The property where I live is a mixture of benchland meadow and steep live oak/chamise covered hills. It does not take much imagination to understand that this would have been a mighty fine place for Indians to be back before the missions came.
The meadows are, so far as I can see, remnant creek bed from Cachagua creek's earlier, wetter life. They are covered still with big white oaks, whose acorns are choice eating. Down below us there is a rock known as Indian Rock, which is covered with mortars overlooking the most resilient pool of water in the often dry valley. One of the roads between here and the valley floor cuts through rotting granite, but at a certain point you can see the stones turn to water polished river cobbles, now about fifty feet above the water. If you are used to only driving Cachagua road, it comes as a surprise to stand in the meadow here and see that these benchlands are quite extensive, covering an altitude of about 1200 feet and harboring some of the last open oak meadow woodland around. For the most part white oak country is being crowded out by chamise and live oak, fire prone vegetation that kindles like gasoline soaked newspaper and chokes off everything around it.
When I was young here, in the late 70s, there was one winery called Durney. This never was wine country historically, but Durney was a tough old bird with money from who knows where, a son in law with a viticulture degree from Davis, and thirst to play El Patron. He originally built a small chapel in the fields, the way they do it in Spain, and encouraged his hispanic workers to worship there. They generally declined.
The winery long ago changed hands, and the software millions glut briefly put intense pressure on Cachagua to Napa-fy itself with “Executive Orchards” and other such nonsense. But in the meantime Durney had been joined by a couple of serious wineries, the most interesting of which was started by a relocated Swiss vintner more interested in getting hands dirty than gazing from his veranda. The wineries are a mixed blessing.
On one hand, they have augured a middle class in Cachagua. In most places that would not be the case—serious wine being usually the province of the rich. But this is not like most places, and our rich are generally richer than yours. For the most part they are an unpretentious sort, by which I mean they don't build McMansions. They tend to build extremely high end but modestly sized homes, many of them surrounding expensive art and breathtaking views rather than an extra five bedrooms. As such they were always a somewhat invisible class.
Used to be that between them and the backhoe driving, dope growing class there was not much representation. Much of the horticulture, manufacture, and service surrounding the wineries are jobs for people who do fall in that category, even if their standard of living would not look like middle class solidity in other parts of the country. The landscaper for this property is the kind of person who never existed in Carmel Valley when I was a child: a local kid who got a horticulture degree and is building a house on his labor rather than a trust fund or, like me and my ilk, a propensity to shack up together in trailers on remote property. Some of his work involves tending small orchards that produce modest amounts of grapes. The grapes are then bought by wineries and in exchange the owners are given cases of already bottled wine from years past.
But the wineries use vast amounts of water, and some of them lots of chemicals. During the fires last summer, everyone had to post at the bottom of the driveway a placard with a description of the water resources on their property for firefighters to see. It was sobering to read the astronomical well figures on the winery gates. This in a very dry valley, whose river downstream is ludicrously overpumped and where residential well permits are very hard to come by. It was clear that the wineries had been getting away with humongous allocations because of their agricultural status. I cringe to imagine what happens if they go bankrupt and are able to pass on all that water to subdividers. Alan, the landscaper here, spent the late summer triaging water supplies for his clients when their wells went dry.
The old Durney winery, or part of it, is across the road from here and I look out over it day and night. Two big white oaks stand near the top of the hill, a circle of grass beneath them. Occasionally wild pigeons flock there in the afternoon. I discovered last autumn that all the recent coyote shit was stained purple and when I looked closer saw that they had been eating wine grapes. I sleep a little easier knowing it is certified organic as their downhill slope runs right into the aquifer where my drinking water is pumped from.
The winery is now called Heller. Last summer, my friend Gary came to visit and I decided it would be nice to buy a bottle of their wine to drink while we had a barbecue overlooking the hill where the grapes come from. It was the most expensive bottle of wine I have ever bought and I was secretly hoping that it would suck so that I would not be tempted to make it a habit when friends visit.
But it did not. It was strong and delicious, complicated and oaky. It was everything you'd want your neighbor to be growing out of the same soil you live on. It was the only bottle of wine I have ever thoroughly enjoyed and remembered long afterward. As I write this, I can see the fields over there green and dormant. It's a good sight.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Food
My friend Joe stopped by on his way to town the other day. I had set aside a couple of pairs of shoes for him, left when a mutual friend had passed away. Joe lives high in the mountains, at over 3000 feet though he can see the ocean from his trailer. At such altitude, the mushrooms come on late and he left us some white boletus that his son had found. In exchange, we had some fresh squid to trade, caught by a client of my mom's out on the bay.
The squid was enormous, and I cut a big steak for Joe out of the white rubbery slab. In the freezer was a bag of tentacles and for dinner. That night my mom pounded them up and fried the squid while I sauteed up the boletus. The squid, I was later told, was a Humboldt squid, a variety that used to occur mostly in Mexico but has established itself further and further up the coast. My mom's client is also our dentist and when I asked if the squid was following warmer ocean water or expanding its range for some other reason he said that no one yet knows for sure. I asked him to elaborate, but he had a dremel tool in my mouth and probably misunderstood.
I confess that I like hunting and finding mushrooms more than I like eating them, but I was spurred on by my mom's suspicion. I pointed out that, had they been poisonous, Joe and his son would have already died. The boletes buttery and mild, the squid was hot and chewy. It was a good meal.
The summer I was fourteen, I took my first solo backpacking trips in the mountains above where I am writing this now. First forays into self-sufficiency both literal and concrete. I remember on one trip arriving exhausted on a hot waterless day at a springside camp to the west of Ventana Cone. As I boiled up water for ramen and pine needle tea, I sat watching the fog ramping up along the Coast Ridge and found myself growing teary and thinking of my mom and food. It had not hit me before what it meant that she had put food on the table every day of my life. How good that was. How I had taken it for granted.
Her own mother's food disasters are near legend in our family. We went to visit her once and she had made cheese cookies with so much salt that they sucked the moisture right out of my mouth. Picture Wiley E. Coyote after the Road Runner would somehow get him to eat a block of epsom salts. Another time it was chicken fried steak so dessicated and over cooked that it lay on the plate like, I don't know, a pile of frisbees. When I was a baby, she once gave me a bottle of orange juice before remembering it was of the vodka-spiked variety.
Her ineptitude was all the more baffling given that she had no real ambition to be anything other than a housewife, or so it looked to me at the time. She was a dark and bitter woman who kept gallon bottles of Old Crow stashed around the house and eventually smoked and drank herself to death. I'm sure that what looked like manifest complacency to me was much more complicated. No one has ever been able to figure out what she might really have wanted to be, least of all me, but I wonder sometimes if she liked to cook but was incompetent at it. Or perhaps she hated it and took neurotic revenge by refusing to get any good at it. Either way, her foibles have made me laugh much more than mild competence might have made me smile.
My own relationship with cooking has always been uneasy. There are certain people I love to cook for, though when by myself I could live on on noodles, chips, coffee for much longer than I would care to admit.
But for now I live in a valley capable of producing a palate of food at my door that includes acorns and boletus and good red wine, feral boar, heirloom tomatoes, roast quail, year-round greens, crawdads, fresh eggs, peppers, pears, thistle heads, fiddleheads, miner's lettuce, chanterelles, local beef, and most anything else you can think of from a good sized garden. I even remember a particular driveway that, years ago, was planted with some sort of cultivated wheat whose unripe berries were delicious. The kind of pretense and consumerist instinct that attaches itself to labels like Organic or Artisan or even Locally Grown, fall away and this abundance is just here. It has awakened an interest in food that has been long dormant.
Michael, the local chef who puts on Cachagua Monday Night Diner and used to run a fancy Carmel restaurant or two, once told an interviewer that he had moved to organic ingredients many years before it was chic because (paraphrasing), “It was something we did for ourselves. Shit, we didn't even tell the customers about it. It was just that eating things created by our neighbors, in our little speck of the boonies was what we wanted to do. And the food was just so much better, we were just so much more inspired and we didn't look back.”
Things which we can put our hands on fill us up with stories as much as nutrition. What is missing in so much of the food we eat, even in the self-consciously local and organic variety, is any tangible connection. Sometimes buying an overpriced boutique apple at a co-op, even when accompanied with a precise and well-meaning pedigree, can be just another exercise in distance. Not always, not inevitably, not for everyone, though it works that way on me. But my grandmother's shitty cookies have given me as much amusement over the years as anything else I have eaten. And mirth, as we all know, counteracts toxins of all kinds.
I think back to those days up in the mountains, coaxing my first meals over a blue gas flame, the smell of dried beans and soy sauce. How I had read from Gary Snyder that I could just boil up pine needles and—what do you know—it's not too bad a tea. How I spent a day half-starving in my tent as a torrential downpour kept me inside after I had decided to make an arduous overnight trip with no stove. How that was a root of the appreciation of my mother.
It's good to be home here.
The squid was enormous, and I cut a big steak for Joe out of the white rubbery slab. In the freezer was a bag of tentacles and for dinner. That night my mom pounded them up and fried the squid while I sauteed up the boletus. The squid, I was later told, was a Humboldt squid, a variety that used to occur mostly in Mexico but has established itself further and further up the coast. My mom's client is also our dentist and when I asked if the squid was following warmer ocean water or expanding its range for some other reason he said that no one yet knows for sure. I asked him to elaborate, but he had a dremel tool in my mouth and probably misunderstood.
I confess that I like hunting and finding mushrooms more than I like eating them, but I was spurred on by my mom's suspicion. I pointed out that, had they been poisonous, Joe and his son would have already died. The boletes buttery and mild, the squid was hot and chewy. It was a good meal.
The summer I was fourteen, I took my first solo backpacking trips in the mountains above where I am writing this now. First forays into self-sufficiency both literal and concrete. I remember on one trip arriving exhausted on a hot waterless day at a springside camp to the west of Ventana Cone. As I boiled up water for ramen and pine needle tea, I sat watching the fog ramping up along the Coast Ridge and found myself growing teary and thinking of my mom and food. It had not hit me before what it meant that she had put food on the table every day of my life. How good that was. How I had taken it for granted.
Her own mother's food disasters are near legend in our family. We went to visit her once and she had made cheese cookies with so much salt that they sucked the moisture right out of my mouth. Picture Wiley E. Coyote after the Road Runner would somehow get him to eat a block of epsom salts. Another time it was chicken fried steak so dessicated and over cooked that it lay on the plate like, I don't know, a pile of frisbees. When I was a baby, she once gave me a bottle of orange juice before remembering it was of the vodka-spiked variety.
Her ineptitude was all the more baffling given that she had no real ambition to be anything other than a housewife, or so it looked to me at the time. She was a dark and bitter woman who kept gallon bottles of Old Crow stashed around the house and eventually smoked and drank herself to death. I'm sure that what looked like manifest complacency to me was much more complicated. No one has ever been able to figure out what she might really have wanted to be, least of all me, but I wonder sometimes if she liked to cook but was incompetent at it. Or perhaps she hated it and took neurotic revenge by refusing to get any good at it. Either way, her foibles have made me laugh much more than mild competence might have made me smile.
My own relationship with cooking has always been uneasy. There are certain people I love to cook for, though when by myself I could live on on noodles, chips, coffee for much longer than I would care to admit.
But for now I live in a valley capable of producing a palate of food at my door that includes acorns and boletus and good red wine, feral boar, heirloom tomatoes, roast quail, year-round greens, crawdads, fresh eggs, peppers, pears, thistle heads, fiddleheads, miner's lettuce, chanterelles, local beef, and most anything else you can think of from a good sized garden. I even remember a particular driveway that, years ago, was planted with some sort of cultivated wheat whose unripe berries were delicious. The kind of pretense and consumerist instinct that attaches itself to labels like Organic or Artisan or even Locally Grown, fall away and this abundance is just here. It has awakened an interest in food that has been long dormant.
Michael, the local chef who puts on Cachagua Monday Night Diner and used to run a fancy Carmel restaurant or two, once told an interviewer that he had moved to organic ingredients many years before it was chic because (paraphrasing), “It was something we did for ourselves. Shit, we didn't even tell the customers about it. It was just that eating things created by our neighbors, in our little speck of the boonies was what we wanted to do. And the food was just so much better, we were just so much more inspired and we didn't look back.”
Things which we can put our hands on fill us up with stories as much as nutrition. What is missing in so much of the food we eat, even in the self-consciously local and organic variety, is any tangible connection. Sometimes buying an overpriced boutique apple at a co-op, even when accompanied with a precise and well-meaning pedigree, can be just another exercise in distance. Not always, not inevitably, not for everyone, though it works that way on me. But my grandmother's shitty cookies have given me as much amusement over the years as anything else I have eaten. And mirth, as we all know, counteracts toxins of all kinds.
I think back to those days up in the mountains, coaxing my first meals over a blue gas flame, the smell of dried beans and soy sauce. How I had read from Gary Snyder that I could just boil up pine needles and—what do you know—it's not too bad a tea. How I spent a day half-starving in my tent as a torrential downpour kept me inside after I had decided to make an arduous overnight trip with no stove. How that was a root of the appreciation of my mother.
It's good to be home here.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Repair
My stepfather fancied himself a revolutionary. Che Guevara posters, old stories about the SDS, Irish music. In the days before the Berlin wall fell, he wore a big Soviet watch and organized Wobblies when there were no Wobblies to organize. Mention the election in Chile´ or union corruption and you could be in for an angry shouting match whether you agreed with him or not. I once worked him into a lather by pointing out that Marx and Engels were never workers, that their sympathy for the working class was born from the luxury of philosophizing and not the callouses of hard work. The angrier he got, the more I exaggerated their wealth. He could be fun like that.
He came to Monterey a bum, sleeping under the wharf and drunk. That he had gotten sober was a blessing and a curse. He had never gotten around to imagining how a revolutionary drunk might live when he was no longer drunk. No longer homeless, no longer romantically marginal. He did not want to live in the suburbs, have a real job, or wear a suit but sobriety and a relationship seemed to demand of him a change in things.
It was when it came to vehicles that this conflict was most obvious and eventually comical. Ray was a sucker for anything under $1000 especially if it had the kind of character he was looking for. As far as I could tell, character meant either not running or not running well enough that it could ever be mistaken for a practical, apathetic yuppy car. Revolutionaries drove MGs whose fuel pump cut out on left hand turns, Lincoln Continentals the size of small boats, VW vans with perpetually self-destructing engines, Ford Pintos wrested from the tow truck as the cops were scraping them off the street for impoundment.
When he and I and my mom first moved in together, Ray took it upon himself to teach me the fine art of carburetor rebuilding. It was his way of establishing a connection between us; we would rebuild the carburetor of the Yamaha motorcycle rusting in the driveway and I would have it to use. There were two problems: I did not want a vehicle and Ray did not actually know much about rebuilding carburetors.
I have since built and rebuilt many different engines and have never learned to love carburetors. All those small parts—jets and Venturi bowls, dashpots, convoluted passageways. For awhile though, I could do a California rebuild on a Subaru carburetor in about ten minutes. A California rebuild involves revving the engine very high then jamming the air intake with the heel of a hand or the surface of a rubber mallet and letting the resultant intense vacuum suck out any gunk in the passageways of the carb. Then I would remove the accelerator pump, a small piston that increased fuel flow under heavy load, and flex its rubber skirt to get a better seal.
But that was not the sort of future I saw for myself at sixteen, watching Ray mumble and fuss over a table full of jets and coffee cans. It did not help that Ray's method of working on mechanical things involved lots of confusion and frustrating outbursts. The fact was that, though he was a very good carpenter, he was not much of a mechanic.
You could tell by his hands, which were scarred and stumpy, battered and almost mesmerizing in the their paw-like bluntness. They were not hands meant to handle delicate things, as Ray was not someone good with anything delicate. Still I see now that he was trying to share something that became important to me, the skill to tune and fix, tinker with the little things upon which our physical existence depends. Long after the dogmatic leftist politics left me, this is something that stuck. We live in a world of carburetors and three tab roofing, LED screens blown fuses, rototillers and welded things. To get one's hands dirty is to dissipate the dependence upon abstractions, to take responsibility for our physical selves. I did not realize this then.
On a brutally cold eastern Oregon autumn, during which I was probably about 24, the sky was grey with threat of snow but the air was knife-like, the roads covered with icy crust, the roadside vegetation drifted over. The kind of days when the cows bunch along the fence line for the hay truck and the diesel lines of tractors and trucks freeze up with fuel that has not yet been winterized. I was living then out of the back of an 84 Subaru, a durable, economical car with enough traction to get around in the woods without breaking the wallet at the pump. There were a good number of years where I could measure my possessions in multiples of Subaru loads, usually one or one and a half. The half consisting of books and skis stored in friends' garages and basements.
It was the end of the season for working in the woods, and leaving the mountains ahead of the first snow storm my Subaru had refused to start. It was in the driveway of a cabin I had access to and, after cranking and cranking to no avail, it was too cold to even open the hood so I went back in and started a fire. The next day I had it towed the 30 or so miles to the garage in John Day where the mechanic looked at it with undisguised confusion. A week later I returned for it and managed to drive to the other side of town before it died again, taking my $150 with it.
My friend Larry came down from The Dalles with his truck, and we hauled the Subaru there on a trailer over endless miles of whitescaped earth. There was a mechanic then named Bob who had worked on Subarus since they were first imported. We towed my car to his shop and told him what was wrong. He opened the hood, removed the distributor cap, threw it in the trash with a comment about crappy aftermarket parts. Five minutes later I was on my way.
It was at that moment that I understood to live cheaply and with little margin in the boonies, I was going to have to rethink my relationship with cars. I was going to have to not ever let this sort of thing repeat itself, no matter what I might think of automobiles in the abstract.
I think back on when I did not care to know how to rebuild carburetors, nail up siding, install a garbage disposal and I remember that I was 16. I wanted to write poems and hike for months at a time, own very little. I wanted to live a life of the mind, to have few complicated things requiring complicated repair. It was a good idea, but if I were to be a monk I would be the kind put to work making sandals and robes for my brethren. Whatever there would be to analyze and repair, obsess over in that kind of work would occupy me no less than teasing out the electrical problems in my truck. Either way I still write poetry.
When little else in life makes sense to me, I install windows, build ethanol stills, repack wheel bearing grease. Do things with my hands. My left middle finger is misshapen from the day I grabbed a still spinning wood carving blade on an angle grinder. My left thumb has a long scar from when, at five, I tried to saw a board at my friend Elliot's with a hand saw. My right eye socket is dented from the curvature of a driveline that fell on it. There are too many other little scars from screwdriver mishaps and bashed knuckles to count.
A year or so after the distributor incident with my Subaru, I rebuilt the engine from top to bottom with a Leatherman tool, a handful of crappy sockets, a borrowed torque wrench. The Subaru 1800 engine has an unusual. horizontally-opposed design, with two symmetrical halves to its block. At the crucial point of reconstruction, the halves must be joined with a very delicate attention to torque. Just a bit too much, and the engine will seize and die the first time it is cranked. Just a bit too much and the crankshaft will knock around and bash holes into everything. The difference between too much and too little was explained to me by my machinist. He said that I needed to torque the bolts just so that I could feel the crankshaft seize for one quarter turn before the internal friction heated everything into place.
I got it right, but only after realizing that the torque figures in the manual were incorrect. It was the little motion of turning the shaft, letting it get into muscle memory the way the machinist had shown me, that prevented a huge disaster. I wrote the manual producer a letter explaining their error. I had learned to think, at least briefly, in thousandths of an inch. 150,000 miles later that car still lives on the streets in Bend.
I heard recently that Ray is drinking again, shooting dope, left town for Florida. I hope these are just rumors, but if not I hope that whatever he drove down south actually got him there. Perhaps it is a diminution, or a conceit, but these small things I can do with my own hands are also my politics. They are my way of cutting the world down to size, of being useful to family and friends, of increasing my own sovereignty. I think he would understand that by now.
He came to Monterey a bum, sleeping under the wharf and drunk. That he had gotten sober was a blessing and a curse. He had never gotten around to imagining how a revolutionary drunk might live when he was no longer drunk. No longer homeless, no longer romantically marginal. He did not want to live in the suburbs, have a real job, or wear a suit but sobriety and a relationship seemed to demand of him a change in things.
It was when it came to vehicles that this conflict was most obvious and eventually comical. Ray was a sucker for anything under $1000 especially if it had the kind of character he was looking for. As far as I could tell, character meant either not running or not running well enough that it could ever be mistaken for a practical, apathetic yuppy car. Revolutionaries drove MGs whose fuel pump cut out on left hand turns, Lincoln Continentals the size of small boats, VW vans with perpetually self-destructing engines, Ford Pintos wrested from the tow truck as the cops were scraping them off the street for impoundment.
When he and I and my mom first moved in together, Ray took it upon himself to teach me the fine art of carburetor rebuilding. It was his way of establishing a connection between us; we would rebuild the carburetor of the Yamaha motorcycle rusting in the driveway and I would have it to use. There were two problems: I did not want a vehicle and Ray did not actually know much about rebuilding carburetors.
I have since built and rebuilt many different engines and have never learned to love carburetors. All those small parts—jets and Venturi bowls, dashpots, convoluted passageways. For awhile though, I could do a California rebuild on a Subaru carburetor in about ten minutes. A California rebuild involves revving the engine very high then jamming the air intake with the heel of a hand or the surface of a rubber mallet and letting the resultant intense vacuum suck out any gunk in the passageways of the carb. Then I would remove the accelerator pump, a small piston that increased fuel flow under heavy load, and flex its rubber skirt to get a better seal.
But that was not the sort of future I saw for myself at sixteen, watching Ray mumble and fuss over a table full of jets and coffee cans. It did not help that Ray's method of working on mechanical things involved lots of confusion and frustrating outbursts. The fact was that, though he was a very good carpenter, he was not much of a mechanic.
You could tell by his hands, which were scarred and stumpy, battered and almost mesmerizing in the their paw-like bluntness. They were not hands meant to handle delicate things, as Ray was not someone good with anything delicate. Still I see now that he was trying to share something that became important to me, the skill to tune and fix, tinker with the little things upon which our physical existence depends. Long after the dogmatic leftist politics left me, this is something that stuck. We live in a world of carburetors and three tab roofing, LED screens blown fuses, rototillers and welded things. To get one's hands dirty is to dissipate the dependence upon abstractions, to take responsibility for our physical selves. I did not realize this then.
On a brutally cold eastern Oregon autumn, during which I was probably about 24, the sky was grey with threat of snow but the air was knife-like, the roads covered with icy crust, the roadside vegetation drifted over. The kind of days when the cows bunch along the fence line for the hay truck and the diesel lines of tractors and trucks freeze up with fuel that has not yet been winterized. I was living then out of the back of an 84 Subaru, a durable, economical car with enough traction to get around in the woods without breaking the wallet at the pump. There were a good number of years where I could measure my possessions in multiples of Subaru loads, usually one or one and a half. The half consisting of books and skis stored in friends' garages and basements.
It was the end of the season for working in the woods, and leaving the mountains ahead of the first snow storm my Subaru had refused to start. It was in the driveway of a cabin I had access to and, after cranking and cranking to no avail, it was too cold to even open the hood so I went back in and started a fire. The next day I had it towed the 30 or so miles to the garage in John Day where the mechanic looked at it with undisguised confusion. A week later I returned for it and managed to drive to the other side of town before it died again, taking my $150 with it.
My friend Larry came down from The Dalles with his truck, and we hauled the Subaru there on a trailer over endless miles of whitescaped earth. There was a mechanic then named Bob who had worked on Subarus since they were first imported. We towed my car to his shop and told him what was wrong. He opened the hood, removed the distributor cap, threw it in the trash with a comment about crappy aftermarket parts. Five minutes later I was on my way.
It was at that moment that I understood to live cheaply and with little margin in the boonies, I was going to have to rethink my relationship with cars. I was going to have to not ever let this sort of thing repeat itself, no matter what I might think of automobiles in the abstract.
I think back on when I did not care to know how to rebuild carburetors, nail up siding, install a garbage disposal and I remember that I was 16. I wanted to write poems and hike for months at a time, own very little. I wanted to live a life of the mind, to have few complicated things requiring complicated repair. It was a good idea, but if I were to be a monk I would be the kind put to work making sandals and robes for my brethren. Whatever there would be to analyze and repair, obsess over in that kind of work would occupy me no less than teasing out the electrical problems in my truck. Either way I still write poetry.
When little else in life makes sense to me, I install windows, build ethanol stills, repack wheel bearing grease. Do things with my hands. My left middle finger is misshapen from the day I grabbed a still spinning wood carving blade on an angle grinder. My left thumb has a long scar from when, at five, I tried to saw a board at my friend Elliot's with a hand saw. My right eye socket is dented from the curvature of a driveline that fell on it. There are too many other little scars from screwdriver mishaps and bashed knuckles to count.
A year or so after the distributor incident with my Subaru, I rebuilt the engine from top to bottom with a Leatherman tool, a handful of crappy sockets, a borrowed torque wrench. The Subaru 1800 engine has an unusual. horizontally-opposed design, with two symmetrical halves to its block. At the crucial point of reconstruction, the halves must be joined with a very delicate attention to torque. Just a bit too much, and the engine will seize and die the first time it is cranked. Just a bit too much and the crankshaft will knock around and bash holes into everything. The difference between too much and too little was explained to me by my machinist. He said that I needed to torque the bolts just so that I could feel the crankshaft seize for one quarter turn before the internal friction heated everything into place.
I got it right, but only after realizing that the torque figures in the manual were incorrect. It was the little motion of turning the shaft, letting it get into muscle memory the way the machinist had shown me, that prevented a huge disaster. I wrote the manual producer a letter explaining their error. I had learned to think, at least briefly, in thousandths of an inch. 150,000 miles later that car still lives on the streets in Bend.
I heard recently that Ray is drinking again, shooting dope, left town for Florida. I hope these are just rumors, but if not I hope that whatever he drove down south actually got him there. Perhaps it is a diminution, or a conceit, but these small things I can do with my own hands are also my politics. They are my way of cutting the world down to size, of being useful to family and friends, of increasing my own sovereignty. I think he would understand that by now.
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