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.

People you don't want trickling on you

 Specialty retail is hard, but specialty retail in a small town is even harder. In a small town where the median income jumps by six figures in the summer, the machinery of trickle-down economics operates in plain sight.

 Back in the 1990s, slopping over a bit into the 21st Century, we operated under the philosophy, "Charge what you're worth, and be worth what you charge." Since then, the cost of tooling and the complexity of the systems we have to master has made it harder and harder to stand out and turn a profit. As each subcategory of bicycle becomes more narrowly focused and intricate, a few specialists emerge to cater to the dwindling number of addicts who can afford -- or think they can afford -- to pay whatever it costs to keep their chosen machines running. A town this small can't support all of those specialists, nor will it fund a generalist shop with well-equipped departments for every possible need. When the machines were simpler, we could do an excellent job, charge what was a decent price at the time, and only go broke very gradually. It was so gradual, we didn't even notice it. We were still having too much fun.

Summer is the busy season. It is nowhere near as busy as it was in the 1990s, but it's still more bustling than winter. Winter brings its own type of business, but without the second home crowd that swells the population by tens of thousands and raises the median income by hundreds of thousands for a couple of months.

In our year-round customer base, the income range covers everything from SNAP and Medicaid to stock portfolios and bragworthy adventure vacations. So we have some indigenous tricklers as well as the seasonal ones. Ideally, we wouldn't burn any of them off. In real life, however, some go away mad when things go sideways, and others turn out to cost more than they trickle.

The high-cost tricklers divide roughly into two categories: accident prone and abusive of their equipment, and outright deceitful. The deceitful may also be accident prone or abusive of their equipment, but they are the ones who make a stink afterwards and try to strong-arm you for warranty, or cover the tracks of their abuse before presenting an item for evaluation.

In a small town, you often have to maintain a working relationship with people in life outside of the shop. You may even be friends, or at least friendly. That makes the diplomacy more delicate when they want to support a local business and you know that whatever they buy is going to come back in pieces within a few days to a couple of months.

Some of these human booby traps manage to bugger up their bikes in ways that tie up a work stand for days, and/or call for parts that are very hard to get or very annoying to install. Given the way the latest bikes are designed, just about anything is very annoying to install.

It extends to ski season as well, especially when the misfortune magnet has a taste for higher-end equipment. That stuff is built for speed, not for durability.

In the animal world, insects that are toxic often have distinctive color patterns so that predators know to avoid them. In the retail world, we have to learn to identify the specimens that will end up forcing us to regurgitate the money that they put into our coffers. A refund may have costs attached that take more out of us than just the purchase price. Even if it just zeroes out, in all likelihood we didn't have the money long enough to make the tiny bit of interest that you might get from a sufficiently colossal bank balance. And credit card transactions in either direction have bank fees.

Both the merely jinxed and the outright duplicitous usually end up shopping elsewhere, relieving us of the diplomatic issue as they search for either the perfect place that sells things that never malfunction, or new suckers who haven't figured them out yet. But occasionally they return, forced by momentary need, or seized with nostalgia, or perhaps just hoping that we've forgotten the last time.

Celebrities, Networking and Trickle-Down Economics

Summer brings to Wolfeboro cars that cost more than your house, and people who can afford several of them. It also brings the brief visit of a television personality who has developed a strong affection for the place.

I used to check out the Forbes 400 every year, to see how our "locals" were doing, but I haven't checked the scores yet this year. The billionaires list is updated to 2019, but the latest 400 I can find is from 2018. No matter. It's just like bird watching. "Oh look, there's a Yellow Bellied Sapsucker. And there's a Market Manipulating Cash Amasser." You don't really need to know. It's just a hobby.

Earlier this week, a woman from one of the lakefront houses called to ask if we sell electric bicycles. I explained why we don't, and mentioned a couple of people in the Millionaire Motorbike Club that I thought she could call for more information. I assumed that they already knew each other, because, over the years, I have found out that most of the super rich in the summer population go to the same church. Indeed, the founder of the MMC has been an evangelist for e-bikes, and has gradually converted nearly everyone in the congregation who used to get around by muscle power alone. I figured this latest inquiry was inspired by his efforts.

As it happened, the founder of the MMC showed up to have flat tires on a jogging stroller repaired. I asked casually if he had heard from Mrs. E-curious. Turned out he didn't know her. She hadn't told me this when I had suggested that she call him. I always imagined that the Sewall Road crowd and the wider circle of financial heavyweights along the lake must get together for regular summer socials, to talk about how to keep the help docile, and what each of them is paying for congressmen these days. I guess not.

Jimmy Fallon sightings were reported before the Fourth of July. We haven't had a visit from him in more than ten years. His wife has bought socks from us. The bike shop holds no attraction to the celebrity set. So we listen to the rumors and see the selfies posted by businesses that sell coffee, food, and beer. Again, more bird watching. I joke that the closest we come to a celebrity encounter is when Mitt Romney has another flat tire.

Late yesterday afternoon, in comes Mitt Romney with a flat tire. So that box is checked for the summer. He did look at bikes with El Queso Grande while I was knocking out the flat tire repair. So there may be more trickling. Meanwhile, I have to get to work for just another summer day.

All or Nothing Town

Summer resort towns survive on the frantic seasonal surge. The residents hope that the blur of activity leaves enough cash behind to weather the many months in which the whole outside world forgets we exist, except for the occasional mention on the Tonight Show.

Wolfeboro squeezes a bit more income out of fall foliage and winter tourism, but summer is the big money maker. All. Then nothing.

We're teetering at the edge of that drop into nothing right now. The only reason the shop has seemed busy is that we are running with two people most of the time, and never more than three. We used to need a daily staff of three, with four or five on busy weekends and holidays.

Why do people ask, "How's business?" When I start to tell them, their eyes glaze, they fidget, and they change the subject.

Your obvious capitalist high roller types look delightfully uneasy when some shop clerk starts to lay out detailed observations about the vanishing middle class.

From now on, when someone asks, "How's business?" I'm going to say, "What are you, an economist?" Or I'll just say "F#&k off!"

When Wolfeboro was really booming, in the 1980s and '90s, the resident middle class was mostly land pimps and contractors. It was filled out by school district employees, some professionals, and the few small business owners who were actually generating some profit. There was also a smattering of super-commuters driving to Concord, southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts every work day. All this so their children could be raised in the small town fantasy of a cultural backwater devoid of real opportunity. But it's pretty, and there's virtually no street crime.

Young adults drive any economy, and they can't thrive here. When the boom was big, young adults were servicing it. They raised their families and spent optimistically. But now the kids are grown, the young adults are aging and the money seems harder to get, and wiser to hold, if you can.

The same aging has taken down the seasonal residents. Extended families used to come here for weeks. They might come and go during the summer, but there always seemed to be a contingent around. As age and economics attack those numbers, fewer people come. Some families even sell the lake place. The new buyers don't seem to have the mindset or the finances to fill the region with hustle and bustle from the end of May to early September. The town is turning more and more into a retirement area. The third world economics of the region help a little, just as they do in foreign countries renowned for affordable retirement fortresses. Just keep the poor folks outside the compound and you'll be fine. New Hampshire may cost a little more money, but you're still a tad less likely to get carjacked or invaded here than in some banana republic. Between the residents who remain unwilling to give up basic courtesy, and the ones who still believe in "job creators," most of them will touch a forelock or at least nod pleasantly to the silver-haired benefactors who dribble out a bit of their investment income in return for a secure place to lay their heads.

Even Jimmy Fallon, for all his enthusiastic lip service, really only shows up for Fourth of July weekend. This year he didn't even do that, because he was having his finger sewn back on. I'm not sure if Mitt was around. They're not where the money is made, anyway. The rare birds just provide some color and excitement for those inclined to be excited by such things. The anonymous masses with moderate means used to bring the real lifeblood. Big flocks of quail provide more meat than a handful of eagles. A lot more.

If you're capable of intellectual detachment about your plight, you can see that the rich -- who really are better than the rest of us -- only need so many flunkies. Everyone else is just a drain on society's resources. I have operated under the hope that the culling will be gradual rather than cataclysmic, and that I can continue my modest, comfortable life of genteel poverty by scurrying along the baseboards to fetch my crumbs unnoticed. Writing inflammatory crap like this might seem to run counter to that philosophy, but I hardly expect anything I write to go viral. I have the sense not to blow the gig by getting into any pointless arguments with visiting plutocrats. Even though most of our summer plutocrats have taken up the smokeless moped, they still come in and trickle, and their machinery is amusing. I just have to avoid getting a hernia, lifting one of those behemoths onto the work stand. I would rather work on an e-bike than a gasoline-powered moped, so that's something to be thankful for.

Partly sunny with a one percent chance of trickles

After never really starting, summer seems to be winding down already.

Last year, summer was August.  Things just kind of simmered along, with a little surge around the Fourth of July, and then furiously and briefly boiled over in the last full month of the season. The sad little remnant of the official season, in September, is left to the locals to scavenge what they can of boating, swimming and vitamin D without hordes of visitors and temporary residents. But August was pretty hysterical.

This year, a lot of August already looks like September. Not only aren't people coming in to the shop, I can't see them from the windows overlooking the water and other businesses around us. The deli that shares our parking lot has its lunch rushes, but the people who run it tell me the numbers are off in general.

Our uber-rich and their pretty darn rich extended families and associates have done some trickling, especially Mr. X and his contingent, what with the e-bike assemblies and a couple of new bike purchases. But beyond that things are way too flat for summer. I'm not looking at an overflowing repair queue, and I should be. In fact, there's barely anything waiting. This time of year we expect to fall behind, checking in several repairs every time we go out to test ride one we've completed. That's just not happening.

An in-house rep at Specialized, who called to check in yesterday, agreed with me that the industry is in a bit of a slump. Cycling remains highly regionalized, even localized. The United States as a whole still does not embrace bicycle use in any of its forms universally. Recreational path riding probably comes closest to a universal norm, but that depends on the availability of paths and a thriving non-motorized ethic. There's not much to "yee haw" about on a bike path.

We'll be busy around next weekend. The local triathlon coincides with the Mount Washington Hill Climb and the Timberman triathlon in Gilford, which offers a full weekend of events. After that, who knows?

Whatever people are doing, they don't seem to be vacationing. This got me thinking about Mr. X's family fortune, which is based in the hotel industry. No doubt they've diversified now, but the family name still automatically brings the word "hotel" to mind. If fewer and fewer people can afford to travel, and those who can travel cannot afford a nice hotel, isn't that going to shrink the bottom line?

We can't run on trickles, even if they're occasionally fairly copious golden showers. A resort town suffers when people can't or won't play. As a resident of the area I wonder what brings people in the first place. The general answer is "the lake," but what does that really mean? In the 1990s it seemed like the people who visited and the people who lived here shared a general enthusiasm for things on the land as well as the water. Maybe it's as simple as the people who have the money are getting old and tired and the young ones are using their youthful energy simply to survive. Wherever the young ones are, they may very well be on their bikes, but lack the time and inclination to pedal all the way up here.

When I lived car-free in a town, I lived within my cruising radius except for special jaunts, hitch hiking to the mountains for a weekend or borrowing a car for a specific trip. Thumbing didn't appeal to me, especially after a truck driver pulled a gun on me. Without a car to borrow I would have relied entirely on my pedal power and perhaps the bus. I was a millennial decades before the millennium.

Aggravated battery

Got a call from a wealthy summer resident last month asking if our shop would receive and assemble three or four Stromer electric bikes for him. He's been a dedicated pedaler for many years, but those years have a way of adding up. Mr. X gave up riding the Mount Washington hill climb a year or two ago.

One of his friends is executive chairman of a corporation known for battery powered tools. The chairman has been into e-bikes since Lee Iacocca had his fling with them in the 1990s. We've gotten to see the evolution of the type as he has brought in various broken ones from his fleet. Apparently he is an energetic advocate. Since he took up the Stromer brand he has hooked up several of his friends.

One of those friends brought in two older Stromers. They've lost the keys to the battery compartments. The customer service guy at Stromer told me they can't replace those.  They're apparently not cross referenced to the serial number. Both bikes also have an intermittent electrical problem causing the pedal assist to cut out randomly. Intermittent problems are always great fun to track down. The manual says to check the right brake sensor. Just for grins I checked both of them.  To do that I had to make a test lamp because I don't keep any kind of electronic diagnostic equipment here. The sensor is just a push button anyway. I needed to see how sensitive it was so I could determine whether a rider who rests a hand on the lever could cut the motor out with only a slight twitch.

To get the sensors out I had to remove the lever blades. Electric bikes are bulky, heavy and complicated. Some combination of those factors -- weight, size and complexity -- makes even a simple job take a lot longer.

The Stromers weigh at least 60 pounds. About 25 pounds of that is the rear wheel. The wiring for the motor connects back there. The rear axle is keyed so it goes in the right way. So any job that involves removing the rear wheel means you have to juggle this heavy wheel as you guide it into its nest of cables, past the rear derailleur, sliding the brake rotor back into the caliper, with the axle oriented the only way it will go in.

The older Stromers have Avid cable disc brakes. The levers used on electric bikes have to be set up to accommodate the brake sensors. These levers predate the introduction of cable disc brakes, so their leverage is set up for traditional cantilevers. This means when you pay upwards of two grand for a fancy electric bike with cable disc brakes they feel mushy. Admittedly I've only seen the e-bikes that have wandered into my shop, but every one of them across the price range has had the same lame brake levers hooked up to mushy cable disc brakes. You'd think the e-bike industry would have caught up with the times by retooling to make a sensor-equipped lever with the right pivot distance for the brakes they're actually operating, but that kind of organized thinking seems alien to the battery brigade.

The new Stromers I assembled have Magura MT 2 hydraulic disc brakes. There's only a sensor in the right lever, so you could ride the front brake while still powering the motor, but how many people use the front brake by itself? I do, but I'm a deviant.

The rear brake on one bike went really mushy without making a puddle of fluid to indicate a leak. There was a little fluid around the caliper, but nothing to indicate exactly where it came from or when it got there.

To bleed the brake the bike needs to be oriented so the hydraulic lines run upward to the lever. Stromer puts the rear brake down on the chainstay. Magura says to remove the pads and push the pistons back all the way before bleeding the system. So that means the 25-pound wheel needs to come out and the bike needs to be held in the work stand with the front end pointing at the ceiling.

My bleed kit was improvised late in the last century. After two rounds of bleeding -- completely reassembling the bike to check each time -- the brakes were better, but still not great. Interestingly, there were two black bikes in this shipment and the brakes felt a bit mushy on both of them. The brakes on the red men's bike and the white step-through felt much firmer.  The color is coincidental, but perhaps it indicates production runs with different personnel or even different factories.

A new bleed kit is on order. Friggin' hydraulics.

If you're thinking of getting an electric bike, don't. Just go the whole Hog, as it were, and buy the new electric Harley Davidson. The pedal assist thing is novel, but when it quits on you you're left with a bike that handles like a truck. Imagine pedaling a truck. A two-wheeled truck with sluggish steering. The heck with that.

The older Stromers I've worked on have twist throttles you can use when the control unit is set in the proper mode so you can just twist its ear and feel it leap forward. It takes more out of the battery than any other mode, but it cuts right to the best part of having a motor: putting out no effort to fly through space. Pedal assist not only requires that the pedals be moving, you also have to put at least some pressure on them. That sounds exhausting. And because the power comes on in spurts based on your own output it can make the bike surge a bit erratically. I suppose you adapt after riding electric bikes long enough. I only get to play with them for a few minutes at a time.

In the repair shop the bikes take up a lot of room, especially when you start taking them apart. Information about their innards is hard to get, even from the manufacturer. Manufacturers seem much more interested in pumping more products into the market than in helping existing customers keep existing bikes running smoothly. It seems to be part of the inherent nature of electronics that things work perfectly until they don't work at all, whereupon you junk the whole rig and start over. But some of these characteristics apply to all modern manufacturing and many modern products. Shimano shifters, for instance. And all manner of consumer electronics.

If I did not have an immensely wealthy person's name to drop, I wonder if I would get the level of service I've received so far. Even with the magic name the quality of service has diminished. I think the Stromerians may have crunched the numbers and decided they don't need to be quite so responsive to get their trickle from the trickle-down. No sense wasting deference when profit remains the same. Even a high profile customer is just another existing customer. In modern business ethics, existing customers get taken for granted while the energy goes to snaring new customers. Customer loyalty does not engender manufacturer loyalty, it breeds contempt. That attitude has afflicted the bike industry since the 1990s. No one can tell them how foolish and shortsighted it is. They'll have to learn the hard way, if consumers ever wake up and decide they're sick enough of it to support a different model. A whole lot of shit will have to hit a whole lot of fans for that to happen. So maybe the contemptuous manufacturers are right not to worry.

Mixed in with the electric shenanigans were plenty of brain teasers involving conventional bikes. Repair season is upon us, though business seems to diminish every year. It's not going to competing shops...much. People just don't seem to be around, let alone spending money.

Musing on a quiet day

The nice thing about working with a guy who has traveled to many distant countries with sketchy sanitation is that you can produce the worst fart in the eastern North America and he doesn't even bat an eye. He's hard of hearing, not hard of smelling. But experience has brought him worse olfactory experiences.

I would worry about offending customers, but there are no customers. The day turned sunny, but no one has even rented a bike. We've done about $2.50 in business. Okay, maybe more than that. But dayamn is it slow today.

I'm waiting for a tool to arrive from Stromer for an electric bike I've been working on since August 29. Two of the e-bikes arrived that day in boxes for assembly. One was good.The other was cursed. They both seemed ready to go by Friday that week, but the cursed one barely got a couple of miles (if that) before it went dead. The two sisters who had ridden out on the bikes walked back.

Thus began a long diagnostic process. I had already replaced a main power cable in a bike of the same brand for another member of the Seasonal Resident E-bike Society. He used to be number 368 on the Forbes list of richest people in America, although I did not see him on the list last I checked. Suffice to say he has the funds and corporate clout to get results. We get parts shipped overnight-Saturday delivery for e-bikes belonging to the S.R.E.S. I say this not to brag, merely to marvel at the level of attention enjoyed by the rich and powerful. It's not US they're shipping the parts to. It's the agents of the former #368, who just happen to be us. Us be them. Take that, grammar!

For some reason we don't seem to get real overbearing wealthy snobs in here. The rich we do get, while prone to occasional outbreaks of unbecoming chiseling, have largely learned that we don't respond well to that, and we do provide competent, conscientious service. The ones who just want to sling their money around never bother to come in here. What do they need from a bike shop anyway?

There are some riders in town who simply must own better bikes than we sell. We are but yokels after all. Some of those riders we only see when we chance to look out the window at the precise moment they ride by. Others of them might come to us to get a shift cable or have a flat fixed.

I've learned one thing about e-bikes from my encounters with them over the years: Every part of them is heavy. And you will have to lift the heaviest parts over and over in the process of figuring out what's wrong and fixing it. The Stromer rear wheel, with the motor in the hub, weighs 23 pounds. I know that because I just installed the new one Stromer sent after we isolated the problem that kept the bike from working at all. It had other problems we fixed en route, but that hub motor had definitely stiffened right up. I had not been looking forward to muscling that thing around, but you do what you have to do.

Now I'm waiting for the special freewheel tool required to change the gear clusters, because the replacement wheel came with a 9-speed and the shifter on the bike only goes to 8. We didn't have an appropriate 9-speed shifter hanging around, and it should really be on Stromer's dime, not the customer's, so I called the hot line one more time. The tool is on its way. At least I hope so. I'm looking forward to taking this hot rod for a derby once it's fully functional.

Employer's Guilt

The cellist and I are having a little addition put on the house. It's not like we're secret millionaires or just won a lottery. We're blowing our nest egg to do it. It's a simple decision at the end of a complex line of thought. How we got here doesn't really matter. The point is, we're creating jobs.

When you create jobs, people show up for work. They may be people with whom you don't normally spend time. This crew built a previous addition for us in 1999 to prepare for the arrival of the cellist when she came to live here full-time. A friend of mine had worked for them and his brother still does. So they're not total strangers. Two of them have mountain bikes. One still rides fairly regularly. The other rider has been hindered by a bout with lymphoma that left him with nerve pain originating from tumors near his spine.

I ponder my place in the world more than is probably good for me. In terms of my overall contribution to society I often feel I should live in a hovel no matter what I might by chance be able to afford. I'm a bicycle mechanic in a rural resort town. It's not like I get to do heroic deeds in support of transportation cycling in an area where a lot of people can and will take it up. Around here it will always be a challenge of debatable worth. When the bike business had its high points, like the mountain bike craze of the 1990s and the very brief bike commuting surge in 2008 when gasoline first hit $4 a gallon, I felt like what I did mattered. Now, for most customers I service their hobby, their diversion. It's just not important.

I got over any great sense of superiority as a cyclist decades ago. Now I simply try to represent my people in a way that will do them credit. I'm known as that crazy guy who rides his bike from Effingham to Wolfeboro every day. A source of wonder, I am not a role model for more than a minuscule handful of people. They all know better. But if I want to continue to entertain and amaze them with my persistence, that's fine.

The builders could not commute by bike. They are not hostile to the concept. They simply can't do their jobs without trucks. Their work is physically laborious. Their tools and materials are bulky and heavy. And when you need them, you need them.

In the marketplace, people bring their needs and abilities together to make deals. People who spend all their time making money must trade it to people who make things and do things. People who make things and do things for their money still have to get products and services from other providers because of the time and training they have devoted to their particular specialties. Not everyone sweats and strains while making their legitimate contribution to society.

Work that looks like work needs no explanation. You see shovels moving or hear screeching power saws and the bang of nail guns. A building takes shape or changes form. Is a financial manipulator with no conscience really worth 700 times as much as these practical people giving physical form to an idea I sketched and handed to them?

When my money is gone, it's gone. It was a windfall, an utterly unexpected life preserver on the choppy sea of life. In an actual emergency like a serious medical problem it would evaporate faster than spit on a hot griddle. Expanding the shack means we can more comfortably accommodate visiting friends and family. Having lost a few of those in recent years, that seems like a higher value than trying to crouch on top of a little pile of money that wouldn't even make much of a fire.

Three diapers and a weasel

The diapers are used.  The weasel is deceased. These are landmarks on the daily commute.

I think something finally came and dragged the unfortunate weasel away. It took a surprisingly long time for such a small, portable piece of carrion. I can understand leaving a porcupine for weeks, with the spines and probably weird-tasting meat. But squirrels, equal in volume to the weasel, seem to melt away.

The diapers will be here for months. Adopt-a-Highway crews develop selective blindness when it comes to other people's turd burritos. The weather will remove the biodegradable component but the diaper itself will remain recognizable forever.

We continue to run the shop with a crew of two when it needs a minimum of three to cover all stations. That slows repair work to a complete halt on some days. Mitt Romney has been in town, but I haven't noticed a massive improvement in the economy, only smiling billionaires and their extended families enjoying the prospect of another beautiful summer in their second (third, fourth, fifth, seventh) home.

Many in Wolfe City seem to think his presidency, even if not particularly good for the nation, would be great for tourism. I tend to doubt it because the realities of the office of President of the United States will probably keep him occupied elsewhere most of the time and the security issues peculiar to Wolfeboro's geography will make it a headache for the Secret Service. It seems easier to me to place a security zone around a large estate with ocean frontage than to cut off a chunk of a lake with occupied shore front all the way around it. How do you create a zone of exclusion without pissing off a bunch of rich neighbors? What sort of scary surveillance equipment and even scarier personnel do you use to make sure no one approaches from any of hundreds of access points on the convoluted shore of the lake and comes in under water to within detonating distance of Mittster's compound?

So far, the president of France has pumped a lot more money into our shop coffers than either candidate for the presidency of the United States, even the one supposedly so smitten with Wolfeboro.

It tells you something about Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro's immense concentration of wealth in the summer that Romney bothers with the place at all. He and the family could go tubing, jet skiing, jogging and biking anywhere, but the weird big-money magnet of Wolfeboro brought a bunch of them here.

Their trickle no longer assures our survival. In the grand scheme I guess that hardly matters to them. Someone else will replace us if we collapse. We're not too big to fail. We're too small to notice. The few among them who ride bicycles do their best to sprinkle us with largesse -- not without chiseling, of course, although they've gotten a little better about that over the years. But as the middle class has shrunk and fashions in recreation have changed we have felt the loss. You can't live just on rich people's tossed snacks.

We do our best. I have to head out now, past the diapers and the grave of the weasel to grapple with the pile in the workshop.