Get Back In Your Car

 

The push to get people onto bicycles is bad for us. We are watching a 17 mile long bike trail being built along Highway 133. Who will use the bike trail? Certainly not locals who are commuting to work. The only person I’ve ever seen use that road for non-recreational use was a boy peddling home with some groceries. He was on the wrong side of the road, if that tells you anything.

No, the push to get people out of their cars is bad for the economy. Compare what a person spends on automobile costs versus a bicycle. Cars take gas-lots of gas. $3.71 per gallon gas where I live. What does it take to power a bicycle? A granola bar. Car mechanics? $75-$100 per hour. Bike mechanics? Jacques will fix your bike for free if you invite him to dinner. Purchase price? A 9 passenger van at the Ford dealer will cost me about $25,000 plus $8,000 for a Quigley conversion to four wheel drive. On the other hand, I can pick up 9 bikes for free at the dump, and have Jacques fix them.

When it comes to cars, bigger is better for me. If I want to drive a go-kart, I’ll go to the local go-kart track. No, wait a minute. That was torn down and replaced with expensive storage units which nobody is renting. (Maybe replacing go-kart tracks with storage units was the beginning of the economic downturn. It would support my car-economy theory.) Anyway, a Suburban with a third seat, front bench seat, and large roof rack is almost big enough for me. Almost.

When our family had to leave ranch work, and crashed on the shores of Marble, Colorado a few years ago, gas was almost $4 per gallon. The move about clobbered us financially. But think how good it was for the economy for us to rack up hundreds of miles with trailers loaded to the sky with dressers, beds, and several “mystery” boxes. (You know how it is when you move. By the time you get to the last load, you are so fed up with the process, that you pack a can of brake fluid, 3 lost forks, your wedding photo, grandma’s china bowls, and a flywheel from your first Volkswagen, into one box.)

Don’t think that I don’t like bikes. I do. We have several around here. Most of them should probably go to the dump, though.

In the Aspen area, we have a lot of look at me environmentalists. They put their bikes on the back of their cars and drive around, looking like they must bike a lot. They don’t all bike a lot. The real die-hard bikers peddle out of town and go miles and miles on local trails, or clog up the busiest highways by riding two abreast.

If you want to really see the economy turn around, encourage people to get back in their cars, drive to the mall, buy an auto air freshener, go to the grocery store, pick up picnic supplies, and head for the park where they can watch joggers, parents with baby strollers, and bicyclists.

As the Park Ranger in Smokey Mountain National Park said to me once, “Get back in you car!”

The Economic Barometer is Getting Weird

The measuring stick by which most Americans measure the state of the state is whether or not they have a job. If for example, you go to bed hungry day after day, you might say to yourself "This is lousy, I wish I had a job." You wouldn’t give a hoot about the GNP, or the latest G8, G9, or International Moneychangers Fraternity news.

I recently became gainfully unemployed, and continued building my house with ferver, a little bit of money, and my kids and wife. The prospect of going back to my job was beginning to fade, and I thought that I might become just another nameless face in a sea of workless fathers. That is, until recently.

I was "on call" for my most recent job. Then I was contacted by a local man a few minutes after changing the baby’s diaper on the tailgate of our ’88 Suburban during a church service because my wife was playing the piano, and the baby began crying so I took him outside, only to find that as I was finished diapering and pulling up his little pants I was standing in a big pile of angry ants.

After I dusted most of the ants off of me, I was standing by the road and a "man of local fame" pulled up and told me that he needed me to help him with a job and that I would be "on call". Now I was "on call" for 2 jobs.

The following days (this past week) I was working on my house. Low and behold, a stranger walked up to me, talked about my house project, and asked if I was willing to do work on his new house. Not only that, he wanted me to come and consult about wind and solar energy for him because of the success of our family’s off-the-grid building project. Of course he wasn’t going to have me start right now, but I was to be "on call". Cool. Things are really picking up around here. Now I’m on standby for 3 jobs!

But wait. I was contacted by another gentleman and put "on call" for delivering mattresses. This is getting a little strange…

Oh. Even as I write this post, I’m supposed to call another guy about building a deck. I’ll be "on call".

So, to tie this all together, I guess that I’m a really lucky guy.  Never in my life have I been "on call" for so many jobs. The economy really is starting to turn around. Hang on. The phone’s ringing…