A sunny day in pandemic life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gravel

Bike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolution is a popularity contest

When you walk into a store or other public place that has music playing over a sound system, you have to listen to it. You may be distracted enough not to notice it consciously, or you may find it inescapably intrusive. Or you might even enjoy it. And it changes you. Like it or not, because the popular hits soundtrack is so ubiquitous, you will have songs that autoplay in your head when you hear the first three notes. Regardless, you have to go through the experience with everyone else in that environment, because someone, somewhere, determined that music in public places was the more popular choice.

Think of the mass of humanity's environmental and social choices the same way. If everyone else set themselves on fire, would you set yourself on fire? You might prefer not to, but you will still have to breathe in the stench of charring flesh. And one or more of the happy incendiaries might careen into you and set you ablaze against your wishes.

In the USA, some percentage of people are unquestionably law abiding, and another percentage are automatically resistant to, and defiant of, any authority. In between lies the greatest number, fluctuating between the poles of obedience and defiance as they analyze each situation they happen to notice. A lot of us are oblivious to larger implications most of the time. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when we should have been paying attention to the first bits of debris leading up to the avalanche of deferred consequences our species now faces, the Baby Boomers were focused instead on the basics of life: finding paying work, establishing homes, reproducing. Even the politically savvy tended mostly to view it from a personal perspective, multiplied through an uncounted legion of their theoretical allies who would all benefit if a particular policy made things better for one of them. It's hard to imagine a life very different from one's own. You really have to go try it out. Even the most detailed book or movie can't drag you right in and trap you in it. Interactive video games may come close. I don't know, because I have never tried one. As detailed as they may be, every single thing that happens in one was created by the mind of someone else and is known to them.

Believers in an almighty deity say that the simulation we think of as real life is also the product of a creator to whom everything is known. That really takes the fun out of it. I see how the notion can be comforting, but it's also limiting in more ways than moral strictures and mandatory rituals.

Now that the Teachable Moment has come, environmentally, we find that a substantial portion of the class wants to act up. Look at the scorn and ridicule that greeted California's plastic straw ban. Read the back -- and sometimes all sides -- of a truck or van belonging to a really jacked-up paranoid who sees threats to sacred liberty in every admonition to throttle back and lighten up. You won't have to wait long to see some sentiment that will make you want to retire to a cave and live with the few surviving animals.

In the 1980s I had the same vision that I have today: we could use the grid for good as much as ill. Convenience is not a sin. But conveniences required adjustment to keep them from becoming the engines of global destruction that they eventually did. And eventually was pretty rapidly, because moderation was scorned and ridiculed.

The slogan in the 1980s was "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." It was the golden age of the loaded roof rack, when Yakima and Thule products on the roof of your increasingly large vehicle needed to be locked securely. More than once we heard from friends who had made a day or evening jaunt into a city, only to find their roof rack stripped of every unlocked accessory. We were Recreation Nation, and anything related to the popular activities had really good street value. My attempt to steer that behemoth hinged on trying, through my published writings and in my day jobs, at least to get more people thinking about doing it without internal combustion. Try to get an appreciation of nature to sneak up on them, because Americans -- and probably most humans -- are very resistant to confrontational change. We love confrontation, but only to demonstrate how we can stick to our original position until it kills us. Think of the Confederacy.

I'm approaching a deadline for my quarterly environmental cartoon. The cartoon has been increasingly hard to draw because so many great causes make poor subjects for a single panel image. And I have realized the uselessness of mockery. Humor will only work on someone already inclined to agree with it. The inclination may be deeply buried, unknown to its owner, but it has to be there. Are the few who seem to be awakened worth the stiffened resolve of the outraged opposition?

I don't mind preaching to the choir. It keeps morale up. But nothing seems funny. The extent of the problems that begin with simple individual choices and multiply instantly to a global epidemic, like air pollution or the proliferation of plastic is better served by animation and real video, compressing the sequence of events into a much more visceral revelation of the ugly truth.

One of the hardest things to get used to when you're out there riding a bike and trying to live a low impact life is finding out how many people hate you for it and think you should die. It doesn't have to be the majority. You only have to encounter one homicidal jerk. That's true whether you get tagged by a hit and run driver or you happen to be at the mall the day one of them shows up and opens fire.

Less dramatic and more deadly is the steady accumulation of pollution and degradation by one individual at a time, repeated across a global population in the billions. The system that has evolved funnels gains to a small number of dominant apes, requiring that the lesser apes -- regardless of good intentions -- play some form of the game just to survive. The lifestyle is as inescapable as the music in a department store. It touches every place on this small planet. "Pristine" places are not pure because they are out of reach. We could strip mine the Himalaya, and eventually we probably will.

"Field destroy"

"Just render the frame unusable," said the email from Specialized's warranty department. So we handed it off to our colleague who has an excavator. I have not transferred his photos from the work computer yet, but here is the result:

The warranty department at Specialized was duly impressed.

The strangest debris

The weirdest stuff to tumble out of the insulation in the workshop ceiling during the recent deluge has been these pasta wheels.

I keep finding them, one or two at a time. Right after I picked these off the floor I found another one.

We're guessing mice had concealed them in nests up there. I don't think any of the holes in the floor would have allowed them to pass from the many digestive disturbances we had to hear over the years. Or, for that matter, the ones we would not have heard because they occurred outside business hours.

Best not to think about it.

A mess of unreliable Styrofoam

This morning's park and ride started out promisingly enough. The dirt road had thawed and frozen numerous times, creating such continuous bumps that the video I shot is basically unwatchable. But it was firm and fairly fast.

I figured with heavy snow to end November and a couple of fresheners on top of it that the local snowmobilers would have been up and down the Cotton Valley Trail, packing it to concrete. We've had a lot of warm and wet weather as well, but the snow was so dense and the sun is so weak that the cover is still thick and durable in most places. If past snow seasons were any guide, the motorheads should have been out with the enthusiasm and loud buzzing of the first mosquitoes of springtime.

I figured wrong. The Cotton Valley Trail had one set of ATV tracks on it, making a pair of awkwardly spaced ruts down through the crunchy, collapsible snowpack. The ruts were each too narrow to ride in. Only a little wobble and I would catch the edge. The center wouldn't support my weight,...except when it would. The center was also narrow enough that my waggles as I tried to grunt my way down the unpacked snow would dump me into one of the ruts again.

I dismounted and tried running with the bike for a while, to see if conditions improved. They did not. I turned and ran the bike back to the paved road so I could grind my way back up to the car.

I'm not sure a fat bike would have fared much better. The stiff, crunchy snow would provide plenty of support, but the ATV ruts would be just as much of a nuisance. The fat tires might even make it worse, being more prone to catch the sides. I don't have access to a fat bike to test it, so I have no way to be sure. Because fat bikes have become something of a status symbol, I fear reviews will have at least a bit of bias. I prefer to do my own testing and draw my own conclusion.

I would not commute on anything that did not have lights and fenders. The already bulky fat bike becomes even more cartoonish when you start accessorizing. And then there's the expense, especially for a set of studded tires. It might extend the commuting season considerably, but the big challenge to the park and ride has always been the park more than the ride. If I'm going to ride all the way from home I might as well use one of the bikes I already have.  And I'm not going to ride all the way from home in the dark and the iciness with a bunch of half-hibernating drivers.

The ultimate utility bike would be a fat bike with an alternate set of wheels set up for wide 700c tires. But you'd still have to choose which set to mount that day. You could carry the alternate set along, but that goes way beyond ridiculous.

All the shenanigans on the bike meant that I did not get to work until after the Three Stooges had broken a light fixture in our clothing department and showered more debris down on the workshop as they smashed up a couple of bathtubs with sledgehammers. The rest of the day was pretty quiet.

The aftermath

The workshop looked serene enough after Monday's chaos.

There was this pile of insulation,

This full trash barrel,

This jumble of rental skis, 

The upended rental ski rack, aka the lobster trap,

And the floor looking -- believe it or not -- cleaner than usual.

A faint tinge of a funky brown reek hangs in the air. Much of the wood in this building is more than a century old. The newer stuff has still absorbed grunge for many decades.

The crew from upstairs carried away the pile of insulation and the trash barrel today. They seem thoughtful and chastened.

I'm really glad we don't have gas lines up there. I'm pretty sure we don't, anyway.

Oh man! I always miss the good stuff

A crew has been remodeling the apartment above our shop. My first impression was that I would not want anything constructed by these people, but the units in the building are condos and the owner of that one has made his choice.

Phase one has been demolition. For days we've listened to the sounds of heavy objects being flung, big saws screeching, pounding, prying and heavy boots thumping across the floor. I would swear that they had brought in extra appliances to throw around. The heavy crashes would be accompanied by the light harmony of wire, like oven racks or refrigerator shelves. Maybe they liked the sound, so they threw the same things over and over.

I thought they hit their low point last Wednesday when they dumped over a toilet they were trying to remove, and sent several gallons of water down through the backshop ceiling above one of our fluorescent light fixtures. I leaped for the light switch and bellowed, "Hey! What's DRIPPING!?"

"Sorry! Sorry!" came back through the ceiling, apologetically.

As bad as that seemed, it was a finite amount of water. A couple of carefully placed trash cans caught some of it and we could mop up the rest. As I was checking things out with the stepladder I did discover that the thumping and banging had dislodged a tube in another fixture so it was about to drop to the floor. But the problems had mostly been limited to alarming noise and small bits of dust and debris that would shower down when they got really boisterous.

Last night Big G sent me this email:

"Someone told me looong ago,  there's a calm befooore the storm.

-I know,   its been comin' for sometime."

"I.....wanna knooooow, have you everrrrrr seen it rain?  Comin' down on a sunny day."

The shit storm:

This morning in the backshop I was getting a pair of skis ready for a binding mount when I heard this god awful pounding that shook the building and hurt my ears.  There were clumps of white powdery shit falling everywhere from the rafters.  It sounded like these idiots would be falling on my head real soon.  I grabbed my lunch and jacket and moved them over to the stool in front of your place.  Then I moved to the mail room the see if there were any internet orders.

The flood:

From the mail room I heard the sounds of water dripping on the backshop floor.  Then the sound was more like a hard rain.  And raining it was!  There was a monsoon from wall to bench!  I estimate about 25 gallons!  The "professionals " upstairs managed to cut through a water pipe!  El Capitain was screaming through the ceiling!  -And everybody heard him.  One of the pros came down to us and asked if we knew where the water main was.

It is absolutely amazing how many customers and phone calls there are when shit like this happens!

-I promptly moved my jacket and lunch to the mail room.

El Capitian told the pros that THEY were going to clean up the mess!  -Right after WE make a big pile of rental skis and move the lobster trap.

What IS that fucking stench?:

Is it from all the ladies figure skates with decades of foot sweat and fungus now brought to life after being thoroughly doused?  Is it the saturated insulation now dripping brown fluid?  MY GOD, there IS a fucking bathroom upstairs!  El Capitain and his first mate made it a point to tell me the water was clean.

What IS that fucking stench? 

The pros sent in their grunt equipped with a wet vac.   Their leader, Crazy Woman, told us she called a plumber and he would come over in the morning.  Meanwhile, the entire building has no water.  That's when I posted an "Out of order" sign on our bathroom.

The fix:

Crazy Woman told us SHE capped the pipe.  (Sweat fitting?)  She said it's okay to turn the water back on.  Meanwhile there is more loud pounding and sawing from above.  I removed our sign from the bathroom door.

Flood two:

I heard that heavy rain sound again.  Yep, another twenty gallons.  Vacuum Boy flew out of the back shop and down to the basement.  The fucking pros up above actually cut through a second pipe!  They turned the water off again and I replaced our sign on the bathroom door. 

I figure it's only a question of time when these chimps cut a live wire.  Which reminds me, do you remember were the fire extinguisher is?

This time our agitated leaders demanded the pros call in a plumber at once!

Aftermath:

Right now the rental skis are piled over the ski poles.  (I will check the Skiathlons for water in the morning.)  The lobster trap is on end, the desk is piled with boxes of bindings and customer's boots and your bike stand is moved to one side of the floor.  There is a pile of wet insulation in front of the girls skates.

The pros will return tomorrow morning to remove more insulation and clean up.

What IS that fucking stench?

"I.....wanna knooooow, have you everrrrrr seen it rain?  Comin' down on a sunny day."

 

The crew upstairs has turned our lives into a Three Stooges movie. I never cared for the Stooges, but it sounds like it was more entertaining and less awkward than the carolers.
 

I also feel a bit like the guy who was on R&R when the rest of his unit got hit. Dammit! I shoulda been there! Oh well. I'll be there tomorrow, and maybe they'll come up with something that will make me wish I wasn't.