Parts replacement versus "mechanicking" again

 A rider brought in his fat bike because he had accidentally burped out one of the caliper pistons in the SRAM G2 Ultimate front brake. So it's a four-piston caliper with three stuck, one on the floor, and no juice left in it.

I figured I had one shot to do it economically with what he had: reinsert the rogue piston, juice the system with fluid I didn't mind losing, and use the usual pressure tactics to dislodge the other pistons. This meant trying to do at least a semi-effective fill and bleed to get any kind of pressure from the lever.

The procedure failed because the piston seals for the runaway were too damaged to hold the fluid. It gooshed out around the piston too quickly to impart any force on the remaining pistons. There is no back door way to get those bastards out of there. I can reassemble and keep trying, or troll through YouTube videos, but the shop's hour costs about $80.

This is yet another example of how the industry and its technolemming devotees have set themselves up for ever more expensive repairs for the sake of taking a bike ride.

One more time with the old chorus: Mountain biking started out as relatively cheap fun on beater bikes. Certain visionary riders saw that it could be so much more as long as money was no object. Money, and the precious life hours of mechanics who know better, but are stuck in this futuristic nightmare.

It fits right in with every other dystopian horror we're living through.

I've got one more thing I can try that might save this particular bacon before I report to him that he can tinker with it at his leisure or get a new caliper and start fresh. We'll see how it goes.

EDIT TWO HOURS LATER: The one more thing worked. It worked smoothly enough that it wasn't even too pricey, relatively speaking.

The Competition

 Two local beer joints are run by mountain bikers. Both of them have toyed with the idea of starting a shop to cater to their specialty here, but only one of them has actually done anything.

The backroom shop started as a service facility, but recent social media posts indicate that the proprietors might be selling new bikes on a limited basis.

I absolutely love this. They will find out the difference between beer customers and gear customers. If somebody drinks until they puke, they don't come asking for a refund or warranty. "Hey, that last beer was only in my stomach for about ten minutes! You should at least comp me my next one!" However, a person with a history of fraudulent warranty claims on bike frames is still a rider in town. Maybe it will never be a problem. Maybe they'll stonewall anyone who tries it. They're in a good position to take a hard line, because they're just playing store. They won't live and die by their reputation. They'll play at this as long as it's fun, and then quit. Maybe that's how all specialty bike shops should be, since the equipment is ephemeral, and there are lots of ways to quit riding.

The hobbyist shop or the cutting edge techno hangout may turn the bike shop business into something like the restaurant business. A shop will start up with no clear long-term plan, just serving its specialties until their quality slips or the economics catch up with them or they just get tired of it. It'll be the hot place for a few years at best, and then vanish. Another one will already be taking its place.

When we first heard about their operation, it was based on sending the technical repairs to a guy up north a ways, who does earn his living as a bike mechanic, doing a lot of boutique work for the disposable income crowd. The shop puts technology front and center and passes no judgment on expense and complexity, and the relentless march of obsolescence. He's staked out the technological territory.

There are two ways to ride out a period of technological ferment: Replace your bike frequently, or pull way back to solid simplicity for a few decades to see where it all goes. It depends on your goals for riding. I'd decided more than two decades ago that mountain biking was a nice hike spoiled. But someone into the modern style of mountain biking will be enslaved to the technology, because you definitely can't ride that way on the kind of old, simple bikes I own, any more than you could be competitive in road racing with a vintage steel bike with friction shifting.

I can think of a lot of ways that the backroom bike shop could operate, but with no reliable intel from the inside, I will probably never know. For instance, they could piggyback on a real shop's wholesale supply orders to get parts. But then do they take a markup, or bro deal their friends, undercutting every legitimate shop in the area? Or do they make their customers dig up the parts, and only supply the labor and whatever know-how they have, as well as the work space?

The great part is, I don't need to know. All I have to do is deal with whatever comes through my door on a given day, and keep my own simple fleet running for as long as I have the energy to ride it. What happens next door stays next door...except for what gets trumpeted on social media, but you know that's always buffed up to look great, regardless of what's really going on. Time will tell. It always does.

Your Dream Bike Shop

 The invigorated mountain bike crowd around Wolfe City has been dreaming hard about the perfect shop, while, for the most part, driving out of town or ordering parts and watching videos to get their bikes worked on. We've seen very little of them since their renaissance began more than a decade ago. At the time, after not riding since the end of the 1990s, the returning enthusiasts came in one at a time at irregular intervals, expecting to see that we had somehow managed to maintain a state of the art department for their renewed interest, funded by a nonexistent customer base for more than a decade. That's not how business works.

Having rapidly decided that we couldn't possibly know our asses from a hole in the ground, the new in-crowd quickly turned to their own resources, like a shop owner in a neighboring town, who gave it a good long try, but ultimately succumbed to the fact that you don't stay in business by only selling to the people you identify with. Despite his considerable skill set in his own arena, he could not overcome the reality that the vast majority of bike shop income derives from recreational riders on unexciting bikes, with a smattering of other categories, and a few commuters. The balance will shift somewhat from one location to another, but you'll be hard pressed to find a shop in a rural area or a small town that supports itself mainly with the high end technical hardware lusted after by the most addicted consumers.

As of last year or the year before, I was telling people that a nice $500 bike costs more than a thousand dollars now. The quality of mid and low end componentry has plunged to shameful levels of sheet metal and plastic. Cheap suspension remains heavy, inefficient, and hardly worth servicing. The more complicated the ideal bike becomes, the more expensive, complicated, and vulnerable its low priced imitators become as well. I don't mean box-store bikes. I mean mid- and low-end name brands.

Because Wolfeboro has a little pocket of affluence, the enthusiast clientele comes pre-equipped with a sense of entitlement as they view the world around them through their bubble of financially insulated self interest. Self interest is often interpreted as economic activity that supports an individual and their chosen circle on a broad front, but in specialty retail and absorbing, expensive hobbies it is focused narrowly on creating a small world to their liking, and funneling resources to it, while they might participate in the general economy in a much more even-handed manner.

The supporters of the Dream Shop concept have focused on creating for themselves a new endeavor. They've made no positive moves so far, because a number of factors impede them. The pandemic and its shortages of bikes and parts are only the most recent impediment. Prior to that they were already having trouble finding anyone with shop experience who was enough of a sucker to be their human sacrifice and actually run the place. Once bitten, twice shy. They are further seriously hampered by the fact that most of the rest of them have no shop experience at all. And a few years as a wrench or a salesperson doesn't make you an expert.

In the 1990s, when riders would come in foaming at the mouth over something they'd just read about in a magazine (pre-Internet), my answer was, "Just because you know the latest thing doesn't mean you know everything." Because mountain bikes were still closer kin to bicycles than motorcycles, this assertion carried some weight. Now we have been through decades of "latest things," so some guy who did some wrenching five years ago will be dropping into a new and constantly changing landscape. Granted, if this former mechanic has remained an enthusiast, they will know about the newest stuff, and maybe even have dug into it a bit. But someone who has only been a consumer has no idea what circles of Hell await the owner and key staff of a bike shop in this age of throwaway products and rapid mutation.

Very recently, someone advanced a version of the Dream Shop concept that was centered on our existing business. It's all very nebulous at this point. No one is getting excited. But it acknowledges the extensive contributions that the shop has made to the community since it opened in the 1970s, and it acknowledges some of the realities of operating a completely independent, small shop on the fringes of the economy. Move our place ten miles from the big lake and it would have died in infancy, long forgotten. Even in its favored spot, the course has been mostly rough, negotiating changing fashions in outdoor recreation, and the contrast between the bustling summer scene and the small and notoriously frugal population of year-round residents.

What any dreamer needs to understand is that in order to meet the desires of the technolemmings, and still service the real clientele that actually pays the bills, the service department space will have to be large, well-ordered, fully equipped, and subsidized. I wrote years ago about how the many good sports with simple bikes, whose repairs don't eat up vast amounts of shop time and call for expensive tools, upgraded frequently, subsidize the tech weenies with their endless problems with temperamental, fashionable equipment. This is now hampered by the lack of good applicants to serve as mechanics, and commerce still restricted by the effects of the pandemic. We can't get a full selection of products in most of our departments, not just bike stuff. 

One of our excellent part-time and drop-in helpers got to experience the joys of tubeless tire problems last week. A rider came in with a broken valve stem. He was about to go riding with the kiddies, so we did a pit-crew stem change for him and sent him on his way. The next day he was back with the tire dead flat. Neither the tech who fixed it, nor I, were there, so El Queso Grande checked it in as "just worked on here, tire went flat." It looks more accusatory when it's written out than it might be when the rider returns with his tale of woe. But sometimes it's exactly that accusatory. More joys of being on the front lines of service for an expensive, complicated recreational toy.

Helper dropped in soon thereafter, and dove in willingly to figure out what went wrong. We ran the diagnostic process from what you hope it is to what you knew it would be and really don't look forward to. Tighten the stem nut? Nope. Change out the stem again? Nope. We can hear it leaking into the rim. I say it's the rim tape, which will require completely dismounting the tire, cleaning and thoroughly drying the rim, and applying new tape. We also spotted where the rider had dented the rim. I theorized that the impact could have damaged the rim floor and compromised the tape there. That turned out to be the case. So, strip the tire, peel the tape, clean and dry the rim, apply new tape. Note that the rim floor is now permanently deviated at the dent, so tape may be unreliable. Remount, reseat the beads, reinflate. We don't hear hissing. Soap water produces no bubbles. We could be good. Helper leaves to get on with one of his many other endeavors in a busy and admirably productive life.

By the end of the day, the tire was flat again. Odds are, the wheel will have to be rebuilt with a new rim, or replaced entirely with another factory built wheel. The latter option wastes more material but occupies less time. And then the tubeless setup will have to be installed. 

"Tubeless lets you run lower pressures without the fear of pinch flats," say the technolemmings. Yep. But you can still ding your rim and make tubeless operation impossible. You can also pinch flat the actual tire casing. 

This is the reality of the enthusiast shop. Helper, who is working off his debt for a Specialized e-mountain bike, put in probably three hours not curing the problem. I say this not to indict his lack of skill. He did nothing that any of the rest of us would not have done as well. It's an indictment of the technology and a warning to the dreamers. I'm sure it will fall on deaf ears.

I closed out my week with a "simple pad replacement and brake bleed" on a Trech road bike with Dura Ace hydraulic brakes. Following Shimano's own recommended procedure for that brake, I dismounted the caliper from the frame. Because the brake lines run internally, that still didn't let me get a perfect rising line to the master cylinder in the brifter body. The brifter itself had to be partially disassembled to expose the bleed port. And the handlebar stem clamp had to be undone for part of the late stages of the bleed, which meant that I had to undo the rider's GPS mount, which was blocking the four stem bolts. This is after the standard removal of the brake pads, resetting the caliper pistons, and inserting the bleed block.

They make it easy to get a wrench on the mounting bolts for that caliper, don't they?

Neatly tucked into the crook of the rear stays, the caliper also sits only a few inches from where the brake line emerges from the interior of the frame. The bleed port is on the front end of the caliper, aiming down.

I made the Bleed Board years ago for the many cases similar to this one, in which the brake needs to be dismounted from the frame to do the bleed.

After the bleed, everything has to be completely reassembled in order to find out if what felt good on the bleed block will actually feel right on the brake rotor. In this case, not so much. But by then it was long after closing time, and I still had to ride home. Another 10 p.m. supper. When I get back in the shop after the bike has been hanging for a while I have an idea for a shortcut to chase the last little air ninjas out of it.

We haven't even gotten into tooling up seriously for the smokeless moped market. Smokeless mopeds appear to be unavoidable, at least for now. When a category of technology comes to dominate your industry, regardless of whether it's a good idea, well executed, you have to deal with it.

All the time that someone spends on the delicate needs of sophisticated, expensive machinery is time that we don't have for the high volume of simpler repairs that keep the real majority of America's bike fleet rolling. This will remain the reality, no matter what the dreamers envision. You remember the sappy saying, "If you can dream it you can do it?" Yeah, that's crap. How often have you dreamed that you could fly? Then you wake up.

A world of squish

Once again I spend a couple of hours chasing down weird issues in disc brakes.

The customer came in with his Giant Revolt gravel bike. He said that the brakes needed bleeding, especially the rear, because the lever was pulling right to the bar.

I squeezed it. It was pulling right down. But at the end it didn’t have the telltale squishy feeling of air in the system. It came to a sort of firm stop, as hydraulics go. I told him I thought that it probably just needed new pads.

When I pulled the old pads out, they were only about one-third gone. Because the bike uses Giant’s cable actuated master cylinder, to work with normal brifters, I thought maybe I could snug up the cable part of the system.

No such luck.

I had to root around on the internet for a real service manual. There are little screws all over this unit, so I wanted at least a sketch map to confirm where to attach the syringes full of mineral oil.

As always the configuration of the rear brake line makes it impossible to get a clean, rising line from caliper to master cylinder. I had already taken the bars out of the stem to get access to the cable anchor screws. That made it easy to turn them 90 degrees to the ground to orient the bleed port upwards. But the brake line itself serpentines down and under and around in ways that make the rising line approximate. I hoped it was good enough. Sometimes it is.

After doing the bleed two complete times, the lever feel was still no better. Screw it. I threw a set of pads in, and bingo.

Well, bingo-ish, anyway.  Because I never got to feel this bike in the flower of its youth, I have no way to know how it felt at its showroom best. I can tell you this much: almost every set of hydraulic brakes I have operated has felt squishy, even when the rider was perfectly happy with it. A mountain biker passing through this spring laughed when he felt a set of brakes that a noob complained were too soft. “They all feel like that!” he said. “Get used to it.”

The only hydraulic disc brakes that haven’t felt squishy have been overfilled and rock-like. They’ve needed to be bled down to get the pads to retract at all.

I’m really starting to hate them.

I’m also starting to hate Outside Magazine. Always the rag of egotistical vacationers, their increasing attempts to represent cycling expertise are oriented toward the hobbyist with disposable income and no resistance to technofascist propaganda. Because of all my searching for info on disc brakes, Google fed me this article on “Why you should throw your rim brakes in the trash.”  Hobbyist McMoneybags says that when he’s riding down a mountain pass in the rain, rim brakes don’t work at all on his carbon rims. Dude! I’ve found your problem! Use disc brakes on your tech-weenie wanker hoops. Preach to your well funded hobbyist buddies about what they really must have. But save your pronouncements about what should be the future of a once simple, durable, and highly user serviceable technology.

The things we make and do for each other

In a recent laudatory puff piece on Pinkbike, about his visit to Shimano's factory in Japan, Richard Cunningham used the expression "bowels of the factory." This common metaphor made me laugh out loud. What comes out of bowels, after all?

After decades of cleaning up the wreckage that lies on the shore after a tidal wave of innovation devastates peaceful villages over and over, I have no love for obsessive gear weenies and the corporate behemoths that feed off of them.

Cunningham described and praised the ingenious automated machinery that Shimano designed for themselves, eliminating the human touch from nearly all aspects of their production line. Machines feed material to machines that stamp out parts combined and transported by machines, to be assembled into machines eventually to be ridden by people.

In the article, Cunningham writes, "Keizo said that Shimano realized early on that automation was going to be key to their survival, so they began the learning process by building their own assembly robots – first, developing some of the automation in the machining and forging factory, and culminating with their precision assembly process. Shimano’s experiment grew into a new enterprise and at some point, they were building robots for other industries as well. Connecting the dots, it could not have been a stretch for Shimano to automate a derailleur shifting system after inventing the robots that assembled those components in the first place."

Industrial manufacturing began as a way to speed up individual craft processes and increase their output. It also assured more uniform products that were easier to maintain and repair, that could provide measurably similar performance wherever they were applied. Factory output required fewer people to produce it, compared to individual artisans working start to finish on the same kind of product. Factories could also produce much larger items, through the intermediary of large machinery beyond the means of an individual artisan. Early factories still needed quite a bit of labor, however, to operate and maintain the machinery. Human hands moved a lot of things throughout the increasingly standardized processes. Management and the accounting department have been working steadily to carve down the human element from the beginning.

The relationship between human labor and industrial manufacturing has been dark and complex. The self-appointed emperors of the industrial age viewed the workforce as serfs. Hours were long, management was oppressive and suspicious. The owners wanted to get as much as possible, and pay as little as possible for it, from the contemptible grunts they hired, chewed up, and spat out, in a human reflection of the growing culture of assembly lines. Labor organized. Conditions improved. But labor and management remained opposing camps. Is it any wonder that "Take This Job and Shove It" became a popular anthem right before people started to notice the sudden drain of manufacturing jobs to countries overseas?

Automated manufacturing frees people to take "better" jobs that don't require as much actual laboring. But they remove the human touch, the human soul. Sure, we invented the soul, and can make it obsolete, but an awful lot of our social conventions were based on humans contributing to the common good. What's left when we don't do that anymore?

If mechanized production lines really do a much better job producing reliable parts, riders are safer by that incremental degree. Only time will tell if we have any more massive recalls like Shimano's crank debacle in the mid-1990s, or the Lambert/Viscount fork failures of the 1970s. Those hinged more on design flaws by the supposed better brains in the engineering department than on manufacturing errors by the drones down on the line.

Vestiges of the human touch remain among those of us who try to fix things. Underpaid and still considered overpriced, we alternate between following the manuals when available and improvising when authoritative guidance can't be found. Last week, I did a restomod on a 1970s Windsor that an older gentleman had found at a bargain shop. He loved the classic styling, the chrome lugs, and general elegance of the bike, but wanted the bars a little higher (of course) and the shifting more accessible. I put on a Technomic stem,  aero brake levers with interrupter levers, and stem shifters. He wants the option of the drop position, but neither of us thought he would like barcon shifters. I hoped to find a vintage set of Suntour Power Shifters on a stem clamp, but I had to settle for a recent set of SunRace friction shifters. The right one didn't offer very good leverage for an aging hand, so I substituted a longer lever from our salvage bin on that side. If a set of Power Shifters ever shows up, I'll call him in to make the switch.

At the same time I'm refurbishing something 40 years old, I might have some tweaky marvel from last week on another stand, or next in the queue, needing its internally-routed cables replaced, or some little air ninjas chased out of its hydraulic brakes. And there are always noises to evaluate in bikes with low spoke-count wheels and carbon fiber everything. Fatal or trivial? Quickly now, the guy wants it back for the next hammerhead ride.

Far away, the presses pound in an automated factory, and robot forklifts carry pallets full shiny new possessions toward what they hope is a waiting public.

Fixing the unfixable

As I was picking congealed grease out of a Shimano Rapidfire shifter pod dating from about 1991,

I actually appreciated how solidly it was made, and how reliably it worked compared to its temperamental descendants. Early versions of a product, even one with lots of conceptual flaws, will be made much better than later versions, because the promoter doesn't want it to self destruct before establishing itself among the uninformed as a solid product. Only then do the manufacturers start watering it down to increase profits.

I hated the underlying concept, and still do. Shimano announced Rapidfire in a triumphant video that they sent out to shops before the 1990 season. We watched our copy in horror, anticipating in full detail the hell that it would unleash on mechanics and riders. We could do nothing to stop it, despite my best subversive efforts. It included the admonition that there was nothing we could fix inside these pods, so don't even try. Word in the cycling press was that intrepid mechanics had disassembled brand new units and reassembled them exactly as they had been, and they mysteriously failed to function. Whether this was true or was disinformation planted by Shimano I never found out. It implied that there was some magic Shinto pixie dust inside these units that would fall out if barbarians profaned the interior.

I plastered these cartoons all over Interbike's Philadelphia show for a couple of years:

It was, of course, to no avail. The technofascists won, leading the technolemmings off of cliff after cliff. But I digress.

The 1991 pod clicks solidly into gear as soon as you flush out the pus that they used for grease. It congeals into a substance we call earwax. My colleague Ralph came up with that one. He was an excellent wrench who was smart enough to get out of the business. It's been bad for his waistline, but probably good for his bottom line, to pursue his interest in computers instead of the 19th Century technology of the bicycle, dolled up with 21st Century materials as it is today.

When hackers and their malware finally make the Internet untenable, bicycles will be waiting to receive the refugees of the Digital Age.

Back to the pod from '91: it felt weird to have so few clicks. I've had to clean out many later versions, chasing more gears, so an original six-speed feels very short. But the wider spacing with fewer stops provides more margin for error. Cable tension has to be relatively accurate, but not neurosurgically precise.

Within a couple of years, the Japanese Buggernaut had enclosed the pods more completely and nearly doubled the number of parts inside. This made them less vulnerable to invading grit and mud, and generally more reliable. It also concealed the insidious activities of earwax under a Darth Vader-like black mask.

In the 1990s, the bike industry, led by Shimano, used the customers mercilessly as test pilots. You might expect such shenanigans from small companies making boutique componentry, but you saw more of it from the big players with lots of leverage. You see it today as manufacturers hump their customers in vulnerable "enthusiast" categories with model year changes intended to make addicts want another hit. There are no white hats in the big componentry business. With the coming of the Electrical Age, batteries are all the rage in everything one might electrify.

Honestly, how did any of us survive the 1970s and '80s on the paleolithic crap we had to ride? In his book, Four Against the Arctic, author David Roberts told the story of four Russian hunters in the 18th Century who survived on an island near Svalbard for six years before being rescued. He and other members of his research team observed that people from a later time, less inured to routine hardship, probably would not have survived. Indeed, look how many perished on Arctic exploration trips when their technological cocoon ripped, dumping them into the elements where Inuit survived and thrived.

We're not Arctic explorers, but we are certainly allowing ourselves to be increasingly isolated and softened by accepting more and more technological intermediaries between us and the realities of the tasks we choose to tackle. Some of these can enhance safety and functionality, but an awful lot, particularly in cycling, pander to riders in search of marginal gains at more than marginal increases in cost, and drive perfectly functional older stuff underground.

Would I miss my outlaw bravado if the stuff I use was totally mainstream? Against what would I rebel in Biketopia, with beautiful routes and intermodal interfaces everywhere? Why don't we build it and find out?

Can you afford to be a technolemming?

In the 1990s I coined the term "technofascist" to describe the forces in the bike industry and their propagandists in the cycling press that insisted on ramming their innovations down everyone's throats. Recently I came up with "technolemming" to describe the consumers who self destructively run off the cliff en masse when the industry tells them that the newest great thing is just beyond the edge of it. There are more good reasons to avoid electronic shifting than to embrace it.

About once a week during the height of summer, someone comes into the shop where I work in a resort town because their electronic shifting has developed a mental issue. Among year-round residents, almost no riders own it. The ones who do are wealthy. In spite of this, the cheerleaders of over-sophisticated technology tout its reliability. Like many people in an abusive relationship, even the ones who are being kicked around by their temperamental lover swear that they still think it's worth it.

A misleading promo for SRAM eTap made it sound like they had developed electronic brakes. I had a good laugh over that for a few days until I double-checked before citing it in this blog. SRAM just has hydraulic disc brakes to go with their wireless electronic shifting. I had to perform therapy on an eTap shifter this summer. There's nothing intuitive about it. You have to learn and remember procedures, and be prepared to have nothing anyway if the batteries die or it develops any number of mysterious ailments of tiny circuitry. But its proponents fall back on statistics. More of it works than doesn't, and that should be good enough to get you to part with the coin.

I've also unstuck a few hydraulic calipers each season. Sure, brake cables can rust on a neglected bike, but sophisticated stuff rots and binds up in so many more and intricate ways. It's all great fun for the short-term addict, but it's an expensive relationship if you try to stay in it for the long haul. Crap that breaks and wears out in a few seasons may be good for the economy, but it is bad for our species and our planet. We've got to get into the habit of owning things for longer and spending whatever we spend on them to fix them, and to buy the time to use them. A bicycle used to be an elegantly simple escape from tweaky technology. The industry couldn't throw that away fast enough when the easy money hit in the 1990s. That's become the minority view of retro-geezers and weirdos. Even your stalwart "bikepackers" embrace hydraulics and suspension, judging by the photos. And those are still consumer activities that waste a person's energy on going away from their productive lives, rather than integrating their exertion into their productive lives.

Still without a car, due to a rather humorous setback suffered by my mechanic*, I rode my 29 commuting miles yesterday under threatening skies in the morning, and under the delivery of that threat in the afternoon. Given the wetness, I rode the old silver fixed gear, for ultimate simplicity. It had been perhaps a couple of years since I used it for a commute. Coming at the end of a week of full-distance commutes, it was kind of grueling. The temperature was in the 50s, with increasing rain for my whole ride home. People travel to distant lands to be this uncomfortable climbing mountains, or trekking across wildernesses, when they can be cold, wet, miserable, and totally thrashed just getting home to supper. I would not trade it.

I've had a lot of purely recreational adventures, all non-motorized. But the baseline through the decades has been bike commuting. Particularly once I moved to a rural area, I have not been able to live entirely car-free, but I will inject transportational cycling wherever I can.

Under the heading of adventure commuting, I did do park-and-paddle commutes in which I used my kayak to cross about four miles of lake and connecting channel, ending with a walk across town to work. Those were great fun, and did save some car use, but took about twice as long as a bike ride all the way from home. I did like the challenge of facing whatever the weather was dishing out: wind, rain, sleet, snow, fog, or placid beauty. Because lake traffic basically vanishes at the end of summer, I would push the season into darkness. Yeah, I might die out there, but you could have a car accident, too.

I would ski to work if there was enough graded width outside the travel lanes on the most direct line to town. Unfortunately, it would be a long, rugged bushwhack with the terrain as it is.

It is more beneficial, physically, economically, and environmentally, to use non-motorized ways to go places you have to go anyway. It is your physiology, your economy, and the environment in which you live that all improve as a result. And yet, because there are considerable social benefits, it's not just self indulgent. Traffic is eased, parking pressure is alleviated, and more people are in better shape.

A shift to durability and more physical engagement with our lives would require a period of adjustment. I don't bother to make a lot of noise about it, aside from my incessant personal whining, because so many people have so many valid excuses born of the technology, infrastructure, and attitudes we have evolved. If you're in a hurry -- and who isn't -- you get in the motor vehicle and mash the throttle. If you want to get a lot done with an awkward load of equipment across a wide geographical area, you use a motor vehicle. I have to borrow one tomorrow to take two cats for their routine vet checkups, because my car is still in the shop.

*The setback my mechanic had fits the theme of over-sophistication: He'd been stacking cars in his shop when he leaves at the end of his day, one on each lift, and another one parked below. My car was in the upper berth above a Mercedes. The Mercedes developed an electrical problem that made it immovable for about 3 hours while the mechanic sorted out its electrical issue (or dragged it away with a chain. He didn't say).

In many ways, I consider my life to be a series of carefully thought out mistakes, interspersed with impulsive blunders. I got here by a series of things that seemed like good ideas at the time. If I'd known how a lot of them were going to play out, I might have narrowed my focus earlier and lived an even less acquisitive life. But you can't change one thing without changing everything. Whatever alternate universes exist, this is the one in which I appear to be. In another one, my parents never met.