Do we really need billionaires?

 As someone who works in a town where trickle down economics drives most of its economy, I see its benefits and the clear boundary beyond which it never flows.

The luminaries of Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro don't give a crap what happens to Ossipee, Effingham, Brookfield, New Durham... Communities with frontage on Lake Winnipesaukee attract wealthy homebuyers. Some of the families have invested in businesses that exploit the other lakes in surrounding areas. Those water bodies don't attract the A-list. They're just good for cash flow. The real life takes place overlooking The Big Lake.

Subtract the billionaires and millionaires, and what do the lakefront towns have to offer in a reality-based economy? The English monarchy no longer needs masts for its sailing ships. Water-powered mills went out more than a century ago. The stony soil is hard to farm. The roads have to wind over and around steep little mountains, and skirt the shores of numerous lakes. Transporting manufactured goods takes longer than in places with straighter highways and easier grades.

Building up a modern economy would mean destroying the quaintness and natural beauty that attract tourists and seasonal residents. Residential development is already doing that, along with the retail sprawl that follows. The state might build up its intellectual economy, but tech jobs seem to be targets of AI. There won't be much left but retail clerk and food service jobs, and those depend on having a decent amount of people around who can afford to buy things and eat out. Oh, and retail is increasingly conducted online now.

Visitors buy things on impulse and necessity, and locals try to support local businesses, but the local businesses themselves have trouble sourcing their products because online retailers feed upstream from their suppliers, driving costs up and margins down, as well as sometimes cleaning out the supply chain completely. Online retailers have a fraction of the overhead that brick and mortar stores do. Massive giants like WalMart can buy with the budget of a small country, effortlessly outbidding a small country store.

There were seasonal residents before there were billionaires. Indeed, fairly average, upper middle class people used to be able to afford camps and cottages to come and rough it for a few weeks every summer. People generally got along fine without soaring, glass-fronted palaces listing for millions of dollars. The boom in the 1980s that ushered in that era drove most of the modest cottage owners out of the area because they couldn't afford the tax hikes that came along with the spike in real estate valuation. It's only gotten worse from there.

It doesn't help that New Hampshire derives most of its tax revenue from property taxes. It was a good scam when seasonal residents shut down their places in early fall and only needed someone to snowshoe in occasionally to check on them through the off season. The more people who live here year-round the more services they need, including some sort of schooling for the young 'uns. Also, the more elaborate the homes, the more care and feeding they might need when the lords of the manor are absent. It drives municipal costs higher for fire departments among other things.

The real estate boom of the 1980s led to a population boom as new residents flocked in to build and maintain the new homes and condos. While much of the new construction went to seasonal residences, the surge required year-round personnel to make sure that everything was ready when the owners arrived. That meant more families with kids in the schools. That meant higher taxes. A collapsing economy would mean more people moving away if they could.

Already, fewer people visit than we saw in the 1990s. Traffic still gets snarled, because the road system was never designed for this kind of population. New England frugality combined with difficult terrain to produce only as many roads as they absolutely needed. Main Street is a numbered state highway. It's actually two state highways that meet at Pickering Corner and turn north for a few miles as Center Street before separating to their separate terminations. Route 28 comes all the way up from southern New Hampshire. A traveler on it could have been driving for a couple of hours already before getting wedged into South Main Street in little ol' Wolfeboro. Route 109 runs from Maine coast sort of east-west to Sandwich, NH. They will always funnel travelers through the center of town. Maybe some of them give up and park long enough to spend money. Or they just crawl along in their air conditioned capsules, maybe taking in the sights, maybe hating every minute. Who knows?

The town has become a center for retirees who can afford it. I would say rich retirees, but where is the threshold of richness? When everyone rode simple, affordable mountain bikes, I had a better sense of the number and ages of children in the area. They might not all buy their bikes from our shop, but we did have the best service department for miles. I don't know what they do now, because we almost never see them. I saw a dip in the school population in Effingham for a couple of years, but that seems to have rebounded. People move to the more obscure communities of Carroll County for their own reasons, like establishing a sovereign citizen compound or taking a shot at homesteading. As homeschooling has grown, institutional enrollment may not reflect the number of families and their offspring. People are around. I don't know all the ways in which they finance it.

Traditional industries include logging and sand and gravel mining. The area has trees and lots of glacial till. One pit complex has its own rail line directly to Boston. Those piles of sand and gravel you see when you pull into North Station on the Downeaster came from Ossipee. Neat, huh? However, shipping the actual substance of your state to another state is ultimately not sustainable.

One rich person is actually a colony of symbiotic organisms feeding off of the wealth assigned to that individual. This is supposed to be the justification for trickle-down economics as the primary model for the distribution of money, but it only goes as far as the personal interests of the named owner. It might work if rich people were perfectly evenly distributed across the country, but they aren't and they can't be. The rich person's discretionary spending goes to the things they like. Our shop happens to have a few wealthy people, both seasonal and local, who like various aspects of what we offer. As time goes by, succeeding generations feel less affection and obligation, meaning that our time as a favored business will fade. It's already happening. The theme park buyers have much more enthusiasm for the little bakery and the boatyard.

To some extent, that's just life. A business has to evolve with the generations as they come along. We're already so old and creaky that the younger generation of riders writes us off without a second thought. We have no representative among them as we did in the 1990s. Someone might buy the name and the tools, and make the business relevant again, but it won't be the same business. Cross-country skiing is even more endangered than road riding in the age of climate and economic collapse. People need money and motivation to want to do laps on a short course of snowmaking in the increasingly common winters when nature does not provide. I have my gear, but I couldn't afford to update it. I wouldn't trudge around that loop on my back-country gear. Well, maybe I would just for exercise during the work week, but if I'm going to trudge I will more likely just go for a hike on my day off.

The world is changing. The economy is changing. Ordinary people have less money, young people have different ideas how to spend what they have, and there aren't enough handy billionaires to take up the slack. We will never be where we were in the 1990s, feeling confident and well funded and full of unfounded hope. The middle class I grew up in was a sustained illusion. The devices that projected that illusion fell apart as the century ended. Don't look back and fall for the bullshit about how a whole family could be supported on one income in the 1950s and '60s, because that was already based on unsustainable factors. Look at the current data and figure out how to do the best we can for the people alive now, and inevitably joining us.

We will die competing for big shares of it. We will die trying to squeeze profit out of every product and service. I don't mean in the sense that "everybody dies." I mean soon, and nastily. Some people are fine with that. Assholes like that have driven our thinking for far too long. They're the ones promoting fossil fuels, reviving colonialist thinking, and making excuses for wars of territorial expansion. They're the ones who have been stockpiling guns in the United States since the 1980s, and lulling themselves to sleep with fantasies of the glorious civil war they're going to have. Because this country has a surfeit of both assholes and guns, they are a political force to be reckoned with, but that doesn't mean by fighting them on their own terms. It won't go well for them, but it will be bloody and waste a lot of decent people's lives. That's how these wars always go.

Unlimited wealth, unlimited liberty, and unlimited personal armament are not ingredients for a pleasant future. While a majority of people might partake responsibly, we are seeing in our lives right now how a minority can use the leverage of money, the threat of force, and a lack of empathy to put survival at risk and make life difficult for everyone.

Independence Day

Main Street was blocked off. Spectators already lined the road to watch the parade. I rode up to the police officers at the Central Avenue intersection. It's a grand name for less than a hundred yards of street.

"Can I get through to Nordic Skier" I asked, gesturing toward Main Street.

"On that?" one said, indicating my bike.  "Sure!"

I thanked them and excused my way through a thin spot in the spectator crowd. I hate being the entertainment, but I had no choice. Hundreds of people waited on either side of the car-free street. I threaded carefully through the random wanderers popping out to take pictures of their friends or searching for a place to squeeze in.

At Mill Street I negotiated passage back through the spectator wall to ride around into the back parking lot of the shop.

Once upstairs in the workshop I had time to look out from the elevated vantage of the backshop windows at the automobiles stuffed into every possible spot, and the bands of parade watchers still streaming in. I spared only occasional glances at the parade once it started. Most of the time, I worked on repairs and contemplated the absolute saturation of the parking facilities. You could not have stuffed another car anywhere, in any direction I could see.

Even on the ride in I had enjoyed the cyclist advantage. Motor vehicle traffic stopped on Center Street at least a quarter of a mile from Main Street. I don't know where people hoped they could go, or how many -- if any -- were just passing through and had lousy timing. Traffic wasn't stopped completely. I had to ride carefully, threading the Death Slot to the right of them at times, and flowing with them in the short breaks where they could move forward.

Usually at the end of the parade, traffic both wheeled and on foot streams the other way, a tide going back out with Fundian energy. The high water mark of humanity and their vehicles surges strongly on the ebb. Within an hour, parking areas in town can be nearly deserted as everyone disperses to whatever other fun they have planned. They'll be back for fireworks at dusk, but I'm long gone by then. This year, however, the parking eased up considerably, but a lot of foot traffic remained. We sold three bikes, did multiple quick repairs for riders only here for the day or the weekend, and had to stop repeatedly to host browsers among the clothing racks, or ring up sales.

This stands in contrast to the previous month or two in which we sold no bicycles at all, and had many ominously uninterrupted days. I don't know why this particular Fourth and its attendant weekend was so busy, but the fact that it lined up so neatly, with the Fourth on Friday, might explain a lot. We're not used to seeing heavy traffic anymore, so a day that would not have impressed us in the 1990s now seems like a big deal.

Summer brings more vehicles, many piloted by people who live where they have to drive more aggressively just to survive. This leads to some increase in close, fast passing, but also a more subtly dangerous tendency for drivers to stop suddenly to wave their fellow motorists out of side streets and driveways. Those drivers nurture the fantasy that we're all nice to each other in this theme park rendition of a country town. A rider needs to be ready to stop short as well as sprint, and read the body language of the larger vehicles. It's our little urban experience embedded in the months of small-town riding.

At the end of the day, I pedaled serenely out my usual route. Evening hazards dwindle rapidly as I pass the driveways of a couple of eating and drinking establishments on the way to the back route out to Route 28. On the Fourth, the evening commute fit into the lull before fireworks traffic.

The coming recession

 Back when the economy sagged around 1990, mountain biking surged, because it looked like cheap, accessible fun. A thousand bucks was still a lot for a bike, but sporty, capable machines costing $500 to $800 were an easy sell.

The recession in New Hampshire started a little sooner than 1990, because the 1980s had spawned a real estate boom that began to falter as the '80s ended. We went down a little sooner and stayed down a little longer than the official dates for the recession period. But the shop stayed busy because the many families that had been feeding off of the building boom couldn't just uproot and leave. Where would they go anyway, when the economy was spongy all over the country? So they stayed.

People from away still visited. People who might have taken a more expensive vacation to a more distant, bragworthy destination stayed closer to home.

Mountain biking thrived because it didn't require much investment after you bought a bike and a few accessories. You didn't need to buy fuel for it, register it, and insure it. Just buy a bike and go find the local trails.

Trails did exist. We rode for miles on logging roads and snow machine trails, and tried out hiking trails with varying success. During mountain biking's exploratory period, mountain bikers hadn't become as jaded and demanding as they are now. Consequently, there were a lot more of them.

By the mid 1990s, when the economy had revved up again, mountain biking was a habit. The bike industry was busily technologizing it to death, but it was a slow poison in pursuit of perfection. The mountain bike of today is truly an impressive product of evolution, well suited to the style and environment of its use. It's also never going to be cheap again, because you can't make a machine that will stand up to the demands of technical trails and fearless riders by keeping it simple. You want a simple bike? Stay away from mountain biking.

Because the bike industry grew obsessed with increasingly expensive technologies in all categories, their user base shrank, leading to much larger and more rapid inflation than in the rest of the economy. They had to farm fewer people for more money per person just to try to tread water.

Changes to mountain bike design do reflect lessons learned from the period of its greatest popularity. Front end geometry is designed around long travel suspension forks. A longer rigid fork would not provide the secure handling that a suspension fork provides, because it would not redirect the force of bumps and bashes the way suspension does. Front suspension allows you to put the front wheel out in front more, while the rider stays back behind the steering axis, which helps reduce the chances of going up and over the bars. Because the suspension telescopes, the wheel moves toward the bike as it moves upward. With a rigid fork, the wheel would stay out there, exerting its full leverage on the fork legs and lower headset bearing. Your simple bike would have to have the archaic geometry of the 1990s. Your riding style would have to reflect that.

You can still take your old 1990s single speed on many trails. Routes we used to ride still exist. Just make sure you don't impede the rightful masters of those trails who paid a lot more for their bikes, especially if you are on one of the trails that they also paid a lot of money to have built.

The combination of tariffs and economic instability looming before us for this summer spell big trouble for the bike industry. Even the sales of cheap e-bikes will suffer, because they are entirely built in tariff-affected countries. Even with that, cheap e-bikes will stay viable because more and more low-level workers will not be able to afford even a beater car. Hard to say how it shakes out nationwide, when so many urban areas have been designed around the armored cavalry model of transportation.

The way the economy is being collapsed, it won't all fall in at once. This will help the administration, because the people who go down first have the least political leverage. They (we) are quite numerous, but easily divided over trivial matters. But the bike market has been fragmented for almost 20 years now. People in general seem to have less to spend on recreation, and far more options to spend it on than they had in the 1990s.

In hard times, people do pay to repair their older items, but they still have limited funds, and repair parts are subject to the tariffs and inflation.

Wood and oil: Things you purchase, just to burn

The first installment of firewood arrived at the end of May. My fun day off activities centered around getting it stacked in shelter so that I can call for the next load as soon as possible, before the price goes up again. It's a tedious chore, but it's part of the price of freedom from fossil fuel dependency.

This year, the direct link between fossil fuel prices and firewood prices has been highlighted. My wood supplier called to say that she had some stuff I could get now that was already expensive, but that any later loads would be subject to price increases because of the soaring cost of the petroleum distillates used in the trucks, heavy equipment, and chainsaws of the cutters and transporters of the "renewable resource" from the forest. This first batch reflected a 20 percent jump in the per-cord price over what I'd been paying for the past three years. The greener wood to follow will be worse.

This house started out as something not as rustic as a cabin, as quaint as a cottage, or as rudimentary as a hut. It was a square little box with walls a little too thin for the climate, but an interior volume about like a large packing crate, so it heated readily from a wood stove plunked in the center of its large open space that was kitchen at one end and living room at the other. We later moved the hot iron box to the basement, after we added a proper chimney and cut a hatch to make a ladder to that lower level.

The basic shelter evolved into something much larger. The newer parts are better insulated, but taller, so they're nowhere near as easy to heat. I spend a lot of time colder, wearing more layers indoors, than I did when I lived in the little box. The little old place didn't have enough room for studio space and an occasional guest. The bigger house evolved to make room for a cohabitant and a music school.

Way back in the mid 1970s I looked to a future of scarce and expensive petroleum and decided to limit my dependence as much as I could. I believed -- and still do -- that we can find a balance between the convenience and economic advantages of some degree of mass production and a cooperative energy grid, and a well-protected environment doing its job to support all life. So I didn't become a full homesteading hermit.

Back when gasoline and heating oil seemed like the primary expenses and pollutants that consumers had any choice about, riding a bike and heating with wood seemed like good strategies. And the bike remains unassailably virtuous. Any number really can play, and the world only gets better as the number of riders -- particularly transportational riders -- increases. The wood stove not so much. This adds to the toil of stacking the expensive chunks of tree, as I think about the evils of my carbon emissions and contributions to atmospheric particulates. I'll have to be even colder and wear more layers through the long gray months.

The design of the house lends itself to a seasonal division. I could shut off the tall back part, and barely heat it, only enough to keep the plumbing from freezing, or even drain that section, and live only in the low part. The tall part is actually helpful in the summer, because I can send heat up and out through the upper windows, drawing in cool air when it's available through the lower ones. It justifies its continued existence.

I'd go solar if I could, but I can't afford the initial investment. So I have to rely on small fires and heavy sweaters. I've been incredibly and undeservedly lucky in sidestepping some expenses for a number of years, but now some older bits of infrastructure look like they're crumbling. And the car is succumbing to its 19 years of New England road salt. So now I have to find something less decrepit, when we should all be weaning ourselves off of our default vehicles. It's hard to get enthused about going into debt for the rest of my life to pay for a vehicle that should have been phased out decades ago. Everyone has been focused on the price of gasoline and paid no attention to the cost of it.

Faced with winters that could bring only cold darkness or could bury us in feet of snow, I can't live without a motor vehicle as long as I live here. I'd be willing to try, but my winter job depends on our mobile society as it exists. I need other people to be able to drive to get here. Without winter tourism, I don't know what would keep the economy going until spring. Locals have a long history of catering to visitors and travelers to bring in extra cash. By the late 20th Century it was a primary source of income for a lot of them.

Loggers do a lot of work in winter, when wet areas are frozen solid, but there's only so many trees at any given time. Cut 'em all down now and you have to find something else to do for 30-50 years while you build up a new crop.

Back when New England was nearly deforested, more people farmed, but the soil was full of rocks, and the growing season was short. The soil is still full of rocks, and the growing season is still short. The air may warm, but the sun only shines for the same length of time that it always did. In mountainous terrain, cold dark hollows are cold dark hollows. Removal of trees only mildly enhances the exposure to sunlight. And the soil will still be uncooperative.

In my own little clearing, the sandy soil makes its way to the top, displacing organic matter. Some areas seem to grow grass and plants better than others, but those are mostly places I would prefer less lush, like the driveway. We've experimented with gardens a few times, but we'd need to push the trees back much further, and work constantly to maintain a good growing medium. It's made more sense to support local farms than to try to establish our own.

When the propane company finally sent out its budget plan for the coming season, the price of that had jumped 50 percent. Fifty percent. Half again as much every month to fill the tank. I've tended to reduce my usage year by year, but the cobbled-together heating system in the house depends on the propane heater to maintain a baseline. That baseline just dropped by about eight degrees. It's going to be a cold, dark winter.

What the hey. I moved here because I liked winter camping. Then I hardly camped because I didn't really have to, once I lived within easy day-trip range of all the fun stuff. And that's when I thought I could afford to do things for fun. Looks like I'll be living in a winter hut by default. On the plus side, the cellist will be safely lodged at her school-year job well south of here, except for her brief visits home.

The wood dealer hasn't come through with a price for the second installment of firewood. If the price stays high, I may be back to scavenging dead stuff from the forest and picking up scraps that fall along the roads. That was the basis for the humorous name for "the estate" when it was a tiny box in a patch of forest: Scavengewood. Now it's more like the drafty castle of broke nobility once the sun slides southward and leaves the northern hemisphere to pay is orbital dues to the implacable cold of the universe.

Get some use out of what's between your legs

As part of today's slate of errands, I noticed that the gas gauge in the car was finally a bit below a quarter of a tank, so I went to the gas station. Because I'm one of those guys who inherited the habit of logging fill ups in a little book in the glove compartment, I can see immediately how long it has been since the last one. In this case, without even getting to full bike commuting, it had been 23 days.

I'm not the best example of your potential savings, because I don't drive anywhere except to work and on necessary errands, like the grocery store. During the pandemic I have avoided combining grocery shopping with the drive home from work on days that I'm in the car, because the incidence of mouth breathers is much higher then. I don't need the aggravation.

My commute by car is about 28 1/2 miles round trip. By bike it's just over 30, because of route variations I use to avoid an unpleasant section of road. The direct route is okay on the ride in, because gravity is with me, and we're all going into town, where motorists have no choice but to slow down. No good choice, anyway. I have envisioned the Grand Prix de Wolfeboro, where we have a full-on, closed course motor race around town. In addition to the Formula One category there can be a "run whatcha brung" race for the locals. That might have to be broken out into further subcategories for rat rods, drift cars, soccer moms, monster trucks, and midlife crisis dudes. So far I have not lined up any sponsors. The people you see practicing are doing it on their own.

Once the weather gets more reliably mild, I routinely go a month without filling the gas tank, and that includes a few optional trips to nearby trail heads or boat launching sites. Your results may vary.

And now for the standard disclaimers: Bike commuting is not for everyone. Many people are unable to do it because of distances they have to cover, loads they have to carry, lack of changing facilities at work, and a host of other insurmountable obstacles. But don't let your privileged status discourage you if you realize that you could commute by bike, but don't, in sympathy with the true prisoners of motorized society. Every bike commuter is saving a parking space, and helping to bring gas prices down by reducing demand.You may not think your individual efforts will have an impact on the thick hide and monstrous body of the oil industry, but add yourself to the unseen multitude across the country who are doing the same thing. The more the better.

The burden of ownership

Thinking more about why the bike industry needs to have more self respect, reasons for that all stem from the increasing complexity and technological vulnerability of the machines themselves. Bikes not only cost more to buy, they cost more to own. They require more vigilance from their owners. Owners can do their own inspection and maintenance or they can purchase it.

In 1979, when I emerged from years of schooling and started going to various jobs, I used a bicycle for transportation, to keep my overhead costs as low as possible. I became my own mechanic because I had access to good instruction and I could maintain my vehicle easily, even in a rented room or a small apartment. My expansion into racing was a matter of convenience. I owned a sporty bike and was riding a lot. Why not compete a little?

Competing a little soon answered that question. Racing can mess you up and destroy your bike. It's like taking the family station wagon to a "run what you brung" event and wrecking it because you're not as good in the corners as you thought you were. But in the case of bike racing you could end up unemployed for eight or ten weeks because you crumpled more than the bike.

Regardless of the odd mishap, it was very affordable to build a bike, and another bike, and another bike... I only went to a shop to buy parts, tools, and bike-specific clothing and shoes. Required maintenance was fairly quick and easy, even if I had to do a complete overhaul. I soon learned to do the overhauls in stages: hubs one week, bottom bracket another week...

Among the useful changes to componentry in the 1990s, Shimano (yes, that Shimano) provided sealed cartridge bottom brackets that you can basically ignore for years. Of course they've "improved" cranks and bottom brackets since then and made life more expensive and difficult, but you can still get the BB UN55 if you have ancient, contemptible square-taper cranks. If you're not such an animal that you can feel how much power you're losing because you don't have a big, hollow crank axle, you can still have hours of fun for a minimal investment.

Early adopters of the bicycle in the 1890s discovered this concept with the simple machines of the time. Up front cost was a bit steep, but ownership cost was quite low, as long as you didn't hit a pebble and get slammed into the gravel from high atop your wheel. Heck, even then a low-budget rider could crawl off and lick his wounds, healing like an animal, much as the uninsured do today in this great land of ours.

Even a simple bicycle can suffer damage beyond the ability of a home mechanic to repair. I've had several frame repairs done by my friend the torch wizard. Without her skills, I would have had to find someone locally or, more likely, have scrounged a frame and transferred parts to it. You'll find frame builders in surprising places, so it's worth asking around. Steel frames can be brought back from some pretty drastic looking damage. Expect to pay for that. Scrounging is generally cheaper.

Carbon frames can also be repaired. I still don't want to deal with carbon's idiosyncrasies, but at least it isn't the disposable material we were led to believe it was as it was emerging as the dominant choice in high performance bikes.

The more moving parts in a system, the more things there are to wear out. The more proprietary parts, the more you depend on a manufacturer to provide replacements. We don't have the after market parts network that automobiles have. You can't just nip down to the parts store and give them year, make and model.

The more complicated the bike and the more it depends on perfect precision, the harder it is for the home hobbyist to cut out the pros and save money by doing the work themselves. You will need to pay the repair shop and wait for them to get to it. Sometimes it's quick. Often it's not, especially during the season when everyone wants their bikes. For every sophisticated function that you gain, you lose independence. You lose accessibility. You lose the durability that simplicity brings.

Humanity voted with its wallet for this. Increased expense and complexity won the popularity contest. Everything costs more because most people were fine with it. You own it now. Can you afford it?

Paradoxes of Pandemic Preparation and Protection

"Stock up and stay home."
  -- Go out every day or two, to see if the stores have managed to replenish necessities cleaned out by panic buying and hoarding.

"Wash your hands as often as possible."
  -- Sign in the drug store: "Restrooms closed for the duration of the epidemic." Also, hand sanitizer not available until further notice. If you're not carrying your own, you are S.O.L.

The grocery store still has a dispenser of sanitizing wipes where the shopping carts are parked. No one has yanked them all out and run away with them.

At the bike shop, it's hardly business as usual, because very little is as usual right now. The winter never really happened, so it's looking like early bike season a month earlier than early used to be. In previous weak winters, sometimes people would show up with their bikes, but more often they don't. This year, we've had a small early surge. It's too small even to be a surge, but more than a blip. One customer who dropped her bike for an early tuneup is a Massachusetts refugee who was told to work from home and decided to come up to Wolfe City and work out of her second home rather than stay down in plague-ridden Massachusetts.

The bike business was already hampered by tariffs and by the massive disruption of Chinese manufacturing as the new coronavirus erupted over there. But the shop owner had to get bikes in, so we're waiting for a few dozen to show up. They will all need to be assembled in case we get a season instead of a nationwide total shutdown.

The schools are closed for three weeks. That means our trainee is available for more hours, although he still has to keep up his assigned schoolwork. We haven't had a lot of customers come in and hang around, so the social distancing thing sort of works. Trainee is a bike racer, so he's already averse to getting sick. The rest of us live in the animal fashion of the working poor. We know instinctively that we cannot get sick or injured. If we don't get any business because there's a nationwide shutdown, or we can't work because too many of us are sick, we know that it's the end for us. There is no national support system, and little hope that this crisis will change that.

Americans have long prided themselves on doing as little as possible for each other. I don't know where that E Pluribus Unum bullshit came from. The obvious operating principle throughout my working life has been Every Man for Himself. We are free to associate, and many do, but those associations have clearly delineated membership. Many of them make no secret that their perimeter is fortified and their members are armed. Others are more benevolent. I suppose we're lucky that the hard-core authoritarians have not quite managed to seize control of national policy, since the benevolent ones have failed utterly to inspire national acceptance.

If we should have to shut down, or I have to be quarantined, I could work from home. I have almost all of the basic tools for a commercial bike repair shop. I can't work on hydraulics at home, and I have not kept up with the 15 or 20 different bottom bracket tools you need to service all comers, but I could get a lot of routine crap done. Somehow the bikes would need to get to me. Either the customers would have to truck them out here, or the shop would have to bring them. They could also provide any special tools a particular repair required, and douse everything with the appropriate chemicals to purify it after it came back from the leper colony. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. It would be cumbersome. More likely nobody would bother.

For now, we sanitize obsessively and wash our hands until they're scaly. We'd been doing gloves for a few years already, just to keep some of the grease, lubes, and solvents off of our skin. We have not adopted masks yet, except for the procedures that made them advisable already. But now you look at every incoming person as a potential suspect.

The cellist arrived at Portland Jetport at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night. Because she fell while hiking a couple of weeks ago, she's been on crutches, and applied for a wheelchair to get through the airport. That meant that I was standing in the greeting area while everyone else got off of two flights that had arrived at about the same time. I watched them stream in and come down a stairway and an escalator to reach the lower level where the baggage claim and the street exits are. A few wore masks. One or two wore gloves. No one made much effort to stand apart, because the system is not set up for it. We arranged ourselves around the conveyor belts in the baggage claim area like bears waiting along a river bank for salmon. When the right one comes along, dart a paw in and snatch it out. The cellist's wheelchair driver waited patiently. He was a quiet, tall young man, probably part of the refugee community that has settled in urban Maine. His presence was calming.

The cellist and I have barely touched since she got here. She extended her stay when the governor of Maryland shut the schools, so she'll be here longer than the two-week quarantine period required for people coming from known hot zones, like Italy. Meanwhile, I'm still potentially exposed every day that I go to work or make a quick sweep through the grocery store because we still can. We don't want to dig into our stash of isolation foods until we know that we have no choice. Otherwise, we might have too little at the point that everything shuts down for real. If one of us gets sick, the other one is almost certain to. But she couldn't stay where she was, because her living arrangements are pretty marginal down there. Her chances of exposure were much greater. That thing that Kurt Vonnegut supposedly wrote, about going into the arts? Yeah, that's bullshit.  Go into fucking finance, people. Become a corporate lawyer. Just go ahead and rape the planet and fleece the chumps for your own fat gains, because it's all for nothing anyway. We can't vote away the Apocalypse any more than someone can pray away the gay.

The internet has developed its own familiar symptoms of proud ignorance, conspiracy theories, doomsayers, spiritual advisers, real scientific medical information, pseudoscientific crapola, and malware. It's a perfect laboratory demonstration of every debate about social, political, and environmental issues. It's like watching a Petri dish getting obliterated under a slimy, furry culture going out of control.

Good luck, everybody.

When things go boom

When I stumbled back into the bike business in 1989, the shop was selling a mix of road and mountain bikes. There was a citizen road racing series around New Hampshire and nearby Maine. Mountain bikes were a strong and rapidly rising category. Local riders seemed to be open to both. The last fade of the 1970s bike boom was dwindling away, while the roar of the onrushing mountain bike boom was winding up like a big jet on the runway.

By the early mid 1990s, the citizen road series was basically defunct. Customers would take ridiculously low trade-ins for the road bikes they were dumping. Mountain bike sales amounted to a feeding frenzy. Not everyone dumped their road bike. Some of them just gathered dust in basements, garages, and sheds until their time might come again.

The shift away from mountain biking locally followed a similar pattern approaching the turn of the century. Our local mountain biking ride group had shrunk to about three people. One of our former riders finally sheepishly admitted that he had been riding on the road.

"I just got tired of cleaning my bike all the time," he said. He liked riding on the road, and was afraid that we would harass him because we were all dedicated mountain bikers. We assured him that we loved road riding, and started a weekly road ride. One rider did try to keep the weekly mountain ride going for a couple of seasons, but it ultimately petered out. It recurred in irregular flickers, like a loose wire sparking, until the last year or so, when a mountain bike resurgence of sorts attracted a fairly regular group again.

From the end of the 1990s until the second decade of this century, the mix of bikes on the floor shifted almost completely to road bikes. A sale of a high end mountain bike became rare. But sales volume also fell, year after year. We were having a little road bike boom, as the nation experienced a similar blip. The average price per bike went up, because there was -- and is -- no real low end in road bikes. The real low end still belonged to wide, knobby tires.

Mountain biking didn't die, of course. It has never come back to its former commercial glory, but its devotees will never abandon it.

Bike sales figures overall have been steadily declining from the high marks of the late mountain bike boom. Categorization offers lots of choices, but deprives the industry of high volume in any category. This means that they can't offer as much price range and variety to customers. The number of units sold is down, while the average price goes up.

Electric bikes spark a lot of consumer interest, but their lowest unit price is at or near four figures, and it goes up quickly from there. Worldwide they are viewed as a strong growth category because so many of them are suitable as a car replacement.

When average price goes up it automatically erects a barrier. There will always be a market for used bikes, but the used bike shopper is limited to bikes that someone else already was willing to buy new. And in most places you can't just walk into the used bike store and browse the racks. There's always eBay and Craigslist, but many of us aren't comfortable with that style of commerce. Hunters and gatherers are different from traders. All three qualities might occur in an individual, but it's not a given.

In a bike boom, people buy machines that they have only considered superficially. They're met by bike enthusiasts who have been thinking about little else for years. Some of those enthusiasts are lifers. They got into it young and never left. Others are well-informed, but just passing through. They'll outgrow it and move on to either real adult motor vehicles or completely different interests. Among the incoming wave in any boom, some will get hooked and stick around. Others will become well-informed during their era, but lose interest by the time their first bike wears out. Or maybe their second.

When booms occur now they're more like pops, or premonitory rumbles that go nowhere. There are too many choices, and most of them cost too much. Among the local fat bikers, for instance, perhaps as many as half of them bought their bikes used from someone else who had forked out the coin for it new. This appears to be somewhat less true for three-season mountain bikes. The road category is virtually dead again.

All riders agree that the roads are not much fun to ride anymore. Even in the 1970s it could be intimidating. Now there are about 100 million more drivers on the roads, in actual trucks, or vehicles built on a truck chassis. People are more distracted, more irritable, and generally more hopeless. The lure of separated bike infrastructure of all kinds is strong. But you won't do much riding if you insist on riding only where it's "safe." The answer to that is, "Okay, I won't ride."

The bike industry is not cycling. What's good for the bike business in any given year may be a bad sign for biking overall. The bike industry is perfectly satisfied if you buy a bike, hang it up and never use it. They do like to see actual participation, because it means that people are wearing things out and breaking them, but just from a bean counter perspective, sales are all that matter. Use drives sales, but sales don't drive use. So when new bike sales drop it only means that people aren't buying new bikes right then. You have to dig deeper to find out why. That opens up a whole world of variables. It sounds expensive and open-ended. In the meantime, a bike economist can only look at category sales and extrapolate consumer interest based on who is opening the wallet for what.

Actual census data would be hard to collect. You would have to send a big team to observe every conceivable cycling venue to count users by type. Almost no one cares anyway.

Individual riders might wonder who their allies are, and where they are. For instance, around here I doubt if there are a dozen dedicated bike commuters, especially over longer distances and open roads like the route I run in commuting season. I didn't choose the route, I simply adopted it as the shortest distance between me and a paycheck where I happened to be employed. For many reasons, I would have been better off to buy a house in a different town, closer to where I work. But most of life is improvised. All this simply means that improvements in riding conditions in one area do almost nothing to make riding better in another area, except perhaps to raise public awareness overall.

Anyone in the middle of their bubble will believe that they're in the middle of a boom. People in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont probably feel like the world is being overrun with off-road riders, because their area is being overrun with off-road riders. But by creating a magnet for a certain user group, the popular area draws riders from far, far away. Those riders may travel through long stretches of country where their kind is little known, and not missed.

Certain categories of enthusiast have to be very enthusiastic indeed to keep up with the related expenses of participation. Cycling is at its most affordable when you can throw a leg over the machine outside your own domicile and start pedaling right from there. I kept waiting through all the long years for more people to catch on to the many benefits of that kind of riding, but it seems to have the least appeal. As a result, conditions have deteriorated because too few people have demanded that they improve.

Our accumulated bad decisions will soon force change upon us. The big question now is whether our species is basically terminally ill -- and therefore might as well just focus on pleasure in our swift decline, or whether we are treatable if we accept a stricter regimen than several generations have so far been willing to adopt. In other words, is it worth bothering to try to create that better world?

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?

Breaking the ice

With the temperature barely 40 degrees (F) and the wind gusting to 30 mph, the day was hardly more inviting than the previous week. But you have to start somewhere. So I did.

Base miles used to be a token thing. We had to remind ourselves not to push big gears before we'd spun the legs for a few hundred miles, one short ride at a time. Short is relative, too. Fifteen or 20 was   nothing. But that's the point of base miles. They were the nothing that adds up to something; the body's reminder of the shape and rhythm of the pedal stroke.

Speaking of the pedal stroke, apparently a recent study has made a high pedaling cadence obsolete. The article I read described the study and did indicate that more work is needed to see how the new information fits in with decades of practice by millions of riders. As usual, a search for answers has turned up more questions. Meanwhile, we all have to live in the real world. I'm going to maintain the cadences that have served me well throughout my cycling career.

Every rider learns the activity from the practices of the riders they know. You learn from your friends.   Maybe you learn from educational programs like Cycling Savvy, Smart Cycling, or a book like Effective Cycling. Most people just start with an interest, buy a bike, and start riding. There are also plenty of magazines and websites. Lots of people who ride and write and need money are happy to find an outlet. There's no shortage of talent.

Anyone who has forgotten to be obsessive about fitness over a long winter will need to take the base mileage phase of the bike season more seriously. I'm physically incapable of going too hard, so that's not a temptation. It's a true rebuilding process.

When I started riding with more than the attention of a child, the people guiding me shared what they knew, including the use of fixed-gear bikes as part of developing a smooth pedal stroke across a wide range of cadence. We didn't focus on that point. The initial challenge was to ride the fixed gear after growing up with bikes that would coast, especially as those bikes offered more gear options as well. The fixed gear seemed like a humorous challenge. It also shaped us as riders without making us think about it. Only after a while did someone more experienced point out the built-in benefit.

A generally human-powered lifestyle will provide a fitness base in that same unconscious way. The fact that I got drawn into the outdoor recreation industry meant that I was doing professionally what people outside the industry have to pay to do. The fact that the outdoor recreation industry pays poverty wages meant that I would never be able to afford the activities any other way. If I wasn't selling the gear and teaching what I knew of the skills, I would not have been there at all.

My mentors in bicycle mechanics were the kind of people who learn how the machinery works and use that knowledge to fund their participation. As skillful tool users, they managed to do a lot of things because they could refurbish old equipment and build some new things with the tools and knowledge they had acquired. They didn't have to follow the more conventional route of making as much money as possible in some unrelated but sufficiently lucrative field and then spending the money on equipment they didn't know much about, to enjoy an activity that they had to fight to find time for. Their interests went well beyond bicycles, and included boats, motorcycles, and airplanes.

The mushrooming crises caused by the consumerist lifestyle make all recreation look extravagant. But at the heart of any human powered recreational activity is the concept of human power. If you are accustomed to getting around on your own feet, or powered by your own exertion in or on a vehicle made for that, you'll be more ready to slide into a more human-powered existence in general.

The separation of human exertion into categories of beneficial exercise, destructive overexertion, and sedentary occupations has led to a general physical decline in which we have some phenomenal athletes, a percentage of fitness hobbyists who are fairly well toned, and a large percentage of people who are so entrapped in the machine age that they have lost most desire and ability to function without a cocoon of mechanical assistance. Labor-saving machines have become barriers to activity. People given leisure face financial demands that make leisure a burden. Free time is just another word for unemployment. Leisure is for the leisure class.

I have always welcomed time to think and to appreciate the beauty that I see around me. But I have had to acknowledge that I pay for this with my precarious financial state, and the likelihood of an impoverished old age, should I live to be old. Perhaps this is the real deal that we should all have been acknowledging. It seemed like we could do better for everyone with our technology, had we been able to convince ourselves to give up the winner-take-all mentality that we had been led to believe was best for us. I've been observing competition for more than 60 years now. I can tell you that it improves nothing but itself. It's a good thing to push your own capabilities. It is not a good thing to build your life around beating other people. It may be natural. It may be the inescapable seed of our destruction. But it ain't good.

In our bloody past it was normal to torture captives and criminals, and to enslave the vanquished. Peel back the technology of weapons until you get to spears, clubs, arrows, and crude blades. At that point, competition for resources makes sense, because hostilities can be contained to more or less natural methods on a short-range battlefield, protecting territories defended by slow-moving ground forces. Border skirmishes keep everyone honest. Start adding alliances and evolving better weapons, communication, and transportation and you reach the point where we perch today, teetering over two or three precipices.

What does it mean to all of you out there? It means that there's a better reason to go for a bike ride than not to.

Unnecessary dangers of the Cotton Valley Trail

Now that the Cotton Valley Trail is complete from Wolfeboro to Wakefield, bike use has increased steadily. It was already a popular ride, but now it actually goes somewhere instead of just out into the woods.

The Cotton Valley Trail has always had more problems than the typical multi-use path, because of the rails left in place for use by the rail car club. The rail car club beat out the non-motorized users when the right of way became available, so all other uses have to bow to them.

Due to the chronic lack of funds for things that actually improve the quality of life for ordinary citizens, there was never enough money to upgrade the trail corridor to safely and pleasantly accommodate the incompatible uses of walkers and riders sharing space with motorized conveyances that of necessity hog the entire width of the rails. In many places, the space between the rails is the only improved surface.

When I was a kid, we used to play on railroad tracks, including bridges. We understood all too well that if we got ourselves killed out there we would be in big trouble for interfering with the smooth operation of the railroad. And if we interfered with the trains and didn't get killed, we would wish that we had. But those were real working railroads.

For years we had noticed that the rail car people seldom put their vehicles on the tracks on the section that runs from Route 109 east down into Wolfeboro. The tracks were removed completely from the mile-long Bridge-Falls Path from downtown Wolfeboro to Center Street in Wolfeboro Falls. From there, the path was sited next to the rails out to the public boat launch at Mast Landing. The path goes between the rails at that point and stays in that nerve-wrackingly narrow space all the way across the first causeway to Whitten Neck Road. After a brief, enjoyable diversion a few yards away from the rails, the path goes back between them for the second, longer causeway across a section of Lake Wentworth.

When you asked the authorities in charge of the trail what could be done to make the crossings safer and the railed sections less stressful, you'd get a mumble of excuses about how the rails had to be there because they were there and to shut up and be grateful. Meanwhile, injuries have piled up, ranging from abrasions and contusions to broken hips, cracked ribs, and the occasional collapsed lung. And the rails almost never see a rail car. In the latest raft of excuses, we were told that the rails are there so that the rail car people can help with mowing and maintenance. The rarity of those work details hardly seems like it's worth the price in damage and injury to bicyclists. But bicyclists come at the bottom of any hierarchy, whether it's on the road or on a path like this. The message is, "suck it up or quit riding."

On Sunday, I left my car at the Allen A Beach parking area and walked to work. It was a rainy day and I didn't feel like riding, but I didn't want to drive into the chronic gridlock of Wolfe City in the summer, or take up scarce parking in our little lot. The walk gave me a chance to document just some of the many unnecessary dangers and inconveniences of the Cotton Valley Trail. It could be entirely great if these were addressed. If some of them aren't addressed, we could lose the whole trail to erosion exacerbated by the presence of the unused rails.

The latest Cotton Valley Trail brochure actually states that rail cars are only used from Fernald Station out to Wakefield. There are many other ways to mow and trim a trail. It is time for the rails to go, and for the trail to be widened and graded for safer use and better drainage.

Look carefully at this first picture. On the left you can just see the rails, buried in vegetation that has been neither mowed nor trimmed in a long time. Imagine that as usable trail width. And this is on a relatively wide section.

At the River Street crossing, the trail moves to the left of the tracks. Again, imagine the generous space available if the rails were gone or buried beneath well-packed fill. It would double the available width. The right of way is already there. The brochure claims that the right of way is 66 feet wide. That much space is never used for the trail.

Sam, you made the ties too wide: These two pictures show the first examples in which the trail is reduced by the protruding tie ends, sometimes covered by vegetation, in other places just hanging out there.  It gets worse.

Oh wait, what's that? Did someone drop something? A hat? A bandanna?

Nope. It's a rock. Someone kindly painted it orange. It protrudes because the fill has settled or washed away. Spray paint is cheaper than actually doing anything about it.

This picture shows how much trail width has been lost because ground covering plants have not been controlled. I suppose this is better than having it lathered with carcinogenic defoliants, but then a wider packed trail surface would achieve the same thing without poisoning anyone.

Even if they didn't remove the rails, the trail would be half again as wide if they just filled and packed up to the near rail.

Here's how much width they would gain if they got rid of the useless rails.

This section of protruding tie ends coincides with a retaining wall. An outbound cyclist, trying to accommodate oncoming traffic, can only fade to the right as far as the ends of the ties. An already narrow trail becomes even narrower. Those rude cyclists! Why do they insist on riding?

Two-way traffic has to get past each other in a space easily spanned by my short little legs.

Not much farther out, tie protrusion is much worse. Lots of dirty looks from pedestrians there, when the oncoming cyclist doesn't scooch right up against the rail to make room. When it's two cyclists passing, one or both equipped with the currently fashionable absurdly wide handlebars, you have to wonder why they don't get tangled more often. They should dismount, right?

What do you call a bike rider who dismounts? A pedestrian.

Approaching Mast Landing you get another good look at wasted space and more protruding tie ends. The rail crossing at the boat ramp has been considerably improved. They filled it in so that the rails are flush with the pavement. This makes them useless to the rail car people, but still slippery when wet for the riders. Non-skid tape is applied occasionally... it's one of the better crossings, and yet it wouldn't need to be there at all if the unused rails were removed.

Just past Mast Landing, the trail goes between the rails to traverse this little residential section. Residential or not, the right of way could support a comfortably wide trail with the rails removed, and it wouldn't turn into the "Cotton Valley Canal" after a heavy rain. Cotton Valley Canal sections are common between here and the Allen A. The rails hold water in the trail bed, just like an aqueduct. If you get there soon enough after a heavy rain, you can ride in water inches deep for many yards. Many, many yards. Riding it during a downpour last week, I was pedaling up a flowing stream for miles, not mere yards.

Welcome to the jungle. These shade-tolerant shrubs, well-watered by the irrigation provided by the Cotton Valley Canal, are flourishing under the conspicuous lack of maintenance.

This shot shows how much trail is lost to the plants. My right foot isn't quite at the rail that indicates the already inadequate width of trail available without the incursion of the foliage.

Here's some trailside erosion on the Crescent Lake causeway. If a rider moves right and wants to put a foot down, it's a long way down. And this is a minor example of erosion compared to the next causeway, across Lake Wentworth.

Imagine this part of the causeway without rails. There's plenty of width for more trail as well as the trailside benches and fishing spots that users already enjoy.

And then there's this. The erosion is undercutting the trail. The rails may be holding it in, but their long-term, barely utilized presence has prevented anyone from properly stabilizing and grading the causeway for longer-term survival and usability.

Beyond Whitten Neck Road, the trail takes a fun little up-and-over, leading to a level section with some sweeping bends. Nice! Except when it rains.

 See the rails over there? They're on a built up level with ditches on either side. And basically no one uses them. The path, meanwhile, is over here, with a little swale to the left and a slope to the right, channeling runoff into it.

At the end of this stretch, the path kinks left to launch riders into another section between the rails.

When I walked the path on Sunday, I saw riders coming toward me as I approached that crossing. As a rider myself, I knew what I would want a pedestrian to do. I walked up to the right of the rails rather than stepping between them exactly at the crossing. I had barely taken my first step on the tie ends right next to the path when I felt a burning pain in my left calf. A wasp stung me, because there was a ground nest in the tie end right next to the path.

That tie end, right there. The pale one with the crack in it. Don't forget your epi pen.

Next causeway, new erosion issues. Here you can see that the fill has actually started to wash down from between the rails. That can spread quickly. 

Here's the outlet and its little gully.

Here are another couple of shots of nasty things for a cyclist to land on if an encounter with oncoming traffic goes wrong. It also shows more of the deterioration of the causeway structure itself.

Looking back toward the causeway, this is just another example of space wasted on the unused rails. On heavy traffic days, riders fan out onto the grass to gain a few places before they get squeezed between the rails again.

This sandy road crossing is usually quite unstable. When the sand is dry, it's very fluffy. The shape of the path going through the crossing does not help a rider set up a good, square angle of attack.

 On the plus side, the rails are often covered by the sand, so they're not as much of a crash hazard. On the minus side, on the rare occasions when a rail car user has come through, the rails are freshly dug out and protruding, and the sand is still soft and treacherous. If the rails are only dug out for "maintenance" operations on the non-motorized facilities of the trail, the danger they present is not worth the benefit they confer. That could be achieved in better ways. This spring, trail crews didn't use rail cars. They drove their personal vehicles in and half-blocked the path with them.

Here's more encroaching vegetation on the approach to the diversion into the Allen A Beach parking area.

I call this Pinch Flat Bridge. The edge of it protrudes more and more as fill settles and washes away. It gets refilled maybe once or twice a year. You get used to it.

The diversion into the Allen A isn't wide, but it's fun. For some reason it just works. 

When traffic is heavy, a rider can stay on the dirt road outside the trail, dive through a few yards down there at the corner, and bail into the beach parking lot itself to reach another dirt road on the far side.

Just watch out for Thumpy Stump, just before the corner. Thumpy Stump has been there for years. You get used to it. But it does suddenly reduce the available space to maneuver past each other.

The parking lot has a big gate in this fence, which is never closed. The path goes in this little gap. It was supposed to serve some purpose at some time. Now it's just another meaningless obstacle, as far as I can tell.

This fallen tree hasn't become a landmark yet, but it's been down for more than a week.

Because I didn't walk any further, I have no pictures beyond this point. There are railed sections between the Allen A and Route 109, all of which would be improved by the removal of the rails. They're just short bridges, but the sharp turns to get between and move out from the rails make them dangerous. The rails protrude when the fill settles, and minor crossings are more likely to be overlooked in a big list of maintenance tasks.

I do like the zigzag maneuvers that relieve the tedium of straight-ahead riding so common on rail trails. In a rail-less environment, I wouldn't mind seeing the ghosts of the crossings left there just to break the monotony. The trail could still be wider and smoother than it is, with the occasional chicane for entertainment. A wider trail would benefit all non-motorized users in and out of the railed sections.

Beyond Fernald, riders are still stuck with the rails for the foreseeable future. You take what you can get. Bike riders represent a much larger demographic than the rail car club, providing a more consistent economic engine. Accommodating them and encouraging them would make financial sense. But maybe a cost/benefit analysis would show that the returns wouldn't be worth the investment. As the trail is currently built, it does send business to the local hospital, and sometimes all the way to Boston, if the injuries are worth the air lift. We just have to work on attracting riders with good health insurance.