added lastest entries

1 files changed, 206 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt
index 771c2d6..312a154 100644
--- a/scratch.txt
+++ b/scratch.txt
@@ -232,9 +232,31 @@ People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun.
 
 # Stories to Tell
 
-## Leaving Washburn
+## Before The Motor Laws
 
-Sailing, blueberry season. packing up. putting the exhaust back on. wash and wax. 
+After last summer's sprint north, we swore we'd never try to move that fast again, and we're not. We said goodbye to our friends, and to Lake Superior, and then we meandered south, down from Copper Harbor, taking our time, driving a day, exploring for a day, and then on again. It was a nice mix of the road and relaxation with no need to be anywhere beyond escaping the weather.
+
+We took a week to slowly working our way down out of the UP, along Lake Michigan, across the Mackinac Bridge and down into The Mitten. We hugged the shores of Lake Huron, one of the Lakes we've visited the least.
+
+Every other time we've left Lake Superior we've gone west, out into the Dakotas. Once through South Dakota, and last year through North Dakota. This year we're headed the opposite way, east and then south. 
+
+When you head west out of northern Wisconsin the notable change is that the trees fall away. After a day of driving you're out of the boreal forests and into the vast nothingness of the plains. What doesn't change is the way people live. Going west, while the landscape changes, you remain in remote, rural areas. 
+
+Going east is roughly the opposite. The trees never stop, but over the days we slowly emerged from the rural world we spend most of our time in to the suburban, to, eventually, the city of Detroit. The boreal forest does fade and give way to a much more mixed hardwood forest, but what's much more noticeable is how you slowly return to... not so much civilization -- that's nearly everywhere -- but modernity, which, from my point of view, driving, is most notably, the world of people in a hurry. 
+
+
+
+
+Though we slowed down there was still a lot of driving, and it was an interesting route.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Electric cars are limited to a city for the most part. I don't think this is a design flaw. I think this is a design intent. Kill the ability to take to the open road and you kill the myth of the open road and the myth of the open road is the quintenssential myth of america. It is, I would argue, the entire idea on which america was founded, long before the road was paved or had cars on it. The electric car is designed to castrate that idea and the current reality along with it.
+
+f the urban operating system is going to happen, as the WEf and all the smart city avocates believe, I want to throw my lot in with the free softwareists -- the drivers.
 
 ## Car Show Post
 
@@ -436,6 +458,188 @@ https://www.vagabondjourney.com/you-cant-get-lost-anymore/
 
 # jrnl
 
+## Copper Harbor
+
+After getting [kicked out of our site in McLain State Park](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/09/stop-breaking-down) we weren't thrilled at the prospect of more time in a Michigan State Park, but there's not really anything else in Copper Harbor. We pulled in around 3 and asked for a site. The woman at this check-in station was very nice and told me to drive around and pick what site I wanted. 
+
+We did that, but by the time we got back there were other people already booking some of the sites we'd been told were open, which I guess makes sense, but it's a crazy way to do things. No one had taken the site we wanted, but I made a joke about putting someone in a choke hold to make sure they didn't take my site and she said, "oh, we have fights in the office sometimes." I see. Well, there you go. Note to self: JuiJitsu is never not useful.
+
+We managed to get a site without any violence, which was nice. We also booked it up for a few days so no one would steal it out from under us. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_082623_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3667" class="picwide" />
+
+Copper Harbor is a place that remains mostly beyond the reach of the world. It's like [Ocracoke](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/05/ocracoke-beaches), [Apalachicola](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2013/05/all-the-pretty-beaches), [Patrick's Point](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/pacific), [Edisto](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2020/01/walking), and other places I've [never named](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/08/canyoneering). They are not off the map -- that's not possible any more -- but they are at the edges, far enough outside the lines to be mostly ignored, visited like shrines by devotees. 
+
+These are worlds where cell phone service is spotty to non-existent and the people who live in them interact more, it seems to me, with the world around them. They are more present, more connected to the people around them than other places.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-20_140714_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3665" class="picwide caption" />
+
+This is my best guess. I don't live in any of them, but after spending months in several I would say that one characteristic they all share is some kind of external hardship that unites the people living there. Up here that's snow. Ocracoke and Apalachicola have storms, for others it's the sheer remoteness of life that bring people together. When the nearest store is hours away, when the nearest hospital is probably too far to help, the nearest services don't really serve you, you have to band together to get by, you share, you help others out, they help you. The way the world has been since the beginning of time -- until the last 50 years anyway, when the [outside expert](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) arrived to tell people they were doing it wrong. Look where that got us. We need to get back to the way of Ocracoke, the way of Apalachicola, the way of Copper Harbor.
+
+All that said, I also think that much of what saves these places from the ills of modernity has to do with size. It might be that this kind of culture can't scale beyond a certain size.There are certain things you can't do if you live here. You can't put your headphones on and ignore the world when the world consists of only a few hundred people. Humans haven't regressed that much yet, thankfully. 
+
+To be clear, I have no romantic notions about small town living. Small towns can be really awful if you want to buck the trends of the town. My favorite example of this is from the 1820s, when Transcendentalist Joseph Palmer -- who was considered eccentric because he dared to grow a beard -- was mobbed by his New England neighbors who tried to shave him in the street. He was then thrown in jail for defending himself, being charged with "unprovoked assault." 
+
+No, I have no particular love for small towns, but it does seem to me that these places that are "beyond the wall" as my friend Josh likes to say, tend to be small. Perhaps it's that there are not that many people who want to live outside the world. Perhaps these really are some kind of ideal small towns made up of eccentrics who drifted in the tides of civilization until they ended up out here in the eddies. 
+
+I'd have to live in one to know, and I don't. I like to visit them though. I like it when my phone stops working, when I can't even find a coffee shop with internet.
+
+One day I stayed home to do some writing, Corrinne took the kids and went with our friends out to a place they call Horseshoe Bay. It was sunny and almost warm. It was enough that the kids braved the water (which is about 45 degrees around here right now).
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_133557_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3668" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_134907_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3669" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_140648_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3670" class="picwide" />
+
+The next day they convinced me to come out. The fog didn't burn off as much as it had the day before, but the girls went swimming yet again.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-22_131005_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3672" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-22_130139_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3671" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-22_135733_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3673" class="picwide" />
+
+Copper Harbor is also home to Fort Wilkins, which the U.S. Army set up in 1844. It was supposed to keep the peace between the miners flooding in to the great copper rush and the local Ojibwe. While some Chippewa opposed the Treaty of La Pointe that had ceded this area to the United States in 1842, the fort seems to have been mostly unneccessary. The miners and Ojibwe got along. That's the story anyway. 
+
+
+
+## Stop Breaking Down
+
+I had a bad feeling pulling out of Washburn. The bus sat for nearly four months this summer. The bus hates sitting. I had time to drive it to the upholstery shop and back and that was the extent of my test driving. I was hoping, whatever was going to break, would do it in a populous area with an auto parts store. 
+
+To dash my hopes, our first stop was the Keweenaw peninsula, the long arm of Michigan's Upper Peninsula that sticks out into Lake Superior. In an already remote place, the Keweenaw is even more remote. That's very much the kind of place we enjoy though, the outer edges, the forgotten places that the 21st century, and in some cases most of the 20th century, has passed over. The Keweenaw isn't as unknown as it once was, but it's still out there.
+
+Fortunately for us the bus made it less than 50 miles before it died in a Walmart parking lot. One minute it was cranking over, about to start, and then boom, dead. Not even a click when I turned the key. Well, well. Electrical issues were not what I had expected to go wrong, but I went and dug out my multimeter (which I'm pretty sure is my most used tool), and started checking connections. 
+
+My instinct was that the starter relay was bad (or remote solenoid as some people call it). It went bad once long ago, before we even hit the road, and left me stranded at a dump station. That's the sort of thing you remember. I swapped out the relay with an extra one I carry, but nothing changed. Damn. 
+
+When I bent down by the starter relay and listened closely I could hear it attenuating, or at least it sounded like something was happening and really it's a pretty simple device, a coil is charged and two pieces of metal touch, completing the circuit and sending the charge on to the starter, which then turns the flywheel.
+
+I've seen quite a few mechanics complaining that over the last few years the quality of parts have done a nose dive. Maybe I'd replaced a dead relay with a dead relay? I called a local parts shop to see if they had a relay but they'd have to order it and it wouldn't be there until Monday. Damn.
+
+One of the things I learned at that dump station long ago was that you can bypass the relay by using a screwdriver to bridge the gap. I did that and she cranked up. Pretty sure I'd solved the problem, I quickly packed up my tools and figured I'd just get another relay somewhere down the road.
+
+As I was pulling out of the Walmart parking lot, smoke began pouring out from under the dash and a strong electrical smell of melting plastic filled my nose. Then some burning wire dropped on the ground between my feet. I quickly hooked the bus back around, parked it in a corner, grabbed my fire extinguisher and started tearing apart the front of the bus looking for the source of the fire. Thankfully stopping the bus had stopped the short and there was no fire.
+
+Still, having hung around Travco forums and other places online, I've heard my share of [electrical horror stories](https://www.bumfuzzle.com/fire/).To head that off I had re-wired everything related to the house batteries, and I replaced the old glass fuse panel under the dash with a modern one. But the "wiring harness" of the Travco is a rat's nest of chaos. It seems to have come that way from the factory as far as I can tell. Whatever the case, I was feeling like I'd just cheated the mechanical gods with so small a fire and I wasn't about to hit the road again until I knew everything was good with the wiring.
+
+The problem was: was the fire related to the engine not starting? Or something totally unrelated? It seemed mighty coincidental to have an electrical fire right after you were messing with the wiring, so I figured they must be related.
+
+I found the remains of the wire on the back of the instrument panel and it turned out to be one of two wires going into a single blade. The other wire went to the windshield wiper, which made it a reasonable assumption to think the other probably went to the other windshield wiper switch. I pulled out the manual and looked over the wiring diagram. The wiring diagram had every instrument and dial on the dash. Except the windshield wiper switch. Damn.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_090539_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3654" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_090935_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3655" class="picwide" />
+
+
+At this point I'd been troubleshooting the wiring for a couple of hours. In six years of traveling we've never spent a night in a Walmart parking lot, but it was beginning to look a lot like we weren't going to move. We called AAA, thinking that it'd be easier to do whatever work needed to be done back in Washburn. We called at 2 PM, they said it'd be about an hour. We made some lunch. AAA called back and said they didn't know when a tow truck was coming. 
+
+I kept testing wires. I went through the whole ignition harness and everything tested fine. I moved on to the relay, which now was giving me nothing on the starter side. Hmm. I decided, since I had nothing else to do, I might as well pull the starter and have it bench tested, so I did. When I did I noticed that one wire from the relay to the starter was pressed up against the transmission lines and the insulation had melted. Not good. I went ahead and took the starter to the auto parts store and had it tested. It was fine.
+
+I came back and re-installed the starter and made a new wire to replace the melted one. I also bent the transmission line down some so it wouldn't touch the wire. That's when I realized I had probably bent it when I installed the exhaust. That felt like the problem to me, but it still wouldn't start, which confused me.
+
+By now it was painfully obvious that AAA was useless. I could see the towing shop they claimed they'd called across the street, so I called them and asked if AAA had contacted them. They had not. Corrinne called AAA back and found that the person entering our info had listed us as an A108 van, which is about 1/3 our size. She got a manager who promised he'd have a tow truck there in an hour. An hour later, guess what wasn't there?
+
+By now I'd given up hope of going back to Washburn. Olivia made dinner while I kept testing and trying to follow the wiring diagram. It started to get dark not long after that, so we called it a night -- our first in a Walmart parking lot. I've spent quite a few nights in various parking lots with the bus and I have to say, Walmart was by far the best.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_074501_keweenaw_T93HZTH.jpg" id="image-3653" class="picwide" />
+
+The next morning I was up and at it after an early breakfast. My plan was to rewire everything related to the ignition. Before I got started though, a couple came over to say hi. They turned out to also own a Travco, and lived just down the road. I told him we were having electrical issues and he offered to help. He went through basically everything I'd done the day before (which made me feel like at least I was on the right track), and ended up at the same point: the relay. Could it be as simple as having replaced a bad relay with a bad relay?
+
+Chris called a friend of his who was a Mopar guy and said to bring the relays by and he'd bench test them. He also thought he had a spare lying around. So I jumped in Chris's car and we went over to his friend's house which turned out to have a massive shop with more tools than some professional mechanics have on offer. When we got there he was welding new tension rods for a model A he was restoring. 
+
+He bench tested the relays and they were both bad. Chris then opened them up and they were both broken in the same way. Odd. While the relay was clearing the breaking point, what was breaking it? Chris's friend dug out an old relay. It was from a manual transmission so it didn't have the neutral safety switch (which means it would start in drive, which doesn't matter in a manual because the clutch is engaged), but otherwise it was a working relay.
+
+We headed back to the bus and installed it. She fired right up. By that time Chris and I had worked out that probably the wire touching the transmission line had sent current back up and burned out both relays. His friend called a few minutes later and said, you know, I was thinking, that wire you mentioned that melted, that's gotta be what blew out the relays.
+
+Problem solved. The melted wire we decided was just an unlucky coincidence, a result most likely of me bumping a wire when I testing the ignition wires.
+
+Chris and his wife invited us over to check out their Travco, which we did. It was a couple years later than ours, and strangely had some parts from a 1972 and some from a 1973, making it one of the more unusual models I've ever seen. Chris had replaced the 413 with a 440 engine and swapped out most of the drive train to get disk brakes in the front. I have no doubt it screams up mountains. I also liked Chris's collection of motorcycles, most of which he'd built out of spare parts.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_142048_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3656" class="picwide" />
+
+After chatting for a bit, thanking them profusely for getting us back on the road, we headed out again, bound for the Keweenaw. We made it to Fort McLain, about half way up, and called it a day. We woke up the next morning on the shore of Lake Superior.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_194236_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3658" class="picwide" />
+
+We'd had reservations for the weekend, but we were supposed to head on that morning. We liked the look of the place though and decided we'd try to stay. We were hunting for a vacant site online when the person next to us mentioned that their site was first-come first-served and they were headed out that morning. Perfect. I went down and booked it for two more nights and we pulled the bus over.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-18_113449_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3659" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-18_180526_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3661" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-19_192043_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3664" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-19_061303_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3662" class="picwide" />
+
+
+The next day I took the kids back to the town of Houghton, which has a park called Chutes and Ladders that their friends back in Washburn (who have a cabin up here) had been telling them about. I was a little worried that it might have been overhyped, but I was wrong. It was probably the best playground/slide setup I've ever seen, including parks you have to pay for, and this one was free.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-18_143136_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3660" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-19_112155_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3663" class="picwide caption" />
+
+The kids liked it so much Corrinne took them back the next day while I got some work done. In fact, we like camping on the edge of the lake enough that we figured we'd extend our stay. At about 11 AM on the day we were supposed to check out, Corrinne went down to extend our stay and... found out that in Michigan people can buy your camp site out from under you. No one in Michigan seemed to see anything amiss about this, but I can assure you Michigan, this is not normal. In every other campground we have stayed in seven years of living on the road, a first-come, first-served site is not vacant until the current occupant leaves. There are no exceptions to this. State parks in 36 states, national parks, forest service campgrounds, state forest campgrounds, country parks, city parks, metro parks. Never an exception. Except Michigan state parks, where occupation counts for nothing. 
+
+No wonder Michigan is hotbed of militia, these poor people have been having the government steal their campsites all their lives. I'd be pissed too. I was pissed. But not really at the policy. That is what it is. Silly, and dare I say unAmerican, but to my way of thinking, Michigan is free to do what Michigan wants and I am free to go elsewhere. What blew my mind was that the woman working in the front office totally went crazy on Corrinne when Corrinne pushed back and said, hey, that's not how it works everywhere else, where does it say that here? The woman exploded in front of the kids, swearing and telling Corrinne "I have a fucking Ph'D, I came here to get a break."
+
+Now it just seems funny to me&mdash;just one more ridiculous person working at one more misguided government institution, but at the time I was very mad. I went back up told that woman exactly what I thought of her and her Ph'D. Corrinne is very southern and polite and nice even when people swear at her. I was born in Los Angeles. I am not nice to people who swear at my wife.
+
+In the end, what are you going to do? We packed up in a hurry and headed out, bound for points farther north.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+## Ready to Start
+
+If you're not excited about where you're going, you're going the wrong way.
+
+Where you're going may be challenging, difficult, a real pain in the ass even, but come what may, you should be excited about getting there&mdash;both the getting, and the there. That's how you know you're [on the path](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/path). 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_151928_open-road.jpg" id="image-3651" class="picwide" />
+
+
+I know people struggle with finding their path. It's not easy. I lose my way sometimes too, but it's still there, inside you.
+
+I think the best way to find your path is to slow down, be quiet, and listen. 
+
+There's a lot of noise in the world, a lot of people telling you what you should do. Some of them may mean well, but no one knows your path. There are no exceptions. No one knows your path. And you don't know anyone else's path. 
+
+I think that's part of the reason some people read this site -- they're not happy with their path.  Our path is appealing, if only, I think, because it's very different. That doesn't mean it's right for you, but it's an option. Most people I've met through luxagraf are looking for something that our culture didn't offer them. If you think the grand dance of existence might involve more than working all your life for [two TV sets and two Cadillac cars](https://inv.vern.cc/watch?v=9iJQQTg5_Kg), as Lou Reed put it, this site is here to tell you you're not alone. 
+
+I believe that we are here to give the gifts that we have built up inside us over millennia of our soul’s existence, that we are here to shepherd each other toward our gifts and give to the world those things that we have inside us. How you do that is for you to figure out, but I have found that letting go of the ideas that haven't been working is a good place to start. You don't have to follow the scripts you were handed. Those may not be your path. Sit down, quiet your mind, and listen. Be patient. 
+
+Toward the end of August I was starting to feel the pull of the road again. We love spending the summer up here, being anchored to a part of the world for a while, but we also get excited to get going again, to see new things. There's always sadness in leaving, we'll miss our friends, but we also know we'll see them again. 
+
+Getting ready to go means getting busy too. I probably have less time to be sad about leaving because I end up running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get everything done in the last couple of weeks. As always, there's a balance to be found. I spent a good bit of time working on the vehicles, but we also found time to do some paddleboarding, pick blueberries, and put together a big sleepover for the kids and all their friends.
+
+Our new exhaust pipe arrived one day toward the end of the August. Since the man who made it couldn't actually be there to fit everything together, it came back to me as a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, with plenty of extra pipe on each piece, and even made a few extra pieces, so I'd have a better chance of getting it all to fit. That was a good call on his part, but it did mean I had to do a lot of cutting to get everything fitted properly.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-02_103527_bus-work.jpg" id="image-3647" class="picwide" />
+
+The tough part was wrapping around the driver's side, keeping the exhaust far enough from the oil pan, but not too close to the transmission cooler lines. There's not much room down there and this took quite a bit of doing, but I was pretty sure I'd done a good job. Actually, I had done a good job if those where the only two factors to consider. Alas, they are not, but I did not realize that when I was installing the tailpipe so I was happily ignorant. That's called foreshadowing.
+
+Once I had it cut and fitted around the engine, fitting the rest was was easy since it's mostly straight. The only hiccup is the bend over the rear axle, but the man who made the pipe did a great job and it fit perfect. We even have a muffler now. Fancy. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-01_131017_paddleboarding.jpg" id="image-3648" class="picwide" />
+
+With the tailpipe in we were pretty close to being mobile again. We just needed seats. For about four weeks this summer we lived with no seats in the bus. No front seats, no couch, no table. Nothing. We slept on the ground, ate on the ground, worked on the ground. It wasn't a ton of fun, but the seats really needed to be recovered. 
+
+The vinyl that was used in the initial job was probably dead stock. Or at least well past its ideal sell date. It turned brittle and began to fall apart last year, getting worse at an accelerating pace until we decided something had to be done. Coincidentally, this summer a new upholstery shop opened up in Washburn[^1] and we were able to get everything redone. Adam of Adam's Upholstery did a fantastic job and the seats look and feel better than they ever have.
+
+Somewhere in there we squeezed in a trip to a blueberry farm, and, after plenty of aborted attempts, we finally got to go sailing on our friend Bob's boat. I don't think the kids have ever talked so fondly about anything we've ever done. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-03_124254_sailing-superior.jpg" id="image-3649" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-03_131017_sailing-superior.jpg" id="image-3650" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-08-24_103527_blueberries-play.jpg" id="image-3646" class="picwide" />
+
+The weekend before it was time to go we set up the tent and the kids invited over some friends from town and had a kids' sleepover/camping trip. They somehow squeezed 8 people in our tent, and despite the rain, managed to stay dry and have a good time.
+
+Meanwhile, a couple days before we were set to go, I came down with a pretty terrible head cold that left me lying down most of the day. I had a list of things that needed to get done, but by the time I was up and doing things again it just wasn't possible. I had to pick one thing and I picked giving the bus a quick coat of wax. I only managed to get three sides done, but she looks good.
+
+It might sound like an odd choice, but there weren't any mechanical things that *had* to be done, and I have found that appearances matter. An old rig that's dirty and beat up just looks old. Take that same rig though and make it shiny and clean, and all the sudden it's vintage and everyone wants to say hi and talk about it. More than any mechanical fix, that good will, much of which comes from that clean first impression, is what gets us down the road.
+
+This is part of our path I think. My experience has been that when you do find your path, and it's not the path most people are familiar with, or want anything to do with, it's best to make them comfortable by making your path at least relatable in the small things. Everyone appreciates a clean home. Everyone knows that when things are shiny, it's because the people who own them care for them, and everyone cares for something. 
+
+I said earlier that no one can tell you your path, and you can go your own way, but you're still part of the world and sometimes you need to make concessions to the rest of the world. You have to meet the world half way. For us that means keeping a tight ship, as it were. Other people might not want your path, they might not even like your path, but most of them will respect it if you give them a way to do that. So wax it was. And then, we were off.
+
+
+[^1]: Technically not new, but relocated to a place we actually noticed it.
+
 ## Every Day It's 1984
 
 Nostalgia is commonly used pejoratively. As if the very idea of looking backward in time and saying, hmm, maybe we lost something between then and now were... bad? The American Psychological Association considers nostalgia a subset of depression, which is, ahem, depressing. But then I guess if you're stuck trying to prop up the present as better than the past, at this point, you have to do some serious philosophical dancing.