Can you afford to have fun?

 A few years ago, as the local mountain bike organization -- to use the term loosely -- was getting more aggressive about building engineered trails, one of their spokespeople would say that developing the trails would attract "people with more disposable income." This spokesperson does competent work with a tractor and a chainsaw, but doesn't depend on them for his very survival. He has always seemed like someone who doesn't have to worry about his personal finances, if you know what I mean.

"Disposable income" is another way to sort people and sift out the undesirables. Whoever they are, they have failed to measure up as potential customers. That's the only yardstick that matters in the US economy.

Bicycles started out as luxury goods way back in the 19th century. Manufacturers were surprised at the volume of sales driven by working class customers who scraped together the coin to have a mode of transportation that extended their shoe-leather cruising range and didn't require oats, hay, water, and shelter, not to mention veterinary care and eventual body disposal. Someone who lived in a boarding house could probably find a place to shoehorn in a bicycle. And bikes were built to last back then, because manufacturers mostly didn't know any better than to make something as solid as they could, and build their reputation on quality rather than marketing. Disposable income wasn't an automatic weeding system.

Most of us would prefer not to ride an ordinary, with its tall wheel -- usually the front -- and tricky handling. Nor would we gravitate to an early model of safety bicycle, with its single fixed gear and substantial weight. But the vehicles evolved rapidly into lighter, more nimble machines still built to withstand the challenges of rough roads and long distances. From their beginning, they evolved from the simplest form, without even pedals, adding each level of complexity a bit at a time to preserve the durability of simplicity while improving comfort and handling. The best of them were relatively expensive, but standards changed slowly enough that a hobbyist or someone who merely appreciated the craftsmanship and ride quality could buy a high-end bike and ride it for decades.

As Wolfeboro shifts to summer mode, I scan the vehicles using our parking lot and the people getting out of them. The vast majority of cars parking in our lot at any time of year are not there for us, and seldom for any other business in the complex. They're poaching to go downtown. With the coming of the second home crowd and their guests, the value of some vehicles can exceed the value of my house.

Disposable income is here to visit. Biking draws a fraction of the participants it did in the 1990s. The seasonal residents and visitors bring with them fashionable bikes in road, gravel, and mountain categories. Sometimes they even bring them in. Overall I see fewer people than in the 1990s to the very early 2000s. When people come in and say the town is busy I want to ask them if they were in a coma from the mid 1980s through 1999. The crowds have definitely shrunk.

Mountain biking thrived because people wanted to ride away from the roads. It died because the industry pandered to the tech-obsessed stunt performer demographic and let prices get out of control. Riders might have had other reasons to cut back on their bike use as well. The transition was blurred by the surge in road riding that bridged the transition from the end of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st. The industry had to re-learn how to make enticing entry-level road bikes and fill in the mid range. But then riders discovered everything that had intimidated and discouraged them about riding on the roads, and the numbers flaked away.

Various forms of road bike hinted at the possibility of the gravel category. But once cycling broke up into very specific categories, prices had to creep higher because no one was making it up in volume.

A cyclist in any category will be disposing of a lot of income to play at all, multiplied by the number of different category bikes that rider chooses to use. Tubeless tires and DOT fluid hydraulic disc brakes use highly perishable fluids that can damage the systems in which they are supposed to work. Regular maintenance draws a certain amount of money. Or you could wait for the tires or brakes to fail completely and then pay to clean up the mess they've turned into. Or quit cycling at that point, or just buy a new bike. Hard to say where you'll get it or who will work on it by that time.

I asked AI whether working in a bike shop was a good job. It basically said "no." It mentioned the chronic low pay, seasonal work load, and the suicidally thin margins that shops have to live on. I asked it how much the tools would cost for a rider to work on their own bike and it gave me a range of $30 to $1,000. It had more details about specific options, if you want to get into fixing your specific suspension system for instance. You will also have to hope that you can get parts when you need them.

The disposable income crowd is a competitive club. You're welcome to try to keep up. If you can't, they won't miss you.

The rantings of an irrelevant old man

 My frank appraisal of the backroom bike operation in town caused considerable angst in the upper management, who fears malicious reprisals of some sort. He grew up in this town. He has long experience with the kind of vindictiveness and long-held grudges that shape so much small-town life. I moved so constantly and lived in communities of such different sizes that I got used to being anonymous and quickly forgotten. I relate to ideas much better than I relate to people. I tried to assure him that the people involved in the subculture in question quit caring what I think shortly after the fat bike flap of several years ago. They've comfortably written me off as a decrepit old fart who is no use to them in any capacity. Why should they feel the slightest distress? I'm irrelevant.

Mountain biking went from a way to expand bikeable territory to a way to limit it when the machines evolved to the point where they function best on contrived courses, many of which are very expensively built. A highly advanced trail network was being built in town last fall, thanks to a deep-pocketed donor who expected to benefit directly from it. Construction ceased with the onset of winter, and other issues. I don't know if there are plans to resume. Other than that, trail support groups have joined the long lineup of nonprofits constantly fundraising to do what we used to do for free. We just happened to do it on the existing unpaved roads and trails that were already out there. Some of those fell under the protection of snowmobile clubs, to which a fair-minded rider might contribute with money and labor, but other lines sprawling over miles of countryside were old Class 6 roads and logging roads. These included public rights-of-way and private corridors that the landowner left open to public access. The more adventurous and skilled rode on hiking trails of varying degrees of difficulty.

The bootleg trail movement in these parts started with pockets of activity in the White Mountain National Forest and other tracts where the builders felt they could get away with it. Some of these evolved into legitimate cooperative ventures with the Forest Service or whatever entity was in charge of the land in question. And specialized trail builders and administrators began the laborious process of putting together a road system for the off-road rider. Even on existing trails, the needs of the wheeled are quite specific, and differ widely depending on whether the rider is headed uphill or down.

The riding that we did for free is not the riding that is favored today. Today's riders need those trails and need those bikes and need to pay whatever it costs to have both. We used to say of our recreational athletic habits that they're "cheaper than drugs." I'm not so sure anymore.

It's significant that the hot shop for technical mountain bike service is also a hot shop for technical downhill ski service. Mountain biking and downhill skiing are both heavily dependent on areas specifically built for them. Downhill ski lift ticket prices have gotten pretty staggering. I don't know how much it costs to ride a mountain bike at a pay-to-play venue, but the costs of buying and maintaining a mountain bike have certainly dug into users' wallets. And you need to be able to transport yourself and your large bicycle to the playgrounds you want to visit.

Original recipe mountain biking was for the masses. Mountain biking today is for the financially superior. Sure, you'll find devotees who build simple lives around it...for a while. But they might have to finance their habit by working in the industry in some way. It becomes more and more insular. The working-class hangers-on may have to be mechanics skilled in the style of machine that the majority favors, or trail builders, or become instructors, like the golf pros, tennis instructors, personal trainers, yacht captains and crews, personal chefs, personal assistants and other support staff in the service economy.

$15 an hour

 Proponents of trickle-up economics make a compelling case for raising the minimum wage from the current (and longstanding) $7.25 an hour to a comfortable $15. Put money into the hands of workers at the bottom to create a more solid foundation to our economy. It also has considerable humanitarian benefits, but those don't even have a line item at the accounting department. If you can't make your case monetarily in some way, it will fail. Even environmental protection has to resort to cost-benefit analyses of open space versus a cancerous sprawl of raped land. Oh yeah, clean air and water, those are good. Now let's dump this mining waste down this conveniently located stream.

If the minimum wage gets raised to $15 an hour, I will get the most significant raise of my entire working life. I know, what was I thinking? All that shit about never giving up on your dreams runs insidiously into the day to day creep of advancing age, until one day you realize that it may never be too late to hit it big (whatever that means) but that in all likelihood you will die destitute after either a period of extreme poverty or a serious illness that you can't afford to treat. In my defense, I did occasionally tap into freelance income that looked promising before another blowdown or washout interrupted progress.

Kill your dreams, kids. Kill them before they kill you. Know when to quit and quit hard. Either that or turn your back instantly on anyone who hinders your single-minded attention to whatever far-fetched notion of creative success you envision. And you still run greater odds of failure than success. Do your best to enjoy the process in either case.

While the rising tide of higher wages will lift most boats, it will sink some of them. This is not a reason not to do it. But some small businesses won't be able to pay that well on the limited revenues they bring in. They will have to restructure to find the right size, which could mean growing, or shrinking, right down to vanishing completely.

The shop I work for already has to manage a broad array of financial stressors. Until 2020 triggered a truly unprecedented level of interest in what we sell, both the bike and cross-country ski business were gradually dying. Cross-country skiing, dependent as it is on natural snow and reliable winter weather, was suffering worse than biking. Biking masked its decline behind category sales, while the real freedom represented by the road bike of the 1970s and '80s and the mountain bikes of the early boom has eroded greatly. Mountain biking mutated into a sport of staggeringly expensive toys operated mostly on engineered courses. Road biking has similarly chased high dollars, while the open road remains a hazardous venue. Separated infrastructure is just another prison, part of the ghettoization of cycling. Move the undesirables into a separate enclave, preferably contained by a fence. Spend millions to go to fewer places than the road, and if someone complains, call them an ingrate. And that's only in places that have scraped up the investment. Elsewhere it's just a free-for-all.

Our clientele consists mainly of people who would see no personal benefit from raising the minimum wage. Whether they want the modern expensive stuff or not, their buying decision doesn't hinge on their hourly income. In the broader area from which we draw, we have customers who will enjoy better finances, but their improved circumstances might lead them away from bikes entirely. Just giving people more money does not mean that they will spend it on what we offer.

I've written ad nauseam about the challenges faced by outpost shops like ours, and many others beyond the reach of powerful retail chains. Each one finds tendrils of support unique to its area. Major suppliers, meanwhile, follow the understandable practice of courting large accounts and using them as the basis by which to judge all others. If a big company makes concessions on unit price for complete bikes they sell to small, independent shops, they still won't support their marvels any better with parts and tools.

A small shop that can't afford to stuff a warehouse with widgets stockpiled against future obsolescence can't offer as strong a service department to the technolemmings who come looking for bargain-priced expertise. And they'll let you know when you don't impress them sufficiently. The classic case was a local trust funder who breaks things a lot. His propensity, combined with the increasingly temperamental nature of modern componentry, led us to some long and complex repairs before he quit bringing anything to us. He came back from one of his many well-funded voyages to somewhere or other to tell us, "I checked with a shop where they really know what they're talking about..." Are we really ignorant, or am I just really bad at confirming his biases for him? I'm never going to get good at confirming his biases.

Because the tech-obsessed represent an increasing portion of the market for recent stuff, but millions of old bikes remain in service, the tech crowd looks for sophistication on demand, while the majority of riders still just need reliable service on their simple machines. Frankly, I'm with them. Technological inequality is a perfect metaphor for income inequality. Back in the olden days, bikes were very similarly designed across the whole price spectrum. You paid more to get something lighter weight, of better metals, more precisely machined and finished. But your mid-price bike might actually handle pretty nicely, so you could enjoy riding at your price point.

With modern componentry, lower-priced bikes have trashily-made versions of the expensive stuff -- which is itself pretty trashily made. Nothing is intended to last, even if it is intended to hold up to heavy levels of abuse during its short lifetime. If you take good care of your stuff, respecting its vulnerabilities as well as its strengths, expect to pay a lot and undergo a long treasure hunt when you finally need suspension or hydraulics rebuilt. And that's on top of the ongoing expense you will incur with tubeless tires and brake fluid.

Why does this matter to a $15 an hour minimum wage? Overhead expenses. A shop needs to have tools, parts, work fixtures, and perishable fluids on demand for the needy technolemming. As "luxury" features like hydraulic disc brakes are used to fluff up the showroom appeal of mid-price bikes, increasing numbers of riders get recruited to run off the cliff because they didn't know that they should refuse to, and might not have had a viable alternative. A big shop in a heavily populated area can absorb more of these changes as part of its overall financial existence. Well-kept tools will last. Mechanics can be trained in procedures, and get better with practice. A large facility can set aside dedicated space for time-consuming projects that require extreme cleanliness, like anything to do with hydraulics. You can do the work in a clearing you stomp out in the middle of a mucky swamp, but you need to defend that clearing until the job is done. In a small shop, that can tie up a bench for a while, preventing other work from getting done.

Repair type is unpredictable, as is repair volume. No one saw last year's stampede coming. We can expect in general that bike work will pick up in April and run in fairly high waves until late summer. Last year it hit earlier and stayed at flood levels until late summer, tapering gradually into autumn. However, the well-documented shortages of parts hampered our ability to get these riders up and running. Those shortages persist as we roll inexorably closer to the new season.

Meanwhile, Specialized imposed a drastic price increase on bikes already ordered, but not shipped. As of February 1, anything that hadn't left the warehouse automatically jumped in price, even if it was a prepaid special order the Big S had themselves been unable to fulfill. We ordered in good faith. Have a kick in the teeth, little guy! Specialized makes the case that they are squeezed by price increases from their suppliers, and other expenses. A price increase was inevitable. But a small shop subsisting on special orders for high end bikes has to negotiate the increase with the customers who thought that they'd already satisfied the financial part of the transaction, and had only to wait patiently for it to arrive and be assembled. If someone digs their heels in, we have to decide whether to eat the loss or refuse the bike and eat a bigger loss. A loss is a loss. You don't stay in business by operating in the red. Maybe we should start laundering money... The problem is that we got into the bike business because we liked bikes, not business. The more complicated the business gets, the more life it eats for diminishing psychic and emotional reward. The accounting department rolls its eyes. Get the money, by any means necessary!

You may wonder how I can claim to live on such meager pay and still go to the dentist and pay to be tortured. The fact is, about all I spend money on is my teeth, my eyeballs, and two aging cats. My car is so old I expect the frame to collapse every time I get into it. I figure if I can chew my food and see where I'm going I'll be able to cheat the reaper for a while longer. My life choices were guided in part by a resolve to explore the satisfaction of life on a modest income, anticipating that if the global economy ever did get adjusted to make a fairer distribution of proceeds, no one would be upper middle class anymore, let alone wealthy. The more satisfied a person could be with less, the better off they would be. The bike as I found it was an excellent element of such a lifestyle. The bike as the industry has made it is just another expensive toy. And minimum wage is just a number. Somewhere outside of our fantasy economy is a real world in which money has to represent actual value of goods or services, and those goods and services have to support basic survival. The number could be anything: $1 a week, $50 a minute, as long as it relates to the real necessities that form the foundation and framework of a sustainable society.

Fat tip or the price of my soul?

I spent the first couple of days last week putting together a $10,000 mountain bike for a young man who wanted to have one here where he summers rather than transport the one he has already where he spends the rest of the year.

Let that sink in.

Among his few and mild requests, he wanted it set up with the tubeless tire option. It comes with the stems and other widgets, and the tires are designed to work that way. It requires a bit of extra labor to remove the casings, take out the tubes installed at the factory, and install the special spoke hole plugs and tubeless valve stem. Oh, and there's this rim strip that you might or might not need. The instructions are ambiguous on that point, and the internet is full of completely contradictory advice.

Being a belt and suspenders kind of guy, I went for the option that uses plugs and rim strip. After the usual wrestling match to get the tires back on, all I had to do was pour in the sealant, pop on the last bit of bead, and blast the tires into place with the compressor. On every setup I've done with all new components, this has been a quick and simple matter. Move deliberately so as not to dump sealant all over the place, and it should go smoothly.

This time, the beads just did not want to catch. When I finally got that sorted, there was a lot of leakage. It wasn't seeping from any of the usual suspects. The valve stems weren't seating properly.

When trying to make a rim and tire combination airtight without an airtight inner tube to bear that burden, the numerous holes that naturally plague a bicycle wheel all need to be blocked somehow. Standard methods evolved using rim tape, and valve stems with o-rings, but good enough is never good enough for the pathologically innovative. When your company slogan is Innovate to Death, you are obligated to mess with things, even when the previous system was completely satisfactory.

A $10,000 mountain bike symbolizes the decadence of the bike industry. To be fair, the base price was only $9,920.00, but the customer decided to put on $180 pedals in place of the cheapo plastic ones that come standard with most bikes. Because a rider still has multiple options for pedals, most manufacturers (maybe all, I haven't checked) put on something that costs them pennies, rather than try to anoint a winner by installing a specific brand and type that would require a specific proprietary cleat.

Ten thousand dollars. Carbon fiber frame. Full suspension, of course, with sophisticated embellishments requiring extra tubing and pressure chambers just waiting for future failure and servicing.

A bike like this is designed to provide a few seasons of hardcore fun and then be cast aside for the next marvel. If you're in the $10,000 mountain bike bracket, that makes perfect sense. You do the same thing with your $80,000 (or more) car, and any other up-to-the-minute devices that you basically lease from the purveyors of such trinkets. You run a revolving account with the faceless, blameless conveyor belt of obsolescence, to keep getting what you deserve as a power player in the economy.

The customer himself was extremely affable, charming, and at times quite funny. I wonder how he is when things aren't going his way. I suppose it depends on who is giving him the turbulence. If it's a superior in the economic hierarchy, he has to suck it up. This time, his money flowed toward us and he received a product and service in return. He expressed his appreciation numerous times, and even said he owed me a generous tip for my extra labors getting the tires to behave. He said that when I was still working on them.  He wouldn't be getting the bike for another 24 hours. I smiled and said something generally pleasant and gave it no further thought.

The tires finally held pressure the next morning, so I let him know he could take the bike and start shaking it down. Sometimes a build is good for months of use right off the stand with only the most minor of follow-up, like crank arm bolts and maybe a tweak to a cable or two. A mountain bike usually faces a rougher inauguration than a road or path bike, so it might need more attention. On the plus side, this particular customer is willing and able to dial in his own suspension preferences and other personalization without professional help.

The launch of this bike fits interestingly with the services I recently performed for another customer on similar expensive full suspension bikes from about 2012 and 2016. The earlier bike had a leaky fork that had been abandoned by its manufacturer, so the customer had to buy a whole new fork. His final tally for all services on that bike was about $1,200. The newer bike only needed suspension pivots rebuilt, and some attention to the headset, for a total just north of $300. The manufacturers aren't just giving away those bolt and bearing kits. Actual removal and installation takes hours. How many hours depends on how tenaciously some of the bearings might be rusted into place. As I assembled the $10,000 mountain bike I imagined its future needs. Would its owner bother to have it rebuilt like that, or would he unload it and trade up? How different might our world be by the time the bike needs that kind of service? This year we're seeing how rapidly everyone's lives can change.

Are you still thinking about the tip mentioned in the title? I wasn't. I'm always a little on edge around wealthy customers, because they have expectations based on their power, but those expectations vary, and are frequently not expressed directly. We're left to guess who really wants to be treated like just another regular person and who wants some degree of fawning and groveling.

I'm really bad at fawning and groveling. I don't get all rebellious and defiant, I just totally forget to fawn and grovel. All jobs are equal on the workstand. The bikes aren't equal. Some of them are pretty horrendous. But once the machine is clamped in the stand it becomes the focus of attention until it is working as well as time, budget, and its original condition allow. And then it's off. Next!

I forget what I was buried in when $10,000 mountain bike guy came to pick it up. I turned my attention to him to run through what I had done to get the tires to behave, and make sure that he was all set to take on the next phase. He was profuse in his thanks, and proffered a folded banknote. I took it, but did not scrutinize it except to note that it was fairly colorful. I mentally reviewed American currency designs. It was definitely bigger than a ten. Tipping is fairly rare in the bike business, and the denominations tend to be small, in the realm of a bit of coffee money. Meanwhile, we were still running through what he was going to do next and whether he needed any parts or tools he had not already purchased. I forgot about the folded bill until the end of the day when I was packing up to head home.

It was a hundred.

My first feeling was uneasiness. The biggest cash tip I'd ever received here was a twenty. Usually it's a five or a ten if anything. Sometimes a gift card to the coffee shop. Staring at a Benjamin, I wondered what was now expected in return. Instant top priority? Step aside, peasants! Or was it truly just a casual gift of gratitude from someone whose personal economy considers a hundred dollars to be merely a nice gesture?

One hundred dollars is only one percent of the price of the bike as delivered. If the ten grand had been a restaurant tab, the tip would have been at least $1,500, and the purchased meal would turn into a bowel movement within 24 hours. But a server at table provides much more continuous personal service. The server at a high end eating establishment is a performer, enhancing the experience.

I'm not going to complain about an unexpected $100 dropping on me. The septic system at my house is pretty ancient, I'm having the top of the older chimney replaced because its crumbling masonry is letting water in, three cords of firewood will soon arrive in my driveway, the property taxes are due, the car needs registration, inspection, and probably other work, and the "tax cuts" have left my household facing another chunky federal income tax bill despite increasing our withholding to try to avoid the same circumstance that blindsided so many people last year at tax time. El Queso Grande said I should spend it on something fun, but where's the fun in letting debt accrue and your house rot? Not much seems fun to me anyway. The things that still raise a flicker of enjoyment either use things I already own or would require a great deal more than $100 and the time I have available. Groceries alone cost a lot more than they used to.

The other thing that occurred to me immediately was to donate the $100 in various size allotments to several worthy causes.

Are there shops where a $100 tip is not unusual? In places more heavily populated with people in the $10,000 bike bracket, is $100 the new $20? I mean, $50 seems so half-assed.

The whole concept of tipping is kind of weird. We're accustomed to it in certain service settings, most notably restaurants and other food and beverage venues. We tip hair stylists, housekeepers, bartenders, cab drivers, some delivery people. As a bike mechanic, I consider myself skilled and professional. You don't see people tipping their doctor, do you? "Great job on the appendix, Doc! Here, have a car!"

Many professionals  -- like plumbers -- charge so much that no one would consider laying an additional cash bonus on them. Perhaps bike mechanics invite the largesse because we're so obviously clinging to the tattered bottom fringe of the middle class. Either that or stretching our arms upward from the sucking mud of the working poor. Our profession has never reached the stature of auto repair, in which every poor striver with a crapbox car still has to find and pay a well-equipped professional to keep that junker on the road. Maybe the auto mechanic isn't doing any better financially, because the overhead for tools and facilities eats up a lot of the gross receipts, but how often do you walk away from a car repair paying less than an amount that would send your average bike repair customer into screaming fits? In addition, because we don't look like skilled workers -- it's just a bicycle -- no one risks insulting our professionalism by offering the very occasional gratuity. It puts us on a par with the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets and carry trays of food to tables more plain than fancy.

Am I expected to touch my forelock and know my place? Will the relationship be defined by whether a particular benefactor wants to cultivate the common touch or make the stratification more obvious? They depend on us, but do they value us?

Sometimes we have to bid against each other to earn the trade. For instance, when there was another shop in town, a notorious low bidder, we never saw a certain well-known wealthy businessman with a career in politics. He went to the low bidder until the low bidder went under. Now he comes to us. When he does, he's kind of a regular guy. He's just a regular guy with hundreds of millions of dollars, who appears in the news as a major elected official. If another low bidder opened up, would he vanish again? The only factor in our favor is that you would have to be a complete delusional idiot to go into the bike business these days, COVID-19 bike boom notwithstanding. But the news of the surge in bike business has created the mistaken impression in the viewing public that bike shops are raking in the coin. Might someone with a small bankroll and grand dreams think that this is the time to jump in? Stupider things have happened.

Unless you happen to be among the powerful, success depends on negotiating a balance between the service you offer and the attitude you can get away with. That's life for the vast majority of us whether we realize it or not.

Disposable Income

Watching a recorded video of the Wolfeboro, NH, selectmen's meeting from Wednesday, Jan. 8, several things struck me about the public comments regarding the shared use policy drawn up to accommodate fat bike riders in the winter.

Several skiers made excellent points about the negative impact that bike riders will have on the ski experience. I made the point before about the irreducible width of 31-inch handlebars. There's also the emotional impact of having to share trails with people working way too hard to go way too slowly, getting incomplete exercise while adding sizable flotsam in the form of their oversized bikes.

A couple of people in support of the bikes made the comparison -- almost entirely incorrectly -- between fat bikes on Nordic trails and snowboarders on downhill ski areas.

First off, alpine skiers and snowboarders are both gravity-dependent sliders on snow. Throw fat bikes onto a downhill ski area and then you have a comparison. By the way, alpine skiers were none too fond of Telemark skiers either. The rhythm of free-heel skiing, within the limits of the gear of the time, made our paths a bit more meandering than your locked-down, fully-mechanized alpine skier would follow. We didn't gouge things up the way the one-plankers did, but we still got in the way of modern progress. Telemarkers cured the problem by turning their gear into what was essentially alpine skis and boots. Snowboarders cured their problem by simply being too numerous to ignore. Needing the money, the downhill areas caved in and sold out. The snowboarders do have a negative effect on the snow surface, but downhill areas are such a mosh pit anyway that lift riders have learned not to care. It's just a theme park.

Proponents of the fat bike revolution tell the cross country skiers that they will be fine just as alpine skiers were fine. It's a nice way of saying that your time is up and you have to watch yourself being replaced by this new thing that is really different from your thing, that requires all the concessions from the skiers, until skiing finally dies out. This is the wave of the future. Resistance is useless.

It's a bit like deciding whether to go ahead and welcome the Panzer battalions or let the invaders machine gun and shell a bunch of you first.

At least two commenters referred to Wolfeboro as becoming a mountain bike and fat bike Mecca. They contend that this is the only thing that will attract "a younger demographic with more disposable income" to the area.

Actually, some jobs would be a really good start. People came here in the 1980s in droves and hordes because land rape was going full bore, and anyone even pretending to be a builder was basically printing money. But many of the people who moved here became super commuters, driving hours at each end of a work day to get to their jobs in Massachusetts and the southernmost parts of New Hampshire. You have to be young to pull off a schedule like that. Other jobs proliferated in the school system, to service the kids that accompanied the influx, which drove taxes up sharply. Peripheral trades, notably landscaping and property care, also saw a boom. Year-round residents use fewer of those services than the second home crowd does.

People quit mountain biking around here around the turn of the century. A few continued. Others have resumed it as various midlife experiences impel them that way. But disposable income had become much more of a requirement.

In the 1980s and '90s, you didn't need a huge amount of money to ride mountain bikes. A mountain bike used to be something you could use to go somewhere. Now it's something you go somewhere to use. You can drop a thousand bucks just on a car rack to carry your fleet of behemoths to your chosen venue. Or you can fake something up, if you're handy with tools. But you'll need more than a thousand dollars per bike per category to get a bike that's reasonably well made and sort of durable. Two thousand a bike is a safer estimate. When everyone was mountain biking in the late 20th Century, it wasn't about the money, it was about the fun: accessible fun that anyone could join. Mountain biking is definitely no longer that.

The people who are riding now, or have returned to riding, are earning comfortable salaries at various things that pay comfortable salaries. They can afford to sit and chat for hours in a place that charges $6 for a single glass of beer. In a way, it's always been true, that the well-off only have to wait a little while for poor upstarts to fall away. Being really good at riding your bike does not provide a pathway to secure long-term income. So the well-funded hobbyist reigns supreme at the recreational side of riding.

The unanswered economic question is whether there are enough well-funded hobbyists to offset the costs of trying to pander to them.

The bike addicts can't level the same charge at cross-country skiers. A crazy top-end ski set might run you more than a grand, but you can do quite well for less. Then it's just a matter of stick time. Go out every day you possibly can, for 30 minutes or an hour, and you can put a serious hurt on posers with expensive gear and no training. Or, if you're not afflicted with competitiveness, you can just enjoy the benefits of the world's most complete exercise and let the neurotics chase each other around.

I guarantee that the median income of our old mountain bike group was half of what it is for the current group, even adjusting for inflation. No one says "whoever dies with the most toys wins" anymore, but they certainly exemplify it.

Here's the thing about a young crowd with disposable income: they get older. You look at the cross-country ski trails, you see people of all ages. Yes, a lot of the them are pretty darn old. But whole families can take it up and keep doing it with fairly minimal investment for decades. How many people in their 60s and up will be spending what's left of their disposable income on mountain biking? And who will replace each wave of the young and affluent as they age out?

As consumer society and car culture flame out in their final frenzy, all forms of human powered transportation face deadly competition on the public right of way. Human powered transportation and recreation would have provided tremendous lifestyle benefits for those of us with lesser means, if we had acknowledged as a species how limited our means actually are. But we're still drunk with the excesses of more than a century of expanding resource exploitation, reinforced and amplified by our collective fantasy life played out on screens large and small. What is the true cost of that disposable income?