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From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Mon Jan 7 17:30:07 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: chapter-29
KINETIC MADNESS, 1987
by Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
Eureka, CA; 12,257 miles.
May 25, 1987
Eureka? Again? Is this a time-warp? If you've been following these
tales for any time at all, you know we spent five weeks here over the winter...
and you also know that we couldn't have possibly pedaled back up the coast as
fast as the date on this column would suggest.
Well, we still have the van. Though vaguely embarrassing for a die-hard
long-distance cyclist, it offers considerable flexibility... especially when it
comes to high-speed spatial relocation for events like the 14th Annual World
Championship Great Arcata-to-Ferndale Cross-Country Kinetic Sculpture Race.
We threw everything in the van, turned a key, sat for a few hours, then
abruptly found ourselves in Chico -- out in the flat farmlands of a whole
different California. Not even unpacking the bikes, we dropped off the boxed
trappings of our Palo Alto layover, visited with the publisher of the Journal
of High Treknowledgy (RAY- ROLLS on GEnie), and hit the road again, winding
along route 299 until -- surprise -- we were in Eureka. This is a maddening
way to travel: too fast. The world drifts by, much too easily, the hills so
smooth that hardly a drop of sweat rises between sea level and 3,000 feet. No
sense of transition zones, no subtle cultural shifts... not even any of those
invigorating moments of panic as logging trucks crowd you to the cliff-edge...
So here we are in Eureka again, complete with bona fide press passes
emblazoned with the sacred kinetic chicken icon. The rest of this chapter will
be written at odd moments, in the tent and on beaches, in restaurants and on
the bike, whenever the swirl of events threatens to overflow the looniness
buffer...
* * *
It's midnight, twelve hours until the 1987 field of kinetic sculptures
explodes from the Arcata plaza in their annual quest for glory. The frenzy is
tangible, the air thick with the fumes of last- minute epoxies and paints. All
over Humboldt County, exhausted builders are oiling chains, attaching flotation
gear, touching up paint jobs, and tweaking their baroque mechanisms of brass
and fiberglass.
In Duane Flatmo's garage shop, the team works in a haze of sleep
deprivation and hastily-gulped snacks. Paint-speckled torn sweatshirts.
Grizzled chins. Litter of Budweiser cans, Calistoga bottles, and sculpture
materials -- a confusing detritus indeed. Gleaming unnaturally amidst the
clutter and filth is the Science Mobile: a grinning bulbous three-wheeled fish
with two seats, two gear trains, a working mouth, tractor-like wheels with
detachable paddles, headlights... and an oddly coherent overall motif of
surrealistic folk art, carnival baroque, and a crazy, dreamlike extrapolation
of 50's art nouveau with a touch of alien-tech.
Elsewhere, in a mad, sordid tangle of machinery on the waterfront, a dozen
or more people struggle with two other machines. June Moxon's all-woman team
fashions a gaint pink high-heeled shoe around a well-designed mega-tricycle
with hydraulic disc brakes; Ken Beidleman's crew debugs the rudder control
linkage and works on final aesthetics of the synthesizer-equipped Bionic Blue
Coach. The scene is repeated, with madness the common theme, in some 40 other
garages.
Yes, it's Kinetic Eve, and for once my compu-bike is in the background.
This weekend I plan to be audience instead of show, and the feeling is deeply
refreshing.
* * *
Day 1. I hear rumors there's another race going on today -- something
having to do with Indianapolis and fast cars. Sounds rather boring. I'm
trudging instead over dunes of ankle-deep sand, my bike in the care of the
Army, my binoculars trained on distant colorful specks being pushed, dragged,
or pedaled slowly along the beach.
Two thousand miles east, hard-core muscle cars roar in a hydrocarbon haze
around a monotonous oval track while thousands of race fans secretly wish for
accidents. Here in Humboldt, the costumed victims of kinetic fever pedal their
homebrew machines over a 38-mile course of land, sand, sea, and mud. After a
noon LeMans start in Arcata, 43 contraptions have come here to Dead-man's Drop
-- where loose sand and gravity conspire to bring all but the most determined
racers to a frustrating halt.
The sight is at once inspiring and ludicrous. Inching painfully up slopes
that are exhausting on FOOT, the biomechanical absurdities struggle to the top.
A giant conestoga wagon, complete with copper pots. A tin lizzie. A
people-powered bus weighing one ton. A mini starship enterprise. A taco. The
Rhino, last year's winner. A host of fanciful yet functional machines, and
many that are one or the other but not both. And, of course, the Science
Mobile, the Heel-a- copter, and the Blue Coach, creations of our Eureka
friends.
To "ace" this race, riders have to complete the course under their own
power with no pushing... so the wheels sink in; the riders sweat and grunt;
rhythmic pedal thrusts yield tiny, incremental gains. All around them is
confusion: the whoops and cheers of the crowd, the relentless buzz of
motorized dune machines (that's cheating...), the urging of pit crews, and a
whole bevy of race officials timing, judging, and carefully scrutinizing
would-be aces.
Top of the Drop: they stop, plop, pop a Calistoga top, mop off the sweat
and relax, staring nervously down a hundred or so feet of 50% grade ending in a
sharp turn between two hard trees. The crowd's tension is tangible; the Army
waves them back to clear the course. Some teams plunge downward with only a
deep breath to reveal their fear; first-timers pause on the precipice and
mutter something about being suicide, then release the brakes with an shout and
give themselves over to gravity. The crowd closes in behind and watches,
anxious and wide-eyed... doubtless with a touch of the same morbid excitement
that energizes the Indy crowd. Nobody gets hurt, but everybody experiences the
mad rush of adrenalin, that oh-God-I-must- be-crazy moment of pure terror when
you let go of the strut and watch the plane fly away without you.
* * *
Sunday night, Table Bluff. Another beery event. I sit in my tent as the
fabric around me billows in chill evening breeze, the rain mercifully past.
Outside, in all directions, a party rages on -- fueled by an open bar,
driftwood fires, and the relentless enthusiasm of this playful microculture.
Yes, it has been quite a night. On a windswept dune the banquet was laid,
a gift from Blue Coach sponsor Fred Deo: candelabras, linen tablecloths, fine
china, champagne, a crew of eight, and a spread of robust delicacies far
removed from the usual camp fare. Deviled eggs with caviar. Crab Louie. Peel
'n eat shrimp. Pickled okra. Exotic salads, artichoke hearts, and the
requisite assortment of cakes. All this naturally spawned no end of toasts and
banter, as over 50 of us sat in the cold drizzle, folding chairs sunk to their
cross-members in soft sand, the violent appetites of hard miles the
irresistable force that easily conquered plates piled high with exquisitely
movable objects.
Ah, camp cooking.
All this followed day 2 of the race. At 8 AM, the sculptures began
hitting Humboldt Bay...
Pausing long enough to check their flotation and propulsion systems, the
riders ran the twin gauntlets of amplified razzing by The Great Razooly and the
relentless press of the crowd. Then... down the ramp and <splash!> into the
Bay. At this point, subtle differences in machine design philosophy became as
obvious as they had been on the loose, sucking sand of Dead-man's Drop. Some
smoothly took to the water, kicked up a mini rooster-tail from their
paddlewheels, and easily made the 2-mile crossing to Table Bluff. Others
floundered as their drive systems tangled with seaweed; still others discovered
fundamental flaws with untested last-minute flotation apparatus and began the
slow, depressing process of sinking. The unlucky were towed ignominiously
across the bay, while others made the trek in an hour or so and emerged amid
cheers on the other side.
I went around the long way, over the hills, pedaling with Maggie and the
trailer-borne trappings of our life. Occasionally, groups of spectators would
shout: "Hey! You're going the wrong way!" To further confuse these
less-perceptive onlookers, I masking-taped a thin strip of styrofoam on my
fairing and told them it was flotation gear...
The evening beach party grew boisterous, with a whole population of
crazies gathered around the driftwood fire in this tent city, swapping kinetic
tales and generally whooping it up. But strange machines lurked in the dunes
to surprise the unwary -- I crawled wobbly from my tent in the middle of the
night and came face-to-face with a giant blue dragon, luminous in the
smoke-diffused glow of a dozen campfires.
* * *
Day 3. This IS a normal Monday morning, isn't it? I awoke to the patter
of rain on the megatent, started coffee, and listened to the hungover grumbling
stirs of the kinetic yankees as they blinked away the grit of a too-short night
on a too-lumpy dune. Cold, windy rain. Greasy hands numbly tweaking black,
water-beaded drive components. Forced grins, the camaraderie a dim shadow of
their earlier exuberance.
One by one, leaving tractor tracks in the wet sand, they rolled off into
the murk, bound for Drizzle Point, two crossings of the Eel River, and the
infamous Slimy Slope that greets the first arrivals with mere mud and torments
latecomers with the deep mucus of well- churned, organically rich swampland.
But I managed to miss that part. We dozed in the rain until the dunes
were vacant and only the smoldering campfires and logistically detailed 2-meter
net traffic remained as evidence of our friends' 3- day ordeal. For the
glory...
* * *
So. Here we are, again in Eureka, in the home of Duane and Micki as if
the past 5 months never happened. Only now, the last set of bike problems has
been replaced by a new set, and out there on the street is the brown van with
WORDY license plate -- part nemesis, part convenience. We have complete
freedom of choice now: there's no compelling reason to drive south and leave
from the Bay Area... nor do I feel like pedaling away from here (with 150 miles
of narrow, winding, logger-infested road between Eureka and the next major
town).
So maybe we'll drive to Seattle and head east into the Canadian Rockies.
Or maybe we'll drive around and do show-n-tells for our equipment sponsors
until Learned Infuriation gets my long-overdue book printed and renders all
this media coverage useful. Hell, maybe we'll rent a house and build a kinetic
sculpture, surviving on odd jobs and long-distance freelancing in this land of
faltering economy in our own quest for glory. Or maybe we'll... well, who
knows. I'll tell you after we do it.
I suppose too many options are better than too few, though sometimes I
envy those who don't spend part of every day grappling with trade-offs.
Off to bed. We're all suffering from PKSD (Post-Kinetic Stress Disorder),
and all this talk of pedaling wipes me out.