Archive for August, 2009

Sunday, 2009-08-09, Austin, Texas

Miles: 2,191

I always think it funny when I meet Europeans who exclaim “oh, I love San Francisco! It feels almost like a European city” I’ve heard this or equivalent many times and I like San Francisco too, for many of the same reasons. But the irony cannot be ignored.

As a Northern Californian, a Berkeleyite, even, I feel a little guilty of the very same sort of offense in coming to Austin and, not surprisingly, liking it. Why even come to Texas, if I’m pretty much just going to its liberal, college town capital? Well. While the Texas countryside offers plenty of good countryside type things, I’ve never once in my life heard anyone recommend another Texan city as a place worth visiting. No one’s ever spoken to me of a lovely weekend in Houston, or a nice time in Dallas (Debbie, perhaps, excepted). My impression of Texan cities is one of suburban sprawl, and man have I seen that before.

::fuzzpic-right(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_8009.jpg”,”Austin.”)::A day and a half here and I’m happy to say that Austin is anyway no Berkeley whatsoever. It is certainly liberal, but it is a state capital of 700,000 unto itself. Berkeley is a 100,000 strong fairly homogeneous section of a much larger metropolis. In Austin the conspicuous liberalness is more tempered and the weirdness, as I’ve so briefly seen it, much less conceited.

Austin also has its own suburban sprawl; I’ve stayed my two nights here actually about 15 miles North of the city center. I’ve been staying with an awesome Couchsurfing host named Ben. I first met up with him and a decent gaggle of the local Couchsurfing community at a little swimming hole west of Austin called Krause Springs. I spent the previous night in the town of Kerrville with my brother-in-law Erick’s parents, so the springs were more or less on the way to Austin. We all spent the entire afternoon swimming there and it was lovely. The springs are privately owned, but they charge only five dollars and just make everyone sign a waiver before letting them jump off of just about anything into the water. I’d learned my lesson about jumping, back on the Kern River, but had to give the rope swing a go. This was not too physically damaging, but my ego suffered slightly when my performance came nowhere near the grace of the various six and seven year olds swinging away. There’s a lot of force on that upswing and my left arm just couldn’t quite manage.

::fuzzpic-left(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7994.jpg”,”Sixth Street on Saturday night, keeping Austin weird.”)::We witnessed a bit of Austin’s deservedly famous nightlife then turned in. The following day Ben took me around to see some sites. The highlight was without question the Catherdral of Junk. Down a quiet residential street South of downtown in a large backyard stands this monumental structure of concrete tiled with such unlikely things as action figures and long-distance calling rate placards reinforced with the most impressive latticework of welded together junk. The structure is composed of no less then 800 bicycles, the pieces of several cars and trucks, a number of refrigerators and bed-frames, and ever so much more. It is decorated with a polychromatic explosion of post-consumer treasure in every shape and size.

::fuzzpic-left(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_8029.jpg”,”In the cathdral.”)::This unlikely feat of artsy, pack-rat engineering contains passage ways between several towers, the highest of which climbs nearly three stories – well above the artist’s modest (but brightly painted) home. The artist/sculptor/architect of the Cathedral, Vince Hannemann, told us he had no training in engineering when we engaged him in conversation (after catching him chasing an unruly dog out the side-door). Nevertheless, the structure is surprisingly stable. But, then again, not quite stable enough that, at the moment Ben and his friend Mike decided to start jumping in unison at the Cathedral’s pinnacle, all I could really think about was how it was probably a very good thing that the Texas Hill Counry isn’t prone to earthquakes.
::fuzzpic-right(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_8049.jpg”,”One of the stable-enough towers.”)::

After the Cathedral of Junk we proceeded to the State Capitol building which, refreshingly, is just open. I don’t quite know if it’s a Lone Star pride thing, or just a peculiar kind of easy-goingness, but the doors are just unlocked. There is a small sign about being subject to search, but the are no metal detectors or x-ray machines. The only guards I could see were two state troopers in fitted cowboy hats chatting idly next to the elevators. ::fuzzpic-left(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_8055.jpg”,”Taller in Texas.”)::Of course the offices were generally closed – it was a Sunday – and the actual desks of the legislature roped off, but aside from that I, and the other late-afternoon tourists, could roam free through the halls. Notable, the cupola of the capitol is shaped like the White House, but very purposefully 14 feet taller. ::fuzzpic-right(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_8061.jpg”,”Austin.”)::In a similar vein, the state flag flies at the same height as the Stars and Stripes – the only state in the Union where this is the case, to my knowledge.

While we were in the capitol a sizable thunder shower unleashed itself on the city, and when we left the building the humidity had notched up just about all the way. This was striking because, just two hours west in Kerrville, it was very arid and, reportedly, hadn’t rained in months. ::fuzzpic-left(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_8103.jpg”,”Austin cools off and the bats fly into the night.”)::On top of this, they had reached triple digit temperatures everyday for nearly sixty days, or so I was told. On a New Mexico station, somewhere near the state line, a jewelry company was promising that your wedding ring would be free if it rains two inches or more on your wedding day.

Friday, 2009-08-07, Kerrville, Texas

Miles: 1967 Gas bill: 149.27

I’ve always wondered how well thought-out speed limits are. Clearly the point of a speed limit is safety. So what, then, is the point of building roads on which it is considered safe to travel at higher speeds, and how do we determine just what ‘safe’ is? The social and economic benefits of driving fast are clear; time to market is not just important for perishable agricultural goods – the ability to reduce stockpiling and quickly respond to changes in demand is a big deal. Socially, a high level of mobility is good for integrating dispersed areas, opening labor markets, etc. etc. Anyone who has traveled in Asia and compared the road systems in India with those of South Korea or Japan, or even just seen the immediate and obvious effects of China’s recent frenzy of expressway-building, will surely have a very concrete understanding of what driving fast can do for a society.

With this in mind, a rational society might decide that its goal should be to maximize the social and economic benefits of fast roads while minimizing the costs of danger. Quantifying both would be difficult, but not impossible, surely. This is, however, not done I am sure. Not only are speed limits fairly arbitrarily set state-by-state, but as anyone who as driven around this great county can attest, the observed speed limit and the posted speed limit are entirely different things according to local culture. Just compare Interstate 5 in rural Oregon versus Los Angeles. Out in Oregon, the speed limit can be posted as 75 and people will be driving 55 and just taking their sweet time thinking about trees and rain, or whatever it is people in Oregon think about. In Los Angeles, in those rare moments that there is no traffic, the posted 65 is completely meaningless, the flow of traffic is 85 at the very least. Go slower and evoke the wrath of Angelinos who aren’t even in a rush, but instead are just offended at the idea of not driving fast when you get a chance.

Amid all this arbitrariness, there are times that, I suspect, speed limits are quite intentionally set. And that is when you hit a little rural town off a highway and the speed drops in about ten 5 mph hour gradations, because each sign is another zone to get you. And I really do wonder, for many rural towns, just how much of the local police department’s budget comes form speeding tickets.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this discussion is instigated by my having gotten a speeding ticket. It was 20 miles or so into New Mexico on Interstate 10 and, apparently, they like to lower the speed limit from 75 to 65 for a mile or two around major junctions. This phenomenon is new to me and I sure did not notice any signs. But I do not doubt to coincidence of the sheriff waiting at the first junction into the state, ready to raise $86 for his county.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009, Los Angeles, CA

Miles: 498

I hadn’t even finished my Nalgene of lukewarm cowboy coffee and Whisper was already shooting ground squirrels. He got the first one, on the first try, and managed to scare off the rest. Whisper is some kind of groundskeeper on the little piece of private property right beneath Lake Isabella Dam, sandwiched between the Kern River and a ranger station where we were camping. He wears a filthy, over-sized T-shirt from a from a bait and tackle store in Gardena and undersized black shorts that are normally hidden by the way that shirt overhangs his impressive belly. He uses a big neck brace but doesn’t let it get in the way of hoeing the garden or even, well, shooting squirrels. He has the same accent as my grandmother and talks too much about Vietnam.

“Where are you from, Whisper?” I asked him.

“From the cold reaches of Pennsylvania.”

“Oh? Where are the cold reaches of Pennsylvania?”(So I know what to avoid, of course.)

“Well there are two.” Pause. “If you cut the state into six equal squares the long way, the first is a big anthracite deposit in the top middle square. That’s where I’m from. The second is down in the…”

Oh. Coal regions. He kept going and I stopped listening.

After six months of very little excitement, a weekend of rafting can be a bit much. With my bruised back, scraped belly, squished foot, and sun burnt knees, I decided Monday morning was clearly for reading by the river while Aaron and the other truly hardy river rats went back for more. After lunch I set off for Los Angeles.

I’d determined to head over the mountains and through the desert as best as I could. I had no plans until dinner time, all my friends were at work, and I’ve driven through the Central Valley once or twice before. I thought I’d seen a road shooting due south over the mountains from Lake Isabella, and set off to find it. After the town of Bodfish I ended up on a one-and-a-half lane road, without even a yellow stripe, that quickly hair-pinned out of the canyon. I didn’t see any signs and, oddly, my schmancy new GPS didn’t seem to know there was a road here. The route, which I now know to be Bodfish Caliente Road, came down into another valley and I couldn’t imagine a more perfect Old West picture. Hemmed in by steep scrubby dark brown canyon walls leading into lighter-shaded rocky mountain sides a few ranches hugged the shady arboreal margin between the road and a small creek.::fuzzpic-left(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7845.jpg”,”Imagining myself an intrepid explorer.”)::

I got further and further away from any roads known to the GPS. Disappointment in technology mixed with a certain feeling of adventurousness. What if the road just ends at the locked gate of some dusty cattle ranch, deer skulls lashed to the posts and a leathery old man pointing a shotgun at me? What if! Yeah, I don’t care! I’m hard core!

The road did not dead-end. It connected to other roads, as most roads do. The landscape got drier, the roads steeper, and the GPS still didn’t know about them. Finally it showed HWY 58 where the road I’d been following ended soon ended.::fuzzpic-right(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7848.jpg”,”Winding over mountains.”):: I took 58 to Tehachape and, to avoid HWY 14, which I’ve driven plenty of times as well, I went over a ridge of about a million giant windmills and took a hypotenuse across the flat Mojave plain. This led me to what always seemed to me the world’s most unlikely exurbs of Palmdale and Lancaster. The GPS knew some of the roads here, but yet perplexingly few. I got a couple miles from 14 and finally saw another road taking me South-East back into the mountains and through the Angeles National Forest. This was another beautiful windy road through steep desert canyons but it ended, startlingly with a sign saying “Welcome to Santa Clarita”. This was followed, with no transition whatsoever, by the immediate explosion of the unremarkable hustle and bustle of the northernmost reaches of the Los Angeles megalopolis.

Even most of the streets in Santa Clarita weren’t known to the GPS and that’s when it hit me: I’d been messing around with some third-party maps my dad had downloaded and in the process failed to re-enable the original Garmin North America map file! I hadn’t noticed immediately because the thing apparently always minimally knows the major highways, which is all I’d been driving on. So much for the adventurous explorer. So much for hardcore.

I made it to L.A. a little early and went and got some coffee and checked my email… and… I’m famous in Ireland!

::fuzzpic-left(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7855.jpg”,”It was Katie’s birthday. Good timing, me.”)::The rest of my time in L.A. has been fairly uneventful. I shared an Ethiopian birthday dinner, went to a cute little bar, slept on a couch, sat in traffic, went running on what used to be my favorite trail in the Santa Monica mountains, got really dangerously dehydrated, sat in traffic some more, got some dinner, went to a Shark Week party with Noah and David Blue wearing a life guard shirt and ketchup on my face while Dave chased me with a card board fin duct taped to his back.::fuzzpic-right(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7863.jpg”,”Shark party. Duh.”)::

Maybe today I’ll get to Eastern Arizona or Western New Mexico. I’m going to try to track down some hot springs to camp at tonight. I won’t pretend to get myself lost; I’ve turned the detailed map back on.

Sunday, August 12, 2009, Lake Isabella, CA

Miles: 318, Gas bill: $32.12

I did three back flips into the river today. After more than five months of worrying about my ever-broken arm, that was very satisfying. It is my natural instinct to climb up onto, hang over, and jump off of just about whatever interesting structures come my way. Five months is a very long time to watch other people acting a fool from the sidelines, always saying “if only I was whole again…”

I got my last set of x-rays about two weeks ago. I’ve been going no-copay to the county hospital thanks to the generosity of the tax payers of Alameda County and my ability to convince them that I was, indeed, unemployed. I was prepared for another all-day wait; being that a large number of patients never show up, the hospital purposefully overbooks every single day. By the laws of randomness this can sometimes end very poorly. The only redeeming thing about Oakland’s Highland General Hospital’s over-crowded waiting rooms is the multilingualism, but only if you can hear it over the din of the multiple televisions synchronized to KTVU 2, the Bay Area’s local Fox affiliate and, as far as I can tell, home of the most cringingly infuriating day time talk shows about apparent celebrities of whom I’ve never once heard. Of course you can’t leave the room, or listen to your music too loudly, for fear that you’ll miss the brief mispronunciation of your name that signals your one and only chance of being seen by the doctor that day. (Seriously though, S-K-O-R-Y has only five letters! There’s no second K, there are no T’s or A’s or anything else. How can it be so hard?!)

The worst day took six hours, but this last time I was out in three, including a trip to radiology.

“Your healed,” the doctor told me, looking at my x-rays on the computer screen.

“But there’s still a gap on one side!” I said. The left edge of the fracture had clearly not filled in, leaving a couple millimeter gap.

“Ah, that’ll be there forever. It’s plenty strong anyway.”

“So I can exercise again and everything?” I ask.

“Oh sure!”

“I can even lift weights?”

“Heh” he chuckles with not a little bit of skepticism in his tone, “you can try.” After a pause, “those pins in your elbow are probably going to get in your way, even if you get your strength back.”

“Oh! I wanted to talk to you about that. One of the pins is coming out on its own.” And it was. Seriously.

“Hmm..” the doctor takes a look as I bend my elbow at him akwardly, “well, they do that sometimes. But no one’s going to want to take that out for another three months at least. We just don’t want to mess around in there yet.”

The resident, sitting at the next computer terminal chimes in, “sometimes a pin will even break skin before it’s ready to come out!”

“And you just leave it in anyway?”

“Yeah. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen to you.”

Yeah buddy, no kidding.

::fuzzpic-left(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7801.jpg”,”Camping right under the dam.”)::I immediately started trying to exercise again, really light weight stuff. It felt great and took effort to keep it light and go slow. Two weeks later and I still can’t do a push-up, so I was pretty apprehensive about a weekend of whitewater rafting. The doctor had said that “it would take a serious trauma to beak that bone,” which I took to mean “if you do something that will break a bone, you’ll break that bone.” So I wasn’t too concerned about a re-fracture, but I was worried about being able to pull my own weight with the paddling. I’m happy to report that a system can be found for anything, including how to lever a paddle and row just fine with one’s body movement and one strong arm. In fact, in a weekend with not a few mishaps, including our raft flipping and the lot of us getting dumped into the water, the only time my left arm hurt was jumping off a 20 foot rock only to realize very quickly that the impact would not treat my elbow too nicely. The feeling of bumping one of these pins protruding from my elbow I can only describe as very similar to hitting your funny bone, only smacking really hard into the inside of the lining of your funny bone. Needless to say, I did not again jump off that rock.

::fuzzpic-right(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7811.jpg”,”Our infallible inflatable chariots.”)::This rafting trip has by the graces of Canyon R.E.O., the Flagstaff-based river (R) equipment (E) outfitters (O) for whom my good friend Aaron Elliot has been working. They have an annual company trip, and friends are welcome. The timing and location couldn’t possibly have been more perfect. The Kern River Canyon rises out of the Central Valley immediately East of Bakersfield, and presents hardly a detour on the way to L.A. I’ve driven down the canyon a couple times, twice now as the first possible Westward crossing in the several hundred mile detour necessitated by the closing of all the snow-covered roads North out of the Eastern Sierra. It’s simply a gorgeous drive, and no matter how week my arm, I had to take the chance to finally go down the canyon by river.

::fuzzpic-right(“Orientation/thumbnails/IMG_7813.jpg”,”Sun sets over the Kern River.”)::The timing couldn’t have been better. The random classes I was taking at community college to pass time just ended on Thursday, and I was planning to leave this weekend anyway, first stopping in L.A. then continuing to take a Southern route to Pennsylvania. Why a Southern route? My car doesn’t have air conditioning, I like to sweat, and I have never been to Texas.

Oh, and the road trip is ‘cause I’m moving to Pittsburgh.