Author Archives: John P

And back south to Los Angeles

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Lotte and I fly back east tomorrow, so I should probably finish the Big Bike Ride Phase 1 narrative! Overall, a fantastic experience. My health, physical and mental, has improved, I’ve seen beautiful landforms and critters, met interesting people – A+ stuff. Lotte has been the best traveling companion pup one could ask for: icebreaker at grocery stops, sleeping bag temperature rating extender and all around pal. Now, it’s back to New England to help with grandkiddo care. After that, I’m up in the air – there are a few people I need to discuss plans with – watch this space!

Done!

Photo credit: Vern Evans

One of the benefits of pitching up at an artist’s complex is that your end-of-trip photo might get snapped by a actual, v accomplished photographer!

Travel narrative follows.

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Northbound

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The ride to and from Monterey was great: there were lots of critters, birds especially, the scenery was magnificent, and I met some cool people. On the way north, my weather luck ran out, though. I hit some strong headwinds and a bit of rain – no big deal, but the headwinds in particular made for long slow days in the saddle.

wow

I did a bunch of thinking about subjectivity as I rode. First, because I’m really prone to misjudging grades – road sections that look like gradual declines but aren’t, climbs that are way harder or slightly easier than they seem, etc. A lot of it has to do with the surrounding landscape – if everything is going up up up, a road that only goes up a little seems downhill in contrast. And part of it is just that I’m bad at eyeball estimates. Second, I was noticing how much subtle changes in my health and level of rest influence my ride. Coming south, I ate something that disagreed with me and was feeling flat when I pulled in to Plaskett Creek in Big Sur. I’d already decided to take a rest day there and spend a (forecast) rainy day lounging in the tent. I ended up napping for a couple hours around noon, spent the (actual) partly cloudy afternoon wandering around the beach with Lotte, and slept an additional 11 hours that night. The ride TO Plaskett was OK, but a bit of a slog; the ride FROM Plasket was an absolute joy. I had a tailwind, my legs felt great and I was in Morro Bay before i knew it. There are objective realities underpinning my experiences, but I’m struck by how being out in the world and using your body for motive power internalizes those factors in a way that other modes of travel don’t.

And that is what counts as deeeeep thought as I pedal along. *embarrassed face* Travelogue below the fold!

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Kelp

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Since my last post I’ve done a bit more riding: up the California coast to Monterey and back to Los Angeles. I’ll post the travelogue in a bit; right now I’m going to focus on the reason for my ride, namely, the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Everyone I know who’s visited the Aquarium has raved about it and seeing what all the talk was about was  a priority. I spent 2 ‘rest’ days in Monterey at the aquarium – I knew that I’d be overwhelmed after 4 or 5 hours and knew there was more that 4 hours worth of things to see.

Wednesday was ‘get acquainted’ day. I dropped Lotte at doggy day care, cycled back to the motel, dropped the bike and walked through Cannery Row to the aquarium. It was fantastic. Multiple large tanks, each focusing on a specific habitat, great exhibits on cephalopods and Baja California, just great stuff.

Kelp forest tank

The kelp forest tank.

The deep reef from above

The deep reef from above.

The top of the kelp forest tank.

A tank full of Lookdowns.

Not all the action was indoors. From the sea-side balconies I saw sea otters in the kelp and a sea lion preying on what an Aquarium volunteer guessed was a young adult Mola mola. As I expected, I was used up about four and a half hours in, so I walked back to my room, mounted up and retrieved the pup.

The next day started the same way, but a little bit later, because I was scheduled to take a behind the scenes tour at 2:30. Going behind the scenes was great – we saw the food prep area, the veterinary suite and the top of one of the large tanks.

Fridge

Just like my fridge!

Necropsy lab

Necropsy area

Reef tanks top

Service balcony at the top of the deep reef.

One of the coolest things I learned on the tour, though, has to do with the orange buoy shaped object in the photo below. It’s a pig.

pig!

The Monterey Bay Aquarium uses seawater from the bay for many of the tanks (all of the big tanks, I think?). The water is filtered during the day to ensure good visibility in the displays, but gets pumped in raw at night. As a result, there’s been a lot of colonization – algae, sea stars, etc, coming in as plankton and growing out in the tanks. What folks didn’t anticipate was that the same thing would happen in the seawater intake pipes; it did. The Aquarium needs to pig the pipes every couple weeks to keep them flowing freely! I don’t know why I find the whole thing delightful, but I do.

An excellent visit to a great aquarium! It moved ‘learn to dive’ way up on my priority list – I want to swim through the kelp forest!

Nányóu Jì

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-or-

Journey to the South

I posted earlier about my encounter with macaws in the context of Mimbres culture and how it seemed to offer a framework to structure a New Mexico to Chihuahua bike ride around. I’ve spent the morning reading RITUAL CHANGE AND THE DISTANT: MESOAMERICAN ICONOGRAPHY, SCARLET MACAWS, AND GREAT KIVAS IN THE MIMBRES REGION OF SOUTHWESTERN NEW MEXICO and 1) my mind is blown and 2) it’s an incredible framework and needs to be a longer ride.

Mimbres macaw bowl

Enlarge the photo and check out the bowl with the macaws and people – note the info on the tag!

The paper argues, well, I’ll let them say it…

Additional points:

  • given that women are most often depicted handling macaws, was this a woman’s quest to the south?
  • I was thinking trade routes, but trade – perhaps turquoise for birds or something similar- may not have been the point. It may have been about esoteric knowledge and the birds that symbolized it with nothing given in exchange except religious alleigance.
  • the Hopi have a story of Tiyo, who journeyed south and returned with ritual knowledge of the Snake Dance – another case of ‘listen to what the people tell you about their history’?

I’n going to keep investigating , but this is exciting stuff! And for those who didn’t recognize it immediately, the title is a riff on Journey to the West. “The novel is an extended account of the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang who traveled to the “Western Regions”, that is, Central Asia and India, to obtain Buddhist sacred texts (sutras) and returned after many trials and much suffering.”* Appropriate, I think.

L.A. River Camp Coffee and the Canning Stock Route

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I first had coffee outside with the L.A. River Camp Coffee crew a couple years ago while out on a visit and doing it again was a priority this time, given that I’d legit biked into town. By way of explanation, LARCC is an informal group of cyclists, organized originally by Errin Vasquez, who meet at a small park on the L.A. River bike path to brew coffee and shoot the breeze – my kind of group! First thing Wednesday morning, I put Lotte in her basket and pedaled 5 miles north to meet the group. It was – no surprise – a ton of fun and there was lots of interesting bike talk.

#adventureteckel at L.A. River Camp Coffee!

Errin and I were talking about Molly Fin (the bike) and frame materials; I said something about a steel mid-tail being a dream machine and he filled me in on the ur-midtail – the bike that inspired the Salsa Blackborow. In 2013, Rick Hunter built a bike for Scott Felter (bagmaker/Porcelain Rocket). Not just any bike, obviously, but a mid-tail fat bike for a ride along Austrailia’s Canning Stock Route. More on the route in a minute, but check out this bike!!!!

Lots of cargo capacity, not because Scott planned to take an #adventureteckel with him, but because the route requires that folks ride with 30-35 days of food and 4-5 days of water. If you want to read about the ride, Tom Walwyn’s blog is the place to start; he has a great Flickr album, too.

20130801-Dune descent 1

I’d never heard of the Canning Stock Route, so I googled it up. It’s clearly a tangent I’m going to spend some time reading about. I’ll quote from Wikipedia:

The Canning Stock Route is a track that runs from Halls Creek in the Kimberley region of Western Australia to Wiluna in the mid-west region. With a total distance of around 1,850 km (1,150 mi) it is the longest historic stock route in the world.

The stock route was proposed as a way of breaking a monopoly that west Kimberley cattlemen had on the beef trade at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1906, the Government of Western Australia appointed Alfred Canning to survey the route. When the survey party returned to Perth, Canning’s treatment of Aboriginal guides came under scrutiny leading to a Royal Commission. Canning had been organising Aboriginal hunts to show the explorer where the waterholes were. Despite condemning Canning’s methods, the Royal Commission, after the Lord Mayor of Perth, Alexander Forrest had appeared as a witness for Canning, exonerated Canning and his men of all charges. The cook who made the complaints was dismissed and Canning was sent back to finish the job.

I’m especially interested in the Royal Commission and the cook, Edward Blake. I wonder if my initial take – that for things to have risen to Royal Commission level, the accusations were serious – is indeed correct. I’ve got no background in Australian history, so no context to judge against; looks like an opportunity for me to learn. Thank you, Errin, for exciting my curiosity!

Zeitgeist and s*cial m*dia

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The past week of the trip has been a whirl of dogs and raptors and art and friends; a wonderful few days. What’s been sticking in my mind is a conversation I had with RKO’C – we ranged all over the place, but talked especially about s*cial m*dia. I’m embarrassed to admit it but I don’t remember exactly how R and I first connected; it might have been via a third person’s blog, but I’d put money on Twitter being the channel. On top of that, we’d just eaten an incredibly delicious meal that had been, in large part, generated by a Facebook post and some actual phone calls (it’s Rebecca’s story, it’s great, and I will let her tell it). In spite of all the backstory, we spent a lot of time being sad about what the two big platforms have become. IMHO Facebook is just an evil company – lacking any compelling reason to stay I deleted my account last winter. And Twitter, where I’ve established some of the most important relationships of my (current) life, has become a slough of bile and stress. People who are very important to me are active on Twitter, so I need to make my peace with the platform, but I have noticed that not spending much time there as I ride has done wonders for my mental health. Not being able to obsessively refresh news sites to keep abreast of the latest torrent in the Trumpian shit maelstrom might be a contributing factor, too! I’ll leave the ‘why’ behind social media suckiness to smarter people, but lots of internet history suggests that unmoderated, “freedom of speech” defaults on platforms enable the folks with the most power and/or the least amount of give a shit as regards behavioral norms. “We can’t censor (except when we do).” is a ridiculously weak position, but it’s inexpensive for the platform – hate speech as an externality: pollution that the community has to absorb.

I checked Instagram the morning after we talked about all this to find that Olivia Laing had just published a piece in the Observer titled ‘I was hooked and my drug was Twitter’. To state the obvious, Olivia was way ahead of me in understanding what’s going on on a personal level with s*cial m*dia. And, duh, R & I are not the only people wrestling with wanting a broader community but being daunted by platforms’ toxicity.

As further proof that talking with friends over Mexican beer and tequila gives one UNIQUE INSIGHT into the state of the world, we also discussed human/machine integration and the next morning Alexa read us a headline about implantable gadgets. We marveled at Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis and the next afternoon as I rode the Pacific Electric bike trail I passed a fellow riding a beautiful replica of the bike from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.

Yeah, I stopped.

Travelogue follows…

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Milestone

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I pulled into Los Angeles yesterday evening and am comfortably ensconced with family! L.A. is/was a big milestone – the primary destination when I set out from Austin a couple months ago and that I actually did it is blowing my mind a bit. While I get myself back together and formulate an actual blog post (eagles! zeitgeist! mole!), here’s a map of our path, post-Tucson.

Just ran the numbers – 2543.69 miles/4093.67 kilometers!

Q: What time is it?

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A: You mean now?

I chanced on this WaPo piece on the health effects of being on the west edge of a time zone and it resonated with something I’ve been thinking about a bit. My daily activity is matched to actual sun position; earlier in the trip the question was, “When will the sun be high enough to warm the tent?” and over the past week, as temps have pushed triple digits, the question changed to, “When will there be enough light to break camp and head out before the sun does its inferno thing?” Depending on where I am in a time zone, the sun/wall clock time match can be no big deal, or a bit of a problem. I noticed it most in west Texas because the sun didn’t set ’til extra late (wall clock time) and stores tended to close relatively early, thus I needed to pay attention to resupply concerns well before I was ready to wrap up the day’s ride. And start times were a little jarring, too – getting up with the sun but not being on the road before, say, 9:30 felt odd. It’s worth keeping in mind that standardized time was very much a product of the industrial revolution, especially railroads. As much as I love trains, I have to give the whole enterprise a failing grade There’s an aspect of fetishization – valorizing wall clock time (and the scheduling needs of capital) over the health and safety of human beings. I’m not saying we should throw the clock out the window, but the notion that folk’s schedules should have no connection to their circadian needs is BS. Howard Mansfield wrote a good book about the development of standardized time: Turn and Jump – recommended.

Before I turn and jump to the travelogue, one more time zone note. Coming into Portal, AZ, my phone kept switching time in hour increments. I couldn’t figure what was going on until I remembered that Arizona, with the significant exception of the Navajo Nation, does not observe Daylight time, so they’re effectively on PDT in the summer. Duh. I’m guessing time zone wobble on one’s cell phone is a pretty bike-tour specific malady: in a car one is going fast enough to switch from towers in one time zone to another definitively, hiking one is traveling slowly enough to do the same, but on a bike, especially moving north/south on a boundary, time, um, changes.

Sunset

More…

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The Chiricahua Mountains

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I wanted to say a little more about the Chiricahua Mountains; when I met Drew in El Paso he told the that the Chiricahuas were an absolute must-experience and he was right. They’re an ecological Four Corners: Rockies from the north, Sierra Madre from the south, Chihuahuan desert from the east and Sonoran desert from the west. Add in the effects of altitude – a change in vegetation, etc. every thousand feet – and you have one of those meeting places in the landscape with incredible diversity. The part of the ride that took me through Cave Creek Canyon was my favorite – I’m a sucker for bosque dells.

Cave Creek Canyon

I’d mentioned that hummingbirds woke me up in Portal; “In fact, thirteen species of hummingbirds are know to occur in the Chiricahua Mountains, and many of these are Mexican species that are rarely seen in the United States.”*


One of the big draws is the Elegant Trogon* – I was told I was a week too early to see one, but B’s feed on Strava indicates it was more like 4 days. Ah, well – a good excuse to return with birding as a focus. I did see a Gould’s turkey, so that’s 2 new wild turkey subspecies this trip (the other is the Rio Grande turkey). Merriam’s wild turkey is a possibility in a week; I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

One last reason to dig the area – Portal has very dark skies. The stars at night are amazing!

*pronunciation note – I’ve always said ‘trogon’ with a hard G, but I heard someone say trojawn in Portal. Google search says hard G is correct; maybe the J person was from Philly – or maybe Google is wrong?