More service activity

By the end of the week, it's all a blur.

A road bike customer asked whether we could get him short cranks because he's got some sort of calcified tendon problem, and can't bend his knee far enough to get around a pedal stroke on 170mm crank arms.

A quick dip into internet research brought me immediately to Bikesmith Design, a machinist who specializes in exactly what our customer needs. In fact, our customer's brother or brother-in-law or friend or something went to an event in Minneapolis years ago for HPVs and met the machinist, who was already working on shorter cranks because HPVs need them to fit into the confined spaces within fairings on recumbent human-powered speed vehicles.

I got the machinist and the customer talking directly to each other so I could get on with other items in the deluge. Eventually, a couple of sets of little cranks arrived, with detailed instructions for our customer to follow as he explored the limits of his bad leg. One set was 85mm long. Mark, the machinist, suggested that the customer use the 85s on a trainer, because they weren't strong enough for real rides on hilly roads. There was a detailed process to determine what the final crank length should be, as well as a set of 100mm cranks that were fully cleared for road riding. The customer opted instead to have us mount the 100s right away, so he could go try them on the road.

Short cranks don't just lower the top of the stroke, they bring the bottom right up close, too. I raised the seat as much as I could, but the post wasn't long enough to cover 70mm. I sent the customer away with a longer post so he could make the swap after feeling out the new riding position. His fork is cut really short, so the best I could do to bring the bars up was flip the stem. If he reconfigures the bike permanently he will need to replace the fork to get a longer steerer. I don't recommend steep rise stems, and I definitely wouldn't put a big clunky stem raiser on the carbon steerer of the existing fork.

The owner of the Specialized Turbo Como 3.0 ebike we recently assembled came by a few days later and said that she'd had a problem with it not running right. "I just turned it off and back on again," she said. "Then it was fine." Hilarious. The bikes are so computerized that now you can use the classic advice: "Hello, IT department, have you tried turning it off and back on again?"

We assembled another $10,000 mountain bike. This one was shipped here by its owner so he could ride with his buddy, for whom we had built up the new one a couple of weeks ago. Here was a bike that he had owned and ridden for a while, and it shifted like crap. These wide-range drive trains with the 42- or 50-tooth large cogs make all kinds of noises and move really stiffly anyway, but this one looked like it had never been adjusted properly. Nothing was bent, but it threw the chain right over into the spokes without hesitation.

When the owner picked that bike up, he spent the entire time with his phone up to his ear as he monitored an important call.

The heavy hitters are here. One guy called asking for "several road bikes." I was stunned into silence. The pandemic bike frenzy has been big enough to get a few minutes of national news acknowledgement, as well as lots of coverage in the cycling media. But the caller might have been spending a few weeks or months on a private tropical island, having a cleanse and a digital fast. I gathered my wits. They may be few, but they scatter far when I drop them.

"You said 'several road bikes.' Is that to rent or to buy?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah, sorry. To buy. All of my kids are big enough now that I wanted to get them nice road bikes that they won't grow out of."

I explained about the current shortage. Because I believe in providing as complete a picture as possible, I always start by explaining that the bike industry has been in decline for close to 20 years. Next I point out that the coronavirus broke out first where everything gets manufactured these days, torpedoing production before interfering with shipping and distribution as it swept around the globe. Thus, already small planned inventories were reduced even further because factories couldn't meet production targets, just as the public suddenly decided to rediscover bike riding after a long period of neglect. And they all got here a couple of months before you did, my unfortunate friend.

That may seem like a lot of unnecessary detail, but anything less makes the bike industry look sloppy and negligent, and retailers look like slackers. The bike industry is tech-obsessed and self-sabotaging, but they're not sloppy or negligent about it. It isn't even entirely their fault that the public lost interest at the end of the 20th Century. The mountain bike boom had already lasted almost twice as long as the 1970s ten speed boom did. The true believers in the surviving form of mountain biking were always a minority, but they were firmly enough addicted to form the nucleus of the addict pool that the industry farms today. The general population changed hobbies the way they always do.

Now they're back. We'll see where it goes. I doubt if it will last a year, let alone ten or fifteen. Meanwhile, our particular shop operates in an area where most of the categories have attracted a handful of adherents who come in on a regular basis to keep our brain cells challenged.

The owner of a Yamaha smokeless moped that he bought last year from somewhere else had had it shipped to us to assemble. This year, he brought it in because "it's making a grinding noise when I pedal hard." This is the same guy who didn't notice that he had Biopace chainrings for the first ten years that he owned his mountain bike, and then brought it in one day concerned because the chainrings had somehow turned oval. It was conceivable that he had only just now noticed that a mid-motor ebike makes noises when the motor engages. However, grinding might be a sign of something actually amiss. He mentioned that he'd read things on line from owners of the same brand who complained of grinding noises.

The Yamaha is light enough that I can actually lift it into the work stand without my little block and tackle rig, as long as it's early in my work week, and I got almost a good night's sleep the night before.

There was play in the bottom bracket. Or was it the bottom bracket? The crank axle disappears into the motor housing, engaging who knows what in there. I could see the face of a sealed bearing on each side. The play wasn't in those bearings. The motor itself was shifting. Under hard pedaling, this could cause gears to engage improperly. The owner said that he had tightened the mounting bolts and the noise had become worse.

I put a wrench on the bolts. They did not want to turn. They seemed bottomed right out. So I undid them, greased the dry threads, and reinstalled them. They torqued down properly instead of binding up. The motor no longer wiggled. There was a faint trace of play in the bottom bracket bearings themselves, but I couldn't do much about that. It was almost imaginary.

The bike made no alarming noises on a test ride. I called the customer to report that we had finished with it, and suggested that he should start a warranty claim with the original dealer if it made any further noises. I had also changed the chain, which was worn almost to the end of the gauge, and absolutely black with grimy lube.

The rate of repair check-ins seems to have slowed. In any normal season we would get these pauses, sometimes long enough to be alarming, but this is not a normal season. There's a blend of exuberant wealth, sober caution, and reckless, pent-up sociability. The people with money seem very happy. The reckless are ready to run out and embrace life, which sounds great until you consider how they are also exporting death and expecting everyone to be okay with that. Color me cautious, but I'm not going to bother to confront anyone outside of my job, because I don't need to get coughed on by some psychopath.

Pushing through headwinds of contempt and hostility

As a commuting cyclist who rides close to 30 miles on the basic route to work and back, I have spent years in the public eye. Even though the vast majority of drivers make at least some effort to accommodate bike riders, there will generally be at least one a day, on average, somewhere along the route, who will emanate some kind of negativity. It might be as mild as squeezing past at an intersection or as blatant as an actual assault. The worst infractions are quite rare, but you never know when one will come, so you ride in a constant state of tension. Anyone passing could have a bad attitude and the means to inflict it on you.

Pandemic precautions have created another way in which we can judge each other. Any venture out in public now puts you on display, subject to public comment and reaction for your clothing, equipment, and behavior.

At work, we continue to follow protective measures, and continue to take some degree of crap for it every single day. I am fortunate that the management takes the situation seriously, so we're all in the fight together. Any time I have to go to any other business I have to wonder what sort of yahoos will be there, as patrons or staff. The grocery store I use most often is doing the best it can, but the high number of selfish idiots is overwhelming. Basically, I don't go anywhere. I hardly did before, but I miss having the option.

On Sunday I drove because of the forecast for severe thunderstorms by the time I would be trying to ride home. This meant that I came in the back way, on Mill Street, past a church a couple of hundred yards from our parking lot. It's a repurposed building, not a classic New England white church with a steeple. The parking lot was full. A dense crowd of people sprawled over the grounds around a large tent in which a stage had been set up with sound equipment for a band. Almost no one wore masks or stayed very far apart. I wouldn't have gotten as good a look if I had ridden, because I would have come in on Main Street and turned down Mill Street from the top.

I got to the shop, parked, put my mask on, and went inside. Because two of our staff had unavoidable matters to attend to, only El Queso Grande and I were available to work.

Repairs continue to come in at least as fast as they go out. Parts may not be available for various reasons. Customers know now that they can't expect a quick turnaround, but that doesn't mean that we can float through in slow motion. And we still get people who -- for various reasons -- want our attention more urgently.

About an hour into the day, a local dentist showed up with his kid, with some sort of mechanical problem with Junior's mountain bike. They picked up masks from our display in the  entryway, but Baldy took no more than a half a dozen steps into the shop and pulled his mask down, first exposing his nose, and then his whole germ-hole. El Queso Grande asked him to pull it back up. Baldy said, "I wear an N95 all day at work. I know about this stuff."

Yes. And? What does that have to do with wearing this mask, now, incorrectly, when you are in a high risk profession that increases the chance that you may have been exposed? Is the N95 just marketing theater so your patients won't know that you cough all over the place between appointments? Why don't you just wipe off the dental tools in your armpit? Disclaimer: I do not know or guess that he does such a thing. But if he's so blase about precautions in other people's businesses, how serious is he about people's safety in his own?

Think of yourself as a gun. Your breath is your ammunition. If you are not sick, you're loaded with blanks. If you are sick -- even without symptoms -- you're loaded with live rounds. You can injure or mortally wound anyone you hit. Unless you live under very strict isolation, you don't know whether you're dangerous. In any firearm safety class, you learn to treat every gun as if it's loaded. That's one of the touchstones of gun reverence: every "good" gun owner observes that fundamental safety principle. It's a myth, of course. Gun handlers relax that perpetual vigilance and get away with it, until they don't. No one can be perfectly careful all the time. We're only human.

Once asked, the dentist kept his mask in place for the rest of the service visit, including outdoors. But we shouldn't have to keep slapping people straight on this. It's like something out of a movie. We're inside our building, looking out at the pod people milling around waiting to assimilate us.

The repairs continue to inspire improvisation. A local camp brought in a mountain bike from their program, with a freehub body that wouldn't freewheel. With extreme force I could get it to shift slightly back and forth. I could hear the collapsed pawls crunching over ratchet teeth, and something else that I couldn't identify.

The hub was tastefully anodized red to match the bike. It had no brand markings at all. The bike was a KHS. The hub could be made by any number of companies that provide house-brand OEM parts. I had to figure out if the freehub body was removable, and if so, how. Some have a bolt that goes in from the drive side. Some have a bolt that goes in through the non-drive side. Some have the freehub body riveted on, in which case the whole hub would be junk. We had no new replacement wheels in stock, and our one salvaged wheel was dirty, but actually a little too sophisticated to waste on this bike. 

After I removed the axle, I found the wrench flats on the bolt, accessed through the non-drive side. I put the long end of a 12mm hex key into the buried bolt, with a 12mm box wrench around the hex key to provide sufficient leverage (with a cheater pipe) to break the bolt loose. Once I had the body out I could compare it to various pictures on supplier websites to see if I could order a whole new body.

No I could not. So then I had to disassemble the body to see if I could fix the pawls.

The interior was a fairly standard configuration, with three pawls held in place with a circular spring. The spring had broken, allowing the pawls to shift out of position. This, combined with the broken fragments of the spring itself, had jammed the mechanism. The pawls and their recesses had not fractured, so if I could replace the spring I could reassemble the freehub body. The 50 tiny ball bearings in two sets of 25 were actually held in such a way that putting them back in place would be much easier than on a Shimano freehub of similar design.

Freehub ratchet springs aren't standardized. We don't have a drawer full of them. They're not a common salvage item when we part out a wreck. I'll tell you what though: they're going to be. This time I scoured the shop and racked my brain for something I could use. Ultimately I thought to dig in our bin of salvaged shifter parts, where I found a circular spring from a SRAM trigger shifter we'd parted out several years ago. We'd gone this long without needing it for a shifter. I snagged it to modify for the freehub. The shifter spring had two loops of slightly heavier gauge than the single loop of hair-fine pawl spring. But the diameter was perfect. I cut a section and test-fitted it. It was beefier, as expected, but I could turn the freehub ratchet without clenching my fist and gritting my teeth. I would have to reassemble the whole thing to know for sure.

The reassembled freehub had a stiff, expensive feel, and sounded like a star ratchet. The stiffer spring really snapped the pawls out. It only pushed the chain very slightly in the highest gears. Maybe it'll wear in. Their other choice would have been to wait for parts that may not be available for months. We might even start a little side business making faux star ratchets for people who want to boost their image in the riding group.

A mountain bike with shifting problems turned out to have, among other things, a tiny rock jammed in the pivots of the rear derailleur.

The penny is there to show scale.

The rock was inside the parallelogram as indicated by the arrow.

Fancy wheels on a road bike I assembled had very important information printed on both sides of the rim at the valve, in print so tiny you would need a microscope to read it.

Another customer had brought in an early 1970s Raleigh Super Course that he found in the house he's renting. He said he had always ridden mountain bikes, and wanted to try road riding. We discussed his options to get the old classic in rideable shape.

Check it out: ten speeds. And it has a cycle computer:

The geometry is a lot like the Cross Check. The frame has middling long chain stays and long dropouts. There's room for fenders above somewhat plump tires. The Cross Check has more modern hub spacing and room for wider tires, as well as canti bosses for powerful rim brakes, but its ancestor here has the general configurations to be able to ride a lot of what would be considered "gravel" today, as well as getting around more than adequately on pavement. This specimen is heftier than later versions because it's old enough to have the steel Stronglight crank.

In the late afternoon on Sunday, a couple brought in a Peugeot that had probably come from the European market in the early 1970s. It looked like your basic UO8 at first glance, but it had 700c wheels and an alloy crank. It still had the steel death rims with the totally useless pattern that's supposed to improve braking, but only makes it a little noisier. At least they appreciated its classic appeal. It's just a loaner while they're visiting family.

I come out of the work week totally thrashed. Days off melt away as I try to do all the things I don't have time and energy for in the margins of each work day. This morning I lay in bed feeling like I'd been poured into a mold and set up there. Bike commuting does take some of my energy, but even when I drive I seem to hit the ground running when I get home and fall into bed around midnight, with nothing to show for it. It's more of a determined stumble than  a run.

I'm sick of wearing a mask, too...

Saturday morning started on an up note when a guy who prunes trees for a living and took a biology class 20 years ago told us authoritatively that masks do nothing and that global pandemics are an inescapable hundred-year phenomenon. Any glance out the back window confirmed that the vacationing public agrees with him and is ready to let nature take its course. We face a high barrier in attempting to inspire widespread respect for the disease and for each other.

It's not just vacationers. The local mason who rebuilt the top of the older chimney at my house stated his own belief that H1N1 was worse and that Covid-19 is just like the flu. He is one of many who doubt the seriousness of the current disease, or who embrace the death toll as beneficial culling. It's all blown out of proportion by The Media.

The broadcast media have done their best to carry on the traditions of yellow journalism since the beginning of the Age of Infotainment began in the 1980s. I suppose it really goes back to the 1970s and the rise of morning news programs like Good Morning America. I'm old enough to remember black and white television and newscasters who sat there wearing a gray suit and a black tie and just presented the news. My father would get home from his government job and watch the six o'clock news before supper. It fit the mood of a world constantly on the brink of nuclear destruction. Simpler times. Now everything is elaborately produced and set to dramatic music. Half the people are sucked in by the effects and the other half are dangerously skeptical of absolutely everything they see. This does not produce a functional balance of points of view. It just rips us apart along yet another line of perforation.

Our shop will continue to observe precautions and endure being labeled as foolish cowards. Fine with me. We have a long way to go before we find out who was right. Even if there's a huge death toll, the survivors will still argue about whether that's such a bad thing. That debate has already begun.

Decades ago, in the 1970s, I was considering how I wanted to live in an overpopulated and polluted world. If we all did nothing, catastrophic events would probably take care of the problem. If, instead, we slowed our reproductive rate and simplified our lives a little, we could let less drastic attrition ease the numbers down. We could avoid the need for mass casualties. I didn't want to be one of them, therefore I should not ask anyone else to be one of them. It seems pretty simple.

That's not how it went.

The American experiment is more than just a political exercise to determine whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can long endure. It's a complete submission to the forces of evolution. The complete dissolution of the republic is the natural conclusion of an obsession with personal freedom and the pursuit of pleasure. Some people will want a cohesive and supportive social system. Other people with legally equally valid opinions will want chaos. Opinion covers the whole spectrum between authoritarian monoculture and total disintegration. Mix it all together and see what comes out.

The mask debate makes life more difficult than it already was. Any venture out in public not only involves the basic risks of human contact, but the added risks of emotional reactions inspired by the mask itself. I'm really tired of wearing one, but it still seems like a partial defense. A partial defense is better than no defense. The latest hopeful drug, for instance, only reduces mortality by maybe 20 percent in the patients already sick enough to need respiratory support. That's hardly a magic bullet, but it indicates a possible line of weakness in the virus that researchers can follow further. There's even a story going around that COVID19 is weakening and will die out on its own. Is this information helpful when we have no idea yet why that would be happening and whether purposeful interventions have played any part? Someone who skims the headlines will see only that the already over-hyped disease really is just fading out by itself. Take that stupid mask off! Be a man!

The problem with a disease, especially one with a pretty long incubation period, is that you don't feel anything right away. Food poisoning hits you within hours. Someone sneezes on you and you feel yourself getting a cold within a day or two. A gunshot hits you right away. Same with a punch in the face. We can understand direct cause and effect perils much better than the invisible progression of a microbial invasion. We grow up learning about the dangers of fire, and falling off of things, and having things fall onto us, and drowning, and interpersonal violence. We can connect the dots when we see them. Micro-droplets of breath moisture that may or may not be infected don't seem real enough to excuse a change in behavior.

Summer has brought an increase in customers even as the bike industry remains unable to provide product. This means more people through the doors, and more arguments about the need for precautions. We've seen people come up the walk, look at our sign requiring masks, and walk away again without coming in. We've had the people with the mask under their nose, and even under their chin. We started renting bikes again, and have to recite our list of rules and procedures to everyone who inquires. Then we have to follow those procedures after decades of muscle memory based on the earlier, more casual process we used to follow. All the while, we do our best to give each other space during the long work day. We spend most of the time masked, and will continue to do so. It really cuts into my compulsive snacking, as well as the excessive hydration necessary to keep the kidney stones at bay. My nose is getting mashed down. And that's just in the sympathetic environment of the shop. I'm really tired of it, but that's not a good reason to give up.

All ignored problems are in crisis

The repairs in the queue at the shop are a metaphor for neglected problems. The pandemic bike boom has inspired millions of people across the country to dig out machines that they have ignored for years. It won't last, but for right now it devours time and resources. People are awakening to a need they didn't know they had. After a while, the furor will die down. Gas is really cheap right now, and businesses are reopening. Cycling will be forgotten again until the inevitable resurgence of infection leads to a new round of precautions. But by then we'll be going into winter, so commercial interest will swing to indoor diversions. By next spring we will be living in a very different world, though still beset by the same ancient human failings.

Before COVID-19 took over the headlines we were talking about the crisis in the environment. Then came the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd, and the country erupted in protest over the festering problem of racism and police brutality. Protests on that have flared up every time there is a high-profile case, but nothing gets fixed. This time, many good proposals are circulating to change the oppositional model of policing that combines lethally with underlying bias.

Change requires more than protest. It requires continuous and sometimes tedious contact with decision makers at all levels of government to keep them focused on more than just well-crafted words of inspiration for public display. But protest comes first to underscore the urgent need to fix this problem now. Consider how many times huge numbers of citizens have had to take to the streets just since the beginning of 2017. Every time they have been correct. Those issues remain acute. All problems ignored since the end of the 1960s are coming to a crisis at once.

I don't know what to do about the fact that some people are just assholes. We've all met them: the people who are looking for trouble. They are the result of many influences, susceptible to no single remedy. It's a human problem. In the idealized notion of a police force, our protectors in uniform are there to provide the muscle for citizens who are victimized by people who came to them looking for trouble. I have been grateful for sympathetic police officers a few times when they happened to be nearby in a confrontation with bullies in motor vehicles while I was riding my bike. I have also been stopped and ordered off of a highway by an officer who did not know -- and was in no mood to hear -- the actual laws regarding cycling on Maryland roadways at that time. As abuses of power go, it was nothing. I just had to wait for him to speed away and I could pull back onto the pavement and continue as I had been. It was 1982. The officer was black. We weren't hearing about police murdering people of color, or white people having any particular advantage in an arrest situation.

In my life I have been harassed by far more white people than Black people. This includes every event that crossed the line from unpleasant expressions of free speech to actual assault. If you say the word "criminal" to me, I imagine someone who looks like a redneck, or an untouchable dude in a suit. The vast majority of the people who have gone out of their way to be assholes to me have been "my own people." I would venture to say that "my own people" take the greatest pride in being assholes to other people. Is that what makes us "the master race?" Great.

It really hits home for bike riders when a racist, fascist asshole in full bike garb decides to be the terror of the bike path and brings national attention to himself as "a cyclist." All the news stories feature "cyclist" in the headline. Way to represent, dickhead.

While the protests and discussion center on the latest manifestations of the four centuries of white supremacy that have gone into the creation of our republic, our country's reprehensible approach to health care continues to burden all of us with higher costs and greater inconveniences as the novel coronavirus continues to spread. The systems of both personal and public health display more defects than competency. These defects, coincidentally, affect people of color more than white people. And the trouble and expense are just beginning, especially as Americans tire of the restrictions recommended to reduce the spread of the disease. They run out to mingle, feeling like they've paid their dues and deserve to get away with yet another indulgence. A young twerp came into the shop yesterday without a mask.  He insisted that he was fine because he "hadn't been sick with anything in over a year." He went on to say that we were "backward" up here for continuing to observe precautions when the rest of the country is opening right up. He did stand six feet away after moving outdoors at the shop owner's request, but he wouldn't don the free mask we provided to remain indoors to complete his business.

As racism and police brutality overshadow COVID-19, COVID-19 overshadowed climate change and all other attention to environmental rape and pillage. Atmospheric CO2 just hit a new record level, and this May was the warmest on record. Interwoven with all of this is income inequality and the injustices perpetrated by concentrated wealth. If individual citizens are to be allowed unlimited wealth, government by the people demands corresponding leverage by the government to rein in the excesses of the wealthy. Is that going to happen? If so, how? Money is the real power. Citizens who vote to give a government responsibility must also vote to fund the government to execute those responsibilities. Otherwise, power rests solely in the hands of those who can pay for it. That's un-American even by the original white male supremacist standards of the US Constitution. The dreamers who framed that document imagined a nation of free people who prized education and had a sense of moral decency. I don't mean morals in the prissy sense of sexual repression and self righteous piety. I mean genuine identification with the challenges that we all face as human beings. James Madison's expectation that the wealthy would appreciate the contributions and indispensable value of the less well-off was practically communistic. It was certainly naive.

The saying "what goes around comes around" is not true. If you are in the privileged class and wealthy enough, you can dish out far more than you ever take in return. If you bought the police force, you can reasonably expect to be treated as a preferred customer. If you have no empathy, no compassion, and no moral compass, you're nothing but a menace to society. This can be expressed through direct personal violence, but is often expressed far more subtly by the ways in which income is gained and funds are bestowed. You can look like a good citizen and a pillar of the community. You can look like a harmless, fun loving, downright liberal kind of person.

A lot of us harmless, fun loving, downright liberal people were somewhat blindsided by the resurgent power of open racism since the public gains of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Once the firehoses were put away and the dogs were kenneled and the police forces started to be integrated ("They call me Mr. Tibbs"), virulent racism seemed to be defanged. There were still jokes, but they seemed more like jokes on the racists themselves, until you tuned in closely. Or maybe we knew some people who just wouldn't be cured, but we perceived them as powerless vestiges of a dying system. Martin Luther King Jr. himself had believed that the arc of history bends toward justice. You wouldn't think so now. Or at least you'd have to admit that many more hands than we realized are holding its metal and doing their best to bend it toward segregation and social stratification.

All problems intersect. Industrialized resource exploitation leads to environmental degradation and warfare. Warfare and environmental degradation lead to displaced populations. Displaced populations make their way to safer places, bringing cultures into conflict. Colonizers export their beliefs to the lands they enter, bringing cultures into conflict. And some cultures are pretty unlikable if you envision a world where we can all be harmless, fun loving and downright liberal. Colonizers using kidnapped labor set up centuries of conflict in the lands to which they imported that labor. Consumerism leads to resource depletion. Consumers judge their consumption based solely on whether they can afford it monetarily, rather than analyzing its wider social and environmental impacts. What example do they have, after all? The wealthy have forever taken the best that they could afford because they could afford it. Only the exceptional few make prodigious efforts to give a lot back, and that's only after they've profited massively from business as usual. Those few do a service to their lesser-known economic peers who put out a lot less, because they create an image of wealthy generosity, and bring up the averages for the whole bracket.

Underlying nearly every other problem is the idea that it's a good thing to want to have as much as you can get, and to keep trying to get more. We have pity and contempt for people who can't stop drinking, or can't control their sexual urges, or who can't stop themselves from pilfering things in stores, or a host of other compulsions, but we make heroes and role models of the people who seize control of as much of the money supply as possible and then dribble it out to the rest of us at their whim.The best salaries go to the people who support that system. The common good is judged by what's good for the people who already have it good.

There's a deep fear that if we make life too enjoyable for too many people they'll just lie around and breed like rodents. They'll gnaw and burrow and proliferate out of control. The benefits of civilization have to be earned by virtuous toil at prices often set by investors looking to profit personally, not divide the spoils among all the working participants. This can be less true among genuine small businesses whose gross revenues don't allow for a lot of profiteering from the top. The basic cost of even a poorly paid employee takes a big bite out of a small operation's income. And a poorly paid employee might not be the best expenditure compared to hiring someone with actual skill and trying to retain them. This describes a challenge facing small bike shops as equipment gets more and more complicated, but revenues are stagnant or declining.

Why you can't make an appointment for service

We get asked fairly often if a customer can make an appointment for service, to guarantee same-day turnaround, like they do with their cars.

Cars are complicated, with a lot of systems that have to work together, but they have to be pretty well foobed not to work at all. The odds are good that a mechanic can do what you ask for and turn you loose until the next thing goes sproing. A mechanic might spot something crucial, if anything is crucial at that moment, but most of the time it's a matter of doing set procedures by the book. When those are standard maintenance procedures, it's really a matter of rote. Even if a less-routine repair is scheduled, a dealer or independent professional can have parts in the pipeline to cover predictable complications.

There are exceptions, of course.

Bike repair is all exceptions. The systems of a bicycle are much more lightly built, reflecting the abysmal power to weight ratio of the human engine, and they are much more interdependent. With rim brakes -- still the most common type -- a wheel out of true risks not only inadequate braking, but also a flat tire if the wheel wobbles enough to allow the tire to rub on the brake pads. Loose hub? Could be a bent or broken axle, not just loose bearings. Loose crank arm? It is quite likely to need replacement with an arm that is the same length, the right profile, and that attaches to the axle the same way as your old one. Your shifting out of adjustment could require complete replacement of the cables and housing, as well as internal procedures to clean out old factory grease. The factory lube in Shimano shifters is the leading cause of malfunction in older units. They want you to buy a new one. But because the bike industry keeps making things rapidly obsolete, finding a replacement part can be a treasure hunt in itself. Cruelly, this seems to happen to the expensive stuff more than the cheap stuff.

Nine is the loneliest number. For a brief time, nine-speed was the top of the line. Once it was supplanted by ten-speed cassettes, the industry stepped away from it completely, keeping eight, seven and some six as OEM spec, but abandoning nine altogether. Weird, huh? You can get some nine-speed parts, but they are the orphan step child of drive trains. The good news is that you can always convert to friction shifting, which allows you to run whatever you can cram in there. I cannot recommend it enough.

We might be able to set up for a same-day repair if we did a thorough examination of your bike on a previous day, but the time we would spend on that is time taken away from every other repair in the queue. It takes experience and knowledge to diagnose accurately. And a lot of the time you need to dig into it to see what it really needs and whether it can be done at all. Sometimes, disassembling a malfunctioning bike is a one-way trip, requiring that the repair be completed just to hand it back in a rideable condition.

We regularly do less than a bike should have, because it's all the customer is willing or able to spend. However, that is never done at the expense of safety. I hesitate to say this, but a lot of stuff gets done pro bono and unrecorded, just to safeguard the rider and to preserve some shred of profit from repairs that develop complications.

At the peak of mountain bike madness, we stocked a lot of parts. Riders were breaking a lot of things, and also looking for upgrades, back when you could still do that somewhat cost effectively. Eight speed was the top of the line, meaning that only two cogs separated the aristocrats from the lowest of the lowly rabble. Nowadays, the top stuff has 12 cogs, the average low end stuff has eight, but you'll still see some new stuff with seven. Super cheap bikes might have six. So that's four cogs between average low end and average high end, each with its own needs for chains, shifters, and derailleurs. Oh, and SRAM and Shimano use different actuation ratios on the shifters, so make sure that all parts that need to match are properly matched. This is true whether the bike is low end or high end.

Auto repair shops have either the resources of the dealership behind them or the highly developed network of auto parts stores for on-demand ordering and rapid delivery. Bike shops don't have that. We have a supplier one day away, and two suppliers two days away, with minimum order requirements and freight charges on every order. The supplier one day away has always been one of the weakest contenders on selection, and they seem to be vying to become more lame rather than less. Add to this the fact that most bike parts come from Asia. Between the trade war and the pandemic, it's surprising that supplies aren't more disrupted than they are.

On Saturday, the owner of an auto body and repair shop in town told me that her business is having trouble getting motor vehicle components because of the pandemic. She didn't say whether it was because of shutdowns in US factories or overseas sources. Maybe both. So for a while even the auto repair business can't necessarily oblige your need for convenient scheduling.

Any repair will take time. Someone somewhere might have written a rate book for standard bike repair procedures, but it should be shelved in the section marked "Humor." The lowly tuneup might take half an hour on a bike that was well assembled or at one time properly tuned, but more often blows out to consume more than an hour -- sometimes a lot more. Once we're in there, we can't just walk away. And we can't usually backtrack to the original crappy configuration of the bike when it came in. Even that would take time. We're better off, once we're going through hell, to keep going. See earlier reference to salvaging some profit from repairs that get complicated. Much of the time, you have to do the repair to determine whether you will be able to do the repair. Diagnosis and treatment become simultaneous, but that doesn't mean that either one was quick.

All these factors have led to the widespread practice in bike shops, that you drop your bike off one day and live without it as long as you have to, until the poor greasy bastards finally get it done and call you. As we shuffle the queue, we can often juggle the small jobs among the large ones, but any interruption will break the flow. If we have to play phone tag because we discovered expensive complications, we can't proceed until we hear back from the customer. If we keep having to stop and restart a job, that means taking the bike off the stand and setting it aside, or hanging it up, substituting another job in the interim, perhaps several times in the course of a repair, as little urgencies pop up during the day.

Some jobs are just a long slog. Suspension pivots, for instance. Every one has to be disassembled, the bearing extracted, new bearings inserted, with care and precision. That's going to tie up a technician and a stand for a long time. Once you've got that thing in several pieces, you don't want to yank it out of the stand. And our work stands are all optimized to the height of the mechanic who regularly uses it. Changing stands slows you down, because the working height is different, and the tools are all in a different place. It seems like a little thing, but you get used to flowing through a work station with familiar movements.

"How backed up are you on repairs?" someone might ask. The answer these days is about two weeks. We may do better, but we're not going to promise it.

"When will you not be so busy?" is the next question. When I say "September," they think I'm being funny or nasty. This year, of course, we can't really say. In recent years, a lot of the repair business has come from second-home residents and long-term vacationers. Who knows how much we'll see of them this summer. Camps have almost all shut down. But the customers are coming from somewhere. A lot of them are locals digging out bikes because they have the time. Once more people start going back to work -- for better or for worse -- they will be riding less. The whole thing could pinch off in an instant. We could be back to solitary contemplation of our debatable life choices. But that goes on in the background all the time anyway. Nothing really changes, you just get more or less of it at a given time.

Bike boom flash mob

The pandemic has sparked a nationwide -- and possibly wider -- explosion of interest in biking. I should take time to research this thoroughly, but I've been too busy dealing with the influx of repair work.

The abrupt rogue wave of biking interest threatens to swamp the bike industry, which had been declining steadily for years, fed only by interest in limited sectors like smokeless mopeds. Smokeless mopeds reflect the general trend toward lower numbers of unit sales and higher individual unit costs. The demands that new technology places on shops hit small, independent shops particularly hard.

A recent article in Forbes Magazine drew parallels between the 1970s boom and the present one. We must be in a boom if mainstream business magazines think it's worth filling column inches with it. But the author, Carlton Reid, is actually a bike person masquerading as a general transportation writer.

Reid blamed the failure of the 1970s boom in part on "cheap imports." Cheap imports? Can you say WalMart? For that matter, scan the floor on any bike shop today and you will see almost nothing but imports, cheap and otherwise. Even the boutique American bike builders rely on imported components, even if the brand name on them is technically American. In the end, the article does correctly state that the 1970s boom fizzled out because Americans simply lost interest. It tracks nicely on the way we lost interest in ethics and an inclusive society a few years later.

The bike business used to be an outpost of freedom. The machines were simple enough that shops could sell and service a lot of them with fairly low overhead costs, and individual owners could easily master the care and repair of their machines, if they were so inclined. The 1970s bike boom relied heavily on the public's interest in reducing petroleum use, and the sense of freedom that bikes represented. The fact that the Baby Boom was bringing the biggest surge of youth and optimism in human history didn't hurt sales, either. A lot of people were feeling frisky. Small shops were easy to start and could expand as needed to serve local interest.

The arc of the mountain bike boom reflected a similar pattern, but with the fatal flaw of rapidly mutating technology. In the 1970s boom, buyers were advised to buy a bike with the best frame they could afford, on which they could hang nicer and nicer componentry as their budget allowed. There was even a progression of upgrades: do the wheels first, then the brakes, then the drive train. Change the saddle to one that suits you. Dial in the stem length and bar width. Maybe you'd prefer to do derailleur and crank upgrades before brakes, because "brakes are just for stopping." Owners were encouraged to think of their bikes as just a starting point for improvement and personalization. When the mountain bike boom took off with the advent of integrated shifting systems and experiments in suspension, the things an owner could change incrementally dropped rapidly to nearly nothing.

The 1970s bike boom coincided with a recession. So did the late 1980s to mid 1990s of the mountain bike boom. This could have contributed to public interest in recreational transportation that didn't require the expense of fuel, licensing, insurance, and vehicle registration. As the economy took off in the later 1990s, complexity and expense of the bikes was also rising. And then in about 2000 the public wandered away again.

Expensive gasoline in 2008 almost brought us back. We saw a huge increase in bike commuting for about a month and a half. Our floor stock had already shifted mostly to path bikes, some road bikes, and a handful of low end mountain bikes, reflecting the kinds of inquiries we were getting from our clientele. Anyone who had kept mountain biking after the boom busted wasn't even asking us anymore. We didn't see those customers until the last couple of years when they suddenly re-emerged, expecting us to have carried a torch for them during their long absence. And they hardly constituted boom numbers at best.

If you take a starving person and stuff them with food, they will probably die. If you take a hypothermic person and suddenly rewarm them they will probably die. If you take a moribund industry and suddenly slam it with consumer demand, it may not die, but it won't be able to sustain a boom. Add the fact that production and distribution were already disrupted by the coronavirus and the boom falls off a cliff as soon as stock on hand sells through.

On the repair side, we are inundated, and none of the repairs are cheap and quick. It's a classic example of how you can be working your ass off and still lose money. We don't outright lose money on each individual repair, but the time it takes to make it reduces the margin we can devote to overhead expenses and necessary re-supply. Many of these bikes look like they were buried in someone's back yard for several years and were dug up only because a quarantined person was rototilling for a garden and hit them. Or they were under an inch of greasy dust in the back of a garage. Or hung under a dripping plumbing pipe in the basement. Mixed with these are the beloved steeds of regular riders who want them back as quickly as possible.

In our first few days of contact commerce after weeks of locking people out I can confirm that customers are a great way not to get any work done. Yesterday was our first Saturday with the doors open. We sold almost all of our remaining assembled floor stock of bikes, which meant that no one was doing any actual wrenching a lot of the time. Customer interaction is made more cumbersome by the need to mask up, sanitize, and maintain distance, but without the precautions brought on by the disease we would have more people in the store, and added demands like rentals. And a few people have been fractious or irate about the precautions. That hasn't blown up into a full-fledged incident yet, but we're only talking about a few days so far.

The fact that we are busy gives some people the mistaken impression that we're making bank. Far from it. We haven't been able to fill stock on bikes, clothing, and other categories that help support the needs of the store. We haven't sold anything but the few bikes we managed to get from the incomplete fulfillment of our preseason orders. Repairs have required special ordering a lot of parts, which means we get pounded on shipping. You may get free freight on your consumer internet purchases, but businesses have to fork out. We are probably subsidizing all that free freight for the retailers who are destroying brick and mortar commerce.

Summer income will be diminished by the sensible restriction of travel and interaction. Then comes the usual doldrums of autumn, followed by a winter seriously in doubt. Our winter business relies entirely on human contact: ski sales, ski rentals, lessons, and ski services for people going to areas where people gather in crowds to use their skis. Winter tourism relies on lodging, dining out, and squeezing into buildings when not out in the cold air. As badly as we are hurt by fickle weather, if people can't even show up it won't matter how good the trail conditions are.

If the ski business is a complete bust, I would push heavily to get people to bring their bikes in for real in-depth service when we have time to dig into it and they don't have the urgent desire to get out on them. Complete overhauls are not cheap, but I can assure you that an annual "tune up" is not adequate to take care of the inner workings of most bikes. This would also be the time to get your suspension pivots rebuilt, and all the other time-sucking minutiae of modern bike ownership. It's all part of the cost of ownership. Would such an appeal work? I don't know if we'll even get to make it. And if we get a ski season, winter is the worst time to bring bikes to us.

For now, we just have to get through the current wave of demand.

Shoppers may safely graze

New Hampshire edges cautiously toward contact commerce. Our shop prepares for limited shopping of our store stock. Shields are up.

My weekly trip to the grocery store was uneventful. I wouldn't have worried much if I hadn't learned from local law enforcement last week that my adversary in the snack aisle incident is a local career criminal considered dangerous. I stepped up my precautions accordingly, as much as one can, short of digging a hole and refusing to come out. Given his CV, I can only hope that his attention span is short. But I do know how energizing a good grievance can be. I've arranged a daily check-in with the cat sitter to make sure that my dependents are cared for in case I don't make it home.

Occasionally I revisit the question of whether to pack some heat when I go out on the bike -- or any other time, for that matter. The answer keeps being the same: by the time you know it would be justified, it will be too late. And it would be useless against 90 percent, or more, of the perils that beset us as riders. As emotionally satisfying as it might be to face down a charging SUV with a barrage of lead, that has way more wrong than right with it. Besides, they seldom come straight at you like that. Those situations evolve rapidly and chaotically. As for career criminals with a history of assault, I readily admit that his skills are probably more honed than mine when it comes to a dust-up. If he were to appear with a gun, the most effective response would be a more dramatic weapon, like a flamethrower.

Other retailers have experienced violent assaults here and there around the country as self-styled freedom fighters literally fight back against the strong request to wear masks and respect distances as the coronavirus romps unchecked. I doubt if anyone who shops at our little outpost would make that much of a fuss. We'll probably just get some pitying looks and snarky remarks from the free and the brave among our clientele. Or they won't show up, knowing that we're wussies, and needing nothing from us anyway.

The people who do need us continue to bring in broken things. Last week it was a suspension rebuild on a full suspension mountain bike and brain surgery on an old Campy Ergopower shifter along with the usual degreasing and reanimation of the dead. This week? Who knows? I have to get in there and see. The queue probably has not shrunk much while I was out. I keep meaning to do a wrap-up of all the curve balls that make up yet another normal week, but the pile of supporting photos has become daunting. I'm at least two weeks behind already.

Angels of Death at the grocery store

This morning I went to get a few grocery items that hadn't made the last list. As a considerate person, I wore a mask. I kind of like it behind the fabric. Once my glasses quit fogging up, it's cozy in there.

Mask use was widespread. This was the first time I'd seen the majority of people covering up. But there were the inevitable few naked faces, mostly adorned with contemptuous smirks. They still kept their distances, so I was content to swing wide and keep shopping. But then I turned down the snack aisle and saw a man and a woman who looked to be in their late 30s or early 40s, fake coughing and sneezing on a masked woman trying to get past them. "If God wants you he's gonna get you," they yelled after her.

I lost it.

"You don't have to be an asshole about it," I said. It degenerated from there. The male charged at me. He was pretty scrawny, but the enemy is not misguided rednecks, it's microbes. He was spewing a bunch of mostly disorganized threatening words, and kept telling me who he was and where he lived, probably to demonstrate that he was not afraid of me.  But he did stop and back up when I thrust a hand out and said, "Back. The fuck. Up." He continued to rant from three or four feet away while I snagged a couple of chocolate bars and retreated out the aisle. We exchanged loud ill wishes as we parted.

A couple of minutes later I ran into a store employee and told him about the situation. I was able to point out the couple to him. Whatever action was taken, I don't know, but a couple of minutes after that the scrawny guy came up six feet away from me, still unmasked, and proceeded to tell me that he was ready any time to have me over to his house for...what, I don't know. I was seriously ignoring him as long as he stayed six feet away.

I'm going to start carrying a boar spear when I have to go out. The crossbar keeps the charging beast from sliding up the shaft and getting too close.

Really, what an unpleasant thought. I gave up bloodthirstiness not long after I got out of my 20s. You don't have to think about it for very long to realize that it's not such a great idea. But our history is built on a pile of not so great ideas, ennobled and mythologized for centuries. The better ideas usually involve not having deadly confrontations, but the people who like deadly confrontations go ahead and start them, and then have to be answered in kind because we do not yet have the ability simply to immobilize them and set them aside while they consider the error of their ways. And you know that the power to immobilize would be abused early and often.

Reminders of the ignorance and malice of people make me want to stay either in the house or deep in the woods where there is no trail. That's not a great option with the ticks coming out heavily. It preys on my mind when I set out on the bike to go to work. I've only done a little so far, due to various schedule conflicts, but I was planning to make it a more regular thing. There's more room and air circulation than on a trail, even if it's exposed to traffic and the vagaries of public opinion.

Tight passing clearances present a challenge to my preferred commuting options. The full route only uses some of the Cotton Valley Trail on the route out of Wolfeboro at the end of the day, but park and ride options use a lot more. There are road alternatives, but they involve left turns at awkward intersections onto high speed roads. The actual speed limit isn't too high, but the herd average certainly is. And commuting time is when impatient motorists are most numerous. Having the right to use the road does not mean that you can assert it without exposure to other people's bad judgment.

If the idiot in the grocery store really gave me the location of his house, all the properties along there are listed to owners with Massachusetts addresses. That would mean that he's not even from around here. And his assertion about a god means that he is inflicting his values on passersby with typical arrogance. The righteous can do no wrong, right? He had quite the potty mouth for a man of god, though. Onward foulmouthed Christian soldiers.

I make no pretense of godliness. My profanity is utterly sincere. I only know that I support my fellow humans in our attempt to prevent the coronavirus from rampaging unopposed. Even the quarantine protesters put on their full tactical costumes and pick up their shootin' irons before going out to make their statement. They dress for the threat they want to face. They lack the true faith and commitment that civil rights protesters had in the 1960s, who went unarmed even though they knew that they would be beaten and teargassed, and dragged across the pavement when arrested. I don't think I could do that. The first thing I felt when that scrawny asshole in the grocery store came at me was the desire to obliterate him physically. What replaced it was a cool calculation, not a godly surge of peaceful acceptance. I don't want to give an unworthy opponent even temporary satisfaction. But that's when I do have to rise to the level of acceptance, that the things I have wanted for the world are uncommon and unlikely, and now their perpetuation is the task of another completely different generation of people. They are free to decide that they don't want them. Ultimately, all I can hope is that things don't get too shitty before I'm tired enough of living to stop doing it, or am forcibly removed.

Stimulate the US economy.

A meme going around now tells people to "stimulate the US economy, not China's. Buy American-made goods! Shop at American businesses." This ignores the fact that American corporate leadership made the decision decades ago to move manufacturing to countries with lower labor and environmental standards, because American workers were insisting on a better deal from management, and American citizens didn't want to live in a toxic hellhole. So the owners of  manufacturing exported the misery and filth. Along with it went the paychecks.

The drop in living standards in this country was not immediate. Overseas production made products cheaper. Credit cards made buying too easy. A person could still aspire to move up the pay scale and get a cushier job, so the loss of manufacturing jobs was less apparent unless you happened to live in a factory town that collapsed within weeks after the major employer shut down. Most people only think about the relationship of job to paycheck. Take money, purchase necessities. Use money left over to purchase non-essentials. Yeah, you should save some, but in the 1980s, interest on savings plummeted, and lots of people went too far with their credit cards. A series of recessions were largely caused by excess consumer debt. I don't know what the official explanation was, but looking from the sidelines it appeared that people got overextended, pulled back, recovered a bit, and began to spend again. We end up living on the expanding shell of a hollowed-out economy because nothing has a basis in reality.

The current disease crisis brings us face to face with essential reality. What do you need? Water, food, shelter, and varying degrees of social interaction and cooperation. The social aspects can be described as love and belonging, esteem, and self actualization, but those are outgrowths of your ability to contribute to and receive physiological needs. I won't say that you don't need them. Even an introvert likes to have a friend or two.

Water depends on a clean environment and control of corporate interests that would privatize the resource and profit from its distribution. Can you say Nestlé? Food depends on clean agriculture and a dispersed food production system that puts sources near end users as much as possible. Agricultural land has been devoured by suburban sprawl. Zoning and community association rules restrict or forbid gardening in some places. There are economic advantages to operations of a certain size. Any size garden requires time and attention that you have to take from other things. Some are more commercially viable than others.

Shelter depends on affordability. It also depends on finding a suitable site. Settlements used to depend on the availability of water and food. If something else drew a population, like a mineral mine in a desert, the money generated by the mine could pay for the import of necessities not provided by the local environment. The same is true of a manufacturing facility that might need a higher population than a region was able to support with its naturally occurring resources. The ability and willingness to transport food formed the basis for factory farming in the first place. So did the ability to redirect whole rivers to irrigate places with sunshine, but little water.

Once we got in the habit of moving things around to suit ourselves, it was easy to believe that we could get away with more and more of it, playing musical chairs until suddenly the music stopped, as it did last month. And here we are.

The bike business has always been international. In the 1970s road bike boom, European component companies dominated the spec, even on the flagship of American bike building, the Schwinn Paramount. The Paramount was everything that the rest of the Schwinn line was not: lightweight, butted tubing, lugged frames with French Nervex lugs, made-in-Italy Campagnolo dropouts,  and Campy componentry. The rest of the boom depended on either European or Japanese companies using European or Asian parts. There hadn't been a complete American bike industry since the end of the 19th Century, more or less. There still isn't. Nor does there have to be.

We're human beings living on a finite globe. The economy is not a battleground. The war analogy works nicely for capitalist emperors stirring up their troops, but you can't push problems around a globe without shoving them up your own ass sooner or later. The time is now. Lube up. The reckoning has arrived. You want the economy to improve in this country? Support improvements in the country where your jobs went. Make labor more expensive over there, so that over here doesn't look so bad anymore. Either that or go, hat in hand, to the corporate powers in this country and say that you're willing to work for shit wages for them, as the better alternative to having no wages at all. Admit that upward mobility was always a long shot, more of a myth than a reality. Keep voting that their taxes should be nonexistent. Keep agreeing that they have no obligation to the nation in return for the money that they hoard in tax shelters and dribble out in charitable gestures to causes that appeal to them. Let the air be brown again, and the rivers catch fire. Good times, man.

Improvements in manufacturing technology are making more and more people obsolete. Even the people in high tech careers find themselves dangling over the abyss, at risk of obsolescence and unemployment. There are too many of us already for the majority to count on achieving relaxing lifestyles. Priorities are going to change. The basics are going to start looking pretty good.

A sunny day in pandemic life

As we battened down the hatches for the coming crisis more than a month ago, the management recommended that I register with the employment security office. Things were looking grim. Research disclosed that I probably already qualified for partial compensation that would add up to an income exceeding my seasonal norm in a regular year. Given a government relief package -- already being discussed at that time -- I could be sitting pretty. Then the repair load surged. For now, my work load and income remain where they usually are at this time of year.

Never a big fan of unearned income, despite my unshakeable support for social safety nets and happy acceptance of the occasional windfall, I have never looked into gaming the system for my own gain. I figure that some people really need it, and it should be left for them. Are some of the recipients working a scam? Of course they are. Why should they be any different than the super wealthy who have been working a tremendously successful long con since 1980? Human nature is human nature, after all. This nature is destroying nature and will end our reign at the top of the evolutionary heap. All that can stop it is a sudden general enlightenment unprecedented in human history or prehistory. Sorry guys. It was nice knowing some of you.

All this would be true even if a plague wasn't stalking the land. We were talking about it up until the new disease took over the headlines. Under the cover of the pandemic news, the greedy destroyers redouble their efforts to throw off the last slim threads remaining of the chains of restraint lightly laid upon them by environmental initiatives dating back to the 1970s. Meanwhile, the multitude of amateur destroyers continue to play with their motorized toys and firearms, fully confident that they are doing no harm to anything worth their sympathy.

Yesterday, as I came out of Snow Road, after a trip to the transfer station, I had to stop and wait for a self-appointed parade of muddy Jeeps to run the stop sign en masse from the road opposite, to turn left onto Route 153 north. Not only did they defy the right of way of anyone else approaching the intersection from opposite them, they also pulled out into a somewhat blind curve on a state highway on which their frisky brethren like to speed. At least one of the Jeeps sported an enormous American flag. They're all about freedom, these guys. Freedom from traffic laws and good sense.

After morning chores and the cellist spending a few hours working from her computer to set up the coming week's online learning for her students, we headed out for her first short ride since she broke leg back in early March. It's actually been much longer than that since she rode, because she doesn't try to ride in the Baltimore area. She swims, mostly, and walks. Six weeks of greater idleness augmented the usual anxieties of an aging rider beginning a new season on the bike. We kept it flat, short, and free of hills.

The day was unusually pleasant. The cellist urged me to ride further after we delivered her back to the house. I had little enthusiasm, but agreed that I would benefit from more distance. I sketched a route that would not expose me to too much headwind or too many flags supporting the reelection of the current occupant of the Oval Office. I can only take so many reminders of human ugliness and impending destruction. Too many people equate freedom with destructive behavior and the tools of hostility. The flags are not numerous, but they're not rare, either.

As I got into the loop I had selected, I realized that it was not as long as I remembered. To the right, a dirt road beckoned. Wilkinson Swamp Road goes straight back through mostly wetlands and forest, eventually to cross the almost circular course of Wilkinson Brook and join Clough Road. From there I could go right and make my way to the road through the Pine River State Forest. The Cross Check is the ancestor of the gravel category. I'd ridden it on those roads quite a bit, although the last time through there I got a bad flat that destroyed a nearly new tire. I proceeded with trepidation. I'd never found an obvious cause for that flat tire, so I had to assume that it was an exceptionally sharp stone in the aggregate surfacing the road. I held my speed back on gravelly descents, and scanned the surface closely as I looked for the smoothest line.

Much of the Class VI section of the road, not maintained for year-round travel, had a better biking surface than the fluffed and graded parts. The surface was more like packed dirt. It was rutted and potholed, but without the sharp stones and loose surface.

I finally reached the scene of the tire disaster of 2015. Hard to believe that so much time had passed, but most of my riding is commuting, and I have many other options for training and fitness rides. I made it down to the brook without incident.

Back when mountain biking was more exploratory and less gymnastic, I would ride this road and the snow machine trails that crisscross the area, on long rambles. Sometimes the weekly ride group would come out here, when the evening light lasted long enough. Trails have been relocated or closed in places, but the general network has been maintained by the snowmobile clubs, so the intersections are in about the same places. The trails are gated to bar ATVs. ATVers being as they are, each gate has a well-worn trail bypassing it so that they can go in and do what they like. I could hear a couple of them ripping it up in there as I passed a junction on my way to Clough Road.

At Clough Road I laughed a little at how the locals have removed the street sign. It's just a dusty T junction in the woods with no hint for outlanders as to where you are or which way is out. I heard the ATVs coming up behind me. They went left as I went right. Good.

Gravel

Bike

Clough Road traverses a generally sandier area. The surface is looser, with lots of stones. Most of the route was basically flat or climbing slightly, so it was easy to control speed and watch for hazards. This whole area was crushed flat by the ice sheet that only departed a little over 12,000 years ago. It's all humps and hummocks and wetlands, ground down to sand and gravel with random boulders. Topsoil varies from forest loam to basically nothing. The route to Effingham Road goes through one dip to a stream before climbing to the intersection. I turned right to close the loop back to Effingham.

Once in Effingham, the road name changes to Hutchins Pond Road. When I moved here, Effingham's part was called Granite Road, and the Ossipee end was called Effingham Road, because, from the point of view of each community, that was where the road went. Now a different road in Effingham is called Granite Road, and it doesn't go anywhere near the section of Ossipee called Granite. Granite Road in Ossipee continues the line of Route 171 eastward into Granite. Granite itself is an undistinguished crossroads. There should be a massive obelisk of the eponymous rock, or a tower, or a fortress.

I wasn't going to Granite. I was heading home. Whatever the road was called, the going was pretty good, with only brief slowdowns where the surface looked like it might hide daggers.

Deep in the Pine River State Forest, I saw a few of the Jeep crowd stopped in and beside the road. I approached slowly. From scraps of conversation I gathered that they would be stopped for a little while. Someone was either stuck or had a mechanical problem. I threaded the traffic jam and rode on. The surface was good. I worked the ridges and ruts. Occasionally, other vehicles came toward me from the Effingham end, mostly trucks.

The road drops down to the pond, and then climbs back up to pass between a couple of farm houses and out to the pavement at the junction of Drake Road and Jones Road. Shortly after I reached the pavement and accelerated with the slight descent and a tailwind, I heard the Jeeps behind me. They passed courteously.

At home I found a posting on an Effingham Facebook page, warning that Fish and Game was patrolling for off-road violators who had been reported in multiple places during the day. Commenters blamed "people from Massachusetts." I had to laugh at that, considering how well defined the bypass trails were at every single gate in the Pine River State Forest. Defiance is endemic. Destruction is a way of life. It lives here as well as visits. Some of it lives depressingly close to my home. It has ruined the peace of pleasant evenings, because I can hear the sound of motors, as the polluting, ground-gouging chariots of the unconcerned churn around on pointless lap after lap. They don't have to be raspingly loud to cut through with a dull grind of needless fuel use and air pollution. It makes a nice companion to the gunfire and occasional explosions. We're not getting better. We're just getting ready to be worse. And they're fine with that. Some are looking forward to it.

Against considerable odds, I can still look forward to a new and better normal when we finally work through the course of the current disease outbreak. Unlikely as it may be, perhaps we really are working up enough of a majority to start giving more of a crap about how we treat things and each other, instead of just how we get to use them and profit from them in the short term. You can't judge by only what you see along your normal ruts. I hesitate to call it hope, but I guess it is. Hope is sucker bait, but it does sustain people through tough times.

The latest thing for Americans to fight about

The alarm went off like a chainsaw next to my ear, shredding through the reverie of my last dreams. It's day whatever the heck this is of the coronavirus conflict.

The bike shop continues to receive repair work faster than we can get through it. This is typical for spring, and much of the summer. Because it's felt like April for a month and a half already, it still seems early in the year. Indeed, in many previous years we would still be ramping up, even this late in the month, as winter might have hung on, or public interest might focus elsewhere. The number of people stuck at home looking at their possessions has reminded many of them that they own bikes. Forced leisure gives them the time to bring them down to us.

Protective procedures make the work cumbersome. Every trip to check in a repair or go to the basement where most of the bikes await service requires going through two locked doors, with some degree of decontamination outgoing and incoming. The same is true of any outdoor test riding. Meanwhile, we share a parking lot with businesses that attract people who are conspicuously less concerned about such precautions. Local case numbers appear to support their point of view. How much of this is the result of the virus's long incubation period? How much is the result of a lack of comprehensive testing? Or are there really very few infected people, and the disease is hardly spreading around here?

Dealing with an invisible foe, we each have to decide for ourselves how strongly to react. After work yesterday, I went up the street to a nearby grocery store. I wore a mask. A handful of other people did as well, but the majority did not. There were few people in the store. None of the staff wore masks. The checkout girl and the stock boy radiated contempt, whether they realized it or not. I concluded my business as quickly as possible and walked back to my car on the nearly deserted sidewalks.

All over the country, people are rebelling against the restrictions of social distancing. In Michigan it led to armed idiots demonstrating outside the capitol building. Protests have also taken place in North Carolina, Ohio, and elsewhere.

Protests like these are largely the result of Americans living pampered lives. Poverty is relative. Relative poverty is still a disadvantage in a prosperous country. Americans are accustomed to levels of comfort and freedom of expression that are far above the norm in countries truly ravaged by shortage or constrained by authoritarianism. The American Dream is based on self indulgence and unfettered imagination. Not everyone has much of an imagination, but whatever they do have is free to roam. We get to see every day how many of them only roam as far as the gun shop and a gathering with irritable friends for some live action role playing. But that's only part of the story of generations of cultivated attention deficit disorder. Since the end of World War II, white Americans have been asked less and less to put up with anything for too long.

Some things have dragged on. The war in Afghanistan has been going on longer than any conflict in our history. But it's far away and involves relatively few Americans in body bags. The War on Terror has faded to a system of inconveniences now permanently attached to air travel, and a radicalized Immigration, Customs and Border Protection force, as well as domestic surveillance measures that go on in the background subtly and continuously. The majority of people never have to notice them directly. We were encouraged at the time to consume at our normal rate to prove that the terrorists had not defeated us.

After 9-11, the period of national unity lasted about 30 hours before the responses diverged into an argument about what to do next. Even the 30 hours was an illusion. The fractures were as immediate as the structural failure in the twin towers, though less spectacular. We were just too stunned in the immediate moment to form our thoughts into plans.

The current crisis is far more difficult for people to comprehend. When you've decided that your enemies are brown people of a certain religion, rightly or wrongly you can at least see them without a microscope. Even though some have highlighted the Chinese aspect of COVID-19, beating up Asians  does even less to fight the problem than persecuting every Muslim does to reduce the incidence of that particular type of fundamentalist terrorism.

A right-wing friend of mine used to splutter with indignation when Black Lives Matter protesters would block a highway.

"What if an ambulance needs to get through? What if there's a fire somewhere?" he grumbled.

Yesterday, protesters you could say "identify as conservative" took part in demonstrations designed to stop traffic in Lansing, Michigan.

When this is over, it will be another event over which we can divide ourselves, just like civil rights, women's rights, the Vietnam War, and the environment. We're still arguing about the American War of Independence and the Civil War. Nazi sympathizers didn't want us to join the Allies in World War II. When the majority prevails it ushers in a period of some uniformity of behavior, but minority opinion doesn't miraculously evaporate. "What did you do during COVID-19?" will become another qualifying question. Did you overreact? Did you blow it off? Was your point of view vindicated or discredited? Will we be sure?

The pro-death faction divides roughly into the strain that believes most people will get mildly ill or not feel sick at all, and the one that believes that serious illness and death are just part of life that we should all embrace for the greater good of our healthy herd and our glorious economy. To the survivors go the spoils! It's the perfect mass casualty scenario, because we don't really have to blame anyone. It was the disease, man. What could anyone have done? We're all better off now. Ya gotta die of something! Whatever happens, be assured that they will feel no shame in the outcome. And a great many of them will survive.

The people who want to force us back together are akin to suicide bombers. They may not have the certainty of their own death that the wearer of a bomb vest or the pilot of a vehicle filled with explosives would have, but they are nonetheless forcing their belief system onto unwilling participants. Some people will die as a result. There are many ways in which responsibility can drift like a bad fart on a calm day, never settling on anyone in particular, so we will never get the closure of saying for certain who dealt what. We fall back onto belief systems, each of us in our own imagined world, to make what peace we can with any of it.