New England, where trends go to die

Fads and fashions in the rest of the country tend to take a while to reach northern New England. By the time they're hip and hot here, they're on the way out everywhere else. So here it is, 2017, and some idiot in a truck finally tried to roll coal on me as I rode to work on Sunday.

Rolling coal is the practice of setting up your diesel truck to spew out copious quantities of thick, black smoke in defiance of the prissy wussies who give a shit about clean air. It is childish, vindictive, and one of the clearest indications that the human species might as well kill itself off now as later.

After laying down a rather thin smokescreen, the brave road warrior appeared to try to tail-whip his truck at me, but he was too far past. Off he went in triumph, having put me in my place. I rode in the fumes for a half-mile or so before the air cleared or I got used to the higher pollution level.

I have to remind myself that evolution is a long-term thing, and that I have no control whatsoever over the outcome. A human lifespan is too short for the big trends to matter, unless your span happens to line up with a sudden accumulation of the consequences of a few generations of ignorance and greed. Even then, you can't do anything about it. If massed ignorance and greed wants to keep going, thoughtful people can do nothing but endure the spectacle of destruction that so many people seem to embrace and enjoy. As much as I feel a surge of rage at the antics of destructive idiots, I have to remember that human existence is itself pointless, and that life has been fairly cushy in spite of the looming collapse of a nation that has chosen to live up to its potential to be a nest of spoiled brats rather than the thoughtful, diverse and interesting culture that the advertising led us to believe was possible.

I can only hope that the arrival of coal-rolling in northern New England signals its rapid decline elsewhere, and that the trend here falters and dies out in the face of ingrained cheapness and practicality. When it comes to flamboyantly destroying motor vehicles, however, the famous New England frugality goes right in the crapper. The American love affair with smoke, flames, and loud noises overcomes any restraining convention in this age when restraint is scorned. And the belief that the best expression of freedom is to offend as many people as possible guarantees that offensive behavior will enjoy rampant popularity.

A Tool in Tamworth

Big G has retired from the bike game. Working in the business was interfering with his riding. He also has a private pilot's license, and the demands of shop life were really cutting into his time for that.

He put the knobbies back on his Cross Check so he could explore the many unpaved roads around here. Today he instigated a trip in Tamworth, starting at Chocorua Lake, just off of Route 16.

Mount Chocorua is a beautiful, craggy peak, frequently photographed from the shore of Chocorua Lake.

Chocorua Lake Road used to be called Fowler's Mill Road all the way from Route 16 to Route 113A. Now it's Chocorua Lake Road from the Route 16 end and Fowler's Mill Road from the other end. Must be a 911 thing. It's dirt, and some of it is not maintained in winter, which can mean it's pretty rough. We're a couple of months out of winter now. Everything was pretty firm.

My own Cross Check is set up for commuting. I didn't want to risk slicing a tire on a sharp stone when I have to ride it to work the next day, so I brought the trusty mountain bike. It has commuting conversions as well, but it also has some nice old gnarly Continental mountain bike tires.

Almost the entire route was unpaved, so I figured I wouldn't get dropped. Besides, we were out to enjoy the nice weather and spring scenery.

Fowler's Mill/Chocorua Lake Road climbs steadily, and then steeply, to a plateau with enhanced views where land has been cleared.

You get another angle on Chocorua, across this field full of big, honkin' rocks.

Looking down the road, you can see Whiteface and Passaconaway, two more peaks in the Eastern Sandwich Range. Those are both on the 4000-footer list, for you peak baggers. Poor little Chocorua isn't even on the Hundred Highest list.

What goes up gets to come down. Continuing westward, the road dropped off the plateau and we dropped off with it. Where it levels out, the road to the Liberty Trail parking cuts off to the northward. This also provides access to the Brook Trail, another route up the mountain, and the Bolles Trail, which ascends to a saddle west of Chocorua, and descends to the Kancamagus Highway.

After a side jaunt to check out the trail head we resumed our meander on Fowler's Mill Road. That brought us to Route 113A for a few yards to pick up the Old Mail Road.

Old Mail Road to Gardner Hill Road. Gardner Hill Road to Route 113 (as distinct from 113A). Route 113 to Philbrook Neighborhood Road (depicted simply as Philbrick Road on this map). Then we were supposed to take Loring Road, but we stayed on Philbrook all the way back to Fowler's Mill Road instead.

Down near Chocorua Lake are some classic New England summer homes. Tucked among large trees, they evoke the era when families with the means to do so would go to their summer retreat, to rough it, canoeing and hiking in the wholesome atmosphere of the mountains. Generations carried on the tradition, but I wonder now how many can maintain a place, or would be satisfied with such simple pleasures. I know the practice is dwindling, just as the real rural life of year-round inhabitants has mutated with time, technology, population pressures, and the rolling waves of the economy.

It's a relief to disappear on a back road and think about geological time, surrounded by surviving scenes of slower times.

No regrets

As I cleaned up tops and slash on Sunday, I kept waiting for Ed Begley Jr. to fly over in a solar powered plane and shit on my head. But I stand by my reasoning in cutting at all, and then in cutting so much. Since the very best thing you can do for the environment is kill yourself, most of us settle for second and third best and call it exemplary.

Around 2002, this is how it looked. As of last Wednesday morning, it looked pretty similar, except that we built a sunroom/music studio off the front of the house in 2012 in a final effort to give the cellist's teaching program a base of operations.

This is the music room when it was brand new. Note the shadows. This darkness bracketed the day, day after day. I would look at the aerial photo of the place on Google Maps and realize what a tiny slice of sky we had.

The trees won't protect you from the government satellites and the black helicopters. They've got thermal imaging and all kinds of weird heinous classified stuff we can barely imagine.

By the end of Thursday, this had happened. Ain't no point in buyer's remorse now. It's barely an eighth of an acre, if that, but it's still a hell of a jolt after 27 years in the shade of forest giants.

White pines are a very assertive species. They thrive where the cycle of fire has been interrupted, overspreading the pitch and red pines that need fire to propagate. I've been tempted to torch a few yards of another part of the property to give those other pines a new generation. In the meantime, taking out this stand seems to have excited a lot of the bird life. Insects, too: because we have not had a real frost yet this fall, dragonflies were patrolling today, and cicadas buzzed in the remaining treetops. But for the sun angle and the color of the leaves, it could have been a summer afternoon. It isn't right, but it's how things are.

Pushing the edge as far back as I did, I can put in a margin of spruce to create thick, low screening from the neighbors, whose logging activities precipitated this whole upheaval. The property line shaves surprisingly closely, within the margin of the trees that are still standing. I want to make damn sure we are not looking at each other's stuff when this is all over. I did not move to a place like this just to stare into my neighbor's back yard. If I could put up with that, I could do it someplace that actually has an economy.

Living in a place like this and caring enough about a bunch of stupid trees to shed a tear over them relates directly to my bicycling activities. I hoped to inspire interest in non-motorized transportation and recreation, starting way back in the 1980s, when you actually had to get your stuff printed on paper and physically distributed to readers. The sprawled-on world I left behind has continued to fester, spawning more and more land rape as the human population burgeons. Even here, things are way more built up than they were when I moved into the little shack from which this house has grown. Fortunately, we have few resources for outside interests to extract, and we're not near enough to anywhere for industry to locate here. Unfortunately, we have to trade on our illusion of wildness, combined with our convenient proximity to the northern margins of sprawl. It's a constant battle between commercial interests that want to rape a little more and a little more to bring in more chumps, and the good stewards who have to remind residents over and over that we lose it all a little at a time.

New Hampshire is among the most forested states in the country. However, the reversion of farmland to forest has been offset by heavy development in the more urbanized southern part of the state. When it comes to wildlife management, clearings and fields have an important role alongside forest stands in various stages of succession. It's all part of the big mosaic. The hard part is waiting for stuff to grow, which it won't start to do until next April.

It would be ironic if Hurricane Matthew blasted in here in a few days and took out a bunch of trees. On the plus side, fewer of them are located within falling distance of the house. If the wind diminishes, we could definitely use the rain. But it would wipe out a holiday weekend's tourist influx.

Oops! I forgot my pants!

Once in a while, on a summer day, with a pair of shorts that is near the end of its useful life, I'll have a momentary stab of anxiety a few seconds after I start to ride, because I can't really feel my shorts and have no distinct memory of putting them on. We do so much by reflex, without focused attention, that I wonder if the right distraction could lead me to forget them.

If it ever did happen, they would send large people with big nets to whisk me away to a nice facility, where I would not disturb the public.

I was distracted this week, because I actually brought one of my own nightmares to life. Ever since I moved to my little shack in the woods, I have had regular nightmares about neighbors doing destructive things that spill over onto my land. These dreams often involve bulldozers, skidders, chainsaws, excavation, deforestation, and utter disdain for property lines.

About three weeks ago, whoever now owns the little cabin next door turned loose a logger on a lot that has been peacefully forested since before I moved here 27 years ago. I heard the chainsaws,  the skidders. I ran out several times to check the property lines. They were unviolated.

A little over a week ago, I got a note. The logger working the neighboring land was someone I had talked to about removing some trees that threatened the house and garage. The Eastern White Pine is the tree most likely to drop something on you. With a height of 80 feet easily in reach, these lovely forest monarchs  are basically a time bomb near your house. I had two actually leaning toward the house from about 20 feet away. They'd been good -- more or less -- since I'd lived there, but one of them had shed a couple of major limbs during snowstorms.

Pine trees can develop majestic structures when they have plenty of space around them. When they don't, they form an interdependent grove. The two leaners near the house were the outliers of a group of four. Cut two and you'd be well advised to cut them all.

I started scrutinizing all the trees in that area and realized that one was falling to pieces, and another pair were immensely tall. Not record setting, mind you, but the taller of the two would easily hit the house from more than 50 feet away. Even if it didn't, it could drop a major chunk on things that would suffer for the impact, such as the leach field.

In a natural forest, clearings occur by cataclysm: fire, hurricane, tornado, major ice storm. These are notoriously hard to schedule and direct. Trained people do controlled burns in managed forests, but not when the stand of trees comes within twenty feet of a house. And the burns are to control undergrowth, not remove full-sized trees.

I realized as I surveyed the grove that I had managed this area like a timber stand, not a yard. When I moved here, I quickly developed a New Englander's clinical practicality. When I had to clear a bit of space for various things over the years, I thinned the stand to favor larger trees. Ultimately, those have to be removed before they start to age and really fall apart.

If I had it to do over, I would have cut more 20 years ago, and started managing it for hardwood trees that hold together better and don't get as tall. It would have made the change less wrenching.

Somehow in the years after 1999, I lost more and more of the hard practicality that survival in northern New England requires. The big pines became familiar. I knew they could literally break bad on me at any time, but they were also soaring and majestic and made that beautiful sighing sound in the wind. That's why I wished I had dealt with them decades back, when I was more human.

On the eve of the logging, I cried. I sat in my dark house and felt waves of loss. I had unleashed the Death Star. Each of these trees is a natural community. I've seen the interdependent plants, birds, and animals that work with the tree throughout its lifespan. Who was I, an ephemeral creature that would be lucky to surpass a century on this Earth to kill off something that could live four times that long? If I truly love nature, I should burn down my own house and live in a little hut of cast-off branches.

True as that may be, I remain too much of a child of civilization to take that drastic a step.

Twenty-seven years ago some of the trees were already quite large. Others gained in stature, subtly enlarging until I looked up in astonishment last week at the potential energy hanging over me. They were the scenery to all that was good and bad in my life here. Even though the practical New Englander in me knew not only that they had to be pushed back but that the space could be managed to nature's advantage as well as my own, the actual destruction filled me with an ache that replaced my appetite and my ability to sleep for several days. I replayed the reasoning over and over.

The logger had said it would only take a day. It took three. He may have done this on purpose. He'd told me that he had stopped short on the neighbor's land, so that the guy could see it and call a halt or permit it to continue. His first break point let me see the grove half cut. I could see that my reasoning had been sound. Saving the remaining trees would not leave a strong stand, nor would it allow light in to promote successional growth. We had to continue.

It was the morning of the third day when I forgot my pants. The clearing that had been a tall forest was a raw cut, sweet with the smell of pitch and scarred by the passage of skidders. This was a logging operation, not the surgical ministrations of an arborist. And the trickiest cuts were yet to come. Trees, commercial size trees, next to and behind a building and overhanging a power line still had to be cut. This was the ultimate trust.

I had been getting up around 5 a.m. and bolting out of the house as close to 7:00 or 7:30 as I could manage. With the shortening days and the fact that I didn't want the loggers dropping a tree on my car, I've been doing park and ride commutes. That meant loading the bike and driving away.

For a normal park and ride, I'll wear my bike clothes to drive to where I park. Even the shoes, uncleated, are fine for driving. But there's no one to see me on a normal day.

I'm a reasonably secure person, but I just couldn't bring myself to wear lycra in front of a bunch of loggers. So I would put cargo pants over my shorts, stuffing the other bike clothes in the car to put on when I parked to begin the ride.

By day three, jangled by all the stresses, my system broke down just enough for me to forget the tights on the coldest morning of the week. I had the shorts, just not the warm tights to put over the shorts.

I briefly considered wearing the rugged cargo pants for the ride, but I knew the climb back up from Wolfe City in the evening would be a chore. I went ahead and chilled my kneecaps, and picked up a new pair of tights when I got to work. There was no exciting indecent exposure.

I got home to find that the precision cutting had turned out perfectly. Precision with chainsaws, skidders, and trees that probably weigh couple of tons apiece still leaves a pile of debris, but that was never in doubt. This happens when you hire someone to be a tornado for you.

The vast majority of the 13 acres under my control will remain undisturbed -- at least by me. Natural cataclysms are nature's business. In the new clearing, we hope to encourage some berry bushes of various types that had been working the margins. And the sky is a welcome sight.

Things appropriate to winter

While we haven't had as much snow as our compatriots 500 miles to the south, one can't be bitter and boycott the little rind we have.

Finally got out to patrol the woods out back yesterday and today.

http://explorexc.blogspot.com/2016/01/shwackin-out-back.html

http://explorexc.blogspot.com/2016/01/ski-new-england-back-country.html

Now, back to the work week and whatever follows.

I'm getting too old for this

The bike business does not respect age. Not surprising when you consider that a young adult can propel and maneuver the vehicle to its greatest potential. Not too young; the best riders need seasoned muscles and honed skills. But at a certain point a rider can no longer keep up.

Bicycling in general encompasses an array of machinery and techniques suitable for all ages. Bikes for children are mostly toys, or perhaps prepare them for what they might some day achieve in bicycling's real theater. Bikes for older riders reflect what people past their prime can still manage to be.

Certain elders achieve the status of wise men. Owners of companies, famous innovators, retired racers all can manage to make the young pups shut up for at least a minute. But put one of these silver-tops in a greasy apron in a little shop in some nowhere town and the young guns would not know to be impressed. And if the greasy old geezer turning wrenches has never been one of those luminaries in the first place, the world really passes them by.

In what passed for the glory days, my physical prime happened to coincide with the mountain bike boom and my skills and style happened to be slightly better than average. This is no modest understatement. My edge was very slim. Mechanical skills and analytical ability made up the rest of my powers, but these were certainly enhanced by the number of people I could leave puking behind me on a long climb. The fact that I was puking to stay in front of them, and chasing faster riders, was excused by the fact that nearly all of us were chasing someone faster. If I could stay ahead of two thirds or three quarters of a ride group, that was solid enough. I knew that all the riders ahead of me were puking to stay out there.

There's a lot of puking, actual or metaphorical, in the prime of cycling. And a lot of acid reflux in your declining years.

Briefly, the local mountain bike crowd shifted to road riding before succumbing to the various ailments of aging athletes. Mountain biking itself went off a cliff, literally. Even if I was in my prime, I would not want to ride in the modern style, on the modern arthropod.

The fragmented bike market does not need hard-driving, monomaniacal riders as much as it needs experienced observers and interpreters. But some of its segments still feed on the intensity of the competitor. Lots of riders claim to understand their lower place in the hierarchy, but when they ride you know they're listening to the narration of their private video, or at least feeling the savage satisfaction of chasing down their quarry, real or imagined. An awful lot of people who come into a shop look at the people who work there and mentally assess whether they would be the chasers or the chased.

Actually, an awful lot of people don't come into bike shops anymore. Not in Resort Town, anyway. Even when there was money to be made, it was not easy because it attracted a lot of competition. We left all of them in the dust eventually, but now the dust settles on us, on a course nearly deserted. The segmented market seeks asylum in enclaves of its own disciples. You're either a big shop or a specialty shop.

We're an outpost, in Resort Town. We're that palisade far from civilization where a traveler hopes the blacksmith can knock together something to keep the wagon going long enough to get them home. We'll never be a big shop, because we've chosen to live beyond the edge of big civilization. The place is hardly remote. The lifestyle has evolved from north country lite to rural suburban. But the rough and rocky land refuses to support much of an economy. When people no longer come from away, the locals can only do so much to keep each other afloat.

The model for New England -- particularly northern New England -- is the subsistence farm. Now that the party is over for cycling, our shop is a subsistence farm. The woods are full of the weathered stone foundations of subsistence farms. The inhabitants of them gleaned whatever sustenance they could before they gave up and moved on, or simply dropped.

In the bustle of civilization, life is less of a struggle against indifferent nature and more of a brawl. There may be more activity in the lands of urbanization and sprawl, but it's no less strenuous. The specialty shop is only as good as its reputation. The big shop has to find the right size for its economy, and maintain a staff that will help it flourish, or at least not embarrass it too badly. If a specialty wanes, the little boutique must shift its focus or wither. The big shop or small chain can grow or shrink categories as long as the staff can keep up with the technology.

Technology is driven by desire. Perceived necessity is the mother of invention. Desire breeds an image. An image is an emotional construct. Emotion responds to first impressions. First impressions can be shaped by prejudicial beliefs. We look for what we hope to see, and often see what we have told ourselves to expect. Does this slightly limping, unkempt mumbler really know what he's doing? Why is someone that age still doing this job?

Because I can. Because the craft needs people who respect the craft. Why waste all that experience?

Like any writer, I console myself with the idea that I may yet figure out how to produce and sell something popular, or at least be discovered after my death and become influential then. Beyond that it's probably better not to pick at things too much. You can't do much more than what seems like a good idea at the time, whatever you're into. Good luck out there. If you need your bike worked on, you know where to find me.