Breaking Camp

Today’s Oregonian featured a brief editorial about the ongoing sell-off and shut down of our National Forest campgrounds: “The Bush administration has no interest in outdoor recreation. It’s not a priority of Congress, either.”

That’s too bad. For twenty-five years now, I’ve traveled to every corner of Oregon on camping trips alone or to meet friends and family in national and state campgrounds. The best campgrounds are the most remote and least used, but one thing you notice no matter where you camp is that camping is a family activity. There are usually lots of kids and bikes and dogs. If there’s water anywhere close, there are fishing poles and inner tubes.

What’s clear as you look around is that this is how working-class and low-income Americans go on vacation. My wife and I can’t afford trips to Europe, but we spent three weeks this summer camping in the Northwest and had a wonderful time. We’re old enough and well-off enough to afford a modest travel trailer, but most folks in the campgrounds we stayed at were in tents or tent trailers. It’s been this way for generations.

Now, the Bush administration is selling off and closing down many of these campgrounds, trails, and recreation sites. The Forest Service budget is taking dramatic cuts, and we can’t afford to even maintain the National Parks.

But look around next time you’re on the road and you’ll notice the quickly growing number of high-end “Diesel pusher” motorhomes. These rigs cost out at about three-hundred-thousand dollars. Mostly you’ll see them parked in developed private resorts with full hook-ups, where their electronically controlled satellite dishes home in on the best TV reception and the occupants seem never to go outside.

I can’t think of a more visible example of the Bush Administration’s contempt for working-class Americans. It’s just wrong that the wealthy can use their huge tax cuts to buy McMotorhomes while the Forest Service is sent begging for a few bucks to keep its campgrounds open for the rest of us. We’re losing a big part of a national legacy, and it’s going largely unnoticed.

Next spring, when I head out for some of my favorite campgrounds, I expect to find many of them closed, gates shut and locked with a chain. It’s a little thing, really, compared to some of the calamities of the Bush administration, but somehow it’s the one that makes me the most angry.

It never got debated. It didn’t make the nightly news. It’s just quietly happening while we sleep.

Good day/Bad day

A few weeks ago I commented that Mary and I were perhaps a little cash poor on account of saving so much money buying an electric bike and a scooter. I joked that we might be in trouble if an emergency arose, say both our dogs need their rabies shots at the same time.

Surprise!

In fact, both dogs needed ALL their shots at the same time, and it seems dogs are subject to all manner of plagues and distempers for which, fortunately, we have vaccinations. Expensive vaccinations.

In addition to getting them up to date on inoculations, our highly trained veterinarian also verified with his stethoscope that their hearts were beating and visually confirmed that they still had teeth. These goods and services combined cost me $192 and something over five minutes of my time, not counting transportation.

Next time, I might have to take the dogs to Canada. Socialized pet care is looking very attractive.

Even worse—and taken together some people might call this a bad day—I had to drive my truck since the two dogs don’t travel well by scooter, which means I couldn’t save big money running my errands on Big Swede. And then, since we were out already, I thought why not take the little guys to the park and go for a walk, except somehow when I got to the park, I locked them in and myself out with the Diesel engine running.

I could practically see the numbers turning on the gas pump. This truck drinks gas like Homer Simpson drinks Duff Beer.

The dogs, fortunately, were safe inside as I’d left the windows partly open. In fact, they were in no hurry to get out at all because they’d found the “Greenies,” two chlorophyll-enhanced dog bones guaranteed to improve dog breath. Five bucks apiece. The plan was to let them chew a few minutes a day, but another twenty minutes and they’d be ready for seconds.

After trying all manner of breaking and entering into my own truck, I finally flagged down a cop—nice guy but not a great sense of humor—who called a locksmith who was there in ten minutes and into my truck in under fifteen seconds. The dogs jumped up and licked my face, and their breath was still terrible.

My attitude, though, remained mostly positive throughout the whole ordeal. It was a beautiful fall day. I got to watch the pelicans raft up at the head of the Link River and drift downstream gracefully dipping for fish. Then paddle up to the head of the river and drift down eating fish again. Then again.

But best was having a laugh at a big decal a parked truck had in its rear window: A giant American flag, of course, and the inscription “Why the hell do I have to press 1 to continue in English?”

I thought, Man, that poor guy NEVER has a good day.

Why walk/Drive more

With a little dip in gas prices recently, most people are back to driving their cars and not giving much thought to conserving. I certainly don’t have a long tradition of walking, using the bus, or riding a bike. Like most people, I got to work in my car, and the fact that I lived close to work meant I could come home for lunch.

When gas was cheap and plentiful, there wasn’t a lot of incentive to find other ways to commute. Who knew about global warming and peak oil? Arabs were our friends back then.

Now, though, things have changed and it would be nice if people were looking for every opportunity to save fuel and money. That doesn’t seem to be happing, though. According to news reports, most people are driving about as much now as they did a year ago, even though higher gas prices mean they have to cut back in other areas. People are actually trying to cut their spending on groceries so they won’t have to cut their driving.

Columnist Thomas Friedman has been addressing this issue for a few years now with a common-sense solution that will never happen: Friedman advocates a higher federal gas tax, maybe another dollar or two a gallon. The money would go into mass transit systems and development of alternative fuels.

With reduced demand and more alternatives, we’d quickly make a substantial cut in our reliance on foreign oil and within a few years could actually be energy independent. We’d all be riding to work in our solar-powered SUVs or going to the beach in a Jeep that runs on laughing gas. Service stations would exist only to wash our windshields.

Of course, Americans would never stand for a higher gas tax and politicians would never propose it: Republicans get too much money from big oil and automakers, and Democrats have to stick up for the little guy’s right to have cheap gas.

Meanwhile, people concerned about the looming impact of reaching peak oil in a few years argue with each other about whether we’ll enjoy a soft landing or suffer a hard landing when demand exceeds supply. The better data seem to support a hard landing, with some observers predicting a total meltdown of the social order. (See the essay “Imagine There’s No Oil” in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine. I found it comforting since Klamath Falls, where I live, already sounds a lot like the “lifeboats” being discussed by peak-oilers. And we’re already heavily armed. We practically invented the second amendment out here.)

Even now, before things get ugly, with my scooter and electric bike, I feel good that I’m doing my little part both to save energy and promote alternatives to gas guzzlers, like my ¾ ton Diesel pickup which has barely moved in the last month.

Mary’s back at work teaching junior high science, and she’s been riding Big Swede every day. Her kids think it’s boss. (They probably have a different word.) I’ve been riding the scooter on errands and start back at the community college in ten days, so I’ll be using it more then. It got seventy-nine miles per gallon on the first tank I measured. It only holds 1.2 gallons, so I can fill it up on pocket change.

Our incredible summer weather is supposed to come to an end tomorrow, though; no sooner and no later, and it might even snow in the mountains. Part of this experiment for me is to see how practical the bikes prove to be over a full year.

Whatever happens over the winter, for the last month, we’ve both been enjoying the pleasures of bicycling and the fun of scooting around town. As with my motorcycle, if winter weather drives us back into our cars, it will be all the more enjoyable to get back on two wheels in the spring.

September 12th

Aren’t we all glad the fifth anniversary of 9/11 is behind us? I even got tired of reading the editorials I agreed with. Fortunately, we don’t have television anymore so I was spared the worst of the media hype. The political hype, though, is unavoidable.

I doubt that it’s possible to have a simple 9/11memorial service that isn’t laden with political agendas. On the other hand, I had my own little ongoing memorial throughout the day, remembering the shock and horror I felt as I began to follow events on TV, marveling at the selfless courage of so many.

I remembered the remarkable occasion of members of Congress standing on the steps of the Capitol singing America the Beautiful. Here are the words:

"O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea! "

And so much for national unity. It seemed, for a brief time, like we might for once do the right thing and stop there: punish the terrorists, free a country and help it rebuild. The world would have loved and respected us for generations. It would have been a far safer place.

Now, we’ve lost that unity and the good will of the rest of the world, and our leadership still claims to be promoting democracy abroad while it tries to stifle it here at home. We’ve never been more divided and more despised. None of this had to happen. Many warned that it would, and they were ignored or ridiculed.

I am saddened and angry, and at the same time I feel removed from it all. These early fall days are much too fine to be spent brooding, and nothing, it seems, will much change for the next two years of the Bush administration.

In the meantime, bless the peacemakers and the caregivers. They have more courage and hope than I do right now. It always falls to them in times like these.

How to contact me

I've heard from a couple of people that they might have left a comment but blogger requires you to sign in and reveal personal information like your social security number and how you voted in the last election before you realized how bad it could really get. (I could have told you, but I didn't have a blog then.)

I know enough not to post my email on my blog but not enough to disguise it as a poisonous snake so spammers will stay away. A friend of mine, though, tells me the custom is to use (at) for @ and people will get the idea.

So I've added my email address in my profile and will highlight it here: rosscarroll(at)charter.net. Even this feels risky, but I'd like to talk to others who are interested in electric bikes or any of the other topics I might bring up.

If I'm found out and drowned in offers to buy stock in Nigerian hula hoops, I might have to change my name and move to Mexico. That's something I've thought about from time to time anyway, though, so it wouldn't be that big a sacrifice.

ross

Proud to be Cro-Magnon!

The Three-Thousand-Dollar Screw

Last week, I was doing some simple maintenance on the VFR. When I took the top off the air box to clean the filter, I dropped a screw and couldn’t find it. I decided to go down to the local Honda dealer and get a new one.

The clerk and I had a good laugh when I told him I had to buy a screw. Ha ha! And then I told him that scrod was the fish most commonly used in fast-food sandwiches and there was a pretty funny joke about “Can I get scrod in this town?” but since I had to explain that scrod was a fish, the joke wasn’t that funny anymore.

Anyway, he had to order the screw (!), so I paid him the 75 cents and left. Before I got out the door, though, I was stopped in my tracks by a new scooter the dealer had on the floor, a Yamaha Vino 125. It is blue, “a blue true dream of sky,” as e.e. cummings put it, though he wasn’t talking about a motor scooter at the time.

Time to reboot my townscape: we were going to get by until at least spring on the six or eight vehicles and one horse we already have. Maybe then we’d buy another ebike if we were still fighting over who gets to ride Big Swede today.

But I could see right away that the Vino filled an important niche in our commuter’s stable: the inexpensive two-wheeler that gets great mileage, is fast enough to use on all city streets, is easy to ride, and is practical for trips of fifty or even a hundred miles. In fact, always putting my wife’s interests first, I thought this could be the perfect ride for Mary to take out to her friend Nancy’s, where she keeps her horse Woodrow. She goes out three or four times a week, and that ten-mile drive into the country is really the only time when we have to use a car.

The test was whether Mary could see herself commuting on a scooter and whether she would fall for the Vino or not. I talked her into going down to the dealer with me when my screw came in, and fortunately, she was quickly persuaded by all the practical considerations of owning a scooter.

“It’s so cute!”

“And,” I pointed out, “it will go fifty, maybe fifty-five miles per hour, so it will keep up with traffic even on the bypass.”

“It’s so cute!” she said.

“It gets sixty to ninety miles per gallon. We’ll probably get on the high end since we’re both little people. It will practically pay for itself in, uh, a year or two.”

“It’s so cute!”

It is cute. It also has a big storage area under the seat, and we’ve ordered a basket for the rear rack, plus a windshield for cold-weather riding. Like the ebike, it will be great for commuting and shopping.

Mary loves it. She’s already doing some practice rides in a parking lot with me providing gentle coaching. (Turn! Turn! Aaaggghhh!) She’s signed up to take the three-day beginning rider course through the Motorcycle Safety Foundation. Even on a scooter, learning to ride is a little intimidating.

So now we’re out $4,000 in less than a month for two new bikes. It sounds like a lot of money when I say it slow, and our “savings” might be stretched to cover an emergency, like if our dogs both need their rabies shots at the same time.

Still, just last spring I was thinking about getting another car so I wouldn’t have to drive my truck. An inexpensive used car that gets good mileage, maybe a five-year-old Honda Civic. Probably eight, ten thousand bucks. Only 35 or 40 mpg.

Not that cute.

The View From Home

I've lived in the same home in Klamath Falls for over twenty years. You'd think I'd get used to the view, take it for granted, mostly not notice.

Or not.

Some people who live near Mount Shasta think it is inhabited by spirits. I think they're right.

Big River Ride

This in from an electric vehicle site. I’ve clicked over to the website and it looks like it would be fun to follow the adventure:

Check out his web site here: www.bigriverride.com

On Thursday, Quentin van Marle, a travel writer, begins a 2,000-mile ride along the banks of the Mississippi River astride an electric Torq eZeebike. The nine-week trip starts at the source of the river at Lake Itasca in Minnesota and winds its way south to the delta beyond the battered city of New Orleans. The ride, sponsored by the eco-friendly detergent manufacturer Ecover, will represent the longest journey made on such a machine. Van Marle, 61, is a cycling veteran; he has pedalled a conventional bike coast-to-coast across the United States, cycled the length of Australia and crossed South Africa from Durban to Cape Town.

"I suppose I hope to establish that electric bikes are not only here to stay but also that they offer urban commuters an absolutely viable alternative to the car," he says."I expect to pedal most of the way. But I will certainly make use of the powerful electric-assist whenever a steep hill looms."