Empathy

Let me tell you a story about privilege and profiling that might help with your understanding of what’s going down in Baltimore, and so many other places.

I used to work downtown.  I was the acting Director of Vehicle Maintenance for the City of Seattle, and my office was on the 52^nd floor of the Seattle Municipal Tower, known in those days as Key Tower from the previous owner, Herman Sarkowsky, who sold it to the city but kept the penthouse for himself.  From my sealed window I could look out to the south over the International District and Sodo, and when the wind blew the building rocked and rolled.

My daughter had a back office job for the Bank of America at that time, working on the 10^th floor of an office tower just two blocks north of me on 5^th Avenue.  We had a regular habit of meeting for lunch every Wednesday in front of her building, which was controlled access with a large customer service counter just inside the main entrance with security people on duty.  You had to pass by them to get to the elevators, and you needed a badge to use them.  Typical of many downtown office buildings, the ground floor extends off to one side to meet up with an underground tunnel across the street, with a deli on the main floor and a small waiting area with seats under the direct gaze of the counter.

Outside, the front plaza is connected to an outdoor mezzanine on the south side, which includes a covered area for employees to take their lunch breaks and a smoking section - before such criminality was outlawed in Seattle - by an escalator moving in both directions along a stairway favored by the younger athletic types.  I quickly found it amusing to wait for her by riding the escalator up and down for a few minutes, and she learned to look for me there first when her elevator disgorged a flock of her and her co-workers.

Those of you who know me would not be too surprised to imagine me in business casual attire, which was expected of a bureaucrat of my level with 15 supervisors and 125 employees, and typically would include Dockers or similar slacks, nice shoes and a button collar shirt with a nice jacket or sport coat and a tie (!), unlike my usual attire of jeans and biker t-shirts if not riding gear or slacker shorts and Tevas.  I still have those work clothes.  I pull them out every now and then and spit on them.  But I admit they were enough to detract from the big guy look with the full beard so that I was never bothered by the security types after I stopped in the first time and told them who I was waiting for.

So one day, when the wind blew and the rain came down sideways, I was out there like usual, riding the escalator up and down, killing time.  The difference was, on this day I was wearing an Aussie Duster coat in deference to the weather, one of those full length coats in leather or heavy waxed outdoor fabric and a built-in cape that, along with the waist belt, shoulder epaulets and trim look like something out of the wild west (which indeed it is) and, on me, with a black leather hat on top, could possibly be considered, ahem, intimidating.

So there I am, about to turn at the top and head back down the escalator, when suddenly appeared a young, earnest Security Guard in full uniform complete with radio and mace on his belt, asking if he can be of any assistance.

I smiled at him and said, “I come here every Wednesday to meet my daughter for lunch, who works on the 10^th floor.  I've been doing this regularly for the last six months or so, but only now do you want to know if you can help me?  Tell me, what is it that made you decide to talk to me now?  Was it the coat?”  He stammered and blushed and assured me that it was just a random coincidence, nothing to be concerned about, and beat a hasty retreat.  I had just been profiled.  Some security person had noticed me riding the escalator, and, strictly because of my appearance, assigned me potential threat status and pushed an alarm button.  The weather improved, and the next week I was back out there in my normal getup, and nothing was said or done.

So what does this have to do with Baltimore, or Ferguson, or Brooklyn?  Nothing, and everything.  My experience on the escalators of the Bank of America Building on 5^th and Marion in downtown Seattle is a simple experiment that any of you can perform any time you want.  Just show up there looking like some kind of a lowlife, or a bum, or a pickpocket, or, heaven help us, a biker, and see how quick you draw a response.  That’s the security people’s job, to identify threats and respond.  Take two kids and ride the escalator all day, and you’ll not get challenged.

Now, imagine how it would feel if changing your clothes made no difference.  What if, no matter what you did, or wore, the minute you started riding up and down that escalator the security guard was going to be right there, wanting to know what you’re up to?  What if it was the color of your skin that set off alarm bells in the security guard brains?  And that simple question, my friends, is the essence of white privilege.  Us white folks know, in the back of our minds at all times, that any cop or security guard that looks at us will assume the best, unless we’re dressed like a beggar or a biker and look the part.  Even then, the last thing we would expect an officer to do, and the most shocking thing they could do, would be to pull a weapon on us.  What if that was the most likely thing to expect in any encounter?  What if it happened over and over again, every single time?  How would you feel about that?  What if, every time you turned around, somebody just like you got killed by the police?  Can you imagine living in a society where that would ever happen?  Like the old guy who was walking down the road on a charity errand the other day, swinging a golf club.  He got arrested for being a black man with an obvious weapon.  How many of us white folks would stop for one second to think, “Gee, maybe I better not take my golf club with me, some cop might decide it’s a weapon”, before heading out for a walk in the park?

Now, imagine you’re a young black man, and you've grown up in the inner city where life is hard all the time and nobody wants to hire you, and your history and the history of all your people is a history of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and discrimination, and you know, deep down inside, just like the white folks know that the cops will assume they are the good guys, you will be assumed to be the bad guy.  Imagine living under that, if you can, and it might start to make sense that every now and then people who live like that tend to explode.  It’s called, “don’t give a fuck”, and people adopt it when their backs are on the wall.  It’s not your fault, directly, but you still have to pay the bill.  So what can any of us do?  Got any ideas? :-{)}

A Solution to America's Immigration problem

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

                                    Emma Lazarus

I guess this had to happen, someday.  These stirring words, that for years summarized America’s attitude towards immigrants, even to the point of having the last few lines etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty, don’t mean the same thing anymore.

Not that they ever did, of course.  What they meant at the time was, “Hey, Europe”, or “Hey, China!”  “We see you’re getting kinda crowded over there, and it’s causing some problems for ya.  Well, we got the opposite problem here, so maybe we can help out some.  We got a lot of wide open spaces that we are in the process of expropriating from the ignorant savages who lived here when we showed up, and we need cheap labor, lots of it.  We’ll take anyone you have that wants to go.  We’ll treat ‘em like shit, of course, but they’ll have a better chance to make it here than they ever would back home, so send em on over, we’ll take ‘em.”  And on that basis, we populated the West and spread from Sea to Shining Sea.  The potato famine in Ireland alone brought millions.

Now, however, the descendants of those huddled masses are starting to wake up and look around and realize there are no more wide open spaces in America, anymore, at least not where anyone wants to live.  Now, the problem is how we can slam the door on all the huddled masses, they’re starting to cost us real money!

Of course, if you have money, immigration laws and quotas mean nothing to you.  I think the current price is around $250k and you can waltz in here any time you like and do whatever you can get away with, just like the rest of us.  And of course they’re handing out Green Cards right and left if you are the type of skilled worker that America can’t seem to produce in sufficient quantities these days, and some Microsoft spinoff wants you.  We supply the whole world with football players; doctors and engineers we have to import.  But the huddled masses, especially the illegal ones, they’re becoming a problem.

If you look at family histories of former immigrants, you will see the same story of hard work, education and diligence leading to greater and greater success as the children grew up here and became Americans.  Sure, you will find lots of stories of those who lost their way to crime and drugs, and they died in our factories and sawmills in droves, but the survivors have made this a better country in many ways.  So it’s easy to conclude that those immigrants, especially the illegal ones who have risked the most and taken the most difficult path to get here, are really the ones we need the most, not only for them but for their children’s children, and that they should not be sent away in chains for making the effort, but rewarded for their success. 

The underlying question in any person’s decision to emigrate to a foreign country is why is it worth the effort?  Why would someone leave the only home they’ve known to come to America?  Either things are real bad at home, or things are that much better here.  It probably doesn’t matter, since they show up every night at the border whatever the reason.  So how to we get them to stop?  Here’s one idea:

Accept the fact that physically coming to America is the goal for all the illegal immigrants, the reward they seek.  So, here’s how you fix the problem.  First, you interview each person you catch, in their language.  You want to know why they made the effort to get here, and why they were willing to leave home.  Then you make them this offer:

We’d like you back some day, maybe, as a legal immigrant, so here’s what we’re gonna do.  We’re gonna send you home on the bus, back to the town you grew up in, and we’re gonna pay you so much a month to stay there until we call you.  It might be the rest of your life, so stay busy.

This achieves two things, it repatriates the immigrant, and they go away happy.  The small amount of money it would cost to keep them home is less than what we are now spending to keep them out, when you look at all the related costs to society, both financial and political.  We can keep track of them individually as well, and, when we need a particular skill, say, picking fruit or crunching algorithms, we know who to call.  It also eliminates the drain of valuable individuals from those countries, and leaves them home to stay involved in their own communities.

You would set up the payment system to only pay them in person, and in that town, and toss in any other restrictions you’d need to keep the local sharks at bay.  Of course, if the reason they fled was violence, you’d want to work with the local government to solve that problem, and part of the deal would be that they would talk to the police.  One way or another, it is in our best interests as a country to keep people in other countries away and happy with us when we don’t want them here.  There’s less likelihood that they will show up with guns some day.  Anyone who thinks that can’t happen is an ostrich on a beach.

So think about the idea of America as a vast fountain of wealth for people all over the world.  All they have to do to get it is successfully run a gauntlet to get here, a gauntlet that will be carefully designed to spot the highly skilled individuals, weed out the criminals, keep families together, and provide American companies the help they need when American citizens are unable or unwilling to provide it.

We already have a budget for this operation.  It’s called Foreign Aid, and we give billions of dollars out every year in cash and in weaponry to individuals in every country.  The difference is that the individuals to whom we currently give the money are the ones who are running the country, and not necessarily the ones it would most benefit.  So every time we set up an account for a successful émigré from, say, Somalia, we simply deduct that amount from the aid to that country.  We just cut out the middlemen and go right to the source.  And, of course, we’re giving cash, not tools with which to go out and kill someone, so we feel better about it, too.

Think of all the money we save in our current immigration process, as we eliminate Green Cards and quotas and all the related bureaucratic nonsense and reduce it down to the same question for everyone.  You want to come to America?  No, problem, run the gauntlet like everyone else, and we’ll see how you do.  No exemptions for wealth, or poverty, you have to show that you’re tough and resourceful and willing to work for it, and then if we need you, we’ll call you.  Thanks for trying.

It would be fair, because you could design fairness into the gauntlet, and apply the same standards to everyone.  It would be effective, because you would always know who to call when a given company needed help and couldn’t find it.  It would be economical when we compare all those payments with the amounts we currently spend on welfare, child care, medical care, foreign aid and border patrols, not to mention a huge part of the State department.  It wouldn't surprise me that we save a pile of money in the process.  Think about how hard it will be to call for death to America when many of your parishioners are getting a check from the Great Satan each month.  You could eliminate the Border Patrol and the fence, because you could have a gauntlet in a room at every American embassy in the world.  There would be no reason to come to the border any more.  Just the reality show income alone in all countries would make “The Running Man” seem like an afterthought.

For some of you, I know an outside context solution like this raises several red flags, chiefly among which is the Biblical admonition that “from the sweat of your brow you shall earn your bread”, from which directly springs the concepts that “they don’t deserve it”, or “they didn't earn it”, or “I don’t want to pay for it”.  The point is, you are already paying for it, over and over again, and all your other objections are irrelevant.  This proposal is based on nothing but a practical solution to a financial problem in this country:  How do we keep out unwanted immigrants at the lowest possible cost and in such a way as to keep them favorable to us, even when they can’t get in the country?  If your objections boil down to “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to keep the bastards out, no matter what it costs”, just be up front about it, and maybe spend a little time thinking about how the future looks when we do it your way.  Who knows, maybe my way might start to sound pretty reasonable if you think about it.

And maybe we ought to change that sign on the statue.  :-{)}

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… :-{)}