Don’t Lose the Light

I have read mini biographies of men and women who disappeared and were never found. Among these were Antoine de Saint- Exupery and Ambrose Bierce. Before they went off to the unknown place of legends they had become cynical and hardened toward their fellow man.

They both seemed to feel betrayed by aging and suffer bouts of moodiness. I believe John Steinbeck suffered similar symptoms.

I would hate to go out this way- becoming misanthropic and full of despair, believing that my best days were behind me and the ones left to me were meaningless.

I often wonder what I will do with my life.

In two weeks I will begin law school but my boss and mentor has already given me a dispiriting talk about becoming a legal professional.

New Zealand is not a place that one goes to become world famous. You can be from New Zealand and be world famous but you need to go somewhere else for this to happen.

The country is filled with remarkable individuals who wander into their garages for a spell and wander out again with fully functioning speed bikes or replica aircraft.

They have a plethora of humble athletes and talented singers.

I have no desire to join their ranks but I do want to make the world a better place somehow and I am frustrated by my lack of progress in that respect.

This weekend we went to a lake surrounded by the Southern Alps and some very dry looking valleys.

The place we stayed was a camp were countless young people have come to fish, swim and build character.

When I was younger my mother would send me to a Christian camp for a week during the summer. In addition to archery, horse riding and canoeing we were treated to a heavy helping of Jesus praising whether we felt particularly inspired to it or not.

If your prayers weren’t up to snuff or you were having personal doubts you would often be ratted out by the commie bastard other campers and be forced to confess and repent.

The lack of pressure to exalt a higher power twice daily at this place almost made me want to praise Jesus for the freedom of not having to praise Jesus but that would have been an odd conversation so I was merely internally grateful.

I found that I slept a lot in the cabin where we stayed and was constantly wrangling Alex into some sort of holding area due to a fear that he would wander off to the lake and come to harm.

Nick accused me of being anti-social and to prove him wrong I marched down to the lakeside, said hello to everyone assembled there and then kayaked around the perimeter of the lake. By myself.

The last time we went out on the water with Nick’s mate James, I tried to water ski behind his jet ski and had the rope jerked out of my hands time and time again.

Nothing makes you feel the distance of your youth quite like having something that was once easy rendered impossible by an organized revolt between your hands, arms and fingers.

We took my fishing rod and even bought some lures in a great show of intent but no fishing took place.

The lake was stocked with brown trout just begging to be snagged but we ignored the call.

I returned home this afternoon to find my garden patch full of sheep. They are doing a bit of grounds maintenance for me and will hopefully render the area easier to work with.

I’ve spent the evening reading about vanished heroes and worrying that all my dreams will come to nothing.

I’m going to switch over to some lighter texts now like “Four Years From Forty: You Can Still Be Someone” or “Dick and Jane Go to the Seaside and Avoid an Existential Crisis.”

Farm Life: The Best Bits

From time to time Nick will send me links for rental houses. For a long time now he has dreamed of having a place with land.

One day he sent me a link for a 100-year-old homestead nestled in the middle of 26 hectares of farmland.

I scanned the photos featuring a wraparound porch with climbing wisteria and huge established trees and texted back a brief note of approval.

We had just renewed the lease on our current house for another year so I didn’t see us moving anytime soon.

Nick suggested I call the owners to see if we could have a look (this was his way of making me talk on the phone because he hates to).

The house was everything I had wanted and dreamed of.

It had a dedicated garden patch and potting shed. There was an orchard on one side of the house and a large grassy lawn on the other.

The rooms were huge with high ceilings and ornate crowns where chandeliers once hung. Almost every room has a fireplace although no chimneys remained.

For almost 15 years the house had served as an office for a seed research company which had a sister farm in Oregon.  There were shelves and outlets a plenty.

Some of the fields are still used by local scientists who, according to the farm’s current owners, will stand in the potato fields for hours studying the plants and discussing them in hushed tones with one another. They don’t grow the plants for food so when it’s time for the harvest the farmer ends up with a lot of spuds.

If there was ever a need for me to show a poker face when deciding on something important I would probably fail miserably. I was enchanted by the house and there was no hiding it. A casual observer might have described me as “dewy eyed and hopeful.”

Nick and I thanked the owners for showing us around, hopped in his truck and headed down the long driveway.

“Why aren’t we telling them right now that we want the place?” I asked.

Nick wanted to live there too but he didn’t want to be discomfited by a phone conversation so he made me do the talking.

The family liked us, we liked them and we got the house.

In addition to the people we rent from, our neighbours include a pair of pheasants, a flock of sheep, one donkey, one horse, three ducks, two working dogs, one cat and a handful of California quail. 

There is also an abundance of wild bird life.

We have all the joys of living on a farm without actually having to do any of the farming.

There is no getting up before first light to hook up teats to a milking machine or rounding up sheep for shearing, drenching or tail docking.

I highly recommend this kind of farm life. It's pretty sweet if you can swing it.

Bye Bye Bowie

David Bowie has died today after battling cancer for the last 18 months.

Time to put the Labyrinth dvd on repeat and remember the good times.

Hello Moto-Vol.III (Trains, Planes and Boats)

This post should be shorter than Vols I and II because I don't like flying, I only owned a toy train set as a girl and remembering some of the treatment I received as a crewmember in the Coast Guard is painful.

So...don't worry about settling in.

My train

When I was about 10-ish I asked for a train set for Christmas and I got a really cool Life-Like kit with a Union Pacific engine.

You could make a mountain out of this paper stuff but I wasn't very good at it and what I created would have baffled any geologist asked to describe it's origins.

I struggled at times because if all pieces of the track weren't connected properly the engine would stop running. None of my trestles were fastened to the board so sometimes the train would derail.

I quickly developed a God complex over the small village I had created and things took a dark turn when I put one of the tiny people on the track and raced the engine toward him whilst cackling maniacally.

Why I Don't Like Flying

 The reason is simple. One day in December 1979 my mother and I dropped my father off at a private airport in Louisiana so he could serve as a co-pilot and that was the last time I ever saw him alive.

I was thirteen months old.

Mom says I wandered around our apartment calling for him and all I can remember is that every time I heard the drone of an engine flying overhead I would go into a sort of trance and feel like there was something I was supposed to remember.

My grandfather owned a Cessna and let me fly it once when I was about 10 so I actually have about 45 seconds of flying time under my belt. Don't be jealous, it's not like I'm instrument rated.

My fondest memory of an aircraft was playing in the blue and yellow Stearman my cousins' maternal grandparents kept in a hangar near their home in Florida. I remember standing on the wing and crawling into the cockpit.

The design of the Stearman is amazing. Minus the engine and wheels it's just basically wood and canvas.

It's so light that you can pick it up at the tail and move it around.

Around age 12, I got super neurotic and became convinced I was going to die in a crash like my father.

Anytime I had to fly anywhere I would make sure I had made peace with everyone in my family and I would get a sickening dread the whole time I was on the plane.

The worst was when I went to China and we flew over Siberia. I remember looking down into row after row of snowy mountains and thinking, "they'll never find our bodies in there." I had brought sleeping pills so I could knock myself out on the flight but I never took them. I decided I wanted to see death coming instead.

In 2012 I outgrew my flying anxiety.

I still won't get in an airplane "for fun." I need to be going somewhere important and flight needs to be inevitable, not voluntary.

My grandfather, uncle, father and several of my male cousins are all pilots. I call it the Phillips sickness and I don't really understand the obsession.

Sometimes though, when I see a small plane taking off, just for a minute, something in my heart soars with it.

Boats

We had a ski boat when I was growing up and dad always controlled it.

Me and my sisters weren't allowed to drive it because our caustic estrogen might have somehow ruined it's performance capabilities.

I lifted up the cover over the motor well once to check out the setup and I later got a lecture about how I could have broken something (with my eyes apparently).

In 2007 I joined the U.S. Coast Guard and was sent to a god forsaken surf station where the Pacific Ocean was often at its nastiest.

I'm squinting into the sun at the center of the front row.

I was forced into indentured servitude aboard a 47-foot motor life boat and had to teach myself how to perform as a qualified crew member.

It involved learning about chart navigation, the boat specs, knot tying, first aid and search and rescue procedures.

I have nothing against the boat. It was incredibly bad ass.

It was made to go out into the worst sea conditions and take a beating. It had hidden buoyancy chambers that made it self righting within eight seconds of capsizing.

When the sea was particularly rough we had to wear special belts and clip ourselves to the D rings found on the upper deck of the boat to keep from being washed overboard.

Weeeee.

No, it wasn't the boat I hated- it was the tyrannical sadists I had to go out with.

I got assigned a mentor who once made the coxswain feign death at sea in total darkness just so he could force me to take us back in.

He wouldn't let me use the computer to plot our route back. I had to navigate by sight.

This wasn't a requirement of our crew qualifications, in fact, it was dangerous and completely unnecessary. My mentor was being a dickwad because he could.

Even Jeff the dying coxswain admitted he couldn't really tell where the jetty was under those conditions. In response my mentor told him to "continue dying."

The mentor and I had a pretty intense stare down before I put the boat in clutch ahead (the boat's lowest power setting). It took us an hour to get back to pier but I got us there safely.

Then there were the exercises in futility.

Eel grass is a protected plant species in California and it is found in abundance in Humboldt Bay where we would do our practice exercises.

We'd be going along and all the sudden a warning alarm would go off because the engines were overheating.

I'd have to go below, put on headphones go into the engine room and pull a mass of eel grass out of the sea strainer. The eel grass would be thrown overboard where it would team up with another floating mass of the stuff and five minutes later we'd suck it back up and the engines would start to overheat.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I had some mad boat hook skills.

We had a major inspection one year so I spent a lot of quality time wedged in the auxillary space scraping a strange green substance off the aluminum fittings with a tiny wire brush. Most of the boat's dirty work was left to the low ranking rabble like me. At least I got left in peace during these times.

Sometimes we would go out to sea to do joint training exercises with the Dolphin helicopters from Group Humboldt Bay.

The first time this happened the guys didn't see any need to explain procedures to me.

Thanks to this method of teaching I nearly got a shock from the rescue basket and I was almost pulled overboard because they told me to grab the trail line attached to the helicopter and pull with all my might. I was halfway over the fantail when I first heard them screaming for me to let go over the roar of the helo.

Dicks.

I pioneered the search and rescue selfie.

The real sticking point here was that the U.S. government had no problem giving me control of one of its million-dollar assets while back home, my father still believed I wasn't competent enough to drive his ski boat.

Ah, family.

Hello Moto (Supplemental)

In case you wanted some more info on Shelley and the Pike's Peak run, here's a video made by Stanford.

Rami's in the video too.

Hello Rami!

Hello Moto-Vol. II

Cars.

Fast cars.

How I used to love them.

Sometime after my father died and my mother was still single she bought a blue Camero with rear window louvres and an eight track player.

Mom had one of these. Surprising.

I suspect that this is the one time in her life when my Mom indulged her inner badass.

This would have been in 1979-1980 when I was around two-ish and maybe the engine rev and style of the car stuck with me on some toddler level.

My first car was a Saturn. It was a five speed and I had to have friends teach me how to drive it because my mom didn't know how and my dad didn't approve of me having my own car at 16. I struggled with the clutch pedal especially on the Alabama hills and stalled constantly but eventually I got it.

Two of the important things that I wanted to know were how to change the tires and how to change the oil. I figured these were basic maintenance issues that every driver should know.

There was only one problem and that was my stepdad's attitude toward women and mechanical objects.

To him the most dangerous thing to moving engine parts wasn't dirt or leaking oil or rust- it was estrogen.

Put a woman next to a motor and it was bound to get destroyed.

Either the woman would break it by touching it in the wrong way or her womanly presence would cause something to go wrong.

This is a man who is an electrical engineer, a man who once took the engine out of a friend's car in college and reassembled it in his dorm room as a prank.

The know-how was there but the willingness to teach me was not.

I was constantly told not to touch his tools, not to plug my guitar into his amplifier and not attempt to fix anything on my car because he would handle it when he had the time.

When I laid down newspaper on the back deck, lined it with brick and hosed it down regularly during a freeze to make my own ice rink my dad's only response was, "you're going to pick up every last scrap of that newspaper."

The way I see it, dad missed out on a lot of quality bonding time with me because of his entrenched notions of proper gender interests and behaviors.

I could have been the son he always wanted but my being a daughter got in the way.

I truly believe growing up in a environment with this patriarchal thinking is why I took up ice hockey, joined the military, became a dj and found myself fixated on certain cars. (I would have taken up drumming too if my mother hadn't decided that the flute was a more suitable instrument for me.)

I felt a constant desire to be contrary to what everyone expected of my gender.

I had to get in there and do the things people were saying women couldn't do so I could smugly correct the dinosaurs who tried to say women just weren't made to do certain things or just couldn't handle them.

Luckily, not all men shared my father's aversion to teaching me about cars.

I had some cool guys come into my life and help me out.

My friend Lesley's dad showed me how to change a tire.

The experience was enhanced when my mate Ben let me strip, balance and replace my own tires in the garage where he worked.

William showed me how to do an oil change. He had these nice little ramps to put the car on so you could get under it comfortably and he had a very calm temperament which was also helpful.

My friend Ryan's father had a silver Porche Boxter which he was going to let Ryan an me take to Auburn for a football game but the weather was bad and he changed his mind. He did however let me sit in the driver's seat and start the engine so I could experience what it sounds like to have an engine roar to life behind my head.

Another friend of mine named Andy owned a black convertible Boxter and he let me drive it home from a bar one night. I was mildly buzzed at the time and had no business being behind the wheel. I can only guess that Andy was worse off than me and so letting me drive seemed like the solid choice at the time. What I remember about the experience was the smell of leather the precise handling of the gear shift and a voice in my head going "don't wreck it don't wreck it don't wreck it."

She shifts well.

I dated a condescending structural engineer named Sam once and thought it would be cool to convince the guys at a local car lot to let me take their Dodge Viper out so I could pick Sam up for lunch in it.

A Viper in "hello officer" red.

I remember sitting in the drivers seat and chatting with the sales guy- "So, bottom feed fueling, what's that all about?" By the time I switched into my "so, I was thinking" spiel I realized what a huge liability having the car would be and that I didn't even like Sam well enough to do something like that for him.

In 2003-ish I worked for a newspaper that wanted a story on the Motorsports Hall of Fame at the Talladega Superspeedway. I could have gone to the museum, asked a few questions and written up a nice little piece but I saw an opportunity and I shamelessly went for it.

I went all wide eyed and "gosh mister that's great" with my host and let slip that I would loooove to see Speedway track.

Wish granted.

We drove through a tunnel out into the center of the speedway in his Ford Explorer.

It just so happened there was one of the those NASCAR driving classes going on that day.

It's one of those things where people who are bored and wealthy can hand over a couple of grand to get behind the wheel of racecar and zoom around the track a few times.

I will never forget the thundering roar of the cars tearing around the track. I got chill bumps on my arms and a terrible yearning to get behind the wheel.

I had never liked NASCAR before because I get panicked in large crowds of people and these crowds of people were the worst.

Imagine being stuck in a seething mob of drunken rednecks who look down on book learnin' and uppity women. They'll all be wearing wife beaters and puffy trucker hats and flicking mullet sweat on each other in their frothing enthusiasm. Beside them large women in Confederate Flag bikinis will be embracing the old Southern adage that "tanned fat is better than white fat."

I. Would. Die.

But take away the masses and give me trackside access to watch the cars and something magical happens.

We toured a workshop in the infield and I got to look under the hood of one of the cars. Every part not dedicated to making the car go faster had been removed. The headlights at the front of the car were decals.

Steve sometimes pretended he was an inefficiently placed air filter. 

Some of the earlier race cars in the museum had willy nilly roll bars going all over the place but this car seemed to have sorted things out.

Seeing that I couldn't hijack one of the race cars and take it around the track I asked my host if he would mind driving us around once or twice.

Wish granted.

The track has 33 degree banked turns which require a minimum speed of  around 70 miles an hour to keep the cars from sliding off the track. I will always remember how the world slid sideways as we coasted into one of these turns and how I almost shat myself when the driver slowed down the car to show me how necessary speed was.

In 2005 I temped for a company in Monterey that had two warehouses full of rare motorcycles and cars, including a Shelby Cobra. They let me wander around in one of them and breathe in the rarefied air during one of my breaks.

In 2006 while I was living in Baja California I met a racing team called Dos Gringos y Muchos Mexicanos (two white guys and a lot of Mexicans).

The car they raced was an old Volkswagen Beetle and the race in question was the Baja 1000.

The Beetles run in the underdog class where the likelihood of even finishing the race in one piece is not good.

God speed little bug.

This is the class that is closest to most Mexicans' hearts because your "crew" consists of a bunch of guys with random tools who show up to help out. For their efforts they are paid in beer and goodwill.

I remember getting a small thrill as I helped the team push the car to the qualifiying inspection point.

If I recall correctly the car disintegrated somewhere in the Vizcaino desert but the drivers were unharmed.

My final badass car experience came about through meeting my friend Rami who was finishing up his PhD at Stanford University. Rami's thesis focused on what happened to a car during autonomous drift.

One magical night he took me to the University's workshop to see their show pony-an Audi TT that could be driven autonomously.

Stanford made headlines when they raced the car (nicknamed Shelley) up Pikes Peak via remote control.

Rami showed me the computers that had been neatly accommodated into the Audi's trunk, let me sit behind the wheel and called the event "When Kelly met Shelley."

This is Shelley. We hung out once.

Seriously, this night still ranks as one of the most awesome and unforgettable things that has ever happened to me in my entire life.

I still get a thrill from certain cars but my interest has definitely switched from speed to function.

Hello Moto - Vol. I

I've been reading Guy Martin's book "When You Dead, You Dead" and it made me do a lot of thinking about my own relationship to cars, motorcycles and mechanical repairs.

My earliest contact with a motorcycle involved my mate Rusty Frith in Dothan, Alabama. I was about 11, maybe younger, and Rusty had this sweet little motorcycle that was just our size. I believe the fuel tank was painted yellow and it may have been a Honda SL70 or a Yamaha Mini Enduro (but maybe not because this would have been the late 80s). Rusty told me all about the specs but I didn't know what he was talking about. I just wanted to ride the bike.

And yes, this is the same Rusty who wouldn't let me be the Airwolf when we were playing with plastic helicopter toys.

This is also the same Rusty who I forced to jump on a trampoline with me after there had been a heavy rain. He said it wasn't a good idea and I said he was a coward. We ended up cracking our skulls against each other and getting goose eggs on our foreheads.

I should have listened to him on that one.

My general recollection of Rusty's bike was that it was fun to ride and easy to handle. I didn't go too fast on it but I drove it by myself and only needed Rusty's help a few times.

The next motorcycle I had contact with was a Honda Shadow my dad owned. He got two helmets with it- one black and one white.

When he was away I would put on the black one and pretend to be Darth Vader.

Dad would take me out for rides on it but I didn't enjoy them very much. He would start yelling at me about "fighting him on the turns" and the first time we went out I wore shorts and felt the sting of a thousand mosquitoes meeting their death against my bare legs. I also burnt my legs on the muffler several times.

Sometime around my 15th birthday I saw the anime film "Akira" and fell in love with Kaneda's bike and the idea of owning a crotch rocket. (Fun fact: a fan of the film built an Akira bike in 2012!)

When I was about 16 a bike shop called Moto Ace opened near my house. I was in the shop all the time, admiring the leather riding gear and fogging up the farings of the Ducatis and Cagiva Mitos.

One day this sweet customized Italian racing bike came in and I asked how much it cost. It was around $40,000 and had been especially imported and purchased by the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum. I was mad that the bike was destined to be put on display somewhere and never ridden and developed a severe case of hard feeling toward Mr. Barber. These hard feelings would continue after the man opened a Porche Driving School with a price tag that only rich individuals and corporations could afford. A recent check of the museum's website has informed me that they have a Britten V1000 in their collection. I now have a permanent case of hard feelings towards Mr. Barber. My condition appears incurable.

Anyway, I enrolled in this black and white photography class and one assignment was to track a moving object so the object appeared clearly while the background was blurred. My first thought was to get a guy from Moto Ace to let me photograph him riding his bike. One of them was willing to oblige and he even loaned me some leathers and took me for a ride afterwards. At one point we went over a bump and I very nearly came off the back of the bike. I was terrified but not completely dissuaded from owning one.

A few months later a guy from one of my uni classes decided to sell his bike and when I expressed interest and asked if he would take me for a ride he was happy to do it. He gave me a helmet to put on that was too big and I didn't tighten the strap enough. While I was wrestling with the huge helmet he told me how he had modified the fuel tank so more oxygen would get in and bike would go faster.

He tore ass around the Birmingham interstates with me holding onto him for dear life while the over-sized helmet tried to float away from my head. I felt sure I was going to die and a small inner voice suggested that a crotch rocket might not be the bike for me.

Aside from the fear of speed I had safety concerns and control issues. A little 150 cc Ninja was easy for me to lift and push around but I would have been blown all over the place on the open highway. Heavier bikes were difficult for me to even lift off the kickstand and I was afraid of losing control and having one fall on me.

I decided to try out a Vespa instead. A place called Bogart's Motorsports had recently opened up and I went there for a test drive. The Vespa they gave had a pearly finish to the paint. I wanted a Vespa because there was one in Roman Holiday and because I had seen the movie Quadrophenia (the scooter was a Lambretta) and thought I wanted to bring back the mods' sense of fashion.

My first few moments on the Vespa I got a bad case of the wobbles in the parking lot and almost ran into a woman's car as she was entering the lot. I was told that the scooter wasn't street legal because of it's low speed and realized there would be no where to drive it and having it would be pointless.

That might have been the end of the motorcycle fever if it hadn't been for my best friend William Gray becoming the owner of a wrecked Ninja.

Some guy that had been living with Will's family had bought the thing and wrecked it when he skidded out on some loose gravel. The accident had nearly torn off one of his pinky fingers and after that he didn't want to "get back on the horse" so to speak.

So William bought the thing from him and it sat on a stand in his basement for a while and got tinkered with from time to time.

At some point William started riding it again and I asked him if he would teach me how to.

We went to our old high school parking lot on a weekend and Will showed me the basics. I went around the parking lot in first gear and finally got up the courage to go to second. The pedal was munted so I couldn't shift properly, I panicked, let the clutch go and gasped as the bike shuddered to a halt and started to tip over.

Somehow I managed to pull my legs out of the way and I felt an instant sense of relief when I saw that the bike had fallen beside and not on top of me.

At that point I heard a high pitched shriek and saw William running towards me.

Thinking he was concerned for my safety I stood up and lifted my hands to show him I was okay only to have him rush past me and cradle the bike and whisper to it, "I'll never let her touch you again."

And I never did. In fact, all desire to ride motorcycles pretty much left me at that point and I haven't been on one since.

I still love the style of vintage motorcycles and the fact that they weren't built for break neck speed.

A few months ago I saw a bunch of vintage bikes on Springs Road and found out a local club was doing a ride out to Akaroa.

New Zealand offers loads of places where you can cruise and road trip on a bike without being surrounded by dickheads popping wheelies on highways or speeding through rush hour traffic.

The admiration of bikes remains but the need for speed is long gone.