City Girl in The Dirt

Campaigner was an ‘83 R80st, BMW’s short-lived, streetified variant of the dual sport R80GS. She spent most of her life getting flogged around on the streets of D.C., (a true city girl at heart) but once in a while, she got the chance to feel the grass beneath her wheels and get off-road for a bit.

The ST’s rear wheel came on and off easily (like a car’s wheel, by way of three nuts) and I had a spare rim fitted with a knobby tire for just such opportunities. From time to time we mounted the knobby and took her to Windy Hill, the eight acres of rolling, hilly open land in the Shenandoah Valley where my mother lived.

In the grassy fields, the kids would ride in front of me, holding onto the tank bag, or behind me, depending on where they fit better at the time. We would rip madly from one corner of the field to the other, dashing wildly up and down the slopes without worries of traffic or other distractions, only bothered by the clouds of grasshoppers we disturbed en route. Solo, I would practice J-turns and power slides, occasionally going arse-over-teakettle into the weeds, but never getting so much as a bruise.

Across the way from Windy Hill, prominent to the northeast, was a big hill—or maybe a small mountain. It rose about five or six hundred feet from its base in the valley at Ida to a wooded summit. A wide swath of this hillside was pastureland, and broad strip of open space ran up the hillside most of the way to the top.

I couldn’t look at that hillside without wondering what it was like to sit at the wood’s edge, along the top of that long alpine-looking pasture, and see the view back to where I stood. So one summer afternoon, I took Campaigner and we went to the weathered farmhouse at the base of the hill to introduce ourselves.

I told the old man who stood in the farmyard I was the son of the woman who lived across the road. Whether he knew her or not, I can’t recall. But I explained my interest in exploring his hillside, and he didn’t seem to mind—at the moment, most of his cattle were occupied elsewhere. As long as I didn’t make any trouble and closed the gates on my way through, I was free to go up the hill.

I thanked him and promised to respect his property. I think, truth is, he was kinda tickled to see us there. He sure seemed to take a shine to Campaigner in a crooked-grinning-John-Deere-Cap-removing-head-scratching sorta way. I suspect he may have been recalling a long-lost motorcycle adventure from the shadow of the past as I rode off.

Now, putting a knobby tire on an 800cc BMW doesn’t qualify it as a ‘dirt bike,’ any more than putting a Viking hat on a puppy lets it sing Wagner. For one thing, it’s a big bike, and the suspension lacks the travel serious off-roading demands. But it has loads of torque at low speeds, and it’s fairly nimble overall; it still had the original wide bars, so controlling it was easy. With this in mind, I slowly made my way through the dusty farmyard, getting the feel of the place, and paused to open the metal gate leading to the pasture—and to the hillside I had admired from afar so many times.

Closing the gate behind me, I paused to take in the view and envision my line to the top. The flat field let to a series of gentle rises, undulating and building towards the last stretch—a long, uninterrupted run up the hillside to the treeline.

The grass was cropped short by the grazing cattle; this made the contours of the land conspicuous, and it was mostly a matter of picking my way between various natural and man-made obstacles: roots, rocks and tree stumps, abandoned equipment and fenceposts. As I gained speed, I stood up on the footpegs in true off-road fashion, letting my legs absorb the rise and fall of the terrain. Campaigner eagerly ate up the rolling ground, and shortly we were riding a dirt rollercoaster with abandon, gradually working our way back and forth across the broad slope.

The perfect line to the top began presenting itself. The pasture opened up in a straight shot all the way to where the grass petered out and the trees began—some five hundred feet in elevation from where we started. One more small rise to cross, then we’re home free.

I kept my eyes on the long line towards the summit as we crossed that small rise.

Only it wasn’t a small rise.

It was a ravine. A deep ravine, hidden by the lay of the land.

I watched in slow motion, waiting for—for the earth to come back, I guess. Instead, it kept falling away without revealing a bottom. Or so it seemed for the eternity I was poised there. I noted with detachment the collection of old appliance dumped there: several refrigerators and freezers, washers and dryers, lying haphazardly where they were dumped countless years before. Their colors: white, pastel pink, pastel green, rusty brown; each representing the epitome of fashion for the era from which it was expelled.

Just before Campaigner’s rear tire cleared the ground, I grabbed a great big honking fistful of throttle, and gassed her into space; she pitched up and flung herself across. We hit the far side with the front tire on flat ground, the rear tire frantically clawing earth. I came down on the gas tank hard enough for it to knock the wind out of me, and held on for dear life until I knew we were on solid ground. 

Heart pounding and metallic taste in the back of my mouth, I paused safely past the edge, still standing on the pegs. I never did actually see the bottom of the ravine—cluttered with debris as it was—but at that moment I knew if I had started falling, I never would have stopped.

I was still only halfway up the hillside, with most of the intriguing open strip still above me. I caught my breath, stood on the pegs again and began to pick my way up the hill.

Hillsides are wildly fractal affairs. The smooth, delicate surface they present from a distance reveals itself, on closer examination, to be as rugged and tortured as their parent mountains, just on a different scale. The ravine was an example; the broad open space I saw from afar was in fact, rough, eroded terrain, littered with rocks, stumps and lumpy hillocks of tuft grasses.

We made our way slowly—never getting out of second gear—making little more than a walking pace for the rest of the climb. Where the pasture turned to forest, the ground was scattered with random chunks of logs, remnants from some-long ago clearing effort. My line dwindled to little more than a vague footpath before ending where the logs encroached for good.

At this point, there was no mistaking an R80st for a real dirt bike. Campaigner could go no further. Stopping, I dismounted, propped one hot cylinder head against a log and shut off the engine. I sat on the ground and stretched out my legs as the bike cooled, snapping a few pictures from this exalted vantage point. The hillock where Windy Hill sat just a stone's throw away looked very small and very flat from here. Trees hid the house from view, but parts of the drive, the garden and the fields were plain to see. I swept the crystalline vista that spread before me—Ida…Windy Hill…Stanley…Massanutten…New Market Gap…Little North Mountain and the Alleghenies, stretching far off to the hazy southwest.

I had accomplished what I set out to do—to explore the beckoning hillside and once there, to see what I could see. On the way up, I learned a little bit about off-road riding, and some other ‘life lessons’ that I squirreled away—like something about ‘looking before leaping’ and ‘making assumptions’ and ‘keeping your eye on the ball’ and so forth.

The return trip, following a decent interval, was calm and uneventful; mostly low-gear riding that let the engine to do the braking. I cut a wide swath around the hidden ravine, and saw a different slice of the hillside on the reverse trip. Sore and tired, I paused once again at the gate, then rode the short distance back up to Windy Hill, to continue the important business of showing the kids what motorcycles are all about. 

The Ten Best-Looking BMWs you’re likely to actually see:

Because you can never have enough top-ten lists:

1.   R100RS  (1976-1984)
2.   R65LS  (1981-1985)
3.   K75S (1985-1995)
4.   K100RS (1983-1992)
5.   R1100S (1998-2005)
6.   R90S (1973-1976)
7.   R75/5 LWB “Toaster” (1969-1973)
8.   R69S (1960-1969)
9.   R100S (1976-1980)
10. R80ST (1982-1984)

A Motorcyclist's Bestiary

Viewing the world from the saddle of a motorcycle offers you a unique—and generally confrontational—perspective on wildlife.

The animals you encounter while riding will tend to fall into one of five categories. Note that this listing is not comprehensive, and generally addresses Eastern North America. Obviously, there will be some overlap among the categories, but you’ll get the general idea:

1. Big Enough To Seriously Eff Your Ess Up:

Moose & Elk
The Maritime Provinces of Canada indicate “Moose hazard” by a triangular yellow sign showing the silhouette of a standing moose and a crumpled car. There’s a reason for that. Colliding with a moose will not necessarily damage your motorcycle—odds are, your bike will continue happily down the road for some considerable distance before it realizes it left you plastered on the moose’s ribcage as it blithely passed beneath it.
Cows, Calves & Horses; also Black Bears
Livestock are very clever and persistent about finding the weak spots in their enclosures—see “other side of fence, grass is always greener on.” A slow moving, irritable and unpredictable wall of meat is the last thing you want to see chewing its cud on your line.
And that big “black plastic trash bag” slowly blowing down the shoulder of the road? It may actually weigh two or three hundred pounds, and have sharp pointy things at several of its extremities.
A close encounter of the worst kind will be really bad for both of you. All three of you, if you count the bike.
Whitetail Deer
See also “Did Not Evolve In The Presence Of Motor Vehicles.” Deer have a defensive strategy of a) freezing completely motionless when they sense a threat; b) if the threat continues approaching, waiting until the threat is nearly upon it, then bolting in an unpredictable direction. This makes sense: If the deer fled sooner, it would give the predator a greater opportunity to identify its escape vector. Waiting until the last instant preserves its options.
But when the perceived threat is an inanimate object with absolutely no interest in prey of any kind, this response is less useful. As the “pursuit curve” does not actually concern the deer, responding as “prey” is inappropriate.
Deer-Motorcycle conflicts generally end very badly for the deer, and with mixed results for the motorcyclist and motorcycle. With good gear, good training, experience and a good bike, a rider can frequently remount with little more than bumps and bruises and a gut full of adrenaline. More commonly, the outcome is a few broken bones (collar, rib, wrist…), a few hundred dollars in repairs to the bike, and a ditch full of venison.
Winged Threats
Accipiters (those big meat-eating birds including hawks, eagles, owls and vultures) thrive along the edges of forests and roadways, where they have easy access to a steady supply of fresh road kill as well as good access to small animals living in the fringes.
Unfortunately, those who hunt from these locations do not check peripherally before launching an attack; they swoop down low and fast, focusing on their distant prey, and often fly directly across the path of oncoming traffic.
Likewise, carrion eaters with full bellies tend to take off low and slow before gradually gaining altitude. A highway-speed encounter between a low-flying vulture and a motorcyclist will be unpleasant, to say the least, as several biker have found out the hard way.

2. Crazy Enough To Make You Eff Your Ess Up All By Yourself:

Dogs, Cats, Squirrels and Foxes (et cetera)
All wildly unpredictable creatures. Furthermore, we have strong personal and cultural aversions to injuring animals which we have anthropomorphized since childhood. This combination creates a situation where our response to the presence of the animal is more of a threat to our safety and well-being than the animal itself is.
Hitting the animal would be regrettable and unfortunate, and would certainly make most riders feel a not insignificant remorse. However, most riders would concur that swerving into oncoming traffic or riding into an immovable roadside object to spare a dog/cat/squirrel would be a much worse choice.
For the past few years, I have been consciously training myself to ignore small, fast, twitchy animals within a certain radius of Beast. In effect, I created a rolling blind spot. I will not endanger myself for the sake of a creature whose actions I cannot control.

3. Clearly Did Not Evolve In The Presence Of Motor Vehicles

Opossums, Porcupines and Skunks
All evolved fascinating defense strategies against predators. Unfortunately, they are useless against motor vehicles.

4. “I’ll Take Arthropods for $200, Alex—"

There are countless ways bugs mess you up. My personal favorite was catching a flying cicada in the middle of my tee-shirted sternum at about 50 MPH—35 of it mine, 15 of it his. It felt like I had been shot, and I expected to see blood pouring down my chest. Also: stinging insects flying into your helmet, butterflies landing across your face, bug splatters obscuring your vision and otherwise distracting you from the task at hand.

5. Obligatory Assists

Anytime I encounter a live reptile or amphibian in the road—turtle, snake, frog or toad—I’ll make an effort to move it along in the direction it is headed. Sometimes all it takes is a gentle nudge with the toe of my boot. Other times, it means parking the bike, walking back, picking it up and gently tossing it across a ditch or fence*. I think we’ve stacked the deck too heavily against these little beasts; it’s appropriate to lend a hand from time to time.

*Hey, it didn’t look like a rattlesnake from a distance.

One more snide remark at H-D's expense, in passing...

"H.O.G.," the "Harley Owners Group," is—to my knowledge—the only factory-sponsored motorcycle affinity group.

Among the handful of Beemer aficionado groups I can think of, not a one receives any sponsorship from BMWNA; hell, BMWNA generally won't give them the time of day.

But the factory backing its own enthusiast club? Isn't that like, oh, I don't know—paying someone to take your sister on a date?

A Fitting Denouement

The sorghum ale has found it's target demographic at last.

I've taken to giving the chickens a bottle or two of it in the afternoon, 'round bout the time humans would be knocking off for a brewski or two. They don't care much for the head, and the carbonation seems to perplex them something awful, but once it settles down a bit, they're on it like white on rice.

Carbohydrates, B vitamins, yeasty sediment? What's not to like? And a chicken with a gizzard-load of homebrew is just a happier chicken, you know?

Rebels and Romantics

Winding my way across Bethel Mountain Road, I mulled over a conversation my friend and I had the night before regarding the phenomenon of the venerable V-twin motorcycle.

He recently had the opportunity to take a big twin out for a spin on the interstate, and while apparently enjoying the hell out of the noise and the ape-hangers and the visceral thrill of it, he did confirm that it—and here I quote verbatim: “…rode like a paint shaker.”

We pondered the popularity—nay the dominance—of such an inherently discomfort-inducing engine design (two large-bore cylinders, 45-degrees apart, sharing a single crankpin), in the end unable to come to any particular conclusion other than “there’s no accounting for taste.”

However, as I darted in and out of the cool shade on the serpentine road, I vaguely recalled something that shed light on the inexplicably ubiquitous V-twin, and helped me make sense of something that had baffled me for decades.

I recalled that in some indigenous cultures around the world, there is a custom I would describe as “conspicuous impracticality.” Owning something impractical as a status symbol. It indicates someone well-enough off to afford something not utilitarian, someone who is not devoted strictly to the business of surviving day-to-day, someone who has enough excess to afford something frivolous.

I have long made the argument  (disingenuously, no doubt) that the choice of motorcycle is practical, reasonable, rational and pragmatic in the extreme. Yet buried within that sober message is an unacknowledged betrayal, a bit of casual dissembling that denies the irrational passion at the heart of motorcycling. I can make a convincing case for the rationality of motorcycles and motorcycling—but cannot disguise that motorcycling is, in fact, an irrational undertaking of the highest order.

A corollary to my disingenuous argument is the passion with which V-twin partisans look askance at sleekly faired, vaguely insect-like sportbikes. They sneer at ‘rice burners’ and ‘crotch rockets’ as soulless, bland, antiseptic machines wholly without personalities or redeeming qualities, stamped out by robots for robots. Sentiments like “I’d rather push ‘X’ than ride ‘Y’”—that sort of thing.

 I must admit I agree with them to a certain extent.

There is an icy heartlessness in the Teutonic Bauhaus functionality of my third-generation boxer twin sportbike. It is a digital bike, far removed from its analog airhead ancestors, and it roars like an angry sewing machine when provoked. Those who design the public face of sportbikes must temper their aesthetic aspirations against the unrelenting logic of the wind tunnel and the dynamometer. Convergent evolution, forcing the same demands on all manufacturers, pushes all sportbikes into a narrower and narrower pathway, stripping away any real distinctiveness—they all appear somewhat related. I admit to generally having a difficult time distinguishing one marque from another at any distance.

Not so for the brash art deco exuberance of the endlessly customized V-twins, for which the sky is the limit—vis the extreme customization (unto utter unridability) of the “butt jewelry” cranked out by the fertile minds inhabiting the world of the chopper.

The stereotypical posture of “motorcyclists v. society” is one of rejecting staid societal mores, of adolescent rebellion writ large. First codified by  Marlon Brando’s “Johnny” and Lee Marvin’s “Chino” in “The Wild One,” (a fictional exploitation of a real, though wildly sensationalized, and insignificant incident in Hollister, California) this rebellious dynamic was updated for a new generation a decade-and-a-half later by  Peter Fonda’s “Captain America” and Dennis Hopper’s  “Billy.” Different era, different drugs—same rejection of society’s conventions.

Fast forward from the 1969 of “Easy Rider” to 2010: Harley-Davidson holds the largest portion of the domestic motorcycle market; cruisers (H-Ds, plus their endless clones and imitators) dominate the industry.

Having birthed and fledged the “Buell” thought experiment—supplying H-D engines for modern, high-tech, high-performance sport bikes designed and built by motorcycle visionary Eric Buell—H-D clawed Buell back into the nest—and smothered it.

In killing the Buell marque, H-D squashed any possibility of internecine market fragmentation and consolidated its grip on the centerpiece of its brand appeal—its iconic legacy engines, a technology largely unchanged since decades before “The Wild One.”

 But at the same time H-D has risen to the top of the motorcycle manufacturing world, the prices of its products have likewise risen, likely placing them firmly out of reach of any latter day ‘one-percenters.’ Today, the average H-D owner is a white man pushing fifty and pulling down around seventy-seven thousand dollars a year. Financing is the most popular option, and the most profitable part of H-D’s portfolio. If today’s new H-D buyers were asked, like Johnny in “The Wild One,” “What’re you rebelling against?” do you expect they would reply with “…Whaddya got?”

Sadly, I suspect there is not the least whiff of rebellion against the values of society about these latecomers to the game—“Rubbies,” as they are so dismissively known, for ‘Rich Urban Bikers.’ I suspect beneath the officially logoed leather vests and wallet chains and officially licensed do-rags, they are more likely to be the enforcers of a status quo than its upenders.

No, the statement they make is not one of rejection and rebellion against “…whaddaya got?” but instead one of status, of being well-established enough, ensconced in the management class to afford not rebellion but conspicuous impracticality.

Certainly, the rise of the Rubbie has coincided with the rise of corporatist cubicle culture, that fiercely reductionist engine grinding away all that is not practical, pragmatic, purposeful, leaving behind a skeletal right-sized world of beige boxes occupying modular grey spaces. We are all shaped—like those sportbikes in their windtunnels—by the unrelenting demands of a uncaring corporate machine seeking to maximize throughput and minimize overhead.

Meanwhile, the guise (dare I say costume?) of ‘biker’ has been drained of any menace by this dress-up Rubbie charade. Biker garb (like its sibling signifier, the tattoo) may garner a passing notice, but it has long since lost any frisson of danger—of denoting someone you’d best not cross.

While I would never go as far as to actually ride a H-D, (…pause to adjust monocle…) I can certainly appreciate the sentiment. It is the same sentiment that drove the Luddites, that drove the original Dutch saboteurs, that still drives the Amish and the Old Order Mennonites. It is the sense that new technology should not be embraced for its own sake, but that technologies should be critically evaluated and judged for the quality of life they yield.

Will the change make things better? Will we put the time saved to good use? Will we become enslaved by the technologies we embrace? What do we stand to lose? The burden should be squarely on any new technology to demonstrate its improving the quality of our lives—not on us conform and make ourselves fit a new technology.

It is not the black leather trappings of Brando’s “Johnny,” rejecting Eisenhower’s America. It is a more universal statement of rebellion: a rebellion against the juggernaut of mindless technological progress, a throwing down of a fingerless, studded black-leather gauntlet, saying in no uncertain terms “The tide of change stops here!”

Well, damn straight, brothers. I’m with you. Let’s ride.
******************************************************

I realize that in the above, I've made a mush of two related ideas. For the sake of my own sanity, vanity and editorial pride, let me see if I can restate things so I might even understand what I'm trying to say: 

1. The appeal of the V-Twin—which is lost on me—is that it represents resistance to change for the sake of change.
2. Motorcycling per se is no longer rebellion against the status quo, but has become an  expression of status.
3. This expression of status, while most frequently expressed via the V-Twin, is not directly related to the V-Twin in and of itself; therefore, I am dancing dangerously close to post hoc ergo propter hoc territory.
4. Enough bullshit. Let's ride.

Notes to a Newbie

So you think you want to start riding. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Sign up for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's Beginning Rider's Course. NOW. Wait lists can be long, and classes aren't always offered year-round. A Friday evening, a Saturday and a Sunday, then Wa-fricking-la, you've got your license.

If you're already riding, then sign up for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's Beginning Rider's Course. Once you've passed that (should be simple, right?) then take the MSF's Experienced Rider Course.

2. Don't kid yourself about the size bike you're going to start out on. A 250 may not be 'big enough to get you into trouble,' but it sure as hell isn't big enough to get you out of trouble—and that's a much more likely scenario. Think 650cc minimum to start.

3. Allocate a grand ($1,000.00) beyond the purchase price of your bike for gear: helmet, boots, gloves, riding suit, rain gear and incidentals. If you're lucky and smart, you'll come in under that amount. Check online sources like www.newenough.com. You can certainly get by with boots, gloves and jackets you already own, but sooner or later you will want motorcycle-specific gear to address the unique challenges riding presents.

4. The first 6 months/600 miles on a new bike are the most dangerous. This learning-curve counter resets with each new bike.

5. Three simple rules: (A) You are invisible (B) Everyone is out to kill you (C) The worst thing will happen in the worst place at the worst time—be ready for it. Always operate with these rules in mind and you'll have a fighting chance.

6. You're the one who decided to undertake the risky activity—don't expect anyone else to look out for you and don't whine when they don't.

7. Riding is like any other kind of outdoor activity, except more so. You are subject to sunburn, windburn, dehydration, fatigue, hyperthermia and hypothermia—sometimes all in the same ride (BTDT). Dress appropriately and plan for the weather to change. Odds are any given ride will be colder than you expected, and cold (especially the early stages of hypothermia) affects your judgement insidiously. Carry thin, light extra layers you can take off and put on easily. In an emergency, plastic trash bags and newspapers make great raingear and insulation.

8. ATGATT: "All The Gear, All The Time." No excuses. Lots of riders have died from stupid, simple 'just-going-to-the-corner-to-get-milk' incidents while wearing flip-flops, tank tops and sunglasses. At a bare minimum, the MSF course requirements: Long sleeves, long pants, helmet, full-fingered gloves, sturdy shoes.

9. Know your limits. Have that conversation with yourself everytime you get on the bike. If you're not 100%, find some other way to get there. Always ride 'your own ride,' as they say. Don't ride a pace you aren't comfortable with, regardless of your riding company.

10. Don't be an ass—Just being on a bike doesn't give you any special rights or privileges.

Cool Air (2009)

August departed promptly, and took summer’s thick cloak of haze and humidity with it; September dawned cool, brilliantly clear, blue and bejeweled with dew. We have reached mid-September with the weather remaining modestly in character. I have lived in this area long enough to expect that eventual sucker-punch of debilitating, energy-sapping Indian summer, but keeping our fingers crossed, this weather is all we could hope for.

Riding weather, at last.

On cool clear nights such as these, the still air stratifies. This layering is not apparent to the eye, but it is obvious to an exposed rider. The gently rolling hills have their heads in a stratum of mild warm air but their feet in a pool of heavy frigid air—a difference of fifteen degrees from crest to trough. The visual cue I had not noted before was the highly local fog—“patchy fog” the weather people call it. Looking out across the piedmont from a high vantage point, the landscape is dotted with dozens of small smoking smudges. Each reveals the presence of a body of water—usually a man-made pond or lake, otherwise invisible, concealed by vegetation or terrain or sightlines.

Once I made the connection, I began to recognize the long low horizontal (and clearly artificial) line of a dam; set back from and above the road, the water was unseen. But these pools hold heat in their water, and when the air temperature suddenly drops, they work to reach their own equilibrium by driving water vapor into the air above them. This appears as fog, and in some places, it pours like a viscous fluid down a grade—following the flow of the cooler, heavier air—and out across the landscape. I rode through such a flow the other day, an eerie experience: like a spill of some inscrutable spongy mass, it rolled from a field down an embankment and across both lanes of the road. My head was above it, my body immersed in it; my passage roiled it into dissolution.

This morning I rode among tendrils of fog here and there, and the rising sun shone—from one moment to the next—first from below the plane of the fog, defining it as a ceiling; then from above the fog, making it the floor. Similar to flying through layers of clouds in an airplane, but on a more human scale.

The air has a taste and feel of its own, filled with liquid exhalations of the thousand flowers blooming in late summer exuberance, the goldenrod and ironweed, loosestrife and Joe-Pye weed, the late-passing Queen-Anne’s lace and countless other stems large and small whose riotous color spreads across the fields. Their days are numbered—these cool evenings but a prelude to the chill nights to come—the inevitable frost waiting just a few weeks out ahead of us. We will get all the blooming in that we can before that frost calls an end to our fun.

First Drafts from Folsom Prison

I shot a man in Reno just to see if the gun still worked.

I shot a man in Reno for changing lanes without signalling.

I shot a man in Reno for driving with his turn signal on.

I shot a man in Reno for driving fifteen miles below the speed limit.

I shot a man in Reno for driving in the passing lane.

I shot a man in Reno for tailgating.

I shot a healthy man in Reno for parking in the handicapped space.

I shot a man in Reno for parking in the fire lane.

I shot a man in Reno for improperly using apostrophe’s.

I shot a man in Reno all the way from Tahoe.

I shot a man in Reno for using ‘reactionary’ when he mean ‘reactive.’

I shot a man in Reno for talking on his cellphone in the movie.

I shot a man in Reno for wearing a ‘Guinness’ shirt while drinking a Bud Lite.

I shot a man in Reno for generically referring to motorcycles as ‘Harleys.’

I shot a man in Reno for randomly using “quotation” marks.

I shot a man in Reno for using ‘literally’ to mean ‘figuratively.’

I shot a man in Reno for misusing the HOV lane.

I shot a man in Reno for arguing with the cashier over a 25¢ coupon.

I shot a man in Reno for having 12 items in a 10-item express lane.

I shot a man in Reno for organizing his entire financial portfolio at the driveup ATM.

I shot a man in Reno for ordering that drink he ordered at Starbucks.

I shot a man in Reno for saying “fewer,” when he meant “less.”

I shot a man in Reno for using ‘your’ when he meant “you’re.”

I shot a man in Reno

I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. ü

Beast Music

     I. If I had to pick the exact moment the day began to go off the rails, I have to say it was when I chose to stay in rather than head across the vast parking lot for some fast food. Instead, sometime later that afternoon, stomach grumbling, I opted for a stopgap plastic-wrapped “fish sandwich” ransomed from the vending machine and resuscitated with ninety seconds in the microwave.

That may have been the single most uninspiring lunch of my life.

Besides leaving me neither hungry nor sated, it set a dispiriting, dehumanizing tone that lingered with me like a stale fart until the next morning.

When the workday finally ground to an end, I suited up without any real sense of exhilaration at the prospect of five and a half days of free time to do nothing but ride. I suited up and shuffled out of my cubicle, only to arrive bikeside minus a glove. Sweat was already breaking out under the steamy sun as I carefully retraced my steps back across the parking lot, along the sidewalk, back through security into the building, all the way back to my desk.

Nada. Re-retracing my steps, I spied the errant glove hiding in the shadows within a pace of where I had been standing by the bike. Now completely drenched in sweat, I buttoned up and rolled into rush hour, lurching foot-by-foot the entire mile of the dusty strip to the nearest gas station for a quick top-off before hitting the road.

Forty-five minutes after I first started starting, I actually hit the interstate and found my little niche, tucked in amidst the screaming tractor trailers, in time to get ten minutes of riding before the storm hit. Like flipping a switch, the rain began and within seconds, water stood on the road and the blasting trucks filled the air with filthy spray. I got off the highway and watched the madness from the safety and comfort of a gas station awning while the storm sorted itself out and gradually moved on east.

Welcome to West Virginia. Elapsed time: One hour. Miles travelled: Sixteen. And I could still taste that fish sandwich.

For the next four hours, the storms played cat-and-mouse with me. As I rode northward, the sky would clear, the road would dry, it would be beautiful, and in just a few miles the clouds would regroup and the rain would resume. Twice it got bad enough for me to exit the highway and sit it out; I was not the least bit interested in proving anything on this ride.

Eventually, we reached a compromise—it would rain steadily, but not heavily. And so it did, for the last two hours of the first day of my long anticipated vacation. Which, it so happens, corresponded with the beginning of the real riding part—extricating myself from the superslab and entering the highway hugging the west shore of the Susquehanna.

Admittedly, the rain was gentle and erratic enough that I was able to enjoy the riding and the beautiful mix of mountains and river. But as the road wound on, it slowly began outrunning my riding stamina. I was worn from the workday and the hassles of getting this far; the light was fading, I was chilled from the earlier sweat mixed with the spots where the insistent rain had found its way in my suit, I was hungry, Beast was running low on gas, and I had no idea how far it was to my destination.

Did I mention I planned to camp tonight—tent, sleeping bag, the whole nine yards?

Maybe that goes farther to explain the “going off the rails” than a single fish sandwich from a vending machine. Because in pretty much every instance, ‘camping’ is synonymous with ‘outrunning my stamina,’ ‘chilled,’ ‘hungry,’ ‘low on gas,’ ‘tired,’ ‘getting dark,’ and ‘damp.’ That’s exactly what camping means, at least in our household.

Getting annoyed with myself, I started looking for a motel appropriate to my circumstances, meaning ‘cheap’ and ‘willing to shelter a bedraggled motorcyclist as long as he doesn’t do an oil change in the room and ruin our linens.’ Strangely, the little college town I was passing through seemed to have lots of places catering to parents well-enough off to send their kids to a fancy private college in the foothills of the Poconos and overlooking the confluence of the two branches of the Susquehanna, (read: pricey and fancy) but oddly, fairly few targeting my specific demographic. Hmm. Go figure.

No matter. I would bravely soldier on, trusting fate there would be something appropriate down the road somewhere.

But by now, the rain had abrogated our earlier agreement; it was raining both steadily and heavily. It was full-on dark, and both my visor and glasses were spattered with rain and fogged; oncoming headlights made it almost impossible for me to see the road ahead. I rode awkwardly and hesitantly into the darkness, fumbling my way down the highway until I finally recognized a road of the right aspect heading in the right direction. I followed it.

In short order, it took me to the route number I was looking for. Making a calculated guess between left and right, I turned onto the road and began looking eagerly for my destination—the campground.

Prior to this, I had been riding in daylight or in built-up areas; I was now in the country, and it was very, very dark. Except for the headlights of the onrushing cars, which were very, very bright. I really wasn’t liking this part very much at all. The low-gas warning light had been on for a really long time, and there wasn’t a gas station to be found. There wasn’t much of anything to be found, it seemed.

Then suddenly (…really suddenly, like I had to grab a fistful of brake because all of a sudden there it was, and thank FSM for ABS…) I was there. Oddly enough, at almost the exact instant, two Ducatistis arrived, making us the only folks there on eurobikes—everything else, without fail, was a V-Twin, American or otherwise.

A huge fire burned in a ginormous metal bowl near the entrance. I parked Beast, and slowly, creakily, made my way towards the light and warmth. Squishing my way along, I noted the campground was on the fertile flood plain of the Susquehanna (evidenced by the rich cornfields just beyond the road), which also meant the land was very, very flat, and all that rain that had been falling since I left Virginia four hours ago was sitting right where it fell, all two inches or so of it. Right where my tent was going.

Yeah, I was starting to think that perhaps camping was the weak link in my plan.

But angels can come in all shapes and sizes, and in this case my personal angel was a big, beefy, hirsute, tattooed dude riding a triked Suzuki through the gloom. He introduced himself and invited me to come hang out by the fire. Even more betterer, he actually had a tent available for my use; a great big tent. A great big dry tent. With a queen-sized airbed already set up in it.

Perhaps camping, per se, would not be the downfall of my trip after all.

I retrieved Beast, got her secured near the tent, and offloaded what I needed for the night. Once ensconced in my snug, relatively dry castle, I set out in search of dinner at the roadhouse that sat cheek-by-jowl with the campground, a roadhouse with a line of H-Ds filling the parking lot out front. What a beautiful place to find at the end of the road.

Dinner was a 12-ounce Budweiser longneck, downed in two swallows while standing at the bar. I slogged back through the fog and darkness to my beautiful, beautiful tent, stripped off my clammy riding gear (which had absolutely no chance in hell of doing any drying under the circumstances), climbed into my sleeping bag and fell immediately asleep. I dreamed spectacular dreams of broad rivers rushing, of trucks passing on the road, of trains rumbling by, of big V-Twins firing up and thundering into the night.

Then in the early grey light, I loaded up my gear, paid my respects to my angel as we stood by the smoldering remains of the night’s fire, and rode into the dawn of a new day—firmly on the rails, where I would remain for the duration of the trip.

     II. A Sunday Morning in August, 8:00, a Diner with An Undetermined Number of Calendars on the Kitchen Wall:

“God-damned motorcycles.”

The shoulder belonging to that sentiment wrapped around the door at about the level of my forehead. Oddly, its hidden owner had apparently not noticed me pull up.

Nevertheless, I responded with a hearty “Alleluia, Brother!” as I unzipped my riding jacket and sidled into a convenient booth. “Coffee, please.” The waitress hands me a menu, smiling brightly as the enormous speaker exits, muttering an unintelligible addendum as the door jangles shut behind him.

“Don’t mind him, hon. He wunt talkin’ a you.” A compact woman addresses me across a jumbled plate of home fries and toast crusts, coffee in one hand and cigarette in the other.

I smile back at her. “I probably agree with him, anyhow.”

“Naah. My nephew was just killed last week, riding his motorcycle.”

Suddenly this conversation seemed way too personal to be having so casually on a summer Sunday morning, and the diner seemed to shrink all around us.

“He was twenty-seven. Just back from his third tour in Afghanistan. Got out of the Army. Was getting ready to go back over there as a civilian—you know, as one a those contractors. Gonna make some real money for his trouble.”

The coffee comes. A tall, cobalt blue ceramic mug; two creamers. Too hot to drink right now.

“He left a wife behind. They had a service for him down in Charlottesville—that’s where he was living—and a bunch of his buddies gave him a ‘ride off.’”

“Charlottesville? That’s down near where I’m from.” I pause. “I might have seem him on the road…”

“Yeah.” She offers a brief description of him and of his ride. “Some of his buddies are bringing his ashes up here, his riding buddies.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss.” I find nothing else to say, and I cannot begin to unpack the onion of sorrow she has conveyed in such a brief conversation—not here, not now. Who was this man—what kind of man was he, that he survived a war in a distant land, made it back safely to his wife and family, just to die alone on the dark streets of his hometown? I think about it for a few moments, then, I can think no further.

“God-damned motorcycles,” I say quietly to myself as my eggs arrive.*

     III. Sometimes when you are riding, it seems like everyone you talk to has, had or wants a motorcycle. Without fail. And they want to share that with you.

Which is really nice.

     IV. Quaint Old Vermont Sayings: “Heavier Than A Dead Minister.” Discuss.**

     V. Route 17 is one of those roads, like Trinity Road in northern California, or U.S. 129 in North Carolina, that are notable less for what they connect than for what they are. The road is the destination; its endpoints are incidental.

I rode Rt. 17 on Campaigner when it was a relatively new bike and I was half my age. I am pretty sure it was the only place I ever ground a valve cover on that R80st while riding. Phil and I drove it (several times, as I remember) in a 5-speed Toyota a decade ago, when his license was fresh and driving was thrilling. Now me and Beast were warmed up on a beautiful summer morning, ready to attack the road west-to-east, Bristol to Waitsfield.

Rt. 17 is exactly the kind of road Beast was built for. Rising steeply from the valley floor, it winds its way up and over the Green Mountains at Appalachian Gap, then descends sharply into the valley to the east, gradually leveling out before reaching Waitsfield. The road itself is a motorcyclist’s dream, two sinuous lanes of frost-heaved asphalt looping, rising and falling from the deciduous forests of the lowlands to the sweetly scented firs and balsams of the summits. Curves build madly upon curves, piling up so rapidly you ride like a rotary phone being dialed.

I had been waiting for this moment for ages—for years. And when the moment came to finally address Rt. 17, I rode Beast like someone’s elderly grandmother. She might as well have had tennis balls stuck on the ends of her fork legs.

Grind the valve covers? Are you kidding me? I didn’t even remove the vinyl slipcovers from the sofa or rearrange the anti-macassars on the rocking chairs. If I had taken a full week to make some easy practice runs, I might have gotten to know the soul of the road well enough to really do it justice. But I didn’t have a week to learn it—I had one pass at it, and I approached it with great reserve, caution, and deference. I rode the rule I learned at the Dragon’s Tail: Your gear equals how many seconds ahead you can see. In some cases, that wasn’t very far ahead at all; I took an awful lot of turns in first or second gear. Nevertheless, I did have a few opportunities to wring Beast out and get to what I came for.

Beast Has A Happy

When we finally arrived at the gap, I pulled in to admire the view, and to get a picture or two. I caught Beast in profile, silhouetted against the western vista as she ticked away the accumulated heat. If she had been a greyhound, she would have been panting hard, tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth, with a great big goofy smile plastered across her face.

In the end, it turns out I had a second crack at App Gap, returning in the early afternoon and swapping ascending side for descending side by going westbound. The little bit of practice in the morning let me ride the return much better. I took a much more fluid and graceful approach, and except for getting bottled up behind a gaggle of brake-burning flatlanders for much of the descent, I think I did pretty well.

By the time I reached the valley floor at Bristol, the sport bikers were appearing in buzzy packs of two and three, queueing up eagerly to make their pass over the mountain. In the brilliant primary colors of bikes and riders, they seemed childlike and unserious, expensive toys clad in expensive raiment, out for a moment’s romp in a grown-up’s mountain playground. 

I watch them go by me, and smile.

     VI. "Blue Highways" is a book written by William Least Heat Moon, also known as William Trogdon, describing his journey around the United States in a white van in a time of personal turmoil. He stuck to the "Blue Highways," his term for the lesser highways that Rand-McNally designated in blue in their highway atlases—in contrast to the interstate highway system. Blue Highways take you right up to the edge of people's front yards, with lemonade stands (really), yard sales, gardens & vegetable stands, ramshackle sheds and pristine cottages. You can smell their lunches and their laundry, hear their dogs bark at you, and project your own hopes, fears and wildest imaginations onto the screens of their lives as you flash by.

Interstate Highways, on the other hand—regardless of the scenery they traverse—are a long, slow, soul-sucking passage through the dark twisted colon of corporatist America***.

     VII. What is the World Coming to?

A classic Pennsylvania roadhouse, sitting beside a shady two-lane highway nestled deep in the recesses of anthracite country in northeastern Pennsylvania, and above the door, sticking out from the front of the building where passing traffic can’t miss it, is a beer sign. Actually, it is an Ale sign. For Chimay Ale.
I’m not sure what to make of that, actually.

* I'm pretty sure she was referring to Corey Guthrie.

**Bill Bryson actually discusses this at length in "I'm A Stranger Here Myself."

***I know that on close examination, that analogy falls apart. But I still like the sound of it.

A Few Words About Turkeys

When we started looking into raising turkeys early this year, we kept coming across a few consistent threads of turkey lore—that they are stupid; that poults have to be shown what to eat at first; that turkeys will stampede at the slightest provocation, trampling and suffocating each other; that turkeys will drown in a heavy rain; that turkeys break their eggs because they lay them standing up, and so on.

I beg to differ.

Our experience may be uncharacteristic, because we are raising Narragansetts, a breed closely derived from the Eastern Wild Turkey. These are not the grotesquely deformed 'Butterballs' which have had their natural avian grace replaced with bland tasteless tumors of white meat. Narragansetts are spectacularly beautiful birds, large, stately and graceful, with woodland markings. They recall, from deep within, what it is to be a real bird. And when the Toms display, they are the very strutting epitome of what any first-grader or buckle-hatted Pilgrim would recognize as a Turkey—gobble, wattle, snood and all.

Unlike chickens, turkeys have a social structure, which implies they have some awareness of individuals. They have elegant, stylized, sometimes comical display and courtship behaviors. They communicate with one another and with the rafter—the term for a group of turkeys—as a whole. They are muscular fliers, and frequently leap into the air and wheel about for no apparent reason, often half a dozen bursting into flight nearly simultaneously.

They are curious and inquisitive, and have a broad vocabulary of vocalizations that seem to express a wide range of moods, from quiet contentment to pique, alarm and distress. A certain distinctive cry will make them all look in a particular direction and freeze for several seconds. They listen attentively to the flock of chickens, who are out of sight and some distance away across the ridge, and will echo and amplify calls of distress or alarm they may hear from their galliform brethren.

They are generally tranquil and appear thoughtful, unlike the frantic and seemingly pointless activity of chickens. They will cock their heads sideways and quizzically watch an airplane far overhead. I would go as far as to say they are affectionate, recalling how when they were younger (and mercifully smaller) as many as seven or nine young turkeys would hop onto my shoulders, back, neck and extended arms until I couldn't support any more. Once there, they would pick at my hair and ears, cooing quietly all the while.

As a way of showing our appreciation for these magnificent birds, we have gone all out in revamping their habitat. We began with significantly expanding the footprint of their enclosure into the adjacent forest on several sides. We then replaced the standard tee-stakes and four-foot welded wire fence with ten-foot black iron pipes driven two-and-a-half feet into the ground and five-foot welded wire.

We then replaced the lightweight netting roof with 2" mesh aviary netting, held up with/suspended from a complex rope web. Large ropes run from tree to tree outside the enclosure, and smaller ropes run from the tops of the pipes, connected to the suspensors through the netting with carabiners. A final run of rope traverses the perimeter of the fence, providing an edge for the netting to be pulled over. It is a spectacular flight cage, a clear-sky tent of swooping catenaries and vast volumes for the birds to play in, with rough-cedar roosts for them to sleep on under the stars.

It is a real pleasure to share the place with them. Many an evening we have spent just sitting, quietly watching them go about their gentle routine of strolling about their enclosure nibbling the odd bit of forage, preening, stretching like little feathered ballerinas, convulsively dirt-bathing or softly dozing off...

"Good Night and Good Luck"

Right now. Go buy, rent, beg, borrow or steal a copy. And watch it.

Requiem for a cockerel

The other evening we dined on the first of the chickens which we had raised from chicks. The chicks arrived last April, and the newly-matured cockerels went off for butchering last weekend on Saturday and were in our freezer Sunday. It's a little weird to look at it that way—chicks to meal—but I really haven't felt conflicted in the least.

Every single day when I went out to feed the chickens, or check their water, or make sure they were safe, or any of a thousand other chores I performed on their behalf, I would look at them as individual living animals and know exactly how their lives would end. As Joel Salatin puts it, "...a good life, then one bad day."

Virtually every other chicken I have ever eaten in my life—every drumstick, nugget, finger, roast, et cetera, et cetera, has lived a short, wretched life of misery and suffering. Our cockerels ran around like crazy in the sun and the rain, ate bugs and grass and some of our favorite flowers and garden plants, showed off for one another and the hens, and got to act like real birds of planet earth—hell, they got to fly; how many 21st-century chickens can say that?

To show respect for this cockerel and to appreciate exactly what a home-raised chicken tastes like, we did him up plain and simple: a drizzle of olive oil, some salt and pepper, a little butter in the pan to baste him. We baked him for a little over an hour, and accompanied him with roasted potatoes ( also simple, with salt and pepper only) and some sauteed summer squash fresh from the garden.

His meat was flavorful and toothsome; his bones solid and well-calcified. He was small, a little smaller than a regulation NFL-football, except with drumsticks. Three of us dined on him, with a decent portion left over for another meal. His bones will make another meal by way of stock. He was a real treat, unlike the bland, tasteless, textureless meat that is foisted off on us as "chicken" by the Purdues and Tysons of the world.

We have another dozen or so of his cohort in the freezer. I am looking forward to seeing what they're like.

"….been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time"

HOT DAMN!

Beast is finally back in action, and she's in fine form. Every last vestige of injector bronchitis is gone, she’s wearing deep rubber front and rear (...just scuffed enough to be broken in) has two working mirrors all the way to six o’clock, and she’s freshly tuned to boot. She’s got a few scars here and there, but overall, she hasn’t felt like this in years. I’d pretty much forgotten what crisp throttle response was like, and had been riding hesitantly because of the sketchiness of the tires.

This morning, once I reloaded the drivers and remembered how to ride again, I was actually able to relax and focus on the ride instead of fretting over the machine. As a result, without even thinking about it, I opted for the more circuitous, rolling, winding “motorcycle friendly” route instead of the expeditious—but dull—superslab I’ve been favoring on four wheels for so long. Outstanding.

On the way home, I noticed something else interesting. My homeward commute on four wheels is a long string of counting down the miles, endlessly flipping through the radio stations, tedium piled upon tedium up to the last mile coming down the lane. But today, time and distance was irrelevant. I was, as the young'uns say, 'in the moment,' and the otherwise incessantly granular trip home was transformed into a delightful, fluid moment.
______________________________

This is my 300th post on RLYMI, which will be five years old in a week or so. That works out to a post every six days or so. I’m no Great Orange Satan or anything, but I’m pretty pleased with that posting schedule, given all that has transpired during those years. Personally, I think most of what I’ve posted stands up pretty well.

But of course, I’m biased.

"They symbolize the classic American values of independence and hard work...a uniquely American phenomenon."

Harley, Davidson, Davidson & Davidson

Adding extortion to its diverse product line, Harley-Davidson is threatening both the city of Milwaukee (the company's home since it's founding 107 years ago by William Harley and Arthur Davidson) and its labor unions with relocating to another city. Unless the city is willing to offer "incentives" and the unions make wage and scheduling concessions, H-D expects to announce plans to move elsewhere within the next few months.

If I recall correctly, the Milwaukee facility makes the quaint, iconic legacy V-twin engines that define the brands; the motorcycles are assembled at their York, Pennsylvania plant. Milwaukee is also where H-D's corporate headquarters are located, but I don't imagine the suits are feeling any pressure to make concessions and there are no threats to move the white-collar side of things, nor the H-D museum located there as well.

Keep in mind, this is the company that cut 2,000 manufacturing jobs last year, plans to cut 1,400 to 1,600 more jobs by 2012—and reported over $70 million in profits for the second quarter of 2010.

It's a little ironic to me, the cognitive dissonance between the rough, hard-living, hard-riding blue-collar workingman's image H-D has worked so hard to cultivate, and the ruthless, bloodless corporatist approach they are taking to their business model.

But on second thought, I also recall that H-D has, more than any other marque, been responsible for the ascendancy of the RUBs ("Rich Urban Bikers"), those affluent, white-collar, middle-aged, mostly white, mostly males riders who are newly arrived to the game. That demographic has helped keep the motorcycle industry off life support for the last few years (while, ironically, swelling the fatality rate with their poor dilletante riding habits, drunkenness and lack of awareness).

But the average Joe has probably been priced out of the market; motorcycles have slowly become a rich man's indulgence, a second childhood enjoyed on the cusp of senescence. I suppose that in reality, H-D's target demographic is perfectly okay with the current ruthlessness the company displays. Hell, it's probably the same cold logic they pride themselves on displaying Monday through Friday when they aren't out playing badass biker gang member in pseudo colors and tassel loafers.

For what it's worth, if BMW Motorrad showed the same sneering disconnect between the carefully-crafted public image and the way it actually treated the people who build and buy its products, I would feel the same way. As long as the Quandt family remains at the helm, I don't see that happening.

Eff them all. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if within five or ten years (max) H-D had completely abandoned manufacturing altogether and became a finance and "lifestyle" conglomerate, leaving the Chinese and Koreans the dirty work of actually manufacturing bikes.

Take your trademarked "Potato potato potato potato" and shove it right up your p&l statement; this company can't die soon enough. Wake up, HOGs.

Yet more about SOTW, tangentially:

" Recent studies by Professor Nina Kraus, a neuroscientists [sic] at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have shown that the electrical activity inside the brain while listening to music closely matches the physical properties of sound waves.

Using brain scanning equipment Professor Kraus, who presented her findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego on Saturday, said the brainwaves recorded from volunteers listening to music could be converted back to sound.

In one example where volunteers listened to Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water," when the brainwaves were played back the song was clearly recognisable.

She said: 'When we play the brainwaves back as sound, although they don't sound exactly like the song, it is pretty similar. It shows that the brain matches the physical properties of sound very closely.'" 

Slow moving Walter was unavailable for comment.

When A Bicycle Courier Saved The World:

From The Gallup Management Journal (behind paywall) , by way of thewashcycle.com :

"The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 not only showed how close the United States and Soviet Union could come to a nuclear war, but also the sorry state of the communication channels needed to avert it. During one point in the crisis, the Soviet ambassador to Washington had to rely on a bicycle courier to take his urgent messages for Moscow to the local Western Union office."

The Silence of The Cockerels

Well, this weekend we graduated the first cadre of the Class of 2010. Fifteen of them, all adolescent rooster types—technically known as Cockerels—were part of the mixed run of chicks we received in early April, after the disaster we experienced with our first batch of mail-order chicks (e.g., 100% mortality on arrival).

Since our long-term objective is primarily egg production, we knew that beyond one or two select roosters, all the others would provide meat. Specifically, the cockerels would become our younger, more tender "fryer" or "roaster" chickens; the retired egg-layers are our soup/stewing chickens.

For their graduation, we took them to a near-by operation that has a little bit of everything: Pick-Your-Own fruits and berries, orchards, free-roaming poultry, a truck garden and roadside stand, and a full line of self-labeled jams, jellies, sauces and preserves. One of their services is fresh rabbit with 24-hours notice, and they are fully equipped to butcher and process small animals.

Our average butchering and processing time so far has been, setup to cleanup, about one hour per bird. I dropped off two cages of birds late on a cool and pleasant Saturday morning, and by the time we got home late Saturday evening, there was a message on the phone that the birds were frozen and ready to be picked up.

They were all small, hardly more than Cornish Game hens, averaging around three pounds dressed weight. They had probably maxed out close to a month ago, and were simply burning through feed for the last few weeks without adding any weight. But the recent spate of mercilessly hot, humid  weather kept us postponing processing them ourselves—a hot, messy job under the best of circumstances.

We wrestled with the 'ethics' of paying someone else to do our dirty work, but in the end, it made sense, saved us time we didn't really have in the first place, and gave us, admittedly, a far superior finished product. Plus, we received bonus packs of duck feet, duck wings, and several packs of surplus giblets. All told, quite a fair deal and a respectful farewell to a bunch of pugnacious little yard monsters. (Who knew cockerels can draw blood from people?)

We've both dealt  with butchering, and know exactly how hard it is. Odds are, we'll be doing it again in the not so distant future, but when we don't have fifteen birds to process. But in this instance, we paid someone else a very reasonable amount and got something done quickly, mercifully and efficiently that would not have gotten done otherwise.

But yeah, it's a whole lot quieter out there with fifteen fewer roosters...

The Dim Mak

“It was the Dim Mak.”

“The Dim Mak?”

“The Dim Mak. The Quivering Palm. The Death Touch. It's forbidden in the New Earth Army.”

“What does the Death Touch do?”

“It kills you, Bob—with one touch.”

“Jesus!”

“There's a story that Wong Wifu, the great Chinese martial artist...had a fight with a guy and beat him. Then the guy gave him this light tap. Wong looked at him and the guy just nodded. That was it. He had given him the death touch. Wong died.”

“Then and there?”

“No. About eighteen years later. That's the thing about the Dim Mak. You never know when it's gonna take effect.”

Summer Reading List

To help understand how we got here. In no particular order:

"Nixonland," Rick Perlstein. The original sin of contemporary American politics.
"The Looming Tower," Lawrence Wright. Al Qaeda without the hyperventilation.
"The Big Con," Jonathan Chait. Explaining modern snake oil economics. (Surprise: Dick Cheney was there at the creation)
"Legacy of Ashes," Tim Weiner. Why our relations with the world at large are so utterly dysfunctional.
"The Shock Doctrine," Naomi Klein. Chicago-school economics forced upon the world at gunpoint under the guise of "freedom."

"Nixonland" is particularly interesting for me because I grew up in a household that recognized Richard Milhous Nixon for the devil he was; the Watergate hearings were a seminal event in shaping my political consciousness. I've had to put "Shock Doctrine" aside several times since starting it over a year ago because what it describes is so...horrible.

Taken together, these books present a tightly woven narrative of how far modern American politics has strayed from our ideals. All these books interrelate to a significant degree. The question is if there is any way left for us to fix what has happened during the post-World War Two nightmare of American Exceptionalism.

Eyewitness News Update:

Problem solved.

A Long Dry Spell

I realized recently that this may be the longest time I’ve done the least riding since…well, since I went over to the dark side and started motorcycling over a quarter-century ago. I recall riding into town a couple of times back in the dark grey days of winter, when being a man of leisure still held some appeal. Even then, one trip was on the Rockster because Beast’s battery started weirding out on me, and of course Beast had two broken mirrors.

Then came the snows of 2010, and biking became impossible for most of February and well into March. By that time, Beast’s battery wouldn’t fire her up even when left on the battery tender overnight, and the Rockster had sprung a slow leak in her rear tire.

It wasn’t until late spring when I had the resources to start turning the tide of decrepitude—first, a new battery, then two mirrors. Each one of those items, by the way, cost the same as a meal at The Inn, excluding wine.

Then it was, all told, four new tires: a new rear tire for the Rockster (which somehow mysteriously developed a pencil-sized hole in it even as Phil was riding it home), the judicious replacement of Beast’s perilously worn (read: nearly bald) rear tire, and both sketchy front tires just for good measure.

But bikes got to be ridden.

Because poor Beast sat so long out in the elements (...unfortunately, right under the drip edge of the shed roof...) over the winter, she developed injector bronchitis. Could be simple fuel contamination, could be a side effect of the funky ethanol mixes everyone is flogging these days, could be gum, could be a colony of petroleum-eating amoebae, could be any number of things. What it means is she will fire up all right, but won’t idle worth a damn.

And first thing in the morning, there’s nothing like trying to coax a faltering bike uphill on a gravel road when all the sudden she clears her throat and the power jumps from somewhere around “just about to die” to “LET”S GO BABY!” Yeah, that’s fun.

I tried the round trip to work a couple of times, hoping the problem would take care of itself. The first time, I desperately sought out the first place that was open at that time of the morning for some injector cleaner. I dumped half the bottle into the fuel tank, crossed my fingers, then stumbled and lurched on to the superslab and to work.

Topped off the tank with fresh expensive super-duper premium name-brand designer gasoline on the way home, hoping for some modicum of improvement. No dice. Stopped at another joint, got a different kind of injector cleaner, dumped half of that into my tankful of fresh expensive super-duper premium name-brand designer gasoline and stumbled home through a living hazy hot humid summertime afternoon rush hour road work stop-and-go traffic hell.

Anyway. Beast is now receiving some tender wrenchlove, and though the stumbling problem is resisting the first few efforts to correct it, I expect it will be resolved in short order. I trust that shortly, we will be getting our ride on again, and I look forward to that with great enthusiasm. It’s been a long dry spell.

Fox News Update

It's not a fox—a raccoon, according to an eyewitness.
So should this be an Eyewitness News Update?

QOTD

From Nancy Pelosi's Twitter feed:

"By August, more jobs will have been created by Obama and Dem Congress than all jobs created by 8 years of Bush Administration"

How Quintessentially American:

From the New York Times:

By most measures, Harley-Davidson has been having a rough ride. Motorcycle sales are falling in 2010, as they have for each of the last three years. The company does not expect a turnaround anytime soon. But despite that drought, Harley’s profits are rising — soaring, in fact. Last week, Harley reported a $71 million profit in the second quarter, more than triple what it earned a year ago. This seeming contradiction — falling sales and rising profits — is one reason the mood on Wall Street is so much more buoyant than in households, where pessimism runs deep and joblessness shows few signs of easing.

Many companies are focusing on cost-cutting to keep profits growing, but the benefits are mostly going to shareholders instead of the broader economy, as management conserves cash rather than bolstering hiring and production. Harley, for example, has announced plans to cut 1,400 to 1,600 more jobs by the end of next year. That is on top of 2,000 job cuts last year — more than a fifth of its work force.

“Because of high unemployment, management is using its leverage to get more hours out of workers,” said Robert C. Pozen, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the former president of Fidelity Investments. “What’s worrisome is that American business has gotten used to being a lot leaner, and it could take a while before they start hiring again.”

And some of those businesses, including Harley-Davidson, are preparing for a future where they can prosper even if sales do not recover. Harley’s goal is to permanently be in a position to generate strong profits on a lower revenue base…the ability to raise profits in the face of declining sales is a triumph of productivity that makes the United States more globally competitive. The problem is that companies are not investing those earnings, instead letting cash pile up to levels not reached in nearly half a century.

“As long as corporations are reinvesting, the economy can grow,” said Ethan Harris, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “But if they’re taking those profits and saving them, rather than buying new equipment, it hurts overall growth. The longer this goes on, the more you worry about income being diverted to a sector that’s not spending.” “There’s no question that there is an income shift going on in the economy…Companies are squeezing their labor costs to build profits.”

In fact, while wages and salaries have barely budged from recession lows, profits have staged a vigorous recovery, jumping 40 percent between late 2008 and the first quarter of 2010. Harley-Davidson’s profit gain last quarter was helped by a turnaround in its financing unit, as well as more efficient production, but the company is still cutting. Harley has warned union employees…it would move production elsewhere in the United States if they did not agree to more flexible work rules and tens of millions in cost-saving measures.

Even if sales do improve, a surge in hiring is unlikely. “The last thing we’re worried about is when are we going to have to add more capacity, because what we’re really doing is reconfiguring our entire operational system for greater flexibility,” Keith Wandell, the company’s chief executive, said.

This working-man's apocalypse is partly a result of the paradigm shift that has occurred over the last few decades (a guerilla class-war in which the plutocrats smartly defeated and virtually destroyed the middle class before we even knew what was happening) and partly an inevitable outcome of the devil's bargain H-D made the last time it became a publicly-traded company.

I really hate to beat up on H-D and their customers*, but for a 100+ year-old company which made so much from brand loyalty and labelling—and so little from engineering and quality control—it is galling. It is orphan-grade chutzpah to so lavishly reward Wall Street through devastating and empoverishing the union workers who builds their products. This shows such an incredible disconnect between the public face of H-D and its business strategy that it defies comprehension.

Frankly, I hope all the good, hard-working, hard-riding H-D owners will take a good long hard look at what H-D has become—reflected in its utter comtempt for the middle class—before they send another dime in the direction of Milwaukee. There are plenty of alternatives available to what was once an American icon, but is now just another metastatizing tumor, a corporatist cancer sucking the lifeblood from our country.

*Okay, technically, there's nothing I enjoy more...

It Just Makes Me Angry...

I saw a flier pinned to a bulletin board the other day for a charity event. It was a motorcycle ride, sponsored by a motorcycle dealership, with a modest entry fee and perhaps some additional revenue-generators like a poker run or something.

The beneficiary was a man in is thirties who recently lost control of his motorcycle in a single-vehicle accident, and as a result, suffered a traumatic brain injury. His prognosis is not good.

He is in a coma, is likely to remain in a coma for some time, and will need intensive medical attention, rehabilitation and therapy—should he be fortunate enough to recover to that point. He has a family, who are probably still struggling to come to terms with the upheaval they have undergone, but apparently no health insurance or means to afford the millions of dollars in medical expenses he has incurred and will likely face for the foreseeable future.

Curmudgeonly misanthrope that I am, I immediately hopped on the interwebz,  and googled the man's name + "motorcycle accident" + (town). Within about two minutes, I found a local news article quoting the State Police report from the incident, and of course, it completely confirmed my prejudices:

"...lost control of his motorcycle...not wearing a helmet."

As Ian Malcolm said, "Boy, do I hate being right all the time."

Man, I feel like I know this poor dumb son-of-a-bitch, because I've surely talked with his ilk enough times. Let me fill in a few more pieces of the puzzle: Probably riding a used Harley he bought from a friend; self-taught rider or learned a few pointers from the P.O. while the title was being signed over; only owned a shorty helmet for ventures into neighboring states with helmet laws (incident occurred, needless to say, in one of those enlightened bastions of liberty that do not require helmets) and probably adorned said helmet with stickers that asserted his individuality, so to speak.

I can also hear the barroom rant (...jeeze, I can almost smell the cheap beer and Jagermeister shots on his breath) about freedom, liberty, let those who ride decide, yadda yadda yadda. I can almost quote verbatim the weird, fatalistically heroic twisted logic—"...An effin' helmet ain't gonna do me any good if I have an accident—I'll be dead meat!" And of course, the libertarian argument about how it's his business if he wears a helmet, not the government's.

But right now, it's really not his business anymore. It's fallen to a cadre of sympathetic fellow-travelers to right the heinous, grievous error in judgment this poor vegetable made. In all likelihood, it will be the government—the big, bad, librul gummit—and his fellow taxpayers—who will foot the bill for his little self-indulgent exercise in freedom and pig-headed liberty. Except, oops, he probably won't be paying any taxes anytime soon, now will he?

Fascinating thing about accidents. Despite (my assumptions about) the uninformed and speculative nature of this poor saps' understanding of motorcycle accidents and head injury, we actually have some...what's that stuff called? Data, yeah...DATA...on accidents. And you know what?

• Any fall from a standing height—six feet or so—can cause traumatic brain injury. Walking, bicycling, horseback riding, motorcycling. It's all the same; horizontal velocity doesn't enter into the equation unless you run into something. That's why people generally don't get much over six feet tall; it's a natural limit.
• Motorcycle accidents generally produce a number of non-life-threatening injuries. But add a traumatic brain injury to the mix, and the prognosis gets a whole lot worse. It's the difference between taking pain meds for a week and being on a ventilator. 
• A single-vehicle accident means he couldn't control his bike, and essentially fell down; there was no other car or truck involved to share the blame. There was no car to be launched airborne over, no truck side to be thrown into. He did something wrong, was thrown through the air some distance, and landed hard on his unprotected head.
• A helmet—even a stupid shorty bedpan helmet, but preferably a real, live D.O.T. or Snell approved helmet—might have turned this into a "...treated and released..." or a "...held for observation overnight..." instead of a "...long-term rehabilitation..."

I need to muster up an iota of sympathy for this man. I really do. For his family? My heart goes out to them. He really shafted them by his stupid, selfish actions. But for him?

No way. Sorry.
I won't be able to make the benefit ride.
Be safe.

An odd coincidence, and tragedy

A while back, I wrote about arriving at a train crossing as one train passed right before me right-to-left, and nearly simultaneously another train appeared on the second track heading left-to-right. What are the odds, I thought to myself at the time.

Well, apparently better than you might think.

This week a local woman was killed at that very crossing. She apparently broke from the line of  stopped vehicles, ignored the flashing lights and warning bells, drove around the lowered barricades, and around the train—the train on the first track of two closest to her. The train that wasn't going anywhere.

...And directly into the path of the second train, whose approach was hidden by the stopped train. The fast-moving train had enough time to activate its emergency stopping systems before impacting the passenger side of the car with a force witnesses described as "...a bomb blast."

There's nothing funny, or even ironic about this. It's just sad, and I wonder two things—what was so important to make running the barricade seem like a good idea, and what that last wave of appalling regret must have felt like...

Fox News Update

We are nearly three years into our ever-expanding poultry experiment. We have seen our flocks grow in number, complexity, and in their demands on our time. We have added varieties, species, and end-purposes (meat now, in addition to egg-laying). We have avoided losing birds to predation, suffering one attack from a hawk early on that was interrupted by our faithful dogs without any lasting harm, an odd death from unknowable causes, plus some egg-theft executed by a crafty snake (...who we executed right back, as described here some time ago).

Until recently.

Several weeks ago (perhaps because we had been lulled into a false sense of security by our perimeter defenses) we discovered a trail of black feathers leading to, and over, the fence near an overhanging tree. I was able to follow the trail of feathers into the woods for some distance, but gave up in the failing light of evening. What I saw in the twilight established to my satisfaction that the predator was small, powerful, and terrestrial; e.g., a fox, who dragged his victim off into the forest.

As a result, we examined our fences and discovered some blatant weaknesses we had ignored or overlooked. We beefed them up, fixed some weak spots, completed what we had left undone. Yet within a week or so, Mary discovered the headless body of another victim, left inside the chickenyard when the fox was unable to work her through the fence. Again, we examined the perimeter and found the achille's heel—the exterior gates provided ample space for a swift, determined predator to waltz under without a second thought or a moment's inconvenience.

More bolstering of defenses, this time with boards, chunks of broken cinder blocks, and bad thoughts directed fox-ward. We attempt some chemical warfare, sprinkling great wooly tufts of Schroeder-hair regularly about with abandon, and marking the trees and fenceposts ringing the chickenyard (from the five-foot mark on down) with a gallon jug of well-aged man-pee.

And yet, again, evidence of another attempt to breach our defenses—a broken board, some disturbance of the undergrowth, miscellaneous signs, but fortunately this time, no victim to be found and an early morning beak-count tallying all present and accounted for.

We now know what we're up against, and I am getting an inkling of how foxes have earned their reputation for craft. At night, our flocks roost securely inside tightly latched coops with no entry points; I like to think that is when they are the safest (please, fox, don't prove me wrong). Therefore, all three of the attacks we know about happened during broad daylight; two happened during the brief periods when Mary was off the property, and one while she was working in her office, at the farthest point in the house from where the attack occurred.

We cut back weeds and undergrowth to deprive the little bugger of cover and to reveal weaknesses in the fenceline. We will nail more boards, and bigger boards, across vulnerable spots. We will leave Schroeder out in the garden when we have to be elsewhere.

We are learning to think like a fox, and meanwhile, we keep our fingers crossed.

J.S. Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suites—YoYo Ma

I have taken to indulging myself by buying things that I hear on the radio and like. Granted, this does not represent that big of an indulgence because I am not moved to commerce by the radio with (insert radio pun here) great frequency.

J.S. Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suites fall into this category of impulse purchases. Though not as ubiquitous as the Brandenburg Concertos, the Cello suites may still sound familiar to the casual listener—some or all of them are staples of classical radio. But the Unaccompanied Suites are notable for being, well—unaccompanied. Just one man, one instrument, one composer; a lean, stripped-down version of classical music, which we often take to be synonymous with full orchestras or various hands-full of musicians—trios, quartets, quintets, ad nauseum.

In this instance, the music is spare and lean. I am struck by the undeniable presence of three well-defined personalities: Bach, the composer, pulling the music from the ether and capturing it on the page; Ma, the performer; reconstituting the written music; and the cello itself, giving voice to Ma's interpretation of Bach's brilliance. Three voices, singing in one medium.

Ma's cello is deep, dark and woody; it buzzes and burrs under his caress; it contributes its own quality to the music, going beyond what Bach composed. It is a different kind of sound from that of the orchestra, with its many overlapping and interwoven layers and brilliant polish. It is intimate, unadorned, direct, personal, almost conversational. You are in the presence three greats: composer, performer, and instrument.

Listening to this team is like savoring a varietal wine—in this case, a deep, dark, dry complex well-aged Cabernet Sauvignon. As wine from a single variety of grape will yield up its bounty under the guidance of a master vintner, so does the unaccompanied instrument yield up its riches in the hands of a gifted performer. All the richness and complexity, quirks and foibles, strengths and weaknesses are expressed to the pleasure of the patient, lingering listener without disguises, cloaking, masking or artifice. These performances are treasures to be savored at length.

Deepwater Horizon

I have little of value to add to the discussion of the environmental devastation happening in the Gulf of Mexico right now. But I find myself thinking about one little human aspect of this tragedy I have not heard discussed by anyone among the countless talking heads, hired guns, prognosticators, shills and apologists.

There is a cadre—their number now reduced by eleven—who stood briefly on the threshold of a professional and personal milestone, an achievement that cannot be diminished by what so immediately and horrifically followed. This team of people successfully drilled a hole into the earth over two miles deep, from a drilling platform floating on the ocean's surface a mile above (a total of 18,000 feet from drilling deck to the bottom of the hole) —a drilling platform held in its place only by the constantly adjusted nudges of its computer-controlled thrusters.

They succeeded. Safely. They reached the oil-bearing formation that was their target, and they prepared it for its eventual entry into production, somewhere in the near future. But then, this man...

...decided caution was a luxury BP could no longer afford, time was of the essence, and it was too expensive to delay any further. He decided—over the objections of the professionals who had, for seven long years, run the Nostromo  Deepwater Horizon without a lost time accident—to remove the drilling mud that kept the enormous pressures in that oil-bearing formation in check, and replace it with the much less dense seawater.

The chain of command who personally decided it was more cost-effective in the long run to destroy the Gulf of Mexico than it was to run the Deepwater Horizon as the professionals said it should be run would likely fit comfortably in a Ford Aerostar without so much as their thighs grazing. And you can bet not a one of them will face any personal or professional consequences as a result of their benighted cost-benefit analysis. They may face a few uncomfortable moments under the spotlights of a congressional hearing room, but their lavish emoluments will have ensured that whatever bark, it will not be followed by any bite. In a few short years, they will once again find themselves, conscienceless and blameless, atop their professions.

Yet the survivors of the Deepwater apocalypse, those traumatized and brutalized wage-slaves (yes, the same roughnecks, riggers, cooks and clerks who were held incommunicado aboard ship for fifty hours until they signed releases denying injuries or knowledge of the events leading up to the disaster) will always carry with them the legacy of that awful night. Will they be willing or able to work in their profession again? Will they be cursed by their association with this disaster? Are they marked? Will they ever be able to speak with pride of their accomplishment, of their immense achievement, without an uncomfortable silence falling across the room? Will they become demonized for the havoc unleashed by their hubris? Will anyone want to listen to their stories? Will they be believed? Will they tell their children, or their grandchildren, where those scars came from?

We do not know who the "Carter Burke" is in this case. But he surely exists in flesh-and-blood, and his real name is known to some. And yes, he is the one man who made THE one decision that, against the better judgement of his peers, resulted in this catastrophe. In a just world, that man would be found out and made to wear this event around his neck, his albatross, for all the world to see for every waking moment of the rest of his miserable life.

Addendum: The reference to the Nostromo is not quite right; it's a bit of a conflation. The crew of the Nostromo, with the exception of Ripley, were all dead. It was the Sulaco that carried the Colonial Marines and Carter Burke to their doom. But you get the point.