2-10-2007
Sick dog, vet, happy Fat Dog

I made it down through Tucson the HARD way. I didn’t find the freeway route and had to go on down the old highway through town. I think I hit every red light on my way through downtown pulling my little train. I could see some of the Gem and Mineral Show venues but finding a parking place for my little train is almost impossible even under the best of parking conditions (like Sunday morning in a small town).

The country changed radically by the time I got down to Patagonia. This is gently rolling country with nice small mountains. The most striking difference is the vegetation. There were green oak trees, sycamore, mesquite and a few juniper trees with fields of long dry brown grass. It was amazing to be in such a different type of country. It is a little higher in elevation.

I found the campground that Mark had recommended we meet up at. It is about ten miles from town along the side of a small lake. There were I think only one or two other campers in ‘our’ part of the campground. The main community of campers were over in the hook-up part where there were a hundred motor homes/trailers plugged in. The weather wasn’t the best as it was mostly overcast and drizzling rain on and off.

Mark is a ‘real’ cowboy even though you would consider him rather normal otherwise. As all cowboys I have been around, they get up before first light, just to be sure they don’t miss a minute of sunrise. I sort of like to lay in bed waiting for the sun to come up and then step out in the glory of the new day. By sunrise Mark has been for a walk, brewed a cup of coffee, oiled his chain and prepared for the day.

Mark found that there was going to be a nature cruise on the lake in the morning and we both decided to go on it. They had a pontoon boat that held about 12 and we had a full load. It was spitting a little rain occasionally but for the most part it wasn’t that bad. Since we didn’t have our binoculars with us they issued them to us (really nice ones too). Our tour guide was a serious birder and we floated the lake looking for his little feathered friends. Since it was cold and rainy there wasn’t much out there but a few ducks and mostly mud hens. We did come up real close to a pair of beautiful Night Herons. Wow, that was worth the trip for sure.

We got on our bikes and took a little ride. The small roads out in the hills were really nice. I always like small paved roads that don’t have a dashed line down the middle allowing me to cut the corners if I can see it is safe. Those little roads are sure made for motorcycles. It was still spitting a little rain on and off. We took a turn off to Fort Huachuca to see what that was. I figured it was some sort of frontier cowboy and Indian deal. We came to a check point and gate with two old guys in Security Guard uniforms. They wanted to know if we were Americans. Well, yeah, if you consider Montana part of the USA. They had a whole list of questions about insurance, licenses, and when they got to the question about whether we had taken a motorcycle safety test, Mark answered truthfully “no”. I said “sure” which was a frigging lie unless you consider as I do, that I took the stupid little safety test to get my license. They didn’t like the looks of us right from the start and we could both see that it wasn’t going to happen. They did say that there was a museum that we could visit down there. I later asked about what was down at this Fort and was told that it is some sort of secret intelligence facility that is staffed with some really hot shots. It is probably best I didn’t go in there as I suppose someone would spot me as an anarchist and just shoot me.

The little paved road was really nice going through the hills but finally the road turned to dirt. I am not much in favor of rain on dirt roads but the road was in good shape and there were only a few slick muddy spots that we carefully passed through. I was out in front when I topped this little hill and found the other side glinting wet mud. My motorcycle popped out from under me and left me sitting on the road skidding down hill on my butt with my motorcycle sliding along next to me.  There was no real damage it seemed other then the windshield got knocked off its mounts and one of the little racks on the back I built was bent. I picked up bike and rubbed off a little mud off the valve cover. Off we went down the road and found paved road just down the way. After about 20 miles or so I looked down and noticed the OIL, RED LIGHT on!!! The slid down the road had broken a hole in the valve cover and filled the chamber with mud/gravel/sand. Oh, yuck…..

Mark went on back to camp and got his bike trailer and hauled me back to camp. I was done motorcycle ridding for a while I could see. I told Mark that I was headed back to Tucson to see if I could get a replacement valve cover. Mark headed off to the eastern part of the state and was going to check out some hot springs over there.

I made it into Tucson and found the BMW dealer didn’t have a valve cover and wouldn’t be able to get one for a week. I happened to find the parking place I had camped at three of years ago. This place is a parking lot for a movie complex that they allow to be used for people that want to visit the gem show. When I was there before there were a few motor homes camped there but this year there weren’t any. They probably passed a law against it but what the hell, I wasn’t notified, so I pulled in over along the edge out of the way. I decided to check the show out and caught one of the shuttle busses. Most people that go have to bring along a copy of their business license, copy of their tax number, and other stuff to verify that they are real wholesale buyers. One nice little fact I found out last time I was here is that Montana doesn’t have sales tax so I didn’t have to have all those papers. The guy was more insistent this time and I finally had to hand over a business card which he accepted. Gee, can you believe it I got in using a BMWDOG.COM business card printed out on a computer printer on thin paper? Well, it was in color…..

I did two days of the show and had seen enough beads to last me another two or three years. I did a little motorcycle detective work on the blood hound with the help of Bob (Bob’s Motor Werks). I cleaned out that chamber of the valve train and washed the push rod channel as best I could. I then poured about a quart of kerosene down that pushrod and swished the bike around hoping to clean out any dirt that might have gotten in the motor. When I drained the oil I was surprised to find a lot of oil and lots of sand and small gravel. The good news is that there was no small shinny bearing pieces that I could see in the drain oil. I then took off the oil filter cover and found some fine sand in the chamber. There was no way of knowing if any sand had gotten into the ‘clean’ oil system via the by-pass. I fitted a new oil filter and filled the bike with oil. I fired it up and the oil light went out. I carefully rode around the parking lot and finally got it out on the frontage road. I kept checking for oil pressure but pulling the clutch and letting the engine idle. Everything was fine and I thought the bike was going to be fine. It sounded good and seemed ok. After about three or four miles the oil light came on dimly and by the time I found a place to pull off, it went RED. I found a fairly good spot to park the bike off the road and took a hike back along the rail road tracks to get my outfit. It is interesting to walk the railroad tracks. I met a couple of rail bums, one sleeping and the other asking about train schedules. I couldn’t help him but I think catching a ride in a big city like Tucson might be a little tough. I found a small grave along the tracks which was sort of interesting. It was decorated nicely and it had a Mexican name on it. I guess it is a grave of some baby that belonged to an illegal Mexican or maybe just someone that didn’t want to pay the big bucks for a grave yard burial.

I came back and picked up the bloodhound and headed north. I was thinking about the bike along the way for sure and when I checked my phone I found a message from Bob. I called him and he recommended that I pull the oil pan and see if the screen that feeds the oil pump was plugged. That I did, and found that it was clean. Humm, not good, and it looked like this was a lot more serious problem than I could handle out on the road. I went back to the Windspirit and found Lowell across the street and asked him if I could leave my little trailer at his place. In the morning I left my pod at his place and headed on the road for the frozen north country.

It was sure nice heading through the four corners country. This is a sample of the territory in the Navajo, Zuni, Hopi country. The weather was good and dry so I decided to make the run up north on the highways and not on the freeway. Jeez, it got cold up there. I crawled in the back of my pickup somewhere near Rifle, CO. I don’t remember what the temp was when I crawled into bed but it was 9 degrees when I had to get up and pee and decided that since I was up, I might just as well keep on driving. It ended up a trip of driving and napping all the way up. When I was coming into Billings, MT the temperature shot up and it was 58 degrees. I called Bob’s and talked to Anne and asked her if I could drop off the bloodhound. She said sure and invited me to supper. Bob was out on a ride with Charles Ringer, since the weather was so nice. When I got there Bob had me bring the bike in the shop. We had a chance to visit and consider what was happening inside the motor. The latest theory is that the pressure relief valve is stuck open. The only way that could happen is that something (like sand) got through the filter system or by-pass. It doesn’t look good for the bloodhound, well actually it looks good news for the bloodhound but bad news for my check book.

As luck would have it, Bob had been out ridding my Fat Dog motorcycle doing the final road check. He had just finished completely going through that bike which entailed taking the motor completely apart and using the best parts along with the spare block.

The next day Bob wanted to check a few things before he let me have it. It turned out that Craige Whiteley called and Bob asked him to come on over. Craige is the blacksmith that welded up my boxes after that Brazilian road rash problem. Craige is heading down to Mexico and Central America with his son latter this month. We had been visiting about that trip before and this way he had a chance to ask some questions to me. He bought a sheet of aluminum and made his own panniers for his bike. Craige has two R80 GS bikes that they are going to ride down on. Here is his bike with a R100GS tank a nice little  ‘White Dog’. The panniers are really nice and he did a really nice job of mounting them, as a blacksmith would….

Craig and Bob discussing the Fat Dog on the trailer ready for the ride south and a look at the ass of the White dog.

I headed on over to Miles City and called Roger Muggli and asked him if his offer to put me up was still on. “Heck yes” was his reply. Roger is pretty much running the pellet mill mostly by himself since his brother is recovering from back surgery as well as Mike Blum who is recovering from shoulder surgery. Roger works from seven in the morning until about ten at night. The feed pellet business is booming and he showed me orders for a month and a half. I don’t remember how much they are making but there are sure some nicely fed cows and sheep in eastern Montana.

I charged around town the next day and got quite a bit of business done as ell as picked up some more mail. I got a chance to visit with some of my friends and catch up on the news. There wasn’t enough time to see and visit with everyone I would have liked to but I wanted to get back down south as there was a storm headed this way. In the morning the weather had definitely changed and this is the view on the way to Wyoming.

It has been several years since I had to do the icy walk shuffle, but it all came back after that first ‘almost’ slip. This is exactly why I am down in the south country in the winter.

I didn’t trust the back roads on the way south and stuck to the freeway all the way down. When I was coming into Albuquerque I noticed that the temperature was 62 and that is much nicer than what I left up north.

I made it back around nine o’clock and went down and picked up my trailer from Lowell’s. I am back up on the ridge and I think I will hang here for a day or two to recoup from that trip. I stopped in at the Windspirit this morning and there was a big work party that is turning a small building into a craft store. They used to have some jewelry stuff displayed in the computer room that did very well, so they decided to make a separate room to display and sell things that the folks make in the community. There are a lot of people that come through this community from all over the world and I guess they buy things to support the place. There are some very talented artists here, you might remember Lorrayne’s necklace and earrings that Kathleen was wearing in my last dog log.

 

I found this quote from Ron Paul. He is running for President of the United States. I have always liked what he has to say and am always amazed that when the radio folks talk about the people running for president, he is never mentioned. I guess what he has to say is too radical. He got over 400,000 votes last time he ran for President. At least there are that many people out there that ‘think’.  
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Ron Paul, Texas Congressman
As the war in Iraq surges forward, and the administration ponders military action against Iran, it's important to ask ourselves an overlooked question: Can we really afford it? If every American taxpayer had to submit an extra five or ten thousand dollars to the IRS this April to pay for the war, I'm quite certain it would end very quickly. The problem is that government finances war by borrowing and printing money, rather than presenting a bill directly in the form of higher taxes. When the costs are obscured, the question of whether any war is worth it becomes distorted.

Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank have a cozy, unspoken arrangement that makes war easier to finance. Congress has an insatiable appetite for new spending, but raising taxes is politically unpopular. The Federal Reserve, however, is happy to accommodate deficit spending by creating new money through the Treasury Department. In exchange, Congress leaves the Fed alone to operate free of pesky oversight and free of political scrutiny. Monetary policy is utterly ignored in Washington, even though the Federal Reserve system is a creation of Congress.

The result of this arrangement is inflation. And inflation finances war.

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I was sitting in the pod this morning when a game warden came up to find out if I was a hunter. Geez, he was a big dude and much taller than I am. He was really nice and we talked for quite a while. This is HAM season right now he said. That stands for Handgun, Archery, Muzzleloader and is for javelina (desert pigs). They will give the HAM guy a week or two for this hunt. He said they give the pigs a week rest and after that, they open it up for rifle for a week. It has been quail season last week and I have found empty shot shell on the road so I guess there were hunters here while I was gone. I really like seeing the quail but they sure give me a start when they burst out of the brush.

I made a quick run into Globe yesterday to mail a package and a couple of letters. It was nice to be in town and get a meal at a restaurant. I could get fat down here on this Mexican style feed, well, I am getting fat on it and mmmm, it is good…..

Fat Dog in camp.

February 5, 2007
The Agenda Restated
      Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions." I find this bizarre because I never fail to present audiences with a long, explicit task list of projects that American society needs to take up in the face of the combined problems I have labeled The Long Emergency. That the audience never hears this, and then indignantly demands such instruction, only reinforces my sense that the cognitive dissonance in our culture has gone totally off the charts.
     Insofar as I just returned from a college lecture road trip, and heard the same carping all over again, I conclude that it's necessary for me to spell it all out a'fresh. I think of this not so much as a roster of "solutions" but as a set of reasonable responses to a new set of circumstances. (Not everything we try to do will succeed, that is, be a "solution.") So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here it is.

• Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

• We have to produce food differently. The ADM / Monsanto / Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.
• We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami....) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components -- at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.
• We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.
• We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.
• We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear. As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America's heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.
• The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).
• We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case, will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.
• We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.
• Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

      So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. But please don't carp at me, by letter or in person, that I am not providing you with anything to think about or devote your personal energy to. If you're depressed, change your focus. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.

http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary20.html This is the link to his Clusterfuck Nation page with a lot more interesting comments on what is happening around us.