A Revisionist's History: What Neil Young Did for Dad

Growing up, my dad always insisted he liked Neil Young. He even would sing a line or two: “I was lying in a burned out basement, with a full moon over my head. . . .” (I still have no clue what that means, but since just about everything else he sang involved illicit drugs, I have a general idea.) At any rate, Dad “claimed” he loved Neil Young, but I knew better.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love old Neil as much as—probably more than—the next man. More than once, I’ve put my good name on the line in his defense. To bolster my position, I have it on good authority from a Mormon Bishop that Young could have beat Jimmy Page hands down. That’s all the authority I need.

As much as I love Young’s music, it’s a well-acknowledged fact that his real skill was with the guitar. This is why songs like “Cortez the Killer” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” have such timeless appeal as evidenced by the rise in alt-country. In my unlearned opinion, it is also why songs like “After the Goldrush” have lost a little of their stature in the Neil Young field of greats.

So when I tell you that the one Neil Young song my father sang more than any other was “After the Goldrush” (followed up closely by “Old Man” both of which lack the signature Neil Young riffs), you immediately understand one thing about my father. He resonated with Young on a much deeper level than vocal aptitude.

I’m told that one summer during my father’s late teens he guided Kayaks on a remote section of the Salmon River in Central Idaho. By his own admission the Moody Blues formed much of the soundtrack for that summer on the river. Now, I don’t know about you, but even with the most generous and accommodating ear, I could never stomach “Knights in White Satin.” The music literally nauseated me every time. If he would have listened to the lyrics, perhaps he would have felt the same way. But he didn’t have to listen, he was kayaking and separated from home and responsibility by vast expanses of sage brush.


My point is this, we all hear lousy music at one point or another. Sometimes, depending on what we are doing when the garbage comes blaring out of tinny speakers, we develop a taste for it simply because it reminds us of good times.

For my father, Young, the Moody Blues and the Beatles’ Sergaent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had the effect of conjuring up the heroic images of his youth. And in a way, they conjured up the same images for me; because even though our relationship during my teen years was fairly close, these songs allowed us to connect with each other on level to which words alone refused to carry us. We formed a sort of brotherhood listening to all the rock and roll my father knew in the 60’s. And I was ok with that.


Most Saturdays would find my father and I working—for at least part of the day—beneath the flickering fluorescent lighting of my father’s garage. Without ever really “teaching” me, it was there I learned how to do many manly tasks mostly involving dirt bikes. His portfolio of manly skills seemed to have no bounds. And while he taught, Bob Marley would sing his redemption songs about buffalo soldiers in the back ground. (Marley was my contribution to the discography.)

There was one thing my father attempted to teach me that never really stuck. I never learned to ski. My stomach still lurches (the way it does when peering into a pool from the edge of a high drive) every time I think about my pathetic attempts to snow plow.

Of my father’s many skills, the one that stands in greatest relief against the backdrop of his many accomplishments was his mastery of all things mechanical. He could safely command the helm of any motorized vehicle under and through any conditions. He once taught me how to navigate quick sand with a motorcycle in Southern Utah.

My Junior year in high school my father resolved to make one final attempt to instruct me in the art of skiing. He decided take my sisters and me to 49° North, a local resort just east of Chewelah, Washington. This one winter, he decided that we would take the Dodge Dart to the ski hill.

The Dodge was our family’s second car during my high school years. Demonstrating all the vanity of youth, I was a bit ashamed the first few months I drove it to school. Surprisingly, over time I managed to produce some genuine feelings of gratitude and appreciation for the car. Now some 20 years later, I recognize that—as far as high school cars go—the Dart was as good as it gets.

We had the 1973 Swinger, two-door model clothed in baby blue with an intact black-vinyl roof. Once waxed and Armor-All’ed, the Swinger shone. It had no rust or dints. The marine-blue, vinyled-clad interior could transport six belted high school boys in comfort and style. And the cavernous maw of a trunk could easily swallow two full-size mountain bikes. It was, by nearly all accounts, an eye-grabber. On more than one occasion, men approached my father offering to buy the car.

The Swinger had only two flaws of which I was aware. The first, it was rear-wheel drive. Second, it had only a single speaker linked to an AM radio.

In spite of all the things it shared with Eden, Spokane could not boast of mild winters. It didn’t help that my school and my home were located on opposite ends of Spokane’s fabulous “South Hill.” As a result, once the first snow fell, you could safely expect to commune with that snow until late March. Just contemplating the drive home from school would cause the muscles around my abdomen to slowly constrict leading to momentary lapses of judgment. Curiously, no one ever seemed to notice a the difference.

Not having acquired my father’s skill for snow driving at that age, I became adept at waving cars past me while my rear tires spun harmoniously on the ice. Eventually, I discovered passable routes from school to home, but not before developing a healthy respect for ice, hills and the limited efficacy of rear-wheel drive.

Naturally, my father’s decision to take the Dodge gave me pause. My father, Southeast Idaho’s finest son and master of all things mechanical, was an inveterate winter driver. He feared no hill, no matter how icy or how deep the snow. The fact that 49 Degrees was located on a huge, ice-encrusted mountain and that the Dodge self-motated using only the rear wheels interested him about as much as what Mr. Young actually meant by the phrase “burned-out basement.” It didn’t.

Dad’s approach to handling this first flaw with the Dart was to throw two tubes of sand, like oversized hot dogs, and a cement block or two in the trunk, close the lid firmly, and forget about it. Then, with reverse rake in full effect, we exited the drive way and headed north.



For any well-adjusted teenage boy, rear wheel drive is a fact to be accepted and dealt with like a man. After all, what doesn’t kill you gives you bragging rights with other teenage boys. The Dart’s second flaw, however, was an entirely different beast. It was a badge of shame, an unsightly boil on the Dart’s otherwise unblemished, if aged skin. The Dart’s AM radio and single, raspy in-dash speaker simply couldn’t accommodate the demands of a teen’s proverbial security blanket: “cool music.”

My choice in tunes consisted of the unenviable pick between Gospel or the kind of non-English music for which I would develop a taste a few years later in Guatemala. Fortunately, my father was a kind man. He managed to rummage up a FM adaptor from my uncle Jim in California. And soon enough, I found myself developing a taste for Classic Rock.

A few days prior to our departure, we came to a startling realization. Since it was a cinch we weren’t going to discuss our “feelings” during the hour-and-a-half drive to the mountain, nothing but the fickle tastes of some radio DJ stood between my father, me, and the gruesome possibility of silence. This wouldn’t do. We needed a fall-back position in the event of such a disaster.

As luck would have it, that Jolly Old Elf had only the week before brought me my very first CD boom box. Allow me to offer some historical context. The early 90’s were happy bucolic days as the world shook off the tethers of cassette-based music. With CD’s, overnight, it became possible to skip over all those filler songs that separated the gems from the dross. All you had to do was press those fancy little forward arrows, and the player would skip to the next track. Like magic. You could even press a repeat button and enjoy a “hands free” voyage into mind-numbing redundancy. There we stood on a precipice (before the free-fall into napster, 99 cent songs, and mp3’s) and we could see on the horizon the end of a dark era.


And with this dawning came the solution to our immediate threat. We reasoned that if we could bring the boom box with us, even if 98.9 KKZX, the local classic rock station, played an entire hour of Aerosmith, we could turn on the boom box and avoid saying even a word. The only problem was that we didn’t have a way of powering the boom box. Now, to be sure, we could have purchased a prodigious amount of d-cell, lead-acid batteries and neatly cleared that hurdle. But in my father’s home we lived in the shadow of a complete moratorium on all “non-essential” purchases. Genetically, that same moratorium has mysterious found its way into my own home.

There we were, stuck at a terrible impasse, when all of a sudden my father’s sheer mechanical genius came riding to the rescue. (As events will later show, it could not have been divine inspiration.) “What if,” he posited, “we were to wire a car charger adapter to the battery leads in the back of the boom box?” Not understanding a lick of electrical engineering, but wanting desperately to avoid any separation from the opiate of the teenage masses, I agreed.

With the help of a soldering gun, a little splicing, and three pounds of electricians tape, we soon were listening to Old Neil’s sonorous voice serenading the dashboard from the front seat of the dart. Success. With the exception of a fish-tail or two, the drive to Chewelah and beyond passed uneventfully.

Over the years the sting of embarrassment that accompanied my best approximations at skiing has diminished. The little I learned that day about managing skis and poles has also dissolved and passed like smoke through my ears and into the ether. But I will never forget staring out the passenger window into the falling snow and gray light. In the car, the heater purred soothingly beneath the dash, the turquoise-blue light from the dashboard illuminated my father’s face, and Neil Young sang “Heart of Gold.” That experience is etched into my mind.

Post Script: Chrysler built the Dodge Dart back before people ran electronic gadgetry in their cars. In those days, the Big Three never included regulators on the cigarette lighters to govern power surges coming off the engine. One blissful day, the following summer, dad and I were heading West on I-90 with the dirt bikes in tow. The summer sun had scorched the sky to a brassy white. Below the dash torrents of warm air poured through the vents. One minute Neil was with us there in the backseat lamenting “the dead in Ohio” and the next he was gone.

Dreamin' Man: Elephants, Giraffes, and Mummies

I had an interesting dream last night.

As the vision coalesced into a meaningful image, I found myself back at Mosaic. This time the office space was completely different. The office now occupied a two-story space open in the middle with a second-story mezzanine. The setup of the room mirrored the middle room of the Von Trapp home in The Sound of Music or the main sitting room in Giant. (See below.) Unlike the mezzanine in these other movies, the stairs to the second level weren’t visible to view. They had been hidden back behind a wall, as if they had been added to the outside of the building and enclosed as an afterthought.


At any rate, I stood on the mezzanine looking East. Sunlight poured in through the second story windows and lit up the entire room. In fact, so much light came in, I remember wondering if the eastern end of the building was open to the air. When my eyes wandered to the west, the western horizon was backlit with dark menacing clouds. The angle and intensity of the light suggested Spring.

On a side note, it may help to understand that the interplay between light and shadow in the weather has always fascinated me. Naturally, my favorite times of day have always been the hours surrounding sunrise and sunset, when the contrast between light and shadow is most acute.

There are two clear ways in which this fascination impacts my mood. First, a horizon enshrouded in storm—the promise of the storm even more so than the storm itself—strikes me as inherently hopeful and invigorating. This remains true unless or until I can see the sun tugging at the corners of the storm promising fair weather in the wings, which bookends the storm with more sunny drudgery.

All this leads into my second point. A clear, cloudless day with the sun boring down from overhead triggers a descent into my emotional nadir. Sometimes the stark, unfiltered light of day has a way of revealing the harsh unyielding aspects of life that filtered light can blur.

In any event, as I stared around the office space. It suddenly dawned on me that I was new both to the location and to the company. There I stood, staring at my cubicle. All the while, pending tasks were pressing in on my conscious mind. All this had the effect of creating a constant low-level sense of anxiety. And yet, someone, somewhere held in reserve the key tools I needed to begin work.

In keeping with my original experience at Mosaic, I soon traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia. Once in Vancouver, I climbed aboard a helicopter that rose up from the eastern shadows into the sunlight and headed west over the Strait of Georgia separating Vancouver from Vancouver Island.

Below me, the channel appeared more like a river in size and depth. Snow blanketed both banks of the channel although my attention was drawn primarily to the western bank, Vancouver Island. Unlike in Kirkland, Spring was just gaining momentum in Vancouver. Large ice floes coursed southward through the channel. And there, waist deep in icy-black water just off the western bank roiled hundreds of trumpeting and stamping elephants and giraffes. The whole scene was gripping and terrible. Their features seemed so sharp, the colors and proportions so dramatic, and their aspect or visage so intent.

Inland from the western bank, a plain stretched out for several miles leading up to some imposing peaks completely draped in snow. Few clouds marred the clear sky. For the most part, it remained clear and bright with the sun coming from a southerly angle as it might at midday during the winter. For some reason, the vividness of this scene left me with a deep impression. The colors, the animals, they all seemed so striking so tangible in an inexplicable sort of way.


As the helicopter flight continued westward we hovered lower and observed water courses meandering inland like fingers grasping at the island’s shore. On the ground below us we could see the snow melting and patches of brown surfacing. I remember approaching the rear of a large two-story frame home just inland from the shore and which was built around the turn of the 20th Century. The weather had long since stripped whatever paint had graced the walls, polishing the clapboard siding to a dull gray.

Below us, a child mechanically played or worked in the amid the two-foot snow that still blanketed the back yard of his home. Intermittent patches of icy water punctuated the snow field. Submerged below the clear water pools lay a bed of sodden wild grasses compressed from the weight of the snow.

The helicopter moved rapidly over the river and then lower to within 20 or 30 feet of the ground as we approached the child. Just north and a ways east of the house, the bank cut inland at a northwesterly angle. At about that same point and only a few feet north of where the child moved, stood an ancient Cedar completely devoid of foliage. The bleach-white skeletal remains defiantly clawed the sky. The helicopter veered right and north to miss the tree, temporarily blocking my view of the boy.

Then, just as we approached the north side of the home, I looked down to see a middle aged woman who lay almost prone on a wooden platform of sorts just off the back of the home and some fifty feet from where the child worked. While not much older than mid forties, her skin appeared so jaundiced, emaciated, and tight that she could have been mistaken for a mummified corpse.

After passing the home, the rest of the dream descended into a blurry heap. But three more scenes stand out clearly in my memory. First, we landed near a trading post on the island. I remember looking out the trading post into a sunlit yard. The sun shone so brightly that from my vantage point deep within the poorly lit room, I could only see individuals and window frames silhouetted against the bright backdrop. After that, I returned to my office in Kirkland. Dad, Carver, Ellie, Grace and I were together. The image of the elephants and giraffes stamping in left such an impression on me that I needed to show dad. But before I could show him, Carver needed a new diaper. We never found the diaper.

The dream eventually faded to a close with Dad, Ellie, Carver, Grace, and I standing on the Eastern shore of the Vancouver channel staring at the Elephants and Giraffes on the Western bank making all their commotion in the water. Behind the animals, the sun illuminated clouds and filtered down onto the snow-capped peaks below.


Now, how about endowing this dream with some meaning? Rachael pointing out that the Serengeti fauna probably suggested a connection to my current employer. Taken with the overt link to my former employer, it seems probable that this was a stage on which anxieties real, imagined, subconscious, irrational, etc. performed. Don't forget the archetypes: rivers, mountains, snow, and ice generally carry broad symbolic value. Do we have any Daniels in my audience of one? Any budding dream weavers that want to take a shot at casting light on this night vision?

A Revisionist's History: Burley

I was born in Burley, Idaho on February 11, 1977. I remember nothing of Burley. My folks ended up moving to Boise a few months following my birth—a place which resides in only the earliest of my sepia-tinged memories. Over the intervening years, my pilgrimages to and from Utah have taken me through Burley on occasion. My Burley points of contact, now some thirty years later, consist of a Burger King and a handful of worn-down truck stops.

And while I feel no palpable affinity for the place, a part of me resonates with the wide open agricultural feel of Southern Idaho. Admittedly, it isn’t difficult to stifle, gag, and hog tie that roguish romantic urge. Featureless expanses and open range have never appealed to me much. And yet, even while sitting here in this innocuous climate-controlled environment some 32 years and 300 miles away, I can almost taste the dewy alfalfa and stock-yard fragrance so characteristic of small-town Idaho.

Legend holds that my father spent at least one summer of his High School years hauling pipe over Idaho’s finest potato fields in pre-dawn chill. Perhaps that experience etched itself with testosterone-laden ink into his genetic makeup and passed to me undetected, a y-chromosome stowaway. And now, several years later, this latent ardor emerges unpredictably—rendering me momentarily wistful for a place I’ve largely visited only through a car’s windshield.

Bike of the Day: Jamis Quest

I finally did it. After two full years of research, false-starts, and saving, I finally bought a road bike I can love. In the process, I learned that I have serious issues with commitment. On Saturday, my Dad, Carver (my son), and I dropped into Velo Veloce, a local, very “snooty” bike shop in Issaquah. As we were kicking through the shop avoiding the cranky sales clerks, I stumbled on the Jamis Quest—a fairly non-descript steel bike with Reynolds 651 tubing. Being something of a steel enthusiast, I pulled the bike off the rack just for fun. Immediately, I was struck by the lack of heft. Compared to my aluminum bike at home, it felt noticeably lighter. Then I started noticing the componentry: mostly 105 with an Ultegra rear derailleur. Somewhat hesitantly I reached for the price tag. The bike was listed at a number exceeding “too much.” No surprise there. Then I noticed that the shop had discounted the price by 40%. That not only put the bike at the affordable level, it put it more or less at a price I had planned to spend on a bike last summer.


Well, we piled back into the truck and headed back to bucolic Maple Valley where I mentioned the bike to Rachael in passing. Having put up with my capricious bike tastes for years, she recognized very quickly that this was the type of bike I had been looking for at a very affordable price. She encouraged me to go back, get the stinking bike, and be done with it. I thought about it. My dad and I went for a ride in the woods, where I thought about it some more. Eventually, I slept on it. The next morning, Carver, Dad, and I hung some towel hooks for Rachael and then went back down to the shop. We walked into the shop, I pulled the bike off the rack and asked the closest sales clerk for a test ride. After the test ride, and a little “chit-chat,” I asked for a concession on pedals. He was unrelenting. No deal. So we walked out.

Back at home, we fed the kids some lunch, my folks left for Spokane, and Rachael got on the phone with her mom. Finally, I steeled my resolve, put Grace down for a nap, loaded Lydia, Ellie, and Carver into the truck and left for the shop one last time. On the way, I explained to the kids that the people at this shop did not like kids, and that they would speak unkindly to them if the girls were seen touching any of the merchandise. The girls, who like going to the bike shop, promised to hold hands and not touch anything. Carver, who is beyond reasoning with, would be forced to hold my hand the entire time. While the sales clerk rang up the Jamis, I showed the kids the $10,000 titanium and carbon bikes explaining that “those bikes cost more than our minivan. Isn’t that amazing??” We stared at a steel Waterford bike and discussed the difference between cyclocross and straight road bikes. The girls sat on the kid mountain bikes and pointed out their favorite helmets. Who says indoctrination can't be fun?

Finally, the bike was ready. We rolled it out into the lot where I let Carver and Ellie “test ride” the bike. Then we threw it in the back and headed home. When we got home, I wrenched on the bike for an hour or so swapping out the seat post and the wheel set. Then Ellie and I rode our bikes around the block.

It took me three trips to the shop over two days, but finally I was able to part with the bills. It now resides in my garage where these pictures were taken.

Bike of the Day: Pereira Cycles

While looking for new builders a year ago, I found the Pereira Cycles site. According to the site, Tony Pereira, the eponymous owner, is a tech-slump refugee turned full-time framebuilder out of Portland. The fact that he is a full-time builder of bikes says a lot about the quality of his work. But to keep things interesting, I have included an example below that speaks for itself. (Keep scrolling, there are multiple mouth-watering images.) You can find his work at http://www.pereiracycles.com/. If you’re a nut for custom-made steel bikes, check out his gallery.

Here is a TIG-welded single-speed mountain bike, but he builds road bikes as well. In fact, he has a few road bikes with some unconventional derailleur shifting mechanisms. Fascinating. I may submit one of those in a future post, so I’ll hold off for the time being.




















CHECK OUT THOSE CLEAN WELDS!


















INTERNAL CABLE ROUTING??? Wow. Notice the pear symbol on the seat tube. Classy.

Bike of the Day: DBR V-link 3.0

For today’s Bike of the Day, we’ll be branching out into my native bike territory: off-road cycling.

One day, early in the winter of 1986, my father came home from work with two 5-gallon pails in the trunk of our family's ’84 Buick Skylark. He called me into the garage to share his “surprise” with me. To keep things brief, he had the remains of a 1979 Yamaha 2-stroke 80 cc motorcycle. And when I say “remains,” I may be over-generous in my description of the state of this bike. We were dealing with a motley pile of rusting bits of aluminum, steel, and vinyl. All winter, to my displeasure, I shivered in the garage with my father as he pieced this bike back together. Eventually, after a few false starts, we got the bike to run. Something awoke within me during those first rides up in the Canyon with my dad. I began to “thirst” for what mountain biking enthusiasts refer to as “singletrack,” which the rest of us know as trails: the narrower, the better.

Due to lack of funds, I left off dirt-biking about the time I graduated from High School. Today, I satiate that thirst to “carve” an isolated section of singletrack on the back of mountain bike. For today’s bike, we will look at my first full suspension mountain bike: the DBR (“Diamond Back Racing”) V-Link 3.0. And here it is in all its primeval glory.


Specs:

1. XT rear derailleur
2. LX crankset
3. LX shifters
4. Avid 1.0 levers and brakes
5. WTB double-walled rims and tires
6. 5th Element shock
7. Marzocchi Z1 Bomber fork (one of the best forks that Marzocchi made)
8. Titec post, stem, and bar

Whenever I look at this bike, I inadvertently shiver—both out of revulsion and fondness. First, this bike is a constant reminder to me of my darker materialistic side. At the time I purchased this bike, I was finishing up my Senior year as an undergraduate. One of my three roommates, a man by the name of Mark Maher, was a mechanical engineering major with a serious lust for bikes. Between work and class, he and I would discuss biking and bike building. We even toyed with building our own full-suspension mountain bike frame from the salvaged tubing of abandoned bikes around campus. (He’ll enter our Bike of the Day chronicles again.)

At any rate, one day he came to me with a bike listing he had found—FOR ME—on the classified board of the student center on campus. As my mind was consumed with acquiring and building bikes, his passionate insistence that I owed it to myself to look at the bike easily wore down my resistance. That night I borrowed the car of a different roommate, stopped by the ATM, and foolishly withdrew the asking price. (I have since learned the error of my ways and no longer take money with me when viewing a bike.)

Even today, I can remember coasting out of the seller’s garage on the bike and sensing for the first time how it rode. Compared to my hard-tail (a bike with only front suspension), this bike felt SOLID and plush. The shifting was precise and the braking whiplash-inducing. You guessed it, I bought the bike with nary a quibble. All those years of bartering in Guatemala’s open-air markets for nothing. There I was, 22-years-old: no girl friend, no car, no computer. All I had to my name was approximately $300 (post-purchase), some second-hand clothes, and soon, two bikes. Obviously, I didn’t need a second bike. Even more damning, the bike was too large for me. It didn’t fit.

The sizing issue had some interesting consequences one of which manifested itself a few weeks later as spring broke. You have to know something about Utah winters to appreciate how I was feeling that day. We had just been through months of bitter cold, snow, and hazy gray inversions. Unlike Washington, Utah turns brown and dull in the Winter. Anyway, that day the sun was out and everything from campus to the lower foothills of the Wasatch Range immediately east of campus had turned a bright, translucent green.

As I rode through the Quad, my thoughts went to Rachael. We had met earlier that semester and being a young man in Spring, my fancy naturally turned to love--the love of something not quite as cold and unyielding as bikes). That day there were over a hundred people studying in the Quad, enjoying the sun, and milling around. In order to give vent to the rebirth I felt, I instinctively pulled back hard on the handlebars. I was in love, I was warm again, I would ‘wheelie’ through the Quad, and I didn’t care who saw me.

Generally when a bike is too large for an individual, the top tube (the bar that extends from the seatpost to the handlebars) is too long, stretching the rider out along its distance and limiting that rider’s leverage on the bike. Thus, it requires substantially more strength to wheelie a bike that is too big. To compensate I pulled with all 150 pounds of my might. But I failed to take into account the boost that infatuation would give to my otherwise underwhelming strength. And there before those hundreds of people, I went over backwards landing flat on my back nearly in the dead center of the Quad with a loud crack. The bike scooted ahead narrowly missing some pedestrians, my books scattered across the sidewalk, and a hush fell on the crowd. Heh . . .

Someone asked if I was okay.

“Oh yeah. I'm just fine.” I said through clenched teeth and a forced smile. Then I limped over to my bike, crammed my books back into my pack, and rode the rest of the way home a humbler me. Vanity is a cruel master.

A couple of months later, I tried to sell the bike to buy a wedding ring. For two weeks no one bit. Then one day I came out of class to find the bike missing. I was crushed. I was banking on the proceeds from the sale of that bike to cover my first of two installments on Rachael’s ring. The next day I mentioned the theft to my dad. My father, a life-long insurance man, pointed out that I was still covered under his homeowner’s policy. The policy had a clause that covered the replacement price of the bike less $500. After some research, I determined the bike must have been worth $1,600 new. In retrospect, I realized I undervalued the bike.

In any event, I came away with $1,100 which covered my first installment on Rachael’s ring. Today, all I have to show for the bike is my own wedding ring: a plain titanium band that the jeweler threw in when I purchased Rachael’s ring for an extra $25. Titanium may scratch, but it never bends.

Bike of the Day: Schwinn Paramount

So there’s a lot of history behind the Paramount. Legend goes (and it really has a ring of legend) that Serotta built this late 90’s Schwinn Paramount. Evidently, Serotta didn’t want the word to get out that they built something for a mainstream manufacturer so they’ve followed up every leak on the internet and tried to eliminate these leaks. As for the bike, this particular paramount frame is constructed with titanium tubing and—obviously—a heavy dose of Serotta craftsmanship.

Last year, when I was looking to upgrade my road bike I saw this bike on Craigslist. This particular version came equipped with 9-speed Ultegra componentry (my favorite). The crank was a double, even cleaner. I knew better than to let this one go. So I called the guy immediately and we ended up meeting on Mercer Island that evening. I came in the minivan with kids in tow, which actually has bearing on this story.

So the guy shows up, and I hop on the ride. The frame was low to the ground. The bike handled nimbly, just this side of twitchy. You could tell it would really rip. The seller needed money to cover rent and decided to jettison the Paramount. I hemmed and hawed and eventually decided to buy it. I knew better than to come with money (a different sad story) so I went to the bank—with the kids still in tow. At the bank, I just couldn’t bite the bullet. I kept thinking about how much kids cost and how irresponsible it would be to blow 800 bones on a bike. So I went back to the guy and said “sorry, I’m a dork. Thanks for letting me ride your bike a couple of times around the park n’ ride.” He shrugged and that was the last I ever heard of him.

Fast forward a month and a half. It’s July 11th at mile 150 of the STP. I’m lying under a tree feeling slightly nauseous. Around me are hundreds of sweaty one-day riders. And suddenly—one tree over—I see a Schwinn Paramount. I walk over to the guy and begin talking to him about the bike. Long story short, he was the guy that actually bought the bike after I walked away. I still day dream about buying the bike. But I don’t regret the decision I made . . . at least not much.

Light Rail . . . Heavy Subsidy

Here's a short snippet from an article I read yesterday. Evidently, US Census data suggests that spending on mass transit programs tends to benefit a small minority of citizens that---on the whole---overwhelmingly belong to the middle and upper-middle classes. Ironically, these programs are funded by taxes that tend to be born by everyone including the working poor.

Two pertinent segments from the article appear below:

Despite the billions in federal and state taxpayer dollars poured into mass transit programs, only 6,908,323 working Americans take advantage of the subsidized service, according to US Census Bureau data released yesterday. The agency's American Community Survey, a questionnaire mailed to three million households, found that 121,248,284 workers over the age of 16 regularly commuted to work by personal automobile or carpool last year. Despite the comparatively small number served by buses, subways and rail, the Obama Administration has made expanding mass transit a top priority.

The census survey also showed that greater numbers of the working poor used cars and carpools to get to work than transit. A total of 17 percent of transit users reported incomes over $75,000 per year in income while only 10.6 percent fell below the poverty line.

What's significant about this? As I see it, mass transit programs are political darlings, the kind of things that every politician (regardless of party) would like to claim as her own. Usually, the program is promoted as a sympathetic, far-sighted, socially responsible act. These numbers seem to suggest otherwise.

All of this begs the question: if these programs don't help the people they are intended to help, why on earth does Ray LaHood seem so intent on expanding their impact? Or, perhaps in more direct terms: if we insist on mass transit, why not ask those who use it to pay for it?

Thanks to The Newspaper.com for the lead (http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/29/2944.asp).

Bike of the Day: October 30, 2009

Wow, huh??? What a beaut.

One of the advantages or consequences (depending on your perspective) of owning a truck is that you are often called upon to help with moves, wood splitting, miscellaneous hauling, and general yard work. Every year the Boy Scouts in Maple Valley ask me to help them haul bark for a fundraising project. Last year, late in the afternoon we came to the home of a man that had four (count ‘em “four”) amazing bikes hanging in the garage. One of those bikes was the very work of art you see above. While shoveling I said something like “Wow, what an amazing bike.”

The man, a former special ops soldier, narrowed his eyes, looked at me askance, and asked softly, “You like it?”

Uh . . .

“Well, yeah,” I said. “It’s steel, Reynolds 853 no less.”

He paused. “I’ll sell it to you for $800. You sound like you would take care of it.”

I was floored. I told him that as soon as I had finished with the Boy Scouts I would be back with the bills. I ended up going back only to learn that the bike was too large. Dang. Dang. Dang.

At any rate, here are the specs:

27 speed (which I still believe is better than 30)
2003 Ultegra componentry (my favorite year of Shimano's Ultegra and XT componentry)

1. Ultegra double crankset

2. Ultegra 9-speed shifters

3. Ultegra rear derailleur

Reynolds 853 steel tubing (853 is Reynolds’ highest end tubing)

On my mind late on October 29th

I have included below what I felt was one of the most memorable statements from the October 2009 Semiannual General Conference. Elder D. Todd Christofferson made the statment, and he quoted a columnist published in the Deseret News by the name of Walter Williams.

Self-discipline has eroded and societies are left to try to maintain order and civility by compulsion. The lack of internal control by individuals breeds external control by governments. One columnist observed that “gentlemanly behavior [for example, once] protected women from coarse behavior. Today, we expect sexual harassment laws to restrain coarse behavior. . . .

“Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.”