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diff --git a/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt b/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt index 4cc5cae..26cc969 100644 --- a/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt +++ b/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt @@ -21,61 +21,111 @@ But seeing it and understanding it are different than actually solving the probl Days pass. I continue to fail with the bus. The real world of by time constraints, pay checks that don’t arrive, other commitments, weather. I work on other things. Hang wall panels, sand and apply finish. I do things I know I know how to do. More days pass. Still the bus doesn’t start. I get sullen. My wife thinks I’m mad all the time. I’m not. I’m thinking about the engine, I can’t get it out of my head. It reminds me of the first time I tried to write some code. It was fun, but it also was not. +# Main +There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat. -# Main +I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Nevada between the ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. -There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But before we overheat you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will make any small block engine overheat eventually. +When the engine shuts off a silence descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the quiet hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" -I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way, toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of green-gray shrubs, creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. +As a child of the 70s, I've spent a fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, AZ on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. -What I don't see is a good place to pull over. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on highway 168 somewhere in Nevada between the ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. Why not? +I was no stranger to dealing with the sweat, the cursing, the money, and the occasional blood, required to keep old cars running. It used to be a necessity. These days it's a labor of love. There is something in the shape of these vehicles, something in the way they move, the way they were built, that is unlike anything on the road today. People connect to it in a way they don't with modern vehicles. -When the engine shuts off a silence descends. There's no sound but the quiet hissing steam escaping the radiator cap. No wind. No birds. No talking. We all, my wife, three children, and myself, just listen to the now gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road a few feet beyond us. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" +The labor of maintenance is the price of admission to the world of old vehicles, that's all. If you love the design of those vehicles, the aesthetics, the limits, of that era then you don’t hesitate to pay the admission. -As a child of the 70s, I've spent my fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is just what vehicles of those days did.There was the 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born. That was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson, AZ. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. +I'll freely admit most people don't dive in as deep as we have. In June of 2016 my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. We bought it to make it our full time home. We were tired of the suburbs and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. And what better way to do that than in a 50-year-old motorhome? -All of which is to say that I was no stranger to dealing with the work, the sweat, the cursing, and the occasional blood, that it requires to keep old cars running. That's why, two years ago, my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that was just shy of its 50th birthday at the time. My kids called it our bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people these days picture something that looks nothing like our new old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container full of beauty and joy. And it hails from a very different era, one when the Right to Repair was more, the Need to Repair, and when the need to repair was an accepted part of using technology. +My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bright and bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. It hails from a very different era, one when the Right to Repair was the Need to Repair, and when the need to repair was an unspoken, accepted part of using technology. -I wanted one from the first moment I saw it. Partly because it is just that cool, but also partly because I wanted to own my own home, but not a house. I wanted a home I could move wherever I wanted. I wanted to build it out how I wanted, to understand it, to design everything in it exactly the way we needed it, to maintain it, and to take it wherever we wanted to go. The Travco was all that and more. -- -The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. Now almost no one besides us seems to want one. That's probably just as well, there aren't many left. +The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. I wanted one from the first moment I ran across a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. + +There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but after a few months of haunting Craigslist, in June of 2016, I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. For some reason, they changed their mind and sold it. + +I could have picked up where they left off, but I decided to gut it instead. I wanted to understand it, to design and build out everything in it exactly the way we would need it. Wood, sealant, metal, fiberglass, and all the things RV interiors are made out of are static. They just sit there, which makes them relatively easy to restore. I grew up around repair and restoration projects. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. + +In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice the heat, we were too excited watching him tear things apart and put them back together again. It was miraculous to take these discarded things—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them. + +My father had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, graduating to model airplanes in grade school, when I also started using more tools, taking things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then went and built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, and somewhat misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools, anything was fixable. + +So standing there in the hills of North Carolina, looking over the bus for about an hour, I was unfazed. There was some obvious water damage. I knew I’d have to tear out walls and replace them with new wood. And if you’ve got the walls off you might as well re-wire, re-plumb, and re-insulate. But looking around the interior I saw what I saw when I was sketching projects—the finished result. The only thing to do was do the work to make it look the way it already looked in my head. The engine I was blissfully ignorant about. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit. + +That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past cars, I've driven near 250,000 miles. But driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and pointing it downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a break. + +The engine wasn't even off before two people came running up to the bus to see it, take pictures, and talk about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked a question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it? + +The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. I've done a little research, but still can’t confirm or deny this; that said, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it can feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8000 extra pounds of weight on top. + +On that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, I knew next to nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked complex and intimidating and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer; part of what I was after, when we decided to live in a vintage RV, was less computers. + +I spent most of my free time that year completely rebuilding the interior. For most of 2016 it sat in our driveway, with me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it “we’re two houses after the big blue bus.” I gutted the interior down to the bare fiberglass walls. I redid all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I deliberately kept everything low tech. There's only one computer chip in the bus. There's no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we reach camp, but the system will never fail. + +A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously would let no networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, his character commands a spaceship after all, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposed. In his case networked technology opened to door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case is a little less dramatic. We just didn't want to have to have something break when we're miles from the nearest place that could fix it. + +No one is perfect though, and we do have one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. On the surface it doesn't seem so bad. Even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he would not approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. The Bluetooth network is an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but it’s not necessary. To mitigate that point of failure, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail, or, more likely, should I lose my phone, I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure. + +The comedian Mitch Hedburg tells a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. This is a design principle I, and perhaps even Adama, can get behind. Unfortunately, a lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. + +It's is hard to argue against such systems—certainly it is more convenient to flip a switch and have hot water, or to be able to check solar battery status from my phone—but the trade off in potential for catastrophic failure isn't worth the small gain in convenience, especially not when the nearest repair shop is hundreds of miles away. + +What's more, sometimes inconvenience can even end up providing benefits. Inconvenience has a way of forcing you off autopilot and gets you paying attention, and engines this old need you to pay attention to them. It's part of the cost of admission. -There also aren't many people left who even know how to fix these vehicles. Well, that's not entirely true. Since the first day I owned the Travco, people have been coming up to talk to me about it. I bought the bus from a couple that lived up in the mountains of North Carolina. I got a ride up there to pick it up, and after about an hour of looking it over, I handed over the money. The previous owner mentioned offhand that it attracted a lot of attention. I was focused on other things and didn't really pay any attention to that comment until about three hours later. +Modern user interfaces have hidden this from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, making it difficult to start. There are two important components in an internal combustion engine: air and fuel. When your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318 in our bus, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver with the choke cable. It's a cable attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in, and allowing the cold engine to start up. -That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past vehicles, I've driven about 250,000 miles. But those were cars. Driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and promptly pointing it downhill toward home. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I managed to get her out on a four lane road where it felt more manageable. Still, I realized I had been driving completely tensed up for a couple of hours. I decided to pull over at a rest area and take a break. +Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob took years of scouring eBay. By the time I did find one, well I was used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The choke cable I bought has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for over a year now; and I still haven't installed it. I've had a choke cable for over a year now; I still haven't installed it. -The engine wasn't even off before two people come running up to the bus wanting to see it, take pictures, and talk about it—what year is it, where did you get it, and eventually they work their way around to what has become the big question almost everyone wants to know: what engine is in it? +The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once a wire came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up. -The answer is a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. I've done a little research, but have not been able to confirm or deny this speculation. I can say that at times, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it feels like I have about the same amount of power as a Dodge Dart, but with 8000 extra pounds of weight. +Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the engine, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive, but these days I am often just spending time with it. -In 2016 when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, I knew next to nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked intimidatingly complex and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer, part of what I wanted when we decided to live in a vintage RV was less computers, maybe even no computers. There's not a computer chip in the 318, nor is there one anywhere else in the bus. +Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships. -I completely rebuilt the interior, gutting it down to the bare fiberglass and re-running all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I deliberately kept everything low tech. There's no backup cameras, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we stop, but the automatic pilot system will never fail. Because there isn't one. +--- + +The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though like any relationship, me and the bus have had some rocky moments. + +April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into our first campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slide myself under the engine. A thin, warm read liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission cooler cooler lines running into the bottom of the radiator where transmission fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission. + +I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew enough about engines to know that this wasn't too serious. As long at I kept the fluid level topped off, it should be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual of starting the engine. + +I went through a lot of transmission fluid those first three weeks. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it down to the South Carolina coast, and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast, and then we headed inland, across the swampy pine flats of south Georgia and into the Florida panhandle. + +Part of the reason I put off dealing with the leak is that we were staying at a friends beach house on St. Georgia Island. But then the day we were due to arrive the leak got worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left and I had just filled the reservoir two hours before. We unpacked for a week out of the bus and I made spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such and old, huge vehicle. I found one that was game and a few days later, with my wallet a bit lighter, we had the problem solved. + +We continued on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, right into New Orleans where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks as I drove through town. For those two months the bus ran perfectly. After New Orleans though, as we headed into the June heat of Texas, the temperature gauge began to climb. And climb. All the way into the red. We took to driving in the early mornings, which helped, but I knew something needed to be done. + +We stopped to visit relatives in Dallas and had the radiator re-cored, which would eliminate the radiator as the source of the problem. Not an hour outside of Dallas though the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair ship. They replaced the water pump and thermostat, more possible causes of running hot. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. And then, temperature gauge climbed again. + +That, combined with the brutal West Texas heat was getting to us. I punted. We got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a bit and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. I ran out that night and paid way too much for temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. I stopped every half hour and got out and took temp readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was well within the operating parameters. I drove on into the mid day heat and watched the temperature gauge climb. But the readings from the gun never changed. I called my uncle back. If I were you he said, I'd pull out that temperature sensor and chuck it out in the desert somewhere." I hung up thinking that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't even know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. -A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously would let no networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposes. +I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong, and I unhooked the temperature gauge from the sensor so it wouldn't stress me out, but I wasn't happy thinking about the 1000s of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be faulty $15 sensor. How did my uncle know what to do without even being there? How did I learn to do that? I didn't realize it at the time, but I was on my way to learning these things the same way my uncle did, the same way everyone does: the hard way, by bashing my head against the problem until I gave up and turned to someone with more experience. -Adama would approve of our solar panels, which have been our primary source of power for years, but he would not approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. I used to be able to check our battery charge status from my phone, before Bluetooth stopped working on my phone. But I knew there was a good chance bluetooth would fail me, it had before. Luckily for me I had long ago added a shunt with a hardwired gauge, should the Bluetooth fail. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology, but I'm not going to leave the systems that keep the lights on to technologies I can't repair. I thought of the Adama character when my phone stopped connecting to the charge controller, I could almost seem him smiling. +Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests the rocky mountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd made it to about 9,600 feet previously, and this pass was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go, so I thought we should be able to do it. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile out of town before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus only to see the same transmission cooler line leaking again. -Complex systems are inherently fragile. It might be more convenient to flip a switch and have hot water or to check the battery status from my phone, but the trade off in complexity wasn't worth the small gain in convenience. Nothing brought this home for me quite like the choke cable. -When I bought the bus the manual choke cable was broken. When your engine is cold it needs more gas than air to get started. In an aspirated engine the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes, controlling how much air gets into the engine. Too much air and the engine won't cold start. In older vehicles, prior to the mid-1960s, this mixture was controlled by the driver with the chock leveler. Pull it out and the flap in the carburetor closes, the cold engine starts, and then you push it back in. -Manual choke is archaic. But since the bus's was broken I went even more archaic. I did what the choke cable should have been doing -- pulling the carburetor shut so that the cold engine gets enough gas to start -- with my finger. Every time I start the engine I have to lift up the cover, unscrew the air filter and work the carburetor with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dash board knob took years of scouring eBay. By then, well I was used to it. I've had a choke cable for over a year now and I still haven't installed it. -What I discovered after hundreds of cold morning starts is that I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once the cable came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting, which it wasn't, I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. -Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the engine, connecting with it if you will. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine every time, but these days I am less looking things over than just spending time with it. -Car enthusiasts often get this way. There is something irrational about being attached to particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Driving around the country now, when I see broken down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships. + +The bus is all mechanical and easy enough to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the coolant system that had us at the side of the road climbing up the White Mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, closing the spring so that coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. + +The engine temperature system is controlled by a piece of wax. The carburetor jets, which control how much gas and air are pulled into the carburetor and sent on to the combustion chambers are just metal cones you tighten or loosen with a screw driver. There are almost no special tools required to fix anything in the bus. I carry a lot of wrenches, a few screwdrivers, and a wide array of spare parts. That's about all I need to keep it going. + + + This has become my guiding design principle, my philosophy of technology if you will, the technology must connect me with the machine in a meaningful way. It doesn't have to be rational, it doesn't have to make sense even, but it must create that connection. There is no technology for its own sake, no technology that abstracts function for convenience, no technology that removes the human interaction for "simplicity" or "ease of use". Ease of use means I can use it, as well as repair it and rebuild it if need be. Eventually I was able to track down reprints of the original shop manuals for the Dodge M300 chassis, which is the basis for the Travco, as well as many other motorhomes of the era. From reading this in the evenings around the campfire, I know that the designers of the bus meant for it to be maintained by anyone. It's written in simple language, with clear instructions, and explanations of why you need to do something as well has how to do it. -I used the same guiding principle when upgrading things to make it livable for a family of five.Limiting complexity was a concious decision by me, just as it was a conscious decision by the Dodge and Travco engineers in 1969. The bus is all mechanical and easy enough to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the coolant system that had us at the side of the road climbing up the White Mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, closing the spring so that coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. +I used the same guiding principle when upgrading things to make it livable for a family of five.Limiting complexity was a concious decision by me, just as it was a conscious decision by the Dodge and Travco engineers in 1969. + +The bus is all mechanical and easy enough to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the coolant system that had us at the side of the road climbing up the White Mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, closing the spring so that coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. The engine temperature system is controlled by a piece of wax. The carburetor jets, which control how much gas and air are pulled into the carburetor and sent on to the combustion chambers are just metal cones you tighten or loosen with a screw driver. There are almost no special tools required to fix anything in the bus. I carry a lot of wrenches, a few screwdrivers, and a wide array of spare parts. That's about all I need to keep it going. @@ -150,7 +200,7 @@ Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is bette These are the first three [philosophical "rules" of the Python programming language](https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonPhilosophy), which happens to be the thing that allows me to live in a Travco, traveling full time. -After finding out about bus, the engine, and that we live in it "full time" as RVers say, the inevitable next question is -- how? The American version of this is *what do you do?*. The European version (about half the people we met in National Parks and other public lands between 2017-2018 were visitors from abroad) is *what is your job?*. I prefer the European version for its specificity. +After finding out about bus, the engine, and that we live in it "full time" as RVers say, the inevitable next question is—how? The American version of this is *what do you do?*. The European version (about half the people we met in National Parks and other public lands between 2017-2018 were visitors from abroad) is *what is your job?*. I prefer the European version for its specificity. The answer is that, since I walked out of the last restaurant kitchen I ran in 2005, I have been a writer and programmer, working from home. For a long time, thanks to demand, I was able to limit my programming to Python (even more specifically, the Django web framework). @@ -336,3 +386,4 @@ Something about Henry Miller driving into LA. Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I assumed it meant no passing lane. + diff --git a/published/2022-04-06_all-wright-all-wright-all-wright.txt b/published/2022-04-06_all-wright-all-wright-all-wright.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a133386 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2022-04-06_all-wright-all-wright-all-wright.txt @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +Somewhere offshore, a few miles south of where I am sitting, the Gulf Stream, a northward current of warm water, collides with the Labrador Current, a southward flow of cold water. That collision of currents creates rough waters, fog, storms, and more often than not, [wind](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/03/whistle-down-wind). + +<img src="images/2022/2022-03-19_173848_oregon-inlet.jpg" id="image-2848" class="picwide" /> + +If you happened to be looking for a good place to test a glider, and you poured over meteorological records for the entire country, the Outer Banks would jump out at you. It jumped out at the Wright brothers, and of course Kill Devil Hills is where they came to test their glider. + +The glider, as it turns out, didn't really work. What put the Wright brothers in the air in the end, was partly the wing design they came up with, partly the wind the Outer Banks provided, but also, arguably mostly, the engine they built. + +We headed over to the Wright Brothers Memorial one windy day and had a look at the dunes where they worked, and eventually, flew. The rebuilt plane is in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, but there's a life size model here, and some parts of the engine (which was also destroyed at some point). + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-01_143324_aquarium-wright-brothers.jpg" id="image-2850" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-01_143222_aquarium-wright-brothers.jpg" id="image-2849" class="picwide caption" /> +<div class="cluster"> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-01_132155_aquarium-wright-brothers.jpg" id="image-2851" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-01_135119_aquarium-wright-brothers_9EfXCN2.jpg" id="image-2853" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +</div> + +To me one of the most interesting parts of the memorial, after the engine, was learning that iconic photo below was shot by John T Daniels, a member of the local life saving station who had never taken a photograph before in his life. Local legend says he never took another. Quit while you're ahead I guess, because with no experience and only one shot to get it right, Daniels nailed it. + +<img src="images/2022/Wright_First_Flight.jpg" id="image-2854" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-01_155137-2_aquarium-wright-brothers.jpg" id="image-2855" class="picwide caption" /> + +We've also enjoyed spending the occasional cold day at the North Carolina aquariums, which aren't huge, but have a enough to keep the kids entertained on a stormy afternoon. The one here has a couple things the one we visited in Pine Knoll Shores did not, like a tiger shark and an albino crocodile. + +<div class="cluster"> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/2022-03-29_155533_aquarium-wright-brothers.jpg" id="image-2856" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-03-29_155701_aquarium-wright-brothers.jpg" id="image-2857" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +</div> +<img src="images/2022/2022-03-29_171506_aquarium-wright-brothers.jpg" id="image-2858" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-03-29_174753_aquarium-wright-brothers.jpg" id="image-2859" class="picwide" /> + +Just in case you didn't get the title, here's the full joke Corrinne made up: What did Matthew McConaughey [say](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuER2Puym4I) when he got to Kill Devil Hills? diff --git a/published/2022-04-13_cape-hatteras.txt b/published/2022-04-13_cape-hatteras.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..41aa055 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2022-04-13_cape-hatteras.txt @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +We headed south from Oregon Inlet, across Pea Island to Hatteras Island. It's not much of a drive, about 45 miles so we stopped off to play on the dunes and get a feel for Pea Island, which is primarily a nature preserve, before heading on to Hatteras. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-02_142856-1_frisco.jpg" id="image-2861" class="picwide" /> + +It's hard to tell when you're driving -- the dunes have been pushed up to form a tall berm alongside the highway -- but the ocean is right next to the road. And the bay is not far on the other side. These islands are thin strips of sand miles out in the ocean. It's amazing they're here at all when you consider the storms that hit them year after year. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-02_121534_frisco.jpg" id="image-2862" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-02_143135_frisco.jpg" id="image-2860" class="picwide" /> + +Frisco campground here on the southern shore of Hatteras is much more our speed than Oregon Inlet. Frisco is more up in the dunes, with junipers and cedars -- even some small oaks -- and plenty of shrubs between campsites. It's more like what most of us think of when we think of camping. Oregon Inlet is more what you think of when someone says "we're going to a Phish show." + +Our site here backed right up to the dunes, near a boardwalk that led over to the beach. A short stroll through the dunes and we were at the water. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-05_075823_frisco.jpg" id="image-2863" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-09_191754_frisco.jpg" id="image-2877" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-06_073239_frisco.jpg" id="image-2864" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-02_153817_frisco.jpg" id="image-2865" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-12_085310_frisco.jpg" id="image-2868" class="picwide" /> + +The other side of the campground sprawled up a small hill, away from the dunes, but with a view of the ocean. The kids and I rode our bikes around the loop nearly every night after dinner to watch the sunset from the top of the hill. The sweet smell of cedar and juniper, and the scrub oak undergrowth reminded me of spots we [camped out west, near Canyonlands](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/08/canyoneering) more than anywhere we've been in the east. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-12_084700_frisco.jpg" id="image-2869" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-14_213934_frisco.jpg" id="image-2870" class="picwide" /> + +Here though we had the beach, and with the wind finally giving us some breaks, we spent as much time as we could out on the sand. Actually it wasn't so much that the wind stopped, it was that temperatures climbed up into the 70s and the wind died down to the point that it was just a welcome breeze. We still had a few storms blow through, but the temperatures stayed warm enough that most days were were playing in the water. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-03_141604_frisco.jpg" id="image-2866" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-14_165358_frisco.jpg" id="image-2867" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-14_165632_frisco.jpg" id="image-2873" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-07_090257_frisco.jpg" id="image-2872" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-06_140342_frisco.jpg" id="image-2871" class="picwide" /> + +When people think of Cape Hatteras, if they ever do, they think of the iconic lighthouse. It's the tallest in the United States and graces countless postcards in these parts. I'm not entirely sure we'd have made it, we're not really lighthouse people I guess, but it happened to be right by the dump station, so one day we stopped off to check it out. + +<div class="cluster"> + <span class="row-2"> + <img src="images/2022/2022-04-07_114059_frisco_01.jpg" id="image-2879" class="cluster pic66" /> + <img src="images/2022/2022-04-07_114126_frisco_01.jpg" id="image-2880" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> + <img src="images/2022/2022-04-07_134331_frisco.jpg" id="image-2875" class="cluster picwide" /> +</div> + + +More remarkable to me than the lighthouse itself is that in 1999 they *moved* it. Exactly how you move a 4,830 ton brick structure is [detailed on the NPS site](https://www.nps.gov/caha/learn/historyculture/movingthelighthouse.htm). It took almost three weeks to move it less than half a mile from its original location down on the sand, to its current home on more stable ground. + +Unfortunately I agree with the opponents of the NPS plan, it loses something when it's not sitting out there on the actual point, in the sand. I did enjoy seeing it flashing every morning though. To my mind that's how you should see a lighthouse, from a great distance. That's its job after all -- to keep you away from it. diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index 5b33ba7..96b5711 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -1,9 +1,53 @@ The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order. # Stories to Tell -- jui jitsu interlude -- solar expansion, back in the woods, inverter woes, broken freezer +We headed south from Oregon Inlet, across Pea Island to Hatteras Island. It's not much of a drive, about 45 miles so we stopped off to play on the dunes and get a feel for Pea Island, which is primarily a nature preserve, before heading on to Hatteras. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-02_142856-1_frisco.jpg" id="image-2861" class="picwide" /> + +It's hard to tell when you're driving -- the dunes have been pushed up to form a tall berm alongside the highway -- but the ocean is right next to the road. And the bay is not far on the other side. These islands are thin strips of sand miles out in the ocean. It's amazing they're here at all when you consider the storms that hit them year after year. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-02_121534_frisco.jpg" id="image-2862" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-02_143135_frisco.jpg" id="image-2860" class="picwide" /> + +Frisco campground here on the southern shore of Hatteras is much more our speed than Oregon Inlet. Frisco is more up in the dunes, with junipers and cedars -- even some small oaks -- and plenty of shrubs between campsites. It's more like what most of us think of when we think of camping. Oregon Inlet is more what you think of when someone says "we're going to a Phish show." + +Our site here backed right up to the dunes, near a boardwalk that led over to the beach. A short stroll through the dunes and we were at the water. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-05_075823_frisco.jpg" id="image-2863" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-09_191754_frisco.jpg" id="image-2877" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-06_073239_frisco.jpg" id="image-2864" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-02_153817_frisco.jpg" id="image-2865" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-12_085310_frisco.jpg" id="image-2868" class="picwide" /> + +The other side of the campground sprawled up a small hill, away from the dunes, but with a view of the ocean. The kids and I road our bikes around the loop nearly every night after dinner to watch the sunset from the top of the hill. The sweet smell of cedar and juniper, and the scrub oak undergrowth reminded me of spots we [camped out west, near Canyonlands](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/08/canyoneering) more than anywhere we've been in the east. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-12_084700_frisco.jpg" id="image-2869" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-14_213934_frisco.jpg" id="image-2870" class="picwide" /> + +Here though we had the beach, and with the wind finally giving us some breaks, we spent as much time as we could out on the sand. Actually it wasn't so much that the wind stopped, it was that temperatures climbed up into the 70s and the wind died down to the point that it was just welcome breeze. We still had a few storms blow through, but the temperatures stayed warm enough that most days were were playing in the water. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-03_141604_frisco.jpg" id="image-2866" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-14_165358_frisco.jpg" id="image-2867" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-14_165632_frisco.jpg" id="image-2873" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-07_090257_frisco.jpg" id="image-2872" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-04-06_140342_frisco.jpg" id="image-2871" class="picwide" /> + +When people think of Cape Hatteras, if they ever do, they think of the iconic lighthouse. It's the tallest in the United States and graces countless postcards in these parts. I'm not entirely sure we'd have made it, we're not really lighthouse people I guess, but it happened to be right by the dump station, so one day we stopped off to check it out. + +<div class="cluster"> + <span class="row-2"> + <img src="images/2022/2022-04-07_114059_frisco_01.jpg" id="image-2879" class="cluster pic66" /> + <img src="images/2022/2022-04-07_114126_frisco_01.jpg" id="image-2880" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> + <img src="images/2022/2022-04-07_134331_frisco.jpg" id="image-2875" class="cluster picwide" /> +</div> + + +More remarkable to me than the lighthouse itself is that in 1999 they *moved* it. Exactly how you move a 4,830 ton brick structure is [detailed on the NPS site](https://www.nps.gov/caha/learn/historyculture/movingthelighthouse.htm). It took almost three weeks to move it less than half a mile from its original location down on the sand, to its current home on more stable ground. + +Unfortunately I agree with the opponents of the NPS plan, it loses something when it's not sitting out there on the actual point, in the sand. I did enjoy seeing it flashing every morning though. To my mind that's how you should see a lighthouse, from a great distance -- that's its job after all, to keep you away from it. --- @@ -371,7 +415,7 @@ The ability to think deeply and purposefully is one of those skills that, once y ## family in mexico -I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about—hard work and family -- but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example. +I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about—hard work and family—but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example. My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here. @@ -560,7 +604,7 @@ Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. Fo This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. -Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something -- that includes me -- and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website. +Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something—that includes me—and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website. [^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well. ## Essay on Will @@ -591,7 +635,7 @@ Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff. -That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores -- but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. +That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores—but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. @@ -617,7 +661,7 @@ Still, for better or worse. Here are the main tools I use. My primary "device" is my notebook. I don't have a fancy notebook. I do have several notebooks though. One is in my pocket at all times and is filled with illegible scribbles that I attempt to decipher later. The other is larger and it's my sort of captain's log, though I don't write in with the kind regularity captains do. Or that I imagine captains do. Then I have other notebooks for specific purposes, meditation journal, commonplace book, and so on. -I'm not all that picky about notebooks, if they have paper in them I'm happy enough. I used to be very picky about pens, but then I sat down and forced myself to use basic cheap, clear black ink, Bic-style ballpoint pens until they no longer irritated me. And you know what? Now I love them, and that's all I use -- any ballpoint pen. Ballpoint because it runs less when it gets wet, which, given how I live, tends to happen. +I'm not all that picky about notebooks, if they have paper in them I'm happy enough. I used to be very picky about pens, but then I sat down and forced myself to use basic cheap, clear black ink, Bic-style ballpoint pens until they no longer irritated me. And you know what? Now I love them, and that's all I use—any ballpoint pen. Ballpoint because it runs less when it gets wet, which, given how I live, tends to happen. ### Laptop |