Land crabs and porcupines

On the ride to work yesterday a motorist came across the centerline toward me on a sweeping curve with good sight lines, on a pretty morning with no fog or other obstructions. I could see his eye line, so I knew he was not distracted. His expression was ambiguous. I responded the way I almost always do to  a motorist encroaching on my space.

I moved toward him.

I've written many times before about body language, cadence, lane position and general affect as ways to communicate with the subconscious of motorists. They can sense fear, and anyone with a personality inclined to enjoy that will increase aggression if they get a fear response. People in general are likely to take whatever they can get, whether they're being careless or purposely pushy. You have to decide what to let them have.

In this instance, the motorist corrected his line and withdrew to his own side of the centerline. It was just another fleeting moment. I can't even know for sure whether he was reacting to my presence during any part of our encounter. I've also written about the near-uselessness of eye contact with a driver, because they can be very good at looking alert and still looking right through you. Or they use it as an opening to share opinions that you'd rather not have known. I try to keep all the communication nonverbal and impersonal, related only to the immediate need to maneuver around each other in the shared space of the roadway. Our long tradition of sealing ourselves into cans and speeding anonymously down the road has bred this isolationist culture in which we respond to each other as little as possible on a human level, and focus instead on ballistics.

After the pass I thought about how I represented no physical threat to the driver. The intent in moving confidently and unyieldingly is to convey the impression that the motor vehicle may be bigger and faster, but you are more dangerous. In cougar country, hikers are advised to make themselves look large, to discourage the predator from bothering with prey that could put up too much of a fight.  This is different from bear protocols, that say to look humble and retreat graciously. On the road you have to be ready to switch between these protocols, as you assess whether the motorist has a cat or a bear personality. For the most part, though, my first move is to look like a spiky mouthful.

The defense mechanisms of vulnerable creatures reminded me of road kill I'd seen in different ecosystems. In south Florida, I used to see land crabs crossing the roads. Their reflex when they see a threat is to brandish their claws. "That's right, f***er! Don't mess with me! I've got these!"

Blat. A car is unimpressed by threat displays, and a driver may have no time to react, not notice the creature, or be a sicko who gets off on killing things. In any case, the massive vehicle has the advantage. Sometimes the heavy shell of a large specimen can actually puncture a tire, but the crab didn't win, and the motorist was only inconvenienced.

Up here in the piney woods, porcupines waddle across the roads. When a vehicle charges down on them, they put up their quills. "Bring it," they say.

Blat again. In this case, the porcupine loses completely. The quills will not damage the vehicle.

Crabs and porcupines have only the one strategy. Crabs will sometimes accelerate their scuttle. Given the chance they will flee. If you go into their habitat you can see them run for cover of vegetation or a burrow. But porcupines simply do not run. They have two speeds: slow and slower. In their ancestral environment, they evolved not to need to retreat hastily.

As vulnerable road users, bicyclists can choose among strategic options based on specific circumstances. No matter what we do, our health and survival depend on not getting hit at all. There is no "next level" in a conflict with another road user. In any of our strategies we simply want to avoid contact with another vehicle piloted by another ostensibly thinking, feeling being.

Fall already

The only thing worse than the inexorable march of time is the people who feel compelled to point it out. As summer fades and fall actually arrives the poets and philosophers wax on about how great the change is, or how it's such a great metaphor for the unstoppable slide into decay and death. Sweaters! Pumpkin spice! Country fairs! You're rocketing into darkness at 67,000 miles per hour! By next spring you'll be that much older and more decrepit! Enjoy the holidays!

I have a theory -- which I have not been able to research yet -- that a person's perception of the seasons is shaped by the season into which they were born. I was born into the longest daylight of summer, not right on the solstice, but about a couple of weeks thereafter. My blurry little infant eyes took in long days of high sun separated by short nights, on the New England coast. When your life span has only been measured in days, each day is a significant percentage of your whole life experience. I imprinted on summer. I feel rightest when it's brightest.

From a primitive standpoint, long daylight provides the most generous free illumination under which to get done whatever you need to get done. Of course it could be too hot. And the light cannot be stored. Even with solar chargers, there is loss. You can't spread your panels to the arctic summer and light the entire arctic winter with the power you collected. Not yet, anyway. So the retreat of the sun represents a genuine loss.

As years pass, a person learns to appreciate all that a year has to offer. I moved back to New England eager for winter to make the mountains more mountainous. Snow and ice were the attraction, not an interruption to be endured. Short days and long nights were not benefits, but they were a necessary part of the overall machinery that produced snow and ice. I became a connoisseur of winter. Now I can tell you what really makes a good winter good, and what the best parts are. From a mountaineering and exploring standpoint, the best of winter is short and delicate. But the season of darkness is never short and its hand can be very heavy.

As my outdoor activity shrunk steadily to just commuting by bike and occasional short hikes, my use for the season of darkness and cold has dwindled. From a bike commuting standpoint, darkness makes it more convenient to stop along the road or trail for a leak, unobserved. That's about the full extent of the benefits.

On the road, evil bastards seem emboldened by the darkness. I get more close passes and angry honks when I'm riding with lights at night. And it's not because I have startled them. The effect has gotten worse as I have added more and better lights. These happen less out on the open highway than on Elm Street. You'd think that side roads would be more serene. You'd be wrong. Most of my ugly incidents happen on Elm Street. It's a redneck expressway. People from all over know that it provides a convenient connector to the Route 16 corridor. It's not exactly heavily traveled, because its convenience depends on where you live at the other end of it, but it's seldom deserted. So the last few miles to my house, and the first few miles when I'm warming up, are the most stressful.

September always brings an increase in driver aggression, even in daylight. It fades a bit as fall advances, but solar glare becomes a bigger problem. You hope for dry but overcast days for safer riding. The sun's backhanded slap, devoid of warmth, isn't worth the trouble. I actually enjoy its low-angled glare when I don't have to ride or drive in it. It fits nicely with the melancholy introspection of the season. But on the road it's just another hazard to work around.

Earth's orbit being Earth's orbit, if you hang on long enough you come around again into the light. Things grow, life emerges. June never gets warm enough fast enough, but don't complain. It will be gone again. The wheel does not spin in place. It rolls us for a distance that we don't get to control. That's why I don't care for the seasonal cheerleaders. Look to this day. Know the parameters that define its light so you can plan accordingly. Know the fruits of the season so that you can enjoy them. Your next breath is not guaranteed to you, let alone the season. With only the most necessary glances at the big picture for orientation, watch this moment and be glad when you make it to the next.

Guns and Bicycles

After years of mental drought and increasing depression, I suddenly received a request for some cartoons to be used in political advertising by a local group. They wanted clear, simple cartoons to illustrate various current political issues.

The first one was easy. It supports environmental science in governmental policy. I was able to spruce up a piece I'd sent them as a sample and submit it as the pay copy. But the second assignment supports gun control. I wrote about this dilemma on Brain Lynt today, so I won't repeat the whole essay here.

I researched hunting rifles so that I could try to present a nuanced situation as fairly as possible in a literally black and white graphic. The political group takes a firm position, but the case is far from simple. The two sides throw statistics and Constitutional interpretations at each other, and neither side is convinced. One single sentence in our constitution has made the country a great place to be a homicidal paranoid. The group that has hired me supports the "assault weapon" ban, and other measures to restrict firing rate and magazine capacity. Those seem sensible, so I wanted to see what the counter-arguments were.

Being a peace and love hippie type, I never got into guns and gun culture. I've shot guns, and had them pointed at me, but I wasn't turned on by the hardware or the activity. I have a couple at home for defensive purposes, but there again I'm more likely to grab something else when I hear a noise at night. Maybe I'll regret my life choices when civilization collapses next month and we're all suddenly living in the wild west again, but I do hear that it's easy to get a gun whenever you want one. That's one of the primary arguments against gun control. Apparently, you can go to just about any shopping center parking lot and find an arms dealer peddling Glocks out of his trunk. Maybe. Probably not.

As I read through various lists of "best deer rifles" I saw how the reviewers included something for everybody. Militarily-styled rifles were on every list, but they were never the first choice. The reviewers included them for people who were already inclined that way.

Outsiders come at the gun control debate viewing gun owners and users as a monolithic block, the way outsiders come at debates over cycling viewing all riders as a monolithic block. As soon as you look a little more closely you find gun owners who support various controls, based on their own point of view, just as you find riders who support specific types of riding. You can find regular users in either general category -- gun owners or bike owners -- who will support points of view held by outsiders who are partly or entirely unfamiliar with the details of either activity. Because ownership of either guns or bicycles encompasses such a huge cross-section of the population, there are few broad-brush proposals that don't severely inhibit the freedom of some users. When you're dealing with an activity protected in the Bill of Rights, you can't just brush it off unless you want to consider letting some other constitutionally-protected things get brushed off.

Not every gun user likes all guns. Not every gun user uses them for their lethal potential. All guns do basically the same thing, go bang and make a little projectile come flying out of the tube, but the power and destination of that little projectile can differ widely. Bicycles all appear to work basically the same way and do basically the same thing, until you look more closely at where they're ridden and how.

Guns still kill more people than bicycles do. Even if a gun owner doesn't use it for its lethal potential, guns weren't invented just for perforating paper or plinking cans. The desire to control their use is understandable. I support the concept. But the solution will not be something simple enough to depict in a single panel cartoon. As long as they're considered a legitimate part of daily life, and possession is enshrined as a right, any limitation on them risks impinging on what would be a justifiable use. Even militarily-styled weapons apparently have non-homicidal uses for lead-heads who want to deliver a lot of rounds in a hurry. If you're hunting something with no bag limit, that moves fast, you might want that quick-firing, shorter weapon. While I am not into killing for fun, and I wish no one else was either, that's a philosophical debate that can go on for several more centuries. In the meantime, it's legal in a lot of places.

More anti-cyclist infrastructure on the Cotton Valley Trail

As if riders didn't have enough to handle at the rail crossings, now they've added these slalom gates. Gossip says that the intent is to guide riders to the exact crossing point. The goofy yellow paint and the "no shit Sherlock" arrows are more unhelpful attempts to deflect liability by belaboring the obvious.

I will say that I have observed riders winging through the crossings at stupidly oblique angles and foolishly high speeds. The ones I saw managed to pull it off, but they obviously had no idea how lucky they were. So the gates prevent a rider from slicing off the corner. But they constrict traffic during heavy use periods, when the path can be a log jam of pedestrians and riders. And any minor error in alignment -- that you might have been able to correct -- risks catching a pedal on those orange posts. They're springy, to reduce the chances of impalement, but not so floppy that you could hook a pedal and just ride through it.

At least one crossing also has the heavy wooden sign post inconveniently -- not to say dangerously -- close to the crossing itself. Cyclists dismount indeed. That crossing is further out, closer to Bryant Road.

The intent is always to get riders to dismount. A rider who isn't riding isn't bothering anyone. That's true on roads or paths. But it isn't really true when a knot of pedestrians and riders tangles up in the confined space of a crossing that was already too small before the addition of the slalom gates.

The drive-to-ride crowd can drive somewhere else. Mountain biking has become entirely drive-to-ride. As dedicated trail networks proliferate for purely recreational forms of cycling, large blocs of the pedaling population are neatly removed from the traffic mix and feel less need to advocate for the freedom to ride everywhere.

Long distance transportation cycling isn't highly practical for the vast majority of people, but infrastructure should still be built to accommodate riders no matter what. A rider might make short hops on a long road, and long distance riders have rights, too. Most attention gets paid to built-up areas with denser populations. This compartmentalized approach is as wrong as wildlife management plans that focus only on one species, or too small a piece of habitat. Any trail that connects two relatively major points of interest needs to be considered from the transportation as well as recreation angle. Any trail that can be connected to the rest of the transportation network is part of that network.

This could be yours

This stem, custom made in the early 1990s for a guy who is about 6-foot-14 1/2 inches tall, has been abandoned by its owner as part of a weird mutant bike built at the family compound on an old Sterling frame. He scraped off a bunch of the family's old junk on us, most of it early '80s road bikes with enormous frames.

They're a tall bunch.

The whole bike isn't worth much, but it has a couple of parts that could be useful for a home mechanic who wants some solid components from before The Great Cheapening. For instance, it has a forged crank, 74-110 BCD. Probably 175mm crank arms, so it's too long for me. And the derailleurs  are made of actual metal. It has top-mount, indexed thumb shifters with friction option. Early production mountain bikes were practical. They had indexing for convenience, but could be switched to friction if the indexing went out for any of a number of very possible reasons. The earliest models didn't even have indexing, because the first crack of dawn of the mountain bike era arrived just as index shifting was starting to make its way onto road bikes.

Plenty of room to mount your electronics on that long stem. Hell, sling a hammock.

They had this first-generation Rock Shox hanging around. A full inch and a half of travel! Ooooooh! Pump it up to about 12 psi. The first shock pumps used plastic syringes. The air valve was a rubber plug like you'd find on a basketball. And shock forks had to have a stop for the bridge wire of cantilever brakes. Check those crown bolts before every ride! You don't want the fork legs falling off, or the fork suddenly shortening so the tire hits the fork crown.

This bike has to handle very weirdly. That stem is totally crazy. I had a 150 on one bike, during the long stem era. Lots of mountain bikes had short top tubes, long stems, and narrow bars. Frame design evolved in the mid '90s, to longer top tubes and shorter stems. As evolution continued, stems got even shorter as bars got wider. I just packed a Karate Monkey for a guy who had sold it to someone on the west coast. Its handlebars are 31 inches wide. That's just ridiculous.

Too bad they're 31.8s. They would make a great combination with the crazy long stem.

Sensitivity Training

Still mulling over last Saturday's slapstick comedy in the parking lot.

Because human evolution has been physically invisible for longer than we've even had a name for it, we have to think about what we're doing and why we're doing it instead of just doing it. Not only do we have lots of instinctual behavior, we have philosophies attached to it and reflexive behavior taught to us to further complicate the candor of our reactions. And we haven't even figured out where our instinctive promptings reside. Some of us have mental and emotional images that don't match their physical bodies. Even the big fat blob in the middle of most bell curves has its own curves that make up that very average average. How much of what feels instinctive now is attached to physical brain and neural structures, and genetic coding, that could in time disappear? I don't mean a lifetime. I mean thousands of years, if we don't manage to annihilate our species well before then.

Say, on the other hand, that we have stalled physically, and all further evolution will have to continue to be philosophical. That makes all of it optional, especially as it pertains to personal freedom and interpersonal respect.

For behavior to be deemed improper, society must have standards of propriety. As we fumble our way toward a genuine respect for women, we come up against instinctive promptings that are a source of both outrage and comedy. We could always laugh at our instincts. The outrage is much newer, even if it is long, long overdue. Right now we've begun overthinking it as we begin to compensate for thousands of years of underthinking it.

"Trust your instincts" is some of the worst advice imaginable.

Question normality. You may affirm it, but make it justify itself. To tangle you up even more, never forget that it's your own brain analyzing your own brain. It's enough to make you say "screw it," and do what feels like it comes naturally. Let the audience decide.

While I joke that my recoil was prompted by the admonition to avoid uninvited physical contact with someone of the opposite sex, I also don't particularly like to grab onto people at all. I'll take it from my huggy friends, but it's not my first impulse. And I'm so accustomed to falling in various contexts without anyone there to catch me or help squeegee me up afterwards, I actually forget what it's like to be in a mutually dependent group. I vaguely recall that it could be nice. But it went away. It's too easy to fall into habits of isolation. Even when I'm with people I have this weird sense of looking at them from a distance, or through a screen. Oh wait, this is real? Oops.

Even at work, I spend most of my time working individually on the gratuitous complexities of machines that their own inventors don't even seem to understand. The longest conversations I have except on the day when I have another mechanic in the backshop are with my cats. It has its good points, but certainly a down side as well.

You train yourself

You train yourself all the time, whether you are purposely practicing a discipline you want to perfect or just thinking about concepts you want to incorporate into your behavior.

As long as I have been in the bike business, articles in the trade publications have talked about making shops more welcoming to all sorts of riders. Female riders in particular criticized the elitist and sexist characters they met in some shops.

Because I learned most of my basic mechanical techniques and riding skills from a woman, I never thought that "girls" were inferior or did not belong in the pure realm of cycling. But just being your  average horny idiot is a gateway to inadvertent acts that could be construed as creepy by someone particularly sensitive. And any time you find yourself even temporarily being an above average horny idiot you can be sure that you've already made a pile and skidded through it. The job offers many opportunities to stand too close, or talk about personal things, or even lay a hand on someone under the pretext of biomechanics or bike fit.

The more attractive you find a person, the more you need to focus on the professional necessities of the encounter. It's fine to be friendly, but remember why the person came to the shop in the first place.

The recent surge of awareness of the constant barrage of unwanted male attention faced by so many women highlights the need to maintain a certain distance and reserve. Almost 30 years ago, I wouldn't hesitate to flirt with a customer I found attractive. I figured I was a good looking guy with a bright future, what's not to like? History has proven otherwise, but that shouldn't be the only reason I take a much more reserved approach. I figure that women need a break from even the hint of lust. The deeply buried horny center of my brain still tries to get my attention, but now I enjoy thwarting it while I laugh at its promptings.

Last week, a very attractive and friendly woman came into the shop on a ride with a male companion. They seemed like a couple, but not a gooey cooey kind of couple. They were on interesting bikes. Hers was an old Trek 520 touring bike. His was a Bridgestone XO. She asked questions about how riding position might relate to some calf pain she was having. She's a yoga instructor, and they both seem to work in fields where anatomy is important. They could name muscles that I used to be able to locate, but now the names are more like people I used to party with that I haven't seen in years. Soleus? Oh yeah, we used to hang out together. And gastrocnemius. I could tell you stories about gastrocnemius, oh yeah. I've had to cram my head with so much bike anatomy that my knowledge of human anatomy has faded like a fax in the sun.

The woman was riding in running shoes. I suggested that the pain started because she was trying to ride some stiff climbs in floppy shoes. Because she was using calf muscle to stiffen and stabilize her foot as well as provide power in the pedal stroke, it was shortening and tightening the muscles. We turned out not to have bike shoes to fit her, but while she was sitting to try on what we did have, she spotted a road bike hanging on a display hook. She ended up test riding the bike and putting it on hold.

Today they came to pick up her new road bike. She had new shoes that she'd picked up during the week, so she bought pedals to match. She'd never ridden clipless before. I gave her the usual instructions and warnings before we went down to the back parking lot to check her position on the bike.

"Remember that you have to twist your foot outwards," I said. "And release both feet when you're getting ready to stop, in case the bike happens to tip the opposite way from the one you'd expected."

She circled and landed successfully once. Because she was also practicing getting into the cleats, stopping and starting as we dialed in her riding position gave her a good opportunity for repetition. Around she came for another landing. She unclipped a foot...and it was the wrong one. Over she came, toward me.

"Never touch a woman without her consent," was the first message to my brain in the split second as she toppled toward me.

Yeah, so she hit the parking lot. She might have bounced off of me a little bit, but I had it so engrained in me to keep my hands to myself that it never occurred to me to grab her. I wasn't even sure if I should help her up. She's an athlete and a yoga instructor after all. And in the scrabble to regain dignity after suffering the newbie cleat fall, isn't it more empowering to let her take control as quickly as possible? Yeah, that's it: it was empowering. Empowering is good, right?

R-e-s-p-e-c-t. Yeah, buddy.

Fortunately, she was only a little scuffed up, and the bike was barely scratched. Scratched is even too strong a word. There was a bit of grit on it. I brought her some hydrogen peroxide to wash out the minor scrapes while we joked about how I had totally blown the trust fall.

Talking about it with my coworker afterward, he said, "So you weren't a creep, but you weren't a hero either."

The couple left on their shakedown cruise. They reported back just before closing time. It went well. So that's good. The goal is to put people happily on bikes.