Project: bike rack

After two years of thinking about it, two months of procrastinating doing anything with it, and two weeks of building it, my bike rack is done. Now I can store up to five bikes in one corner of my apartment. Also, I proved that I can make something useful out of real materials, not just out of abstract sequences of 1's and 0's.

The rack is of my own design and meets the following requirements:

• The rack shall stand freely—no holes in any walls, no leaning against the wall.
• The rack shall be compact and fit within a corner of my apartment. (Actual dimensions: 3ft x 4ft x 8ft)
• The rack shall be capable of being taken apart and put back together.

Of course, there are the obvious requirements, too, such as not crumpling and thus not damaging a few thousands dollars worth of bikes.

Overall, the rack works well. The bikes are staggered in height so that five bikes fit in four feet of width. Getting a bike in and out of the rack is no harder than what I did before having the rack, which entailed maneuvering bikes stacked against each other, all leaning against a wall. Now, with the rack, I can retrieve any one bike irrespective of the others.

There's a problem with the rack, however, and that's that it leans. This is because the combined weight of the bicycles—100 to 150 pounds when the rack is fully loaded—pulls the rack forward. The five vertical, weight-bearing 2x4's bend under that forward pull. But the rack feels sturdy, so I think this is only a cosmetic issue. As far as I can tell, any alternative design that wouldn't lean and would fulfill the freestanding requirement would require more wood—more joints, more nuts and bolts, more work. Possibly I would have been better off designing the rack to lean against the wall. However, the best solution, for those who own the walls they live in, is to drill the bike-hanging hooks directly into the wall's studs and be done with it.

But I'm happy with the rack. I could have bought something pre-made and machine-precise, and maybe that would have been cheaper and certainly it would have been easier, but if I had pursued that route I wouldn't have learned as much as I did making my rack.

This one's about the weather

It's that time of year again: monsoon season is setting in. Temperatures are high; the dew point is inching up: and each evening the buildings, roads, and sidewalks belch their daily heat into the warm city air—air trapped between mountains and with nowhere to escape. It's hot and getting hotter.

Not counting my first five years, I've lived only in places where summer is the dreaded season. This is truer in Houston than in Phoenix; Houston summers are tougher and last a month or two longer. (Clearly I'm not talking about calendar summers here.) But in both places—and San Antonio, where I lived a couple of summers—spring and fall have the easiest weather, the golden mean between the extremes. I'm interested to know what life is like someplace where the extreme itself is golden, where summer has the easiest weather.

Though, in three months, I'll go back to not caring.

Nothing to get cranky about

For about an hour this morning, only one of the four bicycles I own was in working condition. This was down from two the hour before because I ripped off the left crank during the last few miles of this morning's ride. After failing to reattach the crank using a tiny Allen wrench I borrowed from a passerby cyclist, and after deciding not to dandy-horse it home the six or sever miles remaining, I phoned Laura for a rescue. But other than that the ride was a good one.

Unlike that time I used sheer herculean lower body strength to rip apart a chainring on my fixed-gear Schwinn, this morning's bike destruction was due to negligence. I started my ride (and Tuesday's ride) knowing that the crank bolt had fallen out sometime on my Sunday ride. The only things keeping the crank attached to the bottom bracket were the two hex bolts on the cranks—I recommended against riding a bike like this. Those two hex bolts held for eighty miles or so before letting go and stranding me. Fortunately, neither I nor the bike incurred any permanent damage, as far as I know.

What about my other two non-working bikes, the ones that weren't working at the start of the day? One is the Schwinn I wrecked. The other is a used road bike I bought off Craigslist to replace the Schwinn. It's a sun-faded and slightly rusted Benotto 10-speed I think I can make into a working beater bike suitable for leaving locked up in public places. It's non-working because it's missing a chain, tires, tubes, and rim tape. After acquiring rim tape today (when I picked up the new crank bolt at the nearby bike shop), I'm now ready to get the Benotto cruising.

Hopefully, I'll soon be up (and down) to three-out-of-three working bikes.

Free-camping

A little over a year ago, when Laura and I traveled to Kansas to attend a wedding, we agreed to split rental car fees with four of Laura's friends who were also flying in town for the wedding. It was a smart plan, but it had a catch: our flight arrived late at night; their flights all arrived the next morning.

Where do we sleep?

How about in the airport?

Is that allowed?

I think it is. But we'll find a secluded spot in case it isn't.

I enjoy sleeping in airports and in pullouts off unpaved forest roads and just about anywhere that's free. After doing so, I awake the next morning pleased with having saved $50 or so by avoiding hotels and motels.

In addition to saving money, sleeping out gives me the thrill of meeting a challenge, of making myself safe even though I go unconscious for the night and am my most vulnerable. Even before falling asleep in that airport a year ago, on the second floor in front of some administration offices, Laura and I scouted the airport and decided upon the least probable spot we'd be disturbed. All night the PA system blared messages for the cleanup and maintenance crews, and not until we awoke the next morning to the sounds of early morning travelers did we know how it would turn out. (By the way, always pack earplugs when you travel.) I'm lucky that Laura mostly agrees with me on my affinity for sleeping out. Mostly agrees.

I like having a bed and a pillow.

You have a blanket in your backpack and your stuff sack of clothes functions as a pillow.

On our recent California trip, we avoided the hotels and motels altogether, splurging only twice by spending the night at paid-for campgrounds. We free-camped the other nights—in the barren Nevada desert; at the commune in Northern California; in Death Valley National Park; and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, waiting for the next morning to replace a blown-out tire. It wasn't glamorous, but it was adventurous. (By the way, don't leave on a road trip with bald tires.)

Have crutch, will travel

Tomorrow Laura and I will begin our California road trip. Our one goal for the trip is to visit Laura's sister, who lives in a commune in the northern part of the state. Beyond that one goal, we have little planned for several of the trip's days, and nothing is definite. But I think we'll have no problem finding good places to be and worthwhile stuff to do; today Laura checked out from the library a few California travel books, and I'm ready to decompress into unemployment and self-imposed structure.

However, I'd be lying if I said I was 100% excited about the trip and could think of nothing else I'd rather do. Many people wouldn't feel this way if they were leaving for a carefree road trip the next day. For them, traveling is an end in itself and what Laura and I will be doing for the next week-and-a-half is the Good Life.

But the truth is I dislike traveling. My attitude towards it is like what many people feel towards exercising: when I do it it's because it's good for me, but most of the time it feels like a chore. I rarely feel that way towards exercise, but regarding travel it's the exception that I'd not prefer to do something else. I'd prefer to do my routine at home.

It's taken me a long time to come to terms with disliking traveling. Our society tries hard to convince people to be dissatisfied with their day-to-day circumstances—satisfied people are less inclined to spend their money—and what better exemplifies day-to-day dissatisfaction than believing you're better off some place other than home? That's the view I'd like to take—that those of us who prefer to stay put are somehow more satisfied with our lives—but probably it's false. I dislike traveling because I feel a compulsion to know in advance what my week will entail and to have that week go a lot like the previous week. Compulsion has little if anything to do with satisfaction.

Just as it's taken me a long time to come to terms with disliking traveling, it's taken me a long time to accept that routine is a crutch, a weakness—another comfort zone I should exit once in a while. Having a routine is a luxury of normality, and normality is a luxury of prosperity. Only a prosperous person—in the broad sense including all people of the world—can afford to know in advance how his or her week will go. Impoverished people must be more adaptable, more willing to bend to unforeseen opportunities and risks as they present themselves. For such people, most weeks may pass unchanged from the one that preceded it, but such people must be ready to modify themselves according to changes in their environment rather than the other way around.

So I look at Laura's and my upcoming California road trip as an important opportunity for me to walk awhile without a crutch—to go without the comfort of knowing in advance how things will turn out. Who knows? Perhaps someday such opportunities will be forced upon all of us.

* * *

I figure I should embrace my lack of a routine while on the road, and thus I won't be blogging. I expect my next blog post will be on June 20.

I, Schwinn

We all die eventually, but somehow I figured I was a survivor and would live to be a hundred. I didn't have any rational basis for thinking this; it just seemed right. Is that hubris? Did thinking this way let me take life for granted? I don't know.

Now, young in years but old before my time, I'm broken and useless. What little I still own will soon be taken from me, and I'll be tossed out with the garbage. How quickly things can change.

I was never much for looking into the past, and I don't like to talk about the years before I moved to Phoenix. Only through the nostalgia of youth can I say those were happy times. In truth they were unproductive years of neglect and unhealthy want. But Phoenix! The Valley of the Sun. How that move changed me! How free I became! How happy I was exploring the city and learning new routes. Everyday it seems I went someplace new. I was doing what I had always wanted to do. Because of that I can say that I got to live—if only for a short while.

Of course, the initial exhilaration of new settings wore off in time, and my joyful explorations ebbed into steady routine. My body began failing me—in small ways at first, a spoke here, a new chain there. I could no longer deny I wasn't the spry youth I once was. Aging causes some of us to do stupid things. In hindsight I realize the surgery was a mistake. Keep the body God gave you—that's the lesson I learned. But I gave in to impulse and went under the wrench. I trimmed down, lost the gears and the free-spin hub, and proudly showed off my mid-life crisis as a fixie. Graceless aging is all it ever was, though.

Some decisions can't be taken back—especially when your original guts end up in a landfill far away. And it's not that I was useless. Not yet anyway. But life can be awfully short, and it can be taken from you in an instant. That's another lesson—but one that's hard to learn before it's too late. But I learned it. Now I'm broken and useless and ready to be tossed out with the garbage. Maybe I'll finally be rejoined with my dérailleurs and shifters and rear brake in the landfill?