Coming full circle
Bikes I have ridden: year acquired/number of gears:
1975: 1
1976: 3
1983: 18
1992: 21
2001: 27
2008: 1
So a couple of days ago I succumbed to a long-felt need and bought a singlespeed bike, a Kona Paddy Wagon. Just one gear. Freewheel optional. Fantastic.
When the hill gets steeper, pedal harder.
Overnight hike in the Snowy Mountains
K walking through wildflowers near Guthega. Mt Kosciusko in the far background. A magic night camping by the Snowy River, followed by an arduous trek back around three mountain peaks.
Advice for overnight backpacking:
- Pack sheets of kitchen paper between your Trangia pans. It’ll stop rattling and give you something to clean up with.
- Wear long pants/gaiters when walking through long, scratchy heath, or you’ll end up like me.
Rafting the Franklin
Got back a week or two ago from spending nine days rafting down the Franklin. It’s a very different thing, to only have one thing to do each day: to get down the river. Sometimes paddling, sometimes shooting the rapids, sometimes humping the raft over rocks or lining it down waterfalls.
There are so few wild places left.
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc
When I was twenty, an architect friend-of-a-friend designed a house where kitchen and shower wastewater ran in a stream across an internal atrium, the idea being that an awareness of one’s effluvia was a prerequisite for dealing with it effectively.
At the time, I didn’t grok it: I had an intellectual appreciation for environmental concerns, but I didn’t see what I do now – how intuitively right his solution was. What is it, to feel something deeply, rather than just thinking it? What’s the difference between “knowing” and knowing?
Up a mountain in New Zealand
Double Cone at the Remarkables after some ice climbing. I never seem to have my helmet on straight.
Fun with new camera
K at Mt Stromlo, in the burnt-out observatory.
More cars, less bikes. how?
I’ve been thinking bike-positive thoughts of late, and thinking about ways to motivate people to walk/cycle/public transport their way around. It’s a challenge, particularly since my city (Canberra) is highly optimised for car transport. The roads are more direct, wider, better lit and better maintained than the bicycle paths. I can drive 13 kilometres in 17 minutes (average speed: 45.9 km/h) to get to work, whereas the same trip on cycle paths is 18 kilometres in 45 minutes (average speed: 24 km/h). So I need to spend an extra hour each day to commute back and forth by bike.
How can we start to change that equation? Conventionally, only economic incentives have been proposed to help reduce private car use – but people have repeatedly shown that economic incentives are ineffective. We should instead be thinking of using the currency which really matters: time.
Prioritise cycle routes over roads for cars: If the cycle paths were as direct as roads (or I could safely ride on the roads), I’d save almost half an hour (13km @ 24km/hr = 32.5 minutes each way).
Slow cars down: one way to make it safer for cars to coexist with bikes on the road would be to limit their speed, say, 40km/h, saving weight (smaller, less powerful engines), fuel, pollution, and noise. This would reduce the incentive to drive, help the environment, and make the roads safer for everyone. And before you think this is politically impossible, consider that we already have quite arbitrary speed limits already.
Worth thinking about?
Polar Bear Dream
nordic fjord, slanted midsummer light
polar bear rolling in the warm shallows
white coat flowing, disclosing hidden currents
chewing my arm playfully, friendly black lips
I jump in the water, fear of death overcome
Fragmentary notes of speculative botany
...once pollinated, the single flower’s petals enlarge and fuse to form a protective sac surrounding the stamens and pistils. Only the calyx remains outside, rooted close to the ground. The sac grows over the course of several weeks until it is a hand-span or more in diameter: as it does so, it loses its pigmentation and acquires a milky translucency, through which the flower’s reproductive parts can only be vaguely seen. These parts are thus protected from the fierce daytime sun and the cold nights of the mountainous regions where the plant is typically found.
During this first phase, the sac is filled with moist interior air with a rich scent which is not wholly pleasant. As the summer grows hotter, a shift in photosynthetic metabolism takes place and the air inside slowly becomes hydrogenous, while at the same time the protective sac enlarges still further and its translucence thins until it is acquires an iridescent transparency: the stamens and pistils are thus revealed to the sun, and the combination of the atmospheric composition and the intense heat desiccates the interior parts, the seeds of which are now fully developed yet tiny specks that bake in the heat.
Then, as the late-summer storms approach, the flowers’ stems, which by now have dried and weakened to mere threads, release their swollen, hydrogen-filled sacs; and lo! they rise into the air, swirling on the storm’s updrafts, the afternoon sun glinting on thousands of spheres rising to meet the dark clouds, ever faster as they are swept into the anvil head; and in the seething electrical dark they burst, sometimes in flames as the gases within are ignited by lighting: and the seeds within spill out; and the cloud’s gravid vapour nucleates around each seed, surrounded by its own tiny ocean, a raindrop which nourishes the seed as it falls back to earth, to begin the cycle anew.
Leaf, for Autumn
Just went to a lecture by John Tonkin which made me think I should put some of my art-squibs up. Accordingly, Leaf from October 2005.