weblog.masukomi.org - adventure

Debugging Our Ambulance

2023-12-08T00:00:00-05:00

Table of Contents

Debugging Our Ambulance

tl; dr: two developers use standard debugging techniques to fix electrical problems in their ambulance.

Setting The Stage

We had to drop our car off at the dealership last night. In order to avoid walking home in the dark, on roads without sidewalks, in 27°F (-2.7°C) - or just the last two shortly after dawn, we needed to drive the 🚑 Ambulance. Unlike most years, I actually remembered that it had a block heater^[1] and had turned it on at the beginning of winter.

Because it was so cold, I went out in the morning and double checked that that the block-heater was turned on. It was. What I didn’t check was the voltmeter^[2].

The Problem

That evening - in the cold, and dark of winter - I hopped into the 🚑, turned the key, and… nothing. Literally nothing happened. I looked over to the voltmeter and understood why. Zero volts coming from the batteries. Nothing to power the ignition.

A debugging we will go

Gather the initial known truths

The ambulance has 2 separate electrical systems. There’s the 12v DC system (normal car stuff) and the 120v AC system (normal “house” electrical stuff).
An Inverter takes DC power from the batteries and converts it into AC power. This is not very efficient and you loose a fair amount of power along the way even with an expensive inverter like the ones they use in ambulances.
A Converter takes AC power and converts it to DC power.
There’s no reason you can’t have an Inverter and Converter in the same physical device.
The voltmeter reads 0 volts.
The system is acting as if there is no power.

We don’t know where the AC in from the side of the ambulance goes. I suspect it’s in our wiring diagrams^[3] but we haven’t hunted that bit down yet.

Propose Theories

the batteries are “dead”. They aren’t set up as some assume. See footnote.^[4]
the batteries are disconnected.
the ambulance isn’t getting power from the house.
- The house plug is bad.
- The cord is bad.
- The ambulance plug is bad.

Choose A Theory And Test It

Eliminate things you can test rapidly.

I started with the second theory - despite it being unlikely - for three reasons: First it could be eliminated in under a minute. Second, because I’d recently replaced the batteries and they live in a slide-out drawer - 🚑s are weird - and its possible one of the leads came loose. Third, because I was already outside and didn’t need to go inside to grab anything to test this. A battery lead being detached is very unlikely to be our problem, because even if it did, each lead is clamped into two batteries. So if it comes off of one post it’s going to still be clamped onto a second one. Two batteries gives us redundancy, reliability, and more available power in an emergency when the engine has stopped running, and thus the alternators aren’t generating any DC power.

The leads were very well attached to the batteries. I couldn’t guarantee that the far end of the leads were well connected because I don’t know where they terminate, but it’s very unlikely that anything has gone wrong there. They’re very thick wires and would need significant clamps to hold them in place.

Work on probable things.

The batteries being dead is the most likely. It’s so likely that we just worked with that as a default assumption, and moved on to the third theory.

The house plug had a self-test light, and GFCI test & reset switches that all seemed to be working. We also had a plug-in AC outlet tester which was easy to grab confirmed. So, it was reasonable to temporarily eliminate it as the problem.

It’s difficult to test if the plug on the ambulance is working because we don’t actually know what it connect to inside the ambulance. It’s probably in our wiring diagrams, but even if we did know, it’s unlikely that we could reach it without disassembling parts of the ambulance.

Next was the cord. Testing that required a multimeter. We couldn’t find our “good one”, but we had an ancient Radio Shack one that still had power. A quick trip to YouTube to make sure we were using it correctly for AC wall power, and we confirmed that the cord was transmitting power. We tested this inside in the basement which was both well-lit, and significantly warmer.

Because we couldn’t easily test that the 🚑 was receiving power via its plug, we had to just assume - for now - that that was still good.

Since we had the multimeter in hand, it made sense to eliminate some things that had just become quickly testable: the batteries themselves. They were - unsurprisingly - dead.

We tested the AC plug on the Inverter (for sending power out). It worked. Since the batteries were completely dead, and the outlet had full power, we could reasonably assume that the power was coming from the cord to the house, which meant that power was successfully entering the ambulance and being used by things in it.

Generate new theories
- State of Existing / Old Theories
  1. ✅ the batteries are “dead”.
  2. ⛔ the batteries are disconnected.
  3. ⛔ the ambulance isn’t getting power from the house.
    - ⛔ The house plug is bad.
    - ⛔ The cord is bad.
    - ⛔ The ambulance plug is bad.
- Evaluating What We Learned
  
  We have to assume that the power system from the socket on the wall of the 🚑 to whatever it goes to is fine. It’s been sitting still for months, and is unlikely to have had a problem. We’re also assuming that the other end of the battery leads are still connected. Both of these are too hard to test, and too unlikely to bother trying.
  
  The batteries being dead isn’t surprising. It explains why we couldn’t start. It also raises two questions
  - Why are the batteries dead?
  - What can we do to give them power?
  Normally, plugging it into the wall is all we need to do to give the batteries a trickle-charge that’s significant enough to overcome the normal phantom draw.
- Another Quick Test
  
  We have a lithium jump start battery pack for the car. It was our belief that it didn’t provide enough power to turn over the engine, but it was something we could test quickly. It’d be great to be wrong about it.
  
  When I connected it to the batteries, the ambulance lit up like a Christmas Tree. Thus confirming that the batteries were well connected to the system. Turning the key “worked”, but as suspected there wasn’t nearly enough power to “turn over” the engine. I left it connected so that it could help the batteries out when we figured out how to get power into them. It drained very quickly. These emergency lithium jump-start batteries work by providing a lot of power throughput, but they don’t actually have a lot of power stored. It’s just a short powerful burst until the engine starts and can take over.
- New theories needed
  
  New theory: Power is making it into the ambulance, but not making it into the batteries.
  
  Batteries don’t have separate “input” and “output” things. DC power is like water. It just flows through the system, self-levels, and leaks out any “holes” (things using power) you may have. Since the batteries were well connected (still assuming far end is good) it meant that the problem was likely to be something in the electrical cabinet.
  
  I believe the batteries also go directly to the starter mechanism, but we’re assuming that that’s good, and investigating questions around getting power into them, not getting power to the starter. We need power to exist before we can bother giving it away.
  
  The problem with this theory is that it is too generic. It helps narrow down the problem, but it doesn’t give us anything specific to test, and the system has thousands of wires, a wall of relays, and many other things.
  
  We went back into the warm, and well lit house to think.
  
  Dachary proposed that we might have blown a fuse. The problem with this is that there are surprisingly few fuses in this system. Because we believed (reasonably) that all the stuff to go from “shore power” to the batteries was in the electrical cabinet, the problem with that theory was that neither of us could recall any fuses in there. One wall of the cabinet has a panel that opens behind the driver’s seat, and we think there are some fuses there. Unfortunately the seats don’t fold forward and it’s a pain to get to even when you can see well. Also, we didn’t believe those fuses controlled anything relevant.
  
  New Theory: blown fuse.
  
  Currently not worth testing, because we didn’t have any likely or easily accessible location to look.
  
  So, we got out the wiring diagrams^[3].
  
  At this point we’re thinking that the Inverter and Converter are in the same box. However, I’ve been bothered by the fact that it only says “Inverter” on it. If there is a separate converter I don’t know where it is.
  
  Dachary digs into the wiring diagram while I test something I can’t remember - I’ve probably just messed up the order of something here. She finds the Inverter, but it doesn’t mention a converter. The rest of the diagram wasn’t very helpful, but there was a reference to another diagram number though. So, I start hunting for that one. There I find two things: First, a separate mention of the converter, implying that it’s a physically separate device. Second, an indication that it’s wired in via a standard AC plug. That would have to be one of the plugs in the electrical cabinet.
  
  I head back out, and start re-examining the cabinet. As I’m looking around at the outlets and plugs and wondering where the converter could be I notice a large metal box that I’ve mostly been ignoring. It says “converter” on it. 🤦‍♀️
  
  I start examining the converter and notice that it has 3 wires going into it. AC is 3 wires (positive, negative, and ground) and DC is 2. Because a Converter is AC to DC this must be where the power comes in. The connector they used has places you can stick multimeter leads and test if it’s getting power.
  
  New theory: Converter isn’t getting power.
  
  I also notice a single automotive blade-style fuse hidden behind where those wires come in. It’s impossible to tell if it’s blown, and really difficult to access.
- Closing In
  
  I grab pliers to try and extract the fuse, and a multimeter to test if it’s getting power.
  
  I dive back into the cold and dark. It’s getting power! I attack the fuse. It’s blown.
  
  It’s a 30 amp fuse too. That’s a lot. If it hadn’t blown then “Bad Things™” would have likely resulted. E.g. 🚑 + 🔥… and then maybe 🏠 + 🔥.
  
  I stand up and reach into the cabinet with spare fuses^[5], grab a new 30v fuse, slide it in and the whole ambulance lights up again! I check the voltmeter and it’s back at the standard charging & running level of 13v, which means the batteries are being fed power now!
  
  After a couple hours of changing, it started right up.

Summary

Practicing a considered, and well structured approach to debugging is far more efficient than flailing wildly at random ideas that flit through your brain. It’s also very useful outside of software.

At each step of the way I literally stopped and restated what we knew the known truths to be, and ask what new information we could derive from the theories we’d eliminated or confirmed.

While we didn’t do a formal “post-mortem” to the “production incident”, we did create “action items” from it.

Buy a new multimeter. It doesn’t matter that we have a good one if we can’t find it.
Increase the priority of the existing task to measure, model, and 3D print a custom shroud to improve the water resistance of the 🚑’s outside plug. Rainwater in there seems the most likely cause of a problem.

Good debugging and Incident Management procedures help in your everyday life too.

For a good guide to debugging start with “The Pocket Guide To Debuging”, by Julia Evans.

For a good guide to creating your own incident management processes, start with Graceful Disasters, by me.

Afterward

(based on internet commentary)

The electrical systems in modern ambulances are nothing like those in cars, diesel trucks, or RVs. Unless you’ve helped manufacture these things, or have spelunked in the wiring of one first hand, your assumptions about how things work are probably wrong. Additionally, each one is a literal one-off-custom build.

I assure you that it’s very easy for a brand new starter battery to go dead in 6 weeks of cold weather if an ambulance isn’t plugged in. This makes sense if you understand the regulations these must meet to give you the best chance of survival in some extreme environmental conditions. It makes sense if you understand how they’re used by the EMTs and Paramedics.

Trust me when I tell you, that once we get beyond “Electricity 101” and Ohm’s Law, you should throw your assumptions about how this is wired or constructed out the window. We aren’t guessing about how it’s wired. We have ridiculously detailed wiring diagrams for this specific vehicle. Every wire’s insulation says what that specific wire is for. We know how things are connected. We just don’t know where everything is connected. To put it another way. We know that two wires meet at a junction, we just don’t know which part of the wall each junction is hidden behind.

our ambulance dashboard

A block heater is basically an electric blanket for your engine. This is especially notable for large diesel engines for three reasons: ↩
1. diesel stops being liquid and turns to a gel when it gets cold enough. They actually change the formula in the pumps just before winter temperatures kick in. A diesel engine uses “glow plugs” to heat the fuel. I don’t know what they look like, but they’re essentially just little electric heaters in the fuel system. They take a lot of power, and a many minutes to make the diesel ignitable on cold days.
2. our engine is so large that even if you do manage to get it started in the cold it takes a long time to heat up all the metal.
3. diesel engines don’t have spark plugs. They combust the fuel by compressing it, which is harder to do when it’s a gel.
Ambulances have dashboards with a lot of switches (see below). There’s also a voltmeter (the radial-dial). Unsurprisingly an 🚑 has a lot of electrical stuff going on. Unlike most vehicles there’s a non-trivial phantom draw. It will drain its two AGM batteries if it just sits around for a while. This is acceptable, because it was designed to be used literally every day. It’s also got a 120v AC input on the side (with a weird plug). We don’t drive ours much, but we do keep it plugged in.

The voltmeter is important because if yours is low, the EMTs and Paramedics in the back are going to have trouble using things like IV bag warmers and having lights to see what they’re doing. You want to know early if there’s a problem. ↩
Unlike most vehicles every 🚑 has complicated custom wiring. Every ambulance is custom built. What features you get depends mostly on how much your town is willing to spend^[6]. Manufacturers need to keep track of what they put into each one so that they know how to fix it if it comes back for repairs. When we got ours, we called up the manufacturer, gave them our Vehicle Identification Number, and asked them to send us a PDF of the wiring diagram for our vehicle. ↩ ↩2
The ambulance has 2 AGM batteries wired in parallel. There is not a separate “house” battery and “starter” battery. Within the US there are strict regulations about being able to maintain temperature in the patient area of an ambulance. Basically you need to be able to keep it cool in the middle of Death Valley in the summer, and you need to be able to keep it warm in the northernmost part of Alaska in the winter. You’d need a massive battery to be able to power the heating and cooling systems to achieve this for hours on end. Ambulance manufacturer’s don’t bother. Instead they just guarantee that that will work while the engine is running. In my case they accomplished it by using two beefy alternators. ↩
Of course we have spare fuses on hand. A) it’s an ambulance with a billion cabinets. B) It would really really suck to be stuck on the side of the road just because you didn’t have a fuse. Especially in a long distance (thousands of miles) trip like the ones we take. B) of course the fuses are right next to the electrical cabinet. Why would you keep them anywhere else? ↩
A new Type III ambulance - the big boxy ones with a van shaped front - starts around $150,000. Most towns sell them after they hit 100,000 miles. That’s how we got ours significantly cheaper. ↩

Tourists and Adventurers

2012-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

This post was written as response to The Travel Chica’s post about the flooding of the Atacama

The Travel Chica just discovered that “the driest place on the planet is flooding”.

The two most beautiful places on my itinerary for Chile have experienced environmental disasters just before my arrival. First, there was the fire in Torres del Paine. And now the driest place on the planet is flooding.

…
I just spent US$100 on a bus ticket to get here, dealt with the discomfort of an overnight bus ride, and left a city I loved and wanted to explore more. And I am not going to be able to take pictures of this landscape photographer’s dream destination.

…
People are being evacuated.
The military is handing out mattresses and blankets on the square.

…
The only thing for me to do is book a bus ticket out of here. …And wait until I can escape to northern Argentina…

So, let’s recap: People’s homes are flooded. Entire villages are being evacuated, and she’s complaining about a $100 bus ticket and the “discomfort of an overnight bus ride”.

She’s traveled to a “photographer’s dream destination” and when she finds out that she will not be able to take the same pictures everyone else has been taking for years, but instead has been presented with the opportunity to photograph something that has never happened within our lifetime “the only thing for [her] to do is book a ticket out…” Just imagine how extraordinary (literally) it would be to go to the same places of all those beautiful pictures she admired, and find beauty in a landscape transformed by an element that is almost never present.

This, is a spectacular example of the differences between a typical tourist and an adventurer. A tourist books itineraries, expects comfort everywhere despite the being in a land rife with poverty, and gets upset when things don’t go according to plan.

An adventurer says “Holy shit! How fortunate am I to be experiencing something that has never happened in my lifetime, to be in a place where the money I bring to the community when paying for food, guides, and shelter can have a real impact in this time of crisis, to be able to photograph things no-one else will have the opportunity to, to tell stories no-one else can tell, and to have the ability to hop the next bus out whenever I want.”

The adventurer thrives in the unexpected moments of life. The tourist gets annoyed.

I will never be a tourist.

Adventure means taking chances

2010-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Tomorrow morning Dachary and I will be climbing on our motorcycles and setting off for an epic adventure lasting nearly four months and over 17,000 miles. The goal is to drive south from Boston MA, USA until we reach the most southerly city on the planet: Ushuaia Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina. I can’t wait. Usually when we tell people their first reaction is “Be careful in Mexico.” Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, rebels living in the jungle… not a concern. But Mexico! OMG Flee. The fact that millions of US Citizens cross into Mexico, shop, and relax just south of the border without harm is irrelevant. Some Mexican citizens have been kidnapped, and held for ransom. Some Mexican businesspeople have been extorted. Some US citizens have been kidnapped but most of them are hispanic and there have been

“very few cases where a tourist is targeted at random,” said Eric Drickersen, who supervises the FBI’s border liaison office in San Diego.

More importantly, most of this stuff seems to be happening close to the US/Mexico border; a place we intend to spend only as long as it takes us to get through customs and head south. We’ve got better things to see than Gringo tourist traps. So, I appreciate the concern, really I do. But, if you’re gonna worry, worry about bigger things. Like breaking a bones in the middle of nowhere, being forced off a cliff-side road with no railings, getting Malaria, being stopped by rebels is south-west Colombia. Me, I’m not actually worried about any of that. It’s all possible. But, worrying about it does’n’t help at all. If anything it makes it worse by stressing you out. But, I am slightly worried about one thing: coming back. You see, I am officially unemployed. When I planned this thing I was under the impression I’d be able to get unpaid leave from my employer, but that fell through in the end, and when given the choice of continuing to sit in a cubicle and continue doing the same tasks I’ve been doing for fifteen years, and getting on a motorcycle and exploring the world for four months, possibly returning home completely broke… well, that’s not much of a choice at all. I mean really. A person has to have their priorities straight. And living in fear of not having money is not a very high priority for me.

“Ooh Can I?! Can I please continue to live a mundane existence so as to make sure I receive another paycheck that allows me to continue to live a mundane existence? Please please?!”

Fuck that noize.

My coworkers gave me a going away party, which I am very thankful for. But, one of the most memorable parts of that was speaking with a coworker about The Adventurists. The Adventurists offer a number of great adventure packages that you should definitely check out, and spend some time daydreaming about. One of the most popular is the Rickshaw Run. They provide you with a “rickshaw” (basically an old vespa with 3 wheels, a windshield, and an open body welded to it) that is not even remotely designed for thousands of miles of driving, almost guaranteed to give you problems at some point along the way, and an a route across India that will take you about two weeks to complete, with essentially no support from them.

Ill-advised, uncomfortable, impractical, dangerous, pointless, furstrating, unreliable, unstable, stupid, painful, all great things that make the rickshaw the ultimate all terrain machine. - The Adventurists

If it was easy it’d just be a pretty ride, but breaking down in the middle of Inda and having to figure out how to fix it… that would be something to tell your friends about. That’s an adventure.

My coworker thought the idea was wonderful, but he had a baby about a year ago, and simply couldn’t do something like that because he had responsibilities. But, his stay-at-home wife is smart, and surely could take care of the baby for two weeks without him, he’d be gone on paid vacation, and the chances of dying are really no higher than they are here at home…

The point is, we build these mental cages for ourselves. “Oh I’d love to do that but I can’t because…” This seems especially true of people with children, but the best gift you can give a child, your partner is happiness, and happiness doesn’t come from a paycheck. We were poverty-level poor for much of my childhood, but my mom did what made her happy, kept us fed and clothed, and did whatever she could to make me happy too. You think I would have cared if she’d left me with Dad for two weeks while she went and had an adventure? Hell no. And, in the years that followed I would have wonderful tales of far off places. When I was a baby she took me to the Grand Canyon. Rode down into it on a donkey. I don’t remember a second of it, but I remember the story, and her telling me how wonderful it was.

Unless you’re in prison there is nothing keeping you from having an adventure. When you look back at your life do you want to see a life spend primarily in a cubicle, a few hours with your friends and family each day before going to bed, and if you’re lucky some time on the weekend squeezed in between all the errands you couldn’t do during the week?

I don’t care what anyone says. That is not a life well spent. I don’t care if that cubicle dwelling allowed you to put your kid through school. You barely get a chance to see them, and you sacrificed your own happiness to do so. Lots of people enjoy their jobs, but few of them think spending 40+ hours a week sitting in a cube staring at a screen is a good life. I love coding, but I want to look back at my life and feel that I lived it, that I did something memorable, and special with it. Sitting in a cube staring at a screen is neither memorable, nor special.

The job I just quit was an excellent one, surrounded by good people, but it did not make for a life well spent. It did, however, provide me with the means to make a good start on one.

We’ll be documenting the adventure on CorporateRunaways.com. I invite you to follow our adventures, and start figuring out how to have your own. Life is too short to spend it all at work. Make it memorable. Make it fun. Make yourself happy.

And then there was the bear...

2010-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

We rode the Trans-Massachusetts-Trail yesterday. A series of dirt roads starting at the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts and working its way north to route 2 where it meets up with the start of the Puppy Dog Trail, which winds its way north all the way to the Canadian border (we’ll be doing that one shortly). Near the end of the trip we stopped for a break in the woods to address the “call of nature” and grab a snack.

To the right was a small hill, and the left edge of the road had a two foot mound, that turned out to be a half buried stone wall, before continuing down the hill. I’m not sure how far it was to the bottom, maybe a hundred feet, but from where we’d pulled off to the right of the road we couldn’t see down past the mound.

We chatted and drank some water, and ended up quietly enjoying the scene for a few moments until we heard something running through the woods just past the mound. We looked at each other, and I walked quickly, and quietly, to the look over. It was an adult Black Bear trotting quickly through the woods. I made a “be quiet” hand motion and mouthed “bear” (Dachary’s eyes got huge) because I didn’t want to bear to come over. Then I remembered all the episodes of Survivorman we’d watched in which Les was walking through the woods yelling “Hey Bear!” because the LAST thing you want to do is surprise a bear.

So I promptly started shouting out “Hey Bear!” Grabbed my keys, shoved them into the ignition, threw on my helmet, started it up and revved the engine, which I’m happy to say has a nice deep growl of a sound . I threw my gloves between my crotch and the bike, checked to make sure Dachary was on her bike, and we took off; zipped jackets and gloved hands be damned!

How close were we? The bear could have easily closed the distance between us in three seconds. How much adrenaline did we have? Just enough to cap off the day with a smile. Although the remaining miles were pretty anticlimactic.

P.S. A coworker opened her eyes wide when I related yelling “Hey Bear!” “I thought you played dead?” she said. For those of you who don’t know: No, you don’t play dead. You make lots of noise, hopefully stay out sight, and the bear will probably stay away from you. If the bear comes up to you, make yourself big, carry a big stick, and pray to your favorite deity. Unless it’s a Grizzly Bear, which you probably won’t know until the thing is pretty much on top of you. If it’s a grizzly I’m pretty sure you do the same thing, except if making noise fails, you play dead. If you play dead for a Black Bear or a Brown Bear, they’re likely to thank you for making it easy to kill you for being in their territory.

P.P.S. On a related note. Does anyone know the appropriate strategy for dealing with mountain lions or keeping them away from your camp? That’s an issue we may have to deal with in Central / South America.

P.P.P.S Afterwards Dachary was all “Why were you telling me to be quiet?!?!” because she’s smarter than me. ;)

800+ lbs of flying idiocy.

2010-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

Yesterday I watched an 800 pounds of chrome, fiberglass, metal, and plastic spinning through the air. Sunlight reflected in movie-like highlights off of the long chromed pipes. The Harley did things other Harleys have only ever dreamed of… in their nightmares.

I saw the whole thing, from start to finish. Dachary only saw the grand finale of flying metal, but her brain came to the obvious conclusion: “That’s a cruiser [spinning through the air]. He was probably wearing jeans and a t-shirt.”

Let’s back up, a fraction of a second earlier.

Two “Harley guys”, out for a ride. Each wearing a Yarmulke style black skull cap (too small to deserve the title of “helmet” in my book), t-shirts and jeans. Cruising along at maybe forty miles an hour. The rear one, obviously not paying attention, gets too close to the front, and as his front tire is almost in line with his friend’s rear, does something I can’t explain. Maybe he clipped the panniers. Maybe he screwed up and hit his wheel into his friends. I’m not quite sure. But the rest was clear.

Uncontrolled front wheel wobble, followed by a lowside (when you “lay the bike down”). I watched as the left side of his torso approached the ground. Some small part of his brain told him to keep his hand up, which was good, because while his hands did have leather gloves on, I’m pretty sure they were fingerless. It’s “cooler” that way. So, he proffered his bare elbow to the gods of asphalt.

His bike was better at keeping its speed on its side than he was, but after an instant it decided that it didn’t like sliding, and figured maybe flying would hurt less, so eight hundred plus pounds of metal went from sliding on its side, uprighted itself (sideways) and lept two feet into the air, where it began it’s pirouette.

I didn’t see it come down. I was heading in the other direction on the divided road, and didn’t feel like performing a re-enactment. There was a light ahead, and I planned to turn around there to help out, because there’s a camaraderie amongst motorcyclists, and we watch out for each other, even when the others are idiots. Also, I had a first aid kit in my panniers. But, just before I got to the light, a police car passed, lights on, heading for the scene. And, as cops are way better trained at handling bleeding idiots than I am, I let them too it. Also, he probably had a better first aid kit than mine, although I wonder if his had a splint too…

Gear Up.

It is said that there are two kinds of motorcycle riders in the world. Those who have crashed, and those who haven’t crashed yet. It’s safe to say that he will have a serious scar on that elbow, and he may have mobility issues with it for the rest of his life. Depending on how the rest of him fell and if he rolled or slid there may be much a broken shoulder and much more skin ground off by the road. There’s probably a couple grand worth of damage to his bike, and his friend may never ride with him again. I know I’d be hesitant to let someone that careless ride beside me.

If he was paying attention it would have never happened. If he was wearing protective gear I honestly believe the worst he’d suffer would be a bruise and maybe a week of aching.

The unexpected: ~ Sometimes it is a grand thing ~ Sometimes it's simple

2009-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

I thought it would be a Grand Adventure. Something I would return from with tales of interesting events and intriguing sights. But it wasn’t like that at all. In fact, there wasn’t a whole lot to report on, on a day to day basis. I’d kind-of bemoaned that about Lois Price’s books. I enjoyed them, but it felt a bit like she’d left out so much. She’d cross entire countries only mentioning their existence in passing. “How could she leave out so much?!” I thought. It just doesn’t make any sense until you have a long adventure of your own that you understand. It’s the simple fact, that for the most part, not much happens on a motorcycle adventure, at least, not while things are going according to plan.

It’s not that they’re boring, or uninteresting. It’s just that, unless something goes wrong, the vast majority of the time you spend on one is spent sitting in a saddle watching the landscape go by. I rode over mountains, through canyons, and clouds, and buffalo. And while I took lots of pictures of many the many interesting things, in the end, they’re essentially a collection of landscapes.

For a while now I’ve been intrigued by the adventures put on by The Adventurists ( http://www.theadventurists.com ). One thing they emphasize on all of them is using vehicles that are wholly inappropriate for the task, and providing absolutely no support should your vehicle break down. On the page for their Rickshaw Run they write, “Support? Of course we don’t provide any support. The Rickshaw Run is supposed to be an adventure. What sort of adventure would you have if we were following you in a truck with spare parts and a comfy bed. No, no we must get out there into the world and get stuck in. When you’re stuck, lost, and up a certain creek without a rowing implement is when you start to have fun - and the last thing we want to do is stop you having fun! If you want a full support crew there’s a very nice place called Butlins based in Bognor Regis.”

What I’ve learned now, is that they are 100% correct. I look back at my journey and realize that the most “interesting” parts of it, when I was actually faced with serious choices and events, were when things went wrong, or when things were anything but smooth. I loved taking my absurdly laden street bike up a dirt road through the rockies at elevations far above my carburetor’s tuning, with the very serious possibility, and near instance, of being crushed between truck and stone as they came flying around a blind canyon curves with no room to spare, or falling over the side of the cliff to my doom, but that just proves their point.

I loved going through the Black Hills National Park. I was astounded by the beauty of it, but I’ll never forget riding through the middle of three buffalo herds on a motorcycle that always put them on edge, or seeing one running in a direction that seemed to be very much towards me. I loved the Badlands, but it was made forty times better by the fact that I could barely keep my bike upright at times on the very gravely road, that I had to ride most of it in the wrong lane, and when a car came towards me I had to slow to a near stop to cross over the eight inch mounds of loose gravel that my street tires were woefully unequipped to handle.

I loved driving a hundred and fifty miles through empty lands and towns so small that the idea of anything as useful as a gas station was absolutely laughable, wondering if it would see a gas station before I ran out, thinking gratefully about that spare gallon and a half strapped to the rear seat.

I look back at Lois’s books now and understand why they’re the way they are, because while I may have ridden through nearly four thousand miles of farmland there’s not a lot to tell you about it. How much does anyone want to hear about four thousand miles of corn, sunflowers, and random green things I can’t identify? Kansas was great, but the most noteworthy moment was when I pulled off the road to eat lunch near some grain silos, and watched two men come out from them to watch me eating a few hundred yards away.

But, you can’t leave it at that. To do so would imply that more mundane bits spent riding between the complications are somehow unimportant, or not worth the time. But it is. I wrote before about how your motorcycle becomes home ( http://masukomi.posterous.com/today-was-the-last-it-started-off-in-a-cloud ) in a very real sense, not just because you have nowhere else to go. There’s something incredible about climbing onto a saddle that’s also your home and setting off on unknown roads. Especially on a motorcycle.

Ted Simon, who wrote Jupiter’s Travels, said “I think the motorcycle is best because it puts you so much more in contact with everything. You experience much more closely the nature of the terrain and can almost taste the cultures that you’re riding through. Because it exposes you to the climate and to the wind and rain it’s a much more complete experience.”

I’ve quoted that before, but it’s just so true. I think my trip through Wyoming’s plains might have been pretty boring in a car. But, there’s just such a huge difference between passing a curious windmill and passing a curious windmill after having felt that same wind pushing against you for hours. Racing towards the silhouetted edge of the cloud that is itself racing along the road is neat, but doing it after riding through the heart of its brother with water condensing and dripping from every exposed surface, after feeling the chill wind that’s blowing thirty five miles an hour against you, the windmill, and the cloud you’re racing, and knowing that when you reach that edge you’ll feel the sunlight again. Laughing with joy when you finally do… Laughing because it’s so suddenly warm, laughing because you raced a cloud, laughing because a tumbleweed suddenly blew across your path, something you’d only ever seen in Road-Runner cartoons and Western movies. “Tumbleweeds don’t really go rolling across the road in front of you.”, you thought.

I loved sleeping in a tent, listening to the cicadas as I set it up, and noticing they’d all gone quiet, but that the chorus of insects was picked up by others and still going strong as I went to sleep wondering if any of the ants that had scampered around as I pounded in tent pegs would find a way in. Doing so wasn’t just the cheap option. It was the *right* option. To have used a motel every night would have left me so cut off from the world; as if the adventure were some safe video game that you could turn off at the end of the day. Even the sterilized campgrounds with their precisely laid out RV spots and electric hook ups felt wrong. I kept thinking of Wan, ( http://totalruckus.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12143 ) a Korean guy who came to the US, bought a little 50cc scooter and circumnavigated the lower 48 states, finding places to hide his tent, when he wasn’t shacking up with strangers from a message board. I kept thinking that if my bike wasn’t neon green and was either light enough to be carried when stuck, like his, or capable of real off-roading, I would have totally done some sneak-camping too.

I loved going three days with no electricity, every night trying to figure out how to keep my iPhone going one more day so that I’d be able to check the GPS if I needed to, something which would drain the battery in an hour and a half, or record my nearly daily audio posts for you.

And there was something liberating about loosing my map in Iowa, and awesome about not knowing what day it was, and later finding you were two days off, and not knowing what state you’re in, checking the map later and discovering you’d passed through three states in a day. I loved how, at the end of almost every day, I’d find myself checking the sun to see how far it was from the horizon, learning just how low it could get before I’d be setting up camp in the dark again. “Come on… Come on…. I’m not going to make it…. shit I’m not going to make it. Oh look, a campground sign! Turn! Turn!”

I learned a lot this trip. It wasn’t the life changing experience I’d dreamed of, but It ended up being the practice adventure I’d hoped for. Incredibly informative, but relatively easy. Too easy to stand on it’s own maybe. Like a bike with training wheels. It gets you from point A to B and you’re excited to be going, but you’re not *really* riding until you take those training wheels off. Now I know that The Adventurists are right. “When you’re stuck, lost, and up a certain creek without a rowing implement is when you start to have fun”. The United States are, honestly, a bit too safe. You have to work at it to worry about gas, and I can’t remember a road I didn’t encounter someone on fairly regularly. To make it exciting here you have to work at it: take the Trans-America Trail ( http://www.transamtrail.com/ ), or make it a real challenge and take a tiny little 50cc bike like Wan. It’s not at all surprising that when you watch Long Way ’Round America, while over 3,000 miles from Alaska to New York is one of the shortest and least interesting pieces of the show.

If that sounds anti-climactic it is, but don’t take that to mean I didn’t have fun, that I didn’t shout a hearty “Hello Cow!” as I passed our four footed cousins who raised their heads to watch me, that I didn’t grin from ear to ear when I saw the Prairie Dog warning, and remember them scampering ten feet from my wheels as I drove past a family of them two states ago.

Or that I even the simplest moments of beauty didn’t make me think about higher powers.

Don’t think for a moment that I would trade a moment of it for the comforts and safety of my home, if anything I regret not going all the way to California. And know that if this has had any impact on my life it has been to show me that the things I want so desperately in my life are just waiting for me to come and join them.

So, who feels like riding to Mongolia with me? Cameroon?

Posted via email from masukomi’s posterous

First there was the pic ~ with mention of a story ~ Now you have the words.

2009-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

It started with a thwapping on my left foot.

Thwap

Like a thick cloth being whipped heavily across my boot.

Thwap

“But, There’s no cloth in front of my foot…” I think.

Thwap

I’m imagining some impossible piece of canvas beating in the wind, occasionally swinging around to slap across my laces.

I look down. There’s a grasshopper IN my shoelaces, its whole body wedged under them against the tongue of my boot.

“I have GOT to take a picture of THAT.” I think. “It’s not going anywhere. I’ll do it when I pull over.”

Thwap

This time it’s the right foot.

Thwap
Thwap

Thwap

I lost count eventually. A hundred? A hundred-fifty?

Thwap

I never saw them. I just felt them. Thwapping against my feet. It became a sad running joke. Invisible grasshoppers jumping to their doom.

I thought that would be the worst of it. Them, the few hundred small flying things that converted themselves into little piles of winged meat on my visor, and the occasional large flying thing which bounced off or exploded into a large yellow stain across my eyes. I wondered why bug guts were always yellow, until I finally hit a mosquito on its way home from a meal. It left a small red splotch that looked remarkably like a Scottish Terrier. I had at least a hundred miles to ponder its shape before walking over to the gas station squeegie and attacking my helmeted head for the third time that day.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the worst of it. I killed a lot of things in South Dakota, but I feel especially bad about the long necked water-fowl that was sitting on the center-line. It seemed confused, as if it couldn’t decide if it should stay there, or attempt to leave. A the last moment it took flight, cutting directly across my path, but far enough ahead that all would have been fine, had it not decided to change its mind directly in front of my wheel, and attempt to turn around. A tenth of a second? A hundredth? Just enough time for my mind to fear that the impact, and following loss of traction as I rode up and over its body would cause me to drop the bike, not enough to prevent the Thumping impact followed, without noticeable delay, by a jolt to the shocks, and then nothing until eventually…

Thwap

I thought it was just dirt, but then I realized it was the remains of countless South Dakotan grasshoppers.

Today was the last ~ It started off in a cloud ~ Ended with regrets

2009-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

Today, my last day, started off about a third of the way across New York in Arkport and found me riding through another cloud. This one was just enough to shorten visibility and mist up your visor. Not like the one in Wyoming which left everything dripping. After a while I made my way past the hills that bounded it and found bright blue skies with sunlight streaming down.

I was excited. “I’m going home!” I thought, but the closer I got to home, the more I didn’t want to arrive. Even taking the Mohawk Trail on the way back through Massachusetts didn’t lift my spirits. In the end, it just didn’t feel like a homecoming. I love seeing Boston’s skyline come up over the horizon after being away. It’s always made me think “ahh, home” before. Today though, I just thought… “Maybe I should have kept going to California…”, and “I don’t want this to end.”

I found a new home out on the road. You hear adventure riders talk about wanting to get back “home” to their bike after they’ve been off it for a day or two. I’d always thought that to be a sort of joke, in that, you don’t have anywhere else to go but your bike, so it is “home” by default. But on this ride I learned the truth of it. Your bike really does become your home. Everywhere else is unknown and a little shaky, but your saddle… Your saddle is the place you go to feel safe and comforted in the way that any good home does. I’d find myself looking out at it from some random restaurant windows, just wanting to be done with my meal so I could climb back on.

A motorcycle is so much more than a “home” though. It is part of the adventure, with a personality all its own, and calling it a “steel horse” isn’t just poetic license. It is a metaphor that lies very close to truth. It eats, it breathes, it has things it likes and doesn’t like that aren’t necessarily shared by others of its breed. I really think that a motorcycle adventure isn’t that different from a horse adventure, except that a motorcycle is so much better at devouring the miles.

I imagine that once upon a time there were men who set out west on their horses, not so much for the promise of gold or new land to call their own, but because they could. Because there were new things to be seen, new places to go.

For a while I was like them: seeing new things, exploring new places, sleeping on ground that wasn’t always soft, starting each day by packing your saddlebags and throwing your sleeping gear over your horses back. Now I’m back at my house with it’s big plasma TV screen and soft cushions, and I’m not convinced it’s an improvement. I look at shelves of books, video games, electronic boxes and wonder “why do I need all this?”

I was riding through clouds in Wyoming, and New York. I saw tumbleweeds crossing before me, and windmills bringing water for cows. I watched the lush beauty of the Black Hills turn to the bleak death of the Badlands in a matter of hours. I drove past two miles of abandoned boxcars, and made my bed to the sound of cicadas instead of Chevrolets. I watched my black gloves bleach a yellow-grey in the sun. And I am not at all convinced that this soft couch is an improvement…

An evil bathroom ~ Did The Joker design it? ~ I'm greatly displeased

2009-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

I walk in and the light snaps on. The stalls resemble small concrete torture rooms where you can easily wash down the blood. I’m about to sit when the light snaps off. “WTF?! Was there a switch I missed?” I start to move and they snap back on. No switch by the door. “This does not bode well.” The lights are on a timer. It is set to approximately 15 seconds after movement stops. It doesn’t notice you on the toilet. Every fifteen seconds the lights snap off and you have to wave your arms in the air to make them come back on.

On the up side: most interesting poo I’ve had in years. :)