The perversion of the fat bike concept

Looking at a fat bike on our sales floor, I compared it to its ancestor, the Surly Pugsley.

The Pugsley was a production version of one-offs built for unsupported exploration on difficult terrain. The same way that original mountain bike builders used existing items and gradually evolved specific variations as the category evolved, so did the Pugsley try to use as much existing technology as possible. The offset fork, for instance, was sized for a standard rear hub, so that an unsupported rider in the wilderness could have a spare rear wheel. The frame was designed around widely available parts except for the rims and the bottom bracket necessary to get the chain past those wide tires. The bike was mildly impractical rather than wildly impractical.

The fat genre mutated rapidly as the industry sensed that it might go mainstream and open up another channel of exploitation. Unfettered fatness has led to the completely specialized components, isolating the genre in its own bubble and eliminating the practicality of its original form.

Surly has moved the original Pugsley to the touring category. They've tweaked the frame a little to make it a better load hauler, but the frame designated as Pugsley is the only one with the offset fork and other expeditionary leanings. The rest of the fat line is in the sport category.

Super fatness may be the wave of the future if the collapse of civilization eliminates most or all paved roads. At the beginning of the 21st Century, it was less than a hundred years since there had been no transcontinental roads in the United States. It was a big deal the first time someone managed to get one of those newfangled automobiles from one coast to the other under its own power, in 1903. Existing infrastructure will crumble quickly once we step back and let it. Look what happens, especially in northern states, in just a year or two.

Of course the riding population may be less thrilled with the modernization of their machines once they can't get parts delivered overnight from Amazon, and watch YouTube videos to learn how to install them. We'll be back to walking in less than a generation. Or we'll return to real horsepower.

Do you know why a draft animal is called a draft animal? Because none of them volunteered. Remember that when you're trying to saddle up Old Bess or learn how to drive a team of oxen on your daily commute.

Assuming for the moment that civilization isn't going to topple any time soon, bicycling remains a recreational diversion for nearly all riders in North America. People's interest may not outlast one set of tires. It seems impossible that a large enough number of people will be able to keep pissing away money like that, but I guess the money's good for now. Since fat bikes were a bit of a circus act to begin with, making them more cartoonish isn't that big a deal.

Commuting like your life depended on it

As a person ages, regular exercise becomes more important to keep the body moving and the mind engaged. Well before you reach the point where someone is holding your elbow and guiding you gently across the carpeted floor of the nice facility in which you spend your last days, you'll get around better if you do as much as you can under your own power.

Wolfeboro is full of old people. The median age in New Hampshire is rising in general, but certain towns attract retirees, meaning that the population is not only aging in place, it's recruiting people who have left the work force. This provides a lot of subjects to observe.

As I watch the retirees through the years, I see that the active ones  -- not surprisingly -- do better than the inactive ones. The local working-age commuters also enjoy an automatically better fitness base. Because of my foolish life choices, I'll be in the work force until they dump my body in an unmarked grave. So it's vitally important to me to stay in shape and save money. Transportation cycling, even for half the year, makes a critical difference.

The bike path system in town draws the largest percentage of locals who pedal. Anyone not fortunate enough to live within a half-mile or less of an access point is very likely to drive to the trail, unload the bikes, perform their obligatory exercise, and drive off to whatever is next. This is also true of many riders who are not yet retired, especially in tourist season. The Cotton Valley Trail is about to be completed all the way from Wolfeboro to Wakefield, fulfilling a plan published back in the 1990s. This makes it a destination journey for people who like to drive around, sampling different paths and trails.

The trails also attract walkers, some with dogs, some with strollers. During peak usage periods, riders have to negotiate this crowd, and the non-riders have to put up with the cyclists.

Walking is actually the best way to get around the tight center of Wolfeboro. I use the bike to get to town, but for any errands right in downtown I will walk, making better time than anyone on wheels when the traffic is at its height. Even when traffic is sparse, a cyclist will have to negotiate left turns and hills, and then find a secure place to park. If the distance is a half-mile or less, hoof it.

On trails or on the road, the vast majority of riding is done for recreation and exercise, separate from the utilitarian needs of daily life. A tiny handful of people use bikes for transportation. Most of them have an athletic background of some kind. We slip through Wolfeboro's legendary summer traffic with ease, but the prisoners of internal combustion all have their reasons to stay sealed in the can, barely moving on a really bad day. They're right: the blockage only lasts for a little over two miles at its worst. Then they can rip along, formation flying with their fellow motorists, far faster than some sweaty idiot pushing on bike pedals.

In the winter, I do not push bike pedals. With access to the cross-country ski trails, and a love of winter hiking and mountaineering, I have always set aside the bike when icy roads and encroaching snowbanks made it an unfair imposition on the road users who really truly can't get around any other way. Loggers and tradesmen need trucks. People who have to cover a lot of distance need to go faster than 15-20 miles per hour. We're all in this together. Yes, many road users could benefit physically and economically if they left the car home and pedaled on the errands on which you see them out there, but a lot needs to be done to make that easy and inviting. Right now it intimidates them.

In winters with little or no snow, the roads are as clear as in summer. Then I will ride, because I am not fenced in by a snowbank.

At some point, even a fit and healthy person starts to get physical problems. A slowing metabolism means that the pounds pile on much more quickly when the exercising stops. If people have walkable and bikeable routes to routine destinations, they have the option to leave the armored wheelchair in the garage, and get a little more conditioning without having to think about it. They'll never believe that they could change the traffic mix in their favor if they all just went for it. They stay in their vehicles, scaring themselves and each other so that only a few at a time ever give it a shot. And then it scares them, so they go back into the car.

Some people love their cars and would never consider getting around by bike. And they don't automatically rot away after age 70 as a stark warning of the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle. Some people manage to live long lives of happy smoking. There's no guaranteed formula. But the odds favor someone who remains active. I feel decrepitude eagerly hook its claws into me when I'm forced to be inactive. Even though the commute sometimes just feels like a treadmill grinding me toward my anonymous death, I know that it is helping me.

No regrets

As I cleaned up tops and slash on Sunday, I kept waiting for Ed Begley Jr. to fly over in a solar powered plane and shit on my head. But I stand by my reasoning in cutting at all, and then in cutting so much. Since the very best thing you can do for the environment is kill yourself, most of us settle for second and third best and call it exemplary.

Around 2002, this is how it looked. As of last Wednesday morning, it looked pretty similar, except that we built a sunroom/music studio off the front of the house in 2012 in a final effort to give the cellist's teaching program a base of operations.

This is the music room when it was brand new. Note the shadows. This darkness bracketed the day, day after day. I would look at the aerial photo of the place on Google Maps and realize what a tiny slice of sky we had.

The trees won't protect you from the government satellites and the black helicopters. They've got thermal imaging and all kinds of weird heinous classified stuff we can barely imagine.

By the end of Thursday, this had happened. Ain't no point in buyer's remorse now. It's barely an eighth of an acre, if that, but it's still a hell of a jolt after 27 years in the shade of forest giants.

White pines are a very assertive species. They thrive where the cycle of fire has been interrupted, overspreading the pitch and red pines that need fire to propagate. I've been tempted to torch a few yards of another part of the property to give those other pines a new generation. In the meantime, taking out this stand seems to have excited a lot of the bird life. Insects, too: because we have not had a real frost yet this fall, dragonflies were patrolling today, and cicadas buzzed in the remaining treetops. But for the sun angle and the color of the leaves, it could have been a summer afternoon. It isn't right, but it's how things are.

Pushing the edge as far back as I did, I can put in a margin of spruce to create thick, low screening from the neighbors, whose logging activities precipitated this whole upheaval. The property line shaves surprisingly closely, within the margin of the trees that are still standing. I want to make damn sure we are not looking at each other's stuff when this is all over. I did not move to a place like this just to stare into my neighbor's back yard. If I could put up with that, I could do it someplace that actually has an economy.

Living in a place like this and caring enough about a bunch of stupid trees to shed a tear over them relates directly to my bicycling activities. I hoped to inspire interest in non-motorized transportation and recreation, starting way back in the 1980s, when you actually had to get your stuff printed on paper and physically distributed to readers. The sprawled-on world I left behind has continued to fester, spawning more and more land rape as the human population burgeons. Even here, things are way more built up than they were when I moved into the little shack from which this house has grown. Fortunately, we have few resources for outside interests to extract, and we're not near enough to anywhere for industry to locate here. Unfortunately, we have to trade on our illusion of wildness, combined with our convenient proximity to the northern margins of sprawl. It's a constant battle between commercial interests that want to rape a little more and a little more to bring in more chumps, and the good stewards who have to remind residents over and over that we lose it all a little at a time.

New Hampshire is among the most forested states in the country. However, the reversion of farmland to forest has been offset by heavy development in the more urbanized southern part of the state. When it comes to wildlife management, clearings and fields have an important role alongside forest stands in various stages of succession. It's all part of the big mosaic. The hard part is waiting for stuff to grow, which it won't start to do until next April.

It would be ironic if Hurricane Matthew blasted in here in a few days and took out a bunch of trees. On the plus side, fewer of them are located within falling distance of the house. If the wind diminishes, we could definitely use the rain. But it would wipe out a holiday weekend's tourist influx.