That is the last line of the preface to the novel I have worked on and off for several decades. I have decided that it is time to release it, warts and all. You might have wondered over the last few postings why I am releasing long ago writing projects to the virtual world. It is really just a form of house keeping, call it a sort of bucket-list of past creativity. I need to finally clean out the old stories so that I can hopefully, imagine, articulate, and tell some new ones.
“The Good Comrade” is based on events that actually happened to a friend of my parents, and my parents, and sister Kathy, were involved as well. My Mothers cousin was intimately involved and it was because of a betrayal of my mother, that the girl who was taken, was at a public place and could be taken by her mother and several other people. It involves the taking of a child, by one parent, from the other. This was during the McCarthy era, and it so happened that the Mother, although she was born and raised in Farmington, Utah, had become during her college years, the mid to late 1930's, at the University of Utah; a communist and later, after she had been married to my parents friend, and later divorced, she married an African-American. Remember this was in the early 1950's before Rosa Parks famous bus ride, and long before meaningful civil rights legislation. In several states miscegenation was still against the law.
The novel although based on these real events, is a work of fiction. I have no way of knowing how anybody, other than maybe my mother, father and sister Kathy, felt about all of this, but I did hear the story many times, and my father's point of view varied from telling to telling. There are characters that I have made up, to help, in my opinion; the narrative, and there are others that just let me, in the frame-work of the story, describe somethings about the landscape of the West, that have meaning to me.
I hope that some of you will find this interesting enough to read the book. I would be more than happy to discuss any of it, with anybody, at any time. It is available directly from createspace, or through Amazon and Also through the Kindle Store.
Now that this is done, in the sense of being released by me so that completely uninterested parties may read it, if interested, I find that a kind of burden has been lifted, my sense of holding this, has been expiated and I can go on and maybe write, tell and think about some new stories.
The line referring to the saddest story I have ever heard, comes from one of my favorite Novels. “The Good Soldier,” by Ford Maddox Ford. The first line of this novel, which some critics have said is the finest French Novel ever written in English, is “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
https://tsw.createspace.com/title/3466557 or through Amazon or the Kindle Store
The Great Basin
Wheeler Peak
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Saturday, November 27, 2010
THE BUS DON'T STOP HERE ANYMORE, HARDLY EVER
Believe it or not, I actually had someone say that to me once and today's thoughts relate to that. In the summer of 1968, with my childhood friend Steve Hatsis, we started out for Northern California in my sister Cynthia's Sunbeam Alpine in late July. I don't remember exactly what we intended, but as we made our way West on the old Interstate 80 the world seemed young and filled with possibilities. In those days, the Interstate, at least in Nevada, ended just before you got to a town, and then started back up at the other end of town. This meant that you actually had to go through each town. I am sure we had the top down, and the car was pretty windy inside and you really couldn't go that fast. I think we intended to go to at least Reno the first day and I do remember vividly, going through the old tunnel West of Elko. The reason I remember this is that years later I would read, that just above the tunnel, or the tunnel itself, marked the place where two tectonic plates meet. I think we also picked up some food to eat and something to drink in Elko.
At Battle Mountain, with its giant BM on the mountainside, which I remember laughing about as a young kid on a road trip to San Francisco years before, we got gas and I checked the oil. All was fine. Then as I was driving along about 15-20 miles west of Battle Mountain, the engine blew with the tell tell noise that only a bad cylinder produces. I coasted off the highway and into a run down service station. Next door there was a café as well, and a small post office and the most dilapidated Motel I have ever seen, including third world countries. Steve worked in a service station and new a lot more about engines then I did. He thought it was a bad rod. The engine was still running, but not well. Here I am, a just turned 18-year-old kid and it seemed like the world had ended.
I went into the café and asked about a mechanic, etc. and got no real response. I then asked about when the bus stopped on its way back to Salt Lake, etc. That's when the scary waitress said the line about the bus not stopping. I was in a panic about what to do next, and called my parent's back in Salt Lake. After the first call, I then went over to the Post Office which was next door but part of the complex in Valmy Nevada. It was run, as was the service station and the café by a man named Gene. The Cafe was called Genes Golden Grill. About two decades later, on NBC Nightly news they would feature a little segment about Valmy and Gene who owned it all, ran the Post Office and drove the local school bus. A man for all seasons. He quickly told me that he could make a call, but probably the best he could do for us, would be to get us on the first bus back to Salt Lake City, sometime the next morning. Also, for some strange reason I remember that we had to pre-pay to him the bus fare back . I called my parents back and told them what the game plan was and that with luck in the late afternoon of the following day we would be back and we would figure out what to do about the car.
Here it was, just a little after 1:00 PM in the afternoon, Pacific time and we were stuck in this place with nothing to do. We were too young to drink and I am not sure they served alcohol, although they did sell beer in the general store. There was a broken down pickup at the side of the station and Gene told us we could put our sleeping bags in the back of the pickup and sleep there or rent one of the rooms. We choose the pick-up.
We then went back to where the car was parked, got some of our stuff and tried to figure out what to do until morning. Time slowed more than it ever has for anything I have ever done, I was convinced the hours had passed and I would look at my watch and it was fifteen minutes from my last check.
Steve, since he worked in a service station back in Salt Lake City, spoke the language of service stations and this scary sounding guy, who was probably only in his early twenties, but all ready seemed burned out started talking with us. To this day, I remember him telling us that if we ever found ourselves in this certain part of Sacramento, it was Rio Linda, to use his name, which I have forgotten, ever since then, I have never felt very comfortable in Sacramento as a result of the fact that he kept saying about this particular area, “It's easy to get in, but hard to get out”. What ended up happening was that we got the bus the next morning and arrived in Salt Lake fairly late in the afternoon. We took my father's car, which had a trailer hitch down to the service station where Steve worked and borrowed a tow bar that hooked to a car with chains on the front bumper. I wanted to leave that night for the trek back to the car, but Louise would not hear of it. Steve did not even let his parents know what had happened.
The next morning we left at O-dark-thirty as we say on motorcycle trips drove out, got the car and came back in one marathon day. In the meantime, Louise had got us airline tickets on Western Airlines for early afternoon of the next day to LA.
Steve and I ended up spending about a week in Southern California, besides swimming in the ocean, eating all of our meals at Taco Bell, where you could get 5 tacos for a buck, we attended the Newport Pop festival August 3rd and 4th, 1968 and saw Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, and The Animals. I can still remember hearing “Born to be Wild”. This was one of the first festivals to have over 100,000 people show up. The smell of grass permeated the air before, during and after the concert.
Talk about country bumpkins, it was a real eye opener and it is also really the only time in my life I have done any serious hitchhiking which was pretty scary. We hitched down to San Diego and when we were ready to come home, and probably almost broke, we took a bus back up to the Los Angeles airport for the flight home.
The episode in Valmy stuck with me and in my creative writing class at East High School one day I wrote a story called “The Bus Don't Stop Here Anymore, Hardly Ever” that drew a bit on the real events but much more on some perceptions from the experience. Remember in the spring of 1968 the assassination of Martin Luther King and in June Bobby Kennedy. I then typed the story up and gave it to Jack Christensen, who was a great and gifted teacher. I thought he was going to tell me that it was the best thing I had ever written, instead in his handwriting it said “Nice Plot, NOW WRITE THE STORY.”
Fast forward to the fall of 1972, I am finishing up my academic work at Prescott College and am meeting with my faculty adviser. His name was Dr. A. Wilber Stevens and over my years at Prescott I had taken classes from him, had done many independent study projects with him and been to many dinner parties at his house and was even on a first name basis with his wife Marjorie. He was also for a time the Provost of Prescott College. We use to also make jokes about Wilber and pronounced it like the horse in the television show Mister Ed. WILLBUUR!
What we were discussing was the thesis I needed to do to full fill my graduation requirement. I thought about doing a major paper on some completely academic subject such as Taoist and Buddhist thought in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, (paralyzed force, gesture without motion,) or something along that line, but what I really wanted to do was to write a short Novel or Novella as we say in French, not that I speak French, although I wish that I could read French. Wow, that's a lot for very few words. My major was English Literature, almost a standard in my family, and my minor was Chinese History and I had even taken a year and a half of Mandarin. I also read hundreds of Novels of every description and would stay up late at night debating whether based on Aristotle's definition of tragedy, modern tragedy was possible or if Ezra Pound should receive a pardon for his war-time speeches. Since Prescott College was not a big school. (less than 400 Students in those days,) It was sometimes hard to find anyone else who had read the Magic Mountain or Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, and I could only discuss them with Professors and I have really only met a couple of women who enjoyed talking about Hans Castorp and his seven years on the mountain. To get credit for the Magic Mountain, all Dr. Stevens asked me to do was to sum up in as few words as possible what I had gleaned from the Magic Mountain. What I ended up quoting in a short paper was a couple of thoughts from a section or chapter of the book entitled “Snow.” I used these same quotes at the graveside service we had for Bob in December 1974. “ Man is the lord of counter-positions, they can be only through him, and thus he is more aristocratic than they. Man is more aristocratic than death, too aristocratic for death,, that is the freedom of his mind. Man is more aristocratic than life, too aristocratic for life, and this is the piety in his heart. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.”
I ended up writing one section of the proposed thesis that fall, also I took a last class in Asian History and a class called Stable Management, where I learned about bits and bidding and how to age a horse and other useful things. The draft of the segment I gave him, met with his approval, it was somewhat based on a desert outing in my dune buggy during my second year of college, and the only thing he said when I left for the Christmas break, was that he needed my finished manuscript by about April 15th, to give him time to read it before the graduation ceremony in mid May. This meant that since I had finished all the necessary classes, the only added fee due to Prescott was about $150.00 for the reading of the thesis and that I had effectively finished college in 3.5 years. This pleased my father very much.
I ended up writing a short novella that I was not entirely pleased with and the ending seemed forced and it was, because I ran out of time. I found that without the day-to-day accountability that school provided I was fairly lazy, I still am, and I was also very involved with some projects with Bob having to do with cows, and real estate.
When I got down to Prescott a few days before graduation, I discussed my thesis with Dr. Stevens. I was quite surprised when he told me that he had accepted a new Professorship at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and was leaving Prescott at the end of May, and had not had time to really write-up anything for me, and promised that he would, but that he had shown the thesis to several other professors at Prescott and that I was going to get an Honors mark for it. At graduation, with no advanced warning I was also awarded the first, and to my knowledge the only Prescott College Award in Literature, which was really just a copy of ANNALS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 1475-1950 with an inscription documenting the award.
I never did receive any of the promised written feed back about the thesis. I did hear from Dr. Stevens about his new life in Las Vegas and about show girls coming to class straight from performance; presumably with their pasties still attached, to talk about Chaucer, but he never sent me anything. I should have written him and asked and I am not sure why I never did. He ended up retiring from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and for many years he was the drama critic for one of the Vegas Papers and is in the hall of fame of Nevada Poets. I read about all this in his obituary.
I thought that I had lost the manuscript of this several years ago, I had a draft copy and had thought about trying to recreate it, but several months ago I found a copy of my submission from 1973. I have given it a new name and have made some minor changes. The main idea stems from the episode from 1968 in Valmy, Nevada. I wish that I had also given a copy of this to Jack Christensen.
I first read about this new division of Amazon, (Create-space) in the Wall Street Journal several months ago. I have also given some thought to writing the other half of this story, but have decided that since I am not the same person that I was back then, or am I, it would be somewhat contrived. And maybe there really is not any more to say. For any of you who may be interested, this can be ordered through the following link at createspace and Amazon directly and The Kindle Store.
So for what it may be worth. I present for men, women and precocious children of all ages, The Valmy Diaries! The following quote comes from the original short story I wrote in the fall of 1968.
“ THE DREAMING OF A YOUNG MAN, LIKE THE RECOLLECTIONS OF AN OLD ONE, INCOHERENT AND UNRELATED, BUT PART OF A LARGER PATTERN, FORMULATED, LATER ABANDONED, THE MAJESTY OF IT ALL”
www.createspace.com/3479183
At Battle Mountain, with its giant BM on the mountainside, which I remember laughing about as a young kid on a road trip to San Francisco years before, we got gas and I checked the oil. All was fine. Then as I was driving along about 15-20 miles west of Battle Mountain, the engine blew with the tell tell noise that only a bad cylinder produces. I coasted off the highway and into a run down service station. Next door there was a café as well, and a small post office and the most dilapidated Motel I have ever seen, including third world countries. Steve worked in a service station and new a lot more about engines then I did. He thought it was a bad rod. The engine was still running, but not well. Here I am, a just turned 18-year-old kid and it seemed like the world had ended.
I went into the café and asked about a mechanic, etc. and got no real response. I then asked about when the bus stopped on its way back to Salt Lake, etc. That's when the scary waitress said the line about the bus not stopping. I was in a panic about what to do next, and called my parent's back in Salt Lake. After the first call, I then went over to the Post Office which was next door but part of the complex in Valmy Nevada. It was run, as was the service station and the café by a man named Gene. The Cafe was called Genes Golden Grill. About two decades later, on NBC Nightly news they would feature a little segment about Valmy and Gene who owned it all, ran the Post Office and drove the local school bus. A man for all seasons. He quickly told me that he could make a call, but probably the best he could do for us, would be to get us on the first bus back to Salt Lake City, sometime the next morning. Also, for some strange reason I remember that we had to pre-pay to him the bus fare back . I called my parents back and told them what the game plan was and that with luck in the late afternoon of the following day we would be back and we would figure out what to do about the car.
Here it was, just a little after 1:00 PM in the afternoon, Pacific time and we were stuck in this place with nothing to do. We were too young to drink and I am not sure they served alcohol, although they did sell beer in the general store. There was a broken down pickup at the side of the station and Gene told us we could put our sleeping bags in the back of the pickup and sleep there or rent one of the rooms. We choose the pick-up.
We then went back to where the car was parked, got some of our stuff and tried to figure out what to do until morning. Time slowed more than it ever has for anything I have ever done, I was convinced the hours had passed and I would look at my watch and it was fifteen minutes from my last check.
Steve, since he worked in a service station back in Salt Lake City, spoke the language of service stations and this scary sounding guy, who was probably only in his early twenties, but all ready seemed burned out started talking with us. To this day, I remember him telling us that if we ever found ourselves in this certain part of Sacramento, it was Rio Linda, to use his name, which I have forgotten, ever since then, I have never felt very comfortable in Sacramento as a result of the fact that he kept saying about this particular area, “It's easy to get in, but hard to get out”. What ended up happening was that we got the bus the next morning and arrived in Salt Lake fairly late in the afternoon. We took my father's car, which had a trailer hitch down to the service station where Steve worked and borrowed a tow bar that hooked to a car with chains on the front bumper. I wanted to leave that night for the trek back to the car, but Louise would not hear of it. Steve did not even let his parents know what had happened.
The next morning we left at O-dark-thirty as we say on motorcycle trips drove out, got the car and came back in one marathon day. In the meantime, Louise had got us airline tickets on Western Airlines for early afternoon of the next day to LA.
Steve and I ended up spending about a week in Southern California, besides swimming in the ocean, eating all of our meals at Taco Bell, where you could get 5 tacos for a buck, we attended the Newport Pop festival August 3rd and 4th, 1968 and saw Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, and The Animals. I can still remember hearing “Born to be Wild”. This was one of the first festivals to have over 100,000 people show up. The smell of grass permeated the air before, during and after the concert.
Talk about country bumpkins, it was a real eye opener and it is also really the only time in my life I have done any serious hitchhiking which was pretty scary. We hitched down to San Diego and when we were ready to come home, and probably almost broke, we took a bus back up to the Los Angeles airport for the flight home.
The episode in Valmy stuck with me and in my creative writing class at East High School one day I wrote a story called “The Bus Don't Stop Here Anymore, Hardly Ever” that drew a bit on the real events but much more on some perceptions from the experience. Remember in the spring of 1968 the assassination of Martin Luther King and in June Bobby Kennedy. I then typed the story up and gave it to Jack Christensen, who was a great and gifted teacher. I thought he was going to tell me that it was the best thing I had ever written, instead in his handwriting it said “Nice Plot, NOW WRITE THE STORY.”
Fast forward to the fall of 1972, I am finishing up my academic work at Prescott College and am meeting with my faculty adviser. His name was Dr. A. Wilber Stevens and over my years at Prescott I had taken classes from him, had done many independent study projects with him and been to many dinner parties at his house and was even on a first name basis with his wife Marjorie. He was also for a time the Provost of Prescott College. We use to also make jokes about Wilber and pronounced it like the horse in the television show Mister Ed. WILLBUUR!
What we were discussing was the thesis I needed to do to full fill my graduation requirement. I thought about doing a major paper on some completely academic subject such as Taoist and Buddhist thought in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, (paralyzed force, gesture without motion,) or something along that line, but what I really wanted to do was to write a short Novel or Novella as we say in French, not that I speak French, although I wish that I could read French. Wow, that's a lot for very few words. My major was English Literature, almost a standard in my family, and my minor was Chinese History and I had even taken a year and a half of Mandarin. I also read hundreds of Novels of every description and would stay up late at night debating whether based on Aristotle's definition of tragedy, modern tragedy was possible or if Ezra Pound should receive a pardon for his war-time speeches. Since Prescott College was not a big school. (less than 400 Students in those days,) It was sometimes hard to find anyone else who had read the Magic Mountain or Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, and I could only discuss them with Professors and I have really only met a couple of women who enjoyed talking about Hans Castorp and his seven years on the mountain. To get credit for the Magic Mountain, all Dr. Stevens asked me to do was to sum up in as few words as possible what I had gleaned from the Magic Mountain. What I ended up quoting in a short paper was a couple of thoughts from a section or chapter of the book entitled “Snow.” I used these same quotes at the graveside service we had for Bob in December 1974. “ Man is the lord of counter-positions, they can be only through him, and thus he is more aristocratic than they. Man is more aristocratic than death, too aristocratic for death,, that is the freedom of his mind. Man is more aristocratic than life, too aristocratic for life, and this is the piety in his heart. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.”
I ended up writing one section of the proposed thesis that fall, also I took a last class in Asian History and a class called Stable Management, where I learned about bits and bidding and how to age a horse and other useful things. The draft of the segment I gave him, met with his approval, it was somewhat based on a desert outing in my dune buggy during my second year of college, and the only thing he said when I left for the Christmas break, was that he needed my finished manuscript by about April 15th, to give him time to read it before the graduation ceremony in mid May. This meant that since I had finished all the necessary classes, the only added fee due to Prescott was about $150.00 for the reading of the thesis and that I had effectively finished college in 3.5 years. This pleased my father very much.
I ended up writing a short novella that I was not entirely pleased with and the ending seemed forced and it was, because I ran out of time. I found that without the day-to-day accountability that school provided I was fairly lazy, I still am, and I was also very involved with some projects with Bob having to do with cows, and real estate.
When I got down to Prescott a few days before graduation, I discussed my thesis with Dr. Stevens. I was quite surprised when he told me that he had accepted a new Professorship at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and was leaving Prescott at the end of May, and had not had time to really write-up anything for me, and promised that he would, but that he had shown the thesis to several other professors at Prescott and that I was going to get an Honors mark for it. At graduation, with no advanced warning I was also awarded the first, and to my knowledge the only Prescott College Award in Literature, which was really just a copy of ANNALS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 1475-1950 with an inscription documenting the award.
I never did receive any of the promised written feed back about the thesis. I did hear from Dr. Stevens about his new life in Las Vegas and about show girls coming to class straight from performance; presumably with their pasties still attached, to talk about Chaucer, but he never sent me anything. I should have written him and asked and I am not sure why I never did. He ended up retiring from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and for many years he was the drama critic for one of the Vegas Papers and is in the hall of fame of Nevada Poets. I read about all this in his obituary.
I thought that I had lost the manuscript of this several years ago, I had a draft copy and had thought about trying to recreate it, but several months ago I found a copy of my submission from 1973. I have given it a new name and have made some minor changes. The main idea stems from the episode from 1968 in Valmy, Nevada. I wish that I had also given a copy of this to Jack Christensen.
I first read about this new division of Amazon, (Create-space) in the Wall Street Journal several months ago. I have also given some thought to writing the other half of this story, but have decided that since I am not the same person that I was back then, or am I, it would be somewhat contrived. And maybe there really is not any more to say. For any of you who may be interested, this can be ordered through the following link at createspace and Amazon directly and The Kindle Store.
So for what it may be worth. I present for men, women and precocious children of all ages, The Valmy Diaries! The following quote comes from the original short story I wrote in the fall of 1968.
“ THE DREAMING OF A YOUNG MAN, LIKE THE RECOLLECTIONS OF AN OLD ONE, INCOHERENT AND UNRELATED, BUT PART OF A LARGER PATTERN, FORMULATED, LATER ABANDONED, THE MAJESTY OF IT ALL”
www.createspace.com/3479183
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST ARE BOTH PERHAPS PRESENT IN TIME FUTURE.
To bring all of you up to date. Since my bike problems and the trek back to the Great Basin in a U haul truck, I turned around the next week in my car and drove back to Fresno, via the same route I had intended on my bike to Fresno; via Yosemite and spent about 10 days in Fresno with my sister Kathy. I was reminded of the first time I drove this same route in a car which was 1970, after my first year of college, when I still had a full head of hair and could 'wipe a comb across my head,' when I drove Kathy and my then young (4year old) niece and someone Kathy knew back to Fresno. We took my mother's Blue Lincoln Continental which had a 462 cubic inch engine that put out 400 plus horses, in a car that weighed about 2.5 tons. It had an in-dash eight track tape player and Kathy vividly recalls listening to Tommy by the Who several times. In addition I know that I had some Buffalo Springfield, Leonard Cohen, the Who's Live at Leeds and probably Blind faith and of course my favorite Neil Young. This is the same music I still listen to, and although on this trip I didn't have Tommy, I did have Who's Next, Live at Leeds, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen , Neil Young and most of Bob Dylan's early records on CD's. It brought back memories of that trip. Suffice it to say, on the straight stretches of road, in the blue Lincoln, I probably easily drove over 100 MPH. Today, I know, that getting arrested at anything over 100 mph is go to jail, do not pass go, speed, but that was an easier age. Years ago, someone I know was arrested in Nevada at way over 100 mph and the Sheriff as he lead him off to Jail and the Justice of the peace said to him, “Son you are going to make a sizable contribution to the welfare of the people of Winnemucca.” I stayed in Fresno, that trip for about a week helping Kathy and her first husband, Andy, install a watering system for their home in the country near Fresno. For some reason I don't recall, I drove home via Reno and I-80.
Last summer (2009) when the government to try and help save the auto industry in this country, and to stimulate the economy instigated the Cash for Clunker's program, I decided, actually on the last day of the program existing, that I was spending to much money on upkeep on my then ancient 535I BMW. I tend to drive cars till they are completely broken and motorcycles until they wear out or at least one time, when I total them in a crash. I knew what kind of car I wanted to get. In the late 1970's I had a Mercedes 300CD diesel which was the most maintenance free car I have ever owned. I didn't want to shell out what a new Mercedes diesel costs, but I had read a fair amount about the Volkswagen TDI and one of the local dealer's was still accepting cars under Cash for Clunkers and had a new 2010 TDI they had just received over that weekend. I wanted a 6 speed manual transmission and the one they had was a Salsa Red, and so armed with the maximum government stipend under that program, I picked up a cute little Turbo Diesel TDI. Its a pocket rocket, front wheel drive and I have averaged city/highway driving almost 42 miles per gallon. Thank you, all of the Tax payers in this country and the foreigners that buy Treasury Bills!
So on my drive toward Fresno, I wanted to see what kind of mileage I could get with just a long highway trip. I have tracked my mileage on this car since I first got it, online on a website called www. fuelly.com and I also joined the TDI club online for driving tips, etc. There are people on this website that actually brew their own fuel from wood chips, etc and who routinely pick up old frying oil from cholesterol gulch type cafes. I also picked up this neat little gadget called a scan gauge the works on any car made after 1998 and plugs into the OBD port, that by Federal law, is located under the dash. From the TDI club I received some codes, the scan gauge is programmable, for turbo boost, actual water temp, vs the fake gauge on the car and I even programmed some obscure gauges for air/fuel mixture, and engine load. On about six gauges can be viewed at one time, but you can scroll through them. On Fuelly.com you have to name your car, I have never before named either my car on any of my bikes, but for this website I came up with a name for both. The car is Benny Profane, and my current bike is Pig Bodine. I would be very surprised if any of my reader's recognize either of those names, but they are both, characters from the book V by Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon, to say the very least, is a very acquired taste and I have read all of his book's several times. V is still my favorite Pynchon book. Someday, I will devote a whole essay to Pynchon, but suffice it to say that very little is known about Pynchon, compared to him, the late J.D. Salinger was a social gadfly. The only picture of him ever released is his graduate picture from either his high school or Cornell in the mid 1950's. He is in his late 70's roughly the same age as Philip Roth.
Suffice it to say, that although I had planned on driving virtually the whole way to Fresno on one tank of diesel, I ended up topping up in Tonopah, it took a little over 9 gallons, because I needed a break from driving. On the stretch of road from SLC to Tonopah, NV I averaged almost 44 miles per gallon, at slightly more than the posted highway speed. Just as I hit the Nevada-California border near Benton Station, I saw three of Tom Gorey's wild horses and as I looked up at Boundary Peak, the highest peak in Nevada at 13,143, which is about 385 feet less than Utah's own Kings Peak, I felt slightly cheated. With all the beautiful names for different ranges in Nevada, why couldn't they come up with a name other than Boundary Peak for this, their highest peak.
The traffic in Yosemite was not that bad and I ended up driving from Salt Lake City to my sister Kathy's house in Fresno, 715 miles portal to portal, in 11.5 hours of driving time. I turn off my GPS when I stop for fuel, etc and I also turned it off when I got a speeding ticket near Coarsegold about 45 or so miles from Fresno. I had crested a hill and was in 6th gear on the down slope, when you don't have your foot on the pedal, the car doesn't use any fuel, the car started to creep up in speed and by the time my valentine went off, it was too late. I was doing about 10 over the speed limit and as of yet, I haven't got the ticket to see how much it will cost me. All of you have heard the famous comedy routine of who's on first. I have thought several times about trying a variation of this routine involving the Rock Group the Who. In it, the policeman would ask me why I was speeding and I would say Who, he would then say, no why were you speeding and I would say “Magic Bus!” . It would finally come out that I was driving too fast because I was listening to the Who and on the ticket it would be written that I was driving under the influence of the Who. Then when I went to court, the Judge, who would be about my same age, would nod his head, say he completely understood and would dismiss the ticket. Of course, while this was slightly funny to me, in reality, I would of course not try it and I didn't even remember it until after he had completed the ticket and I had left the scene. It' is my first speeding ticket since they set up a road block for me between Silverton and Ouray in Colorado in 1992. But that's a story for another time.
I have visited Kathy over the years on every BMW Motorcycle I have owned. After she moved in to the house she still lives in I visited in 1979 on my first BMW bike an R90-S. I had just finished taking a ten day off shore sailing course around the channel Islands near Santa Barbara and spent a day or two with Kathy and her second Husband Bill and at the time their young daughter Alison and her sister Erika. Just before I got to Fresno, as I was riding along highway 99, a small portion of a recap tire on a truck in front of me came flying back, I swerved and almost missed it completely, but it ended up hitting me on my right shoulder. It hurt and when I took off my shirt later that night, I was black and blue. If the recap had hit me full on in the center of my chest, I am sure I would have gone down on highway 99.
Kathy is a noted Criminal and Labor Law attorney in Fresno, and she also does a fair amount of Appeal work as well. She has served as President of the Fresno Bar and has been editor several times of the local bar newsletter. Several times a year a various bar functions she will be featured as part of the evening playing improvisational jazz piano. She has my Mothers Steinway in her house and I always try and sit near the piano for a few minutes, it always brings back lots of memories. When I was about two and a half, Kathy carried me piggy back almost to the top of Black Mountain. We have always gotten a long well and I enjoy her company a lot. She also writes very funny articles for this newsletter on her travels all over the world. She has been to China, I was going out of habit to say Red China, about three times in the last year and a half. She also is an avid hiker and has gone on Sierra club outings all over the world.
Several times over the last two decades, when she has had very complex cases, and I haven't been as busy as I like to be doing other things, I have gone down to Fresno to assist her in the discovery phase of some of these cases. Have Intellect will Travel. It has always been very easy for me to read things with a good deal of comprehension, and retention, and to figure out how different parts of the puzzle of documents fit together. At age five I took apart my first electric train, just to see how it worked! The first case I worked on in late 1992 was a Federal Criminal Fraud and Conspiracy case involving a defunct Savings and Loan. This was after the Savings and loan Crisis of the late 1980's and was a result of the ill fated Garn St. Germain act and the deregulation of the Savings and Loan Industry. It always takes several years for criminal cases to come to fruition and there is usually years of discovery, etc. There was actually a Savings and Loan in California that invested all of their deposits in franchise locations of Wendy's restaurants! In the case that Kathy had, there were thousands of pages of documents, and I read through the bulk of them and sort of laid out a time line of who said and did what to whom, at any given point in time. I also let her know what documents I thought the Prosecution would probably use when it came to trial. I actually found the work to be very intellectually challenging. (Part of me would have loved to have been a historian and to have perused firsthand through historical documents.) I was also familiar with such terms as core deposit intangible and my favorite term of all disintermedation , which is the flow of money from low to higher interest rates. I have joked with her that if you can understand all of the different characters in the Iliad or the Odyssey and have read Bleak House, or War and Peace, or have completely read Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, then understanding how A relates to B, is not that daunting. Back in 2000, I actually went down for the trial part of a case and got to watch Kathy in Federal court. This case involved phony lease deals which defrauded both some lending institutions and some investors. Not only was I very impressed watching her, it made me realize how much court, in the best sense of the word, is high drama, and like a great actor or actress, you don't see the hours and hours of preparation, only, so to speak, the performance that takes place in front of the other players in the court room. Kathy spends a great deal of time in both Federal and State Courts. She also, so to speak, rides the circuit of courts in the small towns dotted along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley.
So from time to time, I have gone down for this or that case. Most of the cases I have read for her over the years have been Federal Criminal cases involving fraud of one kind or another. Last summer (2009) I went down on another Fraud case having to do with a couple who were using fake trusts, which they had formed based on the advice of a third party entity that went all over the United States selling this tax avoidance scheme at seminars for Doctor's and other high income professionals. These trusts were formed at great expense, to get out of paying income taxes, etc. In addition to the trusts, the couple and the entity they purchased them through, came at if from a particular political view as well and it was interesting reading all this wacko stuff about “Straw Men” and how our currency is somehow illegal, and meaningless, because of this or that, that didn't happen when the United States went off the Gold Standard during the early 1930's. There were even echoes of William Jennings Bryan and his famous “Cross of Gold Speech.” Also they tried to pay the amount of taxes assessed by the IRS, after ignoring deficiency notices for years, with phony credit vehicles. There was also an undercurrent of antisemitism, complete with strange theories about the founding and ownership of the Federal Reserve and even a reference or two to that strange and completely discredited document the Protocols of Zion.
I won't go into any details on this current case, its a Capital Case and this will be an additional appeal on what is referred to as Habeas Issues, but suffice it to say that the transcript of the trial itself, is about 7,500 pages and there are literally 10 boxes of documents. Based on the work I did, we know what we don't know, or what information that had previously been available or called for, that has not made it to Kathy for this additional appeal to the Supreme Court of California. So for about 8.5 to 9 hours per day, I would peruse these records and work on indexes that tell you where this or that is located, both in the boxes and the digital record of documents.
In discovery, all documents are stamped either literally or in the case of PDP document's by electronic stamp with a number referred to as its bates number. I told Kathy years ago that I thought that Bates sounded like a good name for some obscure Civil War general that General Grant despised and in the case I looked at in Fresno this year, I learned about what is called a Batson Wheeler Motion. After reading about this motion, I decided that Batson Wheeler sound like a British historian of obscure WWI battles in France. Instead, just like our Miranda Warning, the naming of these motions, come from the names of real people who were involved in real litigation with sometimes their life at stake. We all make and laugh at Lawyer jokes, but on the Trial and Appellant level the law is about as serious as life gets, and it also on that level at least to me, it; the law is, as intellectually challenging and profound as anything having to do with ideas, and high reason can be.
On Monday the 18th of October, we drove up to San Francisco for a seminar on current trends in Capital Cases. It started at 9:00 am, so it meant that we had to leave Fresno for the drive up about 4:00 am and suffice it to say that we hit Bay area traffic at the worst possible time going up and coming back. Kathy was very funny describing the different pockets of traffic and we did indeed hit the belly of the beast, The only things close to colliding in Livermore was traffic, but we made it with about forty-five minutes to spare. On the return trip at one point it took one hour to go six miles because of a massive accident. On the way home, in additional to listening to a bay area Jazz station, we recited different poems of T.S. Eliot, who was idolized by my Mother when we were growing up and I can remember reciting the Hollow Men at Ensign School in about the 3rd or 4th grade and I knew the line about “ Mistah Kurtz-- he dead,” from Eliot, many years before I actually read Heart of Darkness. There are also parts of Little Gidding that were recited by all of the siblings at the graveside service when my mother Louise died in 1982.
On the return trip, after again fueling up in Tonopah, I turned off of highway 6 onto highway 376 for the 108 mile jog up to Highway 50. I had been on this remote road once before many years ago on a bike and I wanted a change from highway 6 back to Ely. This to me is a strange place for a golf course, and the only town is something called Carver's Round Mountain. At the junction with Highway 50 there was a sign about the cave drawings in Toiyabe cave and I would like to visit the cave sometime. Going home this way added about 70 or so more miles on the return trip, compared to the trip down, and when I filled the car up the next day after returning home I had averaged over 46 miles per gallon on the whole trip. That is actually pretty close to what I probably would have averaged on my motorcycle.. The pass through Yosemite, over Tioga closed a day or two after I drove through it for the season and hopefully will be open by Memorial day next year and my planned motorcycle trip to the 49er rally in Mariposa.
*The opening line from Burnt Norton, the first section from the Four Quartet's of T.S. Eliot
Last summer (2009) when the government to try and help save the auto industry in this country, and to stimulate the economy instigated the Cash for Clunker's program, I decided, actually on the last day of the program existing, that I was spending to much money on upkeep on my then ancient 535I BMW. I tend to drive cars till they are completely broken and motorcycles until they wear out or at least one time, when I total them in a crash. I knew what kind of car I wanted to get. In the late 1970's I had a Mercedes 300CD diesel which was the most maintenance free car I have ever owned. I didn't want to shell out what a new Mercedes diesel costs, but I had read a fair amount about the Volkswagen TDI and one of the local dealer's was still accepting cars under Cash for Clunkers and had a new 2010 TDI they had just received over that weekend. I wanted a 6 speed manual transmission and the one they had was a Salsa Red, and so armed with the maximum government stipend under that program, I picked up a cute little Turbo Diesel TDI. Its a pocket rocket, front wheel drive and I have averaged city/highway driving almost 42 miles per gallon. Thank you, all of the Tax payers in this country and the foreigners that buy Treasury Bills!
So on my drive toward Fresno, I wanted to see what kind of mileage I could get with just a long highway trip. I have tracked my mileage on this car since I first got it, online on a website called www. fuelly.com and I also joined the TDI club online for driving tips, etc. There are people on this website that actually brew their own fuel from wood chips, etc and who routinely pick up old frying oil from cholesterol gulch type cafes. I also picked up this neat little gadget called a scan gauge the works on any car made after 1998 and plugs into the OBD port, that by Federal law, is located under the dash. From the TDI club I received some codes, the scan gauge is programmable, for turbo boost, actual water temp, vs the fake gauge on the car and I even programmed some obscure gauges for air/fuel mixture, and engine load. On about six gauges can be viewed at one time, but you can scroll through them. On Fuelly.com you have to name your car, I have never before named either my car on any of my bikes, but for this website I came up with a name for both. The car is Benny Profane, and my current bike is Pig Bodine. I would be very surprised if any of my reader's recognize either of those names, but they are both, characters from the book V by Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon, to say the very least, is a very acquired taste and I have read all of his book's several times. V is still my favorite Pynchon book. Someday, I will devote a whole essay to Pynchon, but suffice it to say that very little is known about Pynchon, compared to him, the late J.D. Salinger was a social gadfly. The only picture of him ever released is his graduate picture from either his high school or Cornell in the mid 1950's. He is in his late 70's roughly the same age as Philip Roth.
Suffice it to say, that although I had planned on driving virtually the whole way to Fresno on one tank of diesel, I ended up topping up in Tonopah, it took a little over 9 gallons, because I needed a break from driving. On the stretch of road from SLC to Tonopah, NV I averaged almost 44 miles per gallon, at slightly more than the posted highway speed. Just as I hit the Nevada-California border near Benton Station, I saw three of Tom Gorey's wild horses and as I looked up at Boundary Peak, the highest peak in Nevada at 13,143, which is about 385 feet less than Utah's own Kings Peak, I felt slightly cheated. With all the beautiful names for different ranges in Nevada, why couldn't they come up with a name other than Boundary Peak for this, their highest peak.
The traffic in Yosemite was not that bad and I ended up driving from Salt Lake City to my sister Kathy's house in Fresno, 715 miles portal to portal, in 11.5 hours of driving time. I turn off my GPS when I stop for fuel, etc and I also turned it off when I got a speeding ticket near Coarsegold about 45 or so miles from Fresno. I had crested a hill and was in 6th gear on the down slope, when you don't have your foot on the pedal, the car doesn't use any fuel, the car started to creep up in speed and by the time my valentine went off, it was too late. I was doing about 10 over the speed limit and as of yet, I haven't got the ticket to see how much it will cost me. All of you have heard the famous comedy routine of who's on first. I have thought several times about trying a variation of this routine involving the Rock Group the Who. In it, the policeman would ask me why I was speeding and I would say Who, he would then say, no why were you speeding and I would say “Magic Bus!” . It would finally come out that I was driving too fast because I was listening to the Who and on the ticket it would be written that I was driving under the influence of the Who. Then when I went to court, the Judge, who would be about my same age, would nod his head, say he completely understood and would dismiss the ticket. Of course, while this was slightly funny to me, in reality, I would of course not try it and I didn't even remember it until after he had completed the ticket and I had left the scene. It' is my first speeding ticket since they set up a road block for me between Silverton and Ouray in Colorado in 1992. But that's a story for another time.
I have visited Kathy over the years on every BMW Motorcycle I have owned. After she moved in to the house she still lives in I visited in 1979 on my first BMW bike an R90-S. I had just finished taking a ten day off shore sailing course around the channel Islands near Santa Barbara and spent a day or two with Kathy and her second Husband Bill and at the time their young daughter Alison and her sister Erika. Just before I got to Fresno, as I was riding along highway 99, a small portion of a recap tire on a truck in front of me came flying back, I swerved and almost missed it completely, but it ended up hitting me on my right shoulder. It hurt and when I took off my shirt later that night, I was black and blue. If the recap had hit me full on in the center of my chest, I am sure I would have gone down on highway 99.
Kathy is a noted Criminal and Labor Law attorney in Fresno, and she also does a fair amount of Appeal work as well. She has served as President of the Fresno Bar and has been editor several times of the local bar newsletter. Several times a year a various bar functions she will be featured as part of the evening playing improvisational jazz piano. She has my Mothers Steinway in her house and I always try and sit near the piano for a few minutes, it always brings back lots of memories. When I was about two and a half, Kathy carried me piggy back almost to the top of Black Mountain. We have always gotten a long well and I enjoy her company a lot. She also writes very funny articles for this newsletter on her travels all over the world. She has been to China, I was going out of habit to say Red China, about three times in the last year and a half. She also is an avid hiker and has gone on Sierra club outings all over the world.
Several times over the last two decades, when she has had very complex cases, and I haven't been as busy as I like to be doing other things, I have gone down to Fresno to assist her in the discovery phase of some of these cases. Have Intellect will Travel. It has always been very easy for me to read things with a good deal of comprehension, and retention, and to figure out how different parts of the puzzle of documents fit together. At age five I took apart my first electric train, just to see how it worked! The first case I worked on in late 1992 was a Federal Criminal Fraud and Conspiracy case involving a defunct Savings and Loan. This was after the Savings and loan Crisis of the late 1980's and was a result of the ill fated Garn St. Germain act and the deregulation of the Savings and Loan Industry. It always takes several years for criminal cases to come to fruition and there is usually years of discovery, etc. There was actually a Savings and Loan in California that invested all of their deposits in franchise locations of Wendy's restaurants! In the case that Kathy had, there were thousands of pages of documents, and I read through the bulk of them and sort of laid out a time line of who said and did what to whom, at any given point in time. I also let her know what documents I thought the Prosecution would probably use when it came to trial. I actually found the work to be very intellectually challenging. (Part of me would have loved to have been a historian and to have perused firsthand through historical documents.) I was also familiar with such terms as core deposit intangible and my favorite term of all disintermedation , which is the flow of money from low to higher interest rates. I have joked with her that if you can understand all of the different characters in the Iliad or the Odyssey and have read Bleak House, or War and Peace, or have completely read Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, then understanding how A relates to B, is not that daunting. Back in 2000, I actually went down for the trial part of a case and got to watch Kathy in Federal court. This case involved phony lease deals which defrauded both some lending institutions and some investors. Not only was I very impressed watching her, it made me realize how much court, in the best sense of the word, is high drama, and like a great actor or actress, you don't see the hours and hours of preparation, only, so to speak, the performance that takes place in front of the other players in the court room. Kathy spends a great deal of time in both Federal and State Courts. She also, so to speak, rides the circuit of courts in the small towns dotted along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley.
So from time to time, I have gone down for this or that case. Most of the cases I have read for her over the years have been Federal Criminal cases involving fraud of one kind or another. Last summer (2009) I went down on another Fraud case having to do with a couple who were using fake trusts, which they had formed based on the advice of a third party entity that went all over the United States selling this tax avoidance scheme at seminars for Doctor's and other high income professionals. These trusts were formed at great expense, to get out of paying income taxes, etc. In addition to the trusts, the couple and the entity they purchased them through, came at if from a particular political view as well and it was interesting reading all this wacko stuff about “Straw Men” and how our currency is somehow illegal, and meaningless, because of this or that, that didn't happen when the United States went off the Gold Standard during the early 1930's. There were even echoes of William Jennings Bryan and his famous “Cross of Gold Speech.” Also they tried to pay the amount of taxes assessed by the IRS, after ignoring deficiency notices for years, with phony credit vehicles. There was also an undercurrent of antisemitism, complete with strange theories about the founding and ownership of the Federal Reserve and even a reference or two to that strange and completely discredited document the Protocols of Zion.
I won't go into any details on this current case, its a Capital Case and this will be an additional appeal on what is referred to as Habeas Issues, but suffice it to say that the transcript of the trial itself, is about 7,500 pages and there are literally 10 boxes of documents. Based on the work I did, we know what we don't know, or what information that had previously been available or called for, that has not made it to Kathy for this additional appeal to the Supreme Court of California. So for about 8.5 to 9 hours per day, I would peruse these records and work on indexes that tell you where this or that is located, both in the boxes and the digital record of documents.
In discovery, all documents are stamped either literally or in the case of PDP document's by electronic stamp with a number referred to as its bates number. I told Kathy years ago that I thought that Bates sounded like a good name for some obscure Civil War general that General Grant despised and in the case I looked at in Fresno this year, I learned about what is called a Batson Wheeler Motion. After reading about this motion, I decided that Batson Wheeler sound like a British historian of obscure WWI battles in France. Instead, just like our Miranda Warning, the naming of these motions, come from the names of real people who were involved in real litigation with sometimes their life at stake. We all make and laugh at Lawyer jokes, but on the Trial and Appellant level the law is about as serious as life gets, and it also on that level at least to me, it; the law is, as intellectually challenging and profound as anything having to do with ideas, and high reason can be.
On Monday the 18th of October, we drove up to San Francisco for a seminar on current trends in Capital Cases. It started at 9:00 am, so it meant that we had to leave Fresno for the drive up about 4:00 am and suffice it to say that we hit Bay area traffic at the worst possible time going up and coming back. Kathy was very funny describing the different pockets of traffic and we did indeed hit the belly of the beast, The only things close to colliding in Livermore was traffic, but we made it with about forty-five minutes to spare. On the return trip at one point it took one hour to go six miles because of a massive accident. On the way home, in additional to listening to a bay area Jazz station, we recited different poems of T.S. Eliot, who was idolized by my Mother when we were growing up and I can remember reciting the Hollow Men at Ensign School in about the 3rd or 4th grade and I knew the line about “ Mistah Kurtz-- he dead,” from Eliot, many years before I actually read Heart of Darkness. There are also parts of Little Gidding that were recited by all of the siblings at the graveside service when my mother Louise died in 1982.
On the return trip, after again fueling up in Tonopah, I turned off of highway 6 onto highway 376 for the 108 mile jog up to Highway 50. I had been on this remote road once before many years ago on a bike and I wanted a change from highway 6 back to Ely. This to me is a strange place for a golf course, and the only town is something called Carver's Round Mountain. At the junction with Highway 50 there was a sign about the cave drawings in Toiyabe cave and I would like to visit the cave sometime. Going home this way added about 70 or so more miles on the return trip, compared to the trip down, and when I filled the car up the next day after returning home I had averaged over 46 miles per gallon on the whole trip. That is actually pretty close to what I probably would have averaged on my motorcycle.. The pass through Yosemite, over Tioga closed a day or two after I drove through it for the season and hopefully will be open by Memorial day next year and my planned motorcycle trip to the 49er rally in Mariposa.
*The opening line from Burnt Norton, the first section from the Four Quartet's of T.S. Eliot
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
"AND ALL THE MICE ARE IN CHAINS"
This week's blog was supposed to fill in the blanks on the conceptual ride I wrote about several months ago. The ride through the Great Basin to Tonopah and Lee Vining and then after Yosemite to see my sister Kathy in Fresno. I attempted, and that is the operative word, this ride this past Sunday and needless to say, the events of the day were not what I expected when I left the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. This week I was also going to discuss Eugene O'Neill, the American Playwright I know best, I have almost all of his plays in written form and two of them on DVD's and another one somewhere, on an old VHS tape.
But so much for the best of plans and intentions and as the day broke down, in every sense of the word, including terrific rain and lightning and at the end of the day hail, I remembered a line from one of Henry Jame's early novels, the American, where the doomed but beautiful woman; actually a fairly common literary convention, especially to Jame's, says to Christopher Newsome, the rich and lonely protagonist of the Tale, “And All The Mice Are In Chains.”
Apparently, when I last replaced Spark plugs in my bike, I either cross threaded one of them, or it was not tightened enough. As I was wending my way on my beloved Highway 6, about sixty miles from Tonopah, the spark plug unwound itself and shot out the side of the right hand cylinder. This bike has a compression ratio of 12.5 to 1 and even with Ear Plugs and music going, the noise was severe. The Engine died and I pulled in the clutch and looked for a place to get off the road. As I got off the bike about 15 feet away was what I first thought to be a dog, but it turned out it was a coyote and it was very surprised by me being there and took off rather rudely. On my old R1100RS I always carried a couple of spark plugs with me, but on this bike I hadn't really even thought of doing that. From now on, I am always going to have at least one spare spark plug with me. I restarted the engine and began to ride with one fully functioning cylinder and the other one with little compression but with one spark still working. Each of the two cylinders on this bike, have two spark plugs. The bike had very little torque at low RP M's and I really couldn't ride in any gear above about 4th. But, I was at least heading toward Tonopah. This BMW has a count down display for gas, rather than a gauge. From now on I will always believe what it says, for indeed I did run out of gas when it told me I would. By this time the slight drizzle of rain was replaced by thunder, lightning and just before I ran out of gas the second time, hail.
Normally my bike gets somewhere in the upper forties to sometimes well over 50 miles per gallon. But in the configuration I was riding in I wasn't even getting half that. I ran out of gas. The first person who stopped was on a BMW Bike and was heading home to Ely. He didn't have any spare gas and neither one of us could raise a signal on our cell phones. After he left two young guys with a trailer full of ATV'S stopped and they had plenty of extra gas, They gave me about two gallons of gas and offered me more and also would not take any money for the gas, they said it was their good deed for the day. I should have taken them up on the additional gas, for I ran out about 3 miles from Tonopah, as the computer told me I would and this time 3 guys on KTM's stopped and from their off road riding they had extra gas, This got me into Tonopah.
I have stayed in Tonopah on several times, and once when I was with someone, stayed in the Clown Motel. I hate Clown's big time and I dreaded the first time I took Caitlin to the circus. It turns out that she thought clown were weird and one of the first things I asked her about Dan, her future husband, after she became involved with him, was what he thought about Clown's. I also stayed years ago in the Old Mitzpah Hotel, which is now closed and for sale. It was 1975 and I was on my way from Las Vegas, where my then girlfriend was from and we were in her Opel GT, it did not have enough head room for me, and in addition she had her pet raccoon in a cage and it never liked me at all. We were on our way to the UC Davis campus to look at the Vet tech program for her. But I digress and should get back to my most recent stay in the great town of Tonopah.
I stayed at a Motel my good friend's stayed at in May on their way to the 49er rally in Mariposa. They mentioned their was a Mexican restaurant across the street and I hadn't eaten since Oat meal early Sunday morning. So I had dinner there as well. I was hopeful that once I got a new spark plug I would be back on the road. I had decided that even though I was closer to Fresno than SLC, I would return to SLC on the bike and then leave again for Fresno, in my diesel TDI. I couldn't go to NAPA until after 8:00 AM PDT the next morning. I tried to get a good night's sleep.
Suffice it to say, the threads of the cylinder head are shot and I ended up having to rent a U haul Truck. In all the year's I have been riding this is the first time I have been stranded out of State with a bike and only the second time, not counting my accident, that I haven't returned home on my bike.
I am going to take some time to figure out the best way to fix the thread problems on the bike. I suspect I am done riding for this season. I will leave my discourse on O'Neill for another time. But just for a moment think about what it would have been like to know that it was because of your birth that your mother became a morphine addict, that if another child hadn't died, you might not have been born and add to that Irish Catholic Guilt and you have the seeds of in my opinion the Greatest American Playwright. His father was the great actor James O'Neill and he appeared as the Count of Monticristo over 6 thousand times.
But so much for the best of plans and intentions and as the day broke down, in every sense of the word, including terrific rain and lightning and at the end of the day hail, I remembered a line from one of Henry Jame's early novels, the American, where the doomed but beautiful woman; actually a fairly common literary convention, especially to Jame's, says to Christopher Newsome, the rich and lonely protagonist of the Tale, “And All The Mice Are In Chains.”
Apparently, when I last replaced Spark plugs in my bike, I either cross threaded one of them, or it was not tightened enough. As I was wending my way on my beloved Highway 6, about sixty miles from Tonopah, the spark plug unwound itself and shot out the side of the right hand cylinder. This bike has a compression ratio of 12.5 to 1 and even with Ear Plugs and music going, the noise was severe. The Engine died and I pulled in the clutch and looked for a place to get off the road. As I got off the bike about 15 feet away was what I first thought to be a dog, but it turned out it was a coyote and it was very surprised by me being there and took off rather rudely. On my old R1100RS I always carried a couple of spark plugs with me, but on this bike I hadn't really even thought of doing that. From now on, I am always going to have at least one spare spark plug with me. I restarted the engine and began to ride with one fully functioning cylinder and the other one with little compression but with one spark still working. Each of the two cylinders on this bike, have two spark plugs. The bike had very little torque at low RP M's and I really couldn't ride in any gear above about 4th. But, I was at least heading toward Tonopah. This BMW has a count down display for gas, rather than a gauge. From now on I will always believe what it says, for indeed I did run out of gas when it told me I would. By this time the slight drizzle of rain was replaced by thunder, lightning and just before I ran out of gas the second time, hail.
Normally my bike gets somewhere in the upper forties to sometimes well over 50 miles per gallon. But in the configuration I was riding in I wasn't even getting half that. I ran out of gas. The first person who stopped was on a BMW Bike and was heading home to Ely. He didn't have any spare gas and neither one of us could raise a signal on our cell phones. After he left two young guys with a trailer full of ATV'S stopped and they had plenty of extra gas, They gave me about two gallons of gas and offered me more and also would not take any money for the gas, they said it was their good deed for the day. I should have taken them up on the additional gas, for I ran out about 3 miles from Tonopah, as the computer told me I would and this time 3 guys on KTM's stopped and from their off road riding they had extra gas, This got me into Tonopah.
I have stayed in Tonopah on several times, and once when I was with someone, stayed in the Clown Motel. I hate Clown's big time and I dreaded the first time I took Caitlin to the circus. It turns out that she thought clown were weird and one of the first things I asked her about Dan, her future husband, after she became involved with him, was what he thought about Clown's. I also stayed years ago in the Old Mitzpah Hotel, which is now closed and for sale. It was 1975 and I was on my way from Las Vegas, where my then girlfriend was from and we were in her Opel GT, it did not have enough head room for me, and in addition she had her pet raccoon in a cage and it never liked me at all. We were on our way to the UC Davis campus to look at the Vet tech program for her. But I digress and should get back to my most recent stay in the great town of Tonopah.
I stayed at a Motel my good friend's stayed at in May on their way to the 49er rally in Mariposa. They mentioned their was a Mexican restaurant across the street and I hadn't eaten since Oat meal early Sunday morning. So I had dinner there as well. I was hopeful that once I got a new spark plug I would be back on the road. I had decided that even though I was closer to Fresno than SLC, I would return to SLC on the bike and then leave again for Fresno, in my diesel TDI. I couldn't go to NAPA until after 8:00 AM PDT the next morning. I tried to get a good night's sleep.
Suffice it to say, the threads of the cylinder head are shot and I ended up having to rent a U haul Truck. In all the year's I have been riding this is the first time I have been stranded out of State with a bike and only the second time, not counting my accident, that I haven't returned home on my bike.
I am going to take some time to figure out the best way to fix the thread problems on the bike. I suspect I am done riding for this season. I will leave my discourse on O'Neill for another time. But just for a moment think about what it would have been like to know that it was because of your birth that your mother became a morphine addict, that if another child hadn't died, you might not have been born and add to that Irish Catholic Guilt and you have the seeds of in my opinion the Greatest American Playwright. His father was the great actor James O'Neill and he appeared as the Count of Monticristo over 6 thousand times.
Monday, September 27, 2010
"Fear no More The Heat of The Sun"
The first weekend ride of Autumn, I had some choices this last weekend, I could have gone to Zions National Park with the BMW club of Utah, we haven't had a camp out in Zions since about 1991 or 1992. I have been a member of the Beehive Beemers since about 1988 and have been President, Vice-President, and editor of the Stinger, the monthly newsletter,;twice,for about four years total, and was the rally master for the Red Rock Rendezvous the first three years we put on the rally. O r I could have gone to Hagerman Idaho for the yearly camp out with the Idaho BMW club,. It used to be held the first weekend in October, but they moved it back a week a few years ago. Years ago it was held at a run down mineral bath resort called Sliger's and one year Caitlin when she was about 6 or 7 went with me. That Saturday evening they had a drawing for both free camping for the weekend and a membership in the Idaho club for the next year, they asked Caitlin to do the drawing and just as she started to draw the winning number, I blurted out, “if you don't draw my name, you will have to walk home.” I was the most surprised when she did in fact draw my name, and I offered to have her draw again, but everyone agreed there was no way she could have drawn my name, other than chance.
In the years when I was riding fifteen to twenty thousand miles a year, I would routinely end up spending about twenty to twenty five nights a year in a tent, and although I probably will never get up to that level again, I am sure next year I will start doing a little more camping. Weather permitting I want to ride to Death Valley in February and of course to Mariposa at the end of May. Valerie has all ready voiced her desire to go to New Mexico next fall for the Sipapu rally. I also have a trip planned for the ' Going to the Sun Highway' in Montana.
Valerie and Larry called me about a ride for Sunday morning and I was at their house just before 9:00 AM. I let Valerie pick where we were going to ride and she decided she wanted to ride to Chris's restaurant near Huntsville via the Trapper's Loop road. Today's ride will be on the short side, hardly more than 100 miles round trip, but Trapper's is a beautiful road, you could blink and you could be in the Alps somewhere. During the Olympics I remember seeing the view of the back of Mount Ogden on TV several times, and it was so startling to see this same view and it was almost a little disconcerting, it seemed to be magnified as if on steroids, so to speak.
The wind is always blowing down the Canyon, as you hit the mouth of Weber Canyon from Highway 89, its about the usual velocity and as I make the turn onto the on ramp of I-84 the Joni Mitchell song “Urge To Go” comes on my IPOD shuffle, “When the sun turns traitor cold and shivering trees are standing in a naked row, I get the urge for going, but I never seem to go.” Its a very good end of summer, slightly reflective song and even though we are experiencing above normal temperatures, it seems so fitting. There is a sheriff posted at the bottom of Trapper's Loop and I make sure I am going exactly 55, as I go past him. Once he is out of view, I wick it up and just as I step off my bike at Chris's Valerie pulls into the parking lot. Larry was a couple of seconds behind me.
Chris's has always had mediocre service, once years ago, on a ride to Woodruff and back, that Val and I took with a family friend from Park City, I had posted something on the Beehive Beemer message exchange that we were planning a ride and if anyone wanted to come with us, we would be at the mouth of Trapper's Loop at 9:00 AM. It was surprising when about 8 other people showed up. This was about Valerie's first year on her first BMW and when we returned to Chris's for lunch, one of the party asked her how she had pretty much kept up with me, she answered, that she just kept riding to remain about five to six seconds behind me and didn't even look at how fast she was going. Anyway, at this particular lunch, Chris's actually lost the order for our friend from Park City and after he finally got served, to add insult to injury, on the return ride on Trapper's he got pulled over for speeding. He was a pilot at that point in time and this presented some problems with the FAA. It was quite a long time till he rode with us again. Today's meal was uneventful and the service was okay.
I let Larry lead on the way back and as I tuck in behind Valerie, leaving a good margin so that while I can ride at the speed I want, I will not pass her, I watch her ride up Trapper's to the turn off for Snow Basin, she takes every turn at almost the perfect line and she seems to be riding a little quicker today that she tends to on longer rides. Its not cold but even the warm air, seems to have a crispness to it. I'm thinking Jonathan Apples. Larry is so far ahead of us, that I decide that I will ride with Val back to her house. Until Val and Larry married a few years ago, I would always ride back to Val's house with her, to make sure she got home okay, etc. Since she and Larry have been married, sometimes I just turn off at x point and then call later to go over the ride etc. We always share visual and textural perceptions from the ride.
As we turn off of Trapper's Loop and head toward Mt. Green and the I-84 on ramp, I see a little boy on a bicycle, dressed in his church clothes, riding from the church back to his house, behind him are his father and little sister walking, and it reminds me slightly of the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz, he is pedaling very fast, but not really going very fast. I also can picture my Grandson Winston, riding a bike in a few years. As I hit the on ramp, Tom Rush comes on my IPOD singing his version of the same Joni Mitchell song, I have always preferred his version of “Urge To Go,” it is at a much slower tempo, last about 45 seconds more and maybe because I think of Tom Rush as being a slightly haunted human being, it is much more about loss, missed opportunities, regret and aging. I am sure this relates to my brooding northern temperament and my ancestors from Denmark.
Autumn is my favorite time of year, but it tends to make me reflective and slightly nostalgic. I tend to these proclivities anyway, and this time of year seems to make my feelings that more pronounced. I read recently that memory maybe the greatest form of lust there is. I will have to spend some time thinking about that. This past week I re-read Thomas Wolfe's “Look Homeward Angel, A Story of the Buried Life,” Its my Mother's copy with her initial and handwriting Louise Snow August 1936, probably a couple of months before she met my father. She was eighteen years old, I have a picture of her at about this same time period and it has always made me think, how did this young girl become the person I knew and loved so very much and continue to miss on almost a daily basis. Louise long before she became a mother or wife. I first read this book the first winter after Bob died, almost 36 years ago, and I remember as I read of Gant, bursting into tears, Bob had so many Gantian qualities, but maybe all Father's are larger than life, maybe that's the template. Some critic has said of Thomas Wolfe, that he was either “ Talent without Genius, or Genius without talent.” While there is a slightly dated quality to him, and to me a pronounced racists quality to his writing, the use of the N word is prolific, he does have some memorable phrases. I don't think in my whole life I have thought as much about food as he does in almost every chapter. According to the biography I read of him, his mother was not nearly as bad as his fictional mother Eliza.
Today's title comes from the Shakespeare's Play Cymbeline. It is one of the few plays of Shakespeare I don't think I have read. I plan to read it this week. I have my Grandfather's copy of the Falstaff Edition of The Works. I have rather enjoyed seeing Val's notes in some of the plays. Grandfather Val died several years before I was born, and if there was a way to go back and meet some ancestors, he would be first on my list.
In the years when I was riding fifteen to twenty thousand miles a year, I would routinely end up spending about twenty to twenty five nights a year in a tent, and although I probably will never get up to that level again, I am sure next year I will start doing a little more camping. Weather permitting I want to ride to Death Valley in February and of course to Mariposa at the end of May. Valerie has all ready voiced her desire to go to New Mexico next fall for the Sipapu rally. I also have a trip planned for the ' Going to the Sun Highway' in Montana.
Valerie and Larry called me about a ride for Sunday morning and I was at their house just before 9:00 AM. I let Valerie pick where we were going to ride and she decided she wanted to ride to Chris's restaurant near Huntsville via the Trapper's Loop road. Today's ride will be on the short side, hardly more than 100 miles round trip, but Trapper's is a beautiful road, you could blink and you could be in the Alps somewhere. During the Olympics I remember seeing the view of the back of Mount Ogden on TV several times, and it was so startling to see this same view and it was almost a little disconcerting, it seemed to be magnified as if on steroids, so to speak.
The wind is always blowing down the Canyon, as you hit the mouth of Weber Canyon from Highway 89, its about the usual velocity and as I make the turn onto the on ramp of I-84 the Joni Mitchell song “Urge To Go” comes on my IPOD shuffle, “When the sun turns traitor cold and shivering trees are standing in a naked row, I get the urge for going, but I never seem to go.” Its a very good end of summer, slightly reflective song and even though we are experiencing above normal temperatures, it seems so fitting. There is a sheriff posted at the bottom of Trapper's Loop and I make sure I am going exactly 55, as I go past him. Once he is out of view, I wick it up and just as I step off my bike at Chris's Valerie pulls into the parking lot. Larry was a couple of seconds behind me.
Chris's has always had mediocre service, once years ago, on a ride to Woodruff and back, that Val and I took with a family friend from Park City, I had posted something on the Beehive Beemer message exchange that we were planning a ride and if anyone wanted to come with us, we would be at the mouth of Trapper's Loop at 9:00 AM. It was surprising when about 8 other people showed up. This was about Valerie's first year on her first BMW and when we returned to Chris's for lunch, one of the party asked her how she had pretty much kept up with me, she answered, that she just kept riding to remain about five to six seconds behind me and didn't even look at how fast she was going. Anyway, at this particular lunch, Chris's actually lost the order for our friend from Park City and after he finally got served, to add insult to injury, on the return ride on Trapper's he got pulled over for speeding. He was a pilot at that point in time and this presented some problems with the FAA. It was quite a long time till he rode with us again. Today's meal was uneventful and the service was okay.
I let Larry lead on the way back and as I tuck in behind Valerie, leaving a good margin so that while I can ride at the speed I want, I will not pass her, I watch her ride up Trapper's to the turn off for Snow Basin, she takes every turn at almost the perfect line and she seems to be riding a little quicker today that she tends to on longer rides. Its not cold but even the warm air, seems to have a crispness to it. I'm thinking Jonathan Apples. Larry is so far ahead of us, that I decide that I will ride with Val back to her house. Until Val and Larry married a few years ago, I would always ride back to Val's house with her, to make sure she got home okay, etc. Since she and Larry have been married, sometimes I just turn off at x point and then call later to go over the ride etc. We always share visual and textural perceptions from the ride.
As we turn off of Trapper's Loop and head toward Mt. Green and the I-84 on ramp, I see a little boy on a bicycle, dressed in his church clothes, riding from the church back to his house, behind him are his father and little sister walking, and it reminds me slightly of the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz, he is pedaling very fast, but not really going very fast. I also can picture my Grandson Winston, riding a bike in a few years. As I hit the on ramp, Tom Rush comes on my IPOD singing his version of the same Joni Mitchell song, I have always preferred his version of “Urge To Go,” it is at a much slower tempo, last about 45 seconds more and maybe because I think of Tom Rush as being a slightly haunted human being, it is much more about loss, missed opportunities, regret and aging. I am sure this relates to my brooding northern temperament and my ancestors from Denmark.
Autumn is my favorite time of year, but it tends to make me reflective and slightly nostalgic. I tend to these proclivities anyway, and this time of year seems to make my feelings that more pronounced. I read recently that memory maybe the greatest form of lust there is. I will have to spend some time thinking about that. This past week I re-read Thomas Wolfe's “Look Homeward Angel, A Story of the Buried Life,” Its my Mother's copy with her initial and handwriting Louise Snow August 1936, probably a couple of months before she met my father. She was eighteen years old, I have a picture of her at about this same time period and it has always made me think, how did this young girl become the person I knew and loved so very much and continue to miss on almost a daily basis. Louise long before she became a mother or wife. I first read this book the first winter after Bob died, almost 36 years ago, and I remember as I read of Gant, bursting into tears, Bob had so many Gantian qualities, but maybe all Father's are larger than life, maybe that's the template. Some critic has said of Thomas Wolfe, that he was either “ Talent without Genius, or Genius without talent.” While there is a slightly dated quality to him, and to me a pronounced racists quality to his writing, the use of the N word is prolific, he does have some memorable phrases. I don't think in my whole life I have thought as much about food as he does in almost every chapter. According to the biography I read of him, his mother was not nearly as bad as his fictional mother Eliza.
Today's title comes from the Shakespeare's Play Cymbeline. It is one of the few plays of Shakespeare I don't think I have read. I plan to read it this week. I have my Grandfather's copy of the Falstaff Edition of The Works. I have rather enjoyed seeing Val's notes in some of the plays. Grandfather Val died several years before I was born, and if there was a way to go back and meet some ancestors, he would be first on my list.
Monday, September 20, 2010
"I GOT THE CAMPFIRE BLUES UNDER NEATH THE SKY OF OLD WYOMING"
It has been a few years since I have ridden the Mirror Lake highway from Kamas to Evanston, Wyoming and with the return of hot weather, I wanted to ride someplace that would be as cool as possible. I even removed the lining from my coat and re-opened all the vents. I also took some water with me. As I ride up Parley's Canyon I am reminded that riding in heavy traffic on a motorcycle is a little like playing a giant game of chess. I plan my moves and passing and pick and choose empty pockets of traffic and in no time at all, I am again on the highway 40 exit from I-80 and heading toward the turn off for Kamas.
I decide at Kamas that I have enough fuel to get to Evanston and start up the canyon from Kamas. I am heading on highway150 through the area of the highest elevation in Utah and of course I will see King's peak, the highest point in Utah at 13, 528 off to the not so distant right. Fall is very noticeable, leaves turning and an abruptness to the cooler air. Most of the campgrounds I pass on this road have all ready closed for the season. The traffic is light in both directions and I try to ride not over 10 to 15 miles an hour of the posted limit. The lower part of this canyon is open grazing and there are still some cows that haven't been moved in anticipation of winter.
My sister Cynthia use to do some camping with her children in this area, and I am reminded by the name of several campgrounds she enjoyed., Soapstone and Christmas Meadows. I decide at Mirror Lake, not to turn off, on this road, if you stop you are supposed to pay a fee and also there is a part of me who has believed to one level or another that when you visit some places, you help destroy the very reason you wanted to go there in the first place. But the lake is very clear and I have memories from previous stops with others to suffice for today. Looking down at the GPS I see that I am over ten thousand feet above the level of the sea and as I behold the glacial spread of the Unita's, the only East-West Mountain chain in the Continental United States. I think about the process of glaciation and that leads me to suddenly thinking that Terminal Moraine, would make an interesting name for a female character in a short story. Now, all I need to do, is to come up with a plot line to fit the character's name. She would of course, besides being beautiful and smelling of both homemade bread and sage, be part French and I would try and find some fancy spelling of her first name, to make it sound more alluring. But the road beckons and as I get down to a lower Altitude and get closer to the Wyoming boarder, I am reminded of other things, and Termi-nal, ceases to occupy any part of my thinking.
The big flat valley in Wyoming between just beyond the boarder and just before you get to Evanston, is called Hillard, and although I can't tell you where Hillard proper starts or stops, I did in the mid 1970's spend many weekends in this area, moving cattle from the back of a horse. My family started running cows on some land north of the airport, as either a lark, or a fun weekend hobby, but like a lot of things my father did, it soon grew and took on a life of its own. The two main adages I remember from my days in the cattle industry were as follows: It doesn't take fancy barns and white fences to put fat on cattle, it only takes grass and water, and my favorite. The way to earn a small fortune in cattle is to start out with a large one! We decided in the fall of 1973 that we would increase the number of mother cows we were running during the next year. That also would mark the first summer that we would sub-lease some summer ranged near Croydon ,up Weber Canyon towards Lost Creek, from a neighbor. I remember that Bob, my father and that is what I called him my whole life, made me do up a business plan on this increase of cows and the leasing of summer range and I learned a lot in doing it. The first year I under estimated the weight gain of the calves and under estimated the overall expense of checking on the cows, and on the number of calves that we lost during the grazing period. We bought cows through the Producer's Livestock auction in North Salt Lake and had even joined the Coop. Bob knew one of the head people at Producer's , Van Moss, who had even passed out in a bathtub at one of my parent's parties in the 1950's. Van's son Russ was just a couple of years older than me, and was also one of the Auctioneer's at the Monday and Wednesday Auction. The term used to describe what an auctioneer does is Crying. He cries the auction. Van and Russ had some yearling heifers for sale and I went up to Hillard to look at them. We ended up buying about sixty five or seventy five of them with the stipulation that we wouldn't take possession of them until late October or early November of 1974. I don't remember Bob looking at them before I bought them, and I had agreed that I would help take care of them during the upcoming summer, the land up there is mostly irrigated meadows, courtesy of the Bear River and I went up many times that summer with Russ, and using a borrowed horse, I didn't at that time have a decent horse trailer, helped move the cattle, got a good feeling of the land up there and stayed several nights at a big ranch there owned by a man named Dick McGraw. The next year, because of a divorce, that place would be for sale, but things had changed by then. Bob and I also spent the summer looking to buy a ranch somewhere. I also ended up late in September in driving to beyond Dallas Texas to pick up a 20 foot Goose necked trailer to help in hauling cattle and calves. The ride to and from Athens Texas is a tale in and of its self. My good friend Robert Weyher went with me and boy was it a long trip back. I ended up bringing back all of the parts to make a 16 foot goose neck trailer for Ken Garff and coming back over Eisenhower pass on Interstate 70 my mileage dropped to about six miles per gallon. Thank goodness I had a main and two saddle tanks on the truck and gas was relatively cheap!
When we took delivery of the cows, it was time to brand, and to check for pregnancy, etc. In those days some of the best cattle equipment was made by a company called Powder River, this was way before I even knew where the Powder River was located and they had a manufacturing facility in Provo. We ended up getting a parcel of their movable and interlocking 16foot panels, a cattle chute, a squeeze chute, complete with preg gate, and of course a calf table. We had both electric branding irons and a propane burner to heat up a metal wand to help de-horn calves, this was after giving them shots, castrating them if necessary and branding them as well. I have been kicked by both calves and cows so many times. We had a registered brand NT for Northpoint Towers and I even wore a Stetson hat, and listened to Charlie Daniels. I paid for the balance of the cows upon delivery and they were to start calving in mid February. Bob and I had a trip planned in January to look at ranch land in Costa Rica. One of my nieces and one of my nephews; brother and sister, and children of my deceased sister Cynthia, have both purchased property in Costa Rica. Bob loved both Costa Rica and Guatemala and I was looking forward to the trip, although I had mixed feelings about potentially living part of the year out of the US. We continued to look around Utah, Idaho and Wyoming at ranch land and I have always wondered where I might be today if we had purchased a ranch somewhere in the West. In early December of 1974, Bob dropped dead one evening.
The calving of these new mothers was bittersweet. I ended up having to aid a fairly large amount of these births by pulling the calf, and I would come out of the barn where I was calving them at two in the morning, the snow coming down, with my hands and arms still drenched in amniotic fluid, and suddenly remember that I could help a calf being born, but my CPR on my father had not worked. The next fall I spent several weekends traveling with Russ Moss in Nevada and Wyoming on cattle buying trips These were trips to established clients of Producer's to weigh and sort the cattle. I learned a great deal and met some very interesting hard core ranch people. I even got a chance to load cattle into rail road cars and by this time I was a veteran at loading semis with cows. Later in the fall of 1975 I attended a week long seminar at the famous Graham School for Cattlemen in Garnett Kansas. During that hands on week, I learned how to test a cow for pregnancy , which involves putting on a giant glove, and putting your hand up a part of a cow where the sun wasn't meant to shine, and then you push down on top of the uterus. If there is a calf there, it will bounce up against your hand. I also learned a great deal about herd management and artificial insemination. I also in 1976 attended the annual Livestock Show in Denver Colorado. Russ still is a cattle buyer for a large company and lives near Greeley Colorado.
We continued to run cattle until about 1984 and at the same time I was doing some real estate things, but would start out every morning and end up every evening feeding and checking on cows. It was a good balance to more cerebral undertakings and gave me a good balance in life.
I was pleased to see that the Hillard area is still very much farm and ranch country and there did not appear to be many new houses, and where there were, it was a case of probably building a bigger house, or a second house for another generation. There are a lot of gas wells around this area, and that has certainly helped in the stability of ownership. At Evanston I gassed up and then headed toward the boarder and the ride through Echo Canyon via I-80, this section of the road is called the Eisenhower Highway. In 1919 Ike was part of a military convoy that drove across the United States from coast to coast. It tested the feasibility and problems of doing this and it took 61 days to go from Washington D.C. To San Francisco. In 2009 a John Ryan rode a Big Honda from Pruhdoe Bay Alaska to Key West Florida, 5, 641 miles, in 86 hours and 31 minutes. The prior record was held by Salt Laker Gary Eagan at 96 hours and 1 minute. This is straight through with in reality, no sleep, and you would me a complete zombie by the time you were done. In 1945 on his first visits to Germany, Ike was impressed by the Autobahns and during his Presidency the Interstate Highway Act was passed. Ike was very proud of this legislation. Part of its financing was Pentagon related, to help get it passed, and that is why there is a small amount of Interstate Highway in Hawaii. I seem to remember that one of the last sections of the original Interstate to be finished was a section of I-70 between Green River and Salina, Utah.
I don't know why Echo Canyon has never been one of my favorite rides, certainly there are red rock canyons and one gets a sense of what it must have been like for the pioneers but it has always lacked something to me. Its always windy and since I have tended to ride it in summer, hot. At Echo I head towards I-84 and when I had stopped for fuel in Evanston I had clicked my way point for home and was pleased to see that it had me turning off at Henefer, which even without a GPS I had decided to take, and coming into the valley via East Canyon and Big Mountain. The water level of East Canyon, Little Dell and Mountain Dell reservoirs were all noticeably lower than earlier this summer. I elect not to continue to Emigration Canyon and spend the few miles until the mouth of Parley's once again playing the game of traffic chess. The ride was 217 miles.
I decide at Kamas that I have enough fuel to get to Evanston and start up the canyon from Kamas. I am heading on highway150 through the area of the highest elevation in Utah and of course I will see King's peak, the highest point in Utah at 13, 528 off to the not so distant right. Fall is very noticeable, leaves turning and an abruptness to the cooler air. Most of the campgrounds I pass on this road have all ready closed for the season. The traffic is light in both directions and I try to ride not over 10 to 15 miles an hour of the posted limit. The lower part of this canyon is open grazing and there are still some cows that haven't been moved in anticipation of winter.
My sister Cynthia use to do some camping with her children in this area, and I am reminded by the name of several campgrounds she enjoyed., Soapstone and Christmas Meadows. I decide at Mirror Lake, not to turn off, on this road, if you stop you are supposed to pay a fee and also there is a part of me who has believed to one level or another that when you visit some places, you help destroy the very reason you wanted to go there in the first place. But the lake is very clear and I have memories from previous stops with others to suffice for today. Looking down at the GPS I see that I am over ten thousand feet above the level of the sea and as I behold the glacial spread of the Unita's, the only East-West Mountain chain in the Continental United States. I think about the process of glaciation and that leads me to suddenly thinking that Terminal Moraine, would make an interesting name for a female character in a short story. Now, all I need to do, is to come up with a plot line to fit the character's name. She would of course, besides being beautiful and smelling of both homemade bread and sage, be part French and I would try and find some fancy spelling of her first name, to make it sound more alluring. But the road beckons and as I get down to a lower Altitude and get closer to the Wyoming boarder, I am reminded of other things, and Termi-nal, ceases to occupy any part of my thinking.
The big flat valley in Wyoming between just beyond the boarder and just before you get to Evanston, is called Hillard, and although I can't tell you where Hillard proper starts or stops, I did in the mid 1970's spend many weekends in this area, moving cattle from the back of a horse. My family started running cows on some land north of the airport, as either a lark, or a fun weekend hobby, but like a lot of things my father did, it soon grew and took on a life of its own. The two main adages I remember from my days in the cattle industry were as follows: It doesn't take fancy barns and white fences to put fat on cattle, it only takes grass and water, and my favorite. The way to earn a small fortune in cattle is to start out with a large one! We decided in the fall of 1973 that we would increase the number of mother cows we were running during the next year. That also would mark the first summer that we would sub-lease some summer ranged near Croydon ,up Weber Canyon towards Lost Creek, from a neighbor. I remember that Bob, my father and that is what I called him my whole life, made me do up a business plan on this increase of cows and the leasing of summer range and I learned a lot in doing it. The first year I under estimated the weight gain of the calves and under estimated the overall expense of checking on the cows, and on the number of calves that we lost during the grazing period. We bought cows through the Producer's Livestock auction in North Salt Lake and had even joined the Coop. Bob knew one of the head people at Producer's , Van Moss, who had even passed out in a bathtub at one of my parent's parties in the 1950's. Van's son Russ was just a couple of years older than me, and was also one of the Auctioneer's at the Monday and Wednesday Auction. The term used to describe what an auctioneer does is Crying. He cries the auction. Van and Russ had some yearling heifers for sale and I went up to Hillard to look at them. We ended up buying about sixty five or seventy five of them with the stipulation that we wouldn't take possession of them until late October or early November of 1974. I don't remember Bob looking at them before I bought them, and I had agreed that I would help take care of them during the upcoming summer, the land up there is mostly irrigated meadows, courtesy of the Bear River and I went up many times that summer with Russ, and using a borrowed horse, I didn't at that time have a decent horse trailer, helped move the cattle, got a good feeling of the land up there and stayed several nights at a big ranch there owned by a man named Dick McGraw. The next year, because of a divorce, that place would be for sale, but things had changed by then. Bob and I also spent the summer looking to buy a ranch somewhere. I also ended up late in September in driving to beyond Dallas Texas to pick up a 20 foot Goose necked trailer to help in hauling cattle and calves. The ride to and from Athens Texas is a tale in and of its self. My good friend Robert Weyher went with me and boy was it a long trip back. I ended up bringing back all of the parts to make a 16 foot goose neck trailer for Ken Garff and coming back over Eisenhower pass on Interstate 70 my mileage dropped to about six miles per gallon. Thank goodness I had a main and two saddle tanks on the truck and gas was relatively cheap!
When we took delivery of the cows, it was time to brand, and to check for pregnancy, etc. In those days some of the best cattle equipment was made by a company called Powder River, this was way before I even knew where the Powder River was located and they had a manufacturing facility in Provo. We ended up getting a parcel of their movable and interlocking 16foot panels, a cattle chute, a squeeze chute, complete with preg gate, and of course a calf table. We had both electric branding irons and a propane burner to heat up a metal wand to help de-horn calves, this was after giving them shots, castrating them if necessary and branding them as well. I have been kicked by both calves and cows so many times. We had a registered brand NT for Northpoint Towers and I even wore a Stetson hat, and listened to Charlie Daniels. I paid for the balance of the cows upon delivery and they were to start calving in mid February. Bob and I had a trip planned in January to look at ranch land in Costa Rica. One of my nieces and one of my nephews; brother and sister, and children of my deceased sister Cynthia, have both purchased property in Costa Rica. Bob loved both Costa Rica and Guatemala and I was looking forward to the trip, although I had mixed feelings about potentially living part of the year out of the US. We continued to look around Utah, Idaho and Wyoming at ranch land and I have always wondered where I might be today if we had purchased a ranch somewhere in the West. In early December of 1974, Bob dropped dead one evening.
The calving of these new mothers was bittersweet. I ended up having to aid a fairly large amount of these births by pulling the calf, and I would come out of the barn where I was calving them at two in the morning, the snow coming down, with my hands and arms still drenched in amniotic fluid, and suddenly remember that I could help a calf being born, but my CPR on my father had not worked. The next fall I spent several weekends traveling with Russ Moss in Nevada and Wyoming on cattle buying trips These were trips to established clients of Producer's to weigh and sort the cattle. I learned a great deal and met some very interesting hard core ranch people. I even got a chance to load cattle into rail road cars and by this time I was a veteran at loading semis with cows. Later in the fall of 1975 I attended a week long seminar at the famous Graham School for Cattlemen in Garnett Kansas. During that hands on week, I learned how to test a cow for pregnancy , which involves putting on a giant glove, and putting your hand up a part of a cow where the sun wasn't meant to shine, and then you push down on top of the uterus. If there is a calf there, it will bounce up against your hand. I also learned a great deal about herd management and artificial insemination. I also in 1976 attended the annual Livestock Show in Denver Colorado. Russ still is a cattle buyer for a large company and lives near Greeley Colorado.
We continued to run cattle until about 1984 and at the same time I was doing some real estate things, but would start out every morning and end up every evening feeding and checking on cows. It was a good balance to more cerebral undertakings and gave me a good balance in life.
I was pleased to see that the Hillard area is still very much farm and ranch country and there did not appear to be many new houses, and where there were, it was a case of probably building a bigger house, or a second house for another generation. There are a lot of gas wells around this area, and that has certainly helped in the stability of ownership. At Evanston I gassed up and then headed toward the boarder and the ride through Echo Canyon via I-80, this section of the road is called the Eisenhower Highway. In 1919 Ike was part of a military convoy that drove across the United States from coast to coast. It tested the feasibility and problems of doing this and it took 61 days to go from Washington D.C. To San Francisco. In 2009 a John Ryan rode a Big Honda from Pruhdoe Bay Alaska to Key West Florida, 5, 641 miles, in 86 hours and 31 minutes. The prior record was held by Salt Laker Gary Eagan at 96 hours and 1 minute. This is straight through with in reality, no sleep, and you would me a complete zombie by the time you were done. In 1945 on his first visits to Germany, Ike was impressed by the Autobahns and during his Presidency the Interstate Highway Act was passed. Ike was very proud of this legislation. Part of its financing was Pentagon related, to help get it passed, and that is why there is a small amount of Interstate Highway in Hawaii. I seem to remember that one of the last sections of the original Interstate to be finished was a section of I-70 between Green River and Salina, Utah.
I don't know why Echo Canyon has never been one of my favorite rides, certainly there are red rock canyons and one gets a sense of what it must have been like for the pioneers but it has always lacked something to me. Its always windy and since I have tended to ride it in summer, hot. At Echo I head towards I-84 and when I had stopped for fuel in Evanston I had clicked my way point for home and was pleased to see that it had me turning off at Henefer, which even without a GPS I had decided to take, and coming into the valley via East Canyon and Big Mountain. The water level of East Canyon, Little Dell and Mountain Dell reservoirs were all noticeably lower than earlier this summer. I elect not to continue to Emigration Canyon and spend the few miles until the mouth of Parley's once again playing the game of traffic chess. The ride was 217 miles.
Monday, September 13, 2010
MY SISTER WEARS COMBAT BOOTS*
After getting home from last week's ride, and washing the bike, I saw a site you never want to see, a small section of the rear tire, was showing the first tell-tale notion of steel cords. I knew I was going to shortly need a new tire, had even ordered one over the web, and was awaiting its arrival, so until it came, and could be mounted, it was park the bike, do not pass go, etc.
The sum total of the front and rear tire of a bike, that is touching the ground at any point in time, is referred to as the contact patch. This small amount of rubber, has to adjust to all of the demands put upon it by the road, and the rider. The traction pie is only so big, and the more contradictory demands a rider makes at any point in time, the less that is available to respond to any one of them. This is why good tires are a necessity. My bike, is a kind of sports-touring bike, and this bike puts more emphasis on the sport than touring. I usually get about 8 thousand miles out of a rear tire and about 10 thousand out of the front. It costs roughly about $275 for a pair of tires and several years ago I use to go through about 2.5 sets per year. Now I am going through about one pair per year. I also track my MPG and can tell you how much gas I have consumed in the previous year and that on average I gas up every 165 miles. The actual range on the bike is probably about two hundred to two twenty five max. In 2010 I have spent around $185.00 for gas. The physics of riding are fascinating, and the two books I have highlighted are very informative and thought provoking.
I had thought about where I wanted to ride this weekend, the Mirror lake road to Evanston, when I got a call from my brother-in- law Larry to see if I wanted to take a ride on Sunday morning with both he, and my sister Valerie. We haven't ridden together for several months and of course I said yes. Valerie has been riding for about twelve or so years, Larry since he and Valerie married a few years ago. I have watched Valerie; from the day she picked up her first new bike, after taking a Motorcycle Foundation Safety class, It seemed to take hours that first day for her to ride her bike, a Yamaha with shaft drive, to her house. And after the first ride to Magna, I wondered if she had not make a mistake in buying a bike. I figured out that the best way to help build her confidence was to ride someplace with as little of stop and go riding as possible. Ride to Tooele, stop for lunch, and ride back. This seemed to do wonders. The rides got longer and longer. Needless to say, she got better and better and she is both graceful and proficient on her bike. She outgrew her first bike in her first year of riding. She has had 3 BMWS. Larry is on his second BMW. It means an awful lot to me to be able to share my passion for riding motorcycles with a member of my family. She also speaks Swaner, a dialect spoken and on some levels only understood by my sisters. I can make reference to things that happened when we were children and that will explain to any of my family present, just what I am feeling about a given event. It is nice and comforting to be around family and I usually speak will all or most of my sisters at least once or twice a week.
Valerie has gone on trips with me to both California and several times to one of my favorite motorcycle rallies just out side of Taos, New Mexico. It is possible to attend a BMW rally somewhere in this country every weekend from about the middle of April till the end of October. Utah's rally the Red Rock Rendezvous which I helped found, and named, is held the third week of June in Panguitch. I used to go to about six to eight of these rallies each year. This year I have not been to any and this is also the first year since about 1988 that I have not camped out in a tent. The first rally Val went to with her own bike, other than a BMW club camp out in Southern Utah, was the memorial day weekend rally which was then in Quincy California. I arranged for Val's bike to be taken in an enclosed trailer to Quincy, and after I had been there a day or two, I rode down to Reno and Picked Valerie up at the airport on the Friday of the long weekend. We then rode on my bike back to Quincy. Just up from Truckee there is a beautiful expanse of forest that really is the forest prime evil. It rained the whole weekend of and on, and although we did do some riding around the area, I didn't get to show her all of the beautiful places around Quincy. We came back on highway 50 with some friends and I was rather surprised on the return leg, when at one point, Valerie suddenly passed me at over 100 mph. It turned out that she had been thinking about it the whole way home and had even discussed it with my friends. It was a riding rite of passage for her and she did it in a straight section of road with little traffic.
Valerie has gone with me to the rally in Sipapu about three times. Sipapu is about 35 miles south east of Taos, New Mexico up in the mountains. I have attended this rally about twelve times. Its about 675 miles from Salt Lake City and we usually ride it in one day, both ways. Sipapu, which to the Pueblo Indians is the entrance from below ground to our world, in Kiva's it is a small indentation in the floor of the Kiva which symbolizes this portal through which their ancestors first emerged in to the present world. Sipapu New Mexico, is the site of a mom and pop Forest service ski resort. The rally takes over the whole facility and there is first come first serve free rooms in the lodge. Valerie does not like to camp, so I would always take my tent, and Valerie would carve out some space in a room in the lodge. Making it into a woman's only dorm. We always made it part of the weekend to ride down to Santa Fe, for a few hours on Saturday. We have also been up to Angle Fire and have visited the breath taking Vietnam Memorial which is located there. It was started as a father's memorial to his son who died fighting in the war. We have stopped at many old churches on the way to Santa Fe, that always make me think of the Willa Cather book, “Death comes for the Archbishop.” I always figure out a back roads route out of the mountains and we ride through small Villages where the dogs still bark in Spanish. It was always festival weekend in Santa Fe, the weekend after Labor day, and the few blocks around the Palace of Governor's is always closed to traffic. After walking around, doing a little shopping, Valerie likes silver jewelery and fancy belts, and maybe going to a couple of museum's we would pick an upscale place for lunch, and then head back to Siapu. The first year she went we had lunch at the Pink Adobe, where we had lunch several times when we were kids. It is now famous for having been famous, although we did share for desert, a piece of their signature Apple Pie. Santa Fe is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the United States. It was the first Foreign Capitol, invaded by the United States in 1846, and the natives at first, welcomed the invasion. We spent a great deal of time in New Mexico on family trips, and it does remind me of the exploring that Valerie and I did on these trips as kids.
Valerie is a real trooper, except for unpaved roads, or sections of gravel, she is game for most situations, and in rain, sleet or even hail, she maintains her position, in most circumstances, a comfortable distance behind me. Larry likes to hang back far enough on his bike, that he can virtually ride at any speed he wants. Larry was with me three years ago when I was viciously attached by two deer near the Jeremy Ranch exit of of I-80. He called Valerie who wasn't with us, and she called everyone else, so that by the time I arrived at the hospital, all of my family, living in Salt Lake City, were all ready there.
On this day, we rode up Parley's Canyon past Park City, to the turn off on Highway 40 toward Heber City, Our destination was Kamas for breakfast, at Pasillas. We ended up having to ride to the junction with Highway 32, because of a closed exit ramp, Then it was up to Francis, and then North a couple of miles to Kamas. After breakfast we headed to Wanship and the ride back on I-80 to Salt Lake. My gas light came on, I had not filled the bike before we left, and I turned off at the Jeremy Ranch exit, and gassed up and drove the remaining way home by myself.
Weather permitting we will probably ride every weekend till late October. I have certainly in some years continued to ride my bike into December and a couple of years ago, I rode to Arizona in early December to visit some friends who winter there. I had to cut short my trip, because of an expected snow storm in Utah and had barely returned home when the first massive snow storm of the season arrived. I have also made trips to Death Valley in both January and February.
Todays ride was about 125 miles and there is more of a hint of autumn in the mountains than there was last week. I was glad I had re-inserted the lining in my coat and closed the vents in both my jacket and pants. *She doesn't really wear combat boots, but she does have stylish boots and even sometimes wears a pink motorcycle jacket and currently, a black Arai helmet.
The sum total of the front and rear tire of a bike, that is touching the ground at any point in time, is referred to as the contact patch. This small amount of rubber, has to adjust to all of the demands put upon it by the road, and the rider. The traction pie is only so big, and the more contradictory demands a rider makes at any point in time, the less that is available to respond to any one of them. This is why good tires are a necessity. My bike, is a kind of sports-touring bike, and this bike puts more emphasis on the sport than touring. I usually get about 8 thousand miles out of a rear tire and about 10 thousand out of the front. It costs roughly about $275 for a pair of tires and several years ago I use to go through about 2.5 sets per year. Now I am going through about one pair per year. I also track my MPG and can tell you how much gas I have consumed in the previous year and that on average I gas up every 165 miles. The actual range on the bike is probably about two hundred to two twenty five max. In 2010 I have spent around $185.00 for gas. The physics of riding are fascinating, and the two books I have highlighted are very informative and thought provoking.
I had thought about where I wanted to ride this weekend, the Mirror lake road to Evanston, when I got a call from my brother-in- law Larry to see if I wanted to take a ride on Sunday morning with both he, and my sister Valerie. We haven't ridden together for several months and of course I said yes. Valerie has been riding for about twelve or so years, Larry since he and Valerie married a few years ago. I have watched Valerie; from the day she picked up her first new bike, after taking a Motorcycle Foundation Safety class, It seemed to take hours that first day for her to ride her bike, a Yamaha with shaft drive, to her house. And after the first ride to Magna, I wondered if she had not make a mistake in buying a bike. I figured out that the best way to help build her confidence was to ride someplace with as little of stop and go riding as possible. Ride to Tooele, stop for lunch, and ride back. This seemed to do wonders. The rides got longer and longer. Needless to say, she got better and better and she is both graceful and proficient on her bike. She outgrew her first bike in her first year of riding. She has had 3 BMWS. Larry is on his second BMW. It means an awful lot to me to be able to share my passion for riding motorcycles with a member of my family. She also speaks Swaner, a dialect spoken and on some levels only understood by my sisters. I can make reference to things that happened when we were children and that will explain to any of my family present, just what I am feeling about a given event. It is nice and comforting to be around family and I usually speak will all or most of my sisters at least once or twice a week.
Valerie has gone on trips with me to both California and several times to one of my favorite motorcycle rallies just out side of Taos, New Mexico. It is possible to attend a BMW rally somewhere in this country every weekend from about the middle of April till the end of October. Utah's rally the Red Rock Rendezvous which I helped found, and named, is held the third week of June in Panguitch. I used to go to about six to eight of these rallies each year. This year I have not been to any and this is also the first year since about 1988 that I have not camped out in a tent. The first rally Val went to with her own bike, other than a BMW club camp out in Southern Utah, was the memorial day weekend rally which was then in Quincy California. I arranged for Val's bike to be taken in an enclosed trailer to Quincy, and after I had been there a day or two, I rode down to Reno and Picked Valerie up at the airport on the Friday of the long weekend. We then rode on my bike back to Quincy. Just up from Truckee there is a beautiful expanse of forest that really is the forest prime evil. It rained the whole weekend of and on, and although we did do some riding around the area, I didn't get to show her all of the beautiful places around Quincy. We came back on highway 50 with some friends and I was rather surprised on the return leg, when at one point, Valerie suddenly passed me at over 100 mph. It turned out that she had been thinking about it the whole way home and had even discussed it with my friends. It was a riding rite of passage for her and she did it in a straight section of road with little traffic.
Valerie has gone with me to the rally in Sipapu about three times. Sipapu is about 35 miles south east of Taos, New Mexico up in the mountains. I have attended this rally about twelve times. Its about 675 miles from Salt Lake City and we usually ride it in one day, both ways. Sipapu, which to the Pueblo Indians is the entrance from below ground to our world, in Kiva's it is a small indentation in the floor of the Kiva which symbolizes this portal through which their ancestors first emerged in to the present world. Sipapu New Mexico, is the site of a mom and pop Forest service ski resort. The rally takes over the whole facility and there is first come first serve free rooms in the lodge. Valerie does not like to camp, so I would always take my tent, and Valerie would carve out some space in a room in the lodge. Making it into a woman's only dorm. We always made it part of the weekend to ride down to Santa Fe, for a few hours on Saturday. We have also been up to Angle Fire and have visited the breath taking Vietnam Memorial which is located there. It was started as a father's memorial to his son who died fighting in the war. We have stopped at many old churches on the way to Santa Fe, that always make me think of the Willa Cather book, “Death comes for the Archbishop.” I always figure out a back roads route out of the mountains and we ride through small Villages where the dogs still bark in Spanish. It was always festival weekend in Santa Fe, the weekend after Labor day, and the few blocks around the Palace of Governor's is always closed to traffic. After walking around, doing a little shopping, Valerie likes silver jewelery and fancy belts, and maybe going to a couple of museum's we would pick an upscale place for lunch, and then head back to Siapu. The first year she went we had lunch at the Pink Adobe, where we had lunch several times when we were kids. It is now famous for having been famous, although we did share for desert, a piece of their signature Apple Pie. Santa Fe is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the United States. It was the first Foreign Capitol, invaded by the United States in 1846, and the natives at first, welcomed the invasion. We spent a great deal of time in New Mexico on family trips, and it does remind me of the exploring that Valerie and I did on these trips as kids.
Valerie is a real trooper, except for unpaved roads, or sections of gravel, she is game for most situations, and in rain, sleet or even hail, she maintains her position, in most circumstances, a comfortable distance behind me. Larry likes to hang back far enough on his bike, that he can virtually ride at any speed he wants. Larry was with me three years ago when I was viciously attached by two deer near the Jeremy Ranch exit of of I-80. He called Valerie who wasn't with us, and she called everyone else, so that by the time I arrived at the hospital, all of my family, living in Salt Lake City, were all ready there.
On this day, we rode up Parley's Canyon past Park City, to the turn off on Highway 40 toward Heber City, Our destination was Kamas for breakfast, at Pasillas. We ended up having to ride to the junction with Highway 32, because of a closed exit ramp, Then it was up to Francis, and then North a couple of miles to Kamas. After breakfast we headed to Wanship and the ride back on I-80 to Salt Lake. My gas light came on, I had not filled the bike before we left, and I turned off at the Jeremy Ranch exit, and gassed up and drove the remaining way home by myself.
Weather permitting we will probably ride every weekend till late October. I have certainly in some years continued to ride my bike into December and a couple of years ago, I rode to Arizona in early December to visit some friends who winter there. I had to cut short my trip, because of an expected snow storm in Utah and had barely returned home when the first massive snow storm of the season arrived. I have also made trips to Death Valley in both January and February.
Todays ride was about 125 miles and there is more of a hint of autumn in the mountains than there was last week. I was glad I had re-inserted the lining in my coat and closed the vents in both my jacket and pants. *She doesn't really wear combat boots, but she does have stylish boots and even sometimes wears a pink motorcycle jacket and currently, a black Arai helmet.
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