The Last Run to Castle Rock

It started out as a simple three day campout for the guys, the destination being the Flat Track Races at Castle Rock, Washington, on their half mile dirt track outside of town on the Toutle River.  We didn’t know it then, of course, but it was the last race ever to be held at that track.  Mt. St. Helens blew up the next spring and wiped out the track, the river, a bunch of trees and quite a few people.

It was a mostly Harley crowd on this run, Dude on his ’69 Sportster, me on my purple ’71 FLH, Jerry on his knucklehead chopper, Bill on his 45 trike and Butch on his Toms’ Cycle Yamaha 650 chopper.  In those days, we always had a chase truck along, in this case Bill’s old ‘52 Dodge pickup, driven by Magoo, a good thing, as it turned out. You could become a biker pretty cheaply back then, but the price was the lack of dependability that comes from running used, worn-out parts because it was all we could afford.

We jumped off from Jerry’s place on the plateau above Graham, which is a short skip to the Orting-Kapowsin Highway that leads south past Lake Ohop to Eatonville.  From there, you have a choice of the Eatonville cutoff or the long way through LaGrande, both of which lead to Highway 7, the Mountain Highway.  From there, all roads lead to Morton, as it should be.

You can leave Morton in 4 directions.  Take a right on Main Street and you will find yourself on State Highway 508, a lovely winding country road (after you get past the pig farm) that rolls into Chehalis on the south side by way of Onalaska.  Or you can go back the way you came on Highway 7, which stops at Morton, as if to say, “I’ve got you this far, you’re on your own now.”  But we try to never go back.

The other two ways out are east or west on Highway 12.  East takes you up the hill through Randle and Packwood to White Pass and the road to Yakama.  West, the way we went that day, heads toward the distant ocean via another fine country road.  Two lane blacktop is where it’s at.  We turned off and headed south on what is now called the Jackson Memorial Highway, named after a Senator who was not dead yet then, but now nobody remembers the original name of the road.  Still, that is where we turned, because it leads to Toutle, and thence to Castle Rock, our destination.

We had made reservations at the Weyerhaeuser primitive campground somewhere out by Silver Lake.  We had planned to be there by early afternoon, but the Harley Gods frowned down on us, specifically the Knucklehead, which popped, sputtered and died on the side of 12 outside Morton.  The curse of the Milwaukee Vibrator caused the points to loosen up inside the distributor until the gap widened all the way.  It took us a while to find the problem and fix it by resetting the points with a matchbook cover (.018” thick) and back on the road we went.  So we rolled into camp late, as usual, set up in the dark, and then rode back to the nearest country tavern for dinner and beer, lots of beer.

There’s a task, a quest, if you will, to which I set myself years ago, that continues to this day.  That is the search for the best biscuits and gravy in the country.  So far, I think it’s the Tastee Freeze in Laurel, Montana, and Marty says there’s a place in Missouri that fills the bill, but you can’t rightly say until you’ve ate at them all, now, can you?  So the next morning we took the quest into Castle Rock on our Harleys, with disappointing results.  For one thing, the town was packed to the gills for the event, an AMA sponsored national short track event that drew the likes of Jay Springsteen and all the good local boys who came out to take him on that day.  There were exactly two bars in downtown Castle Rock in those days.  In one of them, one of the 1%er clubs placed a large prospect at the door who informed all comers that patch holders got in free, but anyone else had to pay a joint at the door cover charge.  Needless to say, the 50 or so patch holders for the various clubs who were in town and not at war with each other at the time had a pleasant, relaxing day in uncrowded surroundings, while the landlord cried in his beer and the other place in town was jammed, standing room only and hope for a drink.  That got old fast and we headed for the track.

There’s something about the noise at a flat track race.  Most of the bikes in the top classes were Harley XR 750s, with the occasional Norton and the Honda copy of the XR that wasn’t ready for prime time yet, so the sound was a hornet’s nest of short stroke Sportsters at full song.  As the pack hits the turn, the volume goes up as they pitch the bikes sideways and spin the rear wheel while jamming the steel shoe into the ground to form the tripod, and drops as they straighten up and fling themselves onto the seat to get the tire to bite and throw them at the century mark again.  Oh, yeah, and the track sold beer by the large plastic cup.  By the time the Finals come around, the crowd was roaring.  The smell of testosterone competes with the smell of the Castrol in the fuel tanks.

Then, suddenly, it’s dark, the race is over, and the grassy field that surrounds the stands is full of motorcycles, thousands of them, the owners of which are streaming out the doors full of beer, with that noise echoing in their heads.

I’m standing by my bike, looking around at chaos.  Over there, a man is using a Bowie Knife blade tip to scoop large doses of either cocaine or methamphetamine out of a plastic bag and hold them under the noses of all in their party, spilling visible amounts on the ground in the process.  Over there a woman is screaming, a man is trapped under a fallen bike while around them swerve a steady stream of sportbikes all jammed together as twelve lanes form two on the only road to the freeway, visible in the distance.  All you see in any direction is headlights on chrome, all you hear is engines and all you smell is exhaust.

The promoters of the event, knowing full well what they have unleashed on the highways, and experienced in the crowd control needed for it, have arranged a little scenario on the side of the onramp in a well lit location that every single rider must pass on the way out.  A motorcycle, a four cylinder Japanese sportbike, lays on its side on the shoulder.  Parallel to it, but a few feet further on, is a figure in racing leathers and helmet lying flat on his back, apparently dead.  A few people are standing around, their faces betraying their helplessness to do anything for the poor guy, but they approach anyone who attempts to stop and render aid and urgently send them on their way.  The figure on the ground is a mannequin, and the intent is to penetrate the testosterone with a splash of cold water before the racing fans hit the freeway.  It certainly worked on me.

Our group had run into several of the Zudmen, and were yacking and telling stories while we waited for the zoomie bikes to get out of the lot first.  It’s always better to have the wheelie boys in front of you far enough so you have time to avoid the chaff.  It was only after they fired up and left, while we waited for stragglers, that Dude noticed that Dragon Lady had dropped her purse on the ground on the way out.  That put us in the position, of course, that we had to catch up with them, and all we knew was they were going to form up at the next rest area to the south.  So off we flew, into the dark night with our dim headlights and no real idea where this was gonna end and how, with a belly full of beer for courage.  Magoo and Bill took the truck and the trike back to camp, knowing better than to try to keep up with us, which turned out to be bad, because the Knucklehead finally died on the side of the road somewhere near Woodland, and refused to be revived this time.

JB and I wound up sitting in a raised brick flower bed outside a closed restaurant off some nameless off ramp for hours while we waited for the rest of them to go back to camp, wake Bill, and send him along in the truck to pick up the Knuck.

The morning cook came along in the wee hours and took pity on us and gave us some coffee.    We ran out of cigarettes about half way through.  Then we watched Bill drive by on the freeway twice before he figured out we had to be this way.  By the time we got back to camp, they had drunk all the beer, so we hit the hay.  We never did find that rest area.

The next morning we headed back the way we came, with the knucklehead, which had a long wide glide front end with a 21” wheel and no front brake, sandwiched into the back of the 1952 Dodge stepside pickup with the frame resting on the tailgate and the front tire down by the bumper, tied in with rope.

About 15 miles outside Toutle the frame on the Yamaha broke at the front motor mount.  It turns out the boys at Toms Cycle just butted the frame tubes together at the bracket with no slugs or fillets to give it the strength needed in that critical area, so it broke.  Mr. Murphy said it broke on the side of the road.  So into the back of the Dodge went the Yamaha, stuffed in next to the Harley with more rope.  Good thing we had lots of rope.

A few miles further up the road, the 45 trike burned a hole in a piston.  That poor little thing, which I later took over and restored back to stock, had been struggling all day to keep up with the big boys.  A flathead 45 trike puts out about 9.44 SAE net horsepower at the rear wheel in stock form, and this one had big meats on the back because they looked cool.  When I took that rear end apart, the extra weight and inertia of the big tires had been wearing away at the end of the axle inside the differential and when those little C-rings fail the axle, wheel and brake drum squirt out the side as you go around a corner and drop you on your ass.  Good thing it only holed a piston.

Fortunately, the trike also had a long front end, which we simply lifted over the tailgate and stuffed it in between the two prior residents, held in with even more rope.  It turned out the trike did fine like that, just a little squirrely in the corners and don’t stop too fast.

So there we were, three bikes in the back of a ’52 Dodge, and four guys to fit into the cab of a truck made for two.  We rested in the long grass on the side of the highway and debated how to choose who got to ride passenger with me and who got to ride in the back with the bikes.  Then, wonder of wonders, who should show up but the girls!  Three of them, in fact, mine, JBs and Magoos, in Barbs car.  They had decided to trace our route and see if they could catch up with us on the return trip, and it worked.  Not only that, but they brought us a picnic lunch, and more beer!

And so it was that another memorable adventure ended up on the side of the road, this time with sweethearts, sandwiches and beer to wash down another good one.  Somewhere, I’ve got pictures.  :-{)}

Four Heart hat seeks new head

Hello there,

I hope to be introducing myself to you as your new hat soon.  Here’s my story:

There were these people, a man and his wife, who traveled to Florida to visit their friends.  It’s not like they had not seen each other for years or anything like that- they actually live about an hour apart in Washington- but the visit was more about escaping the cold rain and the dismal early Spring weather for the more typical 80+ degree days and hot sunshine of south Florida on the Caribbean side.  The Florida folks had bought property down there for a winter hideaway.

So anyway, as they were strolling the white sand beaches of Florida that surround Sanibel Island looking for shells and such the one old guy, who has developed a habit of picking up garbage everywhere he goes (something about if everyone who went for a stroll on a beach or in a park took out one more piece of garbage than they generated during their stay, why, pretty soon we would run out of garbage, wouldn’t we?), rescued me from where I had landed, up on the high tide mark, where I was half-buried under the sand, with only my bill showing.  He thought I was just another piece of cast-off refuse, and threw me in the bag with the other bits of flotsam and jetsam uncovered by the wind and the waves.  It was only after he cleaned me up that he saw my potential, and decided to help me find a new owner, or re-unite with the last one.

If you look at a map of the currents in the Gulf of Mexico, you’ll see that the water comes in from the South between the Yucatan peninsula from which the Mayans and later the Aztecs once ruled the known world, and the west end of Cuba, which is so long it funnels the water back out into the Caribbean Sea by way of the west coast of Florida, where I was found.  That means I could have come from anywhere within that giant loop, if indeed I was not dropped by some careless kid right there on the beach, which I stipulate is probably the more likely scenario, but I prefer the mystifying romance of the grand idea to the mundane laziness of the overfed tourist.

Every morning, along the 3,400 plus miles of shore containing the Gulf, people stroll the beach looking to see what washed in overnight, especially after a storm.  In many cases and locations, they are looking for something to eat or sell for that night’s dinner, and in others, like in Florida where the visitors are likely to be touristas, they are looking for something interesting to take home for a souvenir.  All of Florida was under water during the Jurassic period, way back before Lawrence Whelk was a baby, so you just scratch the surface anywhere and you see the fossilized white shell fragments out of which the sands were created, a process that continues to this day.  Most of the beaches are shallow, and when the Manta Ray jumps, as it did for me, it is off in the distance.

But enough about the beach, let’s get back to me.  As you can see from the picture, I’m red, the color of love, and I have 4 hearts on my front surrounding a jewel that is no doubt of the precious variety.  The old guy left me on display on a post in the parking lot of the Tropical Winds resort on Sanibel Island, right next to the shell washing station.  All you have to do is walk in and pick me up.  I’m about a medium size.  Hurry up, I’m waiting.  :-{)}

P.S. (You don’t want to actually stay at the Tropical Winds Resort, by the way.  The place is a pit, and the price is a joke.  Check out the reviews on Tripadvisor.com, and you’ll see what I mean.)

The Banking System

My eight-year-old granddaughter, Alyssa, has demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of our American banking system, and the results of her education could be edifying to many of us.

First, she drew up her own design for money, in this case called Alyssa-bucks, on a sheet of paper.  I pointed out that she could draw four Alyssa bucks per page and use the photocopier to create a small fortune, which she proceeded to do.

Then, she awarded me three Alyssa bucks for being nice, and announced the formation of the Alyssa bank, and asked if I wanted an account.  I did, and deposited my three A-bucks in my new account.  Then she asked if I had a job, and, when I said I did not, created a job application for me on the spot, which I dutifully filled out.

Next, she announced I had gotten the job, which apparently required me to do nothing other than keep her happy, which is already my first responsibility as a grandpa anyway, so that was easy.  Then she asked if I needed a loan.  When I replied in the affirmative, she created the documents on the spot and promptly loaned me three more A-bucks, but then charged me one for the loan, and another one for the monthly account fee, leaving me with one buck in hand and owing three more.  I decided I had better pay that loan off quickly, so I instructed the Alyssa bank to take three A-bucks out of my account and pay off the loan.

So at that point I was debt free, and still had one whole Alyssa buck in my pocket, leaving me solvent and happy.  I offered her the buck for some of her leftover Easter candy, which she was happy to take, but then it turned out all the good chocolate was gone already, so I complained and demanded my money back.  Her response to that was to decide that I was being mean to her, so she cancelled my account and charged me my last dollar for taxes, leaving me with no candy, no money, and no prospects, since she also fired me from my job.  It was nice while it lasted…

So the lingering question in my mind is how is this scenario different in any substantive way from the operation of the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve?

Trials and Tribulations

Of assembling a Harley Sportster transmission after the case has been modified for a ball bearing on the sprocket side.

Some projects are doomed from the start, and a big part of experience is learning how to spot them in advance.  My own Ironhead Sportster project from Hell is a good example of one of those.  I didn’t.

This poor motorcycle, which had only accumulated some 12,000 miles in its brief tortured existence before I rescued it, had fallen under the control of an idiot, who thrashed and trashed and jumped and dumped it within an inch of its life, only abandoning it to the corner of the garage when the oil coming out the transmission was equal to however much you put in.  Then it became trade bait and payment for debts, and changed hands several times before I wound up with it for $1000, which proved to be way too much.  Still, it was a numbers matching original 1979, which is rare because they were so ugly nobody bought one.  It even still has the 18” rear mag wheel.

The drive chain on a Sportster is on the right side, and the transmission pops out the left side after you pull the clutch and a bunch of other stuff.  Where the mainshaft goes through the right side case there is a steel insert cast into the aluminum case and bored at the factory to fit a pressed-in bearing race that houses a series of loose roller bearings held in place by a retaining ring on the one side and a thrust washer on the other.  When one over-tightens the rear chain the load is felt as accelerated wear in those rollers that can lead to bearing failure that causes the mainshaft to wobble under load and wipe out the oil seal behind the sprocket, which then allows all the oil in the clutch and transmission to run out past the shaft.  If one is of the type to notice the oil, but think, “Well, it’s a Harley, after all, they just mark their spot, right?”, and do nothing about it, well, then it’s not surprising one would also not notice that the oil stopped leaking out on the garage floor after every ride, mostly because one never cleaned up the previous oil anyway, but tracked it into the house, after which the old lady chewed on one for some time.  Then, when one noticed the rear chain was kinda sloppy because the bearing was chewed up, and took a Crescent wrench to the axle nut and tightened that chain right up, plus a little for smoothness, it was a good thing one had drag pipes on the bike, which made it less likely that one heard the bearing sieze up and start to spin inside the critical steel sleeve, cause that woulda made some noise, all right.  Especially when the dry-as-a-bone gearbox started to howl as the gears lost their alignment because the mainshaft was going south and started rubbing the corners off the gears.  But even for one so idiotic as to fail to notice or understand the significance of all this, there comes a point where the bike just wouldn’t go no more, so there it sat.  And when I first pulled the sprocket off and looked at the charred remains of the mainshaft and the hogged out guts of the right side engine case, I knew I was hosed.  Screwed, blued and tattooed, as they say.  So I parked it for a few years to see if it would fix itself, say about ten.

Then I got introduced to Keith Johnson, a genius machinist, welder, technologist and beer drinking hippy biker then creating strange things from a garage along Lake Tapps.  He had run across this same problem in the past and created a spud to which you could bolt the engine case half down flat on the table of a milling machine and pick up the exact center of where the mainshaft bearing bore used to be, and re-machine the case to fit a ball bearing.  He had turned up an old Harley Davidson blueprint from 1958 that showed the dimensions of a counter bored pocket exactly five hundred thousandths of an inch deep and 2.0476” diameter, apparently a modification requested by the Racing Department, who were flogging the early Sportsters at dirt tracks all across the country and needed more load capacity there.  Keith proceeded to do just that through both the steel insert and the aluminum case itself, working upside down from the back side of the housing, and it came out right, an achievement that I take my hat off to, speaking as a machinist myself fully aware of how tricky that job was.

So that fixed the engine cases, and the frame had been straightened and repaired by Darwin in White Center, so it was time to put it back together.  About 5 years later, one day, innocently, Ron said, “You know, those projects are great to have, but every now and then you gotta actually do one, right?”  That’s when I knew it was time to get back on the Sportster from Hell, and stay on it this time.  I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Oh, yeah, one more thing.  When you replace the loose rollers on the sprocket side of the mainshaft with a 6205R ball bearing, it turns out to be 15mm wide, or .590”, which does not leave room for the stock thrust washer with the tang on the bottom that matched the notch in the race that you’re not using any more, so you have to find a thrust washer that matches the ID and OD but is about .040” thick, which I found at Grainger under part number 4XFR4, to bring the end play down to about .005”.  The OD and ID are 1.540” and 1”, respectively. 

Then you discover that the mainshaft is .983” diameter and the bearing you got is 1”, so then you cut a piece of feeler gage about .007” thick on the bias so it fills the gap and slip it in between the shaft and the inner race with some Loctite 609 to keep it there, knowing it will be further retained by the sprocket on the outside and mainshaft low gear on the inside.

Here’s a copy of the factory drawing from 1958 that shows the counter bore:

With that in hand, and a good machinist sitting in front of a decent milling machine, you can get that wasted engine back in useable shape again.  Good luck.  :-{)}

Revival

As I have been reminded of late, the project of bringing back to life an old motorcycle that has been in storage, if not disassembled, for lo these many years is not smooth and straightforward.  There will be fits, and stops and starts, parts lost and found, mistakes made, oh, yeah, lots of those…

I picked this bike up sorta as a favor for a friend, some twenty-one years or so ago, and it was pretty thrashed, as detailed in the previous installment of this story, titled “Trials and Tribulations”.  The one thing it had going for it was the fact that it was a numbers-matching original XLH-1000, but that was pretty much the only thing.  I’ve learned, for example, that in 1979 the Sportster engines came with three different exhaust valve diameters, 1 5/8”, 1 11/16”, and 1 ¾”, and that mine were the smallest, meaning it was the cheapest of base model Harleys from the days when they still produced the XLCR and the XR-1000.  So that put the kibosh on any thoughts of somehow breaking even financially on a restoration project featuring this particular bike, especially given the bent frame, hogged out transmission case and general state of destruction visited upon it by a succession of idiotic owners, or one really bad one.

I decided early on that, because of the rough treatment it had received, this bike was the Harley equivalent of the abandoned puppy, and that the only proper response was to take it in and nurse it back to health, no matter how long it took.  I suspect the main reason it survived all these years was because we only moved once in all that time, which allowed the Sporty the luxury of rest, and of being forgotten.

After the initial rush of enthusiasm when the project arrived, which resulted in some fortuitous parts finds like the new rear caliper and brake rotors and the Koni shocks off the discount table at the dealer and the frame being repaired and straightened by Darwin in White Center and powder coated by Art Brass, the discovery of the ruinous transmission damage put a ten year damper on the project, during which time it lived in boxes under the bench.  I gotta say that, in all that time, the only good part I lost was the front upper motor mount, and that’s a bummer, because all the cheap chromed aftermarket parts are junk that must be reworked to even start to fit.  I’m still looking for that.

The assembly of the engine was delayed for a few years while I tried to get the flywheel and crank shaft runout within factory specs.  The early version of the crank had retainers and screws around the crank pin nuts, the way they’d done it since the early days, but, starting in late 1979, they dropped the retainers and substituted a drop of Loctite 690 on the taper and tighten the hell out of those nuts, which I never trusted, but there it is.  I have an old Shovelhead service manual that says to use a drop of battery acid in place of the Loctite, which is newfangled.  I finally took it up to Steve at Burgin’s, who showed me you just gotta hit it real hard in just the right place, after which it went together fine.  It hasn’t blown up yet, but I haven’t taken it to the drags yet, either.

After that it was a fairly straightforward process of assembly, test, say damn, disassemble, fix, reassemble, test, say damn some more, and so on.  The gas tank was so full of crud after all the years of dry storage (yes, I know about oil storage, now) that it plugged the petcock strainer so high that reserve fuel supply did not work, causing it to run out of gas on its maiden voyage.  The bike should have come with electronic ignition, which started with the ’78 models, but had been converted to points by one of the idiots, so I went with that.  Right off the bat the little tab that rides on the point cam broke in such a way that it looked fine with the engine off, but lifted like a finger when you attempted to start it, and collapsed the point gap.  After we got that figured out I decided to replace it with a nice Dyna-tech electronic ignition that I found in my pile, only to discover that it was junk, but only after going to the trouble to install it.  Tell me why, please, why, oh, why do people take junk parts off their motorcycles and keep them?  Do they think time heals all wounds?  Have they forgotten the simple fact that electricity, at its root, is smoke, and when the smoke comes out the electricity goes away?  But I digress… forgive me.  The mind wanders when you consider how you installed three different carburetors to fix an electrical problem.

I learned many lessons during the course of this project, some that bear repeating.  I learned not to buy new tires at the start of the project, wait till closer to the end, so as to avoid brand new ten year old tires.  Same goes for batteries…  I learned that the shallow dish in the rear sprocket goes to the inside, and if you guess wrong the first time it will rub on the chain guard and the sprocket cover, which is bad.  I learned that camshaft end play is over rated, and can lead to head-bangers balls, which explains Metallica.

I finally got it home from that ill-fated maiden voyage and discovered that the shifter peg had vibrated half way out of the shift lever, the clutch perch pin had been missing the retaining ring on the bottom and was standing at attention.  The right side front caliper had somehow coughed up one of the nuts that hold the caliper to the fork slider, squirting the shoulder bolt out the side and taking a chunk of the hexagonal pocket on the inner edge of the casting with it.  I noticed that while trying to figure out why the front brakes quit working, and was that brake fluid all over the rotor on that side?  More damns… the left front caliper was quietly disassembling itself as the big bolt that holds the halves together backed out.  Geez, who was the idiot who put the brakes on that front end?  Oh, yeah, that guy… I’ll have to talk to him.

But slowly, almost in spite of itself, the list of things to do got smaller and smaller.  The collector vehicle plate arrived in the mail, finally, and the left turn signals actually fixed themselves, which was good, because there was no reason why they shouldn’t, and I couldn’t figure out why they wouldn’t.

And so, after twenty-one years of breakdown and storage and neglect and renewal, one of Harley Davidson’s equivalent to a teenager in love in the ‘50s is now back on the road.  I owe many thanks to my guru team of Ron Fox and John Van Golen for helping me through the starts and the stumbles.  The plan is to introduce it to the community at the Isle of Vashon TT in 2015, if the Harley Gods be willing.  We’ll see you there.  :-{)}}

urban legends

We've all heard them:  stories of improbable deals, incredible finds, lucky strikes or big scores.  How often have we actually come close enough to one of them to actually be in a position to do something about it?  How about now?  Let me tell you the story…

I did a bad thing yesterday.  I went to a house in Newcastle and bought two Honda Shadows.  Yeah, I know, that’s ridiculous.  The very idea that a dyed-in-the-wool old Harley guy like me would actually go out and buy not one, but two Hondas at the same time is hard to fathom.  But it happened, and that’s another story for another time.  It’s what I found when I went to pick them up that is the stuff of legend.

See, there is this guy, we’ll call him Larry, because that’s his name.  Larry was renting a room from a friend of his named Hugh.  As things happen, Hugh died suddenly just last month.  I don’t know anything about the family situation, other than that Larry got a sudden eviction notice just last week that forced him to be gone by this weekend.  That’s what caused him to place the ad in Craigslist with the two Hondas at the improbably low price that resulted in me showing up at Hugh’s house yesterday morning.  After an intense dickering session that mostly consisted of me walking around in circles trying to convince myself I really wanted to do this, the deal was struck, and I began to load two motorcycles into the back of my pickup along with the usual pile of stuff that accumulates when you own a motorcycle.  As the project continued, I noticed more and more just what was in that double garage besides my two new bikes.

Hugh, it turns out, was a car guy.  When I looked up the address on Zillow and accessed the street view option from Google Earth, the street view of Hugh’s house, taken whenever, shows a top fuel dragster under a tarp in the driveway, so he was a real car guy.  By the time I showed up, the dragster was long gone, of course, but I saw why it had been relegated to storage in the driveway.

The first thing that leaped out at me was the two street rods.  Both appear to be fiberglass bodied ’32 Ford roadster types with the full fenders and running boards and an open hood showing the large V-8 engine and headers.  That was the red one, nearest the doorway.  The black one in the background was facing the other way, so I couldn't see if it had an engine under the hood.  The red rod was half covered in empty cardboard boxes, old blankets, and junk.  Sitting on the rear was a brand new fancy aluminum spacer for a large four barrel carb, along with a couple of gaskets, obviously brand new, just sittin’ there.  Down on the floor alongside was a brand new very large aluminum distributor for some big block engine, just sittin’ there.  A little ways from that was a new crankshaft wrapped in plastic, just sittin’ there on the floor.  Over on the bench I saw what appeared to be a complete rocker arm setup for a big block Ford, just kinda piled haphazardly on top of a bunch of stuff on the bench.

In between the back of the car and that workbench was a pile of what appeared to be brand new name brand hot rod components that was probably 12 feet long and about 8 feet wide and floor to ceiling high.  Most of it was in boxes, some with tantalizing hand-written labels like “Corvette fans”, others closed and packed.  On the wall opposite the pile was a typical car guy setup:  three rollaway toolboxes jammed full of every kind of mechanic’s tool you could imagine.  On the floor on the other side of the red rod was a new looking cherry picker engine hoist, just sittin’ there.  I saw at least one air compressor.  Everywhere I looked was more cool stuff, but I had to get out of there, so I left.

When I walk out into my own garage I see what happens when a man, over many years, has a hobby or an interest and spends time and money on that interest and accumulates the tools of the trade needed to work that hobby, and the spare parts that go along with it.  As an Ebay guy, I stand in a room like that one in Newcastle and look around, and all I see is inventory, bright flashing dollar signs popping out of boxes and dripping from the ceiling.  In the end, all of our toys become someone else’s inventory.  You go to the swap meet, and that’s what you’re looking at spread out all over those tables and on the floor:  a man’s life, reduced to inventory.  Hopefully, when we’re gone, and our inventory has been dissipated out into the community, we can only hope two things.  One is that some of those cool things that we thought highly enough of to collect and hold on to will wind up in the hands of someone who will actually put them to use as they were intended, if not just for the pleasure of owning them as well.  The other thing is that we will be remembered for more than just our possessions, for while our possessions do describe us, they take as much meaning from our ownership and use of them as we do from them, and when they are dispersed that meaning drops off and they become simple things again, a hammer, rather than my hammer or his hammer.  It is only in the memory of people that things become permanently connected to a person, like Eric Clapton’s guitar, or that very cool old National Steel banjo that is displayed behind glass at the first restaurant you come to on the way down into Naches on Highway 410 to Yakama.  That’s why tools I have inherited from my father are more valuable to me than tools I bought myself.

So here is the essence of this Urban Legend:  In a double car garage in a house in Newcastle at this very moment, a man’s life is about to become inventory for someone.  The difficulty lies in the fact that we don’t know who to ask.  The two tenants were on their way out the door, and did not have any contact information to whom could be placed an inquiry about all the stuff in the garage.  Hugh apparently lived alone, and they did not know of any immediate family in the area.

I’m not a car guy, so I wouldn’t know where to start on this pile, but I do get the strong feeling that this is indeed a legendary pile, that is about to change hands one way or the other, and I don’t have any way to find an opening, other than to park out front and wait for someone to show up.  Tomorrow would be a very good day to do just that, but I won’t be there.  I do, however, have one thing you will usually never hear as part of an Urban Legend.  I have the address of the house in Newcastle on my phone.  Obviously, I would not publish that kind of information, but if any of you car guys see this and get fired up by the idea, get in touch with me.  What would be really cool is to hear the rest of the story some day, about the guy who saw an opportunity dangling in front of him and went for it.  But mostly I just want to know what all was in that pile… :-{)}

Evening Light

At a certain time of day in a certain time of year and only when the weather in rainy Washington is clear, the sun reaches through the trees at the precise angle to illuminate a section of the woods behind our house that normally lives in shadow.  To the tree, it must feel like the direct gaze of the Almighty at the time.  Unless you wander by just then, give or take a very few minutes, you would never see it.

In the picture, it’s clear that Spring is on the way.  The ferns are there, as they always are in the shady woods, and the moss on the trunk shows you the way north.  The dead remains of last year’s leaves are becoming one with the earth as the new growth begins to poke through.  The Lindbergh High School athletes run through these woods regularly, so the windfalls and dead stumps are pruned away from the trails, but every winter brings new ones as the standing cottonwoods rot and the winds blow.  The trail passes through groves of cedars that would make a Druid happy, and here you will see a nurse log, there may be an owl or a bobcat.  Viburnum, salal, holly and salmon berries jostle for position with the blackberry vines as the maples and cottonwoods leaf out the upper terrace and the birds go into nesting mode.  In the background the traffic noise, as thousands of people drive by daily on Petrovitsky Way without a second glance, is a dull roar.

Our access to this wonderland through our own back gate was once threatened. The six lots behind the dead end street on which we live represented the last possible building lots on the edge of an unstable slope, at the bottom of which was a salmon bearing wetland named Molasses Creek that flows into Soos Creek as part of a system that flows south along the plateau between Kent Valley and Maple Valley.  A developer had purchased the entire plot, and one day we saw a track-hoe crashing through the brush, stopping to dig a pit for the perc test.  As luck would have it, the soil sample proved that the hillside would not support buildings on the edge, and it failed the perc test, so he stripped the development rights to the parcel and sold them separately to someone else to offset the destruction of somebody else’s wetland, then deeded the entire piece to the County to be used as a passive park.  At some point in the future, the Soos Creek trail will come through here on its way to hook up with the Cedar River trail, and that will be some fine walkin’, indeed. Everybody in the cul-de-sac neighborhood has permanent access now, which is a wonderful thing in a time when little sections of woods are disappearing all around us all the time.

It occurs to me that the same sun that has set this trunk ablaze with light must also, by virtue of the distance from us to it, be repeating this performance all over the world, twenty-four hours a day as the world spins.  That means there must be a similar light show waiting for you somewhere close by in a patch of woods, or a sand dune, or a river bank accessible to you.  You better get out there, you might miss it.   :-{)}

Hard Time

“I’m the one’s got to die, when it’s my time to die.  Just let me live my life the way I want to…”  Jimi Hendrix, If Six Was Nine

There’s a wild look a man gets in his eyes when he has just been released from prison.  I saw it one time, sitting in a booth at a nightclub along Highway 99, and the signs are obvious.  This guy I’d never seen before comes walking in with a couple of buddies, and the difference is glaring between those who have been here all along and the one who just got back.

The first thing you notice is the muscles.  A lot of guys pass the time behind bars working out, both for something to do and to build a rep for safety.  There are no tanning beds in prison, so you see the combination of build and pallor that accompanies too much time in the gym and not enough in the yard.  But mostly, you see it in his eyes.

The eyes of a recently paroled man look out into a world at once familiar and bizarre, the more complicated depending on the number of years in stir behind the parolee.  Things have changed, and a common pleasure like stopping into a bar for a beer with your buddies becomes a born again experience.  Add to that the element of prohibition, caused by the requirements often imposed on one’s life by the Corrections Department – don’t hang around with any of your friends any more, and don’t do drugs or alcohol any more, or go any of the places you used to go anymore - and you can sense the feeling of life about to burst a seam in the man.  On top of that, there is the pressure of “Get a Job Right Now” – even though nobody will hire you, because you’re a convict.  It’s a recipe for recidivism, a term invented to describe the likelihood that a released con will soon be back behind bars.  The fact that we even need such a term is clear evidence that our system of “corrections” has failed, or was never intended to do anything else.

According to one article from 2008, cited here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289  the United States incarcerates a higher percentage of our population than anyone else in the world.  Also noted is that private, for-profit prisons have increased dramatically, from only 5 in 1998 to 100 in 2008, and that most of them sell their inmates’ labor to private companies for profit as well as receive tax dollars to incarcerate them.  It is also clear that the populations of these profit making ventures, the two-bits an hour laborers supplied by Police and Prosecution Departments all over the country, are mostly Black and Latino by a wide margin.

And it should come as no surprise that many of the versions of  “tough on crime”, “Truth in sentencing”, and “mandatory minimum sentences” that have greatly increased the populations of prisons everywhere are spoon fed to legislators, both at the state and federal level, by a lobbying organization known as the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization partly supported by the companies that run private prisons.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison has more information on this topic.

There’s something about America, and our fundamentalist Bible Belt mentality that demands that bad people must suffer for their sins, even as we define as a sin anything that offends our pulpit pounding strictures to live by Old Testament rules and ignore the true costs of such a stance.

Take prostitution, for example.  The World’s Oldest Profession, as it is known, has been responsible for millions of wasted dollars and lives for as long as we can remember, and only because we believe it is a sin.  In reality, the only sin comes from the abuses encouraged by illegality, such as exploitative pimps, child abuse, runaways, and disease.  What if pimping remained a crime of exploitation while we accepted prostitution as a reality in a world where not everyone can find the love they need?  How much would we save as a society if men and women were allowed to ply their trade of love for sale in a safe, healthy, well lit environment with full access to health care and the ability to keep the vast majority of their earnings for themselves, like any other professional?  Think about that.

Think about drugs, as well.  Think about the differences in the penalties for possession of marijuana in Colorado, Washington and Oregon compared with Mississippi or Alabama or Florida.  Take a look at who gets busted for drugs, and where they get shipped to serve their time, and ask yourself who profits from their losses.  Again, what if we removed the production and distribution of all the common drugs favored by addicts and abusers, the heroin, the methamphetamines, Oxycontin in all its flavors (thank you, Germany, 1917), and even that pleasant little herb, cannabis sativa, from the Black Market and brought them out into the open to be taxed, regulated and controlled?  This process has already started for marijuana, because it has simply become too much of a stretch to continue to pretend that pot belongs in the same category of “dangerous drugs” as the rest of the fatal overdose types, and there is way too much money avoiding taxation worldwide to be allowed to continue.  The current struggle is over who will get all that money as the powers that be try to freeze out those organizations that already have distribution networks in place and keep the money for themselves.  Imagine what a few more years will bring, as entire countries follow the example of Uruguay and legalize it.

Two things are slowing this progress: the Bible Belt mentality that says I’m against anything my Preacher says I should be against (never mind that hashish came from God along with wheat and soy and wine grapes) and a concerted lobbying effort by the same companies around the world that are making profits by incarcerating non-violent drug offenders and are acting to preserve the cash flow supplied by our tax dollars and our penal code.

This is where my fundamental Libertarianism takes effect.  While I recognize that many drugs used for recreational purposes are devastating and destroy lives, as became evident to anyone growing up in the White Center area in the ‘60s and ‘70s when the influx of injectable drugs came in like a wave of poison gas on a community and left a residue of bodies, broken homes and jail time in its wake, it still boils down to me to be a personal choice made by an individual that brings down on that individual the results of that choice.  As a society, we do not benefit by putting the surviving individuals behind bars, and we fool ourselves if we think we are somehow going to keep them from the same bad behavior when we let them out.  It is only when we get to the root causes of that behavior, when we answer the question of why it makes sense at the time to shoot that load of dope into your veins, or to get a gun and rob the corner store so you can afford to pay your man what you owe, that we will begin to make a change in our society for the better.   Think about all the money we’ll save when we do.  Legalization of all the “victimless” crimes is a good place to start.   It’s called “thinking outside the box”, and in this case the box is a coffin.  :-{)}