Support your local pedestrian

 On my bike commutes I was seeing a moderately tall, bearded young man walking toward Wolfeboro along Route 28. Usually I would see him somewhere along the north slope between Route 171 and the crossroads at North Wolfeboro Road and Pork Hill Road, but it might be further north before 171 or a little further along, past North Wolfeboro. It took me a while to notice that he was walking all the way into the town of Wolfeboro and walking to various destinations while he was there. If he also walked back out the way he came in, he had to be logging well over 20 miles a day on foot.

I never saw him hitching a ride. He walked on the correct side, facing traffic. I can't recall if I ever saw him walking back northward toward Ossipee, but I might have forgotten it. Whether you see someone along a route depends entirely on your schedules. Our mornings coincided regularly. In bike season I might be starting toward home anywhere within a span of an hour or more. Going in was much more consistent.

The walker wasn't sauntering, but he wasn't speed-walking or jogging, either. When I would see him through the workshop windows, it was generally a couple of hours after I had arrived. The transportation pedestrian maintains a cruising pace, not a racing pace.

Because I hate driving, particularly with other drivers on the road, I have considered various ways to cover the distance to work in the seasons of darkness and frozen precipitation. The obvious first choice would be cross-country skiing. That depends on snow that will provide grip for the skis and smooth running. In New Hampshire, especially with the changing climate, ungroomed snow is often like soapy porcelain or wet concrete. And the skier would have to stay out of the travel lanes, probably outside of the plow drift.

Native Americans in New England invented the snowshoe, not the ski, because terrain and snow conditions here made the short, wide flotation more practical. I do not know if they experimented with some form of traction device lashed to the bottom of it, for the hard, refrozen conditions. However, when snowshoe hiking was the only way to get around, trails would get packed down to a smooth surface. The system worked for a few thousand years.

That was before cars and snowplows. In our modern world, a transportation snowshoe hiker is rare to nonexistent. I have not seen the summer pedestrian pushing into darkness and snow.

On snowshoes, the pedestrian would not be able to maintain more than about 3 miles per hour at best. Skis glide, but snowshoes give nothing away. Plod, plod, plod, you have to take every step. Along the highway, a walker might consider bare-booting it on the pavement when no vehicles were passing, hopping out of the way as necessary. On the stretches with a guardrail, that would require vaulting over the rail and whatever plow-piled snow was in the way. You wouldn't want to chew up the snowshoes on the pavement. Good luck leaping over the guardrail with them on your feet, too. Because a commuting pedestrian is on the road with commuting drivers, traffic will be heavy, requiring frequent leaps out of the way. Or you square your shoulders and forge ahead, leaving it to drivers to do the right thing.

A skier wouldn't be able to match bike pace. Skiing is generally faster than walking, but even on the downhills you won't hit the speeds that a bike can reach. Uphill skiing speeds are totally comparable to walking. So the trip to work and back would take much longer than a bike commute.

Winter rain screws everything up. Especially now, when torrential rains have become more frequent, crossing ten or fifteen miles without a vehicle, along routes designed for vehicles, would take many dangerous hours. Warmer than average temperatures are still much colder than your body temperature. Wetness saps your heat. You can dress for it, but things still have to go smoothly for you to arrive at a safe, warm destination where you can strip off your wet clothes. Arriving at work, that can be awkward. If you have no place to dry the clothes you wore to hike to work, you'll be putting on that clammy mess to head home.

On my particular route, there is a path option for the last three miles into town. The Cotton Valley Trail follows the old rail line, so it is basically straight and level. But you have to survive to get there. Homebound it only covers the first three miles, leaving you to navigate the highway after that. The trail is used by snow machines, bikes, dog walkers, skiers, and the rail car drivers who have demanded that the rails remain in place. They don't specifically clear the rails for winter use, but if the snow and ice cover is low enough I suppose one of them might give it a try. So, depending on surface conditions and time of day (or night) you might be completely alone or in the middle of a bustling winter scene like Currier and Ives only with more dog poop and attitude.

If I lived close enough to work I would definitely walk most of the time. I lived for nine years without using a car to get to my various jobs in the Annapolis area. Only when I moved to a place with snowier roads and a much longer commute did I get a car and start acting somewhat normal for at least part of the year. I like my spot here, so I can't reduce or alter my commuting route to make human-powered methods work safely for the entire year. Maybe if civilization collapses before the climate does I'll be able to ski the abandoned roads to get to work. Someone will have to start making wooden skis for the winter travelers, while we nurse along the simple bikes that survived from the 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st for the summer travelers.

Like all post-apocalyptic fantasies, that one glosses over the violence and destruction that would precede it. We'll never just flip a switch to the post-apocalyptic utopia. Then again, with consensus, we could flip the switch without the apocalypse. Add a human-powered travel corridor to all travel ways. Not everyone can do without a motor vehicle, but the ones who could do it would be more likely to try it if they had a guaranteed route.

The best thing about a snow-based winter system is that you don't have to pay to plow it down to a bare surface. Grooming snow requires machinery and skilled drivers, but it still takes less time and brute force than pushing snow out of the way. Along my route, a human-powered commuter or transportation cyclist could revert to the regular road when snow season ended. The side path would not have to be maintained for summer use. Most likely, the majority of users would like it year-round. That's a fine option. But a ski and walking path could have somewhat steeper climbs, requiring less massive re-grading to establish the route.

Here I am, planning the practicalities of something that isn't going to happen. I did want to be a fiction writer...

Gig workers come with built-in ADD

 This fall, our shop rat moved on to higher paying gigs. We even upgraded his title to Respected Repair Rodent, but the prestige was not enough to overcome our meager pay scale.

Shop rat also served as lab rat for my grossly amateur sociological observations. Based on a totally random sample of one home-schooled teenager, added to broad generalizations and jumbled recollections of other part time coworkers, I reached the stunningly predictable conclusion that someone working multiple jobs will have trouble paying full attention to any of them.

The type of job makes a difference. Specialty retail means working in a toy store for a certain target clientele. Part time workers who enter that realm probably have some degree of personal interest. In the bike business, intense interest can lead to frustration and a quick departure, if the shop's customer balance doesn't provide enough outlet for the enthusiast's personal satisfaction. For instance, a shop in a nearby town, run by a hard-core mountain biker, had to cater to the full range of bike shop customers, which made it hard for the owner to keep mechanics who only wanted to work on the cool stuff. The majority of repair work in most bike shops does not focus on the cool stuff.

Side note here: the cool stuff is much more time consuming and precise to service than repair work on the contemptibly primitive machines scorned by the technolemmings. Forced to find a balance between an hourly rate that actually covers the overhead and a competitive price that attracts customers, shops probably make a lot less money on high dollar repairs for tech addicts compared to tune-ups and traditional services on simpler machines.

Even a good and interested Respected Repair Rodent is likely to have distractions, since the role often attracts school-age youth in their first jobs. Our previous trainee was a sponsored young racer still in high school. He rated everything on the basis of athletic challenge, but having been in bike racing from a very young age, he also understood and respected the machine itself. After high school he went on to join the Marine Corps because it appeared to offer the most satisfying athletic challenge among the services vying to recruit him. His first choice was rescue swimmer for the Navy, but he just barely failed the eye test. The bureaucracy made it needlessly complicated to retake the test. His distractions from work consisted not only of academic needs as he worked toward graduation, but also his training days, first with the Navy pre-induction group, then preparing for the Marine Corps test. Bike racing does not provide complete fitness.

We do have an unlikely part timer who had only ridden a bike much before he was old enough to drive, and never took an interest by the later forms. His main thing is climbing. Our shop is not a pure bike shop. Cross-country skiing during the Telemark ski craze merged with a lot of mountaineering technique and technology through back-country skiing, and the local tourist economy favors a bit of light hiking merchandise. We have been able to offer the climber access to deals on gear for his primary interest. In return, he has mastered a range of bike skills, and is willing to cover a couple of crucial days of the week reliably.

The masters of the financial universe have decreed that workers shall be insecure, and that many shall stitch together their incomes from multiple sources. As a result, workers don't feel invested in the success of any company, and they pick their favorites to receive anything approaching their full attention. Management has been trying to make labor obsolete since the dawn of industrialization. Labor-saving devices aren't meant to ease the crushing physical burdens on the toiling masses. They're purely meant to reduce payroll expenses. Management may frame your layoff as the gift of free time. "Now you can go find that dream job, or start your own small business! Don't think of this as the terrifying revocation of your financial lifeline! Think of it as an opportunity for self-actualization."

Motherf*ckers who moved your cheese want to give you a cheesy book about adapting to changing times, when the aspiring autocrats haven't evolved their outlook toward the general population for centuries, if not millennia. Their cheese is well aged and fully protected.

Evolution is not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the most adaptable. When it comes to humans, however, that really means survival depends on being able to use intelligence and ingenuity to repair the consequences of massive group stupidity. We have faced mostly self-created problems for centuries. Disease challenges us because pathogens evolve. Weather challenges us, but its intensity has increased because of greed and obstinacy. Our mania for "productivity" keeps us gouging and gashing at the earth in a frenzied grab to exploit resources for profit, when profit exists nowhere in nature. Other than that, interpersonal conflicts at every level are humans creating problems for other humans.

In my own working life, I have tried to maintain space for self expression that I hoped would become marketable. The financial channels that irrigate the creative world have changed drastically over those years. I never managed to put more than a small siphon into the main reservoir at the best of times. Regardless of the near certainty of poverty and obscurity, I haven't been able to reconcile myself to shutting up completely. I can add my own lived experience to the profile of the distracted gig worker. 

Drawing on the example of friends of mine who make things, I did try to take jobs in areas that interested me, so that I could earn while I learn. They had practical skills in mechanics and machining, so they fared better financially. I didn't always manage to score the most interesting part time jobs, and they typically paid as little as an employer could get away with paying. Paying as little as an employer can get away with paying is Payroll 101. Pay as little as possible for any service. That may not mean taking the lowest bid, if a little more money will bring in someone less likely to incur extra costs by making stupid mistakes, but it will always be as little as the employer can be forced to pay.

For a super small business like our shop, the entire pay range is limited by the gross revenues of the business itself. This time of year, with its Small Business Saturday, and admonitions to support small businesses helps very little when the economy remains stacked against small businesses at all. You can't send a flood of customers to a struggling business and expect a miraculous recovery. Look at what happened to the bike industry in the Covid surge: an already struggling industry, further crippled by the pandemic's attack on production and delivery, had nothing to sell to the suddenly interested public until the public had moved on a year later.

There's more insecurity than security in the economy that real people inhabit. People are really good at seeing only what is right in front of them, so an individual who is doing well will not look to the dark precipice just coming into view. A successful person in the moment will scorn the less successful and relegate them to their fates.