Kinetic Sculpture Race
Well, here we are again! Pilots Howdy Goudey and Doug Dresnek have entered the Sculpture Formerly Known As "Cow-Trans," (1999),Then Known As "Barrel Of Monkeys," (2000), and now known as "Rolling Blackout,"(2001) into the World Famous Arcata to Ferndale Kinetic Sculpture Race.
If you have nothing better to do with your valuable time, you could squander a few moments learning the History of the Sculpture.
Otherwise, here it is in a nutshell: Barrels for wheels= good flotation, Great down big hills. First Year: barrels only; good on sand, lousy on asphalt. Second Year: Bike tires added; great on asphalt, lousy on sand.
It was smooth sailing all the way through the Arcata bottoms! Then Howdy's ability to pedal was suddenly squelched by a few errant pieces of metal that decided to start slipping. It was all Doug's pedal power over the last few hills that led up to the main road to Samoa Drive.
It was decided that the best way to convince the uncooperative pieces of metal to stop slipping was to pin them together, which would require a drill and a hammer and a pin, all of which we had... except for the drill. Unable to reach our cohorts by radio (is everybody using channel 9?), I pedalled my bike up ahead to Manila to find them. We sacrificed a hard-to-get parking space and drove back up the road to rescue the machine, but on our way there the radio sprang to life with the message that the problem was fixed! And sure enough, we saw the Great Black Beast thundering back down the road en route to Manila (please forgive the lapse into cheesy prose; It's late and I'm tired). I never got the whole story on how they fixed the problem without a drill; perhaps duct tape or divine intervention were involved.
The route winds off the main road, then loops back and crosses it on it's way to Manila, and the sculpture was behaving well. The brave pilots emerged unscathed from a water-balloon attack organized by a group of slingshot-wielding sophisticates, and rolled down the last hill to join the pack, "Ace" status intact.
The street wheels removed, we boldly set forth onto the sand.
And our "Ace" status vanished with a grunt.
It seems that some other pieces of metal had decided to make creaking noises and behave erratically and threaten to break, prompting Howdy to hop off and push as a precautionary measure. Then we joined him, and from here on out, the whole race is a legal push zone.
It's quite liberating to relinquish the lofty goal of "Aceing" the Race.
So we pushed the cumbersome apparatus over the dunes and onto the beach. If not for the weakness in the latest misbehaving pieces of metal, the sculpture could have been pedalled easily down the long stretch of beach. As it was, however, we pushed.
At the point of re-entry into the dunes on the way to Dead Man's Drop, we (and several others) were witness to a dramatic wildlife moment: a baby seal shuffled onto the shore, separated from it's mother, who could be seen (as a dark spot with the nakedeye, or as an adult seal with a borrowed telephoto lense) far out in the ocean. The Sheriff arrived and helped steer people away from the baby, but that's as far as we were able to watch. If anybody saw what happened next, let us know! It looked like Mom was on her way, I just hope there was a happy reunion!
After a great deal of pushing, a tiny fraction of which was legal, we arrived at the top of Dead Man's Drop.
The sculpture flew down it at top speed with no trouble at all! This had happened in both previous years, but back then we had passed this point so late in the day that almost everyone had gone home and we had no audience. This year, there was a large crowd assembled and the great moment had witnesses, and we were told that a speed record had been broken. Doug's head, in contrast, remained intact. Doug's the crazy bastard who rides the machine backwards.
The cheers of the crowd fading in our sandy ears, we pushed the ailing sculpture out to the highway. We were back to needing a cordless drill for repairs, since there was no way the bridge to Eureka could be negotiated without both pilots pedalling. But the only drill we had in our support vehicle was of the plug-in variety, so members of our support crew fanned out to look for an outlet and someone who might take pity and let us use it.
The Christmas Wreath Gift Shop at the Samoa Cookhouse was kind enough to let us use their outlet. Go buy something there!
Doug and Howdy crossed the bridge without incident, achieving their top speed of 18 mph!
After recovering from a wrong turn at the Adorni Center (I asked, "Do we turn here?" and a kid who looked as if she'd been watching sculptures all day and appeared trustworthy replied "Yes." This was incorrect information. The child was clearly a criminal and should be incarcerated immediately), we rolled past the Finish Line.
And that's it for Day One. Tommorrow should be quite an adventure, as the new water paddles are tested for the first time.
Sunday started off with a welcome change to the course: a nice long water section where spectators could easily find a place to watch the sculptures. Rolling Blackout careened into the bay at full speed, and after some minor drifting and fidgeting, churned along the shore without any trouble at all! Steering was a bit odd in the water because both halves of the sculpture actually pivot, so the paddle wheels (which were in place of the bike tires) occasionally behaved at less-that-peak efficiency and Doug was compelled to use his paddle to steer. This meant he sat backwards on his seat and therefore faced forward for the first time in the race (see photos if that sentence was confusing).
But the real spectacle was, they pedalled up the boat ramp and onto dry land with no help!
The machine was working great, so we were all in unfamiliar territory.Bike tires replaced the paddle wheels, and the long stretch of asphalt lay ahead. Oddly, no catastrophies struck on this section of the course, either! A free breakfast was offered to the racers at a popular fast-food establishment along the route, but the consensus among our group was that not ingesting said breakfast would provide us with a distinct advantage over the pilots who partook; our thinking was that we might make time while the others would be constantly pulling off course to use facilities along the route, due to "Ronald's Revenge."
The "bay crossing" was a brief "down-the-ramp-around-the-buoy" affair, with the option of exiting back up the ramp, or trudging through festering anaerobic sludge. A no-brainer. We went with the ramp.
Local cows have a stare unlike the cows in other communities... Our cows have seen far more than any cow should see.
The long climb up Loleta hill is excruciating. And long. And excruciating. And an unfamiliar bright object appeared in the sky. Being from out of the area, the others in our party were able to identify the object, but being a Humboldt County resident, I had only vague memories of what the sun looked like. And what color would you least like your t-shirt to be in direct sunlight? Turns out that's the color we were wearing.
What goes up must come down. What goes up and is on wheels, must go down fast.
We went down fast.
I start to feel a little squirrelly riding a bike any faster than 15 mph, and Rolling Blackout probably shouldn't be driven any faster than 18 mph.
Top speed down the hill: 28 miles per hour.
I was calling out the speed to the pilots from my bike, and I could see Howdy fighting the steering; there's a lot of "play," a fact of which Doug was painfully aware. at 28 terrifying miles per hour they decided to slow down, but it turns out that all four brakes don't slow the vehicle at equal rates, and at at least one point, the downhill brakes were slowing the wheels more thatn the uphill brakes.
So there was a brief and frightening offroad excursion, during which Doug's whole life flashed behind his eyes (he's sitting backwards, remember?), and the weeds and brush were re-mowed. Howdy recovered and steered back onto the road, past a group of Rolling Blackout t-shirt-wearing onlookers (our support crew) and past... Tom.
On the stretch of straight road leading to the Camp site, a member of our crew caught up with us and notified us that we were in trouble with the ref. Apparently Tom took issue with our excessive speed and the zeal with which I reported said speed to the spectators, and there was accusation of "showboating." I was informed that he thought I had yelled "38 miles per hour!" when in fact I had said 28, and he was concerned that the swerving was a bit reckless.
Clearly, this situation called for an exceptional bribe. The following was wrapped around a King-Size Hershey's chocolate bar:
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The bribe was accepted; Tom's memory of the events on the hill suddenly clouded, and after some hoarse campfire singing and relentless blues in "E," we all went to sleep.
The Lamanze start om Monday was mercifully scheduled for 11:00, so we had ample opportunity to assemble our sparse wits for the final leg of the race. Fueled by continental breakfast pilfered from the hotel where our support crew had spent the evening, Rolling Blackout was pushed into "start" position.
It had seemed a good idea the night before to leave the bicycles behind and run along with the sculpture for the "short" backtrack up the road that led to the juncture where the course heads across the slough and on to Slimey Slope. The allure of this decision faded as we realized that the sculpture was working really well. In previous years the apparatus could barely keep up with passing gastropods, but this year it's flat-road cruising speed was up around 16 MPH. So while the less cardio-vascularly challenged members of our team faded into the distance, I hitched rides with various gas-burning vehicles. One guy used to work for Cal-Trans and wasn't completely amused with 1999's "Cow-Trans" entry, but was gracious nonetheless. And Six Rivers Portable Toilets was kind enough to let me share the platform with their unmentionable payload (although their was no fragrant evidence thereof- I heartily endorse this company!).
Emboldened by the Sculpture's performance thus far, our pilots refused assistance from the Pit Crew for this stretch, electing to wrestle with gearing and pedal through... but the familiar shadow of malfunction clouded their efforts. The steering broke, so ropes were attached to the corners of the machine, so that Howdy could steer "go-cart" style. Which would have been difficult in itself, but there was of course more to come.
"Roll in, roll out" is the rule in the water, and oddly enough, the machine followed the rule with nothing but a lot of grunting by the pilots. The water itself was less than knee-deep, just enough to float about half the time, with the street wheels (still attached) making intermittent contact with the silt-covered rocks of the "riverbed" and providing enough forward momentum to maintain our heading. Doug and Howdy struggled and shifted their way to the top of the incline past the water, and started toward the sandy approach to the anaerobic mud-fest that is Slimy Slope.
It seems that the frame was enduring a lot of bouncing as Doug and Howdy struggled with the gears and the sandy moguls, and with a sickening crack, two of the four welded cross-pieces which held one side of the frame to the other, just plain broke. This meant that the machine was now at risk of folding in half, with the juncture point of the two halves dropping to the ground.
So two stones were wedged into place at the juncture, and held by a few yards of duct tape. The repair was thing of beauty, to be sure. Our eyes teared up with pride.
The goal of the day was now to preserve the machine just enough to be able to drive it across the finish line in Ferndale.
In a moment of insanity, this year's officials had designated Slimy Slop to be not a legal push zone. The approach to the slope through the somewhat flat but truly muddy road was a legal push zone, but not the hill itself. While this didn't directly affect our entry, it did extend the amount of time the "Ace" sculptures spent through this stretch, to 20 to 30 minutes apiece. So there was quite a backlog of machines waiting to ascend, and the poor souls at the back of the line were unprotected by trees and at the mercy of a cold wind, and were certainly freezing off extremities at an alarming rate (side note: Tom has been designated "Slime-Master" for next year's race, and assured us that the this year's method would be abandoned. Go Tom!).
You may use the word "sucks" in two ways when discussing deep mud: in the general, vernacular term for all things unpleasant, or as in "...sucks the shoes right off of your feet." I was witness to liberal uses of duct tape by the racers to secure their footwear.
when our turn in line finally arrived, steering spinning uselessly and duct-taped rocks preventing total structural collapse, we all picked a corner and pushed through the mud.
"Splorch" is a very descriptive word.
At the top of the hill the pit crew were again bikeless due to a logistical flub, but the machine still rolled. An additional rope was attached to the corners opposite Doug so that both drivers could help steer, and off they pedalled toward the glorious Finish line. (Another side note: At the point where the road to Slimey Slope meets pavement, A member of our party was inside one of Six Rivers Potable Toilets when it was hit by a truck! No injuries were reported, but the driver will certainly pay karmic retribution.)
The customary pandemonium was in effect at the Finish line, And that was that!
The machine won Second Place for Engineering! For more results check Humguide, and we'll see you next year, For The Glory!