Luxagraf: Topographical Writings

Engine

Everywhere I go I see it.

I'd like to make a movie of it. Start with a cutaway diagram of the Travco that slowly rotates in my head as it zooms into the gas tank in the rear and then follows the gas down the line toward the front to the right of the engine, drawn up into the fuel pump, pushed out and up, under the alternator to the top of the engine, through the fuel filter and into the carburetor where it mixes with air and dives down until it ignites with a spark.

This little movie runs on a loop in my head. It invades everything I do. I see it sitting at stoplights, a similar path of electricity out of the breaker, up the light pole and to the switch which sends it to the top lens, which happens to be red.

I see it doing the dishes. The water leaving the tower, flowing down increasingly narrower pipes, off the main street line and into my hot water tank where it sits until a flick of the faucet calls it up through more pipes and out onto my hands.

Everything flows like this. Every system around us, when it works, does something similar.

Right now the Travco does not work. I can see it in my head and yet I cannot make it work. It has to be the fuel pump. I have spark, I have compression, the missing ingredient in the basic trifecta of the internal combustion engines is fuel.

But seeing it and understanding it are different than actually solving the problem, making it work. This is basic difference between architects and builders. Builders have to solve problems in the real world that architects will never encounter.

I'm never short of help.

Days pass. I continue to fail with the bus. The real world of by time constraints, pay checks that don't arrive, other commitments, weather. I work on other things. Hang wall panels, sand and apply finish. I do things I know I know how to do. More days pass. Still the bus doesn't start. I get sullen. My wife thinks I'm mad all the time. I'm not. I'm thinking about the engine, I can't get it out of my head. It reminds me of the first time I tried to write some code. It was fun, but it also was not.

Problem solving seems fun after the problem is solved. During the actual solving it's less fun. Food, sleep, these things seem unimportant when I have a problem that needs solving stuck in my head. I tend to get obsessed about things. Even when I don't want to. It's one of the reasons I don't do much programming anymore. I never let things go until I solve the problem to my satisfaction. Of course breaking a web server doesn't cost much relative to damaging an engine, so with the bus the stakes are much higher, the sullen thinking phase I pass through is correspondingly more sullen and requires more concentration.

I consult my friend Jimmy, double check with him that my plan is sane. He says it is and assures me that there's little chance I'll screw anything up. So I crawl back under the bus for another soaking of gasoline and, after much swearing and muscle cramping, somehow manage to get the new fuel pump properly seated under the eccentric on the camshaft and anchored into place. Then I replace all the fuel lines and filter for good measure. Everything from the fuel pump to the carburetor is now my doing.

I step back and get the gasoline soaked clothes off and take a shower. I want these ten minutes of thinking I fixed it to last, which turn out to be a good thing because when I get back in the bus and fire it up and... it still won't start. Damnit.

The is the most demoralizing thing I know of for anyone trying to DIY something. That moment when it should work, but it doesn't. Damnit. I go back to the internet and do some more searching. I message Jimmy again. On a whim I decided maybe I didn't crank it enough to get all the air out of the new lines. So I go back and instead of starter fluid in the carb I go straight gasoline, which, predictably, starts the engine. And then it dies when that gas is consumed. Goddammit.

I decide try one last time, with enough gasoline to possibly set the whole engine on fire. But that doesn't happen. Instead it starts and then it keeps running. This is when it would nice if life had a sound effects choir to ring out something triumphant. But there's nothing. Just me, sitting in the driver's seat enjoying the smell of gasoline and the roar of an engine that has neither exhaust manifolds nor muffler. And it's a damn fine roar. For now.

Back From Somewhere

My kids love to do new things. At least they think they do. They're really good at getting excited about things. Like most kids (I imagine), they get excited about things even when I know they have only a dim inkling of what those things might actually entail. The idea, the anticipation, is often more exciting in fact than the actual thing.

I went to get some coffee the other morning and noticed that the Jittery Joe's roaster was hosting a skate contest the following Saturday. Skating and surfing more or less defined my existence (along with punk rock) from junior high through, well, now.

I try not to steer my kids in any particular direction. I try to expose them to as many different things as possible and see where they're drawn. But secretly I really hope they end up liking a few of the things I did when I was a kid, like skate boarding. So I mentioned the skate contest the night before and showed them a bit of the old Bones Brigade video. They were entertained for a few minutes and then they wanted to move on to something else.

I figured the actual skate contest would be the same way: take it in for an hour or so and then slowly interest would wane and we'd all head home. That's about how it generally goes when we take them to any sort of organized event.

This time, however, I was wrong. They could not get enough of the skating. Neither the intense afternoon sun beating down on the concrete slab of parking lot nor the humidity left over from morning rains deterred them. We were there all afternoon, over four hours of skating, pulled pork and the occasional train rolling by. They never stopped loving it.

Pulled pork sandwiches never hurt.

And neither did I. I haven't skated in years. Over a decade. And even before that most I did was use my old board to go get cigarettes from the gas station down the street. But skating culture, along with surfing culture and punk culture are things that were a huge part of me and that has never never gone away, even if I mostly watch from afar these days.

I still feel more at home among skaters, surfers and punks than anywhere else.

Since having kids though I've accidentally drifted away from that culture. There are practical considerations. It's hard to get out to shows, the beach is a really long way away and I no longer have a skateboard. Instead I find myself at the sort of "kid friendly" affairs I swore I would never go to. And you know what, I was right, those things suck. And they aren't very kid friendly either. But we're remarkably adaptable creatures. Do something enough and it starts to feel normal, no matter how uncomfortable it might be.

I spent so much time not fitting in at kids birthday parties and "kid friendly" events around town I forgot that there was actually people with whom I did fit in. I'd forgotten that I had a people.

The Shredder Joes contest was a nice reminder that there are still sane, friendly, open people out there in the world among whom I feel at home.

On the drive home Corrinne turned to me and said "I know it's been 18 years, but I felt more at home there than I do at any of these hipster family bullshit events we go to." I'd been thinking a similar thing, but I'd been wondering why.

Why did the kids want to spend four hours watching skaters and can't be bothered with a petting zoo for more than five minutes?

I have a few theories, but the one that's most appealing is pretty simple: because the world of skating doesn't have rules. There are the basics rules of taking turns and accommodating the people around you, but for the most part you are expected to do whatever you want to do. The petting zoos and the kid friendly events are full of waiting in line and doing as you're told.

Another part of it is the welcoming nature of people in skate/surf/punk scene. That's not to say there aren't assholes in any group of people. There absolutely are, especially surfers who can be real territorial, but exceptions aside, generally, if you have the humility to start at the bottom, you'll be accepted eventually. It's even easier if you're a kid, I've seen some of the scariest looking heavily tattooed Hawaiian surfers move aside with a smile for some kid just learning¹. The thing about learning a skill like surfing or skating is that you never forget that it is learned, and that tends to create sympathy for those who are just starting out.

Another thing that I think makes the skate/surf/punk scene different is that it's built around practice and failure. Watching skating is watching failure after failure until that time when you stick it and suddenly all that failure is gone. People comfortable with failure typically have less to prove. It was always my experience that skaters, surfers and punks were really only trying to prove something when they're skating, surfing or playing. Hipster parent events are one big gathering of uptight people with something to prove and nowhere to prove it. The difference between the two is palpable.

It could also be that those scenes are full of people who, by necessity, have mastered their fears. To a degree anyway. You can only get so far in skating if you're afraid of getting hurt. I know this because I was always too afraid of getting hurt to be any good². Anyone willing to drop in on a backyard ramp or empty pool has necessarily mastered at least some of their fear. Fear closes you up, it feeds on itself.

Whatever it is that makes these things different my kids seem to pick up on it.

The skate show was also the single most diverse event I've ever been to in Athens. With one exception, there was not a single woman skating. That was disappointing, but when we got home I pulled up some videos of Vanessa Torres, Elissa Steamer and Peggy Oki, along with some great home videos of girls skating on YouTube to balance things out.

The best part of the day for me though was on the way home when Olivia asked if she could have a skateboard for her birthday. Absolutely.

Whereas, while still friendly, they did not hesitate to cut me or my friend Andy out of any wave they wanted. ↩
Put me in the water and my fear disappears, but concrete? That shit hurts. And I could never get past that enough to get any better. ↩

Root Down

One of the interesting things about moving is the archeology it requires, digging through layers of accumulation to reveal yourself. The longer you've been in one location the more stuff that's accumulated. As far as I can tell there is no real way to combat the detritus of the world seeping into your space, save cutting off all contact with the outside world. I imagine monasteries are generally immaculate; the rest of us get out the pick axes and clear the rubble.

At first I spent a lot time thinking how hard it is to move, but then I realized it's probably no harder to move out than it was to move in. Moving out just happens to severely compress time. You acquire over the span of 10 years. You un-acquire in a matter of weeks.

But in between the crap, the dirt as it were, there are the occasional shards of pottery and other things of interest.

Many moons ago I was down in Laguna Beach, CA at the now long gone Tippecanoe's clothing store when I ran across a relatively innocuous dark olive green shirt. Probably handmade, it looked a bit like an old-style baseball jersey, with an iron-on number three in red on the front pocket. On the back it had a cheery serif script that read "Fuck Our Society", flanked on either side by anarchy A's in padlocks. You bet your ass I bought it.

Clearly this was before I started paying attention to fonts.

I was in a band back then and I played quite a few shows in it. I'm pretty sure my friend Ruben asked me to play with his band on the side just because he wanted the shirt on stage with him.

This was Orange County CA in the mid to late 1990s, deviations from the norm simply didn't happen. The shirt stood out. I didn't wear it much. Wearing it was a kind of performance. And this site notwithstanding, I don't generally live my life as a public performance. I haven't worn the shirt since I moved back east in 1999.

Once, on the way to a show, we stopped at Trader Joe's to grab a snack for the road and while we were standing in line I felt a tap on the shoulder. I had been conscious of wearing the shirt since I got out of the car so I turned around expecting some kind of confrontation, but it was a tiny older woman, not much over five feet tall, a grandmotherly figure who I had no doubt was about to express some offense at my shirt. But instead she looked me up and down and then smiled and said, "I like your shirt."

I felt like that was probably the shirt's high water mark. I don't think I've worn it since. Why do I still have it? Fuck our society's obsession with keeping things. I fired off an email to a friend I knew would want it and it's gone.

This particular purge is probably the biggest I've ever done, both because we've been in this house the longest and because I've made the most money. Money, no matter how frugal you might be, seems to breed stuff. It's not the purchases or the money that bother me though. Not even the dumb things like the $1300 TV that's now worth essentially nothing. It's the little things I did not stop myself from getting. It's the lack of personal awareness they demonstrate. The old banjo that caught my eye at a junk shop outside of Nashville, the old mailing label and postage box set, the antique cards, the mediocre books that could have been checked out and returned and the coffee mugs. How many coffee mugs do I actually need? How many books am I reading right now?

All these little things are symptoms of my failure to appreciate things without possessing them.

I sold what I could on eBay. I took the books to a friend's yard sale and looked at them on the ground there in a cardboard box before I finally realized there was nothing special about them at all.

The rest of the accumulation I pitched into boxes and dumped at my favorite local charity thrift store.

Not everything goes though. I'm not a minimalist counting up my possessions. Not yet anyway. The bus may not be huge, but it's downright roomy compared to traveling with only a pack. We also have a storage unit for now. There are things I don't want to throw away, but which also don't belong in the bus. Like old photographs, which are probably the most exciting artifacts to stumble across in a moving dig.

It worries me sometimes that it's always the same photographs I discover whenever I undertake these excavations. The photographs I have are a reasonable catalogue of my life from roughly when I dropped out of college until about 2001 when I switched to a digital camera. There are no physical artifacts documenting anything in my life for the last 15 years, save a handful of prints from our wedding.

On the plus side this keeps the entirety of my photo collection to single shoe box. But I wonder. I wonder how much fun it will be to dig through your parent's hard drive in search of your youth. Will the hard drive even spin 50 years from now? Will there be an operating system and image viewers capable of reading all those zeros and ones? Do you have anything that could read the tape archives of 50 years ago?

I don't normally advocate for buying stuff, but a Fuji Instax printer is on our short list of trip purchases. I want to leave my kids a record of their childhood that exists outside these digital walls.

That's always the hard part of these excavations, figuring out what actually has personal value and what doesn't. I find I'm often wrong. I thought the banjo and the books had value to me, but they don't. Five years ago I almost threw out the photos. Now they're the only thing I keep around.

Another Spring

This becomes a day like any other that is somehow different. Then another and another. Little things. The air feels brighter. The river is lower. Less practical footwear appears on the feet around you.

The mornings are crisp and the pollen hasn't started yet. The trees still bare though the smaller shrubs turn purple and white. Everything feels fragile but possible again.

It might not last. It's possible another snow storm is yet to come, but you have to cast your lot with some version of the future.

And then the pollen does start. The world coalesces out of its dream state into great lime green clouds of oak and pecan pollen. A world of runny eyes and burning lungs. It's awful for a week to ten days. Then the catkins fall in great heaps that mat in the corners of the deck, choke the gutters and require a rake to get out of the yard.

Then the clouds of pollen disappear and you know summer heat is only a week or two away. This is how it goes around here, year after year. It typically starts a bit before calendar spring. I'm not good with dates though. I'm not good with time actually. Unless I have a deadline.

Human are the only ones with deadlines. Spring comes when it comes.

There is the spring equinox. The plane of Earth's equator passes through the center of the Sun with admirable regularity. It might not mark spring precisely, but from here on out there's more light in the day than darkness.

If you whip out your stopwatch you'll notice that the length of day and night aren't exactly the same, but then if you're the sort to whip out a stopwatch for holidays probably no one is going to invite your to their equinox party anyway. It's close enough. It's something to mark, somehow.

One of the unfortunate side effects of not being religious or subscribing to any particular religion¹ is that you have little to mark. Days and months slide by. Changes proceed largely without us or without our marking them in any way. Secularists don't have potlucks.

Secular potlucks? Chicken!

One of the wonderful things about the internet though is that it makes communities possible that would otherwise not be possible. No church to attend every Sunday with the same people? No problem, start a Facebook group². Profit. Or at least potluck.

Which is the world's longest intro to we went to an equinox party and easter egg hunt with a bunch of fellow secularists. And it was great. There was even old school climbing equipment of the sort children could take real risks on. I'd like to attribute that to the lack of religion present, but that would be stretching it. I think it was just some playground equipment that time forgot.

If your twin sister climbs something, there's no way you aren't going to do the same.

There was an egg hunt as well, though my children are a bit young to get too into it. They are far more enthralled by the own anticipation of a thing than any thing itself. Actually maybe that's not something you grow out of, I think I'm the same way. The potluck was good. It had chicken. It marked a thing, a change, or the symbol of a change, that the weather sometimes aligns with, sometimes does not. But it lacked a certain gravitas.

A couple of sticks, some water, hours gone.

Not that spring has much gravitas. But there is a certain violence to change, even seasonal change, that seems like it's worth a pause, however brief, to reflect. The snow melts, the rain falls, it all goes somewhere. Water cuts through red Georgia mud. Trees are washed from banks. Rocks tumble down to sand, slow canyons carved a bit more every year as the silt and sand rolls down from the Appalachia to the sea. The mountains themselves are changing, getting smaller, their sides steeper. All this change destroys what came before.

We like to paint spring as something that emerges out of winter, something that grows up from some blankness, and it does from one perspective, but we overlook that it destroys what came before. There is no change without destruction and decay. It's possible to recast that destruction in pretty words, but it is always destruction, especially from the point of view of what came before. It would be interesting to hear what the caterpillar thinks of the butterfly.

I'm never going to get the collective solemnity of ceremony without religion though. I know that. That sort of gravity comes from larger groups of like minded people than I will ever find, even on Facebook. For now I'll settle for potlucks.

The sun god religions obsess over rules, power and control when we all know potlucks are what matters. ↩
It'd be a whole lot cooler if Facebook wasn't the mediator of anyone's community, but for now that's where the people are so that's where the communities are. Just remember that the people behind Facebook are true Burroughsian shits and act accordingly. ↩

Up in the Air

I tore the rear air conditioning unit off the back of the bus today. It joins the front unit in the growing pile of bus trash at the side of our house.

Afterward I stood back and looked at the Travco. All the clean lines and curves joined together again, no more air conditioning warts to interrupt the sliding smooth and unbroken swoop of white and blue. The big blue bus looked sleek and whole again.

I'll admit it gave me no small measure of satisfaction, thinking that perhaps, amidst the exponentially increasing insanity, I'd made some tiny thing right in the world. It was that same sort joy that comes from eating really dark chocolate. The aesthetic perfection of hundred percent dark chocolate.

I didn't really get a chance to savor this feeling because the universe hates smugness and soon after I had another thought, hmm, maybe I should check and see if it's going to rain any time soon... Oh, well, yes it is. For three days straight. Starting tomorrow. And I just opened a fourteen inch square hole in the roof of the bus. Genius.

The abyss stares back. Wait, did you say rain?

I got a trash bag, some painter's tape, some duct tape, a dictionary of German swear words, and got to work.

I had some time up there on the roof of the bus to reflect on what I had done. More or less an incredibly impractical thing. In the service of what I think is my offbeat, but at times deeply felt sense of aesthetics, I had ripped out two at least partly functioning air conditioners.

Actually I should probably look up aesthetics in the dictionary and make sure that's what I'm acting in the service of. Or I should read Kant. But then it all gets very technical and is predicated on the belief that there is an absolute sense of "good" and "bad" to beauty and I don't know if it matters that much. Maybe dark chocolate metaphors are good enough. If the dark chocolate is good enough. Screw Kant.

Somewhere in a tangle of duct tape and torn plastic trash bags, I got to wondering what Kant would have made of a 1969 Travco. The engine would be new and presumably mind blowing, but Kant was probably familiar with Gypsies at least. The mobile home concept would be familiar. Probably frowned on, but familiar. But what would he make of tearing out an object of convenience and comfort because I think aesthetic integrity and beauty trump personal comfort?

I decided there was a high probability he would think I was an idiot to forego the comfort of air conditioning, which, from his point of view, would be like magic. The problem is I've never been able to get through more than a few pages of Critique of Judgment without being overcome with a desire to reach back through time and give the man a hug¹ and say, relax, it's all going to be okay.

Aesthetics have always seemed pretty simple to me. There is stuff in the world that makes you feel delight. So when you discover this beauty and delight in the world around you, you embrace it and do what you can in service of it². Like removing ugly air conditioners.

The designers of the Travco, to my mind, felt the same way, though they were doubtless bound by certain economic and marketplace constraints I don't have. Hence, warts on the roof if you must. But no one who's of a purely practical bent would ever have designed the large front sliding windows the way they are designed. They're wildly impractical, worse, they leak. But there they are. Pure aesthetics. They look like the person who designed them had discovered delight in their beauty. Little water coming in? Get a towel.

The marketplace does not value aesthetics though. The wonderful sweeping curves of the Travco's windows leaked badly enough that at some point (early '70s) the idea was abandoned altogether.

Aesthetics are a learning experience, a feedback loop of sorts, though the experience is better when it creates change in other direction -- adding in wildly impractical, but aesthetically delightful, sliding windows as it were.

Consider dark chocolate. I'd never really had any until I started dating my wife. I thought chocolate was something that skins a cheap candy bar full of nougat and indecipherable ingredients. The first time my wife gave me a bit of real chocolate was revelatory. The possibilities of life expanded, I had discovered more joy and beauty. Aesthetic progress you might say.

Aesthetics are a life long process, always in flux, that's part of what drives us all to want to know what's around the next corner, over the next hill. As naturalist and herbalist Juliette de Bairacli Levy writes, "I believe that this endless search for beauty in surroundings, in people and one's personal life, is the headstone of travel."

My own aesthetics are like yours I imagine, complicated and often contradictory, nothing so firmly delineated as to please Kant. But one thing I have figured out is that comfort is transitory and moreover, relative. Aesthetics are neither³.

Which is to say, removing the air conditioner might mean that I end up hot, sweating and unable to sleep, but this too, as they say, shall pass. I won't always be hot sweaty and unable to sleep. I will always have to look at the air conditioning wart that used to be on top of the bus. Comfort must be chased; beauty exists.

This is what I kept telling myself the next morning as I mopped up the floor where all the water had come pouring in after my duct tape and trash bag covering collapsed under the weight of accumulated rain water. Comfort is relative. Beauty just is.

For those of us from the relative north, one of the stranger sights in the tropics is the way everyone grabs a jacket the minute the temperature drops below 80 degrees. Even though I have been on the other side of it; living through a succession of New England winters with less and less pain each time. Still, I'll never forget the first night I spent in Goa. The sun went down, the temperature dropped to about 80 and the jackets came out. One person's balmy evening is another person's winter.

By the time I got to Seam Reap several months later I thought I had adjusted a bit. I had not. It was hot, hotter than anything I have experienced before or since. Hotter than Death Valley. I was traveling with Matt and Debi at the time and somehow we convinced ourselves that we didn't need air conditioning. To be honest I think it was Matt that convinced Debi and I. But he was right.

During the day we spent our time outside exploring Angkor Wat in the heat of the day, when the rest of the tourists were passing the time in air conditioned cafés). We went out in the heat of the day precisely because it was hot, because hardly any other tourists did. We had Angkor Wat to ourselves.

Angkor Wat without the people.

We could have returned home to a nice air conditioned room. But if you do that you never adapt. Our bodies are fantastically adaptable machines over the long run. You get used to the heat. This never happens if you retreat to air conditioning at every opportunity.

At night we would crank the ceiling fan to 11 and then, one after the other, take the coldest shower we could get, which was just below scalding because the water tank was in the sun all day, and then dive in our respective beds in hopes that we'd would fall asleep before the real sweating started.

What does this slightly masochistic experiment have to do with aesthetics? Nothing directly, but I came away with from that experience knowing that comfort is relative, both psychologically and physiologically. Seam Reap set my relative quite a few notches above where it had been previously and ever since then I have never really been hot. Sure, it gets moderately unpleasant to be out working in the heat of the day in the Georgia summer, but every time I catch myself about to complain I think, well, at least it's not as hot as Seam Reap.

If you're going to be spending a lot of time in the heat it makes more sense to push through a bit of discomfort until you start to adapt to it than it does to hide out in air conditioning all the time. Eventually, after a few years I suspect, you'll be pulling out the jacket when the thermometer dips below 80.

Adaptation may well be our greatest talent as a species. Air conditioning undercuts that.

So in the end it makes more sense to tear out aesthetically unpleasant air conditioning units than it does to keep them. Comfort is relative and transitory, aesthetics are not.

That said, up until now I've been making it sound like a binary choice -- air conditioning wart atop the bus or nothing. I am not the only one living in the Travco. And the one thing I put higher than aesthetics is never impose your will on someone else. Plus, I do like to have my dark chocolate and eat it too.

I would never subject my kids to Seam Reap without air conditioning. Not at their age anyway. Children are physiologically different, their bodies aren't as good at cooling themselves as adults are.

That's why I took the now useless 110V wire from the roof air conditioner, extended it with some new wire and rerouted it behind the closet and down to where the refrigerator used to be, where there is now plenty of room for a window air unit, which will serve as our new air conditioner and heater.

I can hear Kant breathing a sigh of relief. The magic is there if we need it. The beauty is there as well. Granted, I ripped out the generator, which means we'll never be able to run the air for long, but we should be able to run it enough to cool things off in the evening before bed (and we can run it as much as we like if there's shore power around).

If it does get so hot that no one in my family is happy, or god forbid, our dark chocolate starts to melt, we'll do what people with movable homes have done for millennia -- go somewhere else.

And Schopenhauer, that man really needed a hug. Actually most white male philosophers in European history seem like they would have benefited from more hugs. ↩
If you don't embrace your own aesthetics, capitalism is always there to provide simpler, numeric terms by which to define value. Choose wisely. ↩
There is of course fleeting beauty, e.g. sunsets. The shortness of some beautiful natural phenomena do not, however, affect our judgment of them as beautiful. It just means we only have a limited amount of time to enjoy them. ↩

Bring on the Change

I've been thinking about this little mantra ever since I saw it six or seven years ago. I don't think I've ever seen what I consider the secret to happiness so succinctly and completely captured.

I'm reprinting it here because I've been putting into action lately. And the author of this little guide happiness, Mark Pilgrim, removed his entire online presence back in 2011. When he originally published it in '09 or so he said he was on step 4. I assume he eventually made it to step 8.

Stop buying stuff you don't need

Pay off all your credit cards

Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in your house/apartment storage lockers, etc.

Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit on the first floor of your house attic, garage, etc.

Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in one room of your house

Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a suitcase

Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a backpack

Get rid of the backpack

I would say I am simultaneously on steps 2 and 4, with 5 and even 6 in sight.

For the record, while I understand wandering monks and the like, right now I personally have no desire to go beyond step 7. Still, if I learned nothing else from Tolstoy, I did learn that you never know when you'll end wandering.

Tools

The bag has been sitting on the table in the front room for weeks before I ever carry it out to the bus. It's canvas. Or a nylon made to look like canvas perhaps. It's heavy duty though, looks like it will weather some use and abuse. It hasn't yet. Not much. By the looks of it anyway.

There is a long and complicated story about how it came to be here on the table in the front room. I don't really understand, but I do know it belongs in the bus now.

There are a few screwdrivers inside, some wrenches, files, and a plastic jar of the sort men my grandfather's age seemed inordinately fond of keeping things in, their wives having doled out all the Skippy or Jif the container once held on sandwiches, or in cookies baked in ovens surrounded by Formica counters and build atop linoleum floors, surfaces of the golden age of petroleum, surfaces of the postwar three bedroom brick ranches of the West, well stocked with sugary sweet and creamy peanut butter jars destined ultimately not for the recycling bin but the tool shed behind the carport.

My cousins and I might have eaten the contents of this jar at some point, though it looks perhaps too new for that. Our children maybe. My cousin's children. Mine have never seen a three bedroom brick ranch house in the desert. Never will. Not that one anyway.

Inside the jar is an impressive collection of jeweler's screwdrivers, tiny files, a loupe, a wire brush and a tool whose use is a mystery to me, labeled simply ATT. Not the Bell Telephone Corporation he worked fifty some odd years for, but ATT. Tools demand brevity.

The rest of the bag is filled with larger equivalents of the same tools in the jar. The red and clear lucite handled Craftsman screwdrivers I remember hanging from the magnetic strip on the front of the shelf. The larger flathead with the wooden handle was always sticking too far out of another Jif jar, precariously leaning against the back wall of the workbench.

The shed was metal, unbearable in the midday Tucson summer. It was a mornings and evenings place to work. The bookends of the day.

It's late now. Another day. A long day of tools. There's much to be done on a warm December day. Glue that can't cure in December cold suddenly can cure on a day like today. Now the bus smells of acetone, Sticky Stuff and old carpet. Low voltage wires hang down from the ceiling, scraps of polyiso insulation board scatter the floor. The light is yellow. That yellow light isn't as common as it used to be when he would go out to the shed at night after dinner to tinker with radios and television sets. The light from the warmest LED bulbs I can get isn't nearly as warm as these old incandescents.

Why were they called ranches, those postwar dwellings America scattered across the landscape? They're nothing like ranches. A house is not the ranch. The land is the ranch.

Most of these tools I recognize. Or imagine that I do. I know I remember the screwdrivers. I don't know if they were really there, but I believe my memory of them. I know I don't remember the bag. I can tell by the lack of wear that it's too new, it came along long after I stopped coming around the tool shed. Or Tucson for that matter.

Alan Watts once said, "every one of us is a whirlpool in the tide of existence." The context, or his point actually, is that everything passes through us, we are whirlpools, the water moves through us. Take away the water and there's nothing left. These tools have passed through one whirlpool and into another.

We are not things, Watts was fond of saying, we are happenings. But we are happenings with things. Specifically with tools, many of which help us happen in one way or another. What to make of these tools then?

"The coming and going of things in the world is marvelous," says Watts. "They go. Where do they go? Don't answer, because that would spoil the mystery. They vanish into the mystery."

For now they're mine, my mystery to hold on to. I don't work on TVs or radios and don't have much use for many of them, still, everyone needs screwdrivers. Even the files have come in handy to shaving down the burrs in a few holes I needed to drill in the metal windows channels. Down the road which ones will I need? Don't answer.

I've often wondered what my grandfather would have thought of the bus. It's not his style really. Too big, too comfortable. When we went camping he always slept in a tent. With a cot. A setup I imagine was something like what he spent WWII living in.

I was always in a camper with my parents. My grandparents were in the tent. A tent was good enough for New Guinea it was good enough for Zion, Arches, Bryce, Canyonlands and the rest of the red rock desert we explored for years. It was always good enough for me too.

The darker it gets the more apparent it is that these LED bulbs will never do. The light in here with them on is too blue. I'd rather lose the energy, lose a day of boondocking than light the world with the harsh blue of police stations.

The funniest thing about the bus is how much disdain I've always had for RV dwellers. What's the point, there's nothing about living in an RV that's any "closer to nature" than the average house. Why not just stay at home? Those beliefs were predicated on there being a home. I don't know that it ever occurred to me as a kid that for some of those RV owners that was home. LED lights and all.

My beliefs were in some respect his. He never had any respect for people who needed comfort or modern convenience. He never said as much, but it wasn't hard to absorb that lesson being around him. That's not to say he did not like comfort, he just didn't need it. He grew up the son of alcoholics, his family owned a wood lot in the desert. It was bad enough that he ran away at fourteen. Not that he told me that, not that I even knew that back then. That came later, like the tool bag.

Every day when we were out camping, no matter the weather or temperature outside, he washed his face every morning in the same silver bowl filled with half boiling water and half cold from the water bottle that had spent the night in the cold desert air of the tent. He used the hot water, but even as he did you couldn't help suspect that he didn't need it, that he appreciated it for what it was, but was not at loss without it, that he'd have scrubbed his face with a block of ice if he had to.

Or maybe Freud was right; maybe he was just washing his face. Perhaps it's all just a case of the imagination projecting the image it wants to recall on the scenes of the past that it has access too. But then does it matter one way or the other? Memory is a construct, built with the tools your imagination has on hand. I have these scenes from camping trips, these screw drivers in plastic jars, this warm yellow light to sit beneath. Does it matter which light we choose to see by? I like this yellow light, the weaker light, the warmer light. I like the way it glows. And I like this bag of tools, even if I don't need all of them right now.

8-Track Gorilla

I just sold an old Oldsmobile 8-track cassette player on eBay for $86. Yes, I sold an antiquated music player that takes a format no one has manufactured in over three decades for $86.

I pulled it out of the bus. It's a stock item for a Cutlass Supreme from the late 1960s through early 1970s. I have no idea how it came to be in a 1969 Dodge Travco. What I do have an idea about is why I just sold it, as-is, could-be-working, could not be working, for $86.

In purely practical terms the current value of the 8-track is bewildering and when you first encounter it, you are thinking in practical terms.

Practical would be the brand new, reasonably high end car stereo that will replace the 8-track, which set me back a mere $45 on Amazon. It will play every digital music format you've ever heard of and dozens more you haven't. It's a knock off of a fancier name-brand model most likely made by the same slave laborers in the same factory. Capitalism¹.

But even I would be the first to admit it's also a complete piece of crap, made of cheap plastic and designed to be chucked in a rubbish bin the minute it starts to malfunction. In fact the advent of the car stereo wiring "harness" -- which eliminates any need to understand soldering and reduces the installation process to clicking little plastic pieces into place -- was designed to facilitated this kind disposability. Consumer capitalism.

The 8-track player on the other hand is not disposable in the same way. Nor is it installation-friendly. Whoever installs it will be soldering it in, or perhaps twisting and taping some wires, but either way there will most definitely not be any snapping of plastic. It will take time. Even after all the time it takes to repair it, it will take time to install it.

But there's the thing. If it does turn out to not be working, it can can be repaired by anyone with the patience to sit down, take it apart and figure out how it works.

This is the first part of why I think the 8-track still has so much value to this day. The world is increasingly disposable, not just by design, but by inherent complexity vs price. The cheap stereo is fixable too -- as anyone who's tinkered with a Raspberry Pi can tell you, it's not that hard to solder, though it does take some practice -- but it requires more specialized knowledge and (often) a circuit diagram of some sort. And because a new one is only $45 it's tough to come up with a convincing argument for fixing it.

Purely mechanical devices like the 8-track, which consists of some machined bearings, a capstan, a solenoid coil and a couple other elements, are much easier to figure out on your own, without a schematic. It's also made of things that are fixable, which adds a new dimension to ownership. This is not just a thing you traded for some tickets, which you traded hours of your life to get, but a thing you can fix should you need to. There is an element of self-reliance present that it is not present in the Amazon plastic crap.

There is a kind of satisfaction in taking something apart, wrapping your head around how it works and then putting it back together better than it was before. Sure, at this point you might have to fabricate some parts if they turn out the be broken, but with 3D printers that's well within the realm of possibility (and, should 3D printers not be around there are still plenty of lathes in metal shops all over the place).

What's more, no matter what the things is -- a clock, a wood burning stove, a vehicle, a radio, a turntable, even a house -- I guarantee there are people out there devoting their free time and energy to fixing it. These people have created forums and share knowledge, tips and tricks all over the internet, often you find people joining in who used to work in factories making the thing in question.

In the 8-track's case there is 8trackheaven.com, which does not appear to be maintained, but has another clue as to why people find value in older stuff:

When you say yes to 8-track you're generally saying no to the accepted wisdom of our hallowed consumer culture, decrying this religion of consumption as the worship of hollow, deceptive idols.... Commit an act of consumer disobedience with us and reject the unjust laws of a marketplace ruled by greed. Follow the way of the 8-track and reap the spiritual rewards that come with renewing and recycling instead of stepping in line with the cattle so captivated with the consumerist culture that ultimately benefits only landfill brokers.

I think this little manifesto-style rejection hints at something else in the appeal of restoration, something beyond the ability to repair things. I think that buying and restoring mechanical devices from earlier eras is also a way of traveling through time back to a world we may well have never personally known. There's an element of nostalgia, but nostalgia for something never experienced.

I have no memory of 1969 Dodge Travcos, but in recreating one I'm connecting back to an era I never got to experience. It's not nostalgia for that time, not really romanticism of it either. It's something different, tangibly different. That time is gone, but echoes of it remain in the objects that come down to us. And I think that the world's response to the Travco, the endless smiles and waves reflect that connection, that echo of the age that gave us the Travco.

That age had ideas about itself, about the objects that surrounded it, grew out of it. There is nothing like the Travco on the road now and that says as much about us now as it does about Travcos then. This often brings with it an implicit, or as in the 8-track manifesto, an explicit rejection of the perceived values of today in favor of either the values of the past or simply the value of stasis. The 8-track manifesto isn't nostalgic for 8-tracks necessarily, it's simply that 8-tracks become the stopping point of technological progression. They are good enough.

This is a big part of why I have the Travco. Not that it is the best RV ever built, but that it is good enough. It does not provide every comfort of home and in that sense it becomes a kind of critique of our modern conception of comfort. Do you really need two TVs in your RV?

More to the point the restoration is the embodiment of that rejection -- by existing it says, look, here is an era when no one thought it necessary to have two TVs in their RV. It becomes a kind of nostalgia for a set of values -- though you need to be careful about this since there are some really shitty values lurking back in the age of the Travco and 8-track -- but I don't know that nostalgia is quite the word. I'm not sure we have a word to describe the rejection and embracing.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes in Wind, Sand and Stars, "To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday."

I thought of this line when I was struggling to find a word in the last paragraph, but then I thought that perhaps we do the same thing with object. That is, you could easily change it read: to grasp the meaning of the world of today we use objects that are expressions of the world of yesterday.

Perhaps this is me getting old, but the Travco makes more sense to me than any vehicle being made now. And I don't mean the technical, the engine complexity of now versus then, though that is certainly part of it, but there are less technical things too.

The way the engineers of the Travco looked at the world is reflected in what they built. The way the engineers who built the Honda maxivan I also currently own look at the world is reflected in their choices as well. And these are very markedly different ways of looking at the world. The engineers of the Honda assume me an idiot. They won't let me open the side doors when the vehicle is in drive. They made it howl with beeping should I shift out of park while the door is still open. They decided not to tell me what the oil pressure is, but instead angrily flash an inscrutable light when the oil pressure getting low.

These are minor things that irritate me not because of their actual function but because of what they say about how the designers of the Honda think about me and the rest of the world. It doesn't stop there either. The engineers of the Honda take a dim view of professional mechanics as well. Honda's own workers are not mechanics, they're certified technicians. The world of the Honda is exclusive, stratified, and specialized. It has no place for the mechanic of old and certainly now place for you and I².

I cannot make sense of a world where designers believe they are better at knowing what I am capable of than I am.

This is true of the disposable stereo as well. It has stickers all over it and warnings on the box about voiding the warranty if you unscrew a certain screw to access the inside (as if not having a warranty were some horrible thing). All technology has moved in this direction, much of it to the point of using obscure torx screws and other deliberate attempts to stymie tinkering.

Why? What is so horrible that could happen if I take a think apart? That I might break it? Well then I would have broken it. And learned something.

This is a world that I cannot make sense of, nor can, I suspect, the buyer of my 8-track.

I can make sense of the design world the creators of the Travco came from. It feels more like home to me. It is built to empower the owner, not stymie them. There are access panels everywhere. A lengthy guide tells me how to disassemble most of the core components in the vehicle. Even ones you can't reach without tearing out the walls -- the 12V electrical system is shown complete with schematics. The designers of the Travco felt I might want to -- indeed they knew I would have to -- get to the engine, so the built a massive, awkward access hatch that's half as large as the seats on either side of it.

It is, like all vehicles of its era, designed to be tinkered with. Because tinkering is the thing that makes us human. Or at least that's the message I get when I sit in the Travco tinkering with things. I notice how there's not just a vent at the back of the fridge, but a panel that opens to give access to the entire 2-way fridge internals. I also notice that in the original sales brochures the ease of repair is a central selling point. Not so long ago we liked to fix things ourselves.

The next line in Saint-Exupéry's book is, "The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language." Is the same true of objects? Are objects of the past nearer to us because they are nearer to our natures. Perhaps.

I don't know who bought the 8-track, but I do suspect that she's a bit like me -- she's looking for something to tinker with, something to take back in time to its original state, back in time to a world perhaps she never knew, but misses nonetheless. We are like Saint-Exupéry writes, "emigrants who have not founded our homeland", and I wish her the best of luck in trying to create it.

In an ideal capitalist system anyway. In fact we don't live in a system like that. We live in a system where price of the new stereo is artificially low because we in the west have decided we're okay with exploiting people in other parts of the world for the sole purpose of making sure we have $45 stereos. ↩
This is not to say you can't work on a Honda. You can and I have, but it's certainly not encouraged. ↩

Progress

Restoring artifacts from the past is a slow, painstaking and sometimes tedious process.

I've never participated in an archaeological dig, but sometimes restoring the bus feels like one. I may not be digging million year old dinosaur bones out of the ground -- I imagine it takes a bit more skill to extract dinosaur bones and reconstruct the skeleton of an actual creature from them than it does to peel the paneling, insulation, wiring and plumbing out of a 1969 Travco -- but the aim is the same: bring the past back to life.

The problems is you never quite know what the past was really like. Is that a bone a finger joint or a toe? Should this be attached to that or was it always flopping here? Do I need this random bit of 12V wire tucked behind the under the sink? And, most ominously, the moments you find yourself thinking, "what in the world is that?"

I've also diagnosed a potentially serious disease in restoration projects that primarily manifests itself like this: "Well, as long as I'm in here, I might as well check the ______".

Next thing you know, instead of just fixing some rotting wood behind the kitchen counter you've completely re-done the entire plumbing.

It's all fun though. Especially getting all the crap out. Tearing out the ugly roof wart air conditioning unit and kicking it down to the ground where is shattered was especially satisfying (see a picture of said wart). Falling through the rotting floor under the hot water heater and almost punching my foot through the black water tank, less so. Fortunately I've mostly been working barefoot. I'm pretty sure a shoe would have had just enough extra weight to have cracked the tank.

The air conditioning is gone though and that's all that really matters. I hate air conditioning. I have it in my home because when air conditioning came along we promptly threw out all the things that made it possible to live without air conditioning. So now we build houses in the worst possible way and then pay a ton of money to keep them cool. Progress. Never mind that humanity somehow managed to do for 60,000 or so years, give or take, with, gasp, no air conditioning at all. To hear most people these days those first 60,000 years had to have been one long miserable existence.

I disagree. I think life without air conditioning is grand, if a bit sweatier here in the south. But we don't intend to spend much time here in the south. And yes, I have spent several summers here in the south without air conditioning. I survived. I even enjoyed it.

I did install a fan in its place. I'm not an animal. I even went in for the fancy reversible fan with temperature controlled shutoff, which should be more than sufficient to keep things from getting too bad. The thing is -- forget for a moment that I reject the notion that life should be constantly comfortable and climate controlled -- let's stick to the more universal idea that not being too hot is generally more pleasant than being too hot... it's an RV, if it's too hot where we are, we will fire up the magnificent Dodge engine and go somewhere cooler. I really need to tear out the rear A/C too, but for now it stays.

It should go without saying that the heater has likewise long since departed via graceless and shattering fall to the concrete. Nothing replaces the heater. Instead we now have enough storage space under the stove for more useful items like a slow cooker, a cast iron dutch oven or two, a few jars of fermenting veggies and maybe even a sauerkraut crock.

Next on a chopping block is the two way refrigerator which will replaced by an icebox and the Onan generator which will be replaced by nothing. The ice box move freaks everyone out, "oh my god, how will you live without a refrigerator?!" Technically, we'll still have one, it's just going to be in the form of a 12V freezer, which will allow us to freeze things we need to freeze (ice blocks, bulk purchase meat, huge batches of camp beans from aforementioned dutch ovens) and then turn it off when we don't need it. The other things we need kept refrigerated will do just fine in an icebox.

Almost nothing in the average refrigerator actually needs to be there for any health reasons. If you'd like to learn more, read up on how long distance sailors store food.

The generator will be replaced by couple solar panels on the roof which don't take up 10 cubic feet, are silent and don't belch smoke. Looking forward to the storage space that will buy us in the back, under the bed.

Travco t-shirts (printed by a band called The Swell Season -- no idea what the music sounds like, but I bought some shirts for the girls).

Slowly but surely progress happens. Or what I call progress, which this case means reverting to technology of roughly 1955, around the time technology slips into solipsism. Well, except solar, that, along with incremental improvements in energy efficiency are about the only decent tech inventions since 1955. And those are few and far between. My 1969 Ford F250 gets as good or better gas mileage than the current line of Ford trucks.

Which is not to say I hate technology, just that most of it serves itself or its makers, not its users.

Solar is a notable exception -- possibly the best idea/tech we've ever invented. I mean, I'm not crazy anti-tech, I just think the good, sustainable ideas are few and far between. But I'm not a delusional lunatic who thinks I'm living in the Victorian era by playing dress up or anything. I just don't really like air conditioning. Or heaters. Or generators. And I prefer a good fire to electric light. Hmm.

Elvis Has Left the Building

Elvis is currently in my office, peering over my shoulder as I type. And sorry, but the lovely velvet rendition of the king that came with our Travco has already been claimed by friend. It's not that I have anything against the king, it's that I don't have anything at all, no feelings one way or the other on Elvis. So he came out and will be going to someone who does have some feelings about the king.

Here's an early image of the bus the way we got it (more or less) for reference:

The walls, ceiling and floor of the Travco are also coming out. Stripping them all has been a slow process in part because of the weather -- it's been murderously hot here for a couple of weeks. One day I came out of the bus dripping sweat and thought the outside temperature actually felt pretty pleasant. When I checked the thermometer it turned out to be 97 degrees F. Inside the bus is at least 15-20 degrees warmer.

It's also been slow going because I'm trying to remove the walls relatively intact so I can use the pieces as templates for the new paneling. I still don't know what to do for the ceiling, but a fellow Travco owner got in touch and offered up a bench seat and bunk system, which solves the thing I was dreading the most -- building that from scratch without measurements to work from. One headache solved. Thanks Paul.

I also started cleaning up the exterior. With help of course.

Detailing a 27ft long 11ft tall vehicle is as time consuming as you'd think, but I think the results are worth it. The finish on this thing isn't perfect, but it's still pretty good, good enough that I doubt I'll do anything beyond patching a few soft spots I found on the roof.

What's impressed me the most about all this tear down is just how well this thing has held up.

With the exception of the furnace area beneath the sink there is almost no rotted wood. One piece by the door needs to be replaced, but that's it. That's pretty amazing for a 46-year-old vehicle. Of course there is a gaping hole in the floor under my sink due to a very poorly installed furnace that lacked any sealing and was obviously still leaking.

So I get to do a little subflooring and an interesting curved cut to match the contour of the side right next to the door.

Once that's done the next step is to rework the wiring and install a solar setup. Then I can re-insulate and start the fun part -- putting it all back together.