E-bikes are the new Muffy

 Two e-bikes were parked by the entrance to the grocery store yesterday at 7:00 p.m. They were black, heavily built, with brand names that had no connection to the traditional bike industry. I usually see them on the road. Their riders wear regular -- non cycling -- clothing, and ride all year.

Lower income people who for various reasons did not use cars would traditionally buy cheap bikes. These were often in the Muffy category. Muffy was bike shop shorthand to describe bikes in the category with Huffy and Murray, two major brands in the degenerated US bike industry. The category also included Columbia, Kent, and any other department store brands. As department stores faded in prominence with the rise of Walmart, the new category of Walgoose emerged. Walgoose refers to the disgraced Mongoose brand, which left the bike shop channel and moved into the big box channel when Brunswick Outdoor Recreation bought them in the 1990s.

When smokeless mopeds first hit the scene, we only saw them in our shop as playthings of the super wealthy. The earliest proponent of them in our orbit would dispute the title of super wealthy, having modestly settled for only a few hundred million dollars. The others are also small fry, barely in the billionaire category at all. We're not talking Musk and Bezos money here, but certainly quite comfortable. The electric bikes were toys. However, e-bikes eventually reached the takeoff point. The craze has attracted more companies than the mountain bike boom ever did. Prices are tumbling, with quality to match. They still cost way more than a Walgoose, but they provide excellent value to a worker who never aspired to be a cyclist. Well, a motorcyclist, maybe.

A smokeless moped is a fantastic transportation tool for someone whose job is already tiring enough, who gets paid as little as society can get away with to do things society definitely wants done. The ones with a throttle option eliminate pedaling entirely. They're low-powered electric motorcycles, neatly protected from the need for licensing, registration, and insurance by the mere presence of a bicycle crankset and a pair of pedals.

Smokeless mopeds aren't cheap compared to a Walgoose, a Muffy, a Toadmaster, or the current incarnation of Schwein. But they offer a much better ride.

Product support for e-bikes can be bad. Because lots of little companies are slapping these things together from the same limited array of parts suppliers, you will find a lot of cheap, no-name parts. I haven't done more than skimming research into the e-bike community online, but I have picked up snippets from forum threads where enthusiasts talk about substitutions, repairs, and upgrades that a knowledgeable person can do. For anyone who doesn't know how all that stuff works, or have a friend who does, electrical problems in particular can be discouraging. But even if you get just three years out of an $800 moped, you made out better than you would with an $800 car, and took it a lot easier than you would with a cheap non-motorized bike.

The e-bikes I see regularly used for practical journeys around here all have onboard lighting systems. They are configured for transportation. Hunting and fishing stores sell versions configured for those activities. You pay more than $1,000 for a solid transportation vehicle, but it has a lot of what you need to have your best chance of survival in the mosh pit that is the American highway system.

Established bike companies offer electrified versions of sport bikes in road and mountain categories. These adaptive aids for the enfeebled are not transportation bikes, although someone might try to graft attachments to them to make them do some actual work. The same companies have their leisure bike versions with varying degrees of adaptability to daily practicality. The more an e-bike tries to look and act like an analog bike, the less useful it is in the broader moped category.

Gas engine mopeds didn't pretend to be bicycles. They knew their place in the hierarchy of motorcycles. In the 1970s, rising gas prices and periodic fuel shortages led to their surge in popularity. They were equipped like motorcycles. Their engine noise and the blue cloud of oil smoke that often surrounded them identified them readily as something that didn't belong on what passed for bike paths at the time. But it was a free-for-all on the streets. Pedalers, drivers, mopedists, all jostled along on the same network.

Classic gas-powered mopeds mostly died out. But the electric version could be around a while. Aside from battery fires, they make better house pets than gas-engine mopeds do. No drippy fuel or engine oil. Quiet running. The only leakage you might have to worry about is brake fluid. They have limitations in cold and wet weather that an internal combustion machine does not, but they still have many advantages for someone who needs cheap transportation.

In endless hope and constant fear

 A road rider lives in endless hope and constant fear. The hope propels us, keeps us going out there because the odds aren't really that bad. The problem is that things can go gruesomely wrong in an instant. Anyone out there who isn't thinking about that stands a greater chance of experiencing it. I can't be the only one listening to a motor vehicle coming up from behind, wondering casually if it will be the last thing I hear. Of course I'm not. The fear has made many riders give up the road.

There's more than hope and fear, of course. We also proceed in exasperation and complete bafflement at times. Those feelings are common to all road users. "Who is this idiot?! And why did they just do that?!?"

Fear keeps you sharp. It doesn't have to be debilitating terror. I'm sure that enthusiastic mountain bikers, safe from motorists on their trail networks, experience fear. You have to look for trouble in a purely recreational context like that, but even at an intermediate level a hazard can ambush you if you forget to respect the possibility.

Hope motivates the transportation cyclist. It was strong in the 1970s, diminishing through the 1980s as the Boomers chased wealth in a wide variety of motor vehicles. It returned with the popularity of mountain bikes in all environments, even those with no mountains, and hardly any woods. But the off-road aspect pulled most riders away from contact with traffic except when driving to where they wanted to ride. The industry abandoned its cheerful suggestion that riders might like to use their bikes a lot more than their cars, and switched to baiting them with more and more expensive, elaborate technology.

My paid writing from the mid 1980s onward tried to use recreation as a gateway to environmental stewardship. Motorized recreation had seemed masochistic to me since the first gas crisis in the early 1970s. At that time, I did not think about transportation cycling as a central part of my life. I liked to ride my English 3-speed, but had no desire to open the rear hub and anger the gods by probing the mysteries of its miraculous functions. But I did see the price of gasoline more than double and continue to rise. It wasn't until I got to university and overcame my derailleur phobia that I also discovered anything like mechanical aptitude in myself. I also discovered the economics of poverty.

It was a safe experiment. I had family. I wasn't going to sink without a trace, the way real poor people do. But I was working within a set budget. I sold my car before the end of senior year because I was happy and confident on my bike, determined to live within my means. A car brought with it fixed expenses in registration and insurance, the need for parking, fuel, and upkeep. I could shelter and maintain a bike in a single room or a small apartment. All I had to do was find jobs I could ride to. Lots of college students in Gainesville managed school and employment without cars. Most cities and towns seemed to have a resident population of bike riders.

Most cities and towns today have resident populations of riders. Cycling survives because bikes are basically good things. This is more true of the ones that are well made, generally older, but the concept is sound no matter what. The riders starting out may have mostly hope and little or no fear. As fear grows, maybe interest dies completely. No one rides for long without finding reasons to give it up. Whether a particular person does depends on their personal equation.

My love of winter is synthetic

 An ad popped up on some social media site I was perusing, that said, "Goodbye goosebumps, hello, merino," or something like that. I thought to myself, "Goodbye goosebumps, hello hives."

I've tried to be a wool guy. In 1980 I got a Protogs Superwash wool bike jersey and wore it with confidence in the itchless experience promised in the advertising. It was ...okay. I acquired a couple more over the years. But I also rejoiced when a sponsored US team rider I rode with occasionally said that he always wore a tee shirt under his wool jerseys, because it actually enhanced their efficiency. He might just have been playing the expert card to justify his own preference for a barrier layer, but it didn't do any harm to wear the tee shirt.

Protogs offered other garments in miraculous merino. One I bought for backpacking was long-sleeved with a three-button style variously referred to in advertising from different manufacturers as a Wallace Beery, a river driver, or a Henley. I actually tried using it without an undershirt on one trip. The weather was chilly, so I figured out how to ignore it, but as soon as I got back to civilization and had other options I peeled that thing off.

This morning's near-freezing temperatures at dawn got me thinking about winter clothing, and reaching for some of it for the morning bike ride to work.

In the early 1980s, surplus military wool pants were the standard trousers for cold weather adventuring. For cross-country skiers, wool knickers. Not the British knickers, mind you. I also inherited a nicely tailored true navy blue wool shirt from my father's old service kit, and a plaid Pendleton from my grandfather. Those things never got next to my skin.

Wool bike shorts didn't bother me, and I loved my Gianni wool tights. But I warmly embraced polypro and other synthetic long underwear, and each evolution of synthetic outerwear. Fleece pants, fleece vests, pile jackets, each added layering options no longer utterly dependent on a next-to-skin layer of protection, or somehow turning off all of the nerve endings in my skin.

Now, of course, we know that these comfy fabrics are completely evil, sprinkling the earth with nanofibers that are spreading from pole to pole. So now my comfort can be tinged with guilt.

For winter riding, I use a lot of clothing and accessories from cross-country skiing and winter mountain travel. My go-to pant is the Sport Hill XC Pant. It's a great balance of wind blocking and breathability. Wind-front tights make no accommodation for a frigid tailwind. The 3SP fabric in the Sport Hill pants provides uniform protection. The polypropylene fabric also repels water to some extent. The cut is close but not shrink-wrap. Zippered ankles help when layering socks.

I don't ride much in the winter, because I can't count on doing it consistently enough to stay acclimated to the saddle. Hiking and cross-country skiing provide better exercise. A bike is the best machine for translating human effort into forward motion on an appropriate surface like a road or a smooth trail. That's what makes it my preferred personal transportation option in-season. But I've said many times -- and still do -- that it isn't enough by itself. So I welcome the opportunity to explore by other methods in the winter, when I cede the roads to the motoring public. I might bust out for the odd fixed gear ride here and there, but it's fun to get out into places where a bike couldn't go.

I do see the tracks of bikes where bikes couldn't go. You pretty much have to hit a mid- or high-grade rock or ice climb if you want to be completely sure you won't meet up with a downhiller. But steeper hiking trails weed out all but the most foolhardy workaholics who grunt a bike up there somehow so they can launch it back down. The things we do to say we did...

Speaking of layering socks, I get a lot of use out of bread bags in cool to cold weather. I gave up on buying toe covers and overboots that cost a lot of money and wear out far too quickly. For toe warmers, I cut an appropriate size end of a bread bag to put over the front of my sock before putting my shoe on. For really cold rides, I wear a thin synthetic liner with a full bread bag over it, a wool outer sock, and a closed-toe shoe. Sometimes I even double bag, adding another bread bag over the outer sock. The inner vapor barrier keeps sweat from dampening the sock layers. Moisture increases heat loss through conduction and evaporation if it can get out far enough to evaporate. The vapor barrier turns your liner sock into a wetsuit for your foot. Don't waste your time on dreams of perfectly dry warmth. You won't find it.

Winter cycling is the hardest activity to dress for. Riders automatically produce their own wind chill. Exertion on a freewheel-equipped bike ranges from strenuous on a climb to nil on a descent, when wind chill can increase to more than 40 mph (64 kph). You will sweat. Moisture management is up to you.

Some people wear shell jackets. I never used to, preferring multiple fuzzy layers instead. The thickness of the front coverage took the edge off of the incoming frigidity, while moisture could move freely outward to evaporate from the surface, away from my skin. Then I got a Sugoi jacket that Sugoi, of course, stopped making. It had a nice balance of breathability and wind protection, and is a pleasant but visible yellow. It does trap more moisture than the all-fuzzy option did, but all of my fuzzy layers were in muted colors. I vastly prefer muted colors, but I bow to the reality that motorists need all the help they can get to notice and avoid a bike rider. There's a slight risk that a bright, target gives a bad actor a better aiming point, but inattention is more common than actual malice.

This isn't a complete list and discussion of all of the many variations in my wardrobe for cycling. I draw from at least five options just in gloves and mittens. Head covering also draws from a selection of fabrics and accessories. Well. I say accessories, but mostly I mean varying amounts of tape over the helmet vents, and a light mounted on the front of it.

The steady creep of crap...

Like rising sea levels, a steady tide of brake fluid, shock oil, and tire sealant laps higher and higher. On it float the carbon fiber fuselages of high-priced industrial flotsam, while the currents of the murky depths carry along the aluminum offerings. Dragged along the bottom is a spreading tangle of cheap steel frames and flimsy mid- and low-end parts. Brand name and no name products jostle in this festering stew.

There never was a dike against it, but if there had been there would be a lone, drowned mechanic with his finger stuck in it. The surge came right over the top. But there was no dike, so there's just me and my finger, which I have been giving to the industry since the early 1990s. I'm still treading water in this great oceanic garbage patch, trying to rescue the few who are not swimming avidly away.

Hey, if you're going to lose anyway, you might as well have some fun with it. I used to find energy in the belief that I could have some wider influence. Fantasy has played an essential role in human survival. It just functions differently under the influence of different eras. We can tap into each other's imaginations like never before in this period of individual social media participation overlapping with professional productions in a range of legacy media and their evolved, evolving forms. As many as a few dozen people might read this essay. That's a bigger crowd than I could draw if I was raving in a public park anywhere within a short bike ride of where I live or work. Good return on my time, says the lazy man.

Bike season is winding down around here. Enthusiasts are still riding, but the frenzy of summer has gone to sleep until next year. By then we will know if we're going to be living in a smog-shrouded theocracy or be zigzagging toward the flickering image of a world where people are trying to get along with each other rather than get on top of one another. Service work still drops in a job or two at a time. The shop converts to ski season as autumn progresses. It's still only cross-country skiing, so we never get mobbed. As long as people can use motors to get them up a hill, that will be their preference. It's true with increasing numbers of two-wheeled "pedalers," too.

A guy in the shop last week said that he was getting an e-bike that would go 50 miles per hour. I figured he was full of sht, so I looked around online. I found quite a few ads for e-bikes that will do 50 mph. It's absolutely not legal, but the police have much more pressing matters to worry about. There are thousands of bikes on the road, and no effective means to keep track of them. This is a good thing in many ways. I don't like the idea of omnipresent surveillance, even if it does permit jackasses on rule-beating motorbikes to pretend they're on a machine that they would ever power by pedaling alone. I figure that they will sort themselves out on their 50 mile per hour mopeds.

Riders with power assistance do present a hazard to path riders, both recreational and transportational. Few act with malice, but insensitivity hits just as hard. Any vehicle operator becomes velocitized. You get used to your flow through the scenery based on the feedback you get through the contact points with the machine. We drive our cars at what seems like a sedate speed, while a pedestrian walking on the side of that road perceives our vehicle as hurtling past them. Riding an analog bike, 15 mph feels pretty zippy. Twenty feels downright godlike. Throw a little power assist in there and you can legally push close to 30 mph. Juice up the moped and you get into survival mode.

Survival mode is sneaky. You are in it before you realize it. You may be within your own reaction time to negotiate the road in front of you as you see it, but have no margin for the unexpected. It happens on an analog bike as well, but almost always on a downhill. The other place you can get into trouble is when larger vehicles are slowed by their own traffic congestion, and a bicyclist is tempted to fly past them or even cut between them at full speed. Filtering is fine, but trying to show off with a power play will get you smacked sooner or later.

As daylight shortens, my bike commuting season comes to an end. I will become flabbier and grouchier (if you can imagine that) as the months progress until next spring releases me to see how much strength my aging body still retains. The problem isn't the darkness, it's the lights. The floodlit behemoths I share the road with blind each other with their headlights and make me disappear. The imperative that motorists have, to pass any cyclist without pausing, means that they will shove through in that tunnel of glare and blackness wherever we encounter it.

There's also a slight uptick in malicious behavior under cover of darkness, but the major issue is insensitivity and impatience.

If I had a good place to park for park-and-ride commuting, I could continue for months, gaining at least some of the advantages of fully car-free transportation. Unfortunately, the local cyclist ghetto, the Cotton Valley Trail, runs off at an angle, so I end up driving almost the whole way to town, or equivalent distance, to intersect it at various points from which to continue by bike. And it's the Cotton Valley Trail: an active rail line masquerading as a multi-use rec path. The rail car hobbyists have the right of way, and some of them can be real pricks about it. Others are kindly ambassadors, but you don't know which is which when you both enter a railed section. On the other end of the speed range, not one single pedestrian is ever glad to see someone on a bike. Add a dog on a leash and your stock drops even further. I'd rather be out on the road with the armored personnel carriers whipping past me. It's much less personal.

Too late this morning as I sit under a cat, but maybe I'll try a few rides from the shopping center three miles out from my house. That cuts off the worst stretch for night riding. But the challenge points up a major issue for anyone with a motor vehicle: where can you leave it? They do lock. They're hard to remove casually. But anyone annoyed at your presence can do a whole lot of inconvenient things short of completely removing your expensive appliance. Pick the right wrong place and you could even lose the catalytic converter. That's become a new hazard at some hiking trailheads in the area.

For now, it's time to displace the cat and finish getting ready to load the car. Driving is so brain-dead easy compared to riding a bike. It's a habit-forming sedative in that way, but side effects include joint pain, stiffness, irritability, inattentiveness, weight gain,... see package insert for full list.

Who is this dirtbag?

 We see them all the time, even in our affluent resort town. A sketchy character brings in a bike that no collecting hobbyist or trendy technolemming would ever want, and bargains for the least amount of work we can do to get the machine operational again. It doesn't even have to be safe. Just get it so that the pedals pull the chain around and the bike moves forward. Some of them don't even have brakes. A scuffed work boot or blown out sneaker will suffice.

Then there are the eccentrics with limited finances and one oar in the water. They come in all ages, genders, races. Some are born with challenges that hinder their pursuit of income and housing. Others suffer head injuries, or battle addictions. Some are just on their own track, seeing the world in their own way. Somehow, they have all come to the bicycle, and the bicycle has welcomed them.

Life already wasn't fair when I was a kid, and it has only gotten less fair since then. There are more and more people, many in unstable family settings, or no family setting at all. It's comforting to embrace the lie that they would all be fine if their families were miraculously transformed into the mythical models of the 1950s and '60s, but the cracks were just plastered over back then. The simple fact that we keep cramming more and more people onto the planet while wondering why ecosystems are failing and the climate itself has been buggered never seems to influence the idea that social failure is solely the result of flawed character in at least two generations of strivers.

We deal with riders in each of those categories just in our dinky town. In my previous bike shop job, in 1980-'81 in Alexandria, Virginia, customers ranged from a family who could afford custom built little Eisentrauts for the kids, down to Moped David, who loved his yellow Motobecane "Yellow Bird." Location matters, so we had more from the affluent end of the scale back then, but in Annapolis I saw the bike hierarchy laid out as well. I only worked in a backpacking and mountaineering store there, but we had one customer who had lost his marriage and home and pickup truck to alcoholism, and now went everywhere on his bike. Two of the town's bike shops were on West Street, an artery that stretched from the heart of downtown at Church Circle all the way out to the edge of town at Parole, where it split into several two-lane highways (at that time) headed generally westward. There were many riders and few cyclists among the commuters along that corridor.

Annapolis was mutilated  through the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st Century by car-centric transportation decisions that made cycling much more dangerous and unpleasant, and didn't really do all that much for motorists either. The areas that grew large buildings and sprawling parking lots drove the development. Road builders just did what they could to throw down pavement in straight lines to connect everything. Some of it reamed out existing roads, adding lanes and traffic lights. Some of it added roads to slam traffic into the existing corridors whether they were ready for it or not. Don't even ask whether they ever really could have been ready for it. All this makes life less pleasant for the recreational rider, and exponentially more dangerous for the cyclist of necessity.

One customer in Wolfeboro now, whose backstory and physical appearance indicate that he may have native Alaskan ancestry, bought a used bike from us to commute to his kitchen job at a local restaurant. A little while later he said that he had gotten a construction job for more money. But then he showed up again at the restaurant job, because the contractor he worked for required him to have a motor vehicle, but his income -- increased though it was -- wouldn't support the purchase and routine expenses of car ownership. Economically, the restaurant job was a better deal, because he could continue to use the affordable bicycle. It's not a great deal, but it's more survivable.

I ran the same calculation numerous times in my own life. I might have made a fraction more money in various editing jobs during the decline and fall of print media, but it would have required owning and using a car every working day, driving as much as a hundred commuting miles each day. The little bit more money would be absorbed and then some by the expenses required to go fetch it. Or I could sell out where I was living and go rent in the more expensive area where the jobs were, probably never able to scrape together the funds to buy back into the real estate market. The real estate market itself is a problem: I don't think I'm unique because I bought a house as a place to live, not as an investment. I didn't -- and don't -- care whether it appreciates in value. I just want it to shelter me. The built-in inflation of a capitalist mindset screws the lower end of the income scale even as it devours their lives for necessities they provide. The same is true of any growth mindset rather than a maintenance mindset.

Transportation riders who have to wait weeks to have worn out tires replaced don't get any help except from a charitable friend if they happen to have one. No one gets "bike stamps" to help them keep rolling. The people who get any subsidy have been in jobs where the company health plan pays them to buy fitness equipment so that their prosperity doesn't make them sick with the expensive ailments brought on by forced sitting and boredom snacking. The HMO reasons that subsidizing equipment now will mean that they don't have to fork out for costly medical care later. It's not benevolence, it's cost accounting.

The rise of e-bikes has led many cyclists of necessity to choose the motor vehicle over one powered by meat alone. It makes sense: they didn't want to be pedalers in the first place. We fix what we can for those riders as well, just as the shop in Virginia fixed The Yellow Bird. 1980 was the waning days of the 1970s moped boom that accompanied the bike boom. That shop had a dedicated moped department with its own mechanics, who enjoyed the motorized aspects. Now, as the smokeless moped has slipped in through the side door solely by forgoing internal combustion, bike shops are expected to embrace and understand them. And the worker bees who choose them don't even give them that much thought. It's just a bicycle, right? But with a motor! How cool is that? It's - like - perfect!

People are accustomed to the failure of their devices. The steady reduction of quality in every appliance has led to a culture that replaces rather than repairs. The "right to repair" movement runs hard into the fact that most things haven't been made to be fixed. Assemblies snap together in ways that break when you try to open them. The people who do fix things have to charge an amount of money that will support them, making the services too expensive for many of the people who need them the most: consumers of used equipment, nursing it through its declining years -- or months -- because it was all they could afford.

The bike industry embraced the disposable model within the first decade of this century.  Parts are gradually being withdrawn for what had been ubiquitous standards throughout the 1980s and '90s. Up until the past couple of years I could confidently tell a rider that an older bike could be maintained and modified relatively easily to suit individual tastes and needs. It's still true, but the options are narrowing. As a low-budget rider my whole life, I appreciated the fact that I could put together a high-quality, nice handling bike from scrounged parts. They might be scrounged new, but they were not bound to any other parts so closely that I had to buy an entire drivetrain to match. Working in a bike shop has given me the advantage of buying things at cost, but the disadvantage of a meager income. But even when I worked outside the bike industry I could shop sales, buy used items, and make targeted purchases of new stuff. The incremental upgrades to my primary bike led to the parts stash that would adorn the next bike. Tools and knowledge put me in a position to help other riders to put together and maintain their bikes for as long as they were interested. That wasn't usually very long.

The bike industry of the 1970s and most of the 1980s built bikes for the long term. Twenty years was a goal. It was a selling point. Same was true in backpacking and hiking gear. Buy good boots, take good care of them, and you could resole them for decades. It offset the discomforts some people experienced when breaking in a sturdy pair of leather boots. But industry observers figured out that most people don't stick with anything for that long. Products can be flashy and flimsier, sell better in the short term and head straight to the landfill. It clears the way for more products to roll out to enthusiasts who decide to reenlist, and newbies looking for the state of the art. Old gear doesn't mark you as a veteran, it stains you as a cheap old geezer too dumb to evolve with the times.

Sometimes, change really does represent improvement. This is certainly true in both cycling and outdoor gear. But in both cases the majority of change seems to be driven by the marketing and accounting departments more than by long-term users who want to spend more time out doing the thing rather than shopping to replace whatever just wore out or broke after a few months or a year. It puts us all on the conveyor belt of expensive replacement, not just the poor idiots who can't afford good boots. The upper echelons of consumers can still support the expense of replacement better than anyone struggling to stay equipped at all.

Without a car, I depended on my bike to get to whatever job I had. Even now, with a car, I depend on the significant amount of money I save by not using it. I have the car when I absolutely need it. And my life has been propped up by several lucky breaks. See earlier reference to how life isn't fair. The person who presents as a dirtbag or a weirdo and doesn't have the backstop of a few strokes of luck is not a lesser person solely based on that.

Assholes inhabit every level of socioeconomic status. This is why I don't embrace any automatic standards of brotherhood on that basis. And, oftentimes, the downtrodden are scarier people because of the ways in which they might act out their frustrations. The psychopathy of the rich tends to be more impersonal, perhaps even unconscious, in perpetuating the systems that create and maintain an underclass that might drag a beat up bike into a shop in search of aid. That "underclass" rider might not expect brotherhood from a place that serves an activity forced more and more into recreational areas, using ridiculously expensive machines to go stupidly slowly compared to motorcycles and ATVs.

We've had a few young guys put full suspension mountain bikes on layaway after they worked with a cheerful trail builder who tried and failed around here before packing up and moving on. He presented a welcoming and hopeful scenario to the kids who helped him lay out the first professionally designed and meticulously built trails in the area. But his business acumen didn't match his cheerful personality and artistic standards. The young guys failed to complete their layaways, and have not returned to try again. Perhaps they have been lured to other attractions. Perhaps they would come back if they could scrape up what it costs for a trailworthy bike.

Back in those 1950s and '60s of golden memory, even through the '70s, kids rode bikes until they could qualify for motor vehicles. The surge of adult cycling in the 1970s recast bike riding as potentially a lifetime activity for more people than the enthusiast base that existed before then. Changes in development through the 1980s progressively reduced the habitat of youth cyclists whose parents were being fed increasingly scary possibilities by media coverage of crimes both real and imagined.

I rode my bike on the streets wherever we lived, from about the age of six or seven. I was never hit by a car or even seriously honked at, from central Maryland to Rhode Island to mid-coast Maine and back to Maryland. The Miami area was a little hairier, but still overrun with riders. It wasn't until the later '70s that motorist hostility went from startling to expected. Others had worse luck. One of my cousins reported getting drilled in the back with a full beer can while riding in the Philadelphia area in the late '60s or early '70s. There were more than 100,000,000 fewer people in the country when I was a kid, and kids riding their bike to get around were a common feature.

We were supposed to outgrow it. That was the accepted model. Then grownups started filling the streets that were increasingly filling with the mere mass of assembled humanity. We were bound to piss each other off.This is the environment that riders of necessity are thrust into and that idiots like me choose to stay in. We may not share a common love of the machine and its simulation of flight, but we do share a common hope to survive each trip.

Fixing bikes while the world burns...

 As a Sunday School kid in the 1960s, I was told, in simple terms a child could grasp, that the world would be destroyed by fire. We'd had the flood. Our loving creator had been there, done that. It was going to be fire next time. We were Episcopalians. We didn't speak in tongues, or handle snakes. We spoke in the sonorous, stately phrasing of the 1928 prayer book. The Apocalypse was theoretical. But the theme was fire.

It seemed obvious in the 1960s that fire meant nuclear holocaust. I remember walking to first grade, or in various neighborhoods, past the big yellow sirens on poles, wondering if today was the day I would hear them go off, and have to remember what sort of shelter gave me the best odds of survival. Fire was coming.

Here we are, some sixty years later. The world is indeed being destroyed by fire, but it's millions of fires, in internal combustion vehicles, combustion-based electrical generating facilities, the heat islands of paved and built up urban areas, the smoky fires of poor people, jet engines, sprawling industrial complexes, and humble kitchen stoves. And more, of course. The air conditioner we run to survive the heat waves that sweep over us is making the problem worse, when multiplied millions of times.

Fire fed the creation of the humble bicycle, once it progressed beyond a walking aid carved out of wood. Other transportation machines had used the wheel and the lever to navigate the inclined planes of the travel ways built for them, but the bicycle pulled together all of the essential elements into a device once described as the perfect mechanism for transforming human effort into forward motion.

To get us to the small fires of brazing torches, ore had to be mined and refined, smelted, forged, cast, whatever, to produce tubes and the joints that connect them into a steel frame. Everything that humans make changes a material from its found form to the form we find useful. How damaging that is to the environment depends on the scale. Steel went out of fashion as the 20th Century ended, which has made it very fashionable indeed with a niche audience. Your hard-core technolemming wants carbon fiber now, although the ones with limited budgets settle for aluminum. But the modern bicycle began with steel tubing.

Here in the prosperous United States of America, bicyclists are an unpopular minority. Roughly six percent of the US population rides a bike according to statistics from 2022. That figure included people who only ride once a year, so the actual percentage of regular users is definitely lower. Seems hard to believe if you're in one of those areas teeming with riders, like popular paths, urban areas, or mountain biking destinations. Venture outside of those circles and the road gets very lonely. If all of those riders stopped today, no one would miss us except the businesses that sell us equipment and service the machines.

At this point, someone reading this might leap in to share statistics about how bikeable and walkable communities see improved local retail income along with the better quality of life that comes when you push the noisy, stinky armored vehicles of the perpetually irritable to the periphery. Those perpetually irritable people in their motorized vehicles are the majority. They don't live in a world of retail statistics. They live in their cars. They vote for people who say it should be legal to run over crowds of distressed fellow citizens misguidedly trying to draw attention to social problems by blocking roadways.

Since mountain biking bloomed and faded, forever mutating the bike industry into a cynical syndicate bent only on separating the gullible from their money, the only thing that has made the purchase of a two-wheeler wildly popular has been the addition of a motor. More fire.

The fire isn't just physical flames and heat. It's also in the constant undercurrent of irritation that flows through most of us. I was going to say all of us, but there must be someone out there who feels only benevolence all the time. What an idiot! Only kidding. Anyone who can sustain that is a remarkable human being just as susceptible to thirst, heat stroke, a punch in the face, or bullet as any of the rest of us, but nonetheless a vessel of light.

Meanwhile, at work, I get to deal with some of the minor architects of destruction of the American Experiment, at both the individual voter level and the moderate donor level. They are nearly always very pleasant people, often complimentary. Indeed, last week a woman came in with her son's bike. She was sincerely pleasant, and very understanding of the challenges facing a small business and a specialty service provider. Her family owns a tree service that reportedly does excellent work for extremely reasonable prices. I ride past their house frequently. I don't think they know that the guy on the bike riding by is the guy at the bike shop, so they have no incentive to be extra nice for favors. We don't exchange greetings, but they don't throw anything, yell anything, or let their dogs chase me. On their garage door is a fresh new banner that says "Trump 2024: Fuck Your Feelings."

At a higher level of culpability in the increasing heat, a certain guy representing the state of Utah after serving as governor of Massachusetts voted as a senator for conservative justices on the Supreme Court who perjured themselves to get confirmed and have been gutting the Constitution ever since. He comes in like a regular vacationer to get his annual flat tire fixed. He's just a regular guy who likes buzzing around the lake in various forms of motor boat, and lining up for ice cream at one of the iconic local shops. I never recognize him at first glance, dressed down, hair awry. He never says "fuck your feelings."

Another family with Utah connections, rather big in the hotel business, is quite fond of us, including me. I have done a lot of bike work for them over the decades, and done it well, because that's always my intent. The bike industry has made it harder and harder to feel good about my job, but I try to do whatever can be done to the highest standards. It was easier when I felt some actual desire to own high-end equipment.The high end is just vastly more expensive ephemeral garbage now. I loathe it, and recommend only things that I think will make the badly designed and cheesily built crap work a little better for a little longer than the life span of a chipmunk. But I digress.

The hotel family has recently invested heavily in local businesses they have enjoyed over their many years as summer residents, and donated hefty sums from their charitable foundations to support our cross-country ski trails. We were commiserating over the steady decline in snow cover. One of them even mentioned global warming. But their voting behavior has prioritized tax cuts and deregulation for decades. Will that change now? And would it be too little, too late?

The majority of people in our area have voted for the fire, time and again. We even have a punk asshole in a noisy truck rolling coal this summer. He blew a cloud at me as I rode up Main Street in the final quarter mile of my morning commute one day in June. I had to laugh. Northern New England is always years behind in fad and fashion. But it also fed my own fire of frustration. Even though I knew that humans were going to destroy themselves, probably within my lifetime, I hoped that they would prove me wrong. I still wouldn't have had kids, because life is pain, and all the joy of it is just making the best of the situation once you're here. But people are here, and keep putting more of themselves here. I was determined to leave the world no worse than I had already made it by existing at all, and by my unwitting cruelty during a shamefully sustained adolescence. All around me I see people determined to make as big a smoking crater as they can, and saying "fuck your feelings" to anyone who begins to stutter a word of advice to the contrary.

Muzzle flashes are fire. Each one burns into the public consciousness, raising the emotional temperature toward general combustion. We have one last chance to vote against the fire. Even then, the fire will resist. A coal fire in Pennsylvania has been burning underground since about 1962. Fire in all its forms wants to consume us. Maybe it's just unstoppable physics. The universe itself expands and contracts on an immense cycle. Maybe each time it reaches the point of producing conscious life it collapses on itself to start again. The motes of consciousness have their moment to believe that they have significance, and to value individual existence, even as each mote willingly consigns others to destruction for various imperfections. "Do what I want or I'll kill you," has been popular for centuries. In my neighborhood I see the flags of the proudly armed and dangerous, including at least one all black, signifying "no quarter asked or given." Pretty bold assertion from someone living in a prefab dwelling you could probably shoot through with a decent quality air rifle. But you can't have a war if you get too wrapped up in critical thinking.

I stand by the work bench, repairing recreational equipment, while the world burns. Bikes are toys. I know it seems silly, but the world would really have been a better place if we'd had a general consensus that it should be a safer place to ride a bike. The shape of society really does come down to individual actions repeated by many. Look at the competition now between a nation of narrow-minded hardasses and one of broad minded generosity. Accounts have to balance, but there are many ways to achieve that. It doesn't have to be The Way of the Hardass. I spend bleak hours alone with my thoughts, trying to remain interested in technology that has made bikes more expensive and complicated while doing nothing whatsoever to improve riding conditions. The heat in the afternoon radiates off the uninsulated back wall of this 1850s barn the way the cold winter wind seeps through it in nor'easters. The fire is strong. Will we choose to stoke it or to extinguish it?

Passing Cyclists

 A few days ago, I drove from my little town on the eastern border of New Hampshire, to Middlebury, on the west side of Vermont. The next day, I drove back. The trip required two mountain crossings in Vermont, on roads enjoyed by cyclists.

I don't enjoy passing cyclists when I'm driving. I can't always give a whole lane any more than I expect and demand that motorists always give me a whole lane. I would much rather have less space and keep motorists flowing past me and out of my life than be a stickler for the perfect pass.

The most challenging places to pass were on the two gaps, Middlebury Gap on 125 and Rochester Gap to the east. Coming west over Rochester Gap had been especially annoying. I had a parade of drivers behind me who would have loved to rip down it at unbelievable speeds, while I was toddling along with three adults, a cello, suitcases, and snacks for an estimated total load of about 700 pounds, in a vehicle  not designed for agility on a mountain road so rough and narrow that our whole train had an ambulance trapped behind us for more than five miles before the weedy ditch appeared to fill in enough for me to pull into it. None of the flamebrains behind me darted around after the ambulance passed. I had to scrape them off at the first opportunity on the wider and more accommodating roadway over Middlebury Gap. That was Friday afternoon.

On Saturday, as we reversed our route, there was almost no motor traffic. It was the weekend. Intrepid cyclists tackled the hills on a beautiful New England summer day that was not too hot, after a night that had been comfortably cool.

The lack of motor traffic helped a lot, but I still kept catching up to riders approaching blind drops. Any normal motorist would just go for it and hope for the best. I waited until I had a clear view before punching it to get clear ahead before I had to scrub speed for the next tight bend. I imagined driving a team car for one of the major European tours.

Murphy's Law of Meeting Traffic states that any time a motorist wants to pass a cyclist and there is an oncoming vehicle, the motorists will synchronize their speeds so that everyone gets wedged into the same space at the same time. It takes noticeable action by the overtaking driver to make sure that doesn't happen. A cyclist who does not expect it may be confused and a bit alarmed by a vehicle hovering back there. Other motorists trapped behind me might fume. But especially on a mountain road when either motorist might have trouble braking and steering if they're going too fast, it's important to anticipate what could go wrong and avoid it.

When the roads are crowded, it's impossible to ensure safe passing all the time. I will pass safely, but other motorists in the line are just as likely to keep barging through. This is why riding around the most scenic lakes of the Lakes Region in full tourist season is so stressful and unpleasant. Since the 1990s, when I would do multiple centuries in a season, there must be a solid million more drivers on the roads around here, adding visitors to new residents who have moved in.

It's getting worse as climate refugees who had second homes are preparing them as refuges for when their old places get too hot and run out of water completely. It'll still be hot here, just not quite as hot as where they were. And when we figure out how to manage the new style of torrential rainfall we will have less devastating flood damage and more facilities to collect the overabundance when it hits. For now, though, we just see more of our summer folk in what used to be the off season. I wonder if enough of them will move here during their child-bearing years to upgrade the schools significantly... The area was already attracting new residents, and the old ones were breeding new drivers, most of whom had no road cycling experience as kids. We see more and more hot rods and trucks, driven with the bravado of teenagers.

If gas prices had only increased at the rate of inflation, fuel would be $2.17 a gallon. Quit wasting your money, kids! Find ways to have fun that don't enslave you to quite as many corporations.