High Desert, Shallow Needs

I am a writer. That's my calling. I write fiction and these articles. I don't write fiction often anymore, but I used to do my college homework, then spend the next 4 hours writing a chapter for my latest book. I did that for years till college ended and the urge to write went away. I would have kept at it if I'd figured out how to get PAID to write, but the paper-based publishing industry in New York? They're self defeating jackasses who despise and act like French waiters to writers they depend on for something to publish. No writers means no publishing. When e-publishing became a thing I did it, of course I put it on the Web before you could charge for that so I'll never get paid for what I already wrote. I would have to write new things. Book publishers deserve to suffer, and they do. E-pub just needs a server, not a printing press in Korea or 2 years of excuses. E-pub is instantaneous. They mocked me when I told them that. Turns out I was right. Music downloads well exceed CD sales. Web pages have done a good job killing magazines. Novels are written and published, often free, online. Who needs print anymore? Besides, $3000 royalty advance divided by 2 years of labor writing and trying to get it published is a tenth of a cent an hour. Who works for that? How dare the industry claim they're enriching writers? Its utter BS. So to hell with them. This is why writing is a Calling, not a Career. It doesn't pay.

I am also a geologist. Even though I have never worked as one, though I have worked as a cartographer, just not a geologist. I would still love to work as a geologist. I am a Lumper, not a Splitter, so I prefer an overview of what I'm looking at rather than infinite division, a reason why splitters get jobs in research and lumpers don't. In the right circumstances, I would work as a geologist even when I'm old and grey. I hate the sea, I love the deserts. I like seafood, but I also like steak and the smell of sagebrush and trout caught in a trickling stream flowing out of the eastern Sierras. Obviously, this means 395 (Hwy 395) is the place for me. I like June Lake and Bishop best. Those are beautiful places, with fantastic views, good fishing, and very peaceful. The tourists come cycling through on weekends or during holiday weeks, mostly up from LA. The air is clean in Bishop, and its got 13,000 high mountains on either side, so when the sun sets, it doesn't get dark for a couple more hours and you can watch the shadow climb up White Mountain to its 14,028 foot peak, capped by snow even in the summer.

In Big Pine, the next small town south of Bishop, there's a turnoff for the pass to the East, Westgaard, which at the top of the pass has a turnoff to the north which climbs to 10,000 feet to reach the Bristlecone Pine Forest, the oldest living things on Earth. The Methusaleh Tree was accidentally killed by a Botany PhD student who was taking a core sample. He drilled through the only living part of the tree. 5,000 years killed by arrogance and ignorance. He really should have known better. The trees are ancient because they are in really poor soil and get very little rain, so they evolved to just barely cling to life on top of that mountain ridge, overlooking some important and spectacular geology in Deep Springs Valley, to the Southeast.

It was in Westgaard Pass that I began to envy motorcyclists. I saw a bevy of young men on Ninja sport bikes racing up the pass, weaving through the S-turns in primary colors, buzzing merrily, and down the far side where they clearly hit 100 mph on the straight, heading for the Nevada border. Beautiful. A 600cc inline 4 Ninja is a race bike with just the right amount of power to weight ratio to haul a normal sized man, my size, to faster than he'd ever think possible on 2 wheels. It was seeing this, back in college while hauling a trailer full of camping gear and food for a geology field trip I was cooking for, that I came to understand why people ride dangerous motorcycles and what they see in it. I have since refined that interest to Vintage bikes, as I prefer to go faster than a bicycle but slower than a race bike because when you go fast, you don't see much more than the road in front of you. I doubt those young men even noticed the Poleta Folds they tore past, or realized they missed the turnoff for the oldest trees in the world. They were in a hurry to keep the adrenaline going. Understanding that I like the scenery is why I later realized that a scooter or a vintage bike was the answer for me.

Later I found out the Routing Problem, in that most of the Rides you can take require you to either get on and off the freeway, needing 70 mph minimum or be killed, or you have to go WAY out of your way to get around it. Up here in the Sierras, its hard to get around I-80. The sections of Old Hwy 40 was broken, and there are miles where you better be fast or you get dead from the person behind you running you down. This means a tiny 250 cc bike isn't good enough for many rides. Around here, I need a 500cc bike to climb highway 20 and then I-80 so I can get to Truckee and the many turnoffs. This is certainly possible. The new Honda CBR500F would do that just fine. And its got enough cowlings to warp the wind for stability through the fast bits. Probably. The wind does GUST hard through Donner Pass and the highway tends to funnel the gusts to the point that it can be interesting in a car with proper aerodynamics. It might be dangerous on a bike. Not that I need a new bike to climb the mountain or maintain proper speed on I-80. Any older and cheaper 600cc or 750cc bike you can think of would also work. The downside with fast bikes is you HAVE TO go farther to find the peaceful place in your mind from moving. I have noticed that about motorcyclists. They ride at the speed the bike can do till they're tired and exhausted, physically. Then they stop, get a room and a beer and a meal and have some laughs. Get up in the morning, get a leisurely breakfast and roar home again, perhaps a bit slower. That's why the Harley riders roll into town and park on Broad Street. Mixing with the Hipsters, the Hippies, and the Junkies.

The woman I wanted to hike with at work is pretty busy. Nicole hasn't had any time on the weekends so we haven't hiked yet. I suspect raising a child pretty well ruins any hope of time for yourself. While I was asking the generalized question of "Are we Hipsters?" of my coworkers, she denied this. Despite tattoos and weird vehicles, a high heel shoe collection in the dozens, she's working two jobs and saving for retirement aggressively, and owns land in Hawaii. Land she plans to build her retirement home on someday. I hope that works out for her. Hawaii is expensive, but if you're perpetually cold like she is, its a good place to stay warm. Post-oil, Hawaii will have a serious population crash, and its far enough off the beaten track it needs to farm its food supply or perish like Easter Island. She's lived in Hawaii before so its probably a great place for her. She asked our coworker to help fix her daughter's bike, so perhaps she and her daughter will go up to Truckee River like I did with Dad last weekend. I hope she has a good time. I offered to sell her the spare mountain bike. Its not fancy or light, but it is cheap and has a full suspension. She could ride with her daughter and not have to make excuses. For someone who exercises as much as she does, that would make sense.

I am not particularly cold, and I can take the heat, dry heat, the cold of frosty mountain mornings, and the altitude, and the dust doesn't bother me. I like the sharp dry air, and the chilly wet air. I like trout and sagebrush and I'm not intimidated by the tiny high desert rattlesnakes that look like 7 inch worms. Allegedly they get bigger but I've never seen one. I'd retire to Bishop if I could. They have really nice bungalows in town which are perfect for my needs and if I get an Enduro bike to putter around on the dirt roads running everywhere, I have it covered. Its not a completely rational place to live, being loved by Angelinos and ignored by NorCal since its on 395 far south of Carson City and the Walker River, so too far for a NorCal vacationer. If the hurricanes come back, there will be a lot more summer rain falling in the desert, including there, and the extra water will make the place bloom again. I'd love to see those dry lakes stay wet. Eventually all that salt will dissolve. It has nowhere to go, true, being internal drainage in the Great Basin, but sometimes there's a downstream, and it might end up in LA, which would make me laugh pretty hard.

My new coworker Kate likes hiking too. "Who doesn't?" she asked. Good question. Kate is working hard to find a way to use her degree, a Masters in International Marketing. This is tricky since our job only really sells domestically, to rich hippies and shop keepers smart enough to know that good smells make window shoppers come in and buy something. Hey, it works. The rich hippies are more of a mystery. Why do they exist? And for how long, since hippies are the very definition of Irrational. The Hipsters are more rational than hippies, and hipster priorities are codepency and trust funds, followed by rejection of solutions in favor of looking different. They do have upsides. They are re-examining old technology, like a sort of low tech steampunk with basic mechanical and electrical ability. They're history rhyming rather than repeating. Cyberpunks like me refused labels too, 20 years ago.

I need new hiking boots. My $30 hiking shoes from last October are wearing out pretty bad, mostly on the inside. Laces, linings. Replacement is not expensive. Maybe Saturday I'll do that. I haven't asked yet, but perhaps Kate will have more time to actually hike rather than vague promises.

I've asked her what she wants to do with her Masters degree. Kate wants to farm. Wants to buy land and farm. Thinks California is too expensive for that. She may be right, but I think the decision is hasty. The thing about farming is there's many places to do it, and many techniques and crops you can grow that will pay the bills. Its all about inputs and yields, and not overwhelming your time with stuff that doesn't pay. Doing the math, and leaving a margin for unexpected problems, is important. Getting off the beaten track, and having either irrigation rights or a well or both, those are key. Soil can be improved. And there are crops to grow while that happens too. Eventually California is going to be mostly farms, like England. We'll use our water over and over, and purify it each time, before releasing it to the sea. The impurities will be sold too. Eventually we'll have cheap desalination and water pumps to recharge our aquifers and provide for coastal irrigation for farms there too. Farming has a bright future here. The questions are how do you do it without going bankrupt, and how do you grow crops without taking hard losses sometimes. Not easy questions to answer. Not at all. Someday there will be mining operations pulling the Phosphorus from the mud below the Mississippi river in the Gulf of Mexico. Mining mud. Crucial for life, mud. Without phosphorus we die. Adenosine Tri Phosphate is our energy. Calcium Phosphate is our bones. So yeah, mining the mud is a career path someday. The upside of desalination is we can pull the phosphorus from sea water too.

Kate got her bike because she was thinking of biking down the mountain from Cedar Ridge to work, similar to my own commute just from the South rather than North. Same elevation change too. Trouble is, the route is narrow, twisty, treed, full of blind corners, and not terribly safe for a cyclist. I got all those lights on my bike so I'd be visible, but my commute is straight and wide so there's good visibility. But her ride home is a lot of climbing through narrow and twisty and you're likely to be hit by a car. That's no good. I've asked if she wants to bring the bike over and we can fix it up in Dad's garage. Probably take an hour for basics, two hours to do it right. I don't know the extent of the rust. I've got all the tools, though. I encouraged her, and I'm responsible for helping her get it working. If she doesn't ride it to work, that's fine. She can ride it for fun at Truckee River trail like I did last week. Good fun.

I am mechanically inclined. Not as much as my Dad, but enough. Bicycles are easy. I like technology I can understand. Every part on a bicycle makes sense. That's elegance of design. I really appreciate that. There's so much kludged together crapola in the world. It's why I like Vintage motorcycles. They are elegant. I don't yet appreciate Enduro bikes. Too much of them wears out, is cheap and expected to break and be replaced. I dislike that part of them. They weren't made to last. When I see rebuilt Yamaha 650s like the Deus Bali or this SR400TT:

Look at it. Nothing wasted. It is beautiful and simple and light. This is a machine of loving grace.

It seems I'll be going by Cedar Ridge this morning for a super-yard sale by rich people. Bring cash, buy stuff. Might want to stop by the cash machine in case I find anything extra good. Not sure if there's things I'd really want, but I should look, just the same. Might find something to replace something needing it. Or maybe a coffee machine since I've discovered Kate gets funny (snarky) when wired on caffeine. When you work with only two people in a carriage house the size of a 1 and a half-car garage, anything to make it comfy is important. Having to dodge each other so there's no bumping or injuries is key. Making that closeness fun and cheerful is really important to being happy at work. I play lots of music like this:

Since the neighbors at the Hairdresser salon next door complained about parking, and claimed their employees aren't parking there (they are, they take our spaces sometimes), we're trading off parking elsewhere on the 3-days a week there's 3 of us instead of 2. I'm going to bike to work on Mondays. It's the Summer now, being June, so provided I don't fall over and rip up my knees and elbows again, that should be just fine. All that exercise, and we're expecting 93'F Monday. Good times.