Intimate Celo

Spring Break is a week away from the Keys, and where one sister likes the ocean and tropical heat the other one lives in a cabin in the mountains an hour out of Asheville. Cheyenne prefers the mountains and she sat up with us the night we arrived, appropriating sister-in- law Geeta's yoga cushion to sit on:

They say it has been an unusually harsh winter in the mountains, and take it from me Spring has been no picnic either, as we arrived in a 40 degree rainstorm. Wine and burning wood cured that.

Brother-in-law Bob is cultivating the theory of self-sufficiency which apparently involves preparing onions for planting by spreading them on the living room floor. They come from somewhere out west, Texas or California I forget and "candy" is their type not what they taste like. Or so I'm told.

There is an eccentric quality to life in Celo that reminds me of the English situation comedy The Good Life which was a huge hit in the England of my youth about a suburban couple that tries to live off the land turning their backyard into a farm to the discomfort of their upper crust conventional neighbors. Celo community is a place apart in the life of Yancey County which surrounds it. Back to the land environmentalists were once seen as hippie weirdos and now while certainly different they are a known quantity and part of the community they infiltrated decades ago. Poverty, pick up trucks and hunting goes on as ever outside the community because this is Appalachia. Inside the community they govern by consensus and the community owns the land, and people live there with the support and agreement of their neighbors. Hunting is banned, paved roads are frowned upon and solar panels and green houses dot the landscape.

Bob and Geeta have an aerial shot of my wife and I leaving San Diego in our sailboat in October 1998. Geeta came along for the first part of the trip and we only discovered her inability to tell her left from her right as we closed the Mexican coast for the first time anxious to get the anchor down after a four hundred mile passage. We posted Geeta as forward lookout with a cliff to our left...er right?...and a semi-submerged reef to our right, or was it on our left? Oh and it was dark at the time too. We made it, not without straining the bonds that tie families together.

The morning view from the guest bedroom. Makes you want to pull up the covers and wait for summer.

Celo is a great place to wander. And if you have a new iPhone camera to check out, so much the better.

 

Rugged winter living. Bob chops the wood, stacks the wood and hauls the wood, generating heat all the way, as the saying goes. This year they finally installed a wall air conditioner that also reverse cycles heat. We prefer not to visit in winter, staying with their eldest son in Asheville is a much more modern option.

Mount Mitchell, the highest point in the eastern US is 6,000 feet up among the clouds over there.

Bob asked for some help to remove the tarps covering his gravel garden, designed in the style of a Japanese sand garden. The sun came out and it was pleasant work, trimming the hedge and raking leaves.

Geeta did laundry. Brueghel painted the scene. Or he would have, had he not been dead (on another continent) for a few centuries.

The house that Bob built while his new bride the doctor ran the local health clinic, the local desperately needed resource in a hollow isolated from the rest of 1975.

 

Bob worked in academia lecturing until both sons got through college debt-free, moving to Minnesota to get a position. Then they came back to Celo to live off the land, to travel, to retire.

Cheyenne made herself invisible while I hunted for volunteers to help rake leaves.

A hollow (pro: "hallah") in these mountains is a dead end valley, a cul-de-sac between ridges. It's where people lived and cultivated in isolation and extreme poverty. Great beauty of course, but you can't eat beauty as any peasant will tell you.

The temperature gauge on the table was supposed to reassure the visiting Florida pantywaists that death by hypothermia was extremely unlikely. I remained wary and kept heavy duty woolens nearby at all times.

No signs of snow - yet.

There are a few more days to go.

Posted with Blogsy

Jersey Biker Takes Me Riding

The day started out looking rather bleak to me 40 degrees and foggy in the mountains over Asheville. Not my kind of perfect day for a motorcycle ride. Keep reading.

Jersey Biker and I exchanged comments on my preferred motorcycle website, ADVrider, and we had a couple of things in common. We are older riders, I have my family connection to Jersey Rider's adopted home town and we like motorcycles and scooters. I showed up at our rendezvous in my car, he was much cooler:

Breakfast was in hip West Asheville and we had biscuits the size of cat heads...I had mine with eggs, grits and local pork sausage. Beat that! I also had Ethiopian goat coffee which was better than it sounds.

Look at that ridiculous Russian contraption. 750cc of 70mph three wheeled weirdness.

Jersey Biker has his up for sale. I guess his figured out how to ride it and it's lost it's glamour. Or something. My wife thinks it's cute, but not cute enough to follow us home. I rode it round the parking lot and it was a blast. It's challenging and slightly scary so of course it's a skill I will need to master before I die.

In the sidecar I look like a more than usually crumpled circus bear.

What a grotesque view of the road. This thing is in my future. It will be a while but one day...

On a more traditional note I rode the bike that came into Jersey Biker's life almost by accident. I really enjoyed the Street 500, Harley's attempt to lure new, younger and female riders to their marque. They should have done this year's ago instead of mucking up Sportsters by cutting their suspension and making them overweight with rubber mounting to kill vibrations. This bike is small, vibration-free and oddly cramped. It wasn't uncomfortable but I felt perched on it with not enough room for my short legs. I found the rev limiter once and I wasn't going fast and the gearbox needs to be used to keep it in the power band. But the controls are light, the gearbox is smooth and running the corners is enormous fun. This machine would make a great all round ride customizable with all those Harley accessories. I like this bike, it's not expensive and it will do a lot of touring commuting and carefree riding for no cost and lots of fun. Harley know what they are doing, and it's retro competition for the Bonneville, especially in the 750cc version.

Then I tried the dreaded maxi scooter, which is like a recumbent bicycle with a 600cc engine and total weather protection.

Jersey Biker loves his Honda Silver Wing scooter, he's had three and they are his favorite ride. He has the world's best riding country in his back yard. I've ridden in lots of places and Appalachia and the Blue Ridge are fantastic. It's a mix of farmland, hill ridges, woods, rivers, villages, no traffic no people and extraordinary roads and views. We were riding not photographing so you'll have to take my word for it. This is a man with a great retirement plan:

I stopped us to grab a few pictures as we approached the Parkway. A sport bike approached and stopped. A young man said he was breaking in his new tires and brake pads and we chatted a bit before he took off.

Had I had a Honda 600 when I was 26... He did say he had fallen off once but he was still out riding. Good man.

We stopped at the top and talked about life and motorcycles and everything. For me, after 18 months of not riding the mountains here or in Italy, this two hour meander was a breath of fresh air clearing my head and my heart. I was laughing most of the way.

The Silver Wing. Much more capable than it looks. Comfortable, planted and with an excellent transmission with no lag at all. I only ride it a few miles but I got into it. I'm not yet ready to give up a geared motorcycle for the comfort and convenience of a maxi scooter but I'm glad I got a taste.

That little Harley, the minx! Windshield, saddle bags, time off and money. California here I come! Who needs a thousand pound monster to roll coast-to-coast?

What a great day.

Thank you Jersey Biker, till next time.

Posted with Blogsy

Key West Rides

I went by the old Lemonade Stand art studio on my lunch break and posed the Vespa for some pictures.

It was goofy sticking my old Vespa into the painted Bahama Village street scene but I enjoyed playing around for a bit with my new-to-me iPhone camera. A young kid with a delivery moped pulled in alongside and started asking me about the Vespa, joking about me selling it to him. Hell no I said it's taken me too long to get it sorted out. At which point the damned thing refused to start...so I pulled the plug and found it oily after riding around town at low rpm so I cleaned it and adjusted the air/fuel mixture screw. Which skills and the sight of a tool kit must have persuaded the modern youth that I was half a mechanic because he asked me to look at an oil leak on his scooter.

Like the t-shirt says, I'm no gynecologist but I'll take a look...I poked around and diagnosed a split oil tank and told him not to overfill it but make sure he has oil in the tank or he'll seize. And take it to Andy's for a proper diagnosis. It's weird how people trust strangers with no visible qualifications.

It was, after that encounter a silent and empty village, so I stopped in the middle of the road for a picture. Why I appreciate Key West: old architecture, dim street lights, and at this hour no one ( else) to bother me.

 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, an over quoted thought but when I stopped for some pre-work caffeine and some people watching from the deli bench on Whitehead Street I noticed this green thing was believed to be an object of beauty:

The "island chopper" seat, the extended forks, all bright green and the ironic tag, appealed to passrsby. In my head the tag referred more to the style, as factory stock Harleys are actually quite sturdy useful tourers as long as you don't want to lean over too far. But this expensive exercise in styling seems like a waste of a good bike to me.

I was in a minority opinion though. Can you imagine the expense, beyond the basic $20,000 bike? And all its good for is going to the Green Parrot?

Well, anyway, there it is.

And then I had another human interaction over my antique Vespa. Parking was crowded and I gave up my spot to a waiting Yamaha Vino 50 whose rider it turns out lives not far from me up the Keys. He was surprised I commuted from Cudjoe on my antique. I told him owning an old scooter is like being a secret society member, a whole world of parts suppliers mechanics and owners out of public view but connected by the Internet and a weird need to own Old where New will do. I could see the wheels in his mind turning.

Driving up the turnpike I had a "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" moment. He was older wearing a helmet and shorts in suitably casual style, his passenger was younger and the bike was an 80s Honda with a rectangular headlight.

You don't often see old Universal Japanese Motorcycles cruising the Turnpike at 70 miles per hour and I wondered what they were doing.

There has to be a motorcycle sub culture in Miami that isn't old farts on Harleys or young kids on sport bikes. Perhaps this is evidence of something else?

What do I know. It was my turn to be a zombie in a car. Sigh.

Posted with Blogsy