I Live With Coconuts And Jack Riepe Envies Me

I had a conversation with Jack Riepe yesterday and consequently he rounded up, apparently, his coterie of neighborhood lunatics to descend on this modest page and flood the comment section. For those of you who have not seen riepe's comment cohorts they are something to behold. That being the case I figured I might as well hold this essay over a day in the hope the fumes from the comment section will dissipate into the ether and not into my pink clad iPad. I encourage you to go to his website and order several copies of his book, at www.jackriepe.blogspot.com I have ordered my copies and look forward to reviewing it here when it arrives. His previous effort was a great read and he assures me this new book is his best effort yet.

One thing I didn't do properly when I was preparing for Tropical Storm Isaac was to knock down my coconuts before the strong winds arrived.

My home is surrounded by mature trees loaded with nuts and in a storm they can become lethal missiles.

I lack the strength agility and skill to climb a coconut tree like one sees in residents of other Caribbean islands so about seven years ago I popped down to the hardware store and bought one of the best most reliable tools ever:

It extends about twelve feet and as hard as it is to wield at that length, this venerable tool can still cut down the nuts from a great distance and I'm lucky because my home has a wide balcony wrapping the entire house. The wide wood balcony makes it easy to put up hurricane shutters and to trim encroaching trees.

I am not a fan of power tools as they need care and maintenance and they make noise and they smell too. So instead I use a machete. I don't care for sports either so we have no need of TV reception which leaves me behind in the red blooded masculinity stakes. Instead I wield a machete and I have a whetstone to keep a blade on the big knife.

Coconuts aren't native to the Keys but they are ornamental and tourists expect to see them in these sub-tropical islands. They produce tons of fronds and lots of nuts when mature. Coconuts in the wild don't look much like the brown hairy orbs you can buy in first world supermarkets.

I like to drink from my nuts while working in the heat and to do that I rest the coconut on a brick and hack the pointy end with the machete. The coconut comes from the tree wrapped in resilient fibers which cover the nut and the meat inside the hard shell. In decades past copra, the white meat was preserved to make coconut oil which has fallen into disfavor in much of the first world.

The brown nut is hidden inside the fiber. Normally I clip the fibrous covering from the pointy end and cut the nut to access the water inside the meat. For clarity I've stripped the outer fiber from this entire nut:

Inside you'll find maybe half a pint of water and it tastes sweet and refreshing. I've tried mixing it with ice and rum or vodka or gin but I find it tastes best direct from the nut.

The fresh meat is sweet and very filling. For those that care you can grate it and dry it and call it copra. Below we see a professionally trimmed tree, as ordered by some snowbird sitting out hurricane season Up North.

I've been told that cutting all the nuts at once off a tree can weaken the growth of the trunk leading to bendy weak spots in the tree, like this:

In the event I've got some time before the next storm to cut my coconuts down but I'll probably procrastinate a bit before I deal with them. That's living with coconuts.

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Hurricane Tool

I realized last week as I was starting to prepare for the arrival of the tropical storm that I could use a new tool in my preparation arsenal. In fact it was long overdue: the humble hand truck.


I ordered it last Friday at the Ace hardware store on Summerland Key and it arrived yesterday morning, $35 and sturdy and simple as I wanted it. You can get trucks with all sorts of bells and whistles but when I was an LTL truck driver I came to depend on my hand truck and I learned then that sturdy and simple are the qualities most necessary when moving stubborn weights around. Cheyenne agrees.


It's dreary but the truck was made in China, Taiwan at least but not in the US, as usual. The Republicans seeking the presidency worry about our religious beliefs and denying us abortion and health care, yet full employment? What an esoteric uninteresting concept!


Some assembly was required, a wheel two washers and a cotter pin, easy enough.


Except - I had to leave out the inside washer on the second wheel as the hole didn't line up...I was rather relieved as the Chinese made hand truck was slightly defective. I'd just read a glowing review of the new CFMoto 650 motorcycle coming from mainland China and I was glad to see even a simple hand truck from the Far East isn't perfect. I have no doubt they will swamp us eventually with I industrial products made properly but not yet.


Even with only three washers the hand truck made everything simple as I moved the garden back to it's proper place.


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Riding For Fun

I faced a long ride home from Tennessee so I started out heading south on the freeway, where I stopped and came across some real horsepower in the parking lot of a gas station.

Hmm, I thought, they look cute peering out of their box. I hardly noticed the column of thick black smoke in the background.

Years ago I learned that typically gray smoke is from a natural source but black smoke usually means something human made is disintegrating. When I was a reporter I was attracted to black smoke. In this case a truck wrecked and caught fire and as I aimed my motorcycle at the freeway onramp I was redirected by a local dude on an elderly yellow Goldwing. He pointed me down a delightful tree lined state highway as the best detour. He was right.

My turn off was Federal Highway 129 which theoretically would carry me from Knoxsville across western North Carolina and through north Georgia to Atlanta where I would end the fun and pick up Interstate 75 and so south to Florida's Turnpike 400 miles south of Georgia's capital.

Highway 129 is a marvel of delightful road engineering. It's most famous as a section of road known as The Tail of the Dragon through Deal's Gap, astride the Tennessee/North Carolina state line. "Not suitable for trucks"...oh yes!

I paused by the lake to tighten the Bonneville's final drive chain. All of which took ten minutes out of my life as I pulled out tools and a tarp and lazed in the sun fiddling with greasy nuts and bolts. I wanted the Triumph in perfect shape for the ride over Deal's Gap.

This was my second visit to the Dragon and it remains as elusive as any an experience to relate in words. I know there are many many fun roads in this area but the estimated 318 turns on this eleven mile stretch are the adult equivalent of a motorcycle roller coaster. I stopped and turned back a few times and played like a child.

There is an overlook at the Tennessee end of then road and I joined some other sight seers.



A couple of modern classic Ducatis looked lovely.

This kid and his high maintenance wife talked with me for a while about his bargain Goldwing, bought for $5000 and complete with cupholders radios and with room enough he said winking, for a barbecue grill!

This was the spot to enjoy the scenery as I had no desire to join the distracted who manage to enliven the Dragon all the time with their sudden off road antics. Deal's Gap is delightfully free of guard rails and safety signs and all the paraphernalia of road warnings. You are on your own.

The state line at the top of the hill is less than a half mile from the end of the road...

...at the junction of 129 and state highway 28 which meet at the gas station and motel which is famously motorcycle friendly.

I liked the note which explained how to pump gas for motorcycles as though cars don't exist in these parts.

I have an ambition to spend a couple of nights here and devote myself to riding the Dragon early and late before and after the hordes arrive. One day next year perhaps.

Against all expectations I like this place. It is spoken of so much one arrives never expecting it could live up to it's overblown reputation. But it does and the road is great fun.



Just because Deal's Gap was at my back doesn't mean the twisties were done, oh no. I had a full afternoon of spirited riding ahead.

Highway 129 in Georgia was a revelation. I had no idea the northern part of the Peach State was such a divine motorcycle ride. I was having so much fun winding down through the three lane highway I could not bring myself to stop, hoping Wikipedia would come through. This winter picture gives a small idea of the winding road I was riding, two lanes on the uphill, one lane for the downhill.

It was a great ride all the way to Highway 19 for Dahlonega, the Moto Guzzi pilgrimage site for the southeastern US.

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Post Isaac

It was a gray day today that started out with immense winds and rain on my drive home, slowing the to thirty miles an hour as cross winds slashed the bridges of highway one with horizontal rain. By the time I woke up before noon the sun was out and winds were rattling the palms around the house. It was pleasant to be out removing the hurricane shutters and organizing the deck furniture knowing the storm was off somewhere to the north, threatening other unfortunates...

life returns o normal tomorrow as everyone gears up or a return to work. I stopped by the gas station to buy some celebratory ice cream and the disconsolate clerk told me he'd been counting customers since three in the afternoon. I was nu ber eleven at seven thirty in the evening. Boredom was written allnover his face. Everyone got gas before the storm he laughed.

It's good to be finished with storm, and I hope none other approaches for a while.


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My Bonneville In The Mountains

This has been a summer of peculiar vacations, a week snatched here and another snatched there, vast amounts of what J H Kunstler derisively calls "Happy Motoring" all quite unlike my usual method of one three week stretch to allow for the batteries to be recharged.

Thus it was that I abandoned wife and dog and took to the Bonneville one more time to ride the great superslab highway north out of Florida. I live in the Keys, and mainland Florida is pleasant enough to pass through, though not my cup of tea as a place to live. I have explored almost all the peninsula and lived in a few places and found flat suburbia not to my taste. So my Bonneville and I pressed the speed limits to escape Flatistan's orbit to find the mountains.

It was hot on the road and wet, downpour after downpour forcing me in and out of my Frogg Togg waterproofs. Vehicles were wrecking right and left as I pounded the freeway north. How I evaded the skidding tumbling sliding cages and trucks I don't know. Well I do actually, because I took cover that first night in the downy softness of a bed at La Quinta. Eventually though we made it to the foothills, about 12 hours out of the Keys, and a Kermit chair and a tuna fish sandwich made a fine picnic in the woods.

I enjoy the solitude of riding, no cell phone no music no radio, just my thoughts inside my head and the sound of wind and motorcycle. It is the purest form of travel involving an engine and gives me a similar meditative state to that which I used to get watching waves while out sailing. Unlike travel by boat it is easy to come across signs of civilization in all it's forms, even the delightfully ungrammatical.

The rolling hills of the Great Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge present views of life that are American iconic, totally different than those tropical seascapes that surround my home. Barns, cows, shaded winding roads and farmland spread between dense forests are the stuff of mountain travel.

It is breathtaking to see miles of sloping forest completely devoid of human habitation. Yet off the main roads are many minor roads that sometimes lead to tracks fading to green...and farmsteads hidden among these forests. There was a movie years ago called Deliverance which set the stereotype of Hollywood nightmares in these hills: crazy toothless peasants intent on the violent buggery of intruders. My experience has been that residents of these hills are gentle, reserved and excessively polite shy people. Among themselves they may be violent sociopaths but I've yet to encounter it.

I stopped by my brother-in-law's place which sits in a forest in the shadow of Mount Mitchell, the tallest peak in the eastern US, though at something under 7,000 feet it's a pimple compared to western mountain ranges.

My ride the last few miles along the Blue Ridge Parkway was a race to beat the darkness, along an empty highway with a 45 mile per hour speed limit and the constant threat of deer, law enforcement, cross winds, sudden shadows across the road and around Mt Mitchell itself I had the unexpected joy of freezing thick fog blowing across the road, impenetrable and gray and sinister. I expected the Hound Of The Baskervilles to leap out at me. Possibly flashing red and blue lights as I sped along.

Instead I got refuge and grilled shrimp and exotic French wines for dinner in the cozy wooden lined dining room at the in-laws. It was a welcome end to a difficult ride. And I had days left to enjoy sunshine and scenery and winding roads before I had to plough south on the freeway once again.

I wasn't alone on two wheels enjoying the winding roads...

...though I think traffic was a lot lighter than it might have been as the impending school season was forcing people to end their vacations by going to box stores and buying ball those things needed to educate and discipline modern young people.

I had no such strictures and could enjoy relatively empty roads at my leisure.

The Bonneville was perfect as usual, nothing to report except it keeps going strong. At the end of this 1600 miles jaunt the speedometer crossed the 67,000 mile mark. This October will mark the fifth year since I bought the bike brand new in Fort Lauderdale for $8,000 out the door. What a bargain! My ride home took 28 hours from Tennessee and the new Sargent seat proved it's worth. My bum got sore but never unbearably so.

I was alone and spent my days ambling, riding curves and sitting in my Kermit chair contemplating life. Which it turns out is good, when you live in the first world even as civilization appears to be crumbling at the edges. I remembered to feel privileged. Happy motoring really can be happy.

I met a man who looks like James May from Top Gear, lives in Winston-Salem and rides a 1990s Moto Guzzi. In the land dominated by Harleys a nerd who rides a modern Bonneville qualifies as someone who "gets it" when confronted by an oddity from Italy.

We talked riding and camping and wrenching (not wenching) and drank non alcoholic fizzy stuff. It was a pleasant interlude, relaxed and mildly introspective in keeping with the rest of the trip

Finding a road blockage with a detour toward blueberries is the sort of serendipity I seek when riding GPS free. I got almonds and apples but the principle of being led by happenstance holds.

So where was I? Dunno exactly, and don't care. A well running motorcycle on an empty road...



...and splendid views. What more could a man want to recharge his batteries?



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