Not knowing any other Americans in Bangkok, I’d done a Google search for “Thanksgiving Bangkok” and found a website devoted to Asian Nightlife with four public Thanksgiving events. I picked the 500B buffet with “Irish Food and Irish folk band ‘No Fixed Abode'” which sounded to me like the doings of an Irish pub. I rode the SkyTrain out to a gigantic world-class hotel, where I was welcomed by a guy ready to seat me at a table by myself. Perish the thought! I saw an older lady sitting alone at another table, asked if she would like some company, and sat with her instead.
She was Canadian, from Ontario. They celebrate Thanksgiving in September, and she was spending the last of her baht on a Thai meal, instead of the pricey buffet, since she was flying out early in the morning and wanted to eat something light.
She told me that she had a small farm up North, and was a member of an organization called WWOOF: Willing Workers on Organic Farms, where she’d hosted many a Japanese or Korean traveller, exchanging food and shelter for some help on the farm. What a wonderful dinner companion!
I put away three plates of food and a dessert plate — I wanted my 500B worth! After the Canadian lady left, I spent some time talking to a retired couple — he a Texan and she a Thai.
They didn’t have pumpkin pie — Thai pumpkins are different and they don’t make pie out of them. What the hotel did was adapt their monthly Irish Buffet into a Thanksgiving dinner, which is why they had an Irish band playing homage to America. I enjoyed the folk music, and the band tried to favor American composers. I stuck around until they wrapped up at 10.
Back at the SkyTrain station, I noticed that one tall girl was dressed in an unusually fancy black dress. I looked out over the streets and the skyline as I waited for the train. When it arrived, I found myself seated opposite of her, across the SkyTrain’s wide central aisle.
She was quite tall, with long fingers, light skin, and a long face. I overheard her talking with her friend, and her voice sounded unusually deep. She looked too young and pretty to have smoked enough cigarettes to explain this. I followed this hunch and studied her more. Her breasts and hips were modest, but then a lot of Thai women are unreasonably thin. Then I caught her Adam’s Apple. Having captured her secret, I loved her all the more.
Traffic rushes down Sukhumvit Road, beneath the SkyTrain station.
I could tell she liked me too. And I wanted to make friends, but how do I go about doing this, especially if I don’t know that she speaks English? And what would she think of my potentially ignoble intentions, for though my admiration was based on the fact that I think very highly of anyone who can struggle so long and hard to to successfully capture their own self-identity, Adam’s Apple or not, she was still a damned fine lady to boot.
When I stepped off the train I looked back through the window, and saw that her head had turned to follow me. For a moment, I was tempted to return, but decided that I would leave it to fate that tonight she and I were bound our seperate ways.
On the way back to the hotel, I worked it out that Bangkok was 13 hours ahead of Chicago. I got back to the hotel at 2300 and Jessica answered the phone. It certainly was 10AM. At 50B/minute, with a 50B connection fee, the nine-minute call ran 500B, but it was worth it to hear mom’s voice on a holiday.
I walked down the hill a little earlier today. Washington Mutual doesn’t do currency exchange, but Bank of America does. I had two Â¥10,000 and a Â¥1,000 to exchange. Bank of America charges a 1% transaction fee to those who don’t hold an account. My answer was that I’d rather pay the 1% than be broke. The guy went to get the exchange rate book, and a big color catalog of what different currency notes look like. I had figured that at 120Â¥ to the dollar, the Â¥20,000 ought to earn me $160, with another $8 for the Â¥1,000.
“Sixteen dollars and thirty-three cents.”
“That’s the transaction fee?”
“No, that’s the exchange.”
He re-did his math and decided that I was in line for $163.50. “How would you like your money?”
“Twenties.” The yuppy food stamp.
He counted out more cash than I’ve seen in a good long while now, and I remarked that I was going to fill my tank.
The 1% charge was waived. I attribute this to a combination of his mis-placed decimal point, and to the impression I got that he was sweet on me. He suggested I open a checking account, now with no fees. I responded that I just might do that in the future when I had some money to put into such a thing. As it was, I was immensely pleased that the exchange cost me less than $5.
Flush with cash, and tomorrow my day of reckoning before the administrative law judge, who may determine once and for all my eligibility for unemployment benefits, which could see me with $2,000 pretty quickly, and a lot less worried about problems.
But what I have other ideas I want to play with now. No more War news for a while, just me, Michael’s stereo, a comfortable office chair, and an Internet terminal. Maybe I can get some ideas worked out.
Beautiful clouds in a break between stormy weather, as seen from a rest stop in Nevada, along Interstate 80.
If there is anywhere I want to be right now it is on the road. Just at Cheyenne I figured out that I could fix the faulty headlight switch by working it back and forth several times. This brute force method cleans some of the crud off the contacts. I got the idea from a pickup truck whose lights flickered rapidly several times before he got on the highway. That is the sort of solution that you’ll see in the American heartland.
But if it isn’t one thing it’s another. Now that I can trust my lights not to flicker out on the highway I’m snowed in at a truck stop east of Cheyenne. It has been snowing on and off since I hit Sacramento. I made it up the Sierras okay and then some goddess of fortune decided to kill my alternator when I hit Reno. So I got to stay a night at Circus Circus and set off the next day.
Casinos are sort of depressing but I got lucky. Since it was Thursday I got a pretty darned nice room for $30. The nicer thing about casinos is that they are eager to do currency conversions for you. They don’t handle Baht but they took the Pounds that Duncan gave me okay. They also cashed my first, last, and only check from the dinner cruise place, and far from charging me commission instead regaled me with drink credits. I had some strong, rough wine while I waited for my repairs. I did not feel at all bad about taking advantage of their generosity because it was a calculated gamble on their part that they’d make money on me gambling. I didn’t gamble, and I gave my second drink credit to the mechanic.
It was an afternoon start from Reno and I spent the night somewhere east of Elko nestled between some semis who had also called it a night in rough weather at a tire chain-up area. Come daylight it was balls out of Nevada, non-stop across Utah and nearly out of Wyoming, hitting nasty nasty snow East of Cheyenne. After wiping out a couple times and nearly getting squished by some trucks I followed a tiny convoy of a truck and two cars to a truck stop where I get to sip coffee and watch the snow. Westbound has been closed to non-essential travel and I’m going to wait and see if the snow lets up for an Eastbound fella like me.
I began stopping more frequently to scrape ice from the windshield wipers and from the front of the car, which quickly became coated with ice, like this, as trucks would pass and splash large amounts of freezing slush on the front of the car, which would also destroy visibility for a few nervous seconds while the wipers caught up with the inundation of slush.
After coffee I pulled back on the road. Turns out that the headlight switch was still mucked up after all, so soon after I spent another night in the car tucked behind a tree at a Wyoming rest stop.
Next morning it was back on the road through more snow. Nebraska came and went hardly without note because my attention was on safe navigation through patches of rough weather – not as rough as the night before but definitely stuff that requires your attention. It was pretty rewarding. I dont know how many snowplow I passed with their warnings, “SNOWPLOW / FLYING SAND” mounted on the back with strobe lights flashing, and sparks flying where the plows scraped the pavement ahead of them.
Take it slow, but not too slow. At near white-out conditions, it is good when you can track the vehicle ahead of you, and keep an eye out that whoever is coming at you from the rear also knows that you are there.
At a truck stop I heard tell of a snow plow that got rear-ended by a semi. I later passed some orange service vehicle that was laying on its side next to the road. Plenty of cars were stuck where they had wiped out, and I saw at least two truck trailers on their sides.
Iowa came without fanfare. Now it is getting dark and the rain that was the eastern part of Nebraska is turning back to snow. I can drive with headlights and flashing hazards at my rear. Maybe it is time to relax a while and see if the weather abates before considering eastward progress through the night.
Mary asked me what about me had changed as a result of my trip around the world. You know how you look up at the stars of the Cosmos in a dark, country sky? And you think about the uncountable numbers of stars in the sky, light shining from millions of years in the past, and you just can’t get a grasp on it, so you let it slide? Well, now I see our humble little planet in that way, only I can’t let it slide.
Our own little human world is so big, and vast, just the human part! The part that speaks a thousand different languages, and lives anywhere from hunting in the forest to scavenging from Tokyo convenience stores. Walking, running, subways, minibuses, broken-down old cars, city buses, interurbans, shinkansen, airplanes, ferries, Porsches. Most people are very poor, and a few of us are quite wealthy, and the spread in between is such that it is nearly impossible for anyone near either end of the economic scale to understand the lifestyle of those opposite.
But unlike the vastness of the Cosmos, we can’t let the vastness of the human world slide. We are all human. None of us should be going without food, none of us should be unable to find a place to sleep at night, anyone of us should be able to be treated for medical problems.
We need to learn to communicate with each other … all these languages! We should each learn a few, make friends with people whose existence and culture are far away from our own. An American in the car suburbs of California ought to be able to dig the lifestyle of a Bushman, who ought to be able to dig the lifestyle of a service worker in Italy, who ought to be able to dig that a kid in Afghanistan balances selling newspapers on the streets to support his family with getting to school to realize his dream of literacy, and that kid ought to be able to chat with a technology worker in Tokyo.
And these days, the world just seems blurry to me. I walk around America digging it like it was another foreign country, even though it is also my home, the place where people share my cultural heritage and speak the same language, the place where I am most readily understood and understand without great difficulty. But I don’t know what I want. I’m floating along. A few years ago when I was floating along in the dot-com bubble, living large on the well-paid tech frontier, the idea was pretty clear: work hard, live life, get rich. Recently it has been seek work, get afloat, look forward to paying off debts.
But I still live life. I can’t go without my daily trip to a coffee shop to read the paper. And even if I’m poor I still tip better than most. You gotta have your Confucian rituals and personal code of honor. And even if I lose these bits of my lifestyle, there will be other things that I will find in my shrinking Universe to call my own, to mark my Self.
Work went pretty well today. Then I grabbed myself a haircut, at long last. I bought some soap, I called Rachel while walking down Green Street to check up on her.
And then I got an e-mail from dad.
We don’t communicate so well, so regularly. We have so much in common but we live different lives, far apart.
Grandma had surgery. They pulled out a tumor. But she has more. Six months left to what has been a long, healthy life, with three kids and four grandchildren. Dad’s coming through on his way from Colorado in early May. Maybe I can ride up to Michigan with him.
At first, I was glad that fate had brought me to the Midwest at this time. Then I thought of the scheduling challenges at the job. It is a decent job, but nothing I wouldn’t easily sacrifice if it came to that. The student employees peel away in May, and another full-timer is leaving next week to help her mom raise a new baby. I got frustrated and upset that now I finally have a job, I may have to screw the boss over.
But I know things will work out, one way or another. I’ve got to keep on surfing along the currents of fate in any case, its not like any of us have so much choice about the fundamental things of life anyway. We’ll all do what we have to.
I am not at all on my game today. I went to kick the tape robot, right? Then I check on the backups server to see if it can see everything, and it seems like it lost its SCSI capabilities. Huh? Reboot the server, and get kicked off IRC. Stupid Sysadmin brainfart! I was on the wrong server.
I hope maybe my brain comes back soon, I got work to do.
Yayoi’s been working at the cafe, which tends to mean she’s out for the evening. I love spending time with her but a little quiet time to myself is good for non-work geek productivity. I’m worried if maybe my brain has a finite capacity to function and I used it all up last night working on my WordPress Flickr plugin. You can see it taking shape. I am very excited about that. And, no, its not that my brain has finite capacity, its just that maybe its too busy being excited about other things. The least of those being PHP code. (more…)
I received three movies today. I purchased each one because I enjoyed them each a great deal. They are epic films–two are over three hours long–and they’re all movies I watched alone in Walnut Creek after Yayoi left last year. So, they have an extra layer of special to me. Looking back, I would say that long, dramatic historical epics are great “breakup movies” to watch alone while contemplating life. Or, well, they worked for me.
As memory serves, the first movie that I saw was “Lawrence of Arabia” in which an eccentric, talented, idealistic, and iconoclastic young man with blond hair and dreamy blue eyes gets mixed up in the Arab revolt against British colonial rule. When you meet him as a young man in an office in the middle of the desert somewhere, he is explaining to his companion, in the third person, how boring his current job is . . . he extinguishes a match against his hand, just because, and when his friend hurts himself copying the move, and wants to know the trick, Lawrence explains “the trick is not to be bothered by the pain.” The movie is about three and a half hours long, which is insane, but then so is the subject matter, and three and a half hours is not so long to find yourself lost in the mystery of Arabia. I believe I watched this movie twice, and my description doesn’t do it justice.
The next is “Doctor Zhivago”, that movie we’ve all heard about but none of us has ever watched. Well, I watched it. I don’t remember it as well as Lawrence, but I do remember that this was another epic 1960’s film in which you could get lost in the lead actor’s face, his eyes. You again have the impression of a remarkable man in remarkable times, and the three and a half hours is spent guiding the protagonist through the vagaries of the Russian Revolution and World War II, ending up in this enchantingly weird “ice palace” toward the end. I look forward to an occasion to re-watch this . . .
. . . the third film–and there’s a good chance that you have never heard of it–is Zhang Yimou’s “To Live” . . . at a modest two hours and thirteen minutes, you witness the story of a guy whose wife leaves him because he won’t stop gambling, and he gambles everything away, and then he’s drafted into the war to fight the Japanese, then he finds himself fighting the Communists, then he finds the Communists have pretty much won, he makes his way home, is rejoined by his wife, and it turns out that having lost his material wealth is a good start for Communism . . . the film just barely starts there, and you travel through another decade or two of their life together under the various kinks of Chinese rule. In that it is an epic that brings you through WWII and a Communist revolution, this movie is a lot like Zhivago, but more focused on action and narrative than on the character of the protagonist. I think it is more approachable.
And, more precious. It is out of print and the DVD was over $50 on the Amazon.com Marketplace!
I am thinking I will have to have friends over some nights for epic movie watchin’. If you happen to be interested in getting in on a viewing, let me know, right?
I was behind on packing and slow to get out the door, and just as I was ready to go I checked my mail and got the news that I had an obligation to be back in San Francisco on Monday, April 23! So much for a trip of liesure . . .
Anyway, I had recently gotten in touch with an old friend, who is now living in Long Beach, CA. She said I could stay on her couch, and I inquired if there was any gift I could bring her from San Francisco. She suggested that a Hobee’s coffeecake would be swell. Hobee’s is a breakfast chain in the south bay, and they tend to close at 3pm. I crossed the Bay Bridge and rode down 880, to drop by their East San Jose location, but the traffic turned nasty, and time was running short, so rather than delay I headed East on 580 when the chance came.
It was a breezy ride, as ever, down I-5, up over the hills, and into Long Beach. I tried to get in touch with my friend along the way, but her mobile kept answering “out of range” with no voicemail. Weird. I sent an e-mail . . . finally I arrived in Long Beach and found her place, embarrassed that I couldn’t get in touch beforehand. But, nobody was home.
Ah! What to do? I turned to Yelp Mobile and found a local bar, Joe Jost’s, where I was able to consider my options over a beer and a polish sausage. I had picked up some “discount hotel” booklets at a rest stop along the way, and found a place to crash near the beach. I then visited the rest room and got a call from my friend inquiring as to whether I was planning to visit . . .
. . . it turns out that the mobile number I had for her was an old old old mobile number from the last time she had lived in Long Beach. (She, like me, being one of those folks who has had several phones and area codes since the boom.) At any rate, I got the tour of her new place and spent a comfortable night on the couch.
I woke up early to move the car for street cleaning, then I joined my friend for breakfast at a local favorite restaurant of hers. I had no particular agenda for sight-seeing in Long Beach, though Lorah had said nice things about the Queen Mary. It just so happened that my friend has a shop on board the Queen Mary, so we spent the morning poking around the ship, and I discovered that my old-camera-that-had-been-lent-back-to-me-after-I-lost-my-newer-camera was just about completely dead. (Oh darn.)
Next, we visited the Korean Friendship Bell, a bronze bell in a beautifully-painted pagoda overlooking the Pacific, which Korea gave us for the Bicentennial. There is a youth hostel next door, which I would check out next time I may decide to visit Long Beach, if I did not already have accommodation. We drove further along the coast, visiting the Wayfarer’s Chapel, which is a beautiful glass church on the coast, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. We arrived during a wedding, as this is a very popular venue for weddings, so we couldn’t enter the chapel, and the lady at the visitor’s center advised that visits are best planned for odd hours–11am, 1pm, 3pm–since weddings are scheduled on even hours.
My original plan had been to take off in the evening and drive about four hours to Las Vegas, and crash at either of two youth hostels I had found online, or perhaps a hotel room, since accommodations are cheaper in Vegas during the week. But I changed my plans to join my friend for a late night of clubbing in Hollywood. Having no particular agenda and an evening to kill, we moseyed further along the coast, and my friend decided to give Santa Monica a shot. We found a parking spot near the beach, and noticed a movie theater. We were just in time to catch “The Namesake” which is a movie we had both wanted to see, and which we both enjoyed.
Afterwards we strolled along the beach, catching the sunset. We then embarked upon several hours of groovy carousing in the Southern California style.
Despite a mild hangover I managed to pull out of Long Beach fairly early, fortified by bananas, Odwalla, and later a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich and coffee along the way. I arrived in Vegas with the intention of at least having a late lunch on the strip. But I had absolutely no plan, and the place was crowded and confusing and hard to navigate. Nevertheless, I pressed on, found a parking spot at the MGM Grand, and after some fruitless wandering, found a buffet that might have been a good deal had my agenda not been merely to eat quick and hit the road.
I figured Friday the 13th must be a good time to at least say I gambled in Las Vegas. On my way out of the buffet I counted to 31 as I walked, and stopped at the slot machine nearest me. I puzzled over the thing a bit, inserted $20, pressed the button just over 100 times, ejected a receipt, and cashed that at the teller for $25.50. This made the buffet a better deal, in my mind, but the truth is that what I mostly lost in Vegas was driving time. Oh well.
I pushed North into Utah, making good time. Just after dark I stopped for gas in Elsimore, UT and inquired about local accommodations. The lady suggested a likely-cheap place the next town up the road. I was feeling pretty tired as I hadn’t slept much the night before, and the car has this disquieting habit where the AMP light will come on and the headlights start to flicker while driving downhill a long ways. I figured that if the car was to break down, I’d rather not deal with that in the mountains of Utah at night.
But, after a bit of relaxation at the gas station in Elsimore, a bit of coffee, a bit of chocolate . . . I took off down the road, feeling better. I wasn’t sure what I would do, but when the exit for the motel came up I kept on the highway, past the sign that promised no services for 100 miles, and into a few fairly uneventful hours of mountain driving. I missed out on what is probably some gorgeous scenery, but I managed to keep the car running safely through the night through the mountains, despite the flaky electrics. At one point I had to pee really bad so I pulled over and stepped off the highway, and was struck at the vast array of stars in the sky. That made the whole adventure worthwhile.
I pulled into the Lazy Lizard Hostel at Moab around 12:30. I felt bad about waking the guy up for a $9 dorm bed. He was way out of it and told me to just take any top bunk in a particular dorm room and we would figure things out in the morning. That I gladly did.
It was a rough night at the Lazy Lizard on a thin mattress with a thin pillow. I tossed and turned and just as I was getting my sleep on right my roommates began to stir in noisy ways so that they could get a start on the day’s rock climbing. Americans are not accustomed to the ways of youth hostels, and these guys loved to rifle through their luggage and tromp in and out, leaving the door open. I got up several times throughout the morning to shut the door. At one point I sat up awake waiting for one of the last guys to finish his noisy morning rituals and make his way out of the room. He greeted me and asked if I was a climber. When I told him no he expressed a sentiment that I was probably a nice person anyway, and he was gone, and I rested well a bit longer.
Probably around 0800 or 0900 I made my way out of bed, downstairs, apologized for waking the guy up in the middle of the night, and gave him $9.80 (tax, you see) and bathed. I packed up the car, looking forward to a breakfast in town, some hiking, and some scenic driving. I turned the key in the ignition and where the car usually makes a confident rumbling sound to get the engine purring I heard a click.
Click.
Click.
Huh.
The battery wasn’t dead, but perhaps it was weak. I got the cables out and bummed a jump off a fellow traveler. Nada. A bit longer? No.
Could be a bad battery. The hostel guy suggested the auto parts store was a twenty minute walk into town, and the maintenance guy might be going that way in a while and could give me a lift. I said I wanted a hike anyway, so I walked down the highway for not more than five minutes and bought a new battery. The battery was much larger than the one I purchased last year, but I figured bigger is better. The folks at the store lent me a crescent wrench to get the new battery swapped in.
I had thought to stow the battery in my backpack, but the battery was too large, and needed to be carried level, and besides it was heavy enough to possibly damage or destroy the backpack that has been my long-time companion around the world. I carried that sucker, taking breaks every hundred feet or so to switch arms . . . a guy was packing something in his pickup truck along the way and he offered a ride, which I politely declined . . . it is not that far. A bit farther and another guy offered another ride in his pickup truck. I accepted, and was dropped off in front of my car.
I extracted the old battery, stowing it on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat, and installed the new battery, all charged and ready and–click.
Click.
Click.
“Well, I took an auto shop class twenty years ago . . .” offered the hostel guy. He took a listen to the click. The starter solenoid goes click. Well, you could try replacing that . . .
I walked back down to the parts store and easily carried back a starter solenoid. More work with the wrench and nada. Dang.
So, I asked a couple from Oregon about the mechanic they were waiting to hear back from. They said the guy had been really busy and might not be able to figure out there car today and the woman had figured out Greyhound tickets so she wouldn’t have to miss work on Monday. Gee. I wandered down the road a bit to what looked like a service station where the guys were working on Jeeps. I explained my plight. The guys said they did Jeep rentals and only knew how to service their own fleet. The more mechanically-inclined fellow affirmed that yes, start with the battery, then the solenoid . . . he recalled that with Fords often if the current from the battery is too low then the solenoid wont send any current to the starter . . . anyway, there’s a really good mechanic a little ways down in a big yellow building, and in front of him is another mechanic who is also pretty good.
So, I wandered down the road. Both mechanics were closed. I sighed and wandered back towards the hostel, figuring that worst-case, Moab isn’t such a bad place and the hostel should be cozy for a few days. I badly needed coffee and so stopped by the roadside espresso stand just a little ways down from the hostel. The guy working in the stand was friendly and asked how everything was. I replied that things were good overall, but I had to figure out my car problem. He suggested another guy that might be helpful just a few doors the other side of the hostel, and explained what he called “an old redneck trick” of climbing under the car and shorting the terminals on the starter to get a car started. That sounded worth a try, maybe. He didn’t know if his friend would be open, but he might be. He gave the guy a call and left a message, “but that doesn’t mean he’s closed.” My coffee was on the house.
I walked over there and the guy looked pretty closed, which was easy for me to accept, the kindness of the guy at the espresso stand had buoyed my spirits. I wandered back to the car, and poked around a bit. The wires coming off the negative terminal have always been a bit gnarly, so I cleaned them up a bit and gave the ignition another try and the beast started!
So, I rolled down to the auto parts store and waited a decent while to return the old battery. (I figured the big new battery a worthwhile investment, anyway.) While I was waiting I ended up talking to this other guy about the various symptoms–for example, the alternator light was on as I left the car idling. He suggested I hit it with a piece of wood and see if it started to whine. I banged the alternator with something and yes, it started to whine and the light went out. “That doesn’t mean its bad,” something about setting it to a known state because the indicator light needed a baseline or something. After we had concluded our respective business he had me follow him over to his shop, where he hooked the alternator up to a load tester, which verified that things looked good.
Well . . . I had missed my opportunity for a hike, but I could still have a meal and a scenic drive to Silverton. I popped into the Moab Diner with my maps to consider my itinerary options over a meal. The hostess assured me that a waitress would be right with me. I pored through maps and double-checked calculations, pondering some alternates . . . everything looked good and nobody had yet taken my order. I put my maps away, looked around. I tried making eye-contact with a few waitresses but they all seemed harried and uninterested. I calculated how much time I would need to order and eat and get out of there in order to make it to Silverton before sunset. I figured 3:45 would be my “drop dead” time and five minutes of being ignored later, I finished my ice water and headed out of town, stopping at the espresso stand, where a lady was now working, left a generous tip, and drove off into some beautiful beautiful breathtaking wonderful beautiful scenery. With my failing camera. That’s okay: some things are for my own eyes.
It was a good trip down UT-46, which became CO-90, but no gas along the way until I stopped at Naturita. There I found a green dinosaur logo and stopped at an old-school pump at a Sinclair station. The station was with the convenience store, and I asked the lady at the cash register is $3.05 per gallon was expensive by Colorado standards, and she explained that she hadn’t been beyond the neighboring town since Christmas, so she had no idea. Cool!
I pushed on and down US-550 South from Ouray, where I calculated I had enough time to make Silverton before dark . . . and I drove up, past signs advising of curvy roads, avalanche zones, and speed limits between 10 and 30 MPH much of the way. Up and up twists and turns and curves and well-plowed snow and ice, and freezing water streaming across the road way. Occasional wild animals and oncoming cars, nobody passed me and I passed nobody. Much of the time it was me, the car, and a blue-gray sky going on twilight. Where the scenery of the afternoon had been beautiful, the scenery of early evening was transcendent. It felt very much as if I had drove clear up into some special realm where we mortals are allowed to tread only in times of fair weather, and with great caution. My experience of the road between Ouray and Silverton was this: sublime.
I pulled in to Silverton, which looks every bit an old west mining town with very broad streets. There was snow piled along the streets, and it was nice to be visiting with a proper Winter. I couldn’t figure out the street signs but managed to find the Silverton Inn and Hostel without much trouble. I parked in front, walked right in, studied the notes left to would-be visitors explaining guest cards and rates, toured the available rooms, picked a bed, filled out a card, and took a key. I stopped down the corner where the guy admitted he would have been closed an hour ago, but that he would “make hay” and although he was out of most of his toppings he managed to make for me a delicious pizza, which I enjoyed in the company of his other customers, whose primary interest was skiing. There was further discussion of the guy’s need to sell the property we were on, which included not only the cafe we were enjoying but the energy-efficient house he had built behind it, because he was moving to New Mexico. I then dropped by the bar one block over, and for two or three dollars enjoyed good beer in the presence of a colorful cast of relaxing locals.
I turned in early and slept a good, solid, comfortable Winter sleep on a firm $20 bunk.
I wanted to get down to Durango, about an hour away, in enough time to catch the day’s scenic excursion ride to Silverton and back on the Durango and Silverton Railroad, before pushing on to arrive in Pueblo. I took a nice hot shower, then packed and loaded up the car. I was concerned at the ice on the windshield, and I without a scraper, but that concern was backburnered because the car didn’t start.
Awww crap.
I figured I’d revisit the problem after I had grabbed a cup of mind-enhancing coffee.
I grabbed my travel mug and headed toward the cafe where I had dined on pizza last night, and encountered a lady who explained that that guy usually opens around noon. I walked over to the main street and up a couple blocks and grabbed some coffee and a muffin at a bustling shop full of snowboarder duuudes.
I hustled back to the car, and the same lady from earlier passed by, and I asked about mechanics. There were a couple in town, but they were closed today. You could knock at their house, and they might help, but it is probably better to let them alone. I agreed that I like to have my weekends off, too, and as much as I’d like to spend the evening with the family in Pueblo, I figured that I could get a lot of reading done and rest easily another night in this quiet little mountain town. Maybe I could track down the train station and welcome the steam train as it arrived in this old snowy mountain town, which could be a lot of fun even if I didn’t get to ride.
All the same, I fiddled with the wires some more, but I couldn’t do much without even the most basic tools, so I wandered toward the highway were there looked to be gas stations, where I might find a brief diversion, and possibly even something useful.
I found someone useful. The guy at the Citgo admitted that this was the first weekend of the season that they were open for weekend service, but that he wasn’t a real mechanic, just the weekend warrior. (The owner / mechanic’s son, it turns out.) He said he had a few ideas that might help, but that he’d have to close the shop for a few minutes . . . I wandered back to the car and a bit later he pulled up to the hostel, cleaned up my ugly battery wires, noting that the one terminal had been overtightened and cracked, so let’s put on a new one . . . explaining that you only have to tighten the terminal to the point where it doesn’t move on the post . . . doesn’t start? Okay, so, you did the right by the battery, and the solenoid, so yeah, its looking like a bad starter.
Sure, he could order a new starter and get it replaced during the week, but in this situation, sometimes you could tap the starter a few times with a hammer, and then he crawled under the car on the muddy street, found the starter motor, tapped, got out of the way, and I successfully started the car. He explained where the starter is, and that it looks like a cylinder, and in my case, a very rusty cylinder, and that I could tap it myself if I had to, but that at this point, the starter is likely about to fail completely . . . it might work fine, the tapping trick might work a few more times, but most likely I’ve got just a few more starts, if any, before the thing fails completely and leaves me stranded somewhere. We figured that I might as well keep the engine running and get to Pueblo as soon as possible, where the starter could be replaced under favorable conditions. He reminded me that you don’t actually have to stop the engine to fill the tank . . .
I beamed as he modestly basked for just the briefest moment in heroic glory. I got the sense that he might be most content to account the incident as a good deed, and waited just a moment more before I inquired as to whether and how much cash he should charge for his time. He figured about fifteen or twenty dollars. He then, as I figure it, very quickly considered my circumstances versus my poverty . . . computer guy from San Francisco . . . not working . . . going to see Dad . . . nice old clunker . . . is going to need a starter . . . stayed at the youth hostel . . . and set the charge at $15.
I headed down the road, and there was still a chance I could make Durango in time to catch the train, maybe, and I thought over whether it would be worth the risk if I could, and concluding that yes, if I made Durango in good time I would risk stopping the car if I got to ride the train, because even if I got stuck, I would have had a good time for my trouble.
At any rate, I was still on the highway at 10:00, when the train was set to leave. Several minutes later I noticed some smoke on the horizon . . . I slowed down and listened out the window . . . yes, that was the train coming toward me, parallel to the highway!
You know I pulled over to the shoulder and managed to squeeze some pictures out of my dying old camera! And these were the last pictures I ever took with this camera, which has since refused to work at all.
My last camera, a Canon S100, died at around the same time as Grandma Howard, so I gifted the-camera-I’d-taken-round-the-world to my Grandma to take with her in her coffin to her next life, which makes me inclined to see changing-cameras as epochal. It had been a weird twist of fate to have been in the Midwest at that time, which allowed me to visit her in the hospital just before she entered hospice, and which allowed me to drive back up to Michigan for her funeral not long after. I was pretty broke that summer, working in the cafe in Champaign, and it wasn’t until I was back at Mom’s house and living on Unemployment Insurance that I dared to buy my Canon S400, which I badly wanted for a trip that Yayoi arranged for us: we drove together in my car to Boston so she could check out a job fair. That was the first road trip that I took with a woman who, when I returned to professional work, I invited to live with me. Later, we would marry, move to California, and become separated. I took a third professional job in San Francisco during the divorce process, and shortly after the divorce concluded, so did my most recent job.
So, you will pardon me if I read extra significance into these last photographs and bust into personal metaphor; As the day began, the trip to Durango looked unlikely, but with some outside help, I was pleasantly surprised to be on the way. I was warned that stopping to catch this train was risky, but I decided to take the chance and try for the ride. It proved to be a long shot, and I ultimately missed the full experience, but I am glad I made the effort, because I got close enough to be reminded of my own love for what I had pursued. I don’t regret the near miss, and I know better than to blame anyone. What I do know is that I really dig trains, and that at the next appropriate opportunity, it will be my privilege to buy a ticket, hop into the cab, and work to keep the fire stoked for a prolonged ride through beautiful country. (And until then, I will work for a better understanding of the whole darn thing, to avoid or at least tackle nasty surprises on the next trip.)
So, I rolled through Durango without stopping, and turned East onto US-160. Since I hadn’t stopped to ride the train, I was ahead of time, and perhaps the natural beauty of the mountains on my final leg was further enhanced by mid-day light, as well as my own hunger from not stopping for food, and my eagerness to pull into Pueblo sooner-than-expected, to see Dad and Gwen. That was a good ride, and a homecoming that did us all some good.
“Angry monkeys turn on their cruel trainer and beat him senseless with his own stick after he handed out a vicious beating to one of the trio during a performance riding mini bicycles in a market in Sizhou, China”
Picture: EUROPICS[CEN] (Via: Telegraph.co.uk)
The times, they are a changin’. Huzzah!
Update: Additional photos and story at The Sun. Even more, smaller photos at Mirror.co.uk.
It has been a pretty busy day at work. In between bouts of business I entertain myself with various baubles like mailing lists. Someone made a statement I found utterly hilarious, that in the context of current events:
“I think it would be politically possible to return to a gold standard.”
I responded that:
“I think a carbon tax would be more relevant to the concerns of the 21st Century.”
To which some else responded:
“Our currency and economy are broken, and the solution is to tax use of fossil fuels, biggest source of productivity the world has ever seen!”
And I though yeah . . . it is hard to advocate an idea like a new “tax” during a recession. Personally, I think calling it a “carbon ration” might be smarter: you get your allotment and if you make good lifestyle choices you can sell your excess at a profit. Anyway, I responded from the basis of an idea I heard at TED last week:
Over a century ago we swore up and down that without the cheap energy afforded by black slaves the national economy would collapse. So, instead of abolishing slavery we made compromise after compromise. Ultimately our nation was plunged into the catastrophe of civil war, and we abolished slavery for International PR reasons and in order to literally free up fresh soldiers for the war effort from among the newly-emancipated populations.
These days we swear up and down that without access to unlimited cheap energy, our economy would collapse and we would be unable to enjoy the “quality” of life we do now. And as each decade passes we find greater and greater evidence that we are living on borrowed time, and that we are multiplying the problem of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and that we are approaching various global tipping points which bring us closer to catastrophe.
In both cases, abolitionists and environmentalists are ridiculed and despised an know-it-all killjoys out to ruin everyone’s fun. Where the abolitionists had printing presses that would literally be burned down by their detractors, modern radicals warm themselves with flame wars on the Internet.
To go back to your glib response to a carbon tax, it is easier to make radical changes when it is clear that the status quo is broken. A big reason for the present crisis is that we were fueling growth on unsustainable credit models. Debt Debt Debt. Injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a form of debt against the future, and if we go bankrupt with climate that’s really really not pretty. So, we have a good opportunity to look at how we structure the free market to take natural resources like the atmosphere into account, and price them appropriately so that we can realize economic benefit with the greatest efficiency.
Maybe one way to think of the idea of carbon rationing is that it is like Social Security for the environment: we each make a sacrifice now so as to secure against a future characterized by poverty. In this case the poverty would be a world wrecked by sudden catastrophic climate changes.
This time I am in a moving truck toting possessions of me and my lady to our new place in New York city, where we intend to live for one year for her work. She’s already out there, so it is just me, a 16′ Budget truck rental, and some $3 wifi access at a Motel 6. Hot diggity!
I have made this trek before, with and without my worldly possessions. This time through I own a crazy smart phone which is recording the trip via GPS, and I can upload progress to Google Maps, for all my friends and evil stalkers to see. I can send you a link: just shoot me an e-mail.
I am very happy with the Budget truck. It is a no-frills affair: the radio is just a radio. It has two power ports. I could gripe that it doesn’t have cruise control, but that might actually be a “feature” to keep the fool at the wheel alert. Best of all, it is a Ford, so I already know the dashboard!
This Motel 6 isn’t shabby either. I inquired at a casino just down the road, figuring room rates would be subsidized by gambling, but no. The Motel 6 is less than half the price and has all I need: a decent bed, toilet, shower, air conditioning, a desk and Internet access! (Oh and a TV.) They claim the lowest rates of any national chain, so I’ll have to research what they have down the road.
Ah yes, and as for work: I have received permission to work remote for my San Jose-based employer. As for my old apartment, which I love, a friend fell in love with the place and signed a lease. I left some furniture behind and some e-waste which I have to sweet-talk her into toting downstairs on a weekday, where San Francisco will collect it for free. Another blessing was the help of a trio of college friends who helped load the truck. I treated them to pizza and beers afterwards and we reveled in the pending home ownership of two of our friends. While this recession is hurting many folks, others who have been priced out of the housing market are finding their prudent patience rewarded.
Time to settle in for the evening so I can get on the road good and early tomorrow. The Motel 6 charges $3 for the wifi access, which is just the perfect price for a guy who’d like to kill an hour before bed!
