Here at ExhaustNotes.us we are all about the motorcycle, with a smattering of gunplay and interesting adventure destinations thrown in to keep the place hopping. But what if there were no bikes, adventures or bullets? What then? Keep reading and I’ll tell you what then, Bubba.
Concrete, my friends, and the mixing of it is the solution to a lackluster moto-life. Dusty and powder soft with an aggregate backbone, believe in it and concrete will provide. Trust in it and it will repay you a thousand times. The grey dust keeps me going because lately I haven’t been riding motorcycles or watching Emma Peel on YouTube so there’s nothing to write about except the grey dust. The grey dust keeps me hoping for some far-off, much better two-wheeled days. Think of this as an ExhaustedNotes blog.
Situated in the steep-ish foothills of the Sacramento Mountains, Tinfiny Ranch is slowly bleeding into the arroyo, you know? You put down your cold, frosty beer and the next thing you know your Stella is halfway to White Sands National Monument. On the lee side of The Carriage House we’ve lost a good 18-inches of mother earth because while it doesn’t rain often in New Mexico when it does rain it comes down in buckets. This sudden influx of water tears through Tinfiny Ranch like freshly woken kittens and sweeps everything in its path down, down, down, into the arroyo and from there on to the wide, Tularosa Valley 7 miles and 1500 feet below. Claiming dominion over the land is not as easy as they make it sound.
So I put the motorcycles away and took a cudgel to Tinfiny. I pounded, I dug, I formed and I poured. I am building a wall and Mexico has not stepped up to the plate with the promised assistance. The thing has grown to 70 feet long and varies in elevation from a foot to 4 feet high. Repetition has honed my skills: I can do 8-feet of wall every two days and the days stretch on and on. I figure I’ll stop when I run into the Pacific Ocean.
After the wall is up the resulting divot will require filling with dirt. I have lots of dirt on Tinfiny Ranch; the conundrum is where to borrow it from without causing even more erosion. I’m hoping that leveling the back yard will provide most of the needed fill.
I’ve made the wall porous to keep water from backing up behind it and poured L braces in an attempt to keep the wall from toppling over. The beauty of the wall is that it will work in any orientation. I’m nearly ready to start the slow process of dumping dirt and compacting it 6-inch layer by 6-inch layer until the land is even with the top of the wall. At that point the floodwaters should flow over the wall spilling into the arroyo. Unless, of course, the hill becomes so saturated that the entire wall slips into the arroyo. And I become one of those questing specters drifting the canyons wailing my banshee wail, never resting, never finding peace.
Several things amazed me as I read Empire of the Summer Moon, the first being how it could have not known of it previously. The only reason I learned of it is that I saw Empire in an airport bookstore a couple of trips ago.
It was cool seeing a Salsbury, and doubly-cool seeing it in Australia. Imagine that…a product made in my own back yard, and seeing it on the other side of the world in Australia.
The bike you see above is a 1950 125cc two-stroke BSA Bantam, and it’s significant to me because in the late 1960s I actually owned one of those bikes. It was nowhere near as beautiful as the one you see here. My Bantam was painted kind of a rattlecan flat black, it had no muffler, and the lights didn’t work. I bought it for $30 with no title, I rode it in the fields behind our place for a month, and then I sold it for $50 after leaving it on the front lawn for a day with a For Sale sign. Grand times, those were. I didn’t even know the Bantam’s displacement back then, but I knew it was a Bantam, and the thing had a surprising amount of power. I guess that’s what two-strokes do, and it kind of explains good buddy Joe Gresh’s fascination with the oilers. It’s the only ring-a-ding-dinger I ever owned.
Some of the old British motorcycles of the 1940s, 1950s, and even into the 1960s had magnificent mufflers. This one stood out.
Most all of the fun things we did as little kids were instigated by my Grandparents. Between raising four kids and working constantly to pay for the opportunity our parents were left spent, angry and not that into family-time trips. We did try it a few times but it seems like the trips always ended with someone crying, my parents arguing or a small child missing an arm. With only 16 limbs between us we had to be careful and husband our togetherness for fear of running out.
We always bought infield tickets. Camping at the Daytona Speedway was included with infield tickets so we immersed ourselves in the racing and never had to leave. Gramps had a late 1960’s Ford window van with a 6-cylinder, 3-on-the-tree drivetrain. The van was fitted out inside with a bed and had a table that pivoted off the forward-most side door. To give us a better view of the racing Gramps built a roof rack out of 1” tubing. The rack had a ¾” plywood floor and was accessed via a removable ladder that hung from the rack over the right rear bumper.
When you would climb the ladder to the upper deck your hands would pick up silver paint. If you sat on the deck your pants would turn silver. If you rubbed your nose like little kids do your nose would turn silver. It was like Gramps painted the deck with Never-Seez. After a full day of racing we looked like little wads of Reynolds Wrap.
Our camp stove was a two-burner alcohol fueled unit that, incomprehensibly, used a glass jar to contain the alcohol. Even to my 10 year-old eyes the thing looked like a ticking time bomb so I kept my distance while gramps lit matches and cussed at the stove.