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.  :-{)}

Five Things you should never say in a For Sale Ad

I’ve written a few ads that sold a few things over the years, and I’m getting a feel for what works and what doesn’t.  It occurred to me to write some of these things down to share with others, and save you the time and trouble of learning the hard way.

First, a bit of philosophy:  We sell things for many reasons.  Maybe we don’t like that thing anymore, or it doesn’t fit, or we bought a newer, better one or we stole it or whatever.  Once the decision has been made to sell something, we are immediately faced with two questions:  How fast do we want it to sell, and how much do we think it is worth?  Most of the time, the answer is, “I’m in no hurry, and I want to get the most I can out of this thing.”  That’s the best position for you to be in as a seller.

How much it’s worth is a whole nother essay that I’m not going to try to slip in here.  Two things, though:  Forget NADA or Kelley blue book for car values, check the WA DOL website for access to the official state valuation service, called Price Digest.  The numbers you will get from them are lower than NADA or Kelly because they are based on sales reports from every sale reported to the state, both private and dealership, where the NADA guys are just reporting dealer sales.  Kelly’s Private Party values are estimates, I believe.  The other thing is that Craigslist will only tell you the asking price for a thing, but EBay, if you have an account, will tell you actual sale prices in most cases.  The difference between asking prices on Craigslist for cars and bikes and actual sale prices on EBay are dramatic.

Then you have to ask, “Am I willing and able to ship this thing to a buyer, or do I want them to come lay cash in my hand and take it away?”  A related question is, “how much does it weigh, and who gets to pay for shipping?”  The answer to these questions defines your sales approach, as in EBay vs Craigslist, or some other venue.  It’s a given in this day and age that print advertising is pretty much reduced to little old men and women browsing the back pages of the Little Nickel with their reading glasses on, and not worth your time or money as a sales outlet, generally.  The various Auto Trader magazines are better, because people pay for them, meaning they are more likely to be a serious buyer, but even they have driven their cost up and dropped the run-till-it-sells approach that facilitates my favored reverse auction pricing strategy.  Even if print ads are your chosen method, though, good wording is still, if not even more, critical, since you’re paying by the word and each one must work for your money.

So, now you’re ready to sell, and you have the item all cleaned up and presentable, because you know that good pictures are everything in online advertising. Clean cars sell for more than dirty cars.  Craigslist used to allow hosted pictures in their ads, the ones that filled the screen with nice full color pics of whatever it is, but they got tired of sending customers to Photobucket or one of the other hosting services and cut that out.  Now most pictures on Craigslist and EBay look pretty much the same.  I used to think that cell phone pictures were a bad way to go, but even those have been getting better and better as camera quality improves with each new generation of phone.

So you have to clean things up to sell them, and you need a good clear picture set that is taken against a neutral background so your pictures have no competing images to distract the buyer or confuse the outline of the thing.  The last thing you want is someone trying to figure out what part of town you’re in based on the territorial view behind your car for sale.  I like to use the closed garage door or a hedge or something that is uniform in color.  For indoor pictures I use a pastel bedsheet hanging on the wall, or a sheet of tissue paper on a table to blank the background as much as possible.

Ok, now it’s all cleaned up, you’ve taken your pictures, and now you have to sit down and write the ad.  So here’s what not to say:

1.  Price is firm. – This is a dangerous thing to say, unless you are absolutely sure your asking price is low enough to attract a buyer.  Typically, in a barter transaction, which a private sale most resembles, even though the thing being bartered is cash, you have to leave your buyer some wiggle room, and you need to reward them for taking the time to actually show up and look at your thing.  When you say the price is firm the message becomes, “Don’t even bother me if you are willing to pay $50 less than the $9000 I’m asking, because I’m telling you in advance I’m not willing to take it, so don’t waste your time.”  Variations on this theme are, “I’m in no hurry to sell, or I don’t have to sell”, all of which may be true, but the buyer doesn’t need to know that.  So that’s the first principle of ad writing:

Only tell the buyer what they need to know to make a decision to buy your thing, and no more than that.  I take that one step further and try with each ad to tell the whole story of the thing for sale, but that can lead to verbosity and an overload of superfluous detail, as in this sentence, so observe restraint as much as possible.

For example, the following, while true, could actually reduce your chances of selling the thing, in this case a motorcycle:  “…Owned by an 1%er motorcycle club member who only rode it back and forth to his lawyers office, and to and from the clubhouse on meeting nights, and the drags on weekends.”  The foregoing sentence can be entirely replaced with the words, “low mileage”, and that’s all the buyers really need to hear, isn’t it?

2.  Another thing that’s the kiss of death in ad copy is, in the case of a vehicle, “No title”.  No title on a motorcycle means you’re trying to sell a pile of parts and call it a bike.  The state patrol is going to want to inspect the bike before they will allow you to get a title, and they won’t do that until you’ve spent the time and money making it road-worthy, and why would you do that only to take a chance that it was stolen, and you lose it?  If it’s a car or truck, without a title it is a liability to you that you can’t even donate to charity or scrap it out legally without a bunch of effort.  So get the title before you try to sell anything that needs one, or be ready to accept bottom dollar, rather than top.

3. “…or trade for whatever.”  Now the message is, “I want to buy a whatever-it-is , but I don’t have the money, so I gotta sell my whatever-it-ain’t to buy my new whatever, which tells you something about my general approach to life, which is, always look for the easy way out, so rather than sell my whatever-it-is for as much cash as possible, then searching for the best deal on a new whatever-it-ain’t, now I’m gonna restrict my potential buyer list to only those who might have one of the whatever I want, and they also want whatever I’m selling, and their whatever is worth way less than my whatever, otherwise why bother, so now I need someone who fills all my conditions, plus wants to give me a helluva deal.”  Yeah, right, you can count the potential customers for that deal on the smaller toes of one foot, probably.

It is always, always better to sell your thing outright and use the proceeds to buy a new thing.  Trades and swaps always devalue the item, unless one of the traders is a fool, and cash talks better than any line of patter.  This is especially true when trading in a vehicle at the dealership.  By the way, did you know that the average markup on a used vehicle sold off a car lot is $2500.00?

4. “… must sell, or desperate, or getting divorced, or married, or having a baby, or all three at the same time…”  All bad wording choices, for sure.  “Must sell” is code for “I’m ready to give away this piece of junk, sock it to me, daddy”.  If you’re really up against it, just drop the price, and say nothing.  Drop it a little bit every day or every week, and you’ll quickly find out what the bottom dollar is.  Any personal information included in the ad is too much information, especially the getting divorced one.  That scares people off because they’re afraid they’ll say the wrong thing and set you off on a tantrum about your ex, or go postal all over them, and who needs the drama?  Keep it about the car, or the T-shirt, or whatever you are actually trying to sell.

5. “I know what it’s worth, don’t bother to lowball me, Blue Book says it’s worth x amount…”  Here’s a great recent example from Craigslist:   “I have this beautiful bike, it's in great condition but the clutch handle needs to be replaced, not the clutch itself, the handle needs replaced because i fell on it in my garage. It's a total of like 15 or 20 dollars and 5 minutes of work, all you need is a wrench. Anyways I'm selling/trading because I don't have the time for it anymore and it's just sitting in my yard rotting away. never laid down or wrecked and she's a beast. Call or text anytime, im down for a trade or just straight sell. This bike books for over 2 grand in the condition it's in. Just want it gone. $800.”

Heh, heh, looking at the picture on Craigslist, it’s a thoroughly thrashed twenty plus year old Kawasaki Concours of indeterminate mileage (he doesn’t say) with all the fairings and saddlebags removed, making it into a very strange looking naked bike, and he knocked it over in his garage but now it’s rotting away in the back yard, probably for the last several years, but it’s worth 2 grand because the book says so.  “All you need is 20 dollars and five minutes of work” is the most obvious bit of disingenuous mendacity you would expect, and the natural reaction is to turn the page.  Not a good way to sell anything.

Even if the whatever-it-is is really nice, and the price is good, and all is well, save all discussion of price till you have a buyer standing in front of you with cash in their hands.  That’s when you lay it on, whatever it takes to close the deal, but that's another story...  :-{)}

The Great Warehouse Fire

Early one morning in mid December back in the late ‘90s, as I recall, the employees of the City of Seattle complex known as 805 S. Charles St. arrived at work to find a wondrous sight in their normal parking lot.

At the time, employee parking was about an acre or two of land underneath the southbound Airport Way exit from I-5, at the base of the shore where Beacon Hill on the east and Dearborn street on the north sloped down into what had been tide flats in the early days of the Duwamish Delta.

On this particular morning, as I pulled in to the lot, there was a pile of stuff down the center of the lot that was close to 10 feet high by 30 feet wide and at least 50 yards long.  As I watched, another Engineering Department dump truck pulled in and backed up to the growing pile and added another 14 yards of consumer goods to the pile.  As the driver told the gathered employees, there had been a fire the night before at a warehouse in Sodo that was used to store piles of consumer goods waiting for the holiday shopping season to commence.  In the process of fighting the fire everything was damaged by smoke and water, so they cleared the building, which was done by scooping up everything with a front loader into a series of dump trucks, and our parking lot was the closest available open land to the warehouse.

I gazed in wonder at the pile.  There was a tent; no there were a hundred tents!  There was a pool cue in a case; there was a baseball bat, a sleeping bag, an umbrella, a huge pile of stuff, all brand new there on the ground in front of about 25 guys.  It was getting close to starting time, and everyone was here.  We looked at each other and, without a moment’s hesitation, threw ourselves at the pile.  Guys were coming out with armloads of stuff that they threw into their open trunks, then scrambled back for more.  The man with a pickup was king in a situation like this.  One guy filled his station wagon, then drove home and emptied it into his garage, then came back and filled it again.  By that time, an unfortunate security guard from a private outfit had been dispatched to stand over the pile, and word had spread throughout the neighborhood.  People were coming out of the woodwork.  Standing at a vantage point halfway up the back driveway to the shop, it looked like nothing less than one of those nature shows on TV where the ants are swarming around the corpse.

The security guard would stand at one end of the pile and politely chastise those who were rooting through the damaged goods, whereupon their buddies would be in full scavenge mode at the other end of the pile.  The guard would see this and walk to that end to repeat his ineffectual warnings, while the folks at the first end would dive in headfirst.  Christmas had come early, with a vengeance.

By the time the claims guy had mustered enough backup security to stop the looting, the pile had shrunk about 20 per cent, I’d guess.  They had to scoop it all back up again back into the same dump trucks and haul it off to South Transfer Station, where the scene was no doubt repeated minus the security guards.

So, were we thieves?  Did we steal?  I guess we did, really.  At the time it felt like a windfall out of the sky, and nobody raised a hand and said, “Excuse me, folks, maybe we shouldn’t be helping ourselves to all this largesse, eh?”  Somebody could have said, “Naw, it’s all on someone’s inventory, and the insurance company is gonna pay off, but they won’t go broke, and we’re just helping them out by reducing the pile they have to pick up again, so where’s the harm?”

It says something about how we deal with things that have no value left.  None of the stuff in the pile could have been sold as new after that, so they discarded it.  Why couldn’t they just give it away?

I asked that same question once after a Seahawks football game at the Clink one time.  Aramark is the vendor that has the concessions on all floors there, and we were part of a group that staffed a food booth to raise money for our high school football team around 10 years ago.  At that time, and I assume it’s still the case, we were told to throw out any leftover food at the end of the night.  In our case, that meant about 25 hot dogs, 15 burritos, a few chimichangas and some prepared salads all went into the garbage can in our booth, as every other booth on all floors at the stadium did the same.  I asked at the training session why they couldn’t donate the leftover food to the Union Gospel Mission three blocks away, and suggested the mission would be glad to bring a van over and load up.  The response was legal liability prevented that, somehow, some lawyer’s fever dream turned into a nightmare of wasted food.  We were told we could only take the leftovers home in our stomachs, so of course I stole two burritos on the way out every time that season.  One time I was accosted by a panhandler on the way to my car after a game, one of those scruffy far-gone wasted individuals with few teeth who can barely form a coherent sentence in the best of times.  I asked him, “Are you hungry?  Want something to eat?”  Of course, he didn’t, he wanted money for drugs, but he couldn’t say that, so he nodded his head.  I whipped out a still warm burrito that would have cost him $5 at Taco Del Mar, or $11.50 inside the stadium and said, “Here, eat this!”  His partner stumbled to his feet about then and I asked him, “You hungry too? Here!”, and whipped out another one, which he took with a stunned look on his face.  Then I walked on.  At least they ate well that one night.

Both of these incidents are connected by the idea that value is separate from price.  In both cases, the warehouse goods and the leftover food are being discarded, not because they are worth nothing, but because whoever owns them can’t make any money selling them.  The warehouse fire was a rare event, but the food waste happens at every event at every stadium throughout the country, if they all operate with the same bureaucratic mindset, a mind boggling tonnage of perfectly good food going to the landfill.  I hope at the very least they compost it these days.  And I wonder, why can’t they give it away?  Why, why, why… :-{)}

The Pigeon and the Live Load Pier

The Fremont Bridge is the busiest bridge in town, due to the fact that it is the closest to the water of the four bascule bridges on the Ship Canal between Lake Washington and Elliott Bay.  In my years with the City of Seattle I have been on that bridge, and under it, many times.  When the drunken bridge tender set the south span down on the flying bridge of the passing tugboat, guess who got to crawl out on a plank over the water to repair the shaft coupling?  I made the evening news that time.

So one time I was down under the bridge on the south side, in the room with the main transmission.  The bridge was being held open for some reason, and the live load piers were exposed.

Down under every bridge, on each side, is a pair of big footings, probably 2 foot square, with serious concrete under them to handle the load.  When the bridge goes down the frame rests on these live load piers at the exact moment the two spans line up in the middle.  The bridge crews adjust that point by placing or removing ¼” thick sheet metal shims on the piers, but you can only do it when the bridge is open.

So I happened to be at the southeast live load pier under the Fremont Bridge one day during a full opening, when I saw the strangest thing.  It was the remains of a pigeon, feathers and all, spread out on the top of that live load pier in a constant thickness, a bird shim, if you will!

I tried to imagine how even a bird as dumb as a pigeon could be sitting there for any length of time and not notice the bridge was coming down.  I wonder what the bird thought when it realized too late that something was definitely wrong…

Then I made a critical error.  Assuming the bird had been there a long time, even though it was still recognizably a pigeon, since there was no smell in the air, I picked up a flat nose shovel that was nearby and proceeded to scrape the pigeon off the live load pier.  The stench that boiled up off that pier was enough to gag a maggot!  I swear the tip of the shovel turned brown and began to smoke.  I threw it down and beat a hasty retreat, as the bridge began to descend.  The stench followed me through the transmission shack, past the electrical vault and out into the yard where, realizing that nobody had seen me back there, I casually strolled back through the offices to the bridge deck to see how things were going.  Somehow, I forgot to mention to the bridge crew what had happened, so I never heard the upshot of it, if any.  I bet they had to call the haz-mat squad.

I wondered if the bridge deck was misaligned due to the removal of a shim.  I wondered who had to go put a new shim in.  They had my deepest sympathies.

The moral of this story is:  Forgiveness is sometimes easier than permission… and ignorance is truly bliss, for someone.  Whew!  I feel better now… :-{)}

The Military 45 Chopper Project

Long ago, in my young hippy radical days, I rented a room in a house on Florentia Street on north Queen Anne, a place I had found on an ad on the message board at a hippy radical bookstore in the U District that said, “heads preferred”.  Sure enough, it turned out to be a pretty cool place, I stayed there most of the summer and fall.

So one day Mike, my landlord, said, “Hey, I just bought a Harley, come help me pick it up!”  I said, “Sure!” and off we went in a 1961 Ford Galaxy station wagon.  Mike had seen an ad in the paper and agreed to give this guy $250 for the bike, sight unseen.  It turned out the house was in Top Hat neighborhood, right by where I was raised.  We pulled into a driveway off 1^st Ave S just up from 102^nd and there, sitting in the driveway, was a complete original military Harley 45 WLA two-wheeler.  It even had the old oil bath air cleaner still in place, and the military ammo box saddle bags and the windshield with the canvas lower section.  “Hang on”, the guy says, as he pulls out a ladder.  “I think I got some stuff upstairs in the loft”.  He went up the ladder and handed down the rifle scabbard and some other stuff.  This would have been around 1972 or so.  Easy Rider had been out a few years, and Mike wanted to build a chopper.

We broke the windshield cramming the bike into the back of the Galaxy on its side with all the seats down.  We tied it in with rope and drove back to Queen Anne with the ass end hanging out the back so low it’s a good thing we didn’t try the Counterbalance.  The oil bath air filter turned out to have oil in it, which leaked all over the back of the station wagon.  Shit.

When we got it home, I had to go to work, but the rest of the guys played with it, charged the battery, put some gas and oil in the tanks, and it fired up and ran!

The next day was Saturday, so Mike and I got busy on the project.  First thing we took off all the army stuff and tossed it in a pile in the corner, along with the crash bars, windshield, and front fender, everything that is now unobtanium.  Mike had bought a small oxy-acetylene torch kit and he was ready to go to town.  That and a die grinder was all he needed.

First we tore the front end off the bike, disassembled it, threw the rockers and everything in the discard pile, and Mike cut the lower legs off where they were originally welded at the factory, revealing the short pegs they were fitted over.  He had gone to a wrecking yard and bought two radius rods off a ’49 Ford.  When you straighten the two bent tabs on the end of the rods, they just happen to be 5/8” holes, just like the Harley front axle.  And when you cut them off at about 5 feet long, they just happen to fit over those pegs on the lower triple clamp of the Harley 45, making a rigid front end about 18” over stock.

Then he took the cutting torch and grinder to the frame, cutting off all the sidecar brackets and anything else he didn't need.  The neck was torch cut almost off from the bottom behind the bearing housing, and bent up by way of a water pipe cheater to about a 40 degree rake or so, eyeball straight.  A piece of flatbar was cut to fit the notch so created, and welded in using gas and coat hanger for welding rod.

Then a quick spray can paint job over all the welds and grinds, and it went back together nicely.  No front fender, of course, and the brake wasn't hooked up, but he needed it for a spacer.  Voila, instant chopper.

I remember standing there looking at that monstrosity, and saying, “Mike, you’re not going to actually ride that thing are you?”  “Naw”, he said, “I’m going to find some idiot and sell it to him”.   And that’s what he did, the very next week, for $600.  I hope the poor fool never got it running.

Many years later, I got to thinking about that long narrow back yard behind the house on Florentia Street, and the garage in back, and that pile of takeoff parts in the corner.  I was working in Interbay those days and thought, if I looked for it, I could find that alley again, and maybe, just maybe, the garage would still be there and who knows, maybe the pile of parts would still be laying where we threw them!  So one day, on the way home, I did just that.  I found Florentia street and figured out what house it was.  Nothing had changed, and I went around the block and turned into the alley.

The garage was gone.  The back yard was gone.  In fact, every back yard of every house on Florentia street that faced that alley were all gone, replaced by a series of two and three story condominimums, and the alley was a jam packed parking lot!  There are probably 500 people living in that alley!

I think it’s time to move to Spokane or something… I wonder what happened to those Harley parts…  :-{)}

Crowd Control

Somehow I found myself alone in the middle of a crowd of about 6,000 people that spilled out from the plaza of the Columbia Tower in downtown Seattle on 5^th Avenue across from City Hall.  It was the early ‘70s, and we were mad as hell about something, probably the War in Viet Nam.  There seems to be this pressure relief valve built into American politics, brought about by the Bill of Rights.  When times get tough, people know that, if we take to the streets in large enough numbers and raise enough hell, something will have to be done, one way or the other.  We’re just thankful that the police don’t have a habit of shooting us for doing so, unlike other countries.

As demonstrations go, this one was typical of many.  People streamed in to the area all morning long, many on busses, carrying signs and banners.  Then as now there were many competing groups on the Left, all raising their own banner high and proclaiming themselves the Vanguard of the New Revolution that was bound to happen if only enough people turned out.  They never did, of course.  The powers that be always opened the floodgates and poured a bunch of your tax dollars on the problem, which eased the pressure somewhat.  It’s hard to get too angry when you’re busy pigging out at the public trough, something I can say with a twisted smile after 27 years of service to the Citizens of Seattle and I hope they’re grateful.

Back then, though, I was as young and dumb as any of them, and for some reason, the Bank of America was the enemy of the people that week, probably as a result of their loan policies or some such.  They had this big black tower in the middle of downtown that was an easy target, and also had a nice big plaza on which to gather, so it all came together on this day.

There is a pattern and a routine to demonstrations, once you’ve done a few.  First you listen to a couple of unintelligible speakers shouting over a bullhorn, then the singer gets up and you all join hands and sing about how we shall overcome some day.  The volume and energy of the crowd seems to be proportional to the proximity and number of nearby taverns.  The Hare Krishnas, along with the usual downtown beggars, milk the crowd for spare change all day long.  Usually, after all the speeches and cheers, the crowd slowly disperses each little group to their own neighborhood to rehash the splendor of the day.  This time, however, there was still unfinished business after all the ceremonies, and someone shouted out that we should go across the street and take over the Columbia Tower.  That sounded right, so about 6,000 of us, who were already blocking all of 5^th Avenue for two blocks anyway, decided to do just that.

The 5^th Avenue plaza off the Columbia tower is fronted at the street level with a glass wall about two stories high, with two main doors.  For some reason, when the 6,000 of us reached those doors, they were locked, and the lobby in the background was deserted.  Maybe it’s because it was a Sunday.  So the crowd formed into a churning millipedial mass of sign waving slogan chanters standing about 20 feet back from the doors so we could be sure the TV cameras could see our signs.  I was in the middle of the crowd at that point, about in the middle of the street in front of the tower.

I watched a line of men, Seattle Police officers, in full riot gear, each equipped with a plastic shield and a night stick, come up the escalator inside the tower and form two lines inside each door.  There were about 20 cops in each group, maybe 40 in all.  Somehow, the doors unlocked, and the officers marched out in a formation that swung to either side just like the band at half time of a college football game, ending up in a double wide line facing the crowd.  They said and did nothing, just stood at attention.

The crowd was dead quiet, waiting for what was to come.  I remember a single empty beer bottle was thrown from somewhere near the middle of the crowd in front.  It described a lazy arc through the air and landed with a crash in the middle of no-man’s-land between us and the cops.  All of the officers in unison took one step forward, assuming a martial arts position with their shields raised and night sticks held high, and let out a loud, “Huh!”   6,000 people turned in unison and ran like hell.  I remember thinking, as I ran, “Why are we running?  There are only 40 of them!”  Somehow, this thought did not prevent my feet from doing their stuff, and I got away clean.  My attempt to lead the vanguard of the new revolution would have to wait for another day.

I think back on days like those, and it’s hard to see we made any kind of a difference in this country.  The banks are still screwing us, and the feds are using our tax dollars to bail them out, so it appears that nothing changed.

But to be out there in the street in a crowd like that, the energy and the atmosphere combines to turn a crowd of individuals into a single minded mass that carries a lot more weight than any one of us.  Each of us was marked by the experience internally and indelibly, and that’s where the real change comes from.  The fact that we did it without killing or being killed is a bonus, something we should not take for granted.  :-{)}