Chapter 29: Kinetic Madness, 1987
© 1987 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs
Eureka, California (2,257 miles)
May 25, 1987
Eureka? Again? Is this a time-warp? If you’ve been following these
tales for any time at all, you know we spent five weeks here over the
winter... and you also know that we couldn’t have possibly pedaled back
up the coast as fast as the date on this column would suggest.
Well, we still have the van. Though vaguely embarrassing for a die-hard
long-distance cyclist, it offers considerable flexibility... especially
when it comes to high-speed spatial relocation for events like the 14th Annual World Championship Great
Arcata-to-Ferndale Cross-Country Kinetic Sculpture Race.
We threw everything in the van, turned a key, sat for a few hours, then
abruptly found ourselves in Chico—out in the flat farmlands of a whole
different California. Not even unpacking the bikes, we dropped off the
boxed trappings of our Palo Alto layover, visited with the publisher of
the Journal of High Treknowledgy,
Ray Rolls, and hit the road again, winding along route 299
until—surprise—we were in Eureka. This is a maddening way to travel:
too fast. The world drifts by, much too easily, the hills so smooth
that hardly a drop of sweat rises between sea level and 3,000 feet. No
sense of transition zones, no subtle cultural shifts... not even any of
those invigorating moments of panic as logging trucks crowd you to the
cliff-edge...
So here we are in Eureka again, complete with bona fide press passes
emblazoned with the sacred kinetic chicken icon. The rest of this
chapter will be written at odd moments, in the tent and on beaches, in
restaurants and on the bike, whenever the swirl of events threatens to
overflow the looniness buffer...
It’s midnight, twelve hours until the 1987 field of kinetic sculptures
explodes from the Arcata plaza in their annual quest for glory. The
frenzy is tangible, the air thick with the fumes of last-minute epoxies
and paints. All over Humboldt County, exhausted builders are oiling
chains, attaching flotation gear, touching up paint jobs, and tweaking
their baroque mechanisms of brass and fiberglass.
In Duane Flatmo’s garage shop, the team works in a haze of sleep
deprivation and hastily-gulped snacks. Paint-speckled torn sweatshirts.
Grizzled chins. Litter of Budweiser cans, Calistoga bottles, and
sculpture materials—a confusing detritus indeed. Gleaming unnaturally
amidst the clutter and filth is the Science
Mobile: a grinning bulbous three-wheeled fish with two seats,
two gear trains, a working mouth, tractor-like wheels with detachable
paddles, headlights... and an oddly coherent overall motif of
surrealistic folk art, carnival baroque, and a crazy, dreamlike
extrapolation of 50’s art nouveau with a touch of alien-tech.
Elsewhere, in a mad, sordid tangle of machinery on the waterfront, a
dozen or more people struggle with two other machines. June Moxon’s
all-woman team fashions a giant pink high-heeled shoe around a
well-designed mega-tricycle with hydraulic disc brakes; Ken Beidleman’s
crew debugs the rudder control linkage and works on final aesthetics of
the synthesizer-equipped Bionic Blue
Coach. The scene is repeated, with madness the common theme, in
some 40 other garages.
Yes, it’s Kinetic Eve, and for once my compu-bike is in the background.
This weekend I plan to be audience instead of show, and the feeling is
deeply refreshing.
Day 1. I hear rumors
there’s another race going on today—something
having to do with Indianapolis and fast cars. Sounds rather boring. I’m
trudging instead over dunes of ankle-deep sand, my bike in the care of
the Army, my binoculars trained on distant colorful specks being
pushed, dragged, or pedaled slowly along the beach.
Two thousand miles east, hard-core muscle cars roar in a hydrocarbon
haze around a monotonous oval track while thousands of race fans
secretly wish for accidents. Here in Humboldt, the costumed victims of
kinetic fever pedal their homebrew machines over a 38-mile course of
land, sand, sea, and mud. After a noon LeMans start in Arcata, 43
contraptions have come here to Dead-man’s Drop—where loose sand and
gravity conspire to bring all but the most determined racers to a
frustrating halt.
The sight is at once inspiring and ludicrous. Inching painfully up
slopes that are exhausting on FOOT, the biomechanical absurdities
struggle to the top. A giant Conestoga wagon, complete with copper
pots. A Tin Lizzie. A people-powered bus weighing one ton. A mini
starship enterprise. A taco. The Rhino,
last year’s winner. A host of fanciful yet functional machines, and
many that are one or the other but not both. And, of course, the Science Mobile, the Heel-a-copter, and the Blue Coach, creations of our Eureka
friends.
To “ace” this race, riders have to complete the course under their own
power with no pushing... so the wheels sink in; the riders sweat and
grunt; rhythmic pedal thrusts yield tiny, incremental gains. All around
them is confusion: the whoops and cheers of the crowd, the relentless
buzz of motorized dune machines (that’s cheating...), the urging of pit
crews, and a whole bevy of race officials timing, judging, and
carefully scrutinizing would-be aces.
Top of the Drop: they stop, plop, pop a Calistoga top, mop off the
sweat and relax, staring nervously down a hundred or so feet of 50%
grade ending in a sharp turn between two hard trees. The crowd’s
tension is tangible; the Army waves them back to clear the course. Some
teams plunge downward with only a deep breath to reveal their fear;
first-timers pause on the precipice and mutter something about suicide,
then release the brakes with a shout and give themselves over to
gravity. The crowd closes in behind and watches, anxious and
wide-eyed... doubtless with a touch of the same morbid excitement that
energizes the Indy crowd. Nobody gets hurt, but everybody experiences
the mad rush of adrenaline, that oh-God-I-must-be-crazy moment of pure
terror when you let go of the strut and watch the plane fly away
without you.
Day 2. Sunday night,
Table Bluff. Another beery event. I sit in my tent as the
fabric around me billows in chill evening breeze, the rain mercifully
past. Outside, in all directions, a party rages on—fueled by an open
bar, driftwood fires, and the relentless enthusiasm of this playful
microculture.
Yes, it has been quite a night. On a windswept dune the banquet was
laid, a gift from Blue Coach
sponsor Fred Deo: candelabras, linen tablecloths, fine china,
champagne, a crew of eight, and a spread of robust delicacies far
removed from the usual camp fare. Deviled eggs with caviar. Crab Louie.
Peel ‘n eat shrimp. Pickled okra. Exotic salads, artichoke hearts, and
the requisite assortment of cakes. All this naturally spawned no end of
toasts and banter, as over 50 of us sat in the cold drizzle, folding
chairs sunk to their cross-members in soft sand, the violent appetites
of hard miles the irresistible force that easily conquered plates piled
high with exquisitely movable objects.
Ah, camp cooking.
All this followed the second day of the race. At 8 AM, the sculptures
began
hitting Humboldt Bay...
Pausing long enough to check their flotation and propulsion systems,
the riders ran the twin gauntlets of amplified razzing by The Great
Razooly and the relentless press of the crowd. Then... down the ramp
and <splash!> into the Bay. At this point, subtle differences in
machine design philosophy became as obvious as they had been on the
loose, sucking sand of Dead-man’s Drop. Some smoothly took to the
water, kicked up a mini rooster-tail from their paddlewheels, and
easily made the 2-mile crossing to Table Bluff. Others floundered as
their drive systems tangled with seaweed; still others discovered
fundamental flaws with untested last-minute flotation apparatus and
began the slow, depressing process of sinking. The unlucky were towed
ignominiously across the bay, while others made the trek in an hour or
so and emerged amid cheers on the other side.
I went around the long way, over the hills, pedaling with Maggie and
the trailer-borne trappings of our life. Occasionally, groups of
spectators would shout: “Hey! You’re going the wrong way!” To further
confuse these less-perceptive onlookers, I masking-taped a thin strip
of styrofoam on my fairing and told them it was flotation gear...
The evening beach party grew boisterous, with a whole population of
crazies gathered around the driftwood fire in this tent city, swapping
kinetic tales and generally whooping it up. But strange machines lurked
in the dunes to surprise the unwary—I crawled wobbly from my tent in
the middle of the night and came face-to-face with a giant blue dragon,
luminous in the smoke-diffused glow of a dozen campfires.
Day 3. This IS a normal
Monday morning, isn’t it? I awoke to the patter
of rain on the megatent, started coffee, and listened to the hungover
grumbling stirs of the kinetic yankees as they blinked away the grit of
a too-short night on a too-lumpy dune. Cold, windy rain. Greasy hands
numbly tweaking black, water-beaded drive components. Forced grins, the
camaraderie a dim shadow of their earlier exuberance.
One by one, leaving tractor tracks in the wet sand, they rolled off
into the murk, bound for Drizzle Point, two crossings of the Eel River,
and the infamous Slimy Slope that greets the first arrivals with mere
mud and torments latecomers with the deep mucus of well-churned,
organically rich swampland.
But I managed to miss that part. We dozed in the rain until the dunes
were vacant and only the smoldering campfires and logistically detailed
2-meter net traffic remained as evidence of our friends’ 3-day ordeal. For the glory...
So. Here we are, again in Eureka, in the home of Duane and Micki as if
the past 5 months never happened. Only now, the last set of bike
problems has been replaced by a new set, and out there on the street is
the brown van with WORDY license plate—part nemesis, part convenience.
We have complete freedom of choice now: there’s no compelling reason to
drive south and leave from the Bay Area... nor do I feel like pedaling
away from here (with 150 miles of narrow, winding, logger-infested road
between Eureka and the next major town).
So maybe we’ll drive to Seattle and head east into the Canadian
Rockies. Or maybe we’ll drive around and do show-n-tells for our
equipment sponsors until the publisher gets my long-overdue book
printed and renders all this media coverage useful. Hell, maybe we’ll
rent a house and build a kinetic sculpture, surviving on odd jobs and
long-distance freelancing in this land of faltering economy in our own
quest for glory. Or maybe we’ll... well, who knows. I’ll tell you after
we do it.
I suppose too many options are better than too few, though sometimes I
envy those who don’t spend part of every day grappling with trade-offs.
Off to bed. We’re all suffering from PKSD (Post-Kinetic Stress
Disorder), and all this talk of pedaling wipes me out.