Dave Edgar's Open Salon Blog

When You Wish Upon a Planet

Tue, 22 May 2012 23:05:31 -0400

When You Wish Upon a Planet, You Have Picked the Wrong One, Dammit

I don't want facts to come between us
But you're wishing upon Venus
And when you wish upon a world it never counts

They may twinkle into view
Jupiter and Saturn too
Behind the planets there are stars in large amounts

Never kind
The Fates have rules
They do not suffer fools
at all gladly

Many lasting childhood scars
Come from wishing upon Mars
And when you wish upon a world it doesn't count

Tricycle Fetish

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:08:37 -0400

“The little tricycles they sell now with those dinky little front wheels, a kid can pedal as fast as he likes and still they only crawl. You know what that makes a kid want to do? Something else. But this is the Fast Trike.”

Hearing my flow of words let up for a moment the bike shop fellow echoed, “The Fast Trike?”

“It’s a big hit in the neighborhood. Once you learn how to sit it, how to lean it, it zips right along. A kid can actually be a menace to people on this trike. They love that!”

That earned me a chuckle. “Well, but I don’t think I can find your wheel, even online,” he said, by way of preparing me for disappointment.

“Oh, yes; you aren’t going to find that wheel. My grandfather got that trike at Western Auto in Augusta fifty-five years ago. They made them for decades, but you’re right. Nowadays, they sell wheels like those six inches across, but these ones are ten inches. I know what you’re saying.”

Having cleared that piece of ground, I looked him in the eye. “I didn’t come here to have you order a part, anyway. I expect something from a bike shop. The Wright brothers ran a bike shop! What I came for is to find someone willing to improvise.

“I need two wheels for the back. They can be ten inches, twelve, anything along that size range. Now that axle is just a rod, and it’s pretty narrow, but a bike shop ought to be able to put some kind of sleeve in there if the hub on those new wheels is too big for it. If putting in some other kind of axle is better, I’m willing to go see a friend of mine who does welding. See? It’s tacked in there, three places. He could put a larger rod on there if we need one.”

“There’s only so many kinds of spoked wheels, though, and those are solid rubber tires.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” The dude was still tied to the wheels that were on there. He still wanted to buy a part somewhere, man. Orville, he wasn’t. “Solid wheels, spokes, metal, plastic, inflated tires, butyl, plastic-- wood, even. Would it help if I take these old wheels off, so you don’t have to see them? They seem to be limiting your imagination, here. I’m not trying to re-create a period trike, for people to look at. I’m trying to get wheels on this that’ll hold the back of it up off the ground a little, so that the kids can go fast on it.”

I looked around the shop. “You got trailers here, small bikes. There are wheelbarrow wheels, dolly wheels, lawnmower wheels. I got a grandchild! He keeps looking at this thing, and I keep having to tell him no, it’s broken. That’s why I came to a bike shop.”

“The Wright brothers.”

“Hey– you got into a profession with a rep, dude.”

I was running this particular number on a man down in Bar Harbor, on Cottage Street, better than fifty miles from home. It’s the fourth bike shop I’ve been to, and that doesn’t count all the hardware places. I’ve already left the Trike with three other shops, only to be told, “I can’t find your part.” I was sounding a bit strident, even to myself, but I couldn’t seem to lift their eyes or open their minds. What was needed here was improvisation!

Most of the problem was that the hardware stores, who have the wheels, don’t work on tricycles, while the people who do work on them don’t have a wide variety of different wheels to pick from. Bikes just don’t use ten- or twelve-inch wheels. My difficulty crossed a boundary between categories.

“It could get really expensive,” he said, “if it’s an antique part like this.”

I gave him a look, over the top of the bifocals, but I stayed cool and started over. “Those trailer wheels over there, are they ten inches, do you think?”

We determined they were only eight inches. Finally, some light began to dawn. “The hubs on those trailer wheels,” he told me, “Have the axle built into them, on ball bearings. You couldn’t thread them on an axle like this.”

“What about lawnmower wheels? I’ve seen people with big wheels in the back, even spoked ones.”

“Those are drive wheels, on self-propelled mowers. They wouldn’t thread onto a plain axle, either.”

Now this was progress. I finally had someone imagining some other sort of wheel on the thing. He considered a while, then sent me up the street to Paradis, which is a hardware store, also on Cottage Street. “He’s got wheels for hand trucks, wheelbarrows, things like that, and he would have catalogs to get sleeves if the hubs are bigger diameter. Take it to Paradis, and if he doesn’t have something, come on back and I might be able to find something online.”

Perhaps something I'd said or my manner of saying it suggested it to him, but the solution was an obscure website called Tricycle Fetish. I wouldn’t have found it without Peter at the Bar Harbor bike shop.

And today, I have received and installed new wheels. The Fast Trike is finally ready to endanger pedestrians and skin knees once again.

Haiti in the family

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:01:49 -0500

My wife is now selected for the first group, the first wave, as it were, of nurses being sent to help with the Haiti thing. We still can't plan. No one can tell us when she will go. No one can tell us how long. She asked specifically, "Should I be packing to travel light, or should I be trying to assemble a couple of duffel bags full of medical supplies?" They can't advise her about that, either.

The way it looks now, chances are about even she will be working through the US military in some way (original plans were to send her aboard the USS Comfort, but the Navy decided to stick with just their own personnel, at the last moment), or going in with her team to Santo Domingo, and staging from there on their own.

She got her invitation through her union. She's a nurse with a master's, with decades of experience in emergency medicine, and she's been on clinics in Jamaica, Belize, and the Dominican Republic. She is a crackerjack, as we still say, here in Maine; she is precisely the sort of level-headed trouper they want.

The limits on the Haiti effort are two: communications, firstly, and then access. The ways in and out of Haiti under current conditions are few, and they are clogged. The biggest clog is our own military, which has a couple of myriads of minions in there, hogging the roads, the airports, and so forth.

So we are waiting for the 'phone call. You know, or the e-mail, whatever it happens to be. They talked with her extensively this afternoon, but most of the information went from us to them, as you have seen. We still know little, but they have found out much about her, her character, qualities, and level of preparedness, and that has made them place her in the first row.

Wisely, in my view. She really is all that.

We have close acquaintances and friends already on the way there. Kristy Engel already is in Haiti right this minute. Our Dominican Republic group worked mostly with Haitians in that country, as readers of my blog know. Kristy is administering three clinic-sized medical groups for them. She left already for Haiti the other day, on an expedition with 7 or 8 trucks and buses loaded with equipment, food, water, and personnel, enough to set up the three clinics and also a separate food-distribution point at another location. Kristy doesn't administer the food thing, but we know Salvador and some of the others (Marc, Annaliese, Joaquin) who will be.

There is already a second trip planned from La Romana, using the influx of Abingdon, Mass. docs and pharmacists and nurses and techs who come that week, and thereafter a third trip, on February 2nd, using our Maine group and others.

Wish us luck!

Wildness

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:10:38 -0400

Justin is gone; he went downriver to hang with the family. Yesterday was a luminous day-- no rain, but we were shielded from the sun most of the day. We spent hours on the water, then came home for filet mignon with friends, followed by a long walk in the evening with other friends.

He reflected this morning that it was the sheer ease with which a person can get into real woods here that sets Maine apart. I told him that was an illusion, nowadays. In the Portland area, one is hours from woods. The obscenely overdeveloped coastal zone narrows as you go east, but none of it has to do with woods. It's more like Michigan or Connecticut down there.

The character you speak of is being attacked, year by year, I told him. More and more development is always in train. It's true that people have, up here, this resource, which is wildness. But people see no advantage to preserving it if sixteen more jobs can be created by the wave of a developer's wand.

These developers are not big businesses, usually, either, barring Irving and WalMart, but small business, which is the real enemy. Small business insists on the particularity of property; it is the greatest advocate for crassness and irreflective self-indulgence. We hold nothing in common, they say, and if one holds a property right over something one owes no consideration to any community at large or any heritage to follow.

Far from being the backbone of community, in that sense they are its opposition in every case, reducing to dollars every good, and keeping score with dollars in each measure of mankind's life: A sweep of complex and beautiful majesty from headwater to the big lake? Who owns that, exactly? Well, then, he can destroy it, of course. Next question.

A culture? A civilization? Future generations? Larger issues? None are allowed to impinge on development. Wildness is merely a tourist draw. You can make much more money by converting it to tract homes. Culture, civilization, and future generations are mere words to spice up an ad campaign.

I'm too harsh? If we believed we owed anything to our children's children, we would have acted like it and saved something for them. If we really imagined we participated in a civilization or possessed a way of life worth improving or preserving, we would have made at least one decision which gave those things any regard.

And yet, they all tell us that Small Business is the central term of life itself, the heart of the culture and the backbone of the community. You like to step into a canoe in a place where you can no longer hear the highway. What makes you think that should carry any weight whatsoever?

This was a democratic republic, once, with a capitalist economy. Now it is entirely a capitalism. People have no bearing on policy, except that we may need more cops to preserve our policy from its domestic victims and a bigger army to protect our policy from its foreign victims.

He thanked me for my views on the matter, and went down the river. We shall still be canoeing, though, while the season lasts. I can only despair to imagine how my grandchildren will manage to have such another day as yesterday was. Wildness is going, and I see it, year by year, leaking away.

Tricycle Heroes

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:10:52 -0400

The years were unkind to the Fast Trike, but they only ate it slowly. It had belonged to my grandfather, and it struck me one day, while I was scrubbing off the rust, that it was about fifty-five years old, which is to say, not very much younger than I am. It looked like the trikes that appear in the Dick and Jane books (you know the ones). What that meant was that he bought the thing for his grandkids to use. It lived in his garage but it formed a part of what we called his Grampie Closet, which was mostly a real closet off the dining room where we went to find his trove of toys. I began stocking my own Grampie Closet when I reached a certain age. It's for grandkids that I was scrubbing rust.

Today I took the Fast Trike to a shop called Rose Bicycle. It had suffered a catastrophic failure of a hind wheel, under undue load. The first shop I took it to, in a sad town across the river, could not, they said, repair it. The man claimed he had no source for wheels which would attach as those wheels do. I rather expected to hear something of the kind, ultimately, from Rose Bicycle, so I campaigned.

"This is the Fast Trike," I told the fellow. "It got the name because of the big wheel in the front. Most of these kid trikes, you can pedal 'til you're blue and they still just creep. But once you learn how to sit this thing, how to lean into it, it really zips, and there's that platform in the back, sturdy enough so that a second kid can ride it.

"The Fast Trike is a real hit in my neighborhood, I can tell you.

"Now I grew up to expect things from a bicycle shop. Look at the Wright brothers! They invented flight, on the side, and they were running a bike shop."

The guy chuckled and said something self-deprecating, but I refused to let him off.

"You got into a profession with a rep." He laughed again. "Now, I know nobody will have the exact wheel for a fifty-year-old trike. So it'll be both wheels, new, but consider: they don't have to be spoked wheels; they could be intended for one of those wagons, or one of those wheelbarrow things for gardeners; they don't even have to attach the way these do, the thing could be set up to accept a different sort of wheel. Even the height of the wheels, you know, exactly, isn't particularly critical. They are passive rollers, the ratio with the front wheel is irrelevant. This is a bicycle shop, and I think you can make this happen. When you do, we'll both be heroes."

He said Jim would be back Wednesday. "Jim is more the Wright brothers type," he told me.

I had already read about Jim and his sense of the wrenching responsibilities involved in running a bike shop. So I left them the Fast Trike, and I wait in hope.