You go to ride on the day you have

Only an idiot would go for a bike ride in November rain mixing with snow, with a temperature barely above freezing. So let me tell you what I wore...

Cold weather riding depends on moisture management even in dry conditions. Your body puts it out constantly. Exertion makes you sweat even if the air is cold.

Any outdoor adventurer is advised to wear fabrics that are "warm when wet and fast drying." These fabrics are not as warm when wet as they are when dry. If you expect to get wet, add layers to slow the rate of heat loss through the wet fabric.

Quick review: you lose heat through conduction, convection, evaporation, and radiation. Conduction occurs when you put your warm self in contact with a cold substance -- water, for instance. Or ice. Or cold rocks. Convection is just a fancy word for the wind blowing across you. It could be an annoying cold draft inside your house or a winter gale on a treeless mountain. Or it could be the constant self-created breeze as you pedal through the chilly atmosphere. Evaporation is how your sweat keeps you cool in summer heat, or tries to. It's the body's response to rising internal temperature, so you will perspire when you exert even when you wish you wouldn't. And then radiation is just your precious heat beaming away from you in all directions.

Cold weather cycling is just about the hardest activity to dress for. You can block the wind or mitigate its effect with either shell clothing or more insulating fuzzy layers without a shell. I used to use the second option until I got a particular yellow Sugoi wind jacket that hit the perfect balance of wind blocking and breathability. I wanted something that gave better visibility than my former dark layers, without the full panic mode of hi-viz please-don't-kill-me-yellow. When it was brand new it even repelled water pretty well, but that always fails early in a garment's life. I have never been able to reestablish it in any shell garment, with wash-in or spray-on treatments. But it cuts the wind whether it's wet or not.

For the legs, I used to wear various layering combinations of wool tights with long underwear under and/or wool leg warmers over, with bike shorts as the innermost layer. For sub-freezing temperatures, I would add wind briefs over the shorts. Then I got Sport Hill 3SP fabric XC Pants. They are incredibly effective at blocking wind, while remaining completely breathable. Made of polypropylene, they transport moisture to the surface, where it forms droplets or frost that can be brushed away. So for most cool to mild cold conditions it's bike shorts and 3SP pants. But actual rain adds a factor. Under those conditions I need to turn the outfit into a wetsuit. So I put my lightest polyester riding tights under them.

For the shirt layers, a standard crew neck poly shirt is first.

Followed by a classic wool jersey.

And then a heavyweight (actually pretty light, just thicker) old Craft zip-t

Because the core is critical, I always put a wind vest in the system. Again, Craft. This one with a solid rather than mesh back. The chest pocket is just big enough for my phone.

I led with the shell jacket. No need to repeat. In case I had to stop for a mechanical or other unscheduled delay, I stuffed a Craft warmup jacket with Gore Windstopper panels on the front of it into the rack pack.

Feet just hang down there in the cold wind. For cool rides, I put cut off ends of bread bags over the front of my socks for toe warmers. When the temperature drops to freezing and below, I go to liner socks with full bread bags over them.

If the air is cold and dry, another set of bags goes over the medium-weight wool socks I put over the liners. For wet weather, I put the bags on the outside, over the shoes. Wet shoes take days to dry out. I don't want to ride in wet shoes or go days without a ride while I wait for them to dry. The bags provide better coverage than any of the official cycling shoe covers I've ever had, and I collect tons of bread bags from buying my weekly groceries.

For the challenge of near-freezing wetness I wore these North Face Apex gloves. They are the most wind-blocking gloves I have owned (so far). Not my absolute favorites, because the gauntlet is too tight to pull easily over the jacket sleeve, but top-level protection from cold wind once you've wrestled them into place.

Under the helmet: this old liner from when our shop sold hockey stuff. It's just a simple beanie that pairs nicely with the Cat Ears ear covers on the helmet itself. For really cold rides I use a thin poly balaclava, but usually do not have it pulled down to cover my face. For whatever reason, I have not had problems with frozen face. Maybe it's because I try to do more hiking and skiing than riding when winter is in full force.

Helmet gets taped up over the front vents, leaving the rear vents clear. The headlamp serves as dashboard lighting if I ride at night.

The final accessory is the windshield wiper, a scrap of bandanna for wiping my glasses.

The cold and wet bike: a fixed gear with full fenders. It will keep you warm.

After all that preparation to endure character-building suffering, the rain let up enough that I only had a bit of a chill on the front of my arms once the fabric was thoroughly wet. Seriously nothing debilitating. I looked forward to riding the next day in a similarly wet forecast, but warmer, so without the snowflakes mixing in.

Your friend up in the sky

 Fully into glare season now, our definition of a good riding day changes from our hopes for spring and summer.

In short: your best friend when the sun slants in from the south (or north in that other hemisphere) is a high, dry overcast.

I do love the late autumn and winter sun, but not when I'm sharing the road with motor vehicles. I don't like it when I'm trying to ride a trail with it blinding me and casting deep shadows among the rocks and folds of a challenging off-road course either, but I really don't do that anymore. I would rather enjoy the stabbing glare from a beach or a mountaintop, on foot. Either that or a nice window letting that brilliance and warmth slant across the cup of coffee and some baked treat on the table beside me.

If your schedule allows it, ride your glare season rides during what passes for the middle of the day. The sun will still come in low, but not as low. A cloudy day will expand your safer window by blocking the direct blaze. I have nearly hit pedestrians several times when riding in glare. Blinded drivers are even more likely to hook a turn in front of you when they can't see you at all, as opposed to simply ignoring you.

You can dress for most weather, including a cold autumn rain. Build yourself a fixed gear for those crappy days when you don't want to expose your good bike and its many moving parts to the water and grit. Riding fixed also keeps your legs moving, which is great for generating warmth and developing a very smooth, efficient pedal stroke. It limits your speed on the downhills and makes you exert as the cranks force your feet around. You might resist the pedaling force or simply try to keep up.

Purists consider a brake to be cheating. They can kiss my ass. Slap a front brake on there to help you out when you need it. And fenders. There's no great virtue in slathering yourself with grime while a cold, wet spray saturates you from below as well as above.

Outdoor riding is always more fun than abusing yourself and your bike on a trainer. Cold weather riding is the hardest activity to dress for, but it's worth the trouble just to get out there and log some actual miles. You will redefine "comfort," but at your worst you will still not be as grody as Fridtjof Nansen and Fredrik Johansen were after more than a year in the same underwear. So get out there.

Support your local pedestrian

 On my bike commutes I was seeing a moderately tall, bearded young man walking toward Wolfeboro along Route 28. Usually I would see him somewhere along the north slope between Route 171 and the crossroads at North Wolfeboro Road and Pork Hill Road, but it might be further north before 171 or a little further along, past North Wolfeboro. It took me a while to notice that he was walking all the way into the town of Wolfeboro and walking to various destinations while he was there. If he also walked back out the way he came in, he had to be logging well over 20 miles a day on foot.

I never saw him hitching a ride. He walked on the correct side, facing traffic. I can't recall if I ever saw him walking back northward toward Ossipee, but I might have forgotten it. Whether you see someone along a route depends entirely on your schedules. Our mornings coincided regularly. In bike season I might be starting toward home anywhere within a span of an hour or more. Going in was much more consistent.

The walker wasn't sauntering, but he wasn't speed-walking or jogging, either. When I would see him through the workshop windows, it was generally a couple of hours after I had arrived. The transportation pedestrian maintains a cruising pace, not a racing pace.

Because I hate driving, particularly with other drivers on the road, I have considered various ways to cover the distance to work in the seasons of darkness and frozen precipitation. The obvious first choice would be cross-country skiing. That depends on snow that will provide grip for the skis and smooth running. In New Hampshire, especially with the changing climate, ungroomed snow is often like soapy porcelain or wet concrete. And the skier would have to stay out of the travel lanes, probably outside of the plow drift.

Native Americans in New England invented the snowshoe, not the ski, because terrain and snow conditions here made the short, wide flotation more practical. I do not know if they experimented with some form of traction device lashed to the bottom of it, for the hard, refrozen conditions. However, when snowshoe hiking was the only way to get around, trails would get packed down to a smooth surface. The system worked for a few thousand years.

That was before cars and snowplows. In our modern world, a transportation snowshoe hiker is rare to nonexistent. I have not seen the summer pedestrian pushing into darkness and snow.

On snowshoes, the pedestrian would not be able to maintain more than about 3 miles per hour at best. Skis glide, but snowshoes give nothing away. Plod, plod, plod, you have to take every step. Along the highway, a walker might consider bare-booting it on the pavement when no vehicles were passing, hopping out of the way as necessary. On the stretches with a guardrail, that would require vaulting over the rail and whatever plow-piled snow was in the way. You wouldn't want to chew up the snowshoes on the pavement. Good luck leaping over the guardrail with them on your feet, too. Because a commuting pedestrian is on the road with commuting drivers, traffic will be heavy, requiring frequent leaps out of the way. Or you square your shoulders and forge ahead, leaving it to drivers to do the right thing.

A skier wouldn't be able to match bike pace. Skiing is generally faster than walking, but even on the downhills you won't hit the speeds that a bike can reach. Uphill skiing speeds are totally comparable to walking. So the trip to work and back would take much longer than a bike commute.

Winter rain screws everything up. Especially now, when torrential rains have become more frequent, crossing ten or fifteen miles without a vehicle, along routes designed for vehicles, would take many dangerous hours. Warmer than average temperatures are still much colder than your body temperature. Wetness saps your heat. You can dress for it, but things still have to go smoothly for you to arrive at a safe, warm destination where you can strip off your wet clothes. Arriving at work, that can be awkward. If you have no place to dry the clothes you wore to hike to work, you'll be putting on that clammy mess to head home.

On my particular route, there is a path option for the last three miles into town. The Cotton Valley Trail follows the old rail line, so it is basically straight and level. But you have to survive to get there. Homebound it only covers the first three miles, leaving you to navigate the highway after that. The trail is used by snow machines, bikes, dog walkers, skiers, and the rail car drivers who have demanded that the rails remain in place. They don't specifically clear the rails for winter use, but if the snow and ice cover is low enough I suppose one of them might give it a try. So, depending on surface conditions and time of day (or night) you might be completely alone or in the middle of a bustling winter scene like Currier and Ives only with more dog poop and attitude.

If I lived close enough to work I would definitely walk most of the time. I lived for nine years without using a car to get to my various jobs in the Annapolis area. Only when I moved to a place with snowier roads and a much longer commute did I get a car and start acting somewhat normal for at least part of the year. I like my spot here, so I can't reduce or alter my commuting route to make human-powered methods work safely for the entire year. Maybe if civilization collapses before the climate does I'll be able to ski the abandoned roads to get to work. Someone will have to start making wooden skis for the winter travelers, while we nurse along the simple bikes that survived from the 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st for the summer travelers.

Like all post-apocalyptic fantasies, that one glosses over the violence and destruction that would precede it. We'll never just flip a switch to the post-apocalyptic utopia. Then again, with consensus, we could flip the switch without the apocalypse. Add a human-powered travel corridor to all travel ways. Not everyone can do without a motor vehicle, but the ones who could do it would be more likely to try it if they had a guaranteed route.

The best thing about a snow-based winter system is that you don't have to pay to plow it down to a bare surface. Grooming snow requires machinery and skilled drivers, but it still takes less time and brute force than pushing snow out of the way. Along my route, a human-powered commuter or transportation cyclist could revert to the regular road when snow season ended. The side path would not have to be maintained for summer use. Most likely, the majority of users would like it year-round. That's a fine option. But a ski and walking path could have somewhat steeper climbs, requiring less massive re-grading to establish the route.

Here I am, planning the practicalities of something that isn't going to happen. I did want to be a fiction writer...

The Omnivorous Shop

As our meager snow cover takes a pounding from heavy rain, I wonder what kind of work is likely to come through the door. Thoughts turn toward the coming bike season, such as it may be, but we could as easily see someone with a snowboard or alpine skis to wax, or skates to sharpen. Or, as happens too often, no one at all.

This shop has had to piece together many products to pull in enough money to get by. While cross-country skiing and bicycling remain the principal endeavors, we've also sold ice skates, downhill ski clothing and accessories, some hockey and lacrosse gear, field hockey, tennis balls and inexpensive racquets, badminton, ping pong balls, day packs, hiking accessories... The hockey and lacrosse clientele quickly became too serious about themselves to come to a little omni-shop like this, so we no longer stock more than tape and mouth guards, and a few cheap sticks.

One thing unified our clientele during the last of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Back when mountain biking was really big, the vast majority of our riders did at least one of the other sporty activities. Most of them were in the youth hockey program that was expanding rapidly, but some raced downhill on the school ski team. A few raced on the cross-country ski team. Among the adult riders were lift-served and cross-country skiers, and adult hockey players. Almost no one stuck to pedaling something all year round. There were non-competitive skiers as well, and outdoor generalists who might do a bit of climbing and hiking.

Both the bike and cross-country ski industries have done a lot in the last few years to make those lines more complicated and less profitable. The bike business has been at it since at least 1990. Cross-country skis were actually a welcome refuge until about 2005 or '06, when they really started to screw with things. We'd always had to put up with Fischer's weird ideas, but then Salomon started messing with their solid and successful binding line to see if they could sabotage it, and they did a great job. Meanwhile, Rottefella was pursuing the Shimano strategy of flooding the market with inferior stuff that was made widely available, shortstopping a lot of money before consumers knew what their options were. The better marketed product will always defeat the better made product. It's about convincing consumers. As long as the idea sounds good enough and works well enough to get past the warranty period, you can convince people to "upgrade" to your next piece of crap when the old tinsel falls apart.

The first waves of technofascism seemed to enhance the experience for riders inclined to push the limits or try to compete. Only one or two overactive sentinels like me pointed out that proprietary enslavement was going to end up costing us more than it gives back.

Addicted riders today, in any category, think they're in a glorious age. As long as you can afford to keep up, sure. Keep that needle in there until they find you dead with it, or you finally hit rock bottom and go into rehab. Meanwhile, my low-tech persistence is probably comparable to drinking Sterno and huffing aerosols out of a plastic bag, with only affordability in its favor. I beg to differ, but I know it's open to argument.

Back when a casual participant could enjoy mountain biking to its fullest extent, riding was popular. But the imposition of "improved" shifting systems and the rapid evolution of suspension ambushed many riders who had to take more than a year off and then wanted to pick up where they left off. The only way to keep up would have been to stay on the bike and evolve with the equipment more gradually.

Proponents of engineered trails and over-engineered bikes have suggested that a fancy trail network will attract "younger people with disposable income." They seem not to have noticed that what the area has already attracts retirees with disposable income, because that's the age group that has the money right now. The mountain bike demographic in this area is a few aging young adults whose kids are finally moving out, people in midlife crisis, and athletic retirees who go out whenever their internal organs want to behave for long enough. It's not a place for people on the rise, it's a place for people doing their best to arrest their decline. And some individuals have already expressed their intention to pull up stakes and go someplace warm to live and ride before too many more years pass.

I've lived in a lot of places. When I was a kid we moved so often that I'm not even from where I was born. I never had a home town, or even a town to call home for more than four years, max. Usually it was more like two. But we moved because we had to, not because we wanted to. So when I settled here, it was as much because I had had enough of moving as because this area is any kind of perfect.

Perfect places don't exist.

The bike industry let the demands of the hard-core ruin the experience for everyone else. I don't know how to reconcile the advancement of technology for the gear weenies and stunt riders with the needs of the many, except to say that excruciatingly technical bikes should cost even more than their already inflated price tags and be made in small enough numbers to reflect how many people are actually using them as intended, while the happy masses deserve to get solid, simple, reliable machinery that they can enjoy for many years with minimal mechanical intervention. It doesn't have to be internally-geared hubs. It does have to be more durable than the plastic and sheet metal crap we've been seeing more and more of.

That being said, I acknowledge that shifting derailleur gears seemed to mystify the majority of people who owned them. Indexing started to give them the firm stops they were looking for. One thing led to another, and here we are. But back on the junk heap of history lie simpler machines that allowed for simpler fun that many more people could take up and set aside repeatedly over the course of years. Now if it's been a year you have to wonder whether your brake fluid is still up to its job, and worry whether your shock is holding pressure, and renew the sealant in your tires. Or you could just wing it. That's what most people do.

Bike work would be the most difficult to perform up to in-season standards right now, with our lone work stand half buried in the rental ski rack, and the bike tools pushed safely aside to keep the bench clean for ski wax. The few jobs in waiting are not a rush. The owners of the bikes wanted them stored somewhere out of their way until bike season is undeniably here.

Gale force winds sweep heavy showers against the windows. Notifications on my phone tell me that the power is out at my house. I look forward to an evening by candlelight, trying to drag a cartoon out of myself for my last remaining print outlet. And maybe I'll see if I can make chocolate chip cookies in a cast iron frying pan.

Into the great unknown

With several days left in February, the shop has started making the transition to bike season. It will never be an immediate, drastic shift, because the weather and people's schedules don't work that way. It's always a series of steps. But this is probably the earliest we have ever started them.

For a couple of winters in the 1990s we had a combination of low snow and a surging mountain bike culture. We did a lot of winter repairs for the die-hards who were experimenting with studded tires for the frozen lakes and hard-packed snowmobile trails. That subsided on its own, as we got into a pattern of snowier winters and mountain biking continued to evolve away from the masses.

While the bike component never goes away completely, there is enough of a heritage of real winter sports around here to pull most of our customers into those traditional seasonal pastimes.

This year, the ski trails have not survived the series of rain storms that has pummeled us. So here we are, in the "dead of winter," dead in the water. And then we're slithering on ice when the water we're dead in freezes with the next cold snap.

We have no choice but to ring the dinner bell for the restless cyclists who have been asking when we're going to get busy on the greasy side of things. There must be three or four of them altogether.

I hate trying to work on stuff in the "wrong" season, because the shop is not set up for the slick routines of efficient work flow. Handlebars snag on rental skis. Grease and oil can pollute ski wax. Bikey bench grime is no place to lay a new ski for bindings to be mounted.

Based on the forecast a week ahead, we can look forward to more cycles of dry cold and warm wet. March could continue the trend, or flip it and bury us, initiating a return to ski business. This late in the season, that doesn't mean much in the way of income, but if you're trying to play the touring center game you can't ignore snow before the beginning of April.

For now, I'm preparing rental skis for storage, and rental bikes for the summer ahead. Instead of telling callers they'd be better off waiting for April to bring in their repairs, we're telling them to come on down. February looks like April. That does not guarantee that March won't try to pretend it's January. We're seeing the legendary New England fickle weather elevated to psychopathology.

Memory of meals missed

One afternoon, in the redwood forest, my traveling companion and I had set up our tent in the bargain campsite provided by the California parks department and gone for a little wander among the enormous trunks soaring up to a canopy you could sort of forget about as you examined the vivid green undergrowth in the filtered light. Trees that big seem more like topographical than botanical features.

We returned to find other campers setting up. One was a German woman with a blonde crew cut, riding a touring bike. The others were a couple of hitchhikers, a man in his 20s and a woman who appeared barely old enough to qualify for the description. The road of summer is full of travelers trying their wings for better or for worse.

The young man had just finished a summer stint cooking at an inn in Vermont. He and his companion had traveled across the country swiftly enough to arrive in the redwoods in early September. Still summer, but only technically, the time just after Labor Day is a great one for traveling.

While my own companion and I had given up on culinary gumption and opted for a big skillet full of scrambled eggs, we soon regretted our haste as we watched the young chef whip up something that looked and smelled far more elaborate over the same fire pit.

To make matters worse, he could play guitar and sing. This he demonstrated after supper. We had been joined by a soft-spoken woman with long, straight hair, who asked if anyone minded if she did some background vocals. My own companion, a guitarist and singer herself, stayed in the music circle. I, possessed of only grunts and croaks, wandered the periphery of the firelight, still in awe of the immense forest. The music drifted over me with the flickers of firelight as I tripped over unseen obstacles and got up again, still in the trance of that random convergence of talents in this enchanted place.

Yeah, at the time I also felt like a boring, miserable toad with nothing to contribute. But I was taking it all in anyway.

The next morning, my companion and I had to move on. We had a deadline in Eugene, Oregon, and a few hundred more miles to cover. The chef was making blueberry pancakes.

Several days later, in Oregon, under steady rain, we converged with the crewcut German woman again. I liked her because her watchword was "coffee." "Coffee? Coffee?" she would ask. Even a big jar of instant looked fine to a caffeine freak pushing a loaded bike over wet roads and bunking down in a wet tent each night.

Her name was Marianne. She told us that she had stayed two more days in the redwoods with the chef and his girlfriend, emerging only to go to the little grocery store nearby to get ingredients for the chef's next creation. She said she finally tore herself away because she realized her bike shorts were getting tight, and she was in danger of just settling in there for the winter. We traveled together for a couple of days, eating our own miserable fare, as she described the chef's creations, to give our imaginations a taste of that little bubble of feasting and conviviality.

She left us to rendezvous with other travelers. We rode onward in the rain, a little hungry.