Teaching the craft

 Trainee David asked a lot of questions yesterday. As we worked through each brain teaser and skill builder I thought about teaching the craft, and how many people I've taught it to over the years. In this small shop in this backwater community, it hasn't been a huge number. Partly this is because we were fortunate that a few of them stuck around for several years before escaping to greater prosperity.

The phenomenal Ralph broke out around 2005, after ten really good years. Even then, he went to Harris Cyclery, to play a season or two in the majors before immersing himself in web design as a full-time professional. He learned so quickly that it was hard to tell what he already knew. He would assimilate techniques instantly, as well as doing his own research and bringing new knowledge to us during the critical time from the mid 1990s through the turn of the century. He'd already been wrenching on his own stuff and doing work for friends as a teenage mountain biker from the late 1980s. He respected the past and understood its role as the foundation of the latest and greatest in a way that too many modernists lacked in the rise of technofascism as the mountain bike boom billowed into its climactic fireball.

Short-timers hardly count as students of the craft. We had a number of summer fill-ins of varying usefulness during the 1990s. A couple of them became reliable flat-fixers who were also not afraid to pick up a broom and empty trash cans. Others were there just for the employee discount and the prestige of working in a shop that sold mountain bikes during the brief period in which that had any cachet. They were more notable for their ability to overlook the mundane tasks for which they had actually been hired.

After Ralph we enjoyed the services of Jim A, who was hampered by a longish commute -- much farther than mine -- and less of a fascination with bikes in general. He still performed excellent work for several years, long enough to make the effort worthwhile. He cared enough to learn, which always gratifies a teacher. However, with training in physical therapy and other real career-type skills, he left to pursue those avenues rather than remain chained to a workstand as bicycling entered its decline.

From our Jackson, NH, winter staff we got the services of Big G. He'd had some interest in bikes back in the 1970s boom, as a young engineer in the Boston area. Now not such a young engineer, he had joined us for the ski seasons in 2006, and transitioned to full-year employment after we shut down in J-town in 2009. He was another student who respected and understood the value of the past in shaping the future, so he absorbed a range of skills as rapidly as he could, without trying to dismiss as unimportant the parts that might not have interested him as much.

There have been others who worked earnestly and well, but really had better things to do, and hurried to them at the earliest opportunity. Who can blame them? A complete bike mechanic needs to be able to deal with technology that spans almost a century, and may face any of it within five minutes of each other, on any given day.

Most of the people to whom I have taught the craft no longer practice it. Most of the people alongside whom I learned it no longer practice it, either. Lifers are the minority in this business. The business side does tend to crush the fun out of it.

Trainee David is off to the Marine Corps in July. That will be the last we see of him unless he comes back to visit the shut-ins, the way a youngster named Ray, who was a shop fixture for a few years until shortly before I came on board, drops back in from time to time now after a career in the Navy and in commercial aviation.

The pandemic-induced bike boom continues, along with the shortages in complete bikes and in service parts. This distorts our sense of what we really need in the long term, because the present level of intensity seems impossible to sustain. I also wonder whether the intensity seems greater because of the almost nonexistent supply. If we were sitting on fat inventory, along with every other shop with similar bounty, would we get cleaned out, or would a satiated population come through to pick and poke and chisel for discounts? I noted already how the seekers are no longer just looking for anything they can pedal. They've refined their search to specific categories, and even to specific models.

The return to freer movement in society, as we find new norms reminiscent of the old norms, will be slower than people hope. Its final form will be shaped by a multitude of factors in public taste and medical necessity, as well as economic and environmental considerations, as ongoing neglected problems all come to a crisis point along with the pandemic and its aftermath. This makes it nearly impossible to chart a course into trackless ocean beset with mist and mirage. When will supplies come back? Where will they come from? Who will still want what?

All of this, coupled with chronically abysmal levels of pay, make it nearly impossible to entice anyone to sign on for a career -- or even a few solid years -- as a really good bike mechanic. My first mentor, Diane, got out of the shop scene in the early 1980s and has operated as an independent with her own little machine shop ever since. She has supplemented her income by working on aircraft restorations and other endeavors, including the now shuttered Victory Bicycles, which made accurate replica ordinary bikes (penny farthings) that were sold internationally. Her curiosity about bicycles and their history led her back past the ordinary to the draisine. Talk about owning one of every category!

My second mentor appears still to be a prime mover in the craft, operating the East Coast Bicycle Academy in Harrisonburg, VA. At the time I had no idea that the craft was my future. Indeed, for nine years after leaving the shop where I worked for him, in Alexandria, VA, for a scant nine months, I worked in the yacht industry, in an outdoor outfitter store, and clung to the fringes of the world of journalism before I dropped back into the bike business for temporary supplemental income. Still, despite my youthful arrogance and general density, I absorbed a few fundamental principles that have served me well. That means they have served my customers well, as I applied them to every service issue. Thanks, Les. He found a good refuge for his base of operations. If the whole tinsel and plastic castle of obscenely expensive and ridiculously complicated machines collapses tomorrow, people like Diane and Les will assure that the completely satisfactory and much more locally serviceable machines of the prior era will be ready to emerge and claim their place again as the most efficient way to translate human effort into forward motion. Backward motion, too for you insanely skilled fixed-gear riders.