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| -rw-r--r-- | essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt | 29 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/comeback-sauce.txt | 29 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/everywhere-piece.txt | 49 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/leica.txt | 44 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/new-from-current.txt | 15 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt | 436 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/safety-third.txt | 180 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/tnf.txt | 45 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/whats-missing-is.txt | 204 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/wired excerpt v8.txt | 240 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/wired excerpt.txt | 255 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/wired-piece-v5.txt | 171 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/wired-piece-v6.txt | 211 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/wired-version.odt | bin | 32903 -> 0 bytes |
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diff --git a/essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt b/essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 97780aa..0000000 --- a/essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,29 +0,0 @@ -The Z-Trail sandals from footwear maker Xero are true "barefoot" shoes. The [sandals](https://xeroshoes.com/shop/gender/mens/ztrail-men/) are so thin of sole, so minimal of strap, I routinely forget I'm wearing them. Which is the whole point: Instead of protecting your feet from the ground, barefoot shoes bring the feel of the ground through the sole to your feet. - -Barefoot shoes—a design that has gained a sizable following among runners and outdoors enthusiasts, particularly those of us inclined to believe that modernity creates more problems than it solves—take everything you think you know about shoes and inverts it. - -A growing body of evidence [suggests](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090724091339.htm) that the padding in the modern shoe [isn't good for your feet](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24500535/). Allowing your feet to bend, twist, flex, stretch and otherwise do [what feet evolved to do](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08723) can reduce injuries and improve balance and agility. The more information your feet can convey to your brain, the better you can navigate the terrain. - -Still, there's something undeniably quixotic about paying real money for footwear with almost no support or cushion. While emerging science appears to be on the side of bare feet, for me the barefoot shoe is about something more than the purely physical benefits. I have had a lifelong love affair with being barefoot, because to be barefoot is to be free. - -Not free in any political sense of the word, but free in the way you were free as a child. Free to run and jump and play. Free of obligation. Free to do whatever you wanted for no reason at all because that freedom is the foundation of all human delight. - -Remember when school first let out for the summer? Your feet had been imprisoned in shoes all through the year and suddenly they were free. You'd head to the pool or the beach or the park and jump out of the car with bare feet, ready to play. Of course, it hurt. The burning hot asphalt singed your bare soles. But it hurt so good. Walking across the hot blacktop was nothing compared to the boredom of staring at a blackboard all day. That pain would be gone after a few weeks—your feet are remarkably adaptable body parts—but that sense of freedom remained. - -This carries into adulthood. What do we do at the end of the long day? We take off our shoes. If you're barefoot, it's unlikely you're working. (And if you can do your job barefoot, congratulations, you win.) If you're barefoot, you're also unlikely to have any pressing tasks. You're more likely to be in the backyard or at a pool or at the park or at the beach. You're probably outside and free, or at least doing something delightful. - -There was only one thing that ruined those barefoot summers. It was that sign you'd always see at the entrance to the mini mart: "No shirt. No shoes. No service." Ah, commerce, enemy of freedom. - -That's where the Z-Trails come in. I'm not ten anymore. I want my freedom *and* I want to go into the store. The soles of the Z-Trails are 10 millimeters thin, and the shoes are enough that I don't even notice them in my bag. (They're a favorite camp shoe among ultralight backpackers.) Walking around, I still feel like I'm barefoot. My feet stretch and flex and bend and roll the same way they would even if I wasn't wearing the sandals. - -While I had already tried a few barefoot shoes, I wasn't sold on the idea until I tried the $80 Z-Trails. Every other "barefoot" design I had tried felt too much like a regular shoe. Then Xero sent me a pair of the sandals to test for a barefoot shoes buying guide I'm working on. I distinctly remember putting them on and going outside to walk around the yard for a bit. I remember following my kids around the yard, and when they headed into the brambles at the back of the house, I hesitated. I thought I wasn't wearing shoes. Then I looked at my feet, and surprise, I *was* wearing shoes. I plowed right into the brambles. Twenty minutes later, I was on the Xero Shoes website buying myself three pairs. Since that day, I have worn next to nothing else on my feet. - -Barefoot shoe advocates would probably prefer I extol the science behind the benefits of barefoot shoes rather than sounding like a hippie chasing childhood memories down flower strewn trails, but you can discover that yourself by starting with the links I put at the top of this piece. I will also say that an increasing body of evidence shows that, while comfortable shoes make life easy on our feet, they make life much harder on the rest of our body. Balance and coordination decline over time, injuries become more likely. - -More compelling to me, the Xero Z-Trails are the type of shoes people have worn for most of human history. The materials may be new, but the design is very nearly as old as human feet. Put on these sandals and you will walk like your ancestors. Their tactility creates a positive feedback loop between your feet and your brain. You step on a rock, your brain tells your muscles to adjust. Your balance improves, you stumble less. Your feet grow tougher too. - -The benefits of barefoot shoes cascade over time, but if you decide to dive in, start slowly. *Very* slowly. Xero founder Steven Sashen suggests anyone curious about barefoot shoes should begin by going outside and walking about ten steps in bare feet. Yes, just ten. Then tomorrow, walk 20 steps. If there's no pain, keep increasing the daily step counts from there. - -I should probably say there may still be some circumstances where padded shoes are better. In October, I spent three days of hiking some of the most brutal, root-strewn, leaf-covered [rocky trails the North Carolina mountains](/jrnl/2020/10/walking-north-carolina-woods) have to offer with 50 pounds on my back and barefoot shoes on my feet. I chickened out and did not wear the Z-Trails backpacking. Instead, I wore [Xero's HFS road running shoe](https://xeroshoes.com/shop/shoes/hfs-men/). It doesn’t offer any more padding than the sandal, but since it's an actual enclosed shoe, it’s better at keeping your foot situated over the sole. Even though I was worried my feet would slide around too much in the Z-Trail sandals, the HFS turned out to be overkill. I missed my sandals. - -In fact, the only thing better is letting my bare feet free. That’s the point after all—to feel the world. So even if I haven't convinced you, and even if you never buy a pair of barefoot shoes, take a moment every now and then to delight in that child-like joy of feeling the ground beneath your feet, the earth between your toes. Your soles will thank you. diff --git a/essays/comeback-sauce.txt b/essays/comeback-sauce.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 1cf7f05..0000000 --- a/essays/comeback-sauce.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,29 +0,0 @@ -#Comeback Sauce -##An Ode to JB's Sausage Cart, an Athens, GA Institution -### originally published by Longshot Magazine https://web.archive.org/web/20100904114555/http://one.longshotmag.com/article/going-for-seconds - -<img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150908045114im_/http://one.longshotmag.com/media/images/jb.jpg" alt="bottle of comeback sauce" class="pullpicleft" /> - -I met JB under a very short bridge nearly a decade ago. He was wearing a dejected look I would never see on him again—a momentary interruption in his universally good mood. I was new to the South, recently transplanted from Los Angeles, so when I stopped the car to survey the roadside scene, I wasn't expecting to find a massive overturned oil drum-style barbecue lying in the grass just beyond the crumpled mini trailer that was introducing worry to JB's spirited face. - -I helped him pull the trailer out from under the small railroad trestle bridge. The air felt so hot and still and thick that it was like trying to breathe underwater, and our shirts soaked through with sweat. I leaned on the tailgate of JB's truck while he tried to pound the frame of his trailer roof back into shape. It was the first time I remember ever noticing Kudzu, or hearing the throbbing, ceaseless drone of Southern insects lurking beneath. Everything was alive. - -I helped JB haul the enormous rusted grill pit back onto the trailer. My hands were black with charcoal and grease. JB tied the grill back down and thanked me, promising free sausages when he was back up and running. I smiled, assuming I'd never see him again. But this was not LA. "Oh you'll see me everywhere," he assured me with the knowing tone of a local, "I've got comeback sauce." - -Two weeks later I played a show at the 40 Watt club in downtown Athens, famous for once having been lit by a single 40 Watt bulb. It's a legendary club that helped put Athens on the music map. I was thrilled to play there. I drank gallons of beer, and met what seemed like hundreds of people. After closing time, we all stumbled out the front door looking for something to eat. - -And there was JB. Parked on the edge of the small crumbling parking lot, cooking up sausages for a crowd of drunk kids. I was shocked he remembered me and came through with free sausages, "with comeback sauce ya hear? Cause you'll always come back for more." He smiled. I walked away into the warm night and ate. The sausages were, well, sausages. But the sauce was something else. - -As I was walking home with my friends, JB drove by and then stopped and waited for us to walk up to his truck. "There's a party up ahead, ya'll want a ride?" We jumped on the trailer and rode up the hill. JB set up in the front yard of someone's house. He didn't ask. He didn't need to. This isn't LA, there are probably street food codes, but no one lets them get in the way of a good thing. It wasn't long before the party emptied out of the house and spilled into the street, everyone coming out for the comeback. - -For the next eight or so years I would pay a visit to JB's sausage truck at least once a month. I always came back. Sometimes even when I didn't really want a sausage. I found it difficult to walk by without buying something. Over time JB ceased to recognize me, my face blended back in with the rest of the drunken, if polite, crowds. - -A decade is a long time in a small town. I watched friends come and go. And come and go again. I moved away for a few years myself, lived in big cities, small ones, traveled around the world. But I always came back. - -Athens has it's own comeback sauce, something that draws people back to it like the moths and lacewings that form clouds around the streetlights on a warm summer night. - -It's been a long time since I've seen JB outside the 40 Watt. Sometimes there's a big silver truck serving a full menu. It probably meets city code. I haven't eaten there. I suspect they have no comeback sauce. - -I'm not sure what happened to JB. It wouldn't be to hard to find out -- Athens is still a small town when it comes to that sort of thing -- but I don't want to know. I prefer to keep coming back, hoping maybe one day I'll see that dirty old oil drum of a barbecue throwing smoke up into the thick summer air and hear JB telling someone, ya'll come back now, ya hear. - -Upon re-reading this, I like it much less now than I did at the time. In my defense, I wrote this in about an hour, sent it off to Longshot and somehow it became the cover for the first issue. They even made a t-shirt out of the comeback sauce bottle artwork (not mine). Still, I'm not super fond of this story because I actually know JB and I don't feel like I did him justice. He deserves better. -sng, 2019. diff --git a/essays/everywhere-piece.txt b/essays/everywhere-piece.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 6d2c078..0000000 --- a/essays/everywhere-piece.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,49 +0,0 @@ -Everything smells like grapefruit. - -Out of the corner of my eye I can see the Colorado sunshine, but under here it's dark and cramped and it smells like grapefruit. The smell is transmission fluid, a slick, translucent red lubricant with an unpleasantly sweet citrus odor. I've been sticking my hands in it for months, over 4000 miles now, chasing a leak that won't stop. A leak that causes the engine to overheat sometimes, leaving me on my back in the grass and gravel at the side of the road half way up Dallas Divide, outside of Ridgway, Colorado. There's blood on my knuckles, transmission fluid on my forehead and cheek, and I'm half on the ground, half off it, my torso twisted up into the engine, my face inches from an extremely hot radiator, wondering, not for the first time -- what in the world am I doing? - -It started three years earlier. My wife had just given birth to our third child and we were feeling dissatisfied with life in the American suburbs. It wasn't that we wanted to travel, we just wanted to spend more time with our kids. We didn't want to work two jobs and have a bunch of stuff, but never see each other. We realized that what was going to make us happier was spending more time together as a family and also more time outdoors. - -A raft of studies has shown that time outside makes us happier, healthier people. What's more, listening to the wind in the trees, feeling the sun on your face, the rain on your head, the more we experience these things as children, the happier we are as adults. We feel it in our bones, that peace that comes from being outdoors. - -We could have moved to the country. We considered it, we may yet, but instead we decided to buy and RV and live on the road, see the whole country. And now, having lived this way for over two years, I can say that, for our family at least, the studies, the things we feel in our bones, are all absolutely true. The best part of the way we live is waking up in the morning together, all in the same room, and immediately going outside. Because you don't really live in an RV, you live outside. We cook outside, we eat outside, we learn outside, we play outside. We live outside. Only the weather drives us inside. - -But before we made the leap to life on the road it was all untested intuition. We knew we wanted to home school, part of the spend more time together, made a much easier choice by the fact that my wife is a teacher. - -As a freelance writer and programmer, I've long worked from home. Having those two things sorted from the beginning gave us a huge head start on our way to life on the road. Our main hesitation was that we wanted our three children to still have a place they could call their own. We didn't want to travel, we wanted to take our home on the road. - -The logical thing to do was to buy an RV. The problem for us was that modern RV design leaves much to be desired. Most RVs struck us as generic beige boxes, not unlike the suburban housing we wanted to leave behind. Worse, the construction is often very flimsy. - -We wanted an RV that would make us smile when we saw it, something that was made of actual steel, and preferably something that didn't cost a fortune. That's a tough combo to come across. We were ready to give up on the idea when we discovered the Dodge Travco. - -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 magic and joy. I have no idea what it is about it. I've owned it for four years now, lived in it for over two, and I still can't put my finger on it. Some objects transcend themselves. The Travco has that thing no one can put their finger on, but everyone feels it. - -My wife was not 100 percent sold on the idea of living on the road until she saw the Travco. That combined with a trial trip to Florida added up to an afternoon where, over a couple beers in the sweltering Florida sun, we agreed, let's do this. - -Two days later we bought a 1969 Travco and a few weeks later I went to get it. I fired it up, pointed it downhill, and we were on our way. The first time I stopped, at a rest area on I-85, a man was up at the driver's window asking if he could take a picture before I'd even taken off my seatbelt. "What is this thing?" he asked excitedly, "it's the coolest thing I've ever seen". This would happen hundreds of times more over the years and eventually I realized no one really wants me to tell them what it is, the name doesn't matter, it simply exists and people want to acknowledge that it exists. - -I managed to get it the 200 miles back home, despite having no real idea the condition of the engine or brakes. I immediately started ripping out it's insides, re-wiring, re-plumbing, re-paneling, re-covering things to turn it into something livable for a family of five. The kids took to calling it the big blue bus, a name that has stuck with us ever since. - -It's only 27 feet long, small for an RV by today's standards, but big enough to sleep six and after two years of living in it we know it's all we need. - -It took me nearly two years to fully restore the bus and even with all that work we left long before everything was done. We sold our house and moved into the bus before we had working plumbing or propane. It wasn't until four months into our trip that I finally got around to installing a water tank. Two months after that we got our solar system working. We were more interested in getting on the road than having everything perfect. Even today, after two years on the road I've still yet to install a refrigerator. We've lived for two years with an ice box and small freezer. Sometimes that's been a pain. Texas in June, 115 degrees and 99 percent humidity will melt your icebox in a hurry. - -That's been a big lesson of the road though -- you need very little to be happy. - -Stepping outside the traditional structures of modern life means re-evaluating things, especially that cornerstone of modern life -- comfort. Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort means having sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold rather than relying on air conditioning. - -There are some things that make life easier, on the road and otherwise, but more things do not make life more easy. Quite the opposite I'd argue -- more things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them. The simpler you keep things the less there is to worry about. - -Which doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about. Like anyone with solar panels, we worry about hail. We get skittish around storms, but often that works out in our favor. One afternoon we were headed out of Colorado, bound for Canyonlands. We watched as some gentle tufts of cumulus cloud to the south built into something ominously dark, turning day to night. The distant mountains we were hoping to make camp in were swallowed into the darkness and we watched as lightning snapped out in front of the storm. - -We stopped and consulted the map. To the northeast there was a small bit of state land which was labeled with a campground icon, but there was no further information and our map is ten years old. We decided to give it shot though, it beats driving through a big storm. We cut off the highway and followed an increasingly narrow dirt road -- always a good sign if you're looking for secluded spots -- and ended up with a campsite all to ourselves, a canyon wall to one side and a bubbling river on the other. - -We unfurled the awning, set up the mat and let the kids take of exploring. Instead of driving headlong into who knows what we spent the afternoon playing in the river, watching the thunderheads roll by far downstream. That evening we found bobcat tracks and what might have been some mountain lion prints. The next day we met two women foraging herbs along the river. They told us about a canyon to the east that only locals ever visit, full of petroglyphs and ancient ruins. That became our next destination. In fact, the next two weeks we explored leads that all came about because we turned to avoid a storm. - -But I've made it sound like we know what we're doing, which is not true. We have no clue. We make it up as we go along. We stumble along, following our noses as it were. We let the kids decide where we go. We spent a whole summer visiting the region in which Louise Erdrich's <cite>The Birchbark House</cite> takes place for no other reason than my daughters and I love the book. - -Then there's that grapefruit smell. The bus does break down sometimes. We spend days at the side of the road. The kids have learned to roll with it. They play games at the table while Daddy mutters under the bus and Mommy searches YouTube for videos on engine repair. We don't know what we're doing, but we love doing it. - -That particular day I wrapped a combination of duct tape and exhaust tape around a hose to stop the leak. I rolled out from under the bus, grabbed some water from inside and sat down on the highway guard railing. To the east the whole of the Cimarron Range spread out before us, the southern Rockies painted in green and yellow and gray and white. It was September, the days were growing shorter, it was time for us to head south. - -I watched as the sun began to soften toward evening. Chimney Rock slowly turned to amber as Precipice Peak behind it reddened, and I remembered why we do this, why I don't mind stopping at the side of the road to fix something -- there's nowhere to get to, we're already here. Eventually I fired the bus back up and turned around. We limped back to Ridgway where the next day I finally replaced all the transmission lines. We've never had a leak since. diff --git a/essays/leica.txt b/essays/leica.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f9626e4..0000000 --- a/essays/leica.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,44 +0,0 @@ -Leica's new M11 digital rangerfinder camera may as well come from an entirely different era. Don't get me wrong, it's plenty modern. The M11 has a high resolution sensor (a 60-megapixel backside-illuminated full-frame CMOS sensor to be precise), sophisticated metering tools, and even some of the usual digital accoutrements of cameras in our age. But it thumbs its nose at autofocus, and is perfectly happy to work with lenses that are decades old. - -More than that though, the Leica M11 just *feels* like, well, an old Leica. - -The M11 is very much true to the heritage of the M series camera. It looks like an M series. It's compact, understated, a box on which you attach a lens. The M11 doesn't make many promises, but those it does it keeps. - -The M11 is also true to M series when it comes to price, which is high. The retail price of $8,995 is more that most of us are ever going to spend on a camera. But even for those of us who will never own a Leica M11, I think this is an important device that deserves something more than a simple review. - -The M11 is important because it shows that the engineers at Leica are keeping something alive, something that I think the rest of the camera world has forgotten—that the camera doesn't matter, the photographs matter. The camera is just a tool. - -Any tool is only as good as the person using it. A wrench is just a wrench. Some wrenches may be better made than others, but if you want to do anything useful with a wrench, you need a person with the skill to use a wrench. That skill might come in different forms and guises too. I know what I'm doing with a socket wrench in an internal combustion engine, but I have no skill at all in using a plumbing wrench on the pipes in the basement. - -In the same way, camera are tools. Put an outdated digital camera from the early 2000s in Sebastião Salgado's hands and odds are you'll end up with a great image. Put the Leica M11 in my hands and the odds of getting a great image are less in your favor. - -The reason I say the Leica M11 feels more like a film Leica than a modern digital camera isn't because it isn't capable, but because it has been engineered to be used in conjunction with human skill, that is, your skills as a photographer. This is what makes the M11 so different. - -Cameras are increasingly designed to remove the human skill, or more importantly the lack thereof, from the equation. From autofocus to auto white balance to auto metering, the engineering skill of most camera manufacturers over the last several decades has gone into replacing the skilled individual with a algorithm that presents, not a challenge you must rise to or adapt to, but a series of options you can choose between. - -This is the path of all technological advance in our consumer society, the abstraction of skill to a set of features which claim to have removed the need for skill. And yet. Some photographs are better than others. Some photographs tell a story that's independent of technical perfection. No amount of autofocus speed is going to make your image tell a story if you have no story to tell. - -The Leica comes from a time before photography became a means for social approval, and was about telling stories. Stories the world needed to hear, stories the world would not have been able to hear any other way. The work of photographers like [Sebastião Salgado](https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/sebasti%C3%A3o-salgado?all/all/all/all/0) brought the rest of the world into my sheltered high school photography class in a way that nothing else I'd ever seen did. I would sit for hours leafing though *An Uncertain Grace*, staring at the same photographs day after day until I knew every corner of them. Same with [Susan Meiselas](https://www.susanmeiselas.com), whose sometimes shockingly brutal images brought home the conflicts in Central America in a way that the circus of Oliver North on TV (which happened around the same time) never could, never would. TV was sanitized. Meiselas's photography was a collection of raw emotion seared onto the page in way that no one could fail to understand. These were the things that made me want to be a photographer. - -I don't want to give the impression that no one is doing the kind of work Salgado and Meiselas did. There are plenty of truly great photographers working today. In fact the winner of the [Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award for 2021](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQteG83kQqo), Emile Ducke, is a great example. You know what no one asks in the linked film about his work? What camera he uses. You know what no one asked Salgado back in those days? No one asked what camera he used. No one asked Meiselas what lenses she preferred because it didn't matter. The images are all that matter and we all knew that just owning a Leica M series camera, which it turns out both Salgado and Meiselas used, at least some of the time, wasn't going to get you those images. - -That's why I don't know if you should buy the Leica M11 or not. It's an opinionated camera. It's from a different time, when what mattered was the image. I shot with it as a loaner for one week. The highest praise I can give any tool is the praise I'll give the M11: It did what I asked it to do. It never failed. I failed plenty, but the tool kept on being the tool, waiting for me to rise to the occasion. - - - - - - - - - -Today Instagram is like the TV, it's sanitized photography. - - - -lacks autofocus, or because it uses a rangefinger focusing systemmost of the engineering is going into trying to replicate human skill with digital smarts. - - - - - diff --git a/essays/new-from-current.txt b/essays/new-from-current.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 603fab3..0000000 --- a/essays/new-from-current.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,15 +0,0 @@ - - - - ---- - -From Charles Eisenstein: It is not only systems and institutions that are crumbling. It is not only political parties, social patterns, and economic organizations that are in a state of crisis. On a deeper level, we face a crisis of sense, meaning, and identity. More and more of us have lost trust in the authorities we once trusted. We have come to doubt old standards by which to discern true from false. We don’t know what to believe. We don’t know what is real. We aren’t so sure even who we are. Our notions of progress and our faith in the future has been shaken. - -The collective response to Covid so far has been to deepen our immersion in the old story of Separation, fear, and control. Part of that story is that progress means advancing the human capacity to manage and control everything outside of us. Better security means controlling terrorists and criminals. Better living means controlling bad habits and addictions. Better health means controlling germs and our own bodily processes. At the present writing, it has become obvious that the regime of intensifying control will not bring its promised paradise. Paradise remains ever at the horizon no matter how quickly we race toward it. - -The resolution of this state of affairs, however, need not be a bifurcation. We are not in the world in order to leave it. We are here to anchor a more beautiful world the present one. How do we do that? Not through force of will alone. We need other people who share our vision, who have seen the same possibility that we have seen. Those people remind us that choices and perceptions that seem crazy in the old story, that seem naive or impractical or irresponsible, are actually both sane and necessary. In other words, enlightenment is a group activity. - ---- - -Of course, if there are things to be done, they should be done. But that does not mean we should rush around doing stuff, just because it seems better than doing nothing. Here is what Vinay Prasad has to say in his blog ‘Will science do better post COVID19?’ diff --git a/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt b/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 5a9c1f5..0000000 --- a/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,436 +0,0 @@ -That unmistakable vtwin sound of a harley davidson motorcycle climbing the grade. - -# 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. - -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. - -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?" - -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. - -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. - -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. - -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? - -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. - - --- - -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. - -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. - -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 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. - -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. - -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. - ---- - -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. - -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. - -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. - -We turned around and limped back to Ridgway. I found a side street to park on, in front of a mechanic's shop as it turned out. I got under the bus to see what I could. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the flare was not just cracked but missing a whole chunk. The transmission cooler lines are fitted enough that I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. They were too short for that, and even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more that the transmission cooler ever cooled them. - -I was forced to punt again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the us and eventually found one in nearby Montrose. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the campground. That night we repacked and loaded what we needed for a few days of tent camping in a rental car. - -That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room at Ridgway State Park, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. After he stuffed his laundry in the machine, we started talking. Eventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked which engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard and has haunted me ever since. He said, "do you turn your own wrenches?" I told him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." - -This I realized that night is an absolute truth. You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? - -It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but there was no one open. Nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. In the end we just pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked. I knew what to do, but I didn't have to tools and the hardware stores weren't open. - -I climbed out from under and sat down on the step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife had just asked what we were going to do when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street, rattled and then came flying up and open with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was still at the shop working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line and took it inside and cut off the cracked flare and re-flared it. We put it back on and he showed me where the previous mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened it and cracked the metal. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday he told me. - -This is part of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later—because we haven't stopped needing to fix things. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace two belts, change the spark plugs, and half a dozen other projects. The bus will never not need fixing. But the relationship has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do now. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with our fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. - ---- - -Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada though that community feels far away. It wouldn't do me much good even it was here though. The engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries climb a big hill. Whether its fixing it, or just deal with it's limitations, old cars will teach you patience. - -Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. - -I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though, I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decided to make another push up the mountains. The problem is that now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give us a mile before we overheat again. I will never know of course because the odometer is broken, but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the pull out. - -My wife and I discuss turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot. - -Then we here that unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, probably a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike is too us and the rider pulls over. He checks to see if we're okay. I tell him we are. We go through the usual talk about the bus, but he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. - -That changes everything. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on up. We decide to give the engine another bit to cool before we try again. I am thinking about a conversation I had with some construction workers earlier in the day. We had stopped at the top of the first pass and had a snack. A road work crew we’d passed coming up the mountain pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass, the one we're sitting on now. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.” - -This conversation comes back to me now and I mention it, as casually as I can, to my wife. She does not seem thrilled, but we agree to try for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but about half an hour later we are at the top. A spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out the hazy valley. I have just a second to enjoy it before we go flying past a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead." - -The narrows come up so fast we don't really have time to even plan for it. We're just in it. Fortunately, nothing is coming the other way, but it is very much a one lane road. To this day I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially if its one of the empty hay trucks that drive the rest of highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour. - -Coming down the mountain is easier than coming up, but we do still stop to rest the brakes a few times. We have a vacuum brake system that works extremely well, but long continuous down grades of 6-8 percent do require taking breaks. A few hours later though we pull into a campground outside of Bishop California. It's empty this time of year and the road in is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. There's a loud clang at one point and my wife and I look at each other, but I keep going and pull into the first campsite. I shut off the engine for the final time with a sense of deep relief. - ---- - - - - - - - - - - - -The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is very hierarchical one, which means those us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are. - - -That's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would tell me every time I got frustrated. Remember it's all just nuts and bolts. - -Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking. - -It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've been fortunate to have my uncle who knows more about engines than I ever will to help me out, but there have been plenty of others as well. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos in the past, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of it put together and you have perhaps the most important part of repairing anything: the community. - - ---- - -Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. - -I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though, I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decided to make another push up the mountains. The problem is that now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give us a mile before we overheat again. I will never know of course because the odometer is broken, but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the pull out. Sure enough when we stop the engine is overheating it's just low enough on fluid that it hasn't flooded. - -I shut her down and this time the initial silence is broken by the sound of an engine off in the distance. People. - -Nevada is a lonely place. The so-called loneliest road in America runs across it. I think the road we’re on is far lonelier, but it's not as long, so I guess it doesn't rate. We'd had a good drive until we turned onto this road and got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. We'll take it slow, stop when we need too. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that. - -Up and over the first pass was not too bad, though it was the windiest road we'd been on. We stopped at the pass and had a snack. A road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.” - - - - - - - -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. - -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. - ---- - -I haven't always kept it going though. That's not where I started. For a long time I was happy to understand how it worked, but still let others do the actual work. A mechanic in Florida flared new transmission cooler lines for us. Another in Colorado did the shocks. Another in Utah fixed the transmission cooler lines (again). Everything on the inside I rebuilt and repaired myself, but the engine, for all its apparent simplicity, was still intimidating to me. - -One evening in the laundry room at Ridgway State Park just outside of Ridgway Colorado, while watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, another man came in and, after he stuffed his laundry in the machine, we started talking. Eventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked which engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard and has haunted me ever since. He said, "do you turn your own wrenches?" I told him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." - -I knew he was right. I knew he was right before he said anything because I had come to realize that knowing is not enough. Knowing only becomes useful when you apply it by doing. I knew it was time for me to start doing more, to start doing everything. Sometimes I get sick of crawling under the bus to fix things. Sometimes I want to make it all go away, just tow it to a mechanic and make it all better, leave me free to spend time with my kids. But that's not how it works. If I wanted to really be in control, if I wanted to be responsible for my own home, I had to take ownership of it, all of it. I had to turn my own wrenches. I realized that evening that I was not living up to the goals I claimed I had. I had to do the work myself. The knowledge was nothing without the know-how and the know-how took getting in there and getting dirty. - -That's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would tell me every time I got frustrated. Remember it's all just nuts and bolts. - -Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking. - -It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've been fortunate to have my uncle who knows more about engines than I ever will to help me out, but there have been plenty of others as well. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos in the past, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of it put together and you have perhaps the most important part of repairing anything: the community. - -The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is very hierarchical one, which means those us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are. - ---- - -Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. - -I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though, I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decided to make another push up the mountains. The problem is that now we're starting from well, zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give up a mile before we overheat again. I will never know of course because the odometer is broken, but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decide to take advantage of the pull out. Sure enough when we stop the engine is overheating it's just low enough on fluid that it hasn't flooded. - -I shut her down and this time the initial silence is broken by the sound of an engine off in the distance. People. - -Nevada is a lonely place. The so-called loneliest road in America runs across it. I think the road were on is far lonelier, but it's not as long, so I guess it doesn't rate. We'd had a good drive until we turned onto this road and got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. We'll take it slow, stop when we need too. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that. - -Up and over the first pass was not too bad, though it was the windiest road we'd been on. We stopped at the pass and had snack. A road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.” - - - - - - - - - - -Down the back side despite my best efforts at downshifting the brakes started to smell. We took a break to let them rest and enjoy the view. Of absolute nothing. Excepting perhaps some portions of route 50 (the so-called loneliest highway) route 168 is the most remote road I’ve ever been on. There’s no civilization for its entire run over the White Mountains. Just empty desert and one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that says “no telephone available.” The only other vehicles we saw were a few empty hay trucks driving way too fast for the road. - - -We said goodbye and hit the road again. Climbing the third pass I started to smell that sweet smell of radiator fluid and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging. - - - - - -This is something Matthew Crawford explores extensively in his 2010 book, Shop Class as Soul Craft. Crawford's book is an extended meditation on what it means to work with your hands and abide by the rules of mechanics. There are hard limits, hard realities in the bus's engine that don't exist in the rest of my life. If a few words in this essay are slightly off that's on me to be sure, and I don't look good, but, well, life goes on. If the cam shaft lobes in the 318 are mere millimeters off the entire engine will be nothing but a hunk of useless metal in short order. - - -"As a group, they have quite varied educational backgrounds and careers. What stands out is how smart they are and how much they enjoy what they do. Most of them were fortunate to find a mentor who encouraged them early on, but they are also largely self-taught, picking up new skills wherever they can. They challenge themselves with new ideas for projects and often share the results via the Internet. Makers are practical, clever, and creative. - https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/correspondence-fall-2006 - - - - - - - - - -Problem solving seems fun after the problem is solved. During the actual solving it’s less fun. Food, sleep, these things seem unimportant when I have a problem that needs solving stuck in my head. I tend to get obsessed about things. Even when I don’t want to. It’s one of the reasons I don’t do much programming anymore. I never let things go until I solve the problem to my satisfaction. Of course breaking a web server doesn't cost much relative to damaging an engine, so with the bus the stakes are much higher, which means the sullen thinking phase I pass through is correspondingly more sullen and requires more concentration. - - - -Something here about the exhilaration of figuring things out. Example with the fuel pump and then later with the exhaust manifolds - ---- - -Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. - -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. - -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). - - - -After years of working at home it occurred to me that I didn't actually need a house to work (yes, I am a slow learner). - -I pointed this out to my wife one day and somewhere over some beers while on vacation in Florida we decided to try living in an RV. Two months later we had the Travco, 9 months after that we were on the road. - -Lest you think programming from an RV is somehow glamorous... well, it's not. The project that sustained our early travels involved building an inventory tracking system. We're not talking about building cool apps for hot startups that were going to IPO. I prefer to work for small, family-run businesses even if that means building inventory tracking systems, which, trust me, is not glamorous. - -There is one aspect of work though that very much informed - ---- - -Later when I knew enough to know what questions to ask, I went to YouTube where dozens of total strangers walked me through how to repair everything from faulty wires to brake adjuster screws. But the biggest single step after my uncle set me on the path to turning my own wrenches was to buy a reprint of the original shop manual. Here were the words of the engineers who made the bus. How to test systems, what to do when different problems arise. Even how to tune things just the way you want them. - -There are still things I can't fix. I don't travel with an engine lift so I can't do a complete rebuild. But since that afternoon in the laundromat I've replaced or rebuilt the carburetor, the radiator (twice), the water pump, the alternator, the power steering pump, the fuel pump (twice), the brakes, the shocks, the transmission cooler lines, and a host of other little things I've long since forgotten about. Far more important than any single thing I've fixed though is that I know it's all just nuts and bolts. I given the right tools and the enough time, anyone can fix anything in this bus, including me. Which is exactly where I wanted to be when I bought it. - -And yet, despite all that, despite all the wrench turning, here we are, at the side of the road in Nevada. Because older vehicles might be repairable, but they have other limitations most of us aren't used to facing anymore. This is another part of what I love about the bus. It's an adventure every time I drive it. Nothing has failed in the buses systems to leave us at the side of the road. There is nothing for me to fix. Nothing is broken. The bus is just overworked. It may not have the power to get over the mountain. That's a limitation we've pushed a few times and each time we've made it what gets us over the top isn't technical skills, spare parts, or engine savvy, it's patience. - - ---- - -This is just one moment. This is another one. They pass by whether we use them or not. This is what I tell myself while I sit idly throwing gravel down into a dry ravine, waiting. Patience. This is just one moment. The rest of the day has been amazing. - -We woke that morning in the ghost town of Gold Point. We headed west because for nine months of that's a much of plan as we'd come up with, let's go west. West today started on Highway 266, a little climb up into the hills, through another ghost town and down some more hills into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on highway 168 that we got some hints of our future. There was an ominous collection of road signs indicating steep, winding roads ahead. There was even a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a three digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I figured it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that. - -Up and over the second pass was not too bad. It was the windiest road we'd driven in the bus, but we made it over the second pass into a valley with nothing. Not even phone service. There was one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that read “no telephone available." - -We stopped for lunch and a road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the final pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there’s one part we call the narrows, it's only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" "Seriously." "Don’t tell my wife that." - ---- - -The kids are headed back up. They have gNo fossils were found, though - - -and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging. - ---- - -Programming is a relatively new discipline and still believes that the ideal can exist in the real world. Mechanics know better. Programmers, Python programmers anyway, invent things like virtual environments and attempt to sandbox their programs from outside influence, they try to ignore the real world and it keeps failing. Programmers call these failures bugs and pretend they'll all be fixed one day. They won't. Ask any mechanic. That's not how it goes in the real world, and you can't mitigate or abstract away the real world. Eventually programming will figure this out and become a mature discipline that realizes perfection only exists on paper. - - - - - - -Behind that question I've come to think there are several others worth asking, the first is, how did this thing last so long when so little else has? The answer to that is a long and twisting tale, but the short version is that the Chrysler 318 LA engine was made for a long time, and used in a lot of vehicles, which is to say a lot of these engines are out there in the world. That created a huge market for parts and so far, that market continues to exist though I have to imagine it's shrinking every year. For now though, I can walk into any parts store in America and have whatever part I need in a couple of days.[^1] - -There is, however, I think another question the people who've asked me about the bus engine have in mind though when they say, what engine does it have in it, they are, almost universally, people from the time when many people could and did repair their own engines. - - -[^1]: This is still true even with post pandemic shortages, though I, and many others, have noticed a significant drop in the quality of part available. - - - - - - - - - - - - -Somewhere far up the road there are cool pinyon-juniper woodlands with sagebrush meadows and bristlecone pine forests. - - -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 thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that. - - - - - - -Of course they do. They barely notice when we break down. They half like it. It's a chance to get out stretch their legs, explore the desert. This is part of why we live this way, to do impromptu things like exploring the desert. - -I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's just the radiator overheating. We live in a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome 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 seem to want one. Ours is electric blue with a wide white stripe wrapped around it. - - -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 thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that. - -Up and over the second pass was not too bad either, though it was the windiest road we’ve been on. Down the back side despite my best efforts at downshifting the brakes started to smell. We took a break to let them rest and enjoy the view. Of absolute nothing. Excepting perhaps some portions of route 50 (the so-called loneliest highway) route 168 is the most remote road I’ve ever been on. There’s no civilization for its entire run over the White Mountains. Just empty desert and one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that says “no telephone available.” The only other vehicles we saw were a few empty hay trucks driving way too fast for the road. - -We had snack and a road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the next pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, “there’s one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there.” I just stared at him for a minute. “Seriously?” “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.” - -We said goodbye and hit the road again. Climbing the third pass I started to smell that sweet smell of radiator fluid and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Before it explodes you can smell it coming. A whiff of tk slips in through the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. - -That's when I start looking for a place to pull over. Not that I need one really. I haven't seen another car in four hours of driving. Most of the population of Nevada lives in Las Vegas, and we are not in Las Vegas anymore. - -We are on highway 168 somewhere between a ghost town and the top of the White Mountains. - -I stop right in the middle of the road. Why not? - -No one speaks. We all, my wife, three children, and myself, listen to the hiss of the radiator boiling over. Then my wife turns around and says to kids, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" Of course they do. They barely notice when we break down. They half like it. It's a chance to get out stretch their legs, explore the desert. This is part of why we live this way, to do impromptu things like exploring the desert. - -I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's just the radiator overheating. We live in a 1969 Dodge Travco, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -The view under the doghouse is benign. The engine is fine. The Dodge 318 LA series motor is one of the most indestructible engines ever made. I could with a few simple tools pull the entire thing apart right here at the side of the road and fix anything in it. There are some parts in this beast that can't be replaced, but they aren't in the engine. I would like to avoid doing that of course. It's doubtful I'd get it back together in running shape anyway. When we left a year ago I knew next to nothing about engines. I've been slowly learning as I go, learning the hard way, by breaking down and then figuring out how to get it going again. One thing I have learned, it's damn near indestructible. A few mountains in Nevada aren't going to kill it, it just needs to rest every now and then. Catch its breath. The world of 1969 didn't have always-on technology. You took breaks. You rested. - -The radiator has already stopped overflowing. In half an hour it'll be cool enough that I can open it and top it off with some water to maybe get us the rest of the way over the mountain. I head outside to see what the kids are up to. - -It's late September in the high foothills of the White Mountains. There's not much around. Tufts of creosote dot a moonscape of rock. There's a cluster of cottonwoods at the bottom of a dry arroyo just down the slope from us. It's the only shade we've seen in a day of driving. My wife and kids head down to play in the shade. - - - - - - - - - - - - - -get out to survey the scene. - - - -This isn't the first time we've overheated, it won't be the last. If you want to resurrect and live in a piece of 1960's Americana like the Dodge Travco, you have to be okay with overheating. You have to be okay with stepping back in time to an era when travel was more open ended. - - -A thin thread of a smell, like bacon frying downstairs when you were a kid and it was too cold to get up until that bacon was ready. You know it's coming though, old RV engines overheat climbing mountains. It is what it is. - -We're bound for California and all we've got are paper maps. Which is good because there hasn't been phone service for days. - -More description of the Nevada desert. The kids go off to play. Corrinne looks for pottery and fossils, rocks. - -Something about Henry Miller driving into LA. - - -"optional sewage incinerator system, the “Destroilet,” a gas incinerator-type toilet that almost eliminated the need to empty holding tanks. There were problems to be sure: the 318-cubic-inch engine in the early models had to work very hard to go up any significant incline; there were stability issues because of the lack of anti-sway bars, and its low-slung body hampered tire changing" - -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/essays/safety-third.txt b/essays/safety-third.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 85a6811..0000000 --- a/essays/safety-third.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,180 +0,0 @@ -If you land on luxagraf.net on an odd day of the month, you might notice the little tag line under the site title is "safety third". This comes from a sticker we saw on a pole outside the [Henry Miller Library](https://henrymiller.org) in [Big Sur, California](https://images.luxagraf.net/2017/2017-11-28_161158_monterey_picwide.jpg). Miller no doubt would have agreed. He might have ranked safety even lower in his decision calculus. I often do. - -<img src="images/2023/2017-11-28_161158_monterey.jpg" id="image-3319" class="picfull" /> - -Every time we go to any sort of government park -- state, national, county, city, you name it -- we get handed a set of rules. I can tell which level of government land we are on by the number of rules, the more rules, the higher level government. These rules are invariably couched in terms of safety. - -They range from the ridiculous to the obvious, but almost never tell anyone anything they didn't already know. As we all know, these rules serve no purpose beyond heading off lawsuits. Go abroad to less litigious cultures (like Mexico) and you'll discover there are far fewer rules. - -The Safety Third sticker became our antidote to the endless rules of public spaces. It was a good family joke. Whenever we do something other people might frown on, one of us will invariably shout, "safety third!" before plunging ahead. - -Then the pandemic happened. - -Regardless of your opinion on the response to the disease, one overarching truth struck me: a very vocal and powerful segment of our culture believes that safety trumps everything. For some people I realized, all those ridiculous signs aren't ridiculous. They aren't a joke. They aren't just their to head off lawsuits. For some people these signs are words to live by. - -What was more troubling though was that these people assumed that the rest of us would agree with their thinking, that nothing is worth risking life for, absolutely nothing. - -I think we need to go back to the phrase itself and think about what we're really saying when we say "Safety First". If safety is truly first then love, joy, honesty, purpose, and a thousand other elements of human existence mean nothing once they conflict with safety. - -We saw this in the pandemic when loved ones were forced to die alone isolated in hospitals because it would not have been "safe" for their families to be with them. Again, I don't care what you think of the disease, there is some fucked up thinking behind that "logic". - -Still, this thinking shouldn't have been surprising. It's the natural outcome of an obsession with safety. Our lives were already littered with the tools of safety -- rules, warning labels, helmets, straps, leashes, railings, walls, soaps, disinfectants, goggles, and so on. Who will object to a few more on top of that? - -But I am not so much concerned with any new levels of safety mania, I'd prefer to cut it off at the root. I don't want to live obsessing over safety, and I don't want my kids to live that way either. I suspect most people don't. You probably don't. - -<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_160211_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3316" class="picfull caption" /> - -Safety is an endless positive feedback loop. The safer you think your are, the less risk you are willing to take. Once you get on that treadmill, it's nearly impossible to get off without knocking the whole thing over. People get trapped. Witness Howard Hughes, an extreme, but illuminating example. Cultures too seem to get trapped, with ours currently steaming up that lofty mountain of self-imposed isolation and madness that Howard Hughes pioneered. - -Before I get too deep it's probably necessary to point out that if safety is at one end of a spectrum and reckless idiocy is at the other, in rejecting an obsession with safety I am not suggesting the antidote is reckless idiocy. The opposite of one idea is invariably another bad idea. Sanity is in the middle. - -There is a third option between the timidity born of fear and safety obsession, and cliff diving in Acapulco. It's called thinking for yourself. You can find a balance point between paranoia and recklessness, recognizing that other people will find different balance points than you and that's okay. - -This is what I mean when I say safety third. Not that you should be reckless, but that thinking of safety first isn't going to lead to a meaningful life. When you come to the end of your life, whenever that may be, I am confident that you are not going to be thinking "I wish I had been safer". Bonnie Ware's famous book, *The Top Five Regrets of the Dying* has [not one mention of safety](https://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/). - -Life is not always safe. The sooner you accept this and move on, the happier you will be. Just getting out of bed is fraught with risk. Ask Hughes. He eventually stopped doing it. So if it's safety you really want, that's probably the way to go. - -Still, I'd like to propose that things aren't actually nearly as risky as our ingrained safety-first mentality might make it seem. You may have noticed you weren't born wearing a helmet. In fact your skull was literally smashed as you were born and yet here you are. You then grew to have a reasonably strong skull, similar models managed to help the rest of your species survive lo these last 400,000 or so years. And, while you weren't born with knee and elbow pads, you were born with some pretty remarkable joints and an almost Wolverine-like ability to heal thanks to a very sophisticated immune system. All of which is to say that nature, god, whatever you like to attribute this state of affairs to, has provided you with a pretty good starting point. You're got a good system for avoiding and dealing with injury should you miscalculate risk in some way. - -Proponents of the safety-industrial complex will here likely note that you weren't born with a mountain bike or internal combustion engine at your disposal, and therefore all the defenses of nature are useless, which is true, to a point. - -This is an important objection, we *have* made the world less safe for ourselves. Yet here we are. Enough of us somehow hanging on, just walking around breathing and doing stuff and not dying. - -Ironically the one time it might be worth considering, for example, a helmet -- while driving 65 MPH down a highway -- no one does, and, more to the point, even the most ardent of safety-first supporters will look at you like an idiot if you strap on a helmet before climbing in their Prius. - -What we're left with then is a pretty good system for avoiding and coping with injury, and the notion that we're awfully bad at figuring out which activities are actually dangerous. - -It'd be easy here to point out some of the many other ironies this leads to, for example how padded playgrounds actually lead to children taking greater risks because the padding literally cushions them from life's little bruises, which then spectacularly backfires when they encounter the rest of life, which lacks padding. The whole reason you need to get hurt playing on the playground is so you come to understand what hurts, what you can do, what you can't do, and how to use the information to calculate which new activities you undertake might be risky and what you can do to mitigate risk. You don't understand risk until you take some and earlier you do that, the less painful your failures will be. - -But then our safety mania was never rooted in logic, it's not rooted in a concern for safety at all, but in a fear of death. - -It seems axiomatic that fear of death is a natural outcome of materialist beliefs. Remember that we learned in the pandemic that, for our institutions and leaders, death is the worst possible thing. It is, from their point of view, the ultimate failure of man. It is the one limit no one can get around and therefore the thing to be most feared. But why? Why fear what is as much a part of life as the rest of life? - -Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a disconnection from purpose and passion. **If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose.**" (emphasis mine) - -In other words death phobia is a result of not knowing how to live. - -Disconnection from purpose and passion is where death phobia begins to feedback into itself, driving and increased obsession with safety, which in turn makes us incredibly risk adverse, which in turn keeps us from exploring and potentially finding our purpose and passion. On and on in a viscous cycle. - -It's a vicious cycle that infantilizes us further and further at every turn. The more we avoid for fear of our safety the more lose our ability to judge what is and isn't dangerous. Even those of us who grew up with the good hard ground under our jungle gyms can end up forgetting those lessons and come to see the world as a big bad place full of dangerous stuff. - -How do you get out of the cycle? If you're reading this, chances are you aren't in that cycle, but I have an idea of how we get out at a cultural level: By playing without our helmets. - -If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play. If you can't play, you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. A helmet means supervision. We who play are unsuperviseable. - -This I believe is how we remake the world: by playing. - -To play amidst a world full of rules is perhaps the most subversive act. - -I know, that's not a Very Serious Solution that Very Serious People can go out and implement, but that's the point isn't it? To remake the world any other way would end up right back here eventually. - -You beat the safety game by playing a different one. You play the personal responsibility and risk management game. You go slow, you learn your limits, but then you keep playing. You push your limits. You do things that scare you because they also call to you. You keep expanding and growing, and when the end finds you, you won't have to think... I wish I had... - - - -This is why blanket rules are ridiculous and ignored. The sign that says danger, no lifeguard on duty means little if you know how to read the water to avoid rip currents and are a strong swimmer. If you aren't a strong swimmer and don't even know what a rip current is, then the message of the sign might be important, but in the world littered with such signs that one is just so much more noise. You ignore it. - - - - - - -To play is to be outside the lines of material culture. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It is outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly [^1]. - -[^1]: I am indebted to Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga's book *Homo Ludens*, for this definition of play. - - - - - - - - - - - - -Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9] - - - - - - - - - -I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship. - -I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Safety is largely illusory anyway. - -Oscar Wilde once said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation” - - -for what it really is and it has made me afraid. - - - -I should probably make it part of [my code](/code). - - - - - - - -I think the safety first obession is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. - -It's also a big part of the reason we gave up our independence to ["experts."](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming). Much of the reason we are told we must rely on "experts" is for our safety. - - - - -Clearly, since people like us have been ignoring them. - -social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love. -https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/ -The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death. - - - -The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien - - - - -Because our civilizational answer to “Why are we here?” has unraveled, many of us individually have trouble answering that question too, for the individual story draws from the collective. - -OK, I realize I may have risen to too high an altitude for the practical purpose of preventing the next bout of pandemania. So I will end with this: We can reduce our general susceptibility to fear-mongering by reducing the levels of fear current in society. A society ridden with fear will acquiesce to any policy that promises them safety. How do we reduce ambient levels of fear? There is no single answer. Besides, each one of us already knows how. - -https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5 - - -I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship. - - - - diff --git a/essays/tnf.txt b/essays/tnf.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 868b401..0000000 --- a/essays/tnf.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ -[<span class="small italic">I wrote this essay the night I found out that Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face passed away. I never actually met the man, but I did work for his company for a while and it remains one of the more memorable jobs I've had.</span>] - -In 1995 I dropped out of college for the first time[^1]. I had made it through three semesters, which I thought was pretty good. Especially considering how much college had been getting in the way of my life, which at the time consisted mainly of hiking, climbing, surfing and generally living outdoors. - -It wasn't an expensive lifestyle by any means. I shared a single bedroom trailer a few blocks from the beach (location, location, location) for which my roommate and I paid, I believe, $220 each. Everything I needed, save the mountains and desert, was within walking distance. - -My biggest expense was gear. Rock climbing gear especially tended to be both expensive and, due to the often brutal conditions it existed in, short-lived. It was all good and well to live on bean burritos, but smart climbers did not try to overextend the life of ropes and cams. - -Looking around for ways to fund this lifestyle I did what countless others before and after me had done -- I got a job at the nearest outdoor retailer that would have me. - -In my case that turned out to be The North Face[^2]. My girlfriend in high school had worked at the Gap so I knew the retail clothing drill more or less and I definitely knew outdoor gear. I ate, slept and breathed it. Aside from obscure punk bands, there was little I knew more about than outdoor gear. I turned in an application and after one short interview, got the job. - -I was quite proud of myself. I had set out to do something and I did it. I won't try to unpack the privilege going on here, I was 19. I thought I had skills. I got some inkling of how little skills and how much unearned privilege I enjoyed later when my manager Kristine confessed to me over after work drinks that I was horrible at interviewing and she almost didn't hire me because I never looked her in the eye. But she thought I was cute, so I got the job. Skills my ass. - -I also go the job in part because it was nearly summer, which meant that half the regular employees would soon be departing for seasonal work around the west -- guiding white water trips, leading climbing expeditions and otherwise doing the sorts of things that people (and The North Face itself) expected North Face employees to do. - -This was back a bit, when The North Face (hereafter TNF) still appealed primarily to those spending their lives outdoors. I was selling gear mainly to fellow hikers, climbers and campers. Most of them didn't need the expensive gear they were buying, but then again nobody ever does until they do and then your life depends on it. Or so we all told ourselves. I originally wanted the job because I wanted one of the TNF four season tents. I dumped probably 25 percent of what I made back into gear and you know the one thing I never bought? A tent. Naturally. - -Still, back then a job at TNF was a highly coveted thing for someone with my aspirations, which were basically to work as little as possible and spend as much time outside as possible. - -While the perks were good and the pay enabled me to get by and do what I wanted to do, the job itself was little different that what my ex-girlfriend had been doing at the Gap. It was retail clothing sales. It was boring and the pay was pretty shit. - -There were a few things I enjoyed about it though. I enjoyed helping out the occasional thru-hiker calling from somewhere along the PCT in need of new gear or a warranty repair. The TNF back then had the best warranty in the business. If an item could be repaired it was repaired. If it couldn't be repaired, it was replaced. Very few questions asked. In fact employees like me could make the judgment call ourselves. For PCT thru-hikers I usually just sent out a new bit of gear, usually without even seeing their old one. They were out there doing it, I considered it my job to make sure they did it. - -Another part of the job I enjoyed was the gear testing. It didn't happen very often, but a few times, maybe four or five times in my nine months working there, the San Francisco headquarters would send out some prototype piece of gear they were thinking of making into a product. They'd send out a few tents to all the stores or a dozen jackets and the employees would take them out on their next trip. On one hand it was free gear, on the other it was possibly defective gear. It added a bit of spice to your trip. - -I have no idea how other stores did it, but at our store the gear shipments would generally come in on Thursdays. If there was gear for us to test we would all look over the schedule, see who had the weekend off, sometimes call unsuspecting fellow employees and try to switch shifts, and then make a group trip to the desert. - -After work on Friday we'd meet up at the Goat Hill Tavern, a terrible, brightly lit bar with sawdust and peanut shells scattered all over the floor, chosen chiefly because it was across the street from the store. One unlucky soul would be the designated driver and the rest would proceed to drink themselves silly. When the bar closed we would all pile in Roy's wood paneled Dodge minivan and high tail it out to Joshua Tree National Park. - -We'd get into the campground around three or four in the morning (yeah, we were those people), in varying states of exhaustion, bleary-eyed drunkness and sometimes already hungover. We would then proceed to do any tent testing. If anyone could get a prototype tent set up in the dark, it passed muster. We'd give it rave reviews. If we gave up and just threw our sleeping bags in the dirt the tent got a bad review while we got a few hours of sleep under the Milky Way before the blazing desert sun found us early the next morning. Then it was a full day of hungover climbing and a long drive back to the beach. It was a hard life. - -The other thing I remember about working at TNF was the incredible amount of downtime. In fact, if my memory is correct there were only about 100 customers the entire time I worked there[^3]. There were stretches on mid-week afternoons when no one would come in for four hours or more. - -There was a small climbing wall which we regularly reconfigured in a futile effort to challenge ourselves, but by and large we sat around reading books and magazines. I got a great many other things out of working at TNF, including things I would never have expected, like connections to the Mexican mob and an introduction to really good Thai food, Thai food so good I wouldn't taste better until I made it to Thailand. - -Great jobs are like that and despite the fact that TNF was essentially retail sales, there was something more there, something about the company itself that went beyond what my girlfriend did at the Gap. - -Until one day all that stopped. - -My good friend and manager was sent packing and replaced by a professional salesman fresh off a stint at Mervins. I quit the first day I worked with him and have never regretted it. Everything is grand, until it isn't. - -[^1]: I would drop out four more times from three different schools before finally graduating from the University of Georgia, 12 years and 3000 miles from where I started. -[^2]: I had originally hoped to get a job at a privately owned shop named Adventure 16, but they were not hiring at the time I was looking. -[^3]: This is no doubt a slight exaggeration. However the store I worked at did eventually close for lack of business and in fact entire shopping center did the same a bit later. Last time I was in the area it was largely abandoned and in the process of being converted into loft apartments. diff --git a/essays/whats-missing-is.txt b/essays/whats-missing-is.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 0f6c7d7..0000000 --- a/essays/whats-missing-is.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,204 +0,0 @@ -# What's Missing Is -## A story (fictional) based on my grandparents and other bits of family history. -### Originally published by The Cost of Paper https://web.archive.org/web/20150506051746/http://1888.center/scott-gilbertson/ - -Claire woke up in a sleeping bag. The familiar shimmer of nylon against her skin. The smell of creosote and dampness. Already the darkness was lifting off the desert in front of her. She rolled over on the chaise lounge and groped the ground until she found her headlamp. - -The little tuna can stove was back against the wall of the house. She stretched until she could hook it with a fingertip. She filled it with alcohol and lit it with a match. As the stove heated up she poured the water and grounds into the moka pot. - -She sat up, still in the sleeping bag, and sipped the inky black coffee. She thought of something an ex had once said to her, "Claire, normal people want to be liked and accepted. You don't seem to give a shit. All you seem to care about is your coffee in the morning and your drinks in the evening". More or less. She took another sip. But not really. - -Little bubbles of the past had been welling up and bursting on the surface like that ever since the plane touched down yesterday evening. Every time she heard that horrid kitty litter crunch of someone walking on the endless gravel of Tucson, some bit of her younger self broke loose inside. - -She was facing west, but could tell that the sun had not cleared the horizon. Two Cardinals flitted in the Mesquite tree at the edge of the patio. Flashes of red amongst the blacks and greens. She listened to them talking, the thin chip of their song muted by the morning stillness. - -The desert began to sketch itself in the morning light, watercolor hues of sand and rock that surged together over the rolling canvas until everything was a million rioting shades of pink sandstone that held the river plain like a cradle, the dark green Palo Verde and Mesquite groves nestled like some dark scars in the blushing sand. It seemed to extend forever, spreading out to the west until it climbed up and disappeared into the green, juniper and pine cloaked world of the Catalina mountains. - -It was wet. The rain she had dreamed was not just a dream. Everything beyond the few feet of solid patio cover where she had slept was dripping. The foot of her sleeping bag was wet. She slid out into the cool of the morning, gravel gouging at her heels, and hung the sleeping bag to dry from a hook on the patio cover. - -She cupped her hand to the window and looked inside the house. Her grandfather was passed out in the recliner, fully reclined, just the way she had left him six or seven hours ago, when his eyelids had finally slid shut over the constellations of grief she had watched drift quietly across those dark expanses. The TV still flickered. Ever since she was a girl, the only way he had ever slept. - -<hr /> - -The late evening sun was just starting to temper its edge, take a little something off finally, maybe give a little respite from this goddamn heat, Ambrose was thinking when the entirety of the gravel station lot just outside the window was swallowed by a giant dust cloud that might, he realized, have somewhere in it a car, a customer, perhaps even customers, something he had not otherwise seen since much earlier in the day, back when it was hotter than Ambrose's repertoire of swear words could convey. - -He'd been wondering for some time if he'd need to expand that repertoire for the jungle. The Army was unclear on many things, especially to Guardsmen like Ambrose, not the least of which was how many words he might need to describe the heat of Panama. - -He was still standing in the shadows of the garage wiping his tanned forehead with a greasy rag, trying to imagine humidity, or at least the idea of water, when he heard the door slam and the inevitable gravel crunch of footsteps coming his way. Squinting against the glare of the setting sun he was just stepping out of the shadows when a woman's voice startled him. - -"Sorry about the dust." - -"That's all right ma'am." - -"We need some petrol and a place to stay." - -"Okay. Well I'll fill it up for you. You can stay down to street at the Vida Court. I'm sure there's some rooms." - -"I see." - -Ambrose followed her back to the truck where two small boys and a teenage girl sat atop a pile of trundles and suitcases in the bed. He nodded to the boys and tipped his hat to girl who met his gaze directly, without flinching in the slightest, which brought a warm heat to his cheeks before he could stop it. - -Ambrose turned his head away and busied himself with the gas pump. - -"Heat brings the color to your cheeks." The woman was beside him again. - -"Yes ma'am." Ambrose stared at the ground. "Been a hell of summer, if you'll pardon me." - -"It's not always this hot?" - -"It's always this hot, but not for so long." The woman said nothing, Ambrose glanced up at her. "Ma'am?" - -"I was thinking, I was wondering if my grandchildren will have to endure this place." - -"Ma'am?" - -"We're here for my husband. They said that the dry air would be good for his tuberculosis." - -"Mmmhmm. They say that." Ambrose studied his feet. - -"I don't expect I will get to leave." She was staring off in the distance. "But I'd like to think my daughter might." - -He waited a moment, but she did not say anything more. She paid him in coins and climbed back in the truck. The engine coughed back to life after a few sputters that Ambrose attributed to grungy spark plugs. Most people didn't know to soak them in gasoline, it was rare that they need to be replaced. He decided he liked the woman, she was maybe a bit odd, but the heat did funny things to you if you weren't used to it. He imagined she would endure, something about her seemed incapable of not enduring. At the very least he didn't feel like she should need to buy new spark plugs just yet. He would tell her as much tonight, after he went home to the Vida Court. - -He watched the truck crawl out onto Prince road. He followed it out, kicking a rock out the driveway into the road. He saw the brake lights at the end of the street. The truck lurched into the Vida Court. He thrust his hands in his pockets and walked back toward the office. - -<hr /> - -If she really didn't give a shit Claire reasoned, then she would not have come. People who don't give a shit don't abandon their lives half way around the world, book very expensive last minute plane tickets and come back to this godforsaken fucking desert. - -Although, in truth, now that she was here, she missed this desert in some deranged way that made her half understand why people stayed in abusive relationships. Hate is just a perversion of love, but rage, rage is another thing altogether. - -She had left the desert in a kind of rage, a dull rage of unfairness wrapped up in punk rock and politics, and being born at the wrong time in the wrong place to the wrong people. The people who didn't stick around. - -Claire found her aunt's cigarettes tucked in the side of her purse, which she had left next to the impossibly long telephone cord that connected the old push button land line her grandfather insisted on keeping around. She took two and ducked out the back door for walk in the desert. She wanted to get away from her aunts. - -Her mother's sisters both thought she didn't give a shit. They always had. All because Claire hadn't cried at her own parents' funeral. As if a six year old is aware of social decorums. - -They still hated her for it. Or, if not hated, at least thought she was strange, most likely a little dangerous and best studied in silence. That she insisted on sleeping outside, like animal she had heard her aunt say last night, only reaffirmed this belief. But outside was the only place the rage dissipated. Outside there was only the heat and the stillness and the relative cool of the evening and mornings. Coffee and cocktails were not so far off after all perhaps. - -There was also the rather insulting move of leaving the desert. Claire did what no one else in the family had dared to do since her grandmother stepped off the beat up flatbed into the cactus-strewn world of kitty litter. Leave. We are here to go she had said with the smirk and she disappeared over the horizon, traveling halfway around the world to do god knows what. Claire imagined how much they must enjoy talking about her when she wasn't around. Sometimes she thought she should sit them down and just tell them everything, but they had over the years made it pretty clear that they actually liked her better as an object of fascination than a person. Who was she to deny them such pleasure? - -It was April, the edge of searing heat, more of a baking heat right now. The dry heat of spring in a place where somehow flowers still contrived to not just exist, but explode out of the seemingly dead soil. Claire looked down at the cigarette between her fingers. She'd quit years before, but somehow it seemed like something Emma would do. Now though, standing in the middle of a flame red cluster of Ocotillo flowers she realized Emma would never have lit the cigarette. Would never have even taken it. Would never have even come at all. She was never part of the desert the way Claire was, she had floated above it like a cloud. - -Claire watched a tiny dust devil gathering in the wash down the hill. The desert was where the earth's dust came from. Bits of the Sahara coat the Amazon every year. There is no escaping the desert. Even if you travel half way around the world your desert past will find you, grain by grain, dust to dust. Everything ends up back here in the dry desert plain where it settles and bakes in the heat until it's all as hollow as a corn husk. A little wind and it would all be off again, headed south down to the Mexican coast and out to sea. - -<hr /> - -Emma had developed a peculiar fascination with chewing sand. It came to her mouth as a dry film licked off her lips. From western Oklahoma onward she had been chewing at the nothingness of sand. Now, after jumping down from the truck bed, she violently spat the contents of her mouth on a cactus and resolved to never chew sand again. - -Except that it kept settling on her lips. And she kept licking them, out of habit. Perhaps, she thought, the whole West is just one thin dusty film settling over the world. Certainly the room at the Vida Court was saturated with fine grit. - -Mother had laid Father out on the bed and was giving him a glass of water and some saltines. They were talking in low voices that Emma could not make out. She went outside to get her bag and have a look around. - -The Vida Court was, Emma reasoned, better than sitting atop trundles in the back of the flatbed wedged between sweaty siblings and a mucus and blood-spewing father. And that was about all that could be said of it. - -It was not, for instance, a ten-room farmhouse with three floors and a tornado cellar. Nor was it surrounded by endless acres of imported genuine Kentucky bluegrass with a semicircle of drooping cottonwood trees growing around the pond. There were no ponds for miles. Just a small, rusted copper tub full of sun-warmed water. - -It was only after she removed her stockings that she realized how thoroughly the sand had saturated her. Or perhaps, she thought, perhaps my thighs have tanned through these skirts. She climbed into the water and watched as the brown of her legs faded back to milky white, the dusty film of Oklahoma and New Mexico drifting across the water like great orange clouds moving from one end of the tub to the other. - -She could see the young man from the gas station through the chalky pink haze of the bathroom window, but only as a still, dark frame in a chair on the porch. It wasn't long before Emma found herself standing in the bathtub, dripping water, watching the shadowy porch for signs of movement. - -She put on a clean dress and evacuated the bungalow as fast as she could without raising undue suspicion. The sun was already gone, but the air still held the heat like a treasure of the day. She walked around the cacti and was tempted to touch the thorns. She reached out her hand and ran it from the center out and down the edge, careful to keep her hand moving with the hooked direction of the needles. - -"So y'all sold your farm, bought the truck and hauled your dad out here for some fresh air huh?" - -His voice startled her enough that she almost leaned on the cactus for support. - -"Sorry?" - -"You sold the farm, bought the truck and here you are, TB and all." - -"Something like that." - -"We get quite a few passing through these days..." - -"Oh we're staying I believe." - -"I'm Ambrose" - -He extended his hand and she stepped out of the cacti and took it in her own. - -"Emma." - -"You know, Emma," he took another sip of the beer for courage, "that truck you're family is drivin... you need to pull the plugs and soak them in some gasoline. I can do it if you like." - -<hr /> - -The funeral was over by four. Claire sat on the patio with her Grandfather, eating leftover Fancy Franks. - -"These were her favorite," he said staring down at the last one in his hand. - -"No they weren't, she hated little cocktail crap like this." - -He laughed and pitched the last one out into the desert. "You're right, she did." - -She watched a Brown Thrasher study the frank from a low branch of a Palo Verde tree. "Are you sure you're going to be okay?" - -"Have I ever not been okay?" - -"You wife just died Papa..." - -"She died three years ago Claire, her body stopped working recently is all. I'm old, she was old. People die. It's what we do Claire. Next time you come around here it'll be for me." - -"Don't take this the wrong way Papa, but I'm not coming back for you." - -"I know." - -"How do you know that?" - -"Because when I'm gone there's no one to come back to." - -Claire smiled. "True, plus I'd hate to disappoint all of them. Everyone thinks I don't give a shit. If I show up here after you... well, that would seem like I gave a shit wouldn't it?" - -"Who thinks you don't give a shit? Give a shit about what? They don't think that." - -"About anything. And they do. Like everyone else has these complicated situations and feelings and worries and all this shit and I just float away on a bunch of merry red little balloons." - -Ambrose chuckled. "Who thinks this?" - -Claire gestured around her, "I dunno, everyone..." - -"Mmmhmm. Claire, you know better than most that there is no everyone." - - -<hr /> - - -The rock sounded like a bomb against the window. She was a foot clear of her bed before she had even made sense of the noise. Then she heard his hissing whisper, "Emma..." - -She pulled the window up and crawled out, tumbling down into his arms. "Stop with the rocks, you scared the life out of me". - -They crept through the sandy yard and down the banks of Palo Verde snarls to the edge of the river. He stopped suddenly and she crashed into his body. He started to say something, but she smothered his mouth with a kiss. - -Later they lay on their backs listening to the river. Ambrose told her the names of the stars that he could remember, making up the rest on the spot. - -She asked about the stars in Panama and then suddenly, "you aren't going to get Malaria are you?" -Despite all the words he had conjured for Panama this was one he had not thought of. The Army had not mentioned it either. "Do they have malaria in Panama?" - -"Of course. And snakes and worms and all sorts of nastiness. It's a jungle you know." - -"I know. It'll be beautiful, no desert, no dry cracking horridness." - -Emma smiled. "You've never felt humidity have you?" - -"No, but I already know I love it." - -Emma laughed. "You might be the only person I've met who's happy to be going to war." - -"I'm not happy to be going to war, but I'm happy to get out of here. I've been trying to get out of here for years." - -She laughed again ans stroked his cheek. "You can always leave anywhere Ambrose, you just go. You just have to make sure you understand what you're leaving." She slid out of his arms and walked down to the water's edge. He watched as she crouched down at the river’s edge and skipped rocks out toward the middle. - - -<hr /> - - -The patio had a fan. It spun too slow to move the air much. It had always reminded Claire of a tape reel or a movie projector, except that it was broken and only spun backward. A tape reel forever rewinding. - -The rain had started again off in the distance, a low cloud hung over the mountains, a black mist trailing down from it, filling the canyons and ravines with drops that would become a raging wall of water by the time it passed by here tomorrow morning. - -Inside the house Ambrose tilted back the reclining chair with a long angry sounding trail of ratcheting clicks. She could hear her aunts talking in the kitchen, their words muffled by the faucet and clatter of dishes. She heard the TV come on. They would be running the ticker tape at the bottom of television again tonight: Flash flood warning in effect. - -Tomorrow the newspaper would want everyone to know that someone had died; that a new golf course is going to be built on the hillside above someone’s watery grave; that the threat of flood is the price we pay for sunshine; that the desert is a barren curse; that every place has its curse, that eventually all the curses will combine; that everything will be cursed; that the curse is not so bad; that loneliness is a curse; that loneliness is different than alone, that still, the coffee is quite good down at the.... - -Claire slid her legs into the sleeping bag, enjoying the dry slipperiness of nylon against her skin. It felt like slipping between worlds, cool dry worlds where she could float on red balloons forever. Darkness closed in, the world telescoped down into blackness. The foothills faded, the dark splotches of river slipped into black. Eventually there was only the lone saguaro still glowing in the soft blue light of the television flickering behind her. diff --git a/essays/wired excerpt v8.txt b/essays/wired excerpt v8.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e397500..0000000 --- a/essays/wired excerpt v8.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,240 +0,0 @@ -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.
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-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 Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road.
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-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 desert 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?"
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-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.
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-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. But 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. 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 bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne.
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-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 I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of fixing things, if not themselves, then at least by me..
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-There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but in June of 2016, after a few months of haunting Craigslist 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. Then they changed their mind and put it up for sale.
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-I could have picked up where they left off, but as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it. I wanted to understand the Travco, 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.
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-I grew up around repair and restoration. 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—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.
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-My dad 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. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I came out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, perhaps misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools and a good mentor, anything was fixable.
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-In his 2010 book Shop Class as Soul Craft, Matthew Crawford sees the need to be capable of repair as more than just a desire to fix things. He sees it as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence on stuff. The more I began to work on the bus the more I understood what he meant. Your stuff will never again fail you because you can repair it.
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-Yet these days of high technology, products are often covered with stickers warning you that even undoing a screw will void the warranty or risk injury. Companies like John Deere have even argued that it is illegal for the owner of their machines to repair them. This is creating a world of passive consumption devoid of personal agency. Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. This figure becomes the antidote to passive consumption. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff." The spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging."
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-Since I first read Shop Class I have decided it’s better to go down swinging. It’s not just me either. I see this in the work of filmaker Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves. The spirited man or woman doesn’t want to be passively entertained, or coddled. They seek to take part as co-creators in the world. We’re not along for the ride, we’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
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-When I set off in the bus, I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging. Standing there in the hills of North Carolina, looking over the bus for about an hour, I saw there was some obvious water damage. I knew I’d have to tear out walls and replace them with new wood. And I figured if I got got the walls off I might as well re-wire, re-plumb, and re-insulate the thing. I was unfazed. With the interior, I could see the finished result.
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-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.
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-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.
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-The engine wasn't even off before two people came up to the bus to take pictures, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it?
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-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.) Still, on that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, all I knew was it had a 318 Chystler engine. Beyond that I knew almost 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 fewer computers.
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-The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time rebuilding the interior. For the bulk of 2016 it sat in our driveway, 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 rebuilt all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I 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.
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-A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously wouldn’t let 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 the 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 far from the nearest place that could fix it.
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-(No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I think even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That 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 we don’t have to. To mitigate that vulnerability, 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.)
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-The comedian Mitch Hedburg had 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 bet even Adama could get behind.) 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.
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-Sometimes inconvenience can even be a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, I found out I need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission.
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-Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but 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, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire 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.
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-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 found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.
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-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.
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-Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, 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; these days I am often just spending time with it.
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-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.
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-—
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-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.
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-April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into a campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slid myself under the engine. A thin, warm red liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission lines running into the bottom of the radiator where fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.
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-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 as I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’t 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.
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-In the first three weeks, I went through a lot of transmission fluid. 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.
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-I put off dealing with the leak in part because State and National Parks frown on people working on their rigs in campgrounds. And we were heading to a friend's beach house on St. Georgia Island.. Friend’s houses are much more conducive to repairs. But the day we arrived the leak got dramatically worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left. At this point, I felt overwhelmed by the problem; it seemed like too big of a task. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down so soon, swinging or not. Instead I spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such an old, huge vehicle. I finally found one who was game. A few days later, my wallet a bit lighter, the problem was solved. Still I had these lingering doubts: how spirited was I, taking my engine to a mechanic without even trying to fix it myself?
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-We got back in the bus and on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, into New Orleans where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks. For two months the bus ran perfectly. But 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 something needed to be done.
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-We stopped to visit relatives in Dallas and had the radiator re-cored. That eliminated it as the source of the problem. (Again, those niggling doubts about taking it to mechanics, but even experienced mechanics rarely recore their own radiators). Not an hour outside of Dallas the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair shop. They replaced the water pump and thermostat. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. The temperature gauge climbed again.
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-Our temperature problem, and the brutal West Texas heat, was getting to us. I punted. In Amarillo we got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a while, and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. That night, I paid way too much for a temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. Every half hour, I stopped, got out and took readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was within the operating parameters. We drove on into the midday heat and watched the temperature gauge climb again, but the readings done with the gun remained fine. I called my uncle back. “If I were you,'' he said, “I'd pull the temperature sensor out of your engine and chuck it out in the desert somewhere." I hung up feeling that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't know how to find the problems, let alone fix them.
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-The problem with spiritedness is that, in the beginning, desire far outstrips skills. I don’t know when my Uncle started working on cars, but he’s 35 years older than me. Thirty five years chasing the spirit of inquiry teaches you a lot.
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-I did the best I could with what I knew. I knew he was smarter than me so I took his advice. I unhooked the temperature gauge from the engine sensor. And everything was fine. I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong; I wasn't happy thinking about the thousands of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be a faulty $15 sensor. How did my uncle know what to do without even being there? The learning curve felt insurmountably steep.
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-Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests in the Rocky Mountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd managed to get to 9,600 feet before, and the one we were headed toward was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile into the climb before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus —and saw the transmission cooler line leaking again.
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-We turned around, limped back to Ridgway, and found a side street to park on. I got under the bus again. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the end of the transmission line I could see that the metal pipe, which flares out to wrap over metal fitting on the radiator, was not just cracked, but missing a whole chunk. Instead of forming a tight seal over the metal fitting, fluid was shooting out the side. The transmission cooler lines are fitted tightly along the side of the engine. There is no slack. I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. Even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more than the transmission cooler ever cooled them.
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-I was forced to reach out for help, again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the bus and eventually found one in Montrose, 30 miles away down the mountain. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the Ridgway State Park campground. We started repacking, and gathering up what we need for a few days of tent camping in a rental car.
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-That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room in the campground, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. He stuffed his laundry in the machine, and we started talking. The conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked about the engine, he asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard. Something that has haunted me since: "Do you turn your own wrenches?" I said I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches."
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-I realized that night, I couldn’t keep relying on mechanics. I needed to understand how the 318 worked from the inside out so that I could get in there with my own wrenches. Still, I took it to the mechanic one more time. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics in Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both.
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-It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. So we pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked again. I knew what to do, but I didn't have the tools and the hardware stores weren't open.
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-I climbed out from under and sat down on the Travco’s step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife was just asking me what we were going to do, when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street rattled and opened with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was there working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line, took it inside, cut off the cracked flare, and re-flared it. Then he showed me where the last mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened the nut, crushing the metal on to the fitting until it cracked.. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday, he told me.
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-Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada, almost two years in with the Travco, I knew that engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries to climb a big hill. Eventually old cars will teach you so much, including patience.
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-I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though. I keep walking but can never see more than the next few hundred yards, the road just keeps climbing. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decide to make another push up the mountains. But now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, I give us a mile before we overheat again. (I won’t know exactly, because the odometer is broken). After about five minutes I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the ability to pull off the road.
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-My wife and I talk about turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with the bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot.
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-Then we hear an unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, with the unmistakable thump-thump heartbeat roar of a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike appears and the rider pulls over. He asks if we're okay. We go through the usual talk about the bus. Then he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on his way. We give the engine some more time to cool before we try again.
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-An hour later we’re back in the road, trying for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but after a little while we crest a ridge and a spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out of the hazy valley. We are at the top. I have just a second to enjoy it before we pass a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead." The narrows as this bit of highway is called, comes up so fast we don't have time to plan for it. We're just in it. Thankfully, nothing comes the other way. I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially one of the empty hay trucks that drive highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour.
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-Coming down the steep grade we stop to rest the brakes a few times. After about three hours of descending, we pull into a campground outside of Big Pine, California. It's empty this time of year and the road is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. About 20 yards from the first campsite we hear a loud clang. My wife and I look at each other. I pull into the first campsite, and shut off the engine for the final time with a deep sense of relief.
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-The next morning we watched the sun come up on the high peaks of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. We had a leisurely breakfast and sipped our coffee well into the morning. We found a train museum up the road and thought we'd take the kids.
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-It was around 10 when I started up the engine and then made my customary walk around the bus to make sure all the windows and hatches and vents were closed and properly secured while the engine warmed up. Everything looked good until I came around to the driver's side where I noticed the rear wheels were oddly far back in the wheel well. But wheels don't just move around... that would mean the entire axle had moved. Oh shit.
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-I knelt down and peered under the frame. The rear axle, which supports about 5000 pounds, is held in place by two mounts, one to the front of the axle, one to the rear of the axle. These hold the leaf springs in place. The mounts are secured by four welded steel pins, one at each corner, which hold the axle mount to the chassis. On the driver's side, the forward axle mount, three of the four pins were gone. It was hanging by one pin and had swung down and backward, shifting the entire rear axle about six inches backward.
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-If that pin gave out while we were moving, the axle would come free and most likely tear the back end of the bus off before dropping it on the ground. It was clear we weren't going anywhere. Suddenly all the things that had happened until now, all the leaking fluids, excess oil, even overheating, seemed pretty mild compared to this. Then I thought of something my uncle had said to me over and over, "it's really not that hard, it's all just nuts and bolts."
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-Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That skill takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious when you hold something unknown in your head until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.
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-It also requires asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of them helped me in some way, even if it was just an encouraging word, a congratulations on keeping it on the road.
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-As I sat there staring at the axle dangling by a single pin, I had no idea what to do. So I turned to my uncle, texting him a picture of the problem. A few minutes later my phone rang. My uncle happens to live about two hours from Big Pine, back over the state line in Nevada. Sit tight, he said. He was loading up some tools and would be there that afternoon.
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-We took the kids hiking down to a nearby river. I try as hard as I can to make sure that our adventures don't get in the way of letting our children be children. Making the bus "work" for us is as much about making sure they have space to run and play as it is turning wrenches.
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-Around three that afternoon my Uncle[a] pulled into our campsite with a truck full of floor lifts, jacks, and tools. He crawled under the bus with me. He didn't say anything, just lay there studying the situation. When he climbed back out he said, "I think we can fix that." We made a run to a hardware store in Bishop, about an hour up the road, where we bought some grade 8 steel bolts, which are strong enough to hold. We also went to the store and grabbed some steaks and potatoes for dinner. The biggest lesson I've learned from my uncle is, "relax, and make sure you're having fun while you do this."
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-That night after dinner, while we sat around the campfire, he told me the plan. We'd use two jacks, one to hold up the bus, should that last pin give out, and another to maneuver the axle mount back in place. Once it was close we'd use a flange alignment tool to line up the hole in the axle mount with the hole in the chassis. Then we'd slip in the grade 8 bolts. Once he laid out the plan it seemed simple enough, obvious even. But I never would have thought of it on my own. I'd never even heard of a flange alignment tool and I had no idea there were bolts strong enough to replace forged steel pins. No matter how spirited I wanted to be, I had a long way to go.
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-The next morning we did exactly what my uncle said we’d do. It took the better part of the day, but when we were done the bus was good as new. My uncle didn’t like the sound of the engine though. Why don’t you bring it to my place, we’ll see what we can do about that noise.
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-We spent a few days exploring the area. The kids got to see the train museum. We swam in some hot springs. Then we made our way up to my uncle’s house and I began to learn how everything in the engine worked.
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-This is, in part, what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. It's the people that keep me going. It's all the people I know, all the people I've met, the people who've helped, some professionals, most not. Because we haven't stopped needing to fix things in the bus. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace a head gasket, several worn belts, a failed alternator, the voltage regulator, a fuel pump, and do all the routine maintenance like changing the spark plugs, wires, and oil.
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-The bus will never not need fixing. But my relationship with it has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches.
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-[a]can you give us a physical description of him?
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/essays/wired excerpt.txt b/essays/wired excerpt.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 9e967cc..0000000 --- a/essays/wired excerpt.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,255 +0,0 @@ -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.
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-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 Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road.
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-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 desert 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?"
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-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.
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-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.
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-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 I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of fixing something, of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of, if not them, then at least me.
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-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 bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. 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 time I saw a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. It looked awesome and it had one of the most common engines of the era, which meant we could figure out how to fix it on the road. We wouldn’t need to rely on anyone else to keep us going and safe.
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-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.
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-I could have picked up where they left off, but as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it instead. I wanted to understand the Travco, 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. 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.
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-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—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.
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-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. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, perhaps misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools and a good mentor, anything was fixable.
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-Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft captures this same feeling in a more articulate, philosophical way. Crawford sees the need to be capable of repair as more than just a desire to fix things. He sees it as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence on stuff. The more I began to work on the bus the more I understood what Crawford meant. There is empowerment in knowing how things work. Your stuff will never again fail you because if it does break, you can repair it.
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-Contrast this to the current world of high technology, which is often covered with stickers warning you that even undoing a screw will void the warranty or risk injury. Companies like John Deere have even argued that it is illegal for the owner of their machines to repair them. This is the opposite of empowerment. It is a world of passive consumption devoid of personal agency. It is a world that Crawford and countless others rail against.
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-Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. In his book this figure becomes the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."
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-Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging."
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-In the years since I first read Shop Class. I too have decided it’s better to go down swinging. It’s not just me either. I see this in the work of Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves.
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-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? The modern world offers precious little in response to this. The spirited man or woman rejects the answer often provided by the modern world: that we are here to be passively entertaine and coddled. Instead, the spirited man or woman seeks to actively attend to the world around them. To take part as co-creators in the world. We’re not along for the ride, we’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
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-This was the spirit in which I set off in the bus. I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging. Which was why, 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 with the interior, I could see 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.
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-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 breather.
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-The engine wasn't even off before two people came up to the bus to take pictures, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it?
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-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. Still, on that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, all I knew was it had a 318 Chystler engine. Beyond that I knew almost 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;[a] part of what I was after, when we decided to live in a vintage RV, was less computers.
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-The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time completely rebuilding the interior. For the bulk 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 rebuilt 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.
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-A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously wouldn’t let 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 far from the nearest place that could fix it.
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-No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I think even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That 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 we don’t have to. To mitigate that vulnerability, 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.
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-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 bet even Adama could get behind.) 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.
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-Sometimes inconvenience can even be a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, you need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission.
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-Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but 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, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire 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.
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-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 found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.
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-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.
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-Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, 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; these days I am often just spending time with it.
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-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.
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-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.
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-April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into a campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slid myself under the engine. A thin, warm red liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission lines running into the bottom of the radiator where fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.
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-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 as I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’t 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.
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-In the first three weeks, I went through a lot of transmission fluid. 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.
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-Part of the reason I put off dealing with the leak is that we were heading to a friend's beach house on St. Georgia Island. State and National Parks frown on people working on their rigs in campgrounds. Friend’s houses are much more conducive to repairs. But the day we arrived the leak got dramatically worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left, even though I had filled the reservoir two hours before. I felt overwhelmed by it. It seemed like too big of a task. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down so soon, swinging or not. Instead I spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such an old, huge vehicle. I finally found one who was game, and a few days later, my wallet a bit lighter, the problem was solved. Still I had these lingering doubts: how spirited was I, taking my engine to a mechanic without even trying to do it myself?
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-So we got back in the bus and on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, into New Orleans where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks as we drove through town. For those two months the bus ran perfectly. But 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 something needed to be done.
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-We stopped to visit relatives in Dallas and had the radiator re-cored. That eliminated it as the source of the problem. Again, those niggling doubts about taking it to mechanics. But then even experienced mechanics rarely recore their own radiators. Unfortunately, not an hour outside of Dallas the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair shop. They replaced the water pump and thermostat. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. And then, the temperature gauge climbed again.
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-Our temperature problem, and the brutal West Texas heat, was getting to us. I punted. In Amarillo we got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a while, and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. That night, I paid way too much for a temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. Every half hour, I stopped, got out and took readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was within the operating parameters. We drove on into the midday heat and watched the temperature gauge climb again, but the readings done with the gun remained fine. I called my uncle back. “If I were you,'' he said, “I'd pull the temperature sensor out of your engine and chuck it in the desert somewhere." I hung up feeling that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't know how to find the problems, let alone fix them.
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-The problem with spiritedness is that, in the beginning, the desire far outstrips your skills. I don’t know when my Uncle started working on cars, but it was at least 40 years before me. He’s younger than his sister (my mother), but still 35 years older than me. Thirty five years chasing the spirit of inquiry teaches you a lot.
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-I did the best I could with what I knew. I knew he was smarter than me so I took his advice. I unhooked the temperature gauge from the engine sensor. And everything was fine. I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong; I wasn't happy thinking about the thousands of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be a faulty $15 sensor. How did my uncle know what to do without even being there? The learning curve felt insurmountably steep.
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-Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests in the Rocky Mountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd managed to get to 9,600 feet before, and Dallas Divide was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile into the climb before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus —and saw the transmission cooler line leaking again.
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-We turned around, limped back to Ridgway, and found a side street to park on, in front of a mechanic's shop as it turned out. I got under the bus again. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the end of the transmission line I could see that the metal pipe, which flares out to wrap over metal fitting on the radiator, was not just cracked, but missing a whole chunk. Instead of forming a tight seal over the metal fitting, fluid was shooting out the side. The transmission cooler lines are fitted tightly along the side of the engine. There is no slack. I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. They were too short for that, and even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more that the transmission cooler ever cooled them.
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-I was forced to reach out for help, again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the bus and eventually found one in Montrose, 30 miles away down the mountain. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the Ridgway State Park campground. We started repacking, and gathering up what we need for a few days of tent camping in a rental car.
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-That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room in the campground, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. He stuffed his laundry in the machine, and we started talking. The conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked about the engine, he asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard. Something that has haunted me ever since: "Do you turn your own wrenches?" I said I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches."
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-I realized that night, this is an absolute truth. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics in Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both.
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-It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. So we pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked again. I knew what to do, but I didn't have the tools and the hardware stores weren't open.
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-I climbed out from under and sat down on the Travco’s step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife was just asking me what we were going to do, when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street rattled and then flew open with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was there working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line, took it inside, cut off the cracked flare, and re-flared it. Then he showed me where the last mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened the nut, crushing the metal on to the fitting until it cracked.. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday, he told me.
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-Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada, almost two years in with the Travco, I knew that engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries to climb a big hill. Old cars will teach you so much, including patience.
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-I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though. I keep walking but can never see more than the next few hundred yards, the road just keeps climbing. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decide to make another push up the mountains. But now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, I give us a mile before we overheat again. (I won’t know exactly, because the odometer is broken). After about five minutes I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the ability to pull off the road.
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-My wife and I discuss turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with the bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot.
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-Then we hear an unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, probably a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike appears and the rider pulls over. He asks if we're okay. We go through the usual talk about the bus. Then he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on his way. We give the engine some more time to cool before we try again.
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-As we wait, I think about a conversation I had with construction workers earlier in the day. We had stopped at the top of a pass for a snack. A road work crew pulled over nearby. I had asked them about the pass, the we're on now. They said we’d be fine, though one of them mentioned, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”
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-Now I mention this as casually as I can to my wife. She does not seem thrilled, but we agree to try for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but after half an hour, a spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out of the hazy valley. We are at the top. I have just a second to enjoy it before we pass a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead."
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-The narrows come up so fast we don't have time to plan for it. We're just in it. Thankfully, nothing comes the other way. I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially one of the empty hay trucks that drive highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour.
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-Coming down the steep grade we stop to rest the brakes a few times. After about three hours of descending, we pull into a campground outside of Big Pine, California. It's empty this time of year and the road is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. About 20 yards from the first campsite we hear a loud clang. My wife and I look at each other. I pull into the first campsite, and shut off the engine for the final time with a deep sense of relief.
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-The next morning we watched the sun come up on the high peaks of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. After the previous day we were taking it easy. We had a leisurely breakfast and sipped our coffee well into the morning. We found a train museum up the road and thought we'd take the kids.
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-It was around 10 when I started up the engine and then made my customary walk around the bus to make sure all the windows and hatches and vents were closed and properly secured while the engine warmed up. Everything looked good until I came around to the driver's side where I noticed the rear wheels were oddly far back in the wheel well. But wheels don't just move around... that would mean the entire axle had moved. Oh shit.
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-I knelt down and peered under at the frame. The rear axle, which supports about 5000 pounds, is held in place by two mounts, one to the front of the axle, one to the rear of the axle. These hold the leaf springs in place. The mounts are secured by four welded steel pins, one at each corners, which hold the axle mount to the chassis. On the driver's side, the forward axle mount, three of the four pins were gone. It was hanging by one pin and had swung down and backward, shifting the entire rear axle about six inches backward.
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-If that pin gave out while we were moving, the axle would come free and most likely tear the back end of the bus off before dropping it on the ground. It was clear we weren't going anywhere. All the things that had happened until now, all the leaking fluids, excess oil, even overheating, seemed pretty mild in comparison to this. At the same time, I thought of something my uncle had said to me several times, "it's really not that hard, it's all just nuts and bolts."
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-Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That’s a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.
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-It also requires asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of them helped me in some way, even if it was just an encouraging word, a congratulations on keeping it on the road.
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-As I sat there staring at the axle dangling by a single pin, I had no idea what to do. When I am confronted with a problem that I can't solve in my head, I turn to my uncle. I texted him a quick version of the problem. I sent him a picture. A few minutes later my phone rang. It so happens that my uncle lives about two hours from Big Pine, back over the state line in Nevada. He told us to sit tight, he was loading up some tools and would be there that afternoon.
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-We took the kids hiking down to a nearby river while we waited. I try as hard as I can to make surethat our adventures don't get in the way of letting our children be children. Making the bus "work" for us is as much about making sure they have space to run and play as it is turning wrenches.
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-Around three that afternoon my Uncle pulled into our campsite with a truck full of floor lifts, jacks, and tools. He crawled under the bus with me and surveyed the situation. He didn't say anything, just lay there studying the situation, but when he climbed back out he said, "I think we can fix that." We made a run to a hardware store in Bishop, about an hour up the road, where we bought some grade 8 steel bolts, which are strong enough to hold. We also went to the store and grabbed some steaks and potatoes for dinner. Perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned from my uncle is, "relax, and make sure you're having fun while you do this."
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-That night after dinner, while we sat around the campfire, he told me the plan. We'd use two jacks, one to hold up the bus, should that last pin give out, and another to maneuver the axle mount back in place. Once it was close we'd use flange alignment tool to line up the hole in the axle mount with the hole in the chassis. Then we'd slip in the grade 8 bolts. Once he laid it out is seemed simple enough, obvious even. But I never would have thought of it on my own. I'd never even heard of a flange alignment tool and I had no idea there were bolts strong enough to replace forged steel pins. No matter how spirited I wanted to be, I didn't have the knowledge or tools.
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-This is why the right to repair is a useless fight if there isn't a community of people who have experience to hand down to newcomers. The repair community is perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self-reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to the spiritedness of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us. That isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of either of those states of mind is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.
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-The next morning we did exactly what my uncle said we’d do. It took the better part of the day, but when we were done the bus was good as new. My uncle didn’t like the sound of the engine though. Why don’t you bring it to my place, we’ll see what we can do about that noise.
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-When spent a few days exploring the area. The kids got to see the train museum. We swam in some hot springs. Then we made our way up to my uncle’s house and I began to learn how everything in the engine worked.
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-This is, in part, of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. It's the people that keep me going. It's all the people I know, all the people I've met, the people who've helped, some professionals, most not. Because we haven't stopped needing to fix things in the bus. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace the head gasket, several worn belts, a failed alternator, a fuel pump, and do all the routine maintenance like changing the spark plugs and oil.
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-The bus will never not need fixing. But my relationship with it has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches.
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-[a]then we'd massage this kicker if you rework the end of first section.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/essays/wired-piece-v5.txt b/essays/wired-piece-v5.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 2a3aea0..0000000 --- a/essays/wired-piece-v5.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,171 +0,0 @@ -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. - -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. - -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?" - -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. - -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. - -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 I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of fixing something, of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of, if not them, then at least me. - -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 bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. 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 time I saw a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. It looked awesome and it had one of the most common engines of the era, which meant we could figure out how to fix it on the road. We wouldn’t need to rely on anyone else to keep us going and safe. - -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 as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it instead. I wanted to understand the Travco, 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. 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. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly and misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools, anything was fixable. - -Which was why, 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 withlooking around the interior, I could see 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, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the 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. - -[[break?]] - -The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time that year completely rebuilding the interior. For the bulk 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 rebuilt 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 wouldn’t let 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 the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I thinkAnd I believe even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t not approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That 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 we don’t have to do that. To mitigate that vulnerability [[OK? To avoid repeating point of failure 3x]] 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 bet, and perhaps even Adama , can could get behind.) 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 not easy 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 when the nearest repair shop might be hundreds of miles away. - -Sometimes inconvenience can even beend up as a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, you need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. - -[[break]] - -Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard tomaking it difficult to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but 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, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire 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. - -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 found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year. - -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. - -Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, 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; these days I am often just spending time with it. - -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. - -— - -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 aour first campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slidslide myself under the engine. A thin, warm redread 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 as Iat I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’tshouldn’t 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. - -In the first three weeks, 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 heading tostaying at a friend'sfriends beach house on St. Georgia Island. But then the day we arrivedwe were due to arrive the leak got worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left, even though 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, and finally and after a few days, . I found one whothat was game. AA few days later, . and a few days later, with my wallet a bit lighter, we had the problem was solved. - -So we got back in the bus and 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 weI drove through town. For those two months the bus ran perfectly. But as 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. That, which would eliminated ite 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 shoip. 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, the temperature gauge climbed again. - -Our thermostat problemThat, andcombined with the brutal West Texas hea,t was getting to us. I punted. In tktk where?We got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a while,bit and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. That night, I I ran out that night and paid way too much for a temperaturefor temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. EI stopped every half hour, I stopped, and got out and took temp readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was well within the operating parameters. WeI drove on into the mid day heat and watched the temperature gauge climb again. 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 feelingthinking that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't even know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. - -[[we need to see you following his advice then, because reader isn’t clear if he’s joking or not. And, we now need to know something about your uncle, so we can sense the relationship/his help, more clearly. Maybe something like: - -My uncle, though, did. He was a [[TKTK what/who is he/what does he do? ]] [[Also is he your mom’s brother or your Dad’s? A little tiny bit of bio//and show him to us? What does he look like?] So I took his advice. ] -I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong, and I unhooked the temperature gauge from the sensor. And everything was fine. I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong; so it wouldn't stress me out, but I wasn't happy thinking about the thousands1000s 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? The learning curve felt insurmountably steep. I resigned myself to learning the hard way: by bashing my head against the problem until I gave up and turned to someone with more experience. - -Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests in the Rrocky Mmountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd previously managed to get to 9,600 feet before, and tk pass was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go. I thought we could 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 —and saw the only to see the same transmission cooler line leaking again. - -We turned around, and limped back to Ridgway, and I. I found a side street to park on, in front of a mechanic's shop as it turned out. I got under the bus againto see what I could. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the flare was not just cracked but missing a whole chunk. The transimission cooler lines are fitted enoughenugh that I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. They were too short for that, and even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more that the transmission cooler ever cooled them. - -I was forced to reach out for help, get helppunt again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the bus andus and eventually found one in nearby Montrose, TK miles away. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the Ridgway State Park campground [[right?]the campground, and we started. That night we repacking, ed and gathering uploaded what we needneeded for a few days of tent camping in a rental car. - -That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room in the campgroundat Ridgway State Park, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. HeAfter he stuffed his laundry in the machine, and we started talking. TheEventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked about thewhich engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard. Something thatand has haunted me ever since: . He said, "Ddo you turn your own wrenches?" I saidtold him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." - -This I realized that night, this is an absolute truth. You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics in Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both. - -It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but nothingthere was no one open. Nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. SoIn the end we just pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked. I knew what to do, but I didn't have theto tools and the hardware stores weren't open. - -I climbed out from under and sat down on the Travco’s step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife had just asked was just asking me what we were going to do, when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street rattledstreet, rattled and then flew opencame flying up and open with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was therestill at the shop working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line, and took it inside, and cut off the cracked flare, and re-flared it. Then heWe put it back on and he showed me where the lastprevious mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened the TKTKit and cracked the metal. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday, he told me. - -This is, in part, of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. We—because we haven't stopped needing to fix things. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace two belts, change the spark plugs, and half a dozen other projects. The bus will never not need fixing. But mythe relationship has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do now. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my our fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It’sIt isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. - --- - -[[SG, seems like we want to actually go to the fact that you, at this point, knew that the engine didn’t need fixing, but cooling. I’d skip the link to that community, OR, make it more explicit that you and them would know, this isn’t a thing that can be fixed. So here are two suggestions: - -Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada, TK YEARS in with the Travco, I knew that though, that community feels far away. It wouldn't do me much good even it was here though. The engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries to climb a big hill. OldWhether its fixing it, or just deal with it's limitations, old cars will teach you so much, including patience. - -Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. - -I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though., I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decidedecided to make another push up the mountains. ButThe problem is that now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give us a mile before we overheat again. (I won’t know exactly, will never know of course because the odometer is broken). , but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about TKTK minutes [[because we already used “a mile”]]what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the ability to pull off the roadpull out. - -My wife and I discuss turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with the buswith bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot. - -Then we hearhere anthat unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, probably a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike appearsis too us and the rider pulls over. He askschecks to see if we're okay. I tell him we are. We go through the usual talk about the bus. Then, but he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. - -That changes everything. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on his wayup. We decide to give the engine some more timeanother bit to cool before we try again. - -As we wait, I think aboutI am thinking about a conversation I had with some construction workers earlier in the day. We had stopped at the top of athe first pass forand had a snack. A road work crew we’d passed coming up the mountain pulled over nearbyinto the same turnout we were in. I hadtook askedthe opportunity to ask them about the next pass, the one we're sitting on now. They saidseemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them mentioned,them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.” - -NowThis conversation comes back to me now and I mention thisit, as casually as I can, to my wife. She does not seem thrilled, but we agree to try for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but after half an hour, we make it to the topafterabout half an hour later we are at the top. aA spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out the hazy valley. We are at the top. I have just a second to enjoy it before we passgo flying past a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead." - -The narrows come up so fast we don't really have time to even plan for it. We're just in it. ThankfullyFortunately, nothing comesis coming the other way., but toit is very much a one lane road. To this day I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially if its one of the empty hay trucks that drive the rest of highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour. - -Coming down the steep grade mountain we is easier than coming up, but we do still stop to rest the brakes a few times. We have a vacuum brake system that works extremely well, but long continuous down grades of 6-8 percent do require taking breaks. After TK hours, A few hours later though we pull into a campground outside of Bishop, California. It's empty this time of year and the road in is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. About TK how far along, we hearTherew's a loud clang at one point and mMy wife and I look at each other. I, but I keep going and pull into the first campsite, and s. I shut off the engine for the final time with a sense of deep relief. - -– - -tk broken axle story and fixing the bus with my uncle. - -[[will pick up the rest/work through the rest in morning]] - -Which wasisThat's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just a couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system;, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would saytell me every time I got frustrated. It’sRemember it's all just nuts and bolts. - -[[Scott, here’s a suggested tightened up version (I kept your full original below). It felt like we could be stronger if shorter, tighter:]] - -Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That’s a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking. - -It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. And there’s my uncle, who knows more about engines than I ever will. - -The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self-reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to the spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are. - - - - -Original: - -Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking. - -It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've been fortunate to have my uncle who knows more about engines than I ever will to help me out, but there have been plenty of others as well. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos in the past, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of it put together and you have perhaps the most important part of repairing anything: the community. - -The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self-reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to the spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are. - - - - - - -things I’ve cut: - - -[[TKTk like:]] But it wasn't the look that got me. [[Then something like]] I felt that it was important to be able to repair our home, on the road, TKTK keep me and my family safe. [[then]] - - - 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 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. - -The labor of maintenance is the price of admission to the world of old vehicles, that's all. If you love the design, the aesthetics, the limits, of thosethe vehicles of that era then you don’t hesitate to pay feepricethe admission. - - --- - -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 time I sawran across a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. - - - - diff --git a/essays/wired-piece-v6.txt b/essays/wired-piece-v6.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 47b4490..0000000 --- a/essays/wired-piece-v6.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,211 +0,0 @@ -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. - -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 Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. - -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?" - -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. - -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. - -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 I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of fixing something, of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of, if not them, then at least me. - -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 bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. 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 time I saw a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. It looked awesome and it had one of the most common engines of the era, which meant we could figure out how to fix it on the road. We wouldn’t need to rely on anyone else to keep us going and safe. - -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 as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it instead. I wanted to understand the Travco, 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. 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—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. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, perhaps misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools, anything was fixable. - -Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft captures this feeling well. Crawford defines this need to be capable of repair as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence. What he calls the Spirited Man, who is capable of repair, becomes the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance." - -In the years since Shop Class was published in my own head I have seen the convergence of two worlds, the collision of the spirit of book inquiry with the spirit of real world inquiry. The former seeks to learn, that latter seeks to make and between then I have found a balance that seems to work. It’s not just me either. I see this in the work of Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves. - -I think this goes the heart of the question of existence... why are we here? Are we here to optimize our days in service to some unknown thing? Are we here to be entertained? Or are we here to understand the world around us, to take part in the co-creation of our world? Are we along for the ride or are we standing at the helm, trimming the sails and pointing the bow into uncharted territory? - -Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." - -This was the spirit in which I set off in the bus. I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging. Which was why, 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 with the interior, I could see 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 breather. - -The engine wasn't even off before two people came up to the bus to take pictures, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the 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. Still, on that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, all I knew was it had a 318 Chystler engine. Beyond that I knew almost 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. - -[[break?]] - -The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time completely rebuilding the interior. For the bulk 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 rebuilt 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 wouldn’t let 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 far from the nearest place that could fix it. - -No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I think even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That 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 we don’t have to. To mitigate that vulnerability, 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 bet even Adama could get behind.) 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. - -Sometimes inconvenience can even be a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, you need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. - -[[break]] - -Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but 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, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire 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. - -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 found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year. - -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. I might not be able to fix it, but often I can. 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. - -Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, 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; these days I am often just spending time with it. - -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. - -— - -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 a campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slid myself under the engine. A thin, warm red liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission lines running into the bottom of the radiator where 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 as I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’t 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. - -In the first three weeks, I went through a lot of transmission fluid. 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 heading to a friend's beach house on St. Georgia Island. State and National Parks frown on people working on their rigs in campgrounds. Frien - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -tk broken axle story and fixing the bus with my uncle. - -The next morning we watched the sun come up on the high peaks of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. After the previous day we were taking it easy. We had a leisurely breakfast and sipped our coffee well into the morning. We found a train museum up the road and thought we'd take the kids. - -It was around 10 when I started up the engine and then made my customary walk around the bus to make sure all the windows and hatches and vents were closed and properly secured while the engine warmed up. Everything looked good until I came around to the driver's side where I noticed the rear wheels were oddly far back in the wheel well. But wheels don't just move around... that would mean the entire axle had moved. Oh shit. - -I knelt down and peered under at the frame. The rear axle, which supports about 5000 pounds, is held in place by two mounts, one to the front of the axle, one to the rear of the axle. These hold the leaf springs in place. The mounts are secured by four welded steel pins, one at each corners, which hold the axle mount to the chassis. On the driver's side, the forward axle mount, three of the four pins were gone. It was hanging by one pin and had swung down and backward, shifting the entire rear axle about six inches backward. - -If that pin gave out while we were moving, the axle would come free and most likely tear the back end of the bus off before dropping it on the ground. It was clear we weren't going anywhere. All the things that had happened until now, all the leaking fluids, excess oil, even overheating, seemed pretty mild in comparison to this. At the same time, I thought of something my uncle had said to me several times, "it's really not that hard, it's all just nuts and bolts." - -Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That’s a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking. - -It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of them helped me in some way, even if it was just an encouraging word, a congratulations on keeping it on the road. - -As I sat there staring at the axle dangling by a single pin, I had no idea what to do. When I am confronted with a problem that I can't solve in my head, I turn to my uncle. I texted him a quick version of the problem. I sent him a picture. A few minutes later my phone rang. It so happens that my uncle lives about two hours from Big Pine, back over the state line in Nevada. He told us to sit tight, he was loading up some tools and would be there that afternoon. - -We took the kids hiking down to a nearby river while we waited. I try as hard as I can to make sure the our adventures don't get in the way of letting our children be children. Making the bus "work" for us is as much about making sure they have space to run and play as it is turning wrenches. - -Around three that afternoon my Uncle pulled into our campsite with a truck full of floor lifts, jacks, and tools. He crawled under the bus with me and surveyed the situation. He didn't say anything, just lay there studying the situation, but when he climbed back out he said, "I think we can fix that." We made a run to a hardware store in Bishop, about an hour up the road, where we bought some grade 8 steel bolts, which are strong enough to hold. We also went to the store and grabbed some steaks and potatoes for dinner. Perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned from my uncle is, "relax, and make sure you're having fun while you do this." - -That night after dinner, while we sat around the campfire, he told me the plan. We'd use two jacks, one to hold up the bus, should that last pin give out, and another to maneuver the axle mount back in place. Once it was close we'd use flange alignment tool to line up the hole in the axle mount with the hole in the chassis. Then we'd slip in the grade 8 bolts. Once he laid it out is seemed simple enough, obvious even. But I never would have thought of it on my own. I'd never even heard of a flange alignment tool and I had no idea there were bolts strong enough to replace forged steel pins. No matter how spirited I wanted to be, I didn't have the knowledge or tools. - -This is why the right to repair is a useless fight if there isn't a community of people who have experience to hand down to newcomers. The repair community is perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self-reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to the spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us. That isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of either of those states of mind is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are. - -This is, in part, of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. It's the people that keep me going. It's all the people I've met, the people who've helped, some professionals, most not. Because we haven't stopped needing to fix things in the bus. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace the head gasket, several worn belts, a failed alternator, a fuel pump, and all the routine maintenance like changing spark plugs. - -The bus will never not need fixing. But my relationship with it has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my our fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -things I’ve cut: - - -[[TKTk like:]] But it wasn't the look that got me. [[Then something like]] I felt that it was important to be able to repair our home, on the road, TKTK keep me and my family safe. [[then]] - - - 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 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. - -The labor of maintenance is the price of admission to the world of old vehicles, that's all. If you love the design, the aesthetics, the limits, of thosethe vehicles of that era then you don’t hesitate to pay feepricethe admission. - - --- - -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 time I sawran across a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. - - - - diff --git a/essays/wired-version.odt b/essays/wired-version.odt Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index f917c2a..0000000 --- a/essays/wired-version.odt +++ /dev/null |