless. It's an ancient volcanic ring dike, nearly circular.

When I have to deliver and pick up by myself, I ride a bike rather than bother anyone to drive more than 80 miles to indulge my customer loyalty. Every route has some terrifying nasty sections. The one with the fewest of them runs along the south shore of the big lake, down around the pointy end of Alton Bay. Going up the other side, a rider can use back roads to reduce the time spent on Route 28. The shortest version is 42 miles.

Because I now know someone who works near the mechanic's place in Gilford, I can sometimes hitch a lift to pick up the car. If that doesn't work out, I'm back to my own resources.

When I was young and immune to fatigue, I would hit the road at 5 a.m. and ride all the way to Gilford to get the car before work. When daylight gets a little shorter, an early start means riding in the dark. It works out better to ride to work, work the day, and crank out the last 27 miles after quitting time. Since my mechanic is self-employed and basically nocturnal, he'll still be there at 7 p.m. or later. Don't look for him early in the morning, however.

A Gilford run by bike is an expedition. I only plan on a couple a year for specific things in spring and summer. The distance isn't so bad, but the narrow parts are very stressful and there are a couple of nasty climbs.

This spring, after getting almost no exercise all winter, I had to pull off a Gilford run with less than 200 miles on me. The muffler fell off the car. The stub of the exhaust was up under the car, gassing me at every stop. So off I went, at a steady plod.

Two weeks later, I rode it again, when the rear brakes jammed up. The car is 14 years old and has spent the last 8 or 9 years dealing with New Hampshire road salt.

Okay, we're good to go now, right?

No.

Last Thursday, the front brakes got jealous and seized up hard. On Friday I limped the car to Wolfe City because the weather was nasty and I hoped to avoid riding. By the time I got there I knew I wasn't going to take the vehicle home. As luck would have it, the boss had his truck in Laconia, next town over from Gilford, and agreed to take his loaner back over during the afternoon, so I could drop my smoking hulk and hitch back to Wolfeboro with him.

Halfway to Gilford, my car blew a radiator hose, so I left it for AAA to drag the rest of the way. So now I have to retrieve it. Meanwhile, I went into Memorial Day weekend without a motor vehicle. Sweet!

I love getting in and out of Wolfeboro without a car, especially in summer. Motor vehicle traffic typically backs up for a couple of miles on any road through town. Then you have to find a place to park. As the middle class dwindles and no one has as much disposable income as they used to, the traffic and parking jams don't last all day, every day, from May to September the way they used to, but the busy parts are as busy as ever. And I've always gotten a strange good feeling from getting around without a car. So when circumstances "force" me to rely on pedal power, it's more like extra permission than an extra burden.

On Sunday, I hit the grocery store for a few necessities before heading home by a quiet route avoiding the highway most of the way.

Stoddard Road has some well-established colonies of lady's slipper orchids.

It's easy to stay home when I am home. Evening will come and I will realize that I have not gone outside for more than a few minutes, and I might not have spoken to another human being. While I don't prefer it that way, I've ended up that way. The cats are happy to have me around.  I get to observe the life of the woods.

Phoebes are nesting on a shelf on the side of the house.

Hummingbirds nest in the dense pine forest. That's a phoebe sitting on the hook above the hummingbird feeder. Phoebes are flycatchers, constantly snatching insects wherever they spot them.

Today I wanted to get some produce I had not found in Wolfe City, so I took the fixed gear out to the grocery store nearest to my house, about 3.5 miles away.

Hannaford has added this official bike rack as part of their renovation over the past year. It's even under cover, which was nice when the drizzle started up while I was in the store.

Exercise is not only an effective antidepressant, it may be the only truly effective antidepressant. Despite two gray days and a moroseness that has only increased since the turn of the century, a stupid little errand by bike felt really good. I have a huge amount of difficulty getting myself to exercise as a separate activity, so whenever I can work it into the practical needs of life it is all the more gratifying.

I need the car, as any rural resident does. But being without it can be a real gift.