Of pipes and men

•December 25, 2010 • 4 Comments

peek-a-blue

For the last three days,  the media & television trucks have swarmed around the Corte Madera slough, where one of the sewer lines ruptured. Some kind of mischief is afoot. Check out the finger-pointing in this account.

The county called in the FBI to see why chunks of concrete, and old hard hats, etc were stuffed down a man-hole.
They might have been smarter to inquire internally, since it’s likley that an activist Sanitation District employee decided to go pro-active in the ‘assured employement tactic’ department.
County firemen  have spent time in prison for rustling up business via arson, and I see no reason that the sanitation district would be any different.

Our public employees are impressively compensated, but I woudn’t be surprised if the new hires have a crappier employment package.

So a manufactured crisis would boost work, and guarantee elevated rate payments by an unsuspecting public.

We’ll see what the feds come up with. The report was initially a thousand gallons of raw sewage, and now the latest is three million gallons….

Meanwhile, the tunnel to nowhere (between industrial San Rafael and Larkspur Landing) leaves cyclists about a quarter mile from the safety of the ferry decks.
Everyone on a bike will have to navigate across five or six lanes of traffic–the equivalent of freeway traffic, with a traffic light but not one specifically aimed at bikes)…and if the guy we saw crossing was any indicator, there will be many close-calls, car-bike collisions and within a year perhaps a death due to the lack of foresight, dumping bicycle traffic onto an un-improved, complex automobile intersection.

Fi

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Birthday Wish: a happy dog’s life

•December 10, 2010 • 12 Comments

Alice B. Toeclips, b.  December 10,  1955.

"Alive at fifty five"

In San Francisco.

Birth weight : in excess of ten pounds.

Oldest of six pups.

Died: NOT yet, and NOT IN NEW ZEALAND! Ha!

Don’t get to know the  expiration date.

Today, at fifty-five, I’m so grateful to be alive., and fit!  fit! fit!

Sleeping well, eating well,  daily foot-long floaters, cold, wet nose…full refrigerator.

And a healthy partner to snuffle all over, any time I feel like it.

Remember ‘stay alive, drive 55?  I do, when the sign says so. I’m the slowpoke in the right hand lane.

What’s more, I leave a car length (not a Matchbox car!) per 10 mph for a buffer zone.

Gonna ride through a long-awaited bicycle tunnel (wonder how long it will be, before some ‘event’ forces it to be permanently closed? Am I a sinnick?) later on, then…um…nothing else planned. I never got around to arranging the big surprise party, with everyone dressed up in the ‘five-five’ theme….
Does that surprise me?
No.
I really do fall flat when it comes to organizing something.

On the other hand, I asked the ‘universe’ (aka MTBR website, which I don’t understand, but I ‘joined’ and really don’t post anything on) for “a chauffeur to Moab in mid April”  (my friend Rafa from Ferrarra, Italy will be doing a pilgrimage there next spring).

Within 24 hours, a kind reader/rider was writing back: “if this is the polka-dot, braided, drop-bar Jacquie, I’ll personally come get you and take you there and back”.

I was flabbergasted.

And secretly asked the universe to let me work at the dream job I’ve created & pitched, teaching mtn biking to women of uncertain skills with emphatic  non-racing ambitions. And having someone else do all the planning, booking, brochuring, etc.. But most of all, not having to do it for free. Being WELL paid for it.

I could use that job, and make someone a pile o’ money , along with myself.

If that happens, I’ll tell you guys, first thing. It simply  depends on if  a gentleman named Gary (not that one, the other one) realizes that I’m exactly who he needs for the job.

To me (hoist one),  flaws and all.

Turquoise shit, courtesy Ed Pas

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Old vs. new-rotic

•December 6, 2010 • 5 Comments

Recently had a discussion about Being Sorry with a couple of friends.
For years, I’ve asked my mother-in-love not to  bother apologizing for little stuff:   not returning a call on the same day, not making a fancy enough meal.

She reminded me of my own sorry self.

Having a dignified, excruciatingly thoughtful relative apologize over trivia made me wonder if she was approaching her second childhood.

But my apologies  are even more annoying. First, I forgot to exit childhood in the first place.  And my not-so-original sorriness is nearly existential. Perhaps common in Catholics who took catechism literally?

‘Excuse my existence, I was born guilty”.

A lifetime of of  reflexive apologizing has made me a little famous, for the wrong reason.

The nugget I gleaned from the talk the other night was: apologizing all the time is handing the other person the power to forgive, and the position of Judge. They might not want it (though most sadists would grab the opportunity, natch).

Why is this new to me?
Am I going senile?
The new thing is: do I want to be judged that badly?

This is probably not quite the bike blog you were expecting, but there you are.

The five year old brat  who has never been evicted from the upstairs garret learned early on: apologize for everything, and collect fewer spankings. Plea bargain! Lie if you have to, but look sincere.

The guilt will come.

So

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The Collectors and the Scattered meet at Black Mountain

•December 2, 2010 • 2 Comments

Geoff, Mike and Gloria

After ten days of being home, ’twas time to get into gear, and make someone  resurrect my boxed-up touring bike .

I’d put away most of my exploded “carrion luggage”.

I reluctantly tackled some chores…and re-learned how to make a fire in the Jotul. The Clean Way.

I’d even written several thank you notes.

But maintenance?  I don’t LIKE working on bikes.

My 1995 Breezer Lightning used to go by the name of  “Steal This Bike”,  since it was mass produced, and not my size (spoiled, huh?). It’s my errand bike, and I hadn’t been out on an errand in 10 days.
Charlie wouldn’t touch it, I couldn’t touch it (without wrecking it further)…this was going to need an expert.

Only Mike Varley would have the patience to “make it right again” after my thoughtless 2 month torture spree.

Geoff H. happened to be going  to Varley’s unique shop – Black Mountain Cycles– so he let me come along.
“Gloria Lee will be there” he said.

Gloria is part of a secret cabal of collectors spearheaded by Geoff H. and Noah G. I believe she’s the sole woman among a dozen vintage bike connoisseurs.  They hoard the hard-to-find, the unobtainable, the rare and the sought-after Cunninghams, Potts, and maybe yes a few other hand-built bikes of the 1980’s Age of  Fat Tire Wonderment.

Scanning E-bay and chasing every rumor, they snatch goodies right from under each other’s nose, in a spirited biker version of capture the flag. Their group has no name, and you have to be Invited to Join it, and none of the builders (Potts, Cunningham, Cunningham’s nosy wife, etc) are allowed in…

In the stand at Black Mountain, Varley was expertly re-threading a pristine white Phoenix frame .
“Charlie is having to more or less do the same for my bottom bracket!” I mumbled.

Gloria  pulled a fork out of the box next to her, and all eyes swiveled to the studs on the Type 2 fork.

Apparently the thick brawny studs are better than the thin tapered ones, and uh, I don’t have an opinion on that.  

Posted in Cycling, Jacquie Phelan
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Afterglow, Appetite

•November 26, 2010 • 3 Comments

Let C.K. have his say:

"Women have special chocolate receptors....heh heh!"

“28 degrees (Fahrenheit) when I rolled out at a little after seven. Met Gary Fisher and his son Nick, along with Dirt Rag publisher Maurice Tierney and Jacquie Phelan, and we rode to the dirt together. Nick and Gary must have had something to do, because they didn’t wait at any of the normal break spots.

At the bottom of the Pine Mountain run I caught up with Joe Breeze and son Tommy, both wearing Drake High School jerseys. Tommy is on the team and Joe sponsors it.

As usual the sponsors showed up uninvited. Clif Bar was handing out samples of Gu at the top of Scorcher, and Josh did brisk business at the free pancake/coffee toddy bar set up at The Triangle.

With recent rain the creek at the bottom of Repack was deep and cold, and normally you have to cross it four times, but today the rangers routed the ride onto a singletrack that is usually highly illegal for bikes, and avoided three of the stream crossings. (less chain oil in the creek, happier fish, better route. Someday it will be legal.–jp) 

In Fairfax, the Broken Drum Brewery and the Marin County Bicycle Coalition had set up tents where the beer flowed as long as it lasted, after which the crowd moved across the street to the Gestalt Haus, where you have to pay for the beer but they don’t run out of it.

It don’t mean a feng if it ain’t got that shui.

(Link to Morgan Fletcher’s fine pix)  Link to Brad Sauber’s fine pix.
 

Mildew Club golf course: Frosty! Tam peak in background.

Posted in "knobby nobility", Fairfax, heinous name dropping
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Tharty Ears

•November 25, 2010 • 3 Comments

That’s right. 30 years ago, I pedaled into the County with my friend Darryl Skrabak to attend the annual Thanksgiving Appetite Seminar.

It dawned on me this morning: I saw faces on Thanksgiving 1980 that I’d be seeing for the rest of my life, most importantly that of Charlie The Mollifier Cunningham.

Here’s the route.

In 1980, I rode the ol’ Raleigh Sprite from my home in the Excelsior district of S.F,  25 miles to get to Fairfax, then after the ride, I pedaled home (somehow I’d dropped Darryl along the way–very poor manners).

My skinny tire bike was holding up well f, but the strain I was putting on the steel toeclips must have loosened one. I don’t remember this at all, but Charlie says he spotted the droopy leather strap and realized that the whole thing would come off soon, and offered to do a quickie repair. This all took place on smoker’s Knoll, the little hill after the highest point on the ride.

“Thus setting the tone for our relationship” he chortled this morning as I leapt out of bed in the dark, 3/4 moon bright on the fish pond.

I dug out a picture from the 1983 Appetite Seminar. I’d moved into Fairfax by then. And the weather was roughly the same: sunny, cold, beautiful. Gonna see SeeKay, GeeFisher and even Maurice Tierney, who’s moved West.

Posted in "knobby nobility", Alice B. Toeclips, Fairfax, Jacquie Phelan
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Farewell to Falcon

•November 23, 2010 • 2 Comments

IMG_0370 IMG_0374 IMG_0372And hello to Marin County Open Space non-discriminatory policy.

Some of my readers learned about the concrete facsimile of Horus, the mythic god of the afterlife…perched on a side-ridge of Tam, gazing upon the summit (westward) not more than a km as the 300-pound bird flies. It is no longer there to be sought, found, and celebrated.
Horus bit the dust.

Another reader just told me it’s been ‘recycled’ by MCOSD. As many Marinites will attest, broken up concrete can do wonders as a retaining wall, if held in with chicken wire.

At least the statue didn’t go to waste, buried in the landfill, eh?  Egyptian deity forbid!

In the past decade I’ve seen MMWD demolish the historic “Rosetta Stone” redwood tank, with all the fat-tire grafitti (“Morrow Majority”, George Newman’s ride record, etc), the 1890-ish  barn at Lagunitas reservoir dam (done in a single day, never mind the historic liquor distiller hidden under the floorboards!).  Didja know that MMWD’s other name was “Many Men Working Drunk”?.

Yep. My ranger friend told me so.

Methinks Marin really ought to establish a more formal heritage-erasing agency.  The Cultural Amnesia Board.  There are still plenty of things that should be wiped out: The Marin Town & Country Club artists retreat. It really ought to be razed, with 800 townhomes put in.

Every one and two room cabin that hasn’t yet been “scraped”.

There are more. I will try to think of them, and list them, while I try to apply for a job at this imaginary agency, so I can swipe the treasures before they’re demolished….

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Sydney Airport

•November 21, 2010 • 2 Comments

Has a kiosk with 3 free internet stations.

Too good to be true.

I’m in between planes, four hours to kill, and get a chance to look at  my email.
This takes two seconds…I have nearly lost all my correspondents.  Ach.
“So… write about what a joy it is to be in an airport, where squadrons of kimono’d flight attendants  pull their flight bags along, sporting traditional Japanese (or is it Burmese?) hairdos… and how  nauseated you get testing twelve different bottles of unaffordable perfume” says the Everyone Wants To Know What’s In My Head voice.

“But who would read that?” asks the reasonable editor.

“Uh… people who fly? My two stalkers?    No, really , people can recognize the nausea that is really about the stress of all that  noise–overhead loudspeakers booming in Chinese, followed by bell tones, then an Aussie accent welcoming you to Australia, then a hurry up message about a flight Now Departing which you are convinced is directed at you, even if they’re repeating : Mr. Rashid Cho Alvarez”.

Travel is stressful, but I adore it.   At some point,  galloping down the up escalators (when there’s no one coming up),  and other childish self-entertainment will become impractical and undignified, and at that point, I guess I’ll be too old to travel because my diversions will not be do-able.

Two days ago, I waited a half an hour for my friends at the Auckland airport …reviewing my last message to them , and their last one to me, I figured all I needed to do was stay in one place. That airport is small and un-confusing.

So I rode the (free!) luggage carts, which behave very unpredictably when you’re scooting on them backwards. Mine mostly twirled in circles, but I got it to (bunny)hop, bit at a time, in a straight line  (backwards, cos I was standing on the the cargo runners, holding on to the push-bar).  Great exercise and so much more pleasant than lighting up a ciggie,  like those losers hanging around the automatic doors.

Soon  Liz and Marcos were scooping me up and touring me through downtown Awk!land, where a pair of Argentinian travelers on a very laden motorcycle stood  on the street, with a world map and twelve languages describing where they’d been, what they were up to…semprelamoto.com, I think. Then on to mussels at their favorite restau, Cosmopolitan….

Livin’ the dream.

(Typin’ the cliche!)

Soon it’s back to the OTHER dream, treehouse dreams and lonngggg nights in Fairfax with my belov’d.

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Skipper’s Canyon

•November 18, 2010 • 2 Comments

If i can pry myself away from the computer, here’s where I’m going. On a superb, borrowed ‘jewel suspension’ bike from my very generous host Jim Hawkbridge.

Three hours later…. Reader, I did the ride.

It’s a straight-up-the-highest-sealed-road-in-N.-Z. hillclimb, about an hour, followed by a very memorable singletrack that has a cross-section of 10-inch diameters ABS pipe. The Long Gulch trail follows a tiny creek, and is so steeply pitched that I had to tiptoe the entire 5 km length. Being alone an’ all….The Special Eyes bike has that typical long-travel fork and precipitous perch saddle height that makes me feel insecure. Add to it grippy disc brakes whose modulation is anything but gradual, and you have a recipe for flap-Jacquie.

That was how I got my bruise at the Whackarewarewa 100 last month –riding a borrowed Turner.

The plummeting  singletrack passes a tiny cabin (with a new car parked alongside) tucked in the trees, then it crosses the creek to meet the dirt  Skipper Canyon road.  I went further down, enough to see the chimneys left behind from the old-timey Welcome Home Hotel.

If I were truly fulla pep, I’d have ridden and ridden a few more miles to see one of the longest single-span suspension bridges in the southern hemisphere, and checked out a cool ghost town.  I decided that three hours was a goodly length for a solo ride without pump, patch kit, not even a spare tube. For all I know, the bike had tubeless tires anyway!

Crawling back up the dirt road, it’s easy to see what a challenge building it  must have been in the late 1800’s gold frenzy.   And had I been here in 1951, I could have gotten a beer at the Welcome Home…I don’t think it burned down a second time (like the inn on top of Tam, it had been burned to the ground and rebuilt)…it was simply taken apart and the bits used elsewhere.

Two huge tour buses passed me, hauling giant rafts and adventure clients.

At the Coronet Peak saddle,  a Vertigo Tours bus disgorged 5 clients and one guide. The clients were even more tip-toey than me, and all had pretty heavy armor on…a wave of smugness swept over me.

Ten minutes later I was back at the house, turning yesterday’s minestrone into tonight’s ribollita, hanging out the laundry–these kids keep their clothes impeccable–and falling back into my book, The Story of Pi.

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Moonlight Track, Queenstown

•November 16, 2010 • Leave a Comment

Moke Lake

Neil Proctor ( a Brit living here in Q-town with his Outside Sports co-worker Jim Hawkbridge & Flick Smith) suggested a ride for today, starting right from their front door, and winding around a  trail called the Moonlight Track.
I ‘d seen the word “Moonlight”  the day before, on my ride from Wanaka.  I was at the summit between Cardrona and Arrowtown–one of those lookouts where you have a diorama of all the peaks.

A couple came up and said, You Must Be Exremely Fit, and  I said yeh, well, I’m a former pro bike racer, trying to learn to go slow  Her name was….Selene and er…oh, hell. Well, anyway, I told them I was from Fairfax and their eyebrows shot up, having come from Santa Rosa (roughly 40 miles north of Fairfax) and here we are, the only people in the parking lot…
Digressions.

So I took Neil’s advice.
But first I had to patch the slow leak that bugged me all day yesterday (every 10 km or so: stop and top ‘er up). Then pack a small lunch. There was a map of the ride he’d shown me, and even though I’m always L’Austin Space, I took it to be a good “roll model” for you reader/riders.

The Moonlight Track skirts a deep gorge, probably a feeder for the Shotover river, where evil jet-boats ply the turquoise waters on an hourly basis, day in and day out. It’s always nice to be able to physically occupy a space that usually exists only in the mind: the edge.

Along with me were a few nervous sheep-mamas and their more nervous lambies.

I herded them along, and took pictures nearly every kilometer.

Proof that I can actually get out the door, despite the siren call of TWO APPLE COMPUTERS at my beck & call…that was a hard one, I must admit.
So the bike is jangling like a set of janitor’s keys: the homemade fender’s lost a nut & bolt, so a twister-tie will have to do…and only 3 of the 3 x 9 gears actually work without skipping horribly, and sending me over the bars.

Neil’s preview was so excellent, I didn’t need to consult the map. He’d described the ups, downs, hairpins and the track connecting Moke Lake and Lake Dispute (doesn’t that evoke a few questions?).  I just kept plugging along: he’d said it was an All Day Ride, and he was right. I was worried it was a 30 year old man’s All-Day, but clearly this guy understands how to re-calibrate for his audience. Touching.
(I remember Charlie and my first ride, up Shaver Grade, which he’d promised had absolutely no climbing in it… As we walked the bikes up the gentle incline–I had ruint my knees and couldn’t even tolerate the merest slope–I wondered what he thought constituted a hill. Thus began the great Communication Wars.)

When it seemed I’d gone off course, having dropped down into the gorge I’d been riding above, I stopped in at a modern sheep-shearing barn to get directions. The landowner was right  in there shearing paralyzed sheep with five other guys. They had belts that resembled swingset swings to enable them to hang over the animal and shear madly. Quite a scene, with broomswomen, wool-tossers, and massive bags of the greasy grey-white fluff all around.   The owner directed me on course (I hadn’t gone wrong, just balked early and asked directions a hundred meters before the DOC sign explained where to go).
Tussocks, grass, lakes. Peaks all around, and perfect solitude. Not even sheep baa-ing interupted the quiet. God, I felt brave. If I twisted an ankle or broke a leg, I ‘d have to wait two days for the next biker to come along….

By the time I came off the track and onto the road at Closeburn (“Clothes-burn?” I almost did that with some of my over-used bike gear)I was ready to take it easy. Dived onto the Wilson Bay -Seven Mile walking track, to avoid a horrific hill on the Glenorchy road…but got lost in a biker maze…it was a mini-Whistler, with fun wooden bridges and stuff, but I was only trying to dodge a hill, and wound up riding in the maze for 45 minutes before admitting defeat and coming back out where I went in.

Gently pushed the skipping gears along, and within 40 minutes I was in town.

By seven p.m. I’d made a massive risotto  a la wombat, tomato salad and cheatin’ dessert (a bar of Whitttaker’s chocolate), crafted a menu, and fallen into bed for a nap.
My hosts will be home around 9 (that’s when it gets dark in N.Z. in November!) and that is when we’ll eat.
Cheers.

Posted in New Zealand, travel
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