Perhaps for the first time ever...

 On the ride home from Gilford yesterday, after dropping the car to get its spring service from the most skillful and trustworthy mechanic, I had a remarkable experience.

On the drive over, I had passed through a moderately long construction zone on Route 11 coming out of Alton Bay. Traffic was alternating through one lane while workers replaced sections of guard rail along the other one. I scanned the area to plan my strategy for the return trip when I would be on the bike, because cyclists usually get treated like we don't exist in situations like that. I stop for the traffic controller when everyone else is directed to. When we are released, if I get dropped by the motorists the traffic controller at the other end of the zone will invariably release his prisoners to come charging at me like the armored cavalry.

A short zone isn't too bad. I can usually sprint up to speed and catch a draft. A long zone is just too much unless I get really lucky and can draft a big truck. If I don't get the big truck I get the big fuck. I'm instantly transformed into the imbecile riding against traffic. So I eyeballed this zone to assess the shoulder width and spot places in which to pull off and hover until the tide turned in my favor again.

More than an hour had passed by the time I came back through on the bike. When I reached the traffic controller to enter the zone, he was rummaging in the back of his car. The traffic control sign was just leaning up against his vehicle. The big work zone signs were lying down. Maybe they had knocked off for lunch, or for the day. Maybe that bevy of cars and trucks I'd seen him release a hundred yards ahead of me was the last one. There were still cones down the center line, but no one was working on the other side of the road.

Despite my growing fatigue, I was cooking along pretty good through there. It's always a weirdly fast stretch. Around a slight curve I was able to see the other end of the zone. The traffic controller there had a line of stopped cars. I expected to see him flip the sign and let slip the multitude upon me. I was still cooking along, mind you. Get as far as you can while the getting is good.

Still nothing at that end. I felt twinges of embarrassment and a degree of fear at the resentment that must have been brewing in many of those drivers. I pushed the pace a bit. Technically, traffic control was doing exactly the right thing, but I'm still just a sweaty idiot who insists on going more slowly than everyone else. It's merely an annoyance until something like this happens, and woke traffic control people push their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bullshit on hardworking motorists forced to accommodate this pencil-necked mental defective wobbling along on a child's toy.

Who the fuck do I think I am?!

 As I cleared the end of the zone itself I heard the radio chat between the controllers, acknowledging that I was safely through. I kept up my pace and looked straight ahead until I had passed the last of the prisoners of traffic control. The sooner they could forget me, the better.

Sure, out of the couple of dozen cars stuck in line, someone might have been a rider, and approved. Others might be kindly disposed, or at least neutral. I just didn't want to risk making eye contact with any of the ones who were extra pissed off to have to wait for a bicyclist.

I would always prefer to flow smoothly, noticeable enough to avoid collision, but not on stage long enough to attract hecklers. Road biking is show biz. Road biking is a political statement. Road biking is an act of rebellion against social norms. Like it or not, that's what accompanies your commute to work or school, your trips to the grocery store, your every appearance in the immersive theater of traveling exposed.

Mountain bikers are wussies. Ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaa!

The traffic controllers did what they should always do for a legitimate road user who happens to take longer than the motorized majority to clear the created hazard of a work zone. I was just astonished that they actually did it. Does it do more harm than good? Sometimes -- far too often, really -- a substantial move to undo a prejudice makes initial noticeable progress, but that progress only inspires a resurgent prejudice as the oblivious majority starts to have to deal with the realignment on a widespread basis. A step in the right direction always seems to attract a kick in the kneecaps and a forearm to the face in response.

Will social progress always be the tragic, violent cycle of revolution and counter revolution? I hate how both sides frame it as a fight. I understand the need to fire up sentiment in support of a point of view, but it creates a culture of constant conflict in which battles are won and lost, when in truth a peaceful and prosperous society requires more little acts of cooperation than grand and bloody clashes with a winner and a loser. Getting along takes work. It doesn't have to be grinding, exhausting work, either. It's just the maintenance of an adaptable series of routines that ease the passage of millions of humans for a few million more years. But the fighters may be right in their ultimately grim and hopeless assessment that it really is only a series of bloody clashes with one side or the other ascendant and the bodies piled high all around. Which way do you prefer?

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.

What Price Respect?

Google fed me a link to this opinion piece in Cycling Industry News, titled, "It's time for the bike industry to have some self respect." In it, James Stanfill president of the Professional Bicycle Mechanics Association, lays out an excruciatingly detailed case in favor of continuing training and qualification standards.

Stanfill makes some great points about what makes bike shop work a temporary phase for workers who pass through the industry on their way to something that actually pays decently. However, in his call for retailers to reallocate their budgets to cover the frequent training and retraining needed to keep up with modern technology's rapid pace of obsolescence he assumes that a shop has the money to reallocate. He also assumes that consumers will be willing to pay the higher prices that go along with a general rise in overhead. Bike shops don't have CEOs making billions who can give up their bloated compensation to redistribute the wealth to the workers. The industry as a whole will have to figure out how to get customers to respect them, before we can afford to adorn ourselves with our own new self respect.

Key to that "self respect" is Stanfill's assertion that shops need to be able to measure and present their qualifications to assure entities like insurance companies that they are meeting standards of safety and competence when providing highly complex equipment to the public. He also calls on mechanics to seek professional training and certification where available to make themselves more desirable to this new breed of self-respecting shop. Be ready to fork out on your own for a recognized training course because you take that much pride in being a bike mechanic. What was once a pretty good gig for someone with a modicum of mechanical aptitude is attempting to become a career path akin to auto or aircraft mechanics.

In capitalism, if you don't have plenty of money you are a failure and deserve to die. But in the real world, many areas with a small population have been served by small shops that were able to subsist for decades on a pretty slim margin with incremental investments in tools, and an experiential approach to learning about new things.

For a century, bike shops came in all sizes. Frequently they were small places, sometimes ill-lit, and merchandized by people more attuned to wrenches and grease than to point of sale marketing. Experienced mechanics could train new mechanics at the work stand. What mattered was the quality of the merchandise and the mechanical work, not whether they had a stunning atrium, or row on row of fashionable clothing. If you rode a bike a lot, you appreciated the rough practicality of basic black wool shorts.

All things evolve. Changes can bring improvements as well as unhelpful complexities. They are driven by the desires of existing enthusiasts, but also by public interest. When bikes were simple and people were content with it, a rise or fall in demand only meant changing the rate of production. Things would go obsolete as better things replaced them, but within a narrow range of functions. Weird derailleur systems gave way to the parallelogram, and then to the slant parallelogram. Caliper, cantilever, and drum brakes coexisted using the same basic leverage ratio. Every system of a bike was closely enough related to its forebears that you could figure out a lot based on what you already knew.  You could get deeper into it and become an inventive machinist if you wanted to, but you didn't have to.

Mountain biking pushed a lot of improvements in durability and function as bikes were subjected to consistently rough use. Prior to that bikes had received plenty of mistreatment and neglect, but they weren't advertised for the purpose, the way mountain bikes were. The bike industry had to back its claims with machinery that could withstand the kind of boisterousness that the pioneers of clunking had established as the standard. On the road or trail, user groups appeared to have a contentious relationship. In research and development, designers were borrowing from both categories to improve each of them. Versatile riders were doing both on- and off-road riding to improve their abilities.

All analyses lead back to the stresses placed on retailers and repair facilities by relentlessly mutating technology and category specialization. So I won't flog that again. I merely note that your chances of finding a place that can take care of your particular bike needs get slimmer and slimmer in the face of economic reality. Bike shops will become dependent on climate and population density to maintain a large enough size to remain viable in all categories, including smokeless mopeds. In addition, consumer costs will rise to reflect the greater expense the retailer faces. Training and higher wages cost money. That money comes entirely from consumer spending. When consumers can no longer afford to spend in sufficient volume, they will receive less of something in return, whether it's product selection, service quality, service speed, or the convenience of having any kind of shop within 20 miles.

For the moment, such vast numbers of archaic bikes remain in use that a small shop can eke out a living from the customers who need work on those. As they inevitably dwindle away, the next wave of well-used crap that replaces them will have increasingly esoteric needs, more difficult to meet.

Bike Commuting Study Confirms the Obvious

A study in the UK of injury rates for different commuting modes revealed that bike commuters run a higher risk of injuries requiring hospitalization, compared to driving and walking. This information popped up in my Google News feed this morning. I couldn't resist checking it out.

When I was a kid, every kid tried to learn to ride a bike, and virtually all of them succeeded. Whether they liked it much, or kept it up, learning to ride a two-wheeler was a rite, just like losing your baby teeth, which it occasionally contributed to. Along with it came skinned knees, road-rashed elbows, and occasional broken bones. Abrasions were far more common than fractures, concussions, or internal injuries. And that's before anyone knew what a bike helmet was.

The first time I went to the ER with bike-related injuries, I was about eight years old. I burned in hard on a steep descent in Newport, RI. I was knocked unconscious and spent the following week or ten days as The Amazing Human Scab, from all of the scuff marks, but I was recuperating at home.  I've been in the ER twice more from bike crashes, once in 1982, and again in 1987.  Oh, and there was that one time in the 1990s when I stuffed it mountain biking and broke my wrist. Only the crash in 1987 involved anyone in a car. None of them required an overnight or extended stay.

Balancing on two wheels can be precarious. The whole concept seems ridiculous: it's half of a vehicle. But it works. Once you can do it, it can be addictive. You get more comfortable at it, but you are still very vulnerable. In addition to the big crashes, any rider experiences plenty of other incidents. You're mounted on something that does not stand up by itself. Gravity never quits. The math is easy.

The study report did go on to state that the overall health benefits of bike commuting are vast. The consensus is still that infrastructure, education, and legal policies that encourage cycling are of far more benefit than simply writing it off as too dangerous.

The temptations of Marpril

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To see ourselves as others see us

Hard to believe that anyone in the technical mountain biking community bothers to read any of my rants, but apparently some do. Hey there.

Things written or said for rhetorical effect will focus on specific aspects that support the central thesis. It’s the basis for editorials, legal arguments, and marketing. The benefits of a drug are repeated loudly and clearly in the commercial, while the side effects are recited in a hasty blurb in a low tone.

When I say things that are true, bluntly summing up actual events, it might compose a picture that looked different from someone else’s angle. This is the unsettling effect of seeing ourselves as others see us. That doesn’t mean that everyone sees you that way, only that the dots can connect to create that image. But I went too far, and I apologize.

As an unsociable person, I lack the instinctive understanding of the needs and desires of sociable people. In every activity to which I was exposed growing up, advancement in the activity itself was primary. The social aspects were secondary. It was an unrealistic point of view. For a few hard chargers, achievement is a primary goal and benefit. But among normal people, the social side is much more crucial. It explains a lot about where I’ve landed, and the rough and desolate landscape in which my life will end.

In the case of off-road biking in any season, I’m not alone in my laments but I’m certainly in the minority. Around here I’m definitely alone in criticizing the avalanche of expensive and complicated equipment burying small shops and cutting the tech support cord for riders trying to get a long service life out of their stuff. I don’t see that it generates much public support or sympathetic interest for cycling in general. But I suppose that nothing can do that. We might as well each ride in our chosen style and let the world burn if it's going to.

As stated in the post before this one, cycling is being gentrified. Its greater value as a tool of social evolution is falling victim to its short-term attractiveness to an industry bent on exploiting it as a consumerist bait station. The technofascist element has its hooks into every category. It has the most to work with off-road, followed by high end road and its offspring, “gravel biking.” But the collateral damage shows up in the reprehensible quality of middle and low end componentry as seen on a lot of path bikes, hybrids, and entry level mountain bikes from companies that should be ashamed to have their logo on something like that. Like an asteroid on a converging trajectory, nothing can stop it. Actually, more like the deferred consequences of environmental destruction, it would take too many people to understand and agree all at once. We would prefer an asteroid, that we could maybe blow up with one quick nuke and go back to enjoying ourselves.

Bike Snob: just another naive nerd

Someone posted a link to this Bike Snob article from November 2018, about how we shouldn't promote bikes as good for the environment.

First of all, no one who should get his message is thinking about riding bikes in November. Dedicated riders, whether they call themselves cyclists or loathe to be called cyclists, are probably still riding in the late fall, but the vast majority of people think of biking as strictly a warm, sunny weather activity.

Also unhelpfully, BS mentions "annoying people in cars" as a benefit of cycling, when we will only grow our numbers by enticing people out of those cars, not just pissing them off. Pissing them off perpetuates the climate of conflict. People on bikes will never win a direct conflict with motorists. If motorists really wanted to eradicate us, they could do it in less than a day by running over us on sight.  "See a cyclist, kill a cyclist," could be their slogan. Any rider not killed in the initial assault would be a fool to go out there again except on a tandem with a tail gunner armed with a machine gun. Even then, it would be a short, glorious defeat. So just shut up about how it's a benefit to annoy the motoring public.

Bike Snob goes on to state the other advantages of bike riding: better health, better fitness, more physical energy, fantastic economic benefits, reduced traffic, easier parking. He's young. Riders like me have been trying to set that example for decades, with little success. Writing about it in Outside Magazine is worth almost nothing in creating real public awareness. I was writing about it in newspaper columns, following on the heels of promoters like John Forester et al., before I had even heard of them.

 A couple of years ago, a friend sent me a book called The Man Who Loved Bicycles, by Daniel Behrman, published in 1973, which proves how long we have been losing this particular losing battle.

Bike Snob is not wrong in his assertions, any more than Behrman was, or I am, or any of the thousands of other unsung advocates have been. We keep trying to set the example and we keep getting ignored. Human history is one long sad tale of the majority rejecting simple things that would make life more pleasant for everyone. Instead, our species chooses things that make life much more comfortable for a ruthless minority, and then aspires to join that club. We also choose labor saving devices even if we'd be better served to keep a little labor in some areas and save more in others.

The fact that I'm just seeing this now, ten months after its publication, because someone else just saw it, similarly belatedly, shows you how the internet grants you instant global access, but that the global population still has to find your work, read it, and bother to share it around. It's a little faster than letting a newspaper loose in a hurricane, but about as haphazard. I'm a poor example, because I'm the furthest thing from an information junkie. The information junkies need to get on some meth and speed up their dissemination if they want to get the word around fast enough and far enough to do any good.

Is the teachable moment at last arriving? Bike nerds have been thinking so since the 1970s. We haven't been right yet. But evolution grinds on. The distress in the United States, bellwether of the consumerist world, may finally rise to the bursting point and drive a significant percentage of the population to look at fundamental lifestyle changes. Odds are against it, if history is any guide, but one can hope.

All bikes are road bikes

The invention of the wheel led to the invention of the road. The evolution of the wheel led to the bicycle. The evolution of the bicycle hastened the evolution of the road. The invention of the mountain bike led to the term "off-road bicycle." But that term is incorrect. Except for a few natural surfaces, any route passable on wheels has been constructed. Sometimes the engineering and effort are obvious. Other times the enhancements are few and subtle.

Even on the wide open plains of the American west, traversed by wagon trains of settlers, ruts indicated the common path. The early routes may have been called trails more often than roads, but they served the general purpose. Anything that rolled was well advised to stick to the road most traveled.

Every category of modern cycling has its intended road. Some of them may be called paths or trails, but they were all built. Even a skilled technical mountain biker riding a rocky hiking trail is following a line created and enhanced for human travel. Any natural feature that an adventurous cyclist might attempt, like a dry -- or not so dry -- stream bed is imitating the qualities of a roadway sufficient to the passage of the vehicle using it. Or so you hope as you launch down it. Most of the time, riders use constructed facilities.

With construction and maintenance comes cost. Public roads are financed through taxation. Every adult pays something into the collective coffers, regardless of what motorists might think about deadbeat cyclists who clot things up and pay nothing. The costs are hidden in prices we routinely pay, and folded into our total tax burden. This also includes some public cycling infrastructure, as well as unpaved trails in parks and other public lands. Networks not funded publicly have to charge admission or rely on donations, unless they're completely clandestine operations on land where the builders and users hope they will go unnoticed or at least be tolerated.

None of these concepts are new. I was just reminded of them a few days ago when one of the fat bikers from last winter's trail poaching incident greeted me in the hardware store. We said nothing about controversial matters. It just pulled my mind back to the dispute, and the fundamental principle that lies beneath it.

Bike riders always have to defend their access to ridable surfaces. A couple of times during my years in Maryland, some legislator or other would introduce a bill so restrictive that it would have made cycling on the roads nearly impossible. Only the concerted legal efforts of organized cycling clubs managed to beat back those threats. There may have been more since I left. Getting bikes out of the way is a recurring theme in countries dominated by the automobile. When mountain biking surged in popularity, resistance to them surged proportionately. There's even resistance to building recreation paths and converting rail lines to trail corridors, when local land owners fear that these roads for the unmotorized will attract riffraff.

When bike riding is outlawed, only outlaws will ride bikes. But unlike the outlaw with a gun, the rider can't carry concealed and only whip it out as a deadly surprise. When you're riding a bike, you're right out there, balancing on two wheels. Your odds of passing unseen vary depending on the size and popularity of the road you are using. A trail might see so little use that you could come and go with no one to know. The fat bike poachers outed themselves by posting vain selfies on social media. The weather had kept the legitimate users off of the ski trails that day. A skier might have happened by --  the snow conditions were fine -- but it was a stormy day in late winter, both factors that reduce attendance. On a nicer day, there you'd be. And at any time on a trail or road, some other user may come along. Enough people had to be interested in the first place for a road to get built. Then a rider has to consider whether their use is permitted at all, and what their welcome might be like.

The fatter the tire, the less you need a refined surface for it, but any wheel has limits. Most of the time you do need some sort of road. We're all road bikers in some form.

Motorists are like diarrhea

For a cyclist, motorists are like diarrhea: You can only hold them back for so long. You'd prefer not to have them at all. When you do have them, you'd like to get them out of your system as quickly as possible. You try to hurry to get to a more convenient place to eliminate them. Sometimes you don't make it.

The roads and streets are just a big, irritable bowel. We keep cramping each other's style.

Yesterday, I was a bit of a shit. I think in a past life I was a car-chasing dog. I'm addicted to drafting large vehicles. On the last couple of miles of my commute, I heard a tractor-trailer rig behind me on a narrow, bendy section. I stayed to the right to encourage him to go around, but he had no good opportunity, and was too conscientious to take a bad one. I dropped into a side street, hard right, left, onto a converging straightaway that rejoins the main road at a yield sign. That let the truck get by. It was a big heavy equipment flatbed, empty, doing about 30 mph. At a comfortable distance behind it was a string of passenger vehicles. I launched for that big gap, but I'm too tired and too old. I didn't get to top speed in top gear quickly enough to get into the pocket. The long, low, empty trailer didn't pull enough air to pick me up easily. I managed to get to about 27 mph when I maxed out. Horns broke out behind me.

On a normal day, I ride a line just outside the storm drains, at a speed comparable to what I was doing after the unsuccessful chase. Drunk with adrenaline and incipient tachycardia, I resented the horny driver behind me, and signaled my displeasure with a low, dismissive finger. This elicited a further burst of honking. I made a slightly more graphic gestured suggestion involving my buttocks. The honker passed, at a safe and legal distance, but the next vehicle administered a punishment pass. I shut the gate behind that one, holding back the rest of the motorists for a few more yards until I could dive onto the path.

Sometimes, when a motorist makes a big time about how I'm slowing them down and blows by me, I get to pull out onto Main Street in front of them, because their fellow motorists en masse have slowed them down much more. Not this time. I didn't care either way. I was just hammering to work, same as any morning. Only after I got to the shop and got my heart rate down did I reflect on my own contribution to the tension. I should have been the grownup, says the guy in short pants, riding a bike.

The descent into sin is often a simple thing, a single act that is the trapdoor. In this case, it was running the yield sign like a Boston driver when I didn't have the horsepower to pull it off. I plead the temporary insanity of my drafting addiction, aggravated by the persistent memory of when I could rely on my sprint. As recently as a couple of days earlier, I had managed to slingshot a box truck on the same stretch and tuck right in behind it for a sweet pull to my next exit. But that hadn't involved an intersection violation. To be fair to the honkers, I really had strained their congeniality and relied on their mercy.

The only way to get past a mistake is to take responsibility for it. Learn as much as you can. Look at all of its facets, even when they reflect you clownishly. The fact that it was an anonymous encounter with strangers means that I will never have a chance to acknowledge that they had a point. This makes it all the more important to ride in ways that don't take the low road. If I'd blasted out of that side street into the draft and been whisked away at an effortless 30-plus, they could all admire my shiny lycra ass, because I wouldn't be taking up any more room than they were already leaving behind that big rig. But because I blew the sprint I was now a double failure.

You have to take risks in life. But make sure they're worth it. Often, people interpret this to mean deadly consequences, but more often all manner of less dire consequences are at stake. In this case, it's a black mark on cyclists that one aging hammerhead failed to pull off his rude and dangerous maneuver in morning rush hour. I looked like a rude asshole and affirmed the image of rude assholes on bikes. I'll defend my territory vigorously out there. But now I've been reminded that the line is easy to cross in the intoxication of speed.

Not many people could do my job. But who would want to?

On the Facebook page of a sort-of-young mountain bike rider, he made reference to the three whole weeks he spent working for a bike shop. He dismissed most of the bikes he had to work on as “shit.” It was a classic example of the arrogance of a category-specific rider who ranks the whole world based on his personal choices in technology and obsession.

The arrogant cyclist in any category is a common enough character to have become the stereotype of all bike riders as viewed by our hostile audience. Almost any reviews of a bike shop will mention one or more examples of dismissive conceit. And wherever non riders encounter riders, someone’s feathers will be ruffled. Disregarding the small percentage of hardcore non cyclists who will always find a reason to hate, we cyclists have to admit that a sizable percentage of us do ride in stupid and offensive ways. It is certainly not the majority, but it’s hardly rare. Riders who are impressed with themselves will expect everyone else to be equally impressed.

I love pulling off a good maneuver just as much as anyone. And when I ride the multi-use path I try to maintain my flow and give the pedestrians only as much as I have to for safety and basic courtesy. Based on the expressions on most of them, it’s never enough.

As for shit bikes, most people have the bike they feel they can afford. In 1980 I tried to work the sales floor at the shop where I worked at the time, to see if I could get more people to buy better bikes. Once in a while, it worked. But most people’s eyes would  glaze when I tried to get them to buy up from nutted axles, steel rims, and vinyl vasectomy seats. That was when we sold mostly just ten-speeds and three-speeds for adults, and coaster brakes and BMX bikes for kids. When I reentered the bike business in 1989, I had more success convincing customers to aim a little higher. Even during the recession of 1988-‘92, people seemed to be able to scrape up the money for a mountain bike. But that boom is long gone, along with solidly built bikes that cost $600.

Some shops are lucky enough to be able to specialize in one or two categories they particularly like. To do that, you either need a source of independent wealth, or a strong customer base in your favorite market segment. In a rural town, you need to attract a lot of people from outside the area to finance your dream shop. Otherwise, you will have to make your living by servicing the bikes you call shit.

Youth makes a mechanic arrogant in two ways. On a basic level, young adults are automatically susceptible to arrogance as a matter of simple biology. It’s the time of life when animals try to establish breeding territory and compete for mates. Humans are complex creatures. We filter our simple urges through our technology and experience to form our self image and world view. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of bike shop snots are males between age 20 and 40.

Anyone stupid or trapped enough to have stayed in the bike business for more than two decades has probably had all the arrogance crushed out of them. We can despise WalMart bikes because they are truly a ripoff and a danger to the people who get stuck with them. But there’s a whole world of bikes that would bore and annoy a young firebrand or a bike snob, that still have value and deserve a measure of consideration.

My opinions on bikes are shaped more by economics than by the cutting edge sophistication of their technology. I definitely prefer working on some things more than others. The tweaky new stuff is stupidly expensive and kind of a pain in the ass. Really cheap stuff presents its own challenge. Working on something twenty years old can be a relief. The people who taught me about bikes instilled a respect for the craft. It's a point of self respect to be able to work on whatever anyone throws at you, and to know something of the history and evolution of our machines.

Young riders and mechanics are handicapped by what they’ve never seen. The world begins for them at the point where they began to pay attention. Every generation goes through the same thing. A set of assumptions is provided. Only a minority will look beyond that. Even then, their analysis has to work with their grasp of basic principles. The basics for a bike nerd starting out in the mid 1970s are all cup and cone bearings and things that secure with lock nuts. Someone joining up in the 21st Century may have had some cheap equipment with cup and cone hubs and a fake sealed bottom bracket, but they surely aspire to something with all cartridge bearings, hydraulics, and electronics. Road, mountain, or other, sophistication afflicts all categories. A fashionable conceit can afflict each of them as well.

Modern riders are resigned to the idea that the components they buy and the tools they buy to work on them are all going on the junk pile in a couple of years, to be replaced by the compete set of new stuff they buy, for as long as they can afford to buy. Addicts spend money on their habit. Dealers keep feeding them stronger and stronger doses. If your riding style involves frequent crashes on rough surfaces, nothing will last long anyway. Some burn hot and short. Some endure.

Legal rights versus legal standing

As a slick, heavy, late winter snowfall accumulated on the roadway, I watched three riders on fat bikes slithering unsteadily down Mill Street with a motorist trapped behind them. I contemplated once again the difference between official rights and the treatment someone gets for exerting those rights.

Rights only seem to be won at a blood price. Women were beaten by men, and some died, as they protested over many years to get the right to vote. Black people have endured centuries of oppression and discrimination, massacre and murder. They can tell you how their rights are respected in actuality even now, as opposed to what is written. That’s not even addressing the way some things need to be rewritten even further to secure liberty and justice for all. Native rights everywhere get crushed beneath the advancing front of militarized industrialism. Labor confronted management for a fairer division of the proceeds of that industrial system, but their gains are being erased even as the system continues to gouge the illusion of profit out of the dying planet.

Because the roads are a shared space, every user has to consider the genuine rights and needs of the other users. A cyclist almost always appears to be on a trivial errand. A motorist will ask, "does this person need to be riding here, making me wait and maneuver around them?" By law, the roads are the common herd paths we have all agreed to use to get from place to place by whatever means we have. Horses are still allowed on most of them. You're within your rights -- but out of your mind -- to walk along most of them. Both equestrians and pedestrians will always get more sympathy than a bicyclist, because we have a sentimental attachment to horses in our history, and pedestrians seem like fellow drivers who are just down on their luck. A bicyclist has made a conscious choice to get this wheeled thing with which to wobble half in and half out of the legitimate territory of big metal boxes that go effortlessly quickly at the push of one pedal.

Many of us have had the experience of reporting a motorist to the police when we had only a full description of the vehicle including license number. If you can't identify the driver, you have no case. And, as a bicyclist, your problem seldom merits any expenditure of resources by police to help you nail down that identification. The registered owner simply uses the standard excuse that someone else was using the vehicle that day and the whole thing goes away. Even in cases where a cyclist was killed and the driver was known, penalties are disproportionately light, because bicycling is viewed as a voluntary act known to increase the rider's vulnerability to what would be a minor collision between the armored vehicles customarily used for personal transportation in the modern world.

When a police officer pulls you over in your car, what do they ask for first? Your license and registration. That is the moment at which they nail down who is driving what at the time of infraction. They've got facial ID and the perp in the driver's seat. That is the standard, and it's a good one when you consider how unpleasant it would be to live in a country where you could be thrown in the slammer on nothing more than an accusation. While that is unfortunately common in racially biased enforcement, and hardly unknown even among the privileged, it is not the official standard. It gets complicated when persons of interest are brought in for questioning and actual suspects are detained, but that's beyond the street level experience of a rider simply trying to proceed unmolested in the perfectly legal act of using the public roadway.

I thought that the fat bikers were being foolish and selfish, but I did not get to see whether they were just taking a few yards to pull off safely in the slithery conditions. It wasn't as bad as the morning many years ago when I saw one of the athletic firebrands in Jackson, NH, riding his cyclocross bike down Route 16 in about six inches of new snow, with a gigantic state plow truck stuck behind him. Rights are one thing. Smarts are another. Because we may be asked to pay a blood price for our rights at any time, pick your battles. I hardly expected the plow truck to crush the macho man on the 'cross bike, but I'm pretty sure the penalties would have been slim to nonexistent if he had. Similarly, had one of the fat bikers fallen in front of the car behind them, I doubt if the driver would have been cited for following too closely when he was unable to stop before sliding over the fallen rider. Just bad luck. Sorry about that. You shouldn't have been out there on a bike when you didn't need to be. And who in this great land of ours ever really needs to be on a bike? You hardly even see the DWI crowd riding bikes anymore. At least I don't see too many of them around here.

In the mostly urban areas where a lot of people live without cars, and a lot of them use bikes for transportation, the culture of acceptance builds alongside a corresponding seething cauldron of hatred from committed motorists subjected to large numbers of bicycles in the traffic mix. The cyclists can make a better case that what they are doing is necessary, but they are still branded as slackers and wastrels who should get better jobs and buy a car like a normal person. Rather than respect the contributions of workers on the lower end of the pay scale, performing necessary functions that most of us would prefer to avoid, our wealth-obsessed society scorns them and treats them as disposable interchangeable parts. Lose one dirtbag, grab another one from the sidelines to fill the spot. A lot of bike commuters are involuntary, on really crappy bikes, with no awareness of cycling culture and tradition. They're not out for the health benefits and to save disposable income. They're stuck with it, and are trying to make the most of income that falls far short of any surplus. However, they are reaping some exercise benefits in spite of themselves, and the economic benefits are no less real. With a focus on promoting the lifestyle and improving everyone's experience of it, every bike commuter and transportation cyclist would benefit.

Hope as I might, that is highly unlikely to happen. In spite of the fact that my haphazard pursuit of creative dreams has left me working for less than the proposed minimum wage of $15 an hour, and facing a destitute old age, the fact that I am a white male from a middle class background automatically condemns my ideas as elitist, tone deaf, and contemptibly out of touch with reality. I have been excoriated before. Until I shut up and go away, I will be again. It's sort of like riding your bike. You know that someone is going to yell, honk, swerve, or throw something. Your only defense is surrender. And that's not really a defense.

Whose freedom takes precedence?

In rural areas there are no unimportant roads. Some of them may fall into disuse and neglect, but the ones that actually connect are important arteries, regardless of their size. My commute to work uses one of these arteries, Elm Street. In Ossipee it even has a double yellow centerline. No shoulders, and narrow lanes, but a double yellow centerline. The road I live on, without painted lines or a shoulder, is a virtual expressway for the locals. Their speed and aggression often reflect this.

This morning, driving back from taking the cat to the vet, I met a logging truck with multiple wheels on my side of the double yellow line on Elm Street. It was one of a small group of vehicles using the road the way normal people do.

The logging truck driver was taking his half of the road out of the middle. Forget cyclists, a vehicle that size can take out much bigger prey. Not that a truck driver wants to waste time having an accident, but intimidation clears the way for higher speeds. Higher speed means shorter time in transit.

We had an inch of snow yesterday. It's damp and raw today, under a gray sky. At one point in my life I would have gone out to train in this. It was years ago, when the population was lower and the political climate was less harsh. I thought I had nothing better to do than keep myself in top physical condition. Meanwhile, normal people were working themselves sick, as we are told to do. Who wants to be the lone lemming on the cliff top, looking sadly down at the others? Sure, you're alive and healthy, but you're an outcast. People hate you for refusing to join their foolishness, whether it's a lifestyle or a war. And they talk about freedom.

There's strength in numbers. To get the best use out of those numbers, they have to be organized. Military forces are a good example. A thousand angry people might make a mob, but a thousand trained soldiers is a battalion. The mob engages in free expression and unrestrained action. The battalion answers to a chain of command and moves with discipline and purpose. There is no free expression and no unrestrained action. Organization of all group endeavors falls on a continuum from the amorphous mob to the highly disciplined military formation. At each higher level, the individuals in the group give up more and more pure liberty for the benefits of participation.

Traffic is not a fully organized activity. The shape of infrastructure and the laws and customs of its use make up the rules of engagement. It is both a cooperative and a competitive activity. The personalities of individual road users determine the balance.

As the truck came at me, with its unofficial escort of smaller vehicles -- all larger than a bicycle -- I imagined a cyclist in the mix. Every driver would have had to navigate around the rider. The cyclist, with every legal right to be out there, would have curtailed the freedom of the motorists to travel freely in ways that motorists can handle, for the most part. I suppose cyclists can handle them, too. Any vehicle that passes cleanly, no matter how close, was not a problem, right? That which did not kill you did not kill you. The shot of adrenaline might even improve your average speed for the day.

We complain about what might happen. I do it myself, and agree with the principle that drivers shouldn't squeeze cyclists for fear of hitting them. But from an impartial viewpoint the goal is to move users through the system at the best speed. That is often not the highest speed, but generally maintains the flow. As long as the majority is motorized, the needs of cyclists will be minimized, and we will be marginalized. But we continue to be accommodated to some degree. You take what you can get while maneuvering for more. It applies to life and to traffic.

The Onion recently posted a piece with the headline, "Study: 90% Of Bike Accidents Preventable By Buying Car Like A Normal Person." At the bottom of the page is a link to another item poking at people who bring their bikes onto public transit.

With all the reasons to dislike cyclists, I'm surprised we don't get mowed down more often. Every bit of media that reinforces the stigma against weirdos who clot up the motorized world brings us closer to another front in the conflict of various interests that has been created by the convergence of overpopulation and mechanization.

Society expects conformity. Tolerance for nonconformity varies on yet another continuum from most hung up to most anarchistic. The use of the term "normal" to describe motorists alerts us to the baseline of conformity from which pedalers depart. Drivers respond with varying degrees of anxiety or hostility based on how much they feel a cyclist has injured society by using a non-standard vehicle. The Onion sets the acceptable upper age limit for bike riding at 12 years.

Satire is not just a joke. Satire is a pointed effort to portray the ridiculousness of beliefs and behaviors. There's good-natured ribbing, and then there's propaganda. Satire is often intended to be persuasive. This takes it from the category of joshing and turns it into social leverage.

Some platforms, like South Park, collect their audience on the principle that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." They appear to hold no belief or person immune to ridicule. When it's well done, it provokes thought as well as mirth. But when it just looks like a tidal wave of acid rolling across the landscape it becomes depressing. If they're scourging someone you like to see scourged, it's all great. If they're scourging your beliefs, it's unfair and simplistic.

I like the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, but I don't like the character of Jef the Cyclist. Because the strip is read by the general public, and the general public is notoriously prone to generalization, the sole cyclist character being an arrogant snot means that all cyclists are arrogant snots. Do arrogant snots deserve to be accommodated on the public right of way? Only if they express their arrogance in suitably high-powered cars. An arrogant cyclist deserves to be doored or run off the road, because that's how we do things now. Don't suffer fools. Once fools are identified, persecute them until they smarten up.

The properly humble cyclist shuffles and mumbles and nods deferentially. Yes, we are inferior, evolutionary dead ends who will eventually be eradicated. The fact that some of us are overbearing and egotistical stems not from any actual power but from the pathetic posturing of a doomed subculture. You would be more socially acceptable if your human powered commute consisted of climbing tall buildings and then leaping off in a flying squirrel suit to glide to the next and the next, until you reach your destination. If you don't have access to suitably tall structures, too bad.

I have said more than once that bicyclists need to remember that many people will never be able to incorporate any pedaling into their daily routines. A lot of people could start bike commuting or ride bikes on short utilitarian errands, but technology has evolved to make other alternatives necessary. The amount of stuff we move, over the distances that we cross, in the time we have available, make motorized transportation a fact of modern life. Before that it was railroads and boats and big wagons drawn by burly animals. People who pedal have always been a troublesome minority. Even in the various bike booms, the minority became a larger percentage of the population, but never achieved long-lasting respect.

It's the traffic, stupid

To be more accurate, it's motor vehicles and the people who drive them. The category is, "Things that make people quit cycling on the road."

There is no last word on this topic. It shows no sign of ever going away. Those who choose to pedal must now and forever deal with the challenges of sharing space with large, fast vehicles, mostly piloted by people with minimal training. And professionalism is no help: truck and bus drivers are notoriously hostile to pedalers. Professionalism may make matters worse, because those drivers are on a schedule and are earning their living by driving. The direct monetary connection reinforces their territoriality against not just cyclists but against all amateur road users.

The solution comes not with a single stroke but with a multifaceted response that has to include a lot of infrastructure changes along with behavior modification. Unfortunately, the system we have evolved developed very naturally along the path of least resistance. People were happy to let their communities be designed around motor vehicle flow. Almost no one questioned it. Forget whatever sinister conspiracies underlay specific things like the destruction of streetcars in favor of buses, and other sabotage of public transit. The proliferation of cheap automobiles relative to rising incomes in the mid and late 20th Century guaranteed that they would dominate our lives. The illusion of freedom was easier to sustain when the consequences, both economic and environmental, could be more easily masked.

We all understand the problem, but it seems as difficult to solve as gun violence. Both motorist dominance and gun violence breed fear, which can then be used to control people. In the case of cycling, fear serves to keep riders off the road.

People who used to ride tell me that they can't anymore. Maybe they quit completely. Maybe they switched to separated venues ranging from mountain bike trails to sedate paths. Most of them express their decision as a matter of maturity and wisdom rather than defeat and surrender.

People who haven't ridden on roads much or at all, who take up cycling or continue it in separated venues also assume the mantle of mature wisdom rather than regretful fear.

We all want to feel good about ourselves. Most of us, anyway. The problem is that the ones who have surrendered have surrendered completely. They've put it behind them and will not advocate for road cycling. I have not met a single quitter who said that they would take it up again if they noticed that conditions had improved. It falls to a shrinking group of experienced riders, augmented by younger people who are still in their riding phase, to keep a scrap of territory available to riders willing to face the existing reality and continue to promote proposals for its improvement.

The inexperience of those younger riders hampers their ability to understand the experience of cycling as the body ages. What was good enough for me in my twenties is out of reach to me in my sixties. It takes a bigger and bigger truck, going slower and slower, to get me to sprint it down. The degeneration has been gradual, but, because I have never stopped riding, I have been able to observe and document it. I guess I do all right for my age, but without the explosive power and grinding endurance I enjoyed from age 20 to about 50. And it shouldn't always be about exploring one's physical limits. Transportation and exploratory cycling should seldom be about exploring one's physical limits, or the limits of one's courage. It's okay for daily life to have a certain serenity.

To make this post self-contained, I have to acknowledge that motor vehicles have their uses. Time, distance, payload, and weather can all make a closed, motorized vehicle a better choice than something powered by human muscle. That has to factor into the system. When you need them, you need them. And what Edward Abbey called "motorized wheelchairs" can accommodate anyone who has decided that it's time to settle into their embrace.

You'd be wise to stay out of the way

This video of a massive icebreaker cruising into Helsinki in the 1920s stirred up all kinds of thoughts and feelings.

The first thought was, "What is wrong with those idiots? Give that thing some room!" How could the crowding spectators know that the ice would not crack laterally, dumping them into the frigid water? How could the ones skipping beneath the bow know that they would not slip or trip and go for an unplanned dive beneath that charging hull? The propellors would not be kind.

It must have been amazing to stand that close to the beast as it cut through the ice. But it's also the stuff of nightmares.

Whoever was conning the ship wasn't wasting a lot of concern on the people clustered in the vessel's path. That kind of mass is not going to stop or swerve sharply. It was up to the crushable, but highly mobile, people on the ice to keep themselves from being crushed. If one or more had failed to evade, no one would have blamed the icebreaker's skipper and crew.

To the non-riding majority, we who ride our bicycles on the street look like the idiots playing chicken with that icebreaker. Whether an onlooker is rooting for us to fail or hoping that we don't, when a rider gets crushed it seems inevitable, unavoidable, and entirely the responsibility of the small person who should have known better than to impede the great machine. The critical differences are lost in the glaring and deceptive similarities. And not all the similarities are deceptive.

Machines like big ships and railroad locomotives don't have the maneuverability and stopping power of even a large tractor-trailer. The people running around that icebreaker knew it would not accelerate sharply or swerve abruptly. They could calculate its speed and direction intuitively. The little people and the big ship's crew seem unconcerned about each other because they can be. The disparity of the relationship imparts its own stability, barring an unfortunate crack in the ice.

Elements of traffic on a street, road, or highway are closer in size and highly variable in speed, mass, and maneuverability. The aquatic analogy is demonstrated on any crowded lake on a summer weekend: swimmers, paddlers, sailboats, and motorized vessels in a range of sizes dart around like water bugs. The biggest vessels move ponderously compared to the smallest, but everything is more fluid, if you will.

This summer, a bicyclist was crushed by a tractor trailer in Conway. The driver left the scene. The story was misleadingly reported in all media. Initially, the cyclist was portrayed as avid and experienced. The vehicle was not described. The stark facts were that a cyclist was run down and it was hit-and-run. As details emerged, the rider emerged as somewhat less than meticulous in his riding tactics. The truck driver may not have been aware that his vehicle hit someone. A cyclist has to know something about the limitations faced by drivers of various-size vehicles and take the initiative to stay out of danger zones as much as possible.

When drivers talk about cyclists on the road, some of them display a blanket prejudice, while a handful of others display an undiscriminating concern. In between are all the ones who sound like someone trying to describe how they're not a racist, but... They have my sympathy, because cyclist behavior plays a huge role in safety. It will not protect you from someone who has decided you deserve to be killed just for being out there, but it will keep you whole in nearly every other circumstance. Riders who do dumb things provide talking points for the haters and huge anxiety for the compassionate.

Dumb things. On one level, it's dumb to be out there at all, just as it was dumb to run right up to a massive icebreaker charging ahead with its bow designed to crush whatever is in its path. Let's assume also that none of those people needed to be out there to use the ice for their own purposes as the ship came through. That's a critical factor.

When we're using the roads we all pay for, we all have a stake in the infrastructure and deserve benefits from it. These are your tax dollars at work. The methods we use to move greater numbers of people and volumes of cargo have led to the different size vehicles using the public right of way, but it is public, and putatively designed for the use of all.

Debate simmers, seethes, and occasionally rages about who should be included in "all." Money drives. It has a disproportionate voice in design discussions. Meanwhile, in the real world, people find very good reasons to use a bicycle or to walk from place to place. Intelligent life is not always displayed by complete embrace of the most elaborate technology. But money talks. Whether we're talking about preserving the environment that supports all life, caring for the sick, or creating safe walking and biking accommodations in our entire transportation network, if you can't show a monetary gain you will not get anywhere. Tell me again about intelligent life?

A rider in traffic, or on a road where traffic could occur, takes a calculated risk. Any traveler takes a risk, but the cyclist or pedestrian is particularly exposed to other people's judgment. On the other hand, we are particularly free to bend and break rules to improve traffic flow and enhance our safety. It's a thoughtful dance at all times. We are also able to bend and break rules selfishly in ways that unnecessarily antagonize other users, whether we're on the street or a separated path. Bicyclists are in the middle, between those on foot and those in motor vehicles. Did you have any idea that something as simple as riding a bike brought such responsibility with it?

Responsibility is optional. Everything in life is optional. You may choose to stop, rot, and die at any time. You may choose to be a flaming asshole and call it a blazing torch of liberty. Responsibility can be ducked. It can be chucked. It can be ignored. We could go out in a blaze of selfish anarchy. The universe doesn't care. Why should you?

That's a question you have to answer for yourself. Evolution will note the results.

This is The Renaissance of Hate

A friend in Des Moines, Iowa, just reported that persons unknown had dumped thumbtacks all over a section of bike trail, causing the sort of damage and inconvenience you would expect.

This trail is a segregated venue. These riders are not interfering with the holy motor vehicle traffic so beloved by Americans. Spiking their trail is an act of pure malice, singling out bike riders purely for being bike riders.

We live in a time when we are actively encouraged to give way to our prejudices and express them without reservation. Close borders. Harass, intimidate, beat up, and even kill "undesirables."

Talk radio hosts have been exposed numerous times suggesting that bike riders make perfectly legitimate targets for violent slapstick comedy. They never suggest that riders should get some hazard pay and a share of the residual income from any video coverage of these actions. It goes along with every other form of entertaining contempt peddled fiercely and continuously by people who have soapboxes large and small. The comment thread on any article about bicycling in the mainstream media devolves almost immediately into a collection of traded insults. It's just one aspect of a culture of intolerance that has been growing steadily since the backlash against "hippies" in the late 1970s and early '80s. It is blossoming now with creative expression of destructive tendencies.

We're in the Renaissance of Hate, when divisions mean more to people than coexistence. A large segment of humanity inclines toward duking things out and settling them now, rather than trying to bump along, accommodating each other as best we can. Another segment does try to keep building toward a universally tolerant society, but there are many details to iron out. The human propensity for simple mindedness and quick fixes throws land mines in front of any peace march to try to shut the gentle people up and let the men of action have their way.

I use the term men of action purposely. The culture of hate is sexist. It attracts many followers who are women, but they either think they can fight it out or they buy into the classic gender roles in which men make the big moves and women support them. In general, movements of intolerance try to keep people in their rigidly defined places. Amazing how totalitarian ideas can march in under a banner of freedom. They have specific, worthy recipients in mind when they talk about freedom.

Some things are deplorable and need to be opposed. Sometimes, forcefully delivered rhetoric is not wrong. That complicates analysis for the concerned citizen. But if someone is suggesting that it's okay to target anyone for unkind treatment, that's bad advice. "Hate the sin, love the sinner" is a shorthand way to remind yourself that a broad brush and a machine gun are ham fisted solutions.

At the start of every riding season, and at intervals during it, I wonder whether hatred or negligence will strike me or someone I hold dear. It's one more thing in the back of the mind when gearing up to take a simple bike ride.

The impact of peer pressure

Every year in this country, dozens of people take up transportation cycling, while thousands get their license to drive.

During driving season, I think about these things as I wait to emerge from the steel shell and return to the the sane and satisfying pace of pedaling.

Yesterday, I was chatting with a fellow bike commuter who has had two serious impacts in the past two years. In the first instance (not HIS first by any means), he failed to control the lane and got right-hooked by an impatient and oblivious woman in an SUV. He has a headlong personality, so he can be hard to convince when his negligence might have contributed. And the right hook indicates the motorist's inability and lack of inclination to look for vulnerable users in the death slot before turning.

The second crash was fully the motorist's fault. The driver of a pickup truck made a methodical left turn in front of the cyclist, who was fully in the lane that time, and sitting up, wearing bright colors and all the rest of the safety mantra.

Motocentric mentality absorbs the majority of road users. I need to use the faster vehicle myself in this rural area, where at times I need to go from one place to the next faster than I can pedal it. In my early 30s I would reel off a 50-mile day of assorted errands, but that left no time for other things, like keeping a marriage intact.

Even now I have three cats by my second marriage. While the cellist is away chasing the orchestra dollar, I have to be there for our family. That limits my urge to roam.

Most people assume they have to drive and want to drive. The fact that they are far more impeded by a slow motorist squarely in the lane in front of them for mile after mile than they are by a cyclist or two that they have to slow briefly to pass safely does not get through to them. The slow idiot in a motor vehicle is at least a fellow motorist. They might flip them off, flash the lights, or -- occasionally -- shoot them, but they're at least driving, albeit driving annoyingly badly.

As an experienced cyclist I feel the peer pressure emanating from motor vehicle as they pass. I've been fortunate to avoid major impacts in the past 29 years, but I assume no immunity. Eternal vigilance is the price of a relatively intact skeleton. Scars are cool and all, but injury and healing are expensive and cost you a lot of down time.

I fear legislators more than I fear fellow road users. New Hampshire has fairly enlightened bike laws, but no law is set in stone. Even if they were, there's a whole industry devoted to arguing over interpretation. Laws oppressing cyclists, forcing things like riding to the far right at all times, or even mandatory dismounting for the convenience of passing drivers deserve to be ignored, but they legitimize aggression by motorists, when aggressive motorists already need no excuse. Lawmakers succumb to the peer pressure of the motorist majority to suppress the rights of the pedaling minority.

Any discussion of the cyclist-motorist interface quickly leads to a full-spectrum discussion of advocacy and infrastructure. Have at it. I have to get to work.

I'm getting too old for this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sudden Realization, decades late

We could get some serious corporate clout behind improvements in cycling infrastructure and support if we could get management to realize that workers would live much more happily on a lot less money if they could get around without cars.

If American industry had not been dominated by the automobile industry for so long, some bright bean counter might have noticed already. And now that the American automotive industry is facing serious challenges they might figure out how to make the transition to a broader-based transportation system. They might even get into the bike business, where many of their great-great-grand daddies started, and show the current bike industry a thing or two about mass production and promotion. Can you imagine bike parts stores all over the place like NAPA and VIP and the other chains? Hell, bring on the disc brakes. I don't mind technology as long as you can get the parts.

Most of my objections to the bike industry's attention deficit disorder are based on the way they throw customers and their equipment aside, leaving all their older product, good or bad, to rot, rust or otherwise gather dust. Because bicycling remains a minority activity, even when parts are available you may have trouble getting them because they aren't available near you. Imagine going into any parts store and giving year, make and model, and having the guy go in the back and return with what you need.

Customers already come into the bike shop and give us year, make and model, as if there were comprehensive reference sources we could consult. The bike companies don't make copious amounts of technical information available for current product. You're mostly out of luck trying to find information on anything old. You can, and we do, but it's always a bit of a treasure hunt. We used to save old catalogs and tech manuals, but they started to take up most of the space in the shop.

On a bicycle we have the advantage because we can make a lot of substitutions. That can get expensive, depending on what you're trying to substitute. Downgrades are the cheapest, of course, but sometimes just trying to maintain your quality level can be prohibitively expensive.

People tend to trade in their cars more often than their bikes. How much of that is motivated by the fear of being stranded somewhere with some massive pile of useless automobile that has suddenly decided to quit on you? If the bike breaks you can probably hitch a lift or, at worst, wheel the machine along until you get to some kind of refuge. There are exceptions, of course, but for the run of the mill breakdown the consequences don't have to be as expensive and inconvenient as a lot of automobile scenarios.

We really need to promote the idea that cycling makes happier poor people if the people who run the economy insist on making so many of us. It will be so much cheaper in the long run than having big goon squads to slap us back into line, and bulging prisons overflowing with the uncooperative. Build us Biketopia and all that expensive repression becomes unnecessary.

We were the Culture of Speed once

An item I read about a bicyclist in Kentucky being arrested for vehicular cycling reminded me of the ChipSeal case from several years ago. I'd lost track of ChipSeal in the intervening years, so I went to see what he's up to. His blog reported police encounters from August 2013.

ChipSeal illustrates the difference between an advocate and an activist. He rides within the law, but he takes up every square inch the law allows. Because most people, including many of those paid to uphold it, do not know the law, the vehicular cyclist claiming a permitted share of the road looks conspicuously obstructive to motorists who firmly believe the cyclist has a legal duty to defer to them in all cases. And that, my friends, is the majority of motorists. So ChipSeal and others who assert their rights -- and ours -- in the face of civilian and police harassment keep motorists thinking about bicyclists, but not necessarily fondly.

Any set of principles can take on a religious level of dedication. If we as riders believe we have a right to the road, why do we not all claim this right, all the time? The activists seem to survive at least as well as the less assertive. They would say more so. By being in-your-face visible and present, they are told they make themselves a target, but they also force motorists to steer deliberately around them.

"It is common for motorists to be annoyed with my presence and express it with their automobile horns. Often, the more impatient motorists will pass me on the shoulder. Even when the road divides into two lanes again I will often get free unsolicited advice from motorists or their passengers as they accelerate past me." This is a quote from ChipSeal's blog entry for August 23. It indicates the psychological effect of assertive cycling on motorists and passengers in vehicles passing the assertive cyclist. They do not suddenly start thoughtfully considering the rights and the challenges of transportation cycling. They're just pissed off by one more idiot on a bike.

ChipSeal refers to the Culture of Speed and a windshield view of the world. We notice it now, after almost a century of motorist domination. But we were the Culture of Speed once. Not only did the introduction of human-powered two-wheelers lead to incidents of bad behavior, the bicycle as it evolved also greatly increased the speed and cruising range of a person who might previously have had to walk everywhere. Cycling groups led the movement to improve roads so they could go faster in greater safety. And from the bicycle, on the roads that cycling helped improve, transportation evolved to be even faster with the addition of external power sources that did not eat hay and crap on the road. So the bicycle was left behind by technological development. Whether it should have been is another matter. People wanted to go even farther, even faster, with even less personal effort, even though the automobile required massively greater utilization of resources and mobilization of workers, and thus a greater public cost than bicycling and a good rail system would have required. All that stuff created jobs and set money in motion, so it all seemed just wonderful.

The costs were spread over society in ways we have only begun to calculate. Individuals tend to look only at what they see coming directly out of their pockets. So they'll complain about the cost of a vehicle, registration, insurance, fuel, parking and maintenance and overlook public health and safety costs, congestion, sprawl, pollution, resource depletion and other ills until they get so bad they can't be ignored anymore.

Those of us who for various reasons took up bicycling have to varying degrees refused technology that the mainstream has accepted. Some purists refuse it entirely. Some recreationists don't really refuse it at all, even to the point of despising and persecuting bicyclists who ride on the road. Anyone can hop on a bicycle. Then, no matter what they really believe, anyone who sees them on it will lump them in with "bicyclists" as a category. The opinion of that category lies with the beholder.

Why do we ride? Usually people ride to go faster than a walk. I don't think too many people say, "I ride to go slowly." Even people who pride themselves on riding slowly will find that they have a lower limit. Otherwise, why pedal at all? So speed is relative, but it's always a factor. And relative speed is the root of all our problems with the motorized road user. It's also the root of our problems on paths where we are the fastest users. Then our speed is obvious even if we feel we are working hard to attain it.

Along with speed goes flow. Traffic systems function best when they help the elements using them to flow with the least awkwardness. Wheels create the illusion of flight, so where paths intersect these flights have to cross each other. Mostly we use a system that subordinates the flow on one path to the flow on another, or we use interchanges that keep elements in motion, using ramps and bridges to manage the connections. But motorists can change speed without major muscular exertion, whereas pedalers cannot. We are protective of our speed just as much as drivers are. Indeed, much of our desire to use travel lanes has to do with avoiding the margins of roadways, where debris and poor surface conditions would hold us to very low speeds and rough rides.

We have other reasons to ride in the lane, notably to control passing behavior. But anyone who rides mostly on narrow roads learns to give way in some places and hold the line in others. Full-on vehicular cycling might not get you hit by a car, but it could get you pummeled by someone who followed you until you stopped or tagged into the ditch by someone who had to wait behind you until you did swing right to open the gate.

All of our decisions are calculated to maintain our flow -- in other words, our best sustainable speed.

The motorized Culture of Speed certainly runs at a more frantic pace. Its unquestioning participants can't begin to understand why anyone would settle for less. Only kids and drunks ride bikes to get from place to place. Them and weirdo freaks who probably don't smell very good and must not have real jobs to get to, families to raise and busy schedules to keep. You get nowhere emphasizing the differences between us and them. You have to try to minimize them. Don't think you can do that just by wearing regular street clothes. The drunks wear those. So do the kids. You need to solve the flow problem. Do that and no one will care how we look.