Style In the Gravel Age

We've had the following Ages:

1. The Ice Age.
2. The Stone Age.
3. The Bronze Age. (aka Hyborean)
4. The Iron Age.
5. The Dark Age.
6. The Middle Ages. (aka Medievel Warm Period)
7. The Renaissance.
8. The Gilded Age.
9. The Age of Steam.
10. The Atomic Age.
11. The Silicon Age.
12. And now that everything is running out, oil in particular despite fracking, we're going to have the Gravel Age.

What's that all about? Pavement is made of Tar. Tar is more valuable turned into Gasoline. So tar is being mined in Canada to be turned into gasoline for money. Tar has gotten expensive. Too expensive to use to pave roads in a Full Scarcity civilization like ours. Turns out Post Scarcity was a fantasy popularized using magic-technology in Star Trek. Whoops! Full scarcity is a dusty place. One without paved roads. Low Ground Clearance vehicles are on their way out. Enjoy smooth roads while they last.

Gravel is nicer than dirt and dust, because it is still a road when it is wet. And while it does run off in heavy downpour, it's not as rutted and terrible as straight-up dirt. We're getting gravel and dirt roads because tar in asphalt emulsion, aka Macadam, is made from the oil that's running out and being shipped to China and Europe to replace the oil that's not going to come out of Russia much longer thanks to their invasion of Crimea. After all, despite 97% of the population voting to join Russia, once the dissenting 3% are killed, like they do in North Korea, the rest of the world gets to stare at modern Anschluss and worry who the Russians will invade next. And since we won't have that oil to spare, we're going to gravel roads. You'll see. So prepare your mind for this coming reality.

There are upsides to gravel roads. People who love Rally Car Racing can tell you that you can still go fast on them, it's just that when you lose control, and you will, you die. Gravel Roads don't have highway safety barriers to keep your wreck neat and tidy. Physics takes over. You fly, briefly, then impact something vertical and stop, suddenly. The suddenly is often fatal. This is one of the reasons that Rally Car Racing is really exciting. The other is that the spectators tend to stand alongside the road, feet away from the cars going full speed past them. They are cheered up immensely when a spectator is hit with gravel, or the car flips over in front of them. The EU wants to ban the sport, to make it safer since not having races at all is very safe indeed, but the fans remain solidly in favor of racing on gravel roads. The entire nation of Finland are serious about it, and the Welsh promised to sing in public if they aren't allowed to continue Rally driving, and that's about as popular as Morris Dancing during rush hour. It must continue for the sanity of Europe hinges on it. Italians and Spaniards and Frenchmen are also big Rally racing fans. Now that Eastern Europe is civilizing, they want to take part as well. So yes, gravel roads, but still racing cars.

The solution to this dangerous driving is going a lot slower, for non-rally drivers that still want to get there. Since ALL the roads (outside towns) are going to gravel and dirt, and some are going to vanish entirely, slower is better than not at all. Going on 2 wheels instead of 4 is definitely going slower. A motorcycle on gravel has no illusions about sideways grip. You have little of that. You keep it slow or you die. Death, as I've said before, is a fantastic limiter on stupid behavior. Sooner or later stupid people try their BS on the real world and they END, and the world is just that little bit better. Darwin Awards will get to be blasé in the post-pavement world, in the Gravel Age. It might not even be very stylish to die at high speed. And as soon as the girls stop seeing it as stylish, the impetus to drive madly without girls to cheer you on may end the behavior.

And this is a good thing. Many bad and stupid people died in the 1970's who probably would have done their utmost to prevent the internet or the end of the Cold War, just to keep driving musclecars with solid axles and wearing mullet hairstyles and sweatbands. I am glad those people are long gone. They were really annoying when I was a kid. Rude, too.

Slower keeps you alive, and can still get you there half as fast and twice as living as fast does. Or maybe a third as fast, so three times as living? Likely able to form more complete sentences and probably drier in their shorts from the lack of close calls, but you should know that going slower can still be fun. Fun is found in the singing of birds and the smells and scenery of a forest as you mosey through at a gentle pace, a pace you can see because you are NOT pedaling a bicycle. I won't say staring at a horse's behind is FUN, because it isn't. Its just smelly. And there's flies. But it's pretty great not pedaling.

The other upside of slow is you can get pretty fantastic fuel economy because you don't need a very big engine, so 100 mpg is possible, and 70 mpg is likely. Small engines are often on cheaper bikes, weighing less, so they're less effort to ride and while they take more maintenance, they are also nearly impossible to get stuck because you can physically lift them up. None of those two-person lifting issues like Long Way Round in western Upper Mongolia. You just ride OVER the mud, not through it till you stop and fall over. This is important.

While mass produced big wheel small displacement motorcycles work really well, and can be had for $4-7K, ready to go, complete with fuel injection, those aren't the only choice. For those who crave vintage style, and Harley is NOT there to fill your options since their bikes drag pegs on normal pavement and would bottom out on mild swellings in the road, you CAN get other options. Yamaha, for instance, is re-releasing their 400cc kick start bike with EFI.

Its not perfect, and its $6K which is really a lot of moolah for what it is. If you have enough money to not care, fine. Buy one. But if your money still takes effort to earn, it is worth pointing out that older bikes can be restored for less than that and get really great results. I just hate those tall uprights bikers had in the 1970's meant to tie down your backpack and baggage and give your ugly bike chick girlfriend a place to lean. I thought most guys who rode bikes or drove musclecars were ugly. Their girlfriends were worse. Never seen such craggy faces, and the bandannas, this was before helmet laws, weren't flattering. Neither were the braids. Like looked like badly misused hookers.

Bikes that have easily replaced air filters would be key. And its hard to say how fast those will fill in normal gravel roads in high summer. Worse on dirt, because well travelled roads with no rain? Think 4 inches of floury silt powder waiting to be stirred up. I used to run in that, on an extinct volcano near my house. That dust filled your pores. Do terrible things to an engine intake. While it is tempting to try and cover a road with paving stones, those have gaps which fill with weeds which catch bigger seeds and grow shrubs and later trees and the road become something visible only under ground penetrating radar or an archaeologists careful trowelling. And people really don't care that much, so it could be some time before that happens, if ever.

So having a vehicle with an easy to replace or repair air intake is important. One of the strengths of the VW bug is the air intake was actually a pool of oil, dirty oil, that would catch the dust as it bubbled through. Change that oil, and you make the air move smoother. No actual parts to replace, and you can technically run that oil through a coffee filter a couple times to get the dust out and reuse it. Coffee filters are really useful things. They're very cheap, and they work for unfiltered wine, making it clear, and usually sifting out the tannin crystals which aren't always welcome. I suppose if I'd stayed in Sonoma County, I'd have eventually gotten a degree in Enology, and then a Bachelor in Wine Making. It really is interesting chemistry, after all, and people like good quality drugs. Especially ones with so much legal ceremony and paraphernalia like wine has. Until 1976, and the events semi-documented in the comedy Bottle Shock, wine wasn't a very good business, but it survived. When wine tourists started PAYING to sample wine, which happened during my youth because it was free before that, everything changed and it became fashionable to drink and discuss wine like poetry, and unlike poetry, good wine won't give you heartburn, though it can make your eyes swim.

Bad wine gives you a terrible headache and it makes you angry. During the 1970's and 1980's, Dad got into wine making, and provided you keep the dust from the road out of the casks during fermentation, I think wine making will continue after asphalt is a fond memory and America buys and maintains those 6 wheel trucks like they use in Siberia. Those will be welcome here, I think. Even if they end up running on gas turbine engines to be multi fuel, and use batteries and pressure vessels for torque. It's fine.

I have become, over the last several years, a huge fan of BikeExif, despite not actually riding a motorcycle myself. I want to, sometimes, then I see some horrible motorcycle injury or look really hard at pea gravel on a corner and I think I rather like the Ford Fiesta ST or the Subaru Outback Sport or WRX STI and ponder the simpler joy of a scooter instead. Scooters are twist and go, squeeze the brake, simple as can be to operate. I really appreciate them. They are meant for people who get stuff done, even if what they're doing is going to the library or grocery store or a part time job. As we are entering an era where most jobs will be part time, rather than full time, because there's huge economic incentives to avoid full time benefit costs, most of us will end up on scooters eventually.

And you can laugh at that, but take this seriously. I get the timing wrong, but the outcome right. And life tends to be ironic, so around the time that we've given up the pavement and settled into drought, there will be a huge flood that washes out the roads and bridges and there's war with Russia so there's a fuel shortage and we won't be able to buy the scooters fast enough from China, but we're glad when they get here and the shift from 25 mpg to 100 mpg will seem very sudden when it finally happens. Cutting national oil consumption by 75% will do that for you. It is knowing this is coming that keeps me doing maintenance on my existing car, and driving the all wheel drive or fun race cars in a simulator. Cheaper, and leaves me with funds to buy a motorcycle or scooter later, despite their safety problems.

If I were a Librarian, I'd totally have a scooter. There's a decent article today suggesting that serious library users are also technology fans, and being able to search on google instantly isn't enough for ferreting out quality information. One of the reasons the local library wants me as a volunteer, and hopefully will pay me someday, is I'm techno-savvy. That and I know where the apostrophe goes in I-T-S. Sometimes I think that should be my whole resume. It's particularly rare today, you see?

Bike Exif has some beautiful specimens, carefully modified in usually functional ways, of motorcycles made for use in the dirt. It is not dedicated to Harleys. There are lots of websites for those. This is for Triumph and Yamaha and Honda and KTM and Suzuki and Kawasaki and BMW. All serious bikes capable of touring the world. I like it. I like the fact that you can see the parts and what they do and what is working or not is plainly obvious. I also like that you can build a motorcycle that does its job, cheaply and efficiently, and can be fixed when it breaks. This is important because eventually it will. The real world, when the roads can't be counted on after a serious storm, is going to have lots of challenges. Travel will get to be a lot more interesting, and staying put, in your little burg, might be a serious life extending activity, to the sense that leaving is a life ending one. So people who travel will end up looking very heroic, or very desperate. And local farming for food will become a real occupation again, since travel on uncertain roads tends to be hard on cargo, and makes carrying it quite expensive.

This brings up another point. Safety gear is mostly made somewhere there's cheap labor and extra sturdy sewing machines. How long before there's a local motorcycle safety gear maker, armoring clothing for the thousands of locals who just got their first scooter and just had their first crash and can see the point of better safety? Its going to be a growth industry, even if you're going really slowly. Staying warm in the winter, staying cool in the summer, different riding clothes for each. Scooterists also tend to wear their jacket backwards, to keep the rain from going through the zipper. Sometimes using a second jacket or overcoat. It's kinda silly looking, but it works. So how long before you find yourself riding your scooter in the rain to get to your part time, minimum wage job which has everything to do with proximity to where you live and little to do with your previous occupation, mainly because it keeps the bank from foreclosing on your house and kicking your family out onto the street, where it is still raining. And will you learn if you really like your neighbors once you actually know them? And will you be happy? Will you take up beer making and wine making because that's a good excuse for a party and you can't really buy it, not with shipping charges so high since the bridge washed out and local hops and grapes are a lot easier to get... Not joking. Maybe wine in a box is something you'll end up doing instead. Whatever. You learn to make do. I recall there were wineries which would let you bring your own bottles and bottle some of their vintage yourself, for a fee, saving them the trouble. Bottling is nearly as expensive as making the wine, mostly due to labor costs.

You learn to adapt, because failing to adapt is just as useless to your longevity as rally driving full speed. They'll cheer when you wreck, too. Are you someone else's entertainment? Or will you find style in a comfortable and sensible motorcycle, and some home made leathers sewn by a local tailor that used to be an accountant or burger flipper a couple years ago? It doesn't matter what they did before. It matters what's available now. Adding foam armor pads to double stitched waxed canvas or waxed denim, or better yet leather, all with strong zippers and fasteners to connect the jacket to the pants, and proper serious boots with armored ankles so if the bike comes down on it, you'll be able to walk later. All that, even for riding a scooter, but it IS necessary. Bicycle accidents can be fatal too. Having grown up where Tour De France riders train over winter, I am aware of folk climbing the mountain roads very slowly, and mountain bikes originated at Specialized in Mill Valley, Marin County, about 40 miles South. A Mountain Bike, with or without a suspension, can get along without pavement, riding gravel roads carefully. Its still easier to live closer to your job, since living far from your job not only exhausts you, but exposes you to further risks, including wild animals, highwaymen, crazy people, and common accidents and injury.

Whether you ride under your own power or have a motor, appropriate safety gear is important. And it gets complicated, since a bicyclist wants to avoid overheating, whereas a scooterist or motorcyclist needs armor in case they end up sliding on the road, which is a bad thing to do on rutted gravel. Its rather amazing that most accidents in Long Way Round and Long Way Down are at 1 mph, falling over sideways in the mud. They were really lucky not to have a terrible crash, but going really slowly saved their lives. They would have had a better time on a light enduro bike instead of the very heavy highway cruisers they chose, but whatever. You will probably be on a 250cc enduro bike eventually. Probably carbureted because they are cheap used, but if you're wealthy you might own a fuel injected Honda or Yamaha. And if so, you'll like the low end power. And that's great. But you'll still be wearing armor, and whether this is locally made or modified or something mass produced and irreplaceable because that factory doesn't exist anymore, that's your choice. And sometimes your choices are acts of desperation, one after another. That's life these days. The old days of jobs and middle income wages and upward mobility are gone. We survive and we don't trust anybody, for good reason. Make the best of it. Try to find some degree of comfort, and thus style, in the post pavement world. The crunch of gravel under your front tire, and the dust coming off the vehicle ahead of you, when there's another vehicle, those are the good times. It mostly just gets tougher after that.