School Days

Yesterday the Fabfi Team went networking, you know, the social kind. We visited two prime spots, the village of Bagrami (4-5K people), a few hundred yards from the Taj, and Tutikas (less) across the river. Tutikas warrants its own post, so on to Bagrami...

For the record, not a lot of people roll around like we're doing here--no big guns, no body armor, no armored vehicles. The general sentiment on the ground here among most of the people we hang with is that's a lot of the reason why reconstruction is failing. You can't make friends with a poor farmer in sandals when you're decked out in full combat gear. The military doesn't leave the base in JBad unless they're in a 5 vehicle convoy, needless to say they're not making a lot of progress, but I digress...

Of the 5k people, about 2000 of them are in school--in a building with about a dozen rooms in a C. Some of the rooms have desks. I think they all have blackboards, but the fun ends there. Children go to school half a day so they can fit in twice as many students, and many of the teachers works second jobs (often tutoring) to supplement their meager teacher incomes. (not unlike the here...) This is one of the wealthier satellite villages around JBad.

Our purpose in visiting was to try to entice the teachers and students to come to the FabLab (site is under active development), but interest was mixed. The recurring response to the question of "what would you like to learn?" is "English and computers, so I can get a visa and get out of here", and we're trying very hard to be more than a computer lab if we can help it.

Being up close and personal with Afghans while wielding 7lbs of professional-grade camera equipment really brings out the cultural foibles of this place. Want to make a girl run? Point a lens at her. Women will turn away, boys will climb over each other to be framed right in front. It's it's like they have some sort of ESP for the camera frame (right).

they love cameras:

and they come in multiples of HOLY CRAP!
Too bad this is a war zone, huh? (click for big)

Full album (53 images) here.

Home-brew tire chains

Six inches of snow last night, pleasantly covering the blanket of ice compacted over the last week by the freeze and thaw cycles.  Not a great day for a road ride, slush all the way.  Poaching a mtb ride in the Fells however.... that could be good fun, but the lurking ice beneath gave me pause.  Without any studded tires in my armory, I decided to experiment with a device of my own concoction - bike chains.  Surely a chain system is inferior to the carbide studded tires, but at $50+ each, it's a considerable investment.  On a sheet of ice these things might not be worth the effort, but under the present conditions where the surface layer of snow might guide you most of the way, the chain might provide that extra bite needed to keep from spinning out.  Had I known it would take the remainder of the riding hours to complete I would have taken my chances with the ice.

That old pile of brake and shifter cables found the reason for their continued existence today.  My first version of the cables utilized a daisy chain of sorts, wrapping the cables around the rim.  After spending a good amount of time perfecting the weave so it laid snugly between the knobs, but still proud enough to grab the ice, I realized such a design would only be more trouble than it was worth should I get a flat.  A respectable chain solution needs to be quickly and easily removable.  The design I settled on is something similar to auto chains, though simplified in its lacing.  The pic here shows the final product.  It could probably use at least twice as many laces, but as a prototype it should do fine.

Parts list:

2 72" lengths of shifter/brake cable

30 6" lengths of brake cable

32 wire terminators

Surely there is a better solution than these wire terminators for joining the lengths, but as a first go it's quick and simple.

Using the wire terminators shown here, I laced the 6" lengths together in a zigzag pattern.  The guide wire which provides the tension for the chains will run through the eye of the terminator.

With the 30 6" lengths laced together, they can be slipped onto the shifter cables, which serve as the guide wire for the chains.   One end of the guide wire is terminated by the shifter bead, the other is capped with the remaining wire terminators.  The best way to do this is to run the free end through the same eye that keeps the bead, then add the terminator.   Tension can be kept on the system by snugging the terminated ends of the guide wires toward each other, which means that the guide wires should be threaded in opposite directions.

To cinch up the cables and keep them from slapping the frame I tied the cables down with zip-ties.  Though this defeats the purpose of making a removable chain system it's also a point for which there should be a simple solution.  I haven't tested these off road yet, won't do that till I get rid of the zip-ties.  An absurd amount of salt was dumped on the road today, so I didn't get a good test of their bite, but there should be a good freeze this week - more on that later.

Cultural Crossovers, Sort-of

I got my first glimpses of Jalalabad proper over the last two days, and it is every bit of the cluster- I thought it would be. Much was totally foreign, like the shoemaker sitting in a little pile of leather on the sidewalk making shoes, the deep open sewer troughs, or the storefronts selling nothing but mostly broken mirrors (talk about bad luck), but there were some things that we can all relate to, for instance the five 20-somethings sitting around the bike-shop in January with nothing to do while one guy does the day's only tune-up: the only difference here is that here there's five guys with nothing to do ALL YEAR in EVERY shop. There are so many people without jobs there's a running joke among security folk that collecting rocks is the national pastime. I asked Mehrab, our Afghan house manager, what they do with all the rocks and he just laughed... Anyway, with all that extra labor literally lying around your store, the need for streamlining the order fulfillment process is largely absent:

The mission of the day today was to find plywood. Given the obvious lack of Home Depot locations within driving distance, Mehrab and I set out to the market in the pickup (which happens to be heavily armored, not that it's really necessary in JBad). First we go to the money changing shop, which is fronted, at least, by a couple guys on the sidewalk with little 3'x2' display case style glass tables full of afghanis (the local bling). The guy from the table walks up to our ride, Murab slips him a Benjamin, and a couple of minutes later he comes back with roughly 5000 afghanis.

With cash in hand we search through a couple of shops specializing in 4'x8' sheets of whatever (mostly particle board and masonite) until we find a place that has what we need, but it's not at the shop, it's at the "warehouse", so a couple guys from the shop jump in the pickup with us and we roll off the main drag into this little walled courtyard about 10min drive away. To be honest, I wasn't super comfortable with this turn of events--one doesn't have to be a security operative to know that driving your armored truck into an enclosed space where the exit is easily blocked by one car is not exactly a superb strategic move--but who you know is a big deal out here and nobody screws with Mehrab so I figured we were good to go.

Thanks to some less-than-proper storage and the fact that, well, we're in Afghanistan, finding product that wasn't totally trashed was somewhat challenging. Our search eventually took us into a dingy half-open basement that we had to walk over a mountain of raw cotton to enter. (the cotton gin in the basement is pictured to the right. Sorry for the bad photo but I didn't want to screw up our deal by acting like a tourist) Once inside we sorted through about 50 sheets of ply in the dark to find 5 reasonble pieces. We then proceeded to watch as six, yes SIX guys clustered around the truck arguing about how best to load it. Meanwhile I got to meet one seriously doped out of his mind older Afghan who wanted to shake hands because he was presumably the boss, or father thereof, and I was the tall white dude (you get a lot of points for being the tall white dude). Sooner or later they all get sorted and I jump back in the truck with Mehrab and the two guys from before. We drive them back to the end of their street and pull over where Mehrab then starts to bargain, arriving ultimately at a price of 750 afghanis/sheet ($15), with which he was very satisfied (it can often cost $40, especially if you're from out of town).

...and now we have five sheets of plywood.

The story of a patchy beard

I have a patchy beard. Pretty much the only thing I can do about it is to not have a beard, but that strategy is not compatible with being lazy. For some reason, shaving is my most despised personal chore, perhaps because I don't fell like throwing down $15 for a Mach 5 package. I'd rather be lazy and cheap. I got around to trimming up my beard this morning and uncovered a mystery as ancient as the heavens themselves.


The largest region of shame is the barren track that goes from the middle of my right cheek down toward my neck . Shown below are two pics comparing my left and right sides. I wouldn't mention all of this if there weren't something inherently interesting about it all. You'll notice that there is a large red dot smack in the middle of my right cheek, a birth mark of sorts. This red dot seems to be the hair follicle eating Pac-man responsible for my barren streak. But this is pretty cool really, as long as it isn't cancerous or an alien spore, in that you can see that this mark migrated around during my foetal development, a stable genetic anomaly, like Jupiter's great storm. This of course, doesn't say anything about what the red mark is, or where originally it came from. I'll have to do a closer inspection later and see if I can track the path outside of my beard region.
image credit: www.bic.com [bic razor]

image credit: www.crystalinks.com [jupiter]

Chicken Wire, Lawlessness and the Sweet Smell of Opium

I was going to make this a long post, but there's too much on my plate at the moment to be screwing around with a blog, so here's the Clif's Notes version (more detail to come):

• I'm in afghanistan
  
• I'm working on this
• I'm going to be here the entire month of January

...And this was the journey, including a 2hr 20min ride from Kabul to Jalalabad (there are effectively no laws here, ESPECIALLY on the roads. Lanes, speed limits, shoulders--all meaningless):


Amsterdam:

need a lane? Make one:Bombed out Jingle Bus:

Biker pow-wow:Home Sweet Taj:
See all the photos from today.

Bridges and Scales

For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you've seen that my stories of late have been of a different nature. My thoughts turned toward a different light, my words molded more by emotion than deed. It has been hard to get out for even a short ride. When there has been free time, the motivation has often been absent, certainly not enough for a hill-climb session or daring escapade down to the river. We must have the right mind to do well. Perhaps if I had been stronger I might have been able to do it all. Perhaps next time around, weathered and tempered by these times, I will know how to manage the roots and rocks of life with more elegance and focus.

Most of my rides have been of the mental health variety, composed of equal parts tooling around and reflection. The majority of my time was spent on the the small dirt road network near my father's house, and then mostly repeating the one section of trail that has some decent tech. It's decent compared to nothing, which is most of the trails here, but a smooth ride for Boston's Middlesex Fells. I'd forgotten how tame the trails around Grass Valley are. In my memories, there were chasms, trolls under bridges, avalanches and mythic beasts to be bested. Like most things that require patience, attention and practice, it seemed a whole lot more difficult when I was younger. That's not to say I didn't try - I used to get torn up regularly, I'm just much more practiced at getting torn up now.

The practice on the tech section of the single-track has been fruitful. It's kind of like perfecting scales on a guitar or piano. If the Breck Epic trails are variations of the bridge-root-bridge theme, then I'm all set. I'll try to elaborate on the subtleties of this bit of trail that has been the focus of my attention for the last week or so. The section I'm describing is shown in the pic. The elevation does not come through so well, but it's an approximate 8 foot drop from the top of the far side to the bridge at the bottom. The second bridge is hidden behind the rise with the roots, and is considerably more narrow than the trail. As with many tech sections, there is little relation between the feel and flow of the ride in opposite directions.

Approaching this section from the point of vantage in the pic, there is about a 6 foot drop to the bridge. It's really a rather simple matter to cut to the left, scoot the roots, roll the hump, and jog to the right and across the bridge. The most difficult part of this section was in exiting the tech on the far side into the steep uphill ramp of about 4 feet. Often, I would feel the speed getting sucked out of my bike as I entered the part of the trail with the largest curvature. Riding this section gracefully essentially comes down to a smooth shift of weight. Standing off the saddle slightly entering the upward curvature, you can compress into the saddle as the ground begins to shove you upward. As simple as it is, there were only a handful of times I thought I really nailed this section. Perfection does not come easy.

Riding the section in reverse is in much more direct, no dodging roots. My main obstacle with this one was all mental. Sure you can just roll the roots and slam across the bridge. But like music, riding is not just about hitting the right notes, you have to feel the connections. I found my style with this section by first picturing my niece bouncing off the walls and floors absent of any fear of falling, cruising into the far drop with a good head of steam, taking a slow breath, rising off the saddle, launching off the root saying farewell to the ground and doubt, then feeling the weight of reality again, thrusting the legs down to land rear wheel first (is this technically a wheelie drop? I'm still not quite sure what I'm doing, though it feels pretty awesome, kind of like sex the first time), cruising to the top of the rise with a score of four exhilarated strokes.

I'm pretty sure I grew a day younger every time I rode this. By my reckoning, I left behind about two months on this section. Getting free of the ground, even if only momentarily, is true medicine. Some say cycling is a metaphor for life, and some nutty old Frenchmen say that life is a metaphor for le Tour. While one could draw a metaphor about my breaking free of the ground, the essence of this is a simple act of being, immersion in the moment, playing with and confronting fear.

Dylan, chess, and a business plan

Bob Dylan's latest album "Modern Times" captures the gritty and raw tales of the road in his classical style, though with a voice weathered and worn and references to blindness, canes, and scripture. His sometimes disregard of lyric metric comes off as the tired acceptance of an old man. Lines such as "my mule is sick and my horse is blind" and "they say whiskey will kill you, but I don't think it will" tell us that Dylan, or the personas of his songs, speak of a confrontation with fate. The accompaniment of the harmonica is minimal, with the solitary notes of an electric guitar more dominant, imbuing the album with an air of pointed and critical reflection. Even before the first lyrics of "Nettie Moore", the refrain tells his story - lingering regret of words unspoken, his loneliness offered as a tribute to a love lost.

This album has been the sound track of my story over these last few weeks. Given to me by my father for Christmas, it has been my background while I work at his house, and the rocks off which my thoughts cascade on my drives at night. It speaks to my father, perhaps as old men both he and Dylan share an understanding of battles won and lost and the pains of time. While the mastered version of "Nettie Moore" is superbly moving, his live performances offer an acute measure of the sands of time. I have tried through this album to learn something of what my father feels.

I spent the last two weeks removing the majority of my father's possessions from his apartment. It's been a combination of shoveling shit and an archaeological dig. Each of his 10,221 papers, receipts, pamphlets, letters, catalogs, musings and illegible scratchings were sorted and acted upon. It would have been much easier to bulldoze the lot and move on, as the goal of this effort was to recreate his living space in a way that is efficient and comfortable. Buy you cannot just dispense of someone's life. Each piece had a meaning, a story. A golden example of this is his 1977 edition of the "National Design Specification for Wood Construction: Structural Lumber, Glued Laminated Timber, Timber Pilings and Fastenings". While many other similar ones went to the big file cabinet in the sky, this one we kept for his shelves. Back in the 70's my parents put their efforts toward building houses in Oregon, and nearly lost their shirts doing so. They created beautiful houses. I can only remember faintly now the curved brickwork and carved timbers dressing the roof. In the mess I came across a card from my mother to my father for the Christmas of 1984, when I was still a tot living in Oregon. My father had gone south to seek work in California while my mother stayed back with myself and my sister with our house on the market. The picture here aptly describes our poverty.

Tonight we walked up the hill and watched the sun set, then returned to his house, made dinner and played a game of chess. Our words are few. When we speak, it is often of the projects we will work on, the businesses we might start, the hikes we want to make. I doubt if we will ever embark on any of these adventures together, but life is too short to be concerned only with the dreary details.

My experiences over the last few weeks have been mixed. It is the sadness of a classic tragedy, anger that he has passed on to us the burden of sifting the meaning from the noise, and a great satisfaction of spending this time with him. Being and doing have merged into one. Perhaps it is by sheer exhaustion of the effort, or by meeting squarely the tragedy of his fate, I am not sure. If I have a resolution this year, it has been said in my actions, - to be and do with purpose and generosity. These are good days, trying as they are.