Archive for July, 2010

Mike meets me at the security door out front with handshakes and congratulations and boy are the animals going to be happy to see you.

He is right.

It takes a half a second after he opens the door to the loft, but I hear them coming before I see them tearing around the corner, feet scratching the polished concrete floor. They haven’t seen me since they moved from Los Angeles to Oakland months ago, and they are a mass of tails and tongues and barks and happy-to-see-you-ness.

It’s a happy bunch of dogs in a happy home and I’ve seen this greeting from Murphy and Chuck before. It’s “Hey look! A new person, let’s play!” behavior, and I like and appreciate it, but I know it really has little to do with me. Bully is different, I’ve seen his normal level of new person happy before but today he seems actually happy to see me specifically. I laugh while he dances and barks and acts like Bully, but even more Bully than usual.

“Hi Chip!” Dani walks around the corner followed by two indifferent cats – Goose and Cole – and there are more hugs and happy-to-see-yous and then suddenly we are in a funky bar downing Manhattans and martinis and Long Island Iced Teas and eating massive hamburgers covered with thick slabs of bacon.

It’s good to travel. It’s good to see new places and new people and new things, but it’s also good to stop and visit friends you know and people who are happy you are there, not because you are new or special or different, but because you are you, and because you showed up.

Later, back at the house, I sit on the couch and listen to the dogs make dog sounds while they eat their dinner. Bully walks over and puts his head on my lap and leaves a giant smear of drool and bits of food and I scratch his ears anyway because he’s a good dog, and he recognized me.

July 31: Swings

At a little park where we camped in Scipio, Utah. The swings were nearly as foreboding as the picture would suggest. they’re just swings, in a nice park, with a vagrant sleeping on the picnic table.

July 30: Dunes |Highway 50, Utah

There are weird places like this all through the west, where the prevailing winds pick up little pieces from all the mountains in the surrounding ranges and drop them in a pile all int eh same place. I rounded a bend through on highway 50 through the grassy farmland of western Utah and stumbled upon maybe 5 acres of mini-dunes, then it was back to grass and cows.

-July 29: Ghost House
Riding along in Western Utah, there are dozens of these places dotting the landscape. I was fortunate to be there early in the day when the light was still nice.

“They only live for about a month in the summer.” says the beekeeper. “They live longer in the winter, but in the summer the poor girls literally work themselves to death.”
“The girls?” I ask.
“Yeah, worker bees are always female. They have different jobs depending on how old they are, but all the workers are girls.”
“What about the boy bees?”
“Humph” sniffs the beekeeper. “They don’t do anything except wait to have sex with the queen.”

The beekeeper moves around the boxes that make up each hive, checking for honey and brood (baby bees). My job is to work the smoker and make sure to keep the bees calm and mellow while she works.

I get distracted taking pictures and let the smoker die three times before the beekeeper tells me to just forget it.

I am not a good worker bee.

Fortunately, the beekeeper is patient, and comes up with a new job for me. “Here, lift up these two frame boxes so I can check to see if we have a new queen in this hive yet.” I life the heavy boxes and c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y move them to the table. It’s easy to be focused when you are holding a big wooden crate with 60,000 buzzing bees in it.

The beekeeper has not always been a beekeeper. She went to photography school and got an internship retouching photos at a magazine that specializes in the “west coast lifestyle” – gardening, outdoor living, and the like, and when the internship was over she turned it into a full time job.

The magazines headquarters is a beautiful sprawling complex of flower beds, gardens, test kitchens and indoor and outdoor living areas. Everyone who works for the magazine also has the opportunity to help out in one of the garden areas, and when they decided to add beehives she volunteered to work with them and became the beekeeper.

She still has her ‘real’ job – retouching images and prepping them for the print version of the magazine. She has a nice cubicle, great co-workers and an empowering boss. It’s a good gig, but she really comes alive when she is working with ‘her girls’. Working with multiple hives over the past three years, she has gone from complete novice to professional beekeeper.

Standing by the hives she takes off one of her heavy work gloves and sticks a finger into a frame crawling with buzzing bees. She pulls her hand back and a bee immediately lands on her outstretched finger and starts to eat the honey. The Beekeeper laughs. “See, they won’t sting you unless they feel threatened, they just want to eat.”

The beekeeper like both of her jobs for their unique challenges and rewards and she hope that she can keep both of them for a while despite the obstacles presented by things like ‘new media’ and ‘colony collapse disorder’. “Being a beekeeper isn’t a good full time career” she explains, “unless you want to make a career out of being poor. But she doesn’t sound entirely convinced that poverty and bees have to travel hand in hand, and her eyes light up when she talks about doing more bee work.

After lunch, I ride Big Jim north towards Oakland, and I think about my friend the beekeeper and how happy she seems with her life and her jobs and her bees. I remember how excited she was when she first got her internship, and how hard she worked to turn it into a job. I remember her plans and how she thought her career would go, and how the bees seem to have thrown a happily unexpected twist into her plan. I think about how roads don’t always lead where we think they will even when we think we have thought of everything and that sometimes even when you aren’t looking for the perfect thing, the perfect thing comes along and find you anyway.

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July 28: Approved ATV Route

I was riding along a nice frontage road – wide, smooth, no traffic – when suddenly the tarmac turned into gravel. Then it started climbing. Eventually we crested a nice hill and started a blazing descent at thirty miles an hour around blind corners – brakes were useless. I hoped my tires would hold. I never did see any cows on ATVs though.

July 27: Ryan and Ryan

One of the cool things about highway 50 has been its popularity with cyclists. Shopkeepers and townspeople expect to see people on bikes and go out of their way to help us and make sure that everyone knows where to camp, find some food, etc. I ran into Ryan and Ryan just inside Utah. They left Chicago a couple of months ago and are just a few weeks from finishing their trip to San Francisco. They were able to pass on some tips on getting through Utah, and I was able to tell them about highway fifty and what to expect in Nevada.

July 26: Sacramento River

July 25: Truck and Garage | Placerville, CA

July 24: I Survived | Eureka, NV
Well I almost have anyway. I should be crossing the Nevada/Utah State line sometime today.

July 23: Priorities | Lake Tahoe, California

July 21: Sleeping Dragon | Echo Lake, California

I’m running behind schedule as usual but thought I’d post a quick overview of the next few days. Highway 50 runs pretty much through the middle of Nevada, there are a few small towns and shops along the way but for the most part it is just empty highway through the desert. Its a great test – especially for a solo rider, and it will take about a week to cover it all. I may or may not be able to update the blog while I’m out as I don’t know what sort of wireless coverage I’ll have access to. I’m anticipating a beautiful week of quiet, heat, big sky, and some hills. Once I get into Utah I should be able to find a McDonalds and let you know how it went. Until then…

“Hey bro, does this road loop back around to your place or something?” I had arrived in Santa Cruz after an easy 45 mile spin from Salinas, (Where I took a much needed extra day off to check out the town and sleep) and my host suggested we go for a quick ride to check out the coast. He said it would be a thirty minute ride, it had already been 45.

“Jake!  Hold up.” I yelled again to the figure on the mountain bike half a block ahead of me.
“Yeah, man, what’s up?”
“Does this loop back around to your place?”
“No, we’ll go back the way we came, but I know a different way too if you want to check out the town.”
“You know we’re about 12 miles into this and I already did 45 today…”
“Really? Twelve? Man I had no idea, I just kinda ride ya know. Yeah we can head back if you want to – hey you want to stop for ice cream? I know this bitchin place, follow me.” And he was off like a shot, the bent back wheel on his department store mountain bike wobbling furiously as he darted in and out of traffic.
“Fuckin cycle salmon” I laughed to myself as he rode up the wrong side of the street. “Dude!” I yelled again. “You’re gonna die!” but he was already gone around a corner and I had to shift down and blow through the light to catch up.

The ice cream was worth it.

July 20: Nevada

Really I’m fine. I had a great day off in Lake Tahoe and I’m ready to roll. I’ll be a bit busy with my Nevada project for the next few days but will catch up with you in a week or so.