F*cking bicyclists!

 Mid-week, a couple rode in from Moultonborough on a tandem for a couple of quick adjustments. They ride a tandem because the stoker is blind. They reported that one or more drivers had yelled "fck you!" at them as they rode on Route 109.

I've mentioned before how the roads along the lake shore seem to attract a high percentage of assholes. I have had few incidents either on my commute or in my own neighborhood where there are no prestigious bodies of water. That all changes near any major lake in the state.

On Saturday's ride home, I got to the end of Bay Street in time to spot a "take it now or wait a while" gap, which I sprinted into. The intersection of Bay Street and 109A can be stressful when traffic is heavy with impatient drivers. The last two weeks of August have a hectic feel as vacationers rush to cram in the last of summer fun, and tired locals are more than ready to see the last of them for a while. Neither of these user groups has much patience for someone pedaling.

I made the gap cleanly in front of the line of cars coming up from my right. The leader of that bunch may have been setting up to turn left. There were vehicles coming from each of the three directions, far enough back to give me just enough time to go for it. If I had hesitated, I would have had to hover at the intersection for a long time while they sorted themselves out by pushing past me or cutting in front of me. So I made the left turn and faded to the right, settling into a steady climbing rhythm.

As the line of vehicles came up behind me, I heard continuous angry horn blasts. They weren't right behind me, so I knew they were directed at whoever was leading the bunch, who was apparently passing me too slowly and deliberately for the expert driver behind them. The honking continued as the first vehicle passed, and continued as the angry jerk in a black Mercedes SUV came through next. I expected a closer pass, but it's hard to manage the horn and the string of f-bombs and brush the cyclist's elbow all at once. He did say something about "fcking bicycle," but he sounded like his tantrum was already making him a bit short of breath. I wasn't sure if he was talking to me or ranting to the person in the vehicle with him.

Some people are unbelievably territorial on the road. Anything smaller and slower offends them. How dare we be out there getting in their way, even if we aren't really? The problem is that any particle in the flow changes the flow. Do these drivers want to spend all of their time in concrete-lined chutes, running full throttle to their next vitally important destination? Do the particles in a particle accelerator get hooked on it?

A couple looking for a ride route earlier in the week had thought that they would ride the Cotton Valley Trail, but the husband had a full-on road bike with skinny tires. Sure, a skilled rider could manage the trail on that, but he would spend all his time concentrating on the many rail crossings and the less than ideal surface for such a small footprint. His wife had an e-hybrid. Since they'd driven to town to ride, I figured they wouldn't mind driving a little more to get to nicer roads, so I sent them to park in my driveway and ride in my neighborhood. They left a nice note afterward, taped to the porch rail, so it must have gone well.

We're approaching the end of my bike commuting season, as darkness encroaches on the evening half of the ride. Elm Street in Ossipee is really bad in the dark, as drivers blind each other with their headlights. Last night coming home by car from the grocery store I followed an oversized pickup truck hauling a long trailer with a car on it as it turned in at Elm Street. I imagined having that behemoth try to pass me on a bike in there. Bad enough in daylight, let alone in the dark. And you know they would pass, or harass me for holding them back if I tried to cover the lane. Claiming space on the road becomes much harder in the dark.

A Wasp in the Crotch

 In late summer and fall, various species of social wasp turn into an unemployed bunch of mean drunks. With next year's brood bedded down, and fallen fruit fermenting, not to mention unattended drinks at the last cookouts of the year, workers whiling away their last days have nothing to do but look for sweet things and sting people.

Before that they may aggressively defend the nest. Last summer seemed particularly bad for the number and hostility of wasp colonies.

What does this mean to the cyclist? Road cyclists may travel near flowering plants where bees and wasps come and go. Off-road cyclists not only encounter these insects buzzing about the forest and field, but might encounter a ground nest inconveniently built under a trail feature. And that brings us to your shorts.

Over the course of half a century of bike commuting, I have taken more than a couple of wasps or bees up the shorts. I probably took in that many in my first year out of college. In 1979, my commute was roughly 14 miles each way, with a very enjoyable stretch on St. Margaret's Road headed out toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge from Annapolis, Maryland. Honeysuckle grew thickly along parts of that. Because I wore either touring shorts -- basically hiking shorts with a chamois -- or classic black wool shorts, the leg fit was not snug enough to exclude a stinging insect I might accidentally scoop up on the way by. Fortunately, those hit the outside of my thigh on the right side. It didn't end well for the stingers. To stop the attack I had to pinch them in the cloth and then shake whatever was left out the bottom of the pant leg.

Canvas shorts are harder to sting through, should the wasp hit the outside of the fabric. Difficult but not impossible. The old wool shorts wouldn't stop anything. Lycra likewise presents no barrier at all to an angry hornet. However, modern pads, more elaborately engineered than the old chamois, do protect the most vital areas from direct attack. As poorly as Lycra armors against nearly anything, the heavy pads in most shorts now include a front section conveniently located to deter angry insect stabs. That's not its purpose, but it serves the purpose.

Yesterday, coming into Wolfeboro on Center Street opposite Whitten Neck Road, I was enjoying the curve in the road along a stone retaining wall, heading into a welcome short descent when I felt the burn of a wasp sting on my inner right thigh, what I would call the event horizon of the crotch, not right up in the junction, or the junk. I swatted it away, but it had already struck.

Riders who prefer street clothes or baggy cycling shorts, be warned. Long inseams might move the entry point down the leg, making wasp entry trickier than hitting the exhaust port in the utility trench on the Death Star. But someone did hit that. Fiction, I know. But there's always the real-life example of the HMS Hood, blown to smithereens by one lucky shell from the Bismarck in 1941. Long shots still have a shot.

My commuting setup includes a waist pack, which serves not only as extra carrying space but also as my light bar for rear-facing blinkies. Because of this, any undesired arthropods that fly in through the top zipper of my jersey can't just fall out the bottom. That has led to a few stings and crushed attackers over the years. I have to unbuckle the waist strap on the pack, shake the remains of the insect out the bottom of the jersey, and re-fasten the pack, usually while still riding. Who wants to stop? Not only that, stopping and putting down the landing gear takes time and exposes me to a longer attack by the irate and perhaps not yet deceased wasp.

As I researched this topic, I found many stories of other riders who have been stung, including on the head. A wasp in the helmet can be a real disaster, even if you aren't officially allergic. I'd already heard stories from motorcyclists who took one through the raised visor of a full-face helmet. I tie a bandanna underneath my helmet, which might serve at least to confuse a wasp. Maybe it will like the upholstery and feel like napping instead of attacking.

Riders who scorn helmets might chuckle at the self-created hardship of helmet wearers in this case, but you could just as easily get stung in the face.

Days later, the area of the sting still itches as the venom dissipates. Over the next two mornings, I gave the wall a wider berth and kept my knees even closer to the top tube than usual.

Wood soles and glove leather uppers

The forecast for this weekend wavered back and forth between a chance of showers or a chance of heavier showers.

Rainy rides test your resolve and your equipment. Depending on your bike, you might keep the worst of the deluge out of your butt crack by using proper fenders/mudguards, but in any kind of steady rain you will probably end up with very wet shoes. This is inconvenient for a recreational rider. It's more of a nuisance for a commuter.

Among the many nice things obliterated by progress, the coming of step-in pedal bindings in the mid 1980s, quickly wiped out the cleated racing shoes of the day.

When riders used toeclips and straps, the upper of the cycling shoe was made of light leather. The sole might be stiff layers of laminated leather, some form of plastic, or wood. The break-in procedure actually involved soaking the very tight shoes with water and then going for a long ride while they dried to the exact size of your foot. As soon as the secure grip shifted from a strap that went around the foot to a plastic widget that snapped into the pedal and held the foot from beneath, riders started ripping their shoes apart. D'Oh! Didn't think about that detail, did ya?

Road shoes evolved rapidly, growing various straps, as the uppers got thicker as well to account for the added stress on the shoes themselves and the riders' feet therein. Regardless of synthetic fabrics and ventilated mesh, all that upholstery takes longer to dry than a much lighter shoe with a wooden sole and a glove leather upper. I could stuff my leather shoes with newspaper and they would be dry by morning. My modern shoes might be dry by next week.

I had shoes ranging from almost cardboard soles up to some really nice contoured wood ones. I added over the counter Dr. Scholl's arch supports to counter a little pronation problem that came... and eventually went. I could strip down wet shoes to essential structure for fast drying in one or two easy steps.

I quit riding regularly in cleated shoes several years ago because I wanted to be ready to walk if necessary. My remaining pairs of shoes with slotted cleats were made in the clipless era. I still have a pair of 1980s Detto Pietros, but without cleats mounted. Some riders in ancient times would use shoes like that without the cleats just for the stiff sole to aid power transfer better than a bendy sneaker. Bata offered the Bata Biker, which was a canvas sneaker with a thicker sole under the ball of the foot, but without the bulky cupsoles and rands common today on shoes that ignore the needs and desires of the few remaining toeclip users.

In cycling, almost nothing dies out completely. The toeclip lives on. I predict that it will rise again when a new generation of riders recognizes its economic utility and freedom of choice in footwear. Every once in a while I dust off the old slotted cleats and go for a power ride. With toeclips I have that option: full power with cleated shoes or at least partial power with non-cleated shoes.

One way you can tell my content is not AI generated is the way I keep harping on the same old shit. Also, AI probably doesn't swear as much. My rationale is this: If a concept is good and true and important, repetition puts many versions of it out there for readers to find.

We are the ER of vacation fun

 In Resort Town, our bike shop sees not only a seasonal surge of service work, but intense spikes within it as vacationers and weekenders face unexpected mishaps.

Overall, the work load is far less than it was in the 1990s. We had two full-time mechanics and two full-time staffers who worked the sales floor and the workshop as needed. This level survived into the first decade of the next century, even though the bike industry had already torpedoed itself, and "supply side" economic policies were still hollowing out the general economy. It took at least twice as much work to bury us as deeply as we are buried now with just two elderly mechanics.

When the emergency cases started piling up this weekend, the long-term repair queue was basically empty. Most of the intensity had centered on renters picking up bikes on Friday for the local triathlon on Saturday morning. I had one flat tire job for kid or grandkid left over from the day before, and a repair estimate for a job for later in the week. Every walk-in flat tire or dropped chain qualified for a same-day turnaround. "I'm only here through Monday." "We're only here for the week." "We were just starting out on our ride." Within an hour, we had a full day of rush jobs.

Promise is too strong a word for the assurance we give that we can finish what looks like a simple job within minutes or hours, but it's close. We proceed with confidence because we succeed more often than we fail. You see it all the time on the television medical dramas. Simple diagnosis, initiate treatment, sudden downturn, beeping alarms...

Job 1: flat tire on a Surly Grappler. Clean bike, custom equipped with Brooks saddle and a fairly narrow -- by modern standards -- upright handlebar. Tube tires, so a nice, clean prospect. But then the bead fit was super tight coming off. Tubeless-ready rims are a plague, with their little shelf for the bead to snap into. But breaking the bead loose from that was only the first hurdle. I didn't start that repair, but it got handed off to me because I still have some residual grip strength. This only consumed a little extra time. By the end of the day, all those littles add up. hell, by the middle of the day they add up. Fortunately, the tire went on more easily than it came off. This is often the case. Inexperienced or impatient mechanics will panic and resort to tire levers.

Most of the repairs tumbled in at the same time, as people beginning their Sunday fun discovered their problems. I had already checked in a guy's road bike with a broken pad retaining bolt on the front disc brake and a broken spoke in the rear wheel. The full length of the broken spoke was still there, which meant that I could connect the new spoke to the old nipple, and that enough of the old spoke remained to get an accurate measurement. Pfft! No problem!

The pad retaining bolt, or screw, or pin, depending on you choice of internet search term, was the kind with threads right under the bolt head. The rest of the pin sticks though the tabs on the brake pads and out the other side of the caliper, with a retaining clip on the end of it. Although the customer had somehow managed to twist the head off of this small fastener with a 2.5mm head, I knew I could grab onto the other end of the pin and unthread it from there.

Grabbing the end was relatively easy with our smallest locking pliers. However, the space available in the Shimano 105 brake only allowed me to get about one-eighth of a turn at a time. Progress was imperceptibly slow at first. Everything in there is black or dark gray. Finally I saw threads emerging. This did not speed the process, but it verified progress.

Our stash of pad retaining screws did not include one long enough. I checked our suppliers. No one had one, including Shimano's B2B website. You could find them on retail sites, including titanium ones for stupid amounts of money, but we didn't have one and had no wholesale source. No matter. The customer needed it that day. I used a cotter pin, the way so many brakes do anyway.

On to the spoke. Rear wheel. Remove the cassette. Remove the brake rotor. Center-lock rotor using the same tool as the cassette lockring. Nice. All I have to do now is extract the broken spoke from the nipple and thread in another spoke to keep the nipple from disappearing into the rim.

The broken spoke was welded into the nipple. Fortunately, it was a brass nipple that could take some torque. Holding the spoke with the locking pliers, I twisted the spoke wrench. The nipple moved a little, with the protesting ratcheting noise of dry metal against dry metal. I flooded the area with penetrating oil. One nice thing about disc brakes: no need to keep a braking surface clean on the rim. With the rotor off the wheel, it was safe from drips as well. Good thing, too. It was at least a half hour freeing that spoke without destroying the nipple. If I needed to replace the nipple, that would mean removing the tire and peeling up the rim strip. Sometimes that only requires deflating the tire, pulling back the bead, and prying up a section of non-adhesive rim strip. These days, though, the rim might have "tubeless-ready" rim tape stuck down, not to mention an absurdly tight tire fit requiring more complete removal of everything. Hey, I don't give a shit, I get paid by the hour and bill accordingly. But when we're trying to accommodate a whole flock of people whose vacation fun depends on getting their bikes fixed now, extra steps just add more stress.

Into the chaos came a walk-in with a folding bike. She was half of a couple, but only one bike needed our attention. Based on its condition, I would bet that the other one did, too, but as long as they were satisfied, I wasn't going to instigate anything.

"The chain keeps falling off here." She pointed down between the small cog and the dropout. I could see that the derailleur was hanging funny. "I was trying to tighten the brakes. I messed with this cable too." That was the shift cable.

It took a while to get it onto the stand. The limit screws on the derailleur were run all the way out, so you had your choice of whether to drop the chain down beside the small cog or throw it into the spokes. The customer had run the brake cable the wrong way around its anchor bolt and graunched it down, oblivious to the deeply and unevenly worn pads. The shift cable anchor bolt was rotated in a way we see often, thanks to a quirk of Shimano design. There's a little tab that is meant to hold the plate in the proper attitude while the cable runs under one edge. Instead, people are constantly turning it to put the cable under the little tab. The bike could have used another hour of cleaning and adjustments by the time I got the derailleur working and replaced the brake pads, but it was safe and functional. It can be admitted later for the less acute problems.

Just before the weekend I had done a spoke and tire job on a mountain bike with tubeless tires. That one worked out well, because the customer used spoke hole plugs instead of stupid rim tape. The breaking spoke had popped its plug loose, deflating the tire quickly and completely. I had ready access to the spoke hole to install the new one. We had some rim plugs sitting around, to replace the one damaged when the spoke blew out. The tire re-seated and held. So that was nice. There was only one complication. When I had everything back together all snug, I spun the wheel and heard something rattling, either inside the tire or the rim itself. Fearing it might be another old rim plug or some other debris I had overlooked inside the tire while the bead was detached, I took everything apart to remove whatever was rattling.

There was nothing in the tire except still-wet sealant. The noise was in the rim. Broken nipple? Bits of rim plug? I shook and shook and shook it to move the object to a spoke hole. Eventually, a perfect sphere of something fell out. It was dark and appeared hard. Ball bearing? Too light. And it crumbled under a firm pinch with my fingers. Also, the rim still rattled. I shook it over and over as it released a total of four of these little dung balls. Near as I can figure, they're composed of sealant, trail dirt, and carbon dust, spun into spheres by wheel rotation.

That was just on my stand. El Queso Grande had his own set of urgent care cases, as well as launching most of our renters, and working the register for sales of clothing, sunglasses, daypacks and other merch. It's like the ER staff also operate the hospital gift shop. Hurry up and stitch that laceration! Someone needs a tee shirt! Fortunately, no real lives are at stake. I mean, we need to do our work right so that riders don't end up in the actual ER on our account, but successful repair doesn't depend on speed and precision the way emergency medicine does. However, some of the clientele get fretful over how their planned day of fun is bleeding out on the bike shop floor. We're here to literally save the day.

Between the end-to-end days and the bike commutes on either end, the hours left over go to preparing for the next day and trying unsuccessfully to get enough sleep. The days off go to catching up on that sleep whether I want to or not, and all of the routine chores to get ready for another week. And summer's over and the days are shrinking and we face east awaiting the sun again. Sure, there are a few weeks left, and all of fall, but the cellist is leaving for her school year job, leaving behind the keening silence of tinnitus and the decaying sunlight of our turn toward the season of darkness.

Heavy traffic

Cyclists are used to being at or near the bottom of the food chain out on the road. Even so, I'm more comfortable there than in the confined space of a path with multiple user types and lots of slower riders.

I seldom see other riders on my commute. When I do, it's usually another lone rider or a very small group of athletic adults. We sort out by pace with little or no conversation unless it's someone I already know, or a particularly loquacious stranger. That is one weird thing about riding: you're not in a sealed capsule. I'm no more inclined to get chatty with someone on my bike commute than I would be in my car. Mind you, I have a lot to say, usually profane, about the other drivers I'm stuck with, but I consider it a good thing that they can't hear me. The reverse is probably true. On the bike I care more about keeping my breathing nice and steady while I focus on safe maneuvering around tons of steel piloted by idiots and psychopaths that I'm trusting with my life. We casually throw great masses around at speeds no human could achieve 200 years ago unless they fell off a cliff. And road cyclists go out there throwing elbows with them. It's just another normal day.

On my way home last Wednesday, a rider I hadn't seen in a while was coming southbound as I headed north on Route 28. We exchanged waves. A little further north, near the top of a climb, I passed two other riders stopped on the side of the road. A man and a woman, looked to be in their twenties, wearing please-don't-kill-me-yellow vests, stood astride flat-bar hybrids, talking about something. I grunted a greeting with what breath I could spare as I made the last few pedal strokes to the crest. On the flats beyond, I saw two more riders, similarly kitted and equipped. Once I passed them, I saw two more another couple hundred meters ahead. Okay, nice summer day, and there's a small surge in touring interest.

Past the height of land I geared up and bore down a comfortable amount, relishing the tailwind. For an old fart, I was hammering. I had to laugh, though, at my memory of Tom (Thomas) Prehn looking over and saying, "You've got a higher gear still" as I tried to hang with him during time trail training in 1980. He was kind enough to ride with us local dubs for his long easy rides and the kind of interval training where we would quickly regroup. This was the first -- and only -- time I tried to stick with him when he was putting on a serious burn for ten miles. I was able to stay on his wheel, but he never bothered to let me pull through again. Rising through the grades in bike racing, the steps are exponential, not incremental.

The descent from the peak of 28 to the circle at Route 171 is about two miles. It levels off for a while, but the trend continues helpfully downward. A tailwind makes it even better. Coming off of two rest days, I felt about as good as someone my age can feel. Decades of habit propelled me. Habit maintains momentum on the flat quarter-mile approach to the circle. I back off a little so that I have reserves to deal with any motorist hassles going through it. Intersections are very stressful for a road rider. The circle has four of them.

From a quarter mile back I saw a thick congregation of please-don't-kill-me-yellow vests and helmets on what looked like about twenty riders heading through the circle. They extended from the inrun all the way to the exit continuing on 28 north. I saw no motor vehicles. I entered the chute at about 22 mph. The tour group was hugging the right line. I stayed well to the left and coasted down to about 18. Even at that, I passed them like they were standing still. I greeted the first few as I caught them, and said hey to what looked like the leaders at the front, before accelerating gradually away. At my age, acceleration is always gradual. But from the exclamations I heard from some of the tourists I must have seemed fast.

I usually hammer through the circle as fast as I can. Get to it, get through it, get clear of any motorist conflicts. This may be more or less stressful depending on how many motorists are actually there. They can arrive abruptly, speeding in from any of four directions, sometimes multiple directions. Then they might travel around a quarter, half, or three quarters of the circle at the best speed they can manage, because no one likes to linger in it, no matter what their wheels and propulsion system are. I might even be holding one back because they caught up to me too late for me to send them ahead of me.

The first riders to see me expressed astonishment at my pace. I'm no top tier athlete, but normal people are slow. On a competitive scale I'm solidly mediocre at best, but normal people don't care about the competitive scale at all. I don't either, anymore. I just have the residual benefits of having cared about it in the past.

I wasn't trying to prove a point. I was just trying to escape from the embarrassment of socializing and the delay of being stuck in their clot. I'm very happy to see people claiming their space on the road. I still want to maintain my pace and get home. Or to work, depending on the time of day.

Almost every other time I've encountered other riders on my route, they have been competitive cyclists, even if they weren't in their active racing years, or experienced tourists. Their pace and bike handling reflect that. Even when I've passed casual riders they have not been in large groups.

This group had an advantage at the circle because their large group clearly held the territory. That could enhance their safety or it could inspire the kind of violence we hear about all too frequently, where a road-raging driver rams a group of riders with murderous intent. On Wednesday, however, the circle seemed miraculously deserted. I don't know if their luck held, because I resumed hammering and didn't look back. I generally figure the less people see of me the better.

At home, the cellist told me that she had seen a similar group headed north on Elm Street in the morning. She had hung back until they reached a straight enough stretch to allow her to drive past them safely. She thought one of the kids flipped her off. They seemed like camp groups.

She also asked me if I'd announced I was passing on their left or anything like that. It never occurred to me to do so. I don't talk to other road users in the course of a normal ride. The only talking that went on in road races was trash talk for the most part. Who had the breath to speak when launching an attack? I'm crap as a racer, but I'm in race/combat mode on the road, unless I happen to merge with one of the very few people I know, and our schedules and strengths allow for it. She said that the school where she works holds group ride training before their spring overnight tour, including communication. They also do much of their route on well-developed paths in the Wilmington, Delaware, area. They have to follow path protocols for courtesy and safety.

Courtesy and safety when riding among motorists is almost entirely nonverbal. I do my best to ride a smooth, controlled line that allows drivers to get by me and go bother somebody else. I figure the longer they have to stay behind me the more they'll hate me. Things go pretty smoothly on that basis. However, I can't control the drivers who for whatever reason feel obliged to hang back there for a ridiculous amount of time. It tickles the vanity to imagine they're admiring my power and expertise. How likely is that? Maybe they're just groping under the seat for the 9mm that slid inconveniently out of reach until they finally say "fuck it" and drive past me. I have no way of knowing.

I seem to have one secret admirer on Elm Street. Two or three times last year, a minivan hung back literally for miles, creating an unwilling audience of drivers caught behind them while they shadowed me through the dips and turns. I was feeling frisky on those evenings, doing a pretty good job, but hardly challenging motorist speeds for the entire distance that they stayed back. Then, last Friday, there they were again.

It started with a sense of presence. Their vehicle is not loud, and they don't follow closely. After a couple of minutes I heard someone laying on the horn, but it wasn't right behind me. I was riding fast, but hugging the right line, even in some rough sections. I didn't hammer any of the short climbs that interrupt what is basically a series of fast little downhills for three miles. I eased up on the sort of straight parts, hoping they would get the hint. Finally, they came through, followed by all of the unwilling participants. To their credit, none of them took it out on me. That has not always been the case.

Squeezers

 Dammit, I let them piss me off. Not bird-flipping pissed off, but spurred to foolish exertion.

Squeezers are always a problem. They squeeze past in narrow lanes. They squeeze through at intersections. One of the unwritten laws of driving is that a motorist gets to pass a cyclist wherever they want. Regardless of the real law, waiting behind a pedaler is completely optional. I'm used to it.

The law in many places, and traffic cycling methodology in general, supports riders who engage in traffic control measures to enforce safe passing clearances. Before these laws, I was already herding traffic. As the principles became more established, I experimented with its limits. For instance, cyclists may take a full lane to clear obstacles and prevent unsafe passing. For much of my route, passing is not technically safe. I tried shutting the gate in most or all of these sections. Motorists responded with annoyance, aggression, and more unsafe passing. Not all of them, of course, but the one or two willing subjects who would stay back inevitably corked up a flood of less happy drivers who would let me know how they felt when they finally got to pass. Most of the time, I only hold drivers back on the final approach to an intersection where I expect to roll through the stop sign ahead of them. They can then pass me on the next stretch with less stress to both of us.

Summer brings higher traffic volume. After 36 years riding the same route, I have all of the corners dialed in, not just for fun but to preserve my momentum. Summer traffic breaks the flow. So last Friday, as I pushed hard to make it to work on time, I felt the strain of matching my speed to the fluctuations of the crowded lane beside me on the way in Center Street to the right turn onto Lehner Street. Great corner, but you have to watch the drivers from all four directions, plus possibly turning into or out of the gas station on the corner. Then settle in for the long, gradual grind to Glendon Street with its three-way stop.

A lot of drivers who want to get onto Main Street take a left at Union Street rather than going all the way to Glendon. Not on Friday, though. The one driver close behind me passed cleanly heading for the stop sign. The next driver waffled until we had reached that critically awkward distance at which I swing left to cover the lane. I swung left. Waffly swung further to the left, but still hung there, edging up on me. They ended up in the left lane, alarming the oncoming driver in that lane who had every right to expect that it would be clear. Meanwhile, I slipped into pilot fish position on the first vehicle at the stop sign and flowed through the intersection onto Glendon Street. Waffly came through behind me, so I had to push a larger gear than I liked, to prevent him from doing something rude and dangerous before I could snap a right turn onto Depot Street and get onto Central Avenue. These are grand names for pieces of road that are anywhere from forty to 140 meters long. More or less, anyway.

I'd already been squeezed by a dump truck towing a slightly oversized flatbed trailer with a piece of heavy equipment on it, out in the bendy part of Route 28 where it narrows passing the old boat museum. That guy was whizzing along at 45-50, and not too concerned with passing clearance. I was a little fired up. Then I had to manage speeders on Center Street coming down to 190A and the rail trail crosswalk. Now I merged into the stop and go traffic on Main Street, still chasing the clock.

I learned the hard way years ago not to blaze through slow or stopped motor traffic as fast as I can possibly go. It doesn't impress anyone or turn them into cycling advocates, and it can put you in the hospital, or worse. But I do flow through when the motorists jam each other up completely. With all the crosswalks, unpredictable pedestrians, and on-street parking in downtown Wolfeboro, the Death Slot to the right of the travel lane can be a perilous venture. I moved forward a couple of slots at one crosswalk, getting onto a new shark for a few yards to the next full stop. Just ahead I saw a dump truck (no trailer) with that nice tall tailgate offering a draft for the rest of the way to my turn at Mill Street. We might not reach drafting speeds, but that big shark would control the lane nicely. The vehicles right in front of me were sitting at the crosswalk long after it was clear, so I slid past to sprint after the truck.

Unfortunately, the truck must have been empty. It accelerated away from me as I stomped impotently on slightly too big a gear, with my front derailleur cage rubbing on the chain, grind grind grind, a pathetic old fart on a heavy bike, losing a sprint in front of the sidewalk cafe audience. The cars I had passed queued up behind me as I tried to make it look as good as possible going into the Mill Street corner. It wasn't good.

One of the tricks to survival out there among the fire-breathing beasts is to ride within your limits. Good cadence, a little reserve acceleration, relaxed climbing, all present an image of control. Absolute speed is not as important as smoothness. If you let yourself get ragged, drivers will sense that you are at your limit. They'll react as any predator or competitor will when they sense weakness. As long as you seem like you have something in reserve, they have no idea how much. By blowing up in a failed sprint, I threw away all of that. It bugged me for the rest of the day and all night.

Representation matters. Every rider on the road represents all riders. The idiots, the hotheads, the weavers and wobblers and whiners, each one is all of us to the motoring public, who simply see someone on a two-wheeled vehicle with pedals and think, "there's another one." Maybe they differentiate between the kitted-out racer types who need to get a different hobby, and the chaotic grungy ones who just need to get a better job, but I imagine that admiration is the last thing they feel. Nor should that be a goal, when all we really want is the modicum of respect that lets us use the road for our own purposes. I really prefer to go unremarked, insofar as that is possible. See me enough to avoid collision. That's good enough. You can ride slowly with dignity. Not too slowly... at some point, traffic riding as we allow it here and now is too risky for a rider who can't put out a little heat when needed. But you don't need to give up and run away as soon as you no longer have a 35 mph sprint on tap.

Can you afford to have fun?

 A few years ago, as the local mountain bike organization -- to use the term loosely -- was getting more aggressive about building engineered trails, one of their spokespeople would say that developing the trails would attract "people with more disposable income." This spokesperson does competent work with a tractor and a chainsaw, but doesn't depend on them for his very survival. He has always seemed like someone who doesn't have to worry about his personal finances, if you know what I mean.

"Disposable income" is another way to sort people and sift out the undesirables. Whoever they are, they have failed to measure up as potential customers. That's the only yardstick that matters in the US economy.

Bicycles started out as luxury goods way back in the 19th century. Manufacturers were surprised at the volume of sales driven by working class customers who scraped together the coin to have a mode of transportation that extended their shoe-leather cruising range and didn't require oats, hay, water, and shelter, not to mention veterinary care and eventual body disposal. Someone who lived in a boarding house could probably find a place to shoehorn in a bicycle. And bikes were built to last back then, because manufacturers mostly didn't know any better than to make something as solid as they could, and build their reputation on quality rather than marketing. Disposable income wasn't an automatic weeding system.

Most of us would prefer not to ride an ordinary, with its tall wheel -- usually the front -- and tricky handling. Nor would we gravitate to an early model of safety bicycle, with its single fixed gear and substantial weight. But the vehicles evolved rapidly into lighter, more nimble machines still built to withstand the challenges of rough roads and long distances. From their beginning, they evolved from the simplest form, without even pedals, adding each level of complexity a bit at a time to preserve the durability of simplicity while improving comfort and handling. The best of them were relatively expensive, but standards changed slowly enough that a hobbyist or someone who merely appreciated the craftsmanship and ride quality could buy a high-end bike and ride it for decades.

As Wolfeboro shifts to summer mode, I scan the vehicles using our parking lot and the people getting out of them. The vast majority of cars parking in our lot at any time of year are not there for us, and seldom for any other business in the complex. They're poaching to go downtown. With the coming of the second home crowd and their guests, the value of some vehicles can exceed the value of my house.

Disposable income is here to visit. Biking draws a fraction of the participants it did in the 1990s. The seasonal residents and visitors bring with them fashionable bikes in road, gravel, and mountain categories. Sometimes they even bring them in. Overall I see fewer people than in the 1990s to the very early 2000s. When people come in and say the town is busy I want to ask them if they were in a coma from the mid 1980s through 1999. The crowds have definitely shrunk.

Mountain biking thrived because people wanted to ride away from the roads. It died because the industry pandered to the tech-obsessed stunt performer demographic and let prices get out of control. Riders might have had other reasons to cut back on their bike use as well. The transition was blurred by the surge in road riding that bridged the transition from the end of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st. The industry had to re-learn how to make enticing entry-level road bikes and fill in the mid range. But then riders discovered everything that had intimidated and discouraged them about riding on the roads, and the numbers flaked away.

Various forms of road bike hinted at the possibility of the gravel category. But once cycling broke up into very specific categories, prices had to creep higher because no one was making it up in volume.

A cyclist in any category will be disposing of a lot of income to play at all, multiplied by the number of different category bikes that rider chooses to use. Tubeless tires and DOT fluid hydraulic disc brakes use highly perishable fluids that can damage the systems in which they are supposed to work. Regular maintenance draws a certain amount of money. Or you could wait for the tires or brakes to fail completely and then pay to clean up the mess they've turned into. Or quit cycling at that point, or just buy a new bike. Hard to say where you'll get it or who will work on it by that time.

I asked AI whether working in a bike shop was a good job. It basically said "no." It mentioned the chronic low pay, seasonal work load, and the suicidally thin margins that shops have to live on. I asked it how much the tools would cost for a rider to work on their own bike and it gave me a range of $30 to $1,000. It had more details about specific options, if you want to get into fixing your specific suspension system for instance. You will also have to hope that you can get parts when you need them.

The disposable income crowd is a competitive club. You're welcome to try to keep up. If you can't, they won't miss you.