Adventures in TSA

In which our hero has alien sex toys scanned for bombs, and urethral sounds confiscated…

Okay, so. I travel a bit, sometimes internationally, and so it was I found myself jetting off to Barcelona for a vacation with the extended polyamorous family a few months back.

I have, as those who follow this blog know, been working for several years on a Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon, inspired by (a) my lifelong fear of the alien from Alien (a movie my parents took me to when I was, like, 11 or 12 or something, thinking it was like a new Star Wars…no exaggeration, I had nightmares aout that alien for more than 30 years after), and (b) a suggestion by my wife that I should make a sex toy inspired by the alien, because she loves to push my buttons.

In fact, a photo of one of the early prototypes ended up going mad viral on the Internet, and I’m told has even been uploaded to the official Sigorney Weaver fan page, which means Ms. Weaver has likely seen it. 0.o

Anyway.

I cast four prototype xenomorph hiphugger strapons and one xenomorph facehugger gag in the runup to Barcelona, with the idea that having multiple lovers in the same space would be a fine opportunity for a xenomorph gangbang, truly a test of the design.

So it was I packed all these xenomorph hiphuggers in my luggage and jetted off to Springfield, MO, to meet my Talespinner, who would be accompanying me to Spain.

You would not believe what this looked like on the X-ray. Sadly, they refused to allow me to take a pic.

The problem started quite early. Whilst carrying my luggage aboard the plane, the X-ray showed a suitcase absolutely packed with aggressive alien endoparasites, which, as you might imagine, elicited some…excitement at screening. (I didn’t put them in my checked bag because it was mainly filled with photographic gear and clothes.)

The bag got bounced, the TSA checker opened the lid, and gentle reader, if I could have photographed his expression and shown it to you, you would know that it is possible for surprise to take on human form.

Within minutes, there was a crowd around the table: the TSA inspector, the woman running the X-ray, and two other people, all of them staring in slack-jawed astonishment. The TSA checker called for his superior, who was like “What the…?” One of the other TSA screeners said “Holy shit, that looks like the alien from the Alien movies!”

TSA screener: “Should I—”

Supervisor: “Yes.”

And then they, hand to God, scanned the hiphuggers for explosives.

Eventually convinced the hiphuggers weren’t actually bombs, they allowed me to board, where I sat in a chair that through the miracle of Science flew through the air.

But that’s not the end of the story, oh my no.

When the time came for us to head from Springfield to Barcelona, I re-packed everything, in no small part because of the way TSA freaked out about the xenomorphs, but also prompted by the need to rearrange in order to fit two rather large studio lights for the xenomorph photo shoot we had planned. (That was an adventure in itself; the tripods for the studio lights were an inch and a half too long to fit the suitcase, but fifteen minutes with a hacksaw soon fixed that.)

We set off for the airport, confident that this TSA experience would be far smoother. Alas, it was not to be.

During the rearranging, I’d put the more conventional sex toy kit in my carryon whilst the hiphuggers ent in checked baggage with the studio lights, UV-reactive body paints, UV blacklight, and other miscellaneous orgy supplies.

I did not know, Gentle Reader, I did not suspect, that I had planted the seeds of my own undoing.

For you see, in my conventional sex toy kit I’d placed my collection of sounds. If oyu don’t know what those are, I won’t disturb you with the details, except to say that I had about ten or fifteen and they looked like this:

The TSA guy…

confiscated and threw away the sounds.

When I asked him why, he looked me straight in the eye and told me, you could stab someone with them.”

You. Could. Stab. Someone. With. Them.

Words…words fail. Whatever danger these may pose as a weapon, Gentle Reader, let me assure you that the 100% sustainably made, biodegradable wood cutlery they gave us aboard the plane would be a far better stabby weapon in every single axis.At this point, it’s hard to escape the perhaps paranoid conclusion that my name exists on some TSA list somewhere. I had a slab of Barcelonan chocolate in my computer bag on the way home and it got scanned for explosives every single time I went through security.

They do it with malice.

Fragments of SquiggleCon: Two mottes one bailey

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, or for that matter been on the Internet for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered the phrase “motte and bailey argument” or “motte and bailey doctrine” before.

A motte and bailey argument is an argument in which you believe something, but you don’t really have a good justification for it. So when you’re attacked, you retreat into a different, much more specific belief, for which you do have a good argument. When the attack is over, you come back out to your original, more general belief, the one that’s harder to justify.

An example of a motte and bailey argument I hear in polyamory circles all the damn time is this one:

“You need to have a veto in your relationship if you want your primary relationships to stay healthy.”

“Veto doesn’t necessarily keep relationships healthy. In fact, using a veto on someone your partner loves can break your partner’s heart, and if you break your partner’s hert then you are going to damage your relationship.”

“But a veto just means you can discuss your concerns with your partner! It means you can talk about problems you see in their other relationships! You favor open communication in your relationships, right?”

“Yes.”

“So you agree, all poly relationships need veto.”

In this argument, the bailey is a need for veto, usualy understood to mean the unilateral and unquestioned ability to end a lover’s other relationship. This is a difficult position to defend, so when called, a person may retreat into the motte (“When I say ‘veto,’ I’m only talking about open communication!”), then, when the argument is over, go back to advocating for unilateral and unquestioned ability to end a lover’s other relationship.

The Motte and Bailey argument comes from a style of fortification called a “motte and bailey,” which is a place where an area of land that’s difficult to defend (the bailey) is overlooked by an easily defensible structure (the motte). If raiders or an enemy army or whatever show up, you evacuate the bailey, bringing all the people into the motte. The he motte can be defended from attack. When the attached tack is over, everyone goes back out into the bailey.

Okay, so now that you’re up to speed…

The town of Lincoln in northern Britain is home to a motte and bailey castle, called, appropriately enough, Lincoln Castle. Naturally, I had to visit.


Lincoln Castle was built somewhere around 1068 or so, and has been in use continuously ever since. It’s an unusual motte and bailey structure in that it actually has two baileys. The motte is a smooth, round valley between two hills. Naturally, since if one is good, two must be better, William the Conquerer built two baileys, one on each hill, and there you have it.

Originally, the motte was completely enclosed by a wood fence, and both baileys were built of wood. It was replaced over the years centuries with beefier fortifications of stone. Today, nothing remains of the original wood structures.

Lincoln Castle is still in use today–the castle is now the courthouse and, from what I gather, capitol building for Lincoln. The rest is an open-air museum. We had a blast running around the place.

Here’s a view from one of the two mottes, looking down into the bailey. The round structure on the left is the fortified gate through the outer wall. The red brick structure to the right is an old Victorian-era prison. The round tower in the background is the second motte, because you know what they say about mottes: you can never stop at just one.

Here’s what’s left of the second motte, seen from the middle of the bailey.

As soon as I found out that Lincoln Castle has two mottes, I immediately, on that very spot, registered the domain name twomottesonebailey.com — though I have absolutely no idea what I will use it for. Suggestions?

The second motte, which is in much better shape than the first. The tower still exists, though most of the rest of it is now a broken, hollowed-out shell in which it would be tremendous fun to film a cheesy low-budget movie.

See what I mean? This place is just screaming for orcs or spectral knights or some sort of special effect where mist flows through the windows before congealing into an undead sorceror or something.

The fortification has two gates, one on each side. Breaking in through one of these gates would be a nontrivial undertaking for sure. In the background, between the two trees, is a place where the wall widens into a large round structure that contains cells where prisoners due to be executed were chained up prior to being hanged–more on that in a minute.

Here’s the actual “castle” bit of Lincoln castle. It has been the administrative center and courthouse for Lincoln for…oh, for longer than the country I live in has been a country, honestly. It’s still used today, which is why I have no photos of the inside. Tourists aren’t allowed in, being that it’s a functional courthouse and all.

The Victorian prison. Touring this was interesting. Whenever I see something like this, I always wonder how many innocent people were sentenced here, and how many people ended up here for political rather than criminal justice reasons.

The inside had rather more windows than I expected, though I suppose in an age without electric lights, that makes sense.

Prisoners were kept in cells lining both sides of the stacked corridors. The building is divided into two halves, one for male and one for female prisoners. More on that in a minute, too.

Some of the cells were used by the prisoners to do tasks like washing laundry, making bedrolls, or stamping license plates.

This left fewer cells for actual housing of prisoners, so they were stacked in like cordwood.

Though to be fair, I have stayed in a hostel whose accommodations were roughly similar.

This being Victorian times, God was kind of a big deal (those Victorians were quite the bunch of God-botherers, even as they did the most ungodly of things), so of course the prison had a chapel, and of course, attendance was mandatory.

Each pew was a separate room, divided from its neighbors by a little door, presumably to make it more difficult for the prisoners to shank each other during services, that being considered rather uncouth and all. The prisoners could not see each other, but the person delivering the sermon could see all the prisoners, cleverly combining the functions of a chapel and a panopticon into one (a Chapelopticon? Panchapelcon? I don’t know). Thus do we see religion reflected in architecture. God sees you, so stop doing that thing you do with your private parts ands that feather duster, you pervert.

I was, while we toured the prison, engaging in cybersex with a lovely woman who lives in Waterloo, Ontario, which was a bit freaky. I have now imprinted on Victorian prisons as arousal triggers. There’s no way that can go wrong.

So yeah, executions. The Victorians were big on ’em. They’d kill you just as soon as look at you. Steal something? Say something bad about the king? Poke a badger with a spoon? You’re a dead man walking.

Or women. They were remarkably egalitarian in the judicial application of death.

They had special cells in that bulge in the wall I mentioned earlier. They look like this:

Each one had a steel ring set in the wall, to which they would literally chain the condemned.

On the appointed day, after the crowds had gathered, they’d unchain the people, lead them out into the bailey, and kill them for the entertainment of the guests justice and peace of the land.

And yes, there were crowds. Big ones. People who lived in houses near the walls would rent out second-story rooms with a view at exorbitant rates to folks who wanted a good view. Apparently, there was a full-on riot on execution day when the star of the show had ruined everyone’s entertainment by committing suicide earlier on–the people demanded to see someone be killed, but the prison didn’t have anyone else to kill that day, and it was all a hell of a mess.

I guess that’s what happens before the age of Marvel superhero movies.

So anyway, one of the Victorian prison wardens was a man of Science, who installed a telescope in one of the mottes so he could look at the stars. Err, yeah, that’s right, the stars. To look at. In the sky. Stars.

Remember how I said the prison was divided into a male and a female wing? Female prisoners were kept in the back, and allowed into an outdoor courtyard behind the motte.

Here’s a view from the observatory the warden built for his telescope.

…yeah. Apparently, from what our tour guide said, he had sevral illegitimate children with several different female prisoners.

Those whacky Victorians, amirite?


There is one other bit I don’t have photos of, because photos aren’t allowed in the super special room where it’s kept: the Magna Carta.

Yes, the Magna Carta, one of the original handwritten copies. It’s here, in a climate controlled room with the text of the thing up on the wall.

And there, right at eye level smack dab in the middle of this enormous wall of text, is Clause 54:

No one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband.

Even back then, women’s voices were never taken seriously.

Two Chaosbunnies in the Desert: Bodie, part 3

Part 1 of this saga is here. Part 8 of this saga is here.
Part 2 of this saga is here. Part 9 of this saga is here.
Part 3 of this saga is here. Part 10 of this saga is here.
Part 4 of this saga is here. Part 11 of this saga is here.
Part 5 of this saga is here. Part 12 of this saga is here.
Part 6 of this saga is here. Part 13 of this saga is here.
Part 7 of this saga is here.

Bodie, California was a Victorian-era gold mining town high in the mountains between California and Nevada. The Victorians weren’t very big on human rights, or treating workers well, or sex, or just about anything else, but there is one thing they liked very much, and that was technology.

At some point, today’s cutting-edge tech will look as hopelessly antiquated as the detritus littering the ruins of Bodie. But tech always starts somewhere, and the Victorians were all for embracing the bleeding edge, especially where it making money.

One of the many places Bodie kept up with the state of the art was transportation. When the town was founded, horses and stagecoaches were the order of the day, but that changed as the automotive arts gained ground. Today, the ruins of ancient cars lie scattered all over what’s left of the town.

The residents of Bodie were willing to adopt any new technology that offered to make their lives better or, more to the point, more productive. They may not have had a sewer system, they may have dug their wells directly downstream of their outhouses, but they were on top of mechanization as soon as it was out of beta.

And the trend of abandoning old tech where it lay and replacing it with new didn’t end with mining or stamping machines. The derelict wrecks rusting quietly into the hills span years of the automaker’s art.

They also used whatever worked. In the winter, snow in Bodie could get two stories deep. If that made it most practical to let the horseless carriages get buried and break out the sleds in winter, that’s what they did.

Some of the abandoned cars look personal; others look like working vehicles.

There’s a certain sleek beauty to the lines of this one, I think.

Compare that to the severe utilitarianism of this (possibly horse-drawn?) ore cart.

But they weren’t technofetishists. Their approach to technology was relentlessly, brutally practical. If it worked, they used it. As many of the vehicles dotted about Bodie are old tech as new.

This is a different relationship to technology than many of us have today. They wanted things that worked, not things that were new. If it helped them get gold out of the ground, they used it, and that was that. It’s hard to imagine that utilitarian a mindset today. “New iPhone? Why? My phone makes calls just fine.”

One of the creepiest and most splendid things about Bodie is the fact that when the gold left, so did the people, sometimes with such abruption it seems as thought they forgot to pack.

In reality, it’s more like they didn’t bother to pack. It’s difficult to get up and down the mountain even today; in a time when the only way in our out was by stagecoach (on a toll road!), there would be little incentive to take anything with you that could easily be replaced when you got wherever you were going.

So the buildings in Bodie have rooms that look like their owners stepped out a half-century ago to pop on down to the store for milk and eggs, and never came back. It’s both unsettling and marvelous.

The cast-off child’s toy in this room is a reminder that people raised their kids here, in this inhospitable mining town with its brutal heat and bitter cold and chimneys belching mercury fumes.

Bodie had its own post office, which doubled as the postman’s living quarters.

This was someone’s home. Someone cooked meals here, sang songs here, experienced joy and sorrow here, lived here.

It’s hard to forget that countless lives played out here, from beginning to end. These people lived in an inhospitable place, in a different time, but they lived here, and they experienced the same range of feelings that you and I feel.

This was, first and foremost, a working town. The town had a blacksmith. Apparently, according to the tour guide, this was it. I have no idea what those things on the table are.

The general store looks very much like it did when the town was at its peak, at least if you ignore the film of dust that has fallen like a funeral shroud over it all.

I bet the aspirin was a guaranteed best seller.

The plaster bandages too, I reckon. Industrial accidents in the stamping mill were horrifying.

The Bodie Hotel is one of the best-preserved buildings still remaining. The sign says “meals at all hours,” and I believe it. This place probably never slept.

This room still has a bunch of toys, long abandoned, and what looks like it might be a proto-skateboard of some description.

I wonder if the child these belonged to was sad to give them up.

This room looks expensive to me.

The headline is less interesting to me than the article beneath it: “Blast at magnesium plant injures 22.” There are people today who want to abolish OSHA. How short our memories are.

Bodie at its peak was home to many, many taverns. Today only one remains.

Next door to the sole remaining tavern is a gym. And you want to know something freaky? The cabin where Eve and I wrote More Than Two has that exact same model of hob.

Seriously. The exact same model. Check this out:

Freaky!

One of the guides explained that this was a “buggy,” as opposed to a “stagecoach.” There’s a big difference, apparently (and in fact the toll road into town had different tolls for buggies, wagons, coaches, and freight wagons).

We left Bodie as the sun grew low, and headed out to…well, that is a story for next time.

Two Chaosbunnies in the Desert: Bodie, part 2

Part 1 of this saga is here. Part 8 of this saga is here.
Part 2 of this saga is here. Part 9 of this saga is here.
Part 3 of this saga is here. Part 10 of this saga is here.
Part 4 of this saga is here. Part 11 of this saga is here.
Part 5 of this saga is here. Part 12 of this saga is here.
Part 6 of this saga is here. Part 13 of this saga is here.
Part 7 of this saga is here.

Bodie, California is a classic nineteenth-century California gold rush town. It’s high atop a mountain in the desert, and every part of the town exists for one purpose alone: to facilitate the extraction of gold from the surrounding hills.

The whole of the town exists to support the stamping mill, the large gray building about which everything else revolves. On our second day there, Bunny and I toured the stamping mill. This can be done only as part of a twice-daily guided tour group. The stamping mill, you see, represents the absolute apex of Victorian-era technology, and Victorian-era technology was not exactly built on a foundation of safety first. Even when it hadn’t been abandoned for nigh on a century.

This is a view of the mill from what’s left of the bank, which was, not coincidentally located right across the street.

In principle, a stamping mill is relatively straightforward. Ore goes in the top. It’s crushed into a fine powder—”about as fine as flour,” the tour guide said—by large mechanical hammers. Then, and this is where the famed Victorian indifference to human life really shines, the powder is sifted across a pool of mercury. The mercury reacts with gold to form a mercury-gold amalgam, which becomes a semi-solid mass that workers roll up into a ball and stick in a safe (I swear I am not making this up).

The rock doesn’t stick to the mercury and is discarded. The ball of hideously toxic mercury-gold amalgam is then, get this, placed in a furnace, where the mercury is boiled off, leaving molten gold behind. The molted gold is poured into bars, assayed, and then shipped off down the mountain.

The whole fearsome, dangerous, mind-bogglingly toxic process begins with getting bits of gold ore into the top of the stamping mill, which is done via conveyor belts.

Rain or shine, summer or winter, the gold ore is hauled into the small brown wood building behind the mill, situated atop a hill because Bodie often saw 20 feet of snow in the winter and the mine operators were stubbornly unwilling to let a little thing like that stop the flow of money. The building in the foreground with the very narrow chimney is the furnace where the mercury was boiled off, and I can’t believe I’ve now typed that phrase twice.

The mercury. Was boiled off.

Jesus.

Bodie is about money. That’s it. From stem to stern, everything about the town was in service of making money. The Victorians, ever practical, used whatever new technologies would help with that endeavor, and cast off whatever bits of technology were no longer useful. Even now, the ground around the mill is littered with broken bits of machinery, like this cast-off drive belt made of woven iron.

Or this enormous camshaft. His thing was mounted to an axle driven by an absolutely huge, room-sized steam engine or, later in Bodie’s history, an almost equally ginormous electric engine. The camshaft spun around and as it did, the cams lifted and then dropped hammers that crushed the rock. The hammers were more than a story long and weighed over a thousand pounds apiece. The din, according to the tour guide, could be heard halfway up the mountain. Workers wore cotton in their ears to keep from going deaf.

It didn’t work; deafness was a common problem among stamping mill operators. So were horrifying industrial accidents, mercury poisoning, and in at least one case, being sliced in half by a drive belt.

This being a Libertarian paradise, an injured, poisoned, or deafened worker was fired, given a couple of hours to pack, and kicked out of town.

Our tour started with the machine room, which was, naturally, the second most important part of the stamping mill. The mill had a state-of-the-Victorian-art workshop, with lathes, presses, and other metalworking equipment able to repair or even fabricate almost any part the vast machine required.

This is all that’s left of the huge electric motor that once ran the place. The Victorians were as pragmatic as they were reckless with the lives and safety of others. The mill had multiple stamps, each of which had multiple hammers. They reasoned that it was cheaper to build one enormous engine to power all that than to make numerous smaller engines to power each hammer individually. That presented a single point of failure, true, but as the saying goes, an airplane with three engines has three times as many engine problems as an airplane with only one.

The engine turned this pulley, which fed power to the rest of the mill via the biggest belt you’ve ever seen. It was, according to our guide, this belt that once cut a luckless worker in half.

This is the business end, literally, of the stamping mill: the stamps themselves. Each hammer is a ten-foot-long iron rod with a hook on the top end and a several-hundred-pound iron weight at the bottom end. The camshaft spins, lifting and then dropping all the hammers, and crushing everything beneath them into very, very fine dust.

The dust then poured down the slide and onto the pools of mercury.

Across from the stamps is yet another workshop, this one equipped with large metal-turning lathes to manufacture oversized parts. I say that is if everything in this entire building wasn’t oversized. We make things smaller and smaller; the Victorians, on the other hand, were size queens. If a part didn’t weigh a ton and a half, it was firmly in the province of jewelers and watchmakers, not machinists. It’s a wonder they could make a pocket watch any smaller than a manhole cover.

Once out of the mill, which even today probably violates a dozen EPA regulations on mercury exposure, we wandered around some more, looking at the old-school mining equipment scattered like weird metal vegetation.

Like this steam-powered elevator that lowered miners into the deep shafts.

When I say the castoff bits of Victorian tech were everywhere, I mean everywhere. You can’t walk anywhere in Bodie without tripping over, stepping on, or stubbing your toe on it. The Victorians believed the only thing better than iron was more iron. Subtle they were not.

The rod in the foreground of that last photo is one of the tops of the giant hammers from the stamping mill. You can see the hook that engaged the cams in the camshaft that lifted and dropped them. If a particular hammer or stamp needed to be fixed, the worker would take a block of wood, reach in to where the camshaft ran through the top of the stamps, and jam the piece of wood in under the hook to hold that hammer up…because, naturally, they wouldn’t stop the mill just for a paltry thing like service.

Workers lost their fingers doing this. They were fired and given a couple hours to leave.

When we came back out, Bunny and I saw…a bunny. A real, honest-to-God Bodie bunny, right there watching us.

This was not the end of our adventures in Bodie, or in fact of our adventures period; I still haven’t got to the copulating dinosaurs yet. Stay tuned!

Two Chaosbunnies in the Desert: Bodie, Part 1

Part 1 of this saga is here. Part 7 of this saga is here.
Part 2 of this saga is here. Part 8 of this saga is here.
Part 3 of this saga is here. Part 9 of this saga is here.
Part 4 of this saga is here. Part 10 of this saga is here.
Part 5 of this saga is here. Part 11 of this saga is here.
Part 6 of this saga is here. Part 12 of this saga is here.

We are nearing the end of this tale, gentle readers, but what an end it is.

Bunny and I piled into the Adventure Van, headed to where we had heard of a large ghost town called Bodie, an 1800s gold-mining town in the rugged mountains of eastern California. Bodie was a–

“Hey, pull over!” Bunny said.

I pulled over near this apparently abandoned(?) building advertising bail bond services. Seemed legit.

We took some pictures, tromped about for a bit, then climbed into the Adventure Van once more, headed for Bodie. Bodie was a thriving gold mining town with more than ten thousand residents at its peak, located at more than eight thousand feet elevation in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was a huge and fantastically profitable gold mining town, producing tens of millions of dollars (in 1850s dollars!) in gold. Miners were paid $4 a week for dangerous, heavy physical labor under grueling conditions; of that $4, $2.75 per week was deducted for room and board.

You get there by following a narrow dirt track up and up and up into the mountain. Bodie is well off the beaten path, in much the same way that a manned excursion to Mars is not a jaunt down to the local grocery store. Fortunately, it was not a terribly steep grade–stagecoaches loaded with gold had to be able to make the trip, after all–and the Adventure Van was up to the journey with a minimum of grumbling.

We drove for a couple of hours. “I hope this is worth it,” I said. Bunny said something noncommittal.

It was worth it.

When at long last you’ve traveled up to the summit of the Bodie Hills, the first thing you see from the road, aside from a “State Park” sign, is this.

This was the jackpot, the mother lode, the Platonic ideal of a Western ghost town. This, gentle readers, truly was the bee’s knees.

We parked–with, I must confess, some excitement–and left the comforting shelter of the Adventure Van into the dry, dusty heat of Bodie, California.

The moment you step out of the parking lot, thoughtfully provided for you by the California Department of Parks and Recreation, you walk up a slight rise and see…this.

This small picture can not do justice to how amazing this place is. Click on the picture to see a (much) bigger version.

Less than a quarter of the town remains; the rest burned to the ground quite some years ago. At its peak, the town had sixty-five saloons, numerous brothels, and several churches that one could go to for absolution of one’s sins, which were numerous indeed. Bodie was by all accounts a very violent place; common hobbies included murder and various lesser crimes. According to one of the tour guides we spoke to, it’s not uncommon for people who do heavy labor at high altitudes without proper acclimatization to suffer psychotic breaks.

Bodie had an extensive network of roads, all unpaved. Again, click on the picture to embiggen.

The large gray building on the left-hand side of the first picture is the stamping mill, the entire reason for Bodie’s existence. I plan to write an entire post about that stamping mill. Raw gold ore was carried to the stamping mill, where the rock was crushed to a powder as fine as flour, and gold was extracted from it by a process that was absolutely and completely bonkers and showed a careless–indeed reckless–disregard for the life, health, and safety of the people who worked there. More on that later.

Bunny and I eventually spent two days in Bodie, wandering around taking pictures–many hundreds and hundreds of pictures. I’ve condensed the trove down to about eighty or so, which will likely take several posts to work through. Apologies in advance for what I’m about to do to your bandwidth, O readers.

Life in Bodie was not particularly pleasant. The air at eight thousand feet is thin. During the summer, the temperature routinely exceeds a hundred degrees Fahrenheit; during the winter, twenty feet of snow is not uncommon. Everything from building supplies to construction equipment had to be carried up the mountain. There was one road that climbed into Bodie from the west, ran straight through town, and exited to the east. Naturally, as it was the only way into or out of Bodie, it was a toll road (buggies 25 cents; carriages 75 cents; discounts for firewood and mining gear).

The houses we saw tended to be quite small and simple, save for this one, a veritable mansion belonging to the overseer of the stamping mill. You can click this picture to embiggen it, too.

The tour guide didn’t say, but I suspect the stamping mill overseer made rather more than $4 a week.

This place was more typical of the houses in Bodie.

You’ll notice the remnants of derelict machinery in the foreground. Bodie is littered with abandoned equipment rusting quietly into the desert; it’s everywhere.

Even with all its violence and squalor, Bodie was the absolute pinnacle of Victorian technology. It was on the cutting edge of mining industry, and there was no new, experimental mining tech they would not use if it would increase the rate at which they could mine or process ore. The town of Bodie was a bit like the Silicon Valley of the 1800s–it was absolutely state of the art for new machinery and new techniques.

Bodie was abandoned rather abruptly when the mines stopped being profitable. All that tech was left where it was, because Bodie is so remote and inhospitable that it simply wasn’t worth carting it all back down the mountain again. So now it lies scattered everywhere, remnants of what was once innovative, up-to-the-minute industrial know-how.

In fact, I’ll probably dedicate an entire post just to various bits of cast-off technology we found littering the countryside.

At one time, Bodie sported several churches. Today, only the Methodist church still stands.

The writing on the archway in the back reads “Praise waiteth for thee O God in Zion.”

The buildings are in remarkably good shape because of the foresight of one person, James S. Cain, who, as people left, offered to buy their houses or shops for a dollar. Since they were leaving anyway, and there was little of value remaining, almost everyone agreed. He continued to work the mine, making far less money than it had produced at its peak but still enough for him to turn a modest profit. Later, he hired guards to protect the deserted town from looters and vandals.

In the early 1960s, what was left of Bodie became a protected state park.

Being a closely-packed, densely-populated town made entirely of wood in deep desert, Bodie had several fire stations, only one of which remains.

In the 1930s, after the town was all but completely deserted, a fire swept through it, destroying a significant percentage of the remaining buildings, including all of the brothels (of which there were once many) and all of what had once been Chinatown.

Only a few of the buildings along what used to be Main Street survive, including a tavern and a gym.

At its peak, Bodie had a significant enough population of children that it featured a large, two-story school. I’m not sure I would have tried to raise children here, but hey, that’s me.

This is what happens if you leave an 1850s-era globe in a window exposed to harsh ultraviolet light for over a century. I think this is amazing.

The sun really is brutal at 8,000 feet. Bunny and I both got sunburned right through our clothes–something that, I gather, is quite common at that altitude. Wish I’d have known about it before we were there!

The mill overseer’s digs, as I mentioned before, were quite luxurious.

“Luxury” is not the first word that springs to mind to describe most of the other housing, but the accommodations weren’t really that bad, considering. That is, if you can get past the harsh environment with its blistering heat and brutal cold, the violence, the long hours of backbreaking labor without insurance or OSHA regulation, and the lack of medical care or sanitation.

It’s hard to imagine what this place must’ve been like when it was home to tens of thousands of people, when we see only the few remnants that are left.

One of the nicest houses we found was located a good distance from the mill that was the hub of Bodie’s economic activity. It was huge, even larger than the mill overseer’s mansion, and crafted to a much higher standard. I’d love to know the story of whoever lived there.

Bodie had its own prison–necessary given the proximity to extremely valuable resources, the general criminal proclivities of many of its inhabitants, and the tendency of hard manual labor at high altitude to produce psychosis.

It also had a rather large cemetery, which included a special wing just for infants. Infant mortality in Bodie was frighteningly high, with cholera one of the leading causes of death.

The Victorians knew rather a lot about steam technology but rather less about medicine. All the buildings had outhouses; there was no sewer system. Outhouses were built near houses, and higher areas were more desirable for houses. Water came from wells, which were easier to dig in low areas. So a common pattern you see over and over throughout Bodie is outhouses located just up the hill from a well.

We arrived in Bodie late in the afternoon and soon had to make our exit. I asked one of the park rangers where the closest town was. She said we could go back out the way we came, which would take us to a town about an hour away, or we could continue through the town and go down the other side of the mountain to get to Aurora.

We opted for the latter. It turns out that either I radically misheard her, or she was playing a trick on us. Aurora, you see, is a ghost town in Nevada, even more inhospitable and inaccessible than Bodie.

We got to the base of the mountain and discovered we could go no further. The Adventure Van simply wasn’t up to what passed for a road. So we camped for the night at the base of the hill, near a sign that warned us not to travel any farther.

The next day, we drove back up the mountain to Bodie, which will be the subject of the next chapter.

Two Chaosbunnies in the Desert: Disaster in Black Rock Desert and Reconnecting with my Roots

Part 1 of this saga is here. Part 7 of this saga is here.
Part 2 of this saga is here. Part 8 of this saga is here.
Part 3 of this saga is here. Part 9 of this saga is here.
Part 4 of this saga is here. Part 10 of this saga is here.
Part 5 of this saga is here. Part 11 of this saga is here.
Part 6 of this saga is here. Part 12 of this saga is here.

In ther North American continent is a state called Nevada. In that state is a desert. This desert has the rather ominous name of Black Rock Desert, and it’s noteworthy for two things: rich hippies who get together once a year to have sex, do drugs, and build implausible things; and for being one of the most inhospitable places North America has to offer. The latter fact may bear some relationship to the former, as it is, I gather, only sex and drugs that make the place bearable.

In the 1800s, people came to this place in search of riches. Most of them found only pain. Some of them found lead, and presumably also pain.

In my various attempts to research ghost towns online, I came across a reference to Leadville, an abandoned mining town high in the mountains in Black Rock Desert, not too far from Gerlach. Google Earth showed the place quite plainly, and it seemed interesting, so with considerable optimism we set off two chaosbunnies in a 1992 Ford van.

Black Rock Desert is, as it turns out, no place for two chaosbunnies in a 1992 Ford van.

I told Siri to navigate us to the ruins, having given up on Google Maps, which had plainly shown it knows fuckall about turn-of-the-century mining roads. We headed down a long, straight paved road into the desert, me driving, Bunny drinking tea.

“Turn here,” Siri said. There was a conspicuous lack of place to turn–nothing but straight road and fence. I turned around.

“Turn here,” Siri said. The road onto which we were supposed to turn continued in its stubborn failure to exist.

“Turn here,” Siri insisted.

“Maybe Siri doesn’t know where we are,” Bunny suggested.

I kept going. Eventually, after quite a lot of faffing, we discovered the road Siri expected us to turn on, about half a mile from where Siri thought it was.

I say “road.” Of course, I jest. The thing we ended up turning onto was less road than two narrow rutted tracks through desert wasteland. Still, we’d managed to take the Adventure Van into some unlikely places before, so off we went.

And went. And went. And went. The road trail rutted track was narrow enough and rough enough that we were forced to move at about five miles an hour or else risk breaking an axle, and the remains of Leadville was some considerable distance into high desert. We drive along for an hour or two, and started heading up, the road trail rutted track hugging the edge of a mountain that rose abruptly from the desert floor.

We didn’t realize we were playing a game with the desert–a game the desert was determined to win.

We continued climbing, up and up, until we just…didn’t any more.

The van didn’t break down, precisely. The engine kept revving, but the van simply stopped moving. The tires didn’t spin, the van just…stopped. Even in low gear, the engine turned but the wheels didn’t.

I shut off the engine to keep from burning up the transmission, which would have left us well and truly buggered. The road kept getting steeper ahead of us, leaving the inescapable conclusion that we were not going to be visiting Leadville.

We both got out, Bunny looking perhaps a bit more grumpy than I.

From our vantage point, we could see the “road” we’d driven in on. I say “road” in scare quotes because, while it was much more a road than the one leading to Susanville, it still wasn’t what any reasonable person would describe as a proper road at all, though there certainly was quite a lot of it.

That left us with the not inconsiderable task of getting back down. You know that scene near the beginning of the movie Serenity, where the spaceship Serentiy is making reentry and part of the heat shield falls off, and Mal says “just get us on the ground” and Wash responds with “That part’ll happen pretty definitely”? It was a bit like that. I knew we could get the van off the mountain; I just hoped we could do it without arriving in disassociated condition.

My first thought was to put the van in reverse and back down the mountain. I knew turning around was a non-starter, what with the narrowness of the road and the steep cliff on the side and all, but, thought I, that’s why they invented reverse, right?

The desert had other ideas.

The ground was soft and the incline was steep and we were carrying luggage on a rack sticking out the back of the van, and these things all conspired to cause the back of the van to dig into the ground as soon as I tried backing it up.

So with forward, backward, and turning around all off the table as options, that left little choice save “pray for a miracle,” “learn to fly,” “unload all of our gear from the van, take the luggage rack off the back, and try again,” and “wait out here to die.”

Bunny and I aren’t particularly inclined toward miracles, we’d opted to take the van and leave the X-wing fighter at home, and Bunny seemed to have very strong feelings about not dying out in the middle of the desert, so with some resignation and a bit of grumbling, we started unloading the van. Half an hour later, we’d offloaded hundreds of pounds of stuff and carried it down the mountain a bit to where the road, such as it was, widened enough to, with a bit of maneuvering. we thought er could turn the van around, provided we didn’t have a morbid fear of death.

That just left backing the van down the road without tipping off the side and arriving at ground level in disassociated condition. I will save you the descriptions of the white-knuckle bits of that endeavor, as there are plenty of white-knuckle bits still to come in future installments of this story, and instead just say that by dint of much agony and a few close brushes with an untimely demise, we were able to get the Adventure Van back down off the mountain, loaded up once more with gear, and pointed in more or less the right direction, whereupon we left the desert the same way we came in: slowly, and with great concern over the possibility of a broken axle.

Back on the road again, we beat a retreat from the desert. As we left the boundaries of Black Rock Desert, I squinted off into the distance. “Is that water?” I said. Bunny made a skeptical noise. I stopped the van and got out to look. It looked a bit like water, maybe, but it seemed…I don’t know, dryer somehow.

It was, as it turns out, salt, not water. There is collectively not enough water in this picture to drown a gnat.

Final score: Black Rock Desert 1, chaosbunnies in an ancient Ford van 0.

We set off down the road, wallowing in the misery of our defeat and drinking tea. As the sun set, we made camp on the side of the road, still wallowing in the misery of our defeat. Bunny made pasta to go with our wallowing, and we resolved to make it to Bodie, the next (and last) ghost town on our itinerary, the following day.

The following morning, we were up bright and early before noon, and headed off toward California. The day was clear, and the promise of success loomed in–

“Hey, what’s that?” I said.

“Looks like a billboard, maybe?” Bunny said.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “Is that–?”

I pulled over. It was.

For those of you born after the advent of the Internet and broadband, there was once a thing called a “drive in.” Imagine a movie theater–no, not like that, a theater with only one screen. Outside. With a big parking lot in front of it. You would drive your car there and sit in it while you watched the movie. A little speaker about the same size and quality of a fast-food drive-through speaker was mounted at each parking space, but we people didn’t care because you didn’t go to a drive-in to watch the movie, you went to a drive-in to make out and/or have sex in the back of the car while a movie played somewhere in your general vicinity.

Changing demographics have not been kind to the drive-in industry.

We got out and poked around a bit. When this drive-in was abandoned, it happened all at once, it seemed.

Drive-ins had a small shack where the projection equipment was housed, and where the employees made popcorn. Before the movie started out, people in silly hats would come to your car and ask if you wanted popcorn. Then they’d run to the projection shack, make your popcorn, take it out to you, and let you get on with having sex.

We picked our way across a a field littered with broken glass and bits of rebar and electrical cable to the projection shack, which was an absolute catastrophe.

In a previous life, I was once a movie theater projectionist (at a regular theater, not a drive-in). To be fair, the projection booth I worked in wasn’t really a whole lot more tidy or organized than this.

I felt weirdly nostalgic, picking through the rubble of the projection booth. There was a fine layer of dust over everything, so it didn’t look like anyone visited frequently. Not even the local greasers with their pompadours and their muscle cars seem like they can be arsed to come out here all that often.

The concession stand was separated from the projection booth by a wall that ran down the length of the projection shack, without a door through it; the projection booth had its own door, and you couldn’t go from the concession stand to the projection booth. This seems to be typical from what I remember of my movie theater days. The projectionist occupies the most lofty stratum of the theater employee hierarchy, and the booth is his castle; riffraff like ticket sellers and concession workers aren’t permitted in his domain.

There was one lonely piece of graffiti in the concession stand, scrawled without any genuine effort at artistic merit on what was left of the popcorn machine. Honestly, the neighborhood truants, delinquents, and hoodlums really seemed to be phoning it in.

We made our way back to the van and headed off toward Bodie, which would prove to be the shining jewel of the trip. I have much to say about Bodie, and many many pictures. Those will wait for the next installment.

Two Chaosbunnies in the Desert: Creepy Motel

Part 1 of this saga is here. Part 7 of this saga is here.
Part 2 of this saga is here. Part 8 of this saga is here.
Part 3 of this saga is here. Part 9 of this saga is here.
Part 4 of this saga is here. Part 10 of this saga is here.
Part 5 of this saga is here. Part 11 of this saga is here.
Part 6 of this saga is here. Part 12 of this saga is here.

“Hey! Pull over!” Bunny said.

We were in the third–or was it the fourth?–day of the Faffing: wandering around more or less aimlessly, not finding any genuine ghost towns but still having great success photographing the many and varied ruins that dot the Pacific Northwest like acne on a geeky kid’s the day before the high school yearbook photo.

We were driving along a long, boring stretch of road in–god, I can’t even remember what state we were in. Possibly Oregon. Or maybe California. Weeks on the road will do that to you.

“Hey! Pull over!” My ears pricked up. Maxine had become quite adept by this point at spotting interesting things from the road, and she rarely disappointed.

We pulled into an utterly deserted parking lot, gravel crunching under the wheels of the Adventure Van. The sign said Juniper Lodge Motel and Restaurant. The creepiness of the surroundings said photographic gold mine.

We hopped out (get it? Hopped out?) and cautiously poked around. The first thing Bunny found was a portable toilet of the kind you usually see in the backs of campers and RVs, that looked a bit like someone had been cooking meth or something else equally unpleasant in it. I won’t disturb you with a photo, because I didn’t take one (if I had, it would be exactly the sort of thing I might like to share, so consider yourselves lucky, O gentle readers).

The Juniper Lodge Motel had been built as three long, low buildings on three sides of a square, with the road making the fourth side. I’m guessing the gas station used to be in the middle, perhaps, though it seems that would be a rather unpleasant arrangement for one who was wishing to sleep while all night long, people pulled in to get gas.

We cautiously entered the first building, wary of collapsing ceilings, snakes, and drug-crazed gangsters, all of which seemed like they might be a distinct possibility. All we found were ruins.

The bar and restaurant–at least I’m assuming that’s what this was–looked like something straight out of a nightmare horror movie, perhaps a movie called Freddy Krueger Visits the 1977 Guide to Interior Design Bar of the Year or something. That orange! Those beams! That fake wood paneling!

Someone had been there before us, which showed that fears of drug-crazed, machete-wielding gang members perhaps weren’t so far off base as all that.

The rooms were spacious, once upon a time, even if perhaps I might not have chosen that particular texture for the fake wall paneling, if it had been up to me.

The building to the right as you face the motel from the road, where the office once was, had reached a quite spectacular level of decay, one that made us fear for our safety dare we even to venture within. Much of the floor was gone, revealing that the building wasn’t precisely built on what one would call a “foundation” in any traditional sense of the word.

Photos taken, we set off again. We had, at this point, a new Plan. It was a Plan ambitious in its audacity, that would take us into Black Rock Desert questing after a…well, that will have to wait until next time.

Two Chaosbunnies in the desert: Faffing

Part 1 of this saga is here. Part 7 of this saga is here.
Part 2 of this saga is here. Part 8 of this saga is here.
Part 3 of this saga is here. Part 9 of this saga is here.
Part 4 of this saga is here. Part 10 of this saga is here.
Part 5 of this saga is here. Part 11 of this saga is here.
Part 6 of this saga is here. Part 12 of this saga is here.

Fresh from the spectacular triumph that was Susanville, the semi-mythical old mining town on the end of an ancient and long-derelict road that nobody save Apple knows about (and boy, would I love to know how Apple added it to their maps!), we spent the next couple of days in a kind of Ghost Town Limbo. We had entered that period in our adventure I have come to think of as The Faffing.

It is a fact known to anyone familiar with the Great Northwest that the ruins of nineteenth-century boom town lie in scattered disarray across the countryside like clothing at a drug-fueled Roman orgy. Once you get into the desert of the Great Northwest, it’s difficult to swing a cat without hitting the remains of some old logging or mining building from the 1800s.

That is, in fact, exactly the point of our journey. Other countries, possessed of a less exuberant excess of rolling countryside that nobody much wants, or perhaps gifted with a more pragmatic approach to resource allocation, don’t have long-abandoned towns that just kinda sit around for a century and a half because nobody can be arsed to do anything about them.

And even in places where people do want to do things with the land, there’s just so damn much of it that if there happens to be an old tumbled-down log cabin or a gold processing building building of some sort, nine times out of ten it’s easier to work around it than to move it. So it stays there, quietly being Somebody Else’s Problem.

It’s this sort of neglectful attitude toward the dwellings of times gone that drew Bunny to the tour, as her native land of the United Kingdom of Britainlandia is, being on an island, much more conscious of making use of every square meter or hectare or whatever the hell unit of measure they use all the way over there.

So during The Faffing, we saw, and photographed, a great many tumbled-down buildings standing silent testimony to times long gone, though we were rather less successful in finding any real ghost towns. What ghost towns there are are often poorly marked, and the ones that are well-marked, we discovered, seem to be conspicuous in their existential absence when one goes to the appointed spot.

The Faffing was not a time of no productivity, but it certainly didn’t compare to the discovery of what was left of Susanville. Still, we did discover some pretty neat stuff as we wandered about aimlessly in the Adventure Van.

Like this abandoned building and rickety, half-collapsed footbridge over a surprisingly deep and treacherous creek, spotted by Bunny’s eagle eye as we drove down some county road or other.

Or this house, which looks like it ought to feature quite prominently in an episode of Scooby Doo. It was on the outskirts of some quiet little town in Oregon whose name I’ve already forgotten, but man, if I were a kid living in this town, this place would likely haunt my nightmares.

There are tons of old farm buildings lying in ruins all about the Pacific Northwest, some of which look like they might collapse into dust if some poor unsuspecting sod the next county over sneezes too vigorously.

We struck gold with this find, the remnants of an old one-room school building a couple miles outside the semi-but-not-really ghost town of Shaniko, Oregon. Bunny, as per usual, spotted it and said “Hey, pull over!”

The schoolhouse looks a lot Little House on the Prairie and a lot more “Outtake from an episode of Dexter” these days, which adds, I think, to the ambiance. It’s a cool old building, for sure.

We took a random detour from looking for old ghost towns when we spotted a sign pointing to a lava flow in an ancient forest, because, you know, chaosbunnies. The detour took us a lot farther out of our way than the sign suggested, but after quite a lot of travel, we did indeed eventually come to the ancient lava flow.

Oregon’s terrain has been shaped by catastrophic geology, much of it volcanic. Enormous seas of lava once covered quite large expanses of it, wiping out everything around them and leaving behind terrain that, millennia later, still looks kind of like a lunar landscape.

Where these huge flows of lava encountered forests, the lava encased the trees in solid rock. The trees died and disappeared, leaving these formations as their only remains.

We took quite a few pictures, but as this was only incidental to our real purpose (if indeed chaosbunnies can be said to have a “purpose,” as opposed to a mere intention) we did not linger long, and were soon off.

We found some more ruins, this time just outside yet another town whose name I’ve already forgotten but that seemed to be a regional freight transportation hub, judging by the astonishing number of large trucks that formed an unending stream of traffic through the town.

It really is quite astonishing just how many of these ruins lie about, being ruins. We stopped frequently to take pictures of yet another ancient relic of centuries gone by, sometimes to the consternation of state police who wanted to make sure that we hadn’t abandoned the van and headed off through the countryside with cameras and bunny ears and tea because we were, you know, like, in trouble or anything.

Just what set of unfortunate circumstances might force someone to abandon a van armed only with these three aforementioned things is not entirely clear to your humble scribe. Still, it is gratifying to know that people were looking out for us.

We still had some interesting random discoveries, and a few moments of stark terror, closing inexorably in on us, which I shall detail in later episodes of this chronicle.

I have a small stuffed hedgehog that accompanies me almost everywhere I go. Her name is Lilith. Those of you who saw us on the European book tour likely recognize her. Lilith rode on the Adventure Van’s dashboard during The Faffing, and appeared quite unfazed by the whole experience.

Two Chaosbunnies in the desert: Susanville, or, Siri knows better than Google

Part 1 of this saga is here. Part 7 of this saga is here.
Part 2 of this saga is here. Part 8 of this saga is here.
Part 3 of this saga is here. Part 9 of this saga is here.
Part 4 of this saga is here. Part 10 of this saga is here.
Part 5 of this saga is here. Part 11 of this saga is here.
Part 6 of this saga is here. Part 12 of this saga is here.

The next stop on our whirlwind tour of ghost towns, cunningly planned through extensive and repetitive Googling of “ghost towns west coast,” was Susanville.

It would prove an elusive target. Susanville was established in 1864 when some bloke found a big lump of gold in a remote corner of Oregon, and a bunch of other blokes came flocking to the spot hoping to find more lumps of gold. Times being what they were, it wasn’t considered a proper town because it didn’t have its own post office, so in 1901 a bunch of miners, ahem, stole the post office from a neighboring mining town, making Susanville an improper town. Or so the story goes. It is not clear to your humble scribe how one steals a post office, nor whether the legitimacy conferred by a post office remains if the post office is stolen. Such matters are not for me to understand.

I used Siri to plot us a route to Susanville, and we were off. The trip started promisingly enough when we found a turnoff precisely where Apple Maps said it would be, with a much-faded sign suggesting we were on the right track.

Alas, things soon became complicated. I navigated the Adventure Van for quite a long while on a narrow single-lane dirt, steadily moving farther and farther from civilization, until Siri told me to take a left turn onto a road that most completely and utterly did not exist. There was not the slightest sign that a left turn had ever existed in that spot, nor that one is ever likely to exist any time between now and when the stars burn out.

Bunny and I scratched our heads. “Let’s keep going,” she said. “Maybe GPS isn’t sure where we are. We’ll look for a left turn.”

We kept going. A left turn failed to appear. After we had traveled a considerable number of miles, with Siri telling us “make a U-turn, make a U-turn” over and over until madness threatened, I got the idea to try Google Maps.

This is not, I would like to point out, ordinarily such an insane idea. Google often knows better than Siri the ways of human navigation. In this case, however, Google was worse than useless. Siri showed us the road we were on, if I may be forgiven the literary excess of use of the word “road;” Google showed nothing but an endless expanse of featureless green. Where Siri believed there to be an exuberance of roads, including the one we could not find. Google showed nary a trace of human existence at all.

We turned around. “Turn right,” Siri said. Again, the road onto which we were supposed to turn persisted in its obstinate failure to exist.

“Maybe there used to be a road here,” I said. Bunny looked doubtful.

I stopped the van. “Siri says there’s a road right here,” I said. “Let’s get out and walk. Maybe we’ll find it.” Bunny still looked doubtful.

We walked for a while. “Siri says the road is right here,” I said. “Let’s just stay on the road according to GPS and see what happens.” Bunny looked very doubtful.

Still, the one thing you can count on if you’re a chaosbunny is there will be chaos. We set out through the field, watching the phone closely to keep the little blue dot centered on the road Siri insisted was there and reality insisted just as passionately was not.

When we’d walked for ten or fifteen minutes, Bunny pointed ahead. “I think this might be a road after all,” she said. “Look!”

Sure enough, there was a slight depression that was just regular enough to make it seem that, if you squinted hard enough and perhaps dropped acid, might seem it was once a road.

With a new surge in confidence, we kept walking. After another twenty or thirty minutes or so, and an inconvenient but fortunately narrow stream we were forced to jump across, we found… a road. A real, genuine, unmistakeable, honest-to-God road, exactly where Siri told us it would be.

We trotted along the road and rounded a large outcropping of rock, and then, there in front of us…a decaying house, tucked in the shadow of tall trees, glorious in its ruin. We had begun to believe it no longer existed, so as you can imagine, gentle reader, that moment when we rounded that corner made our hearts sing with joy.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Susanville, Oregon.

We poked around the ruined buildings for a while, taking pictures like mad and giggling like…well, like we were mad.

The largest house we found maintains silent watch over what used to be an old gold stamping mill, there on the other side of the river. Little remains of the mill but a heap of lumber.

I’d love to know what life was like out here, back when people came to this place in search of wealth. The few remaining houses are quite large, and were probably surprisingly comfortable given the remote inhospitality of the place.

Some of the remaining structures look a bit creaky. I was reasonably sure they probably wouldn’t collapse on us without warning, entombing us in a pile of old lumber and avarice.

When tea-time came around, Bunny sat down on an ancient and massive tree stump and…well, looked very English.

Tea properly handled, we resumed our explorations. I have no idea what this is, but it’s quite lovely.

We forded the river to examine the ruins of the stamping mill more closely. At first, I thought it was a lumber mill, but Google says no, this is where gold ore was brought to be crushed and processed. Of course, Google also said there was no road out here, so what does Google know?

The view back to the largest house from the mill is quite beautiful. I don’t imagine life here was easy, but it certainly did offer scenic natural beauty in spades.

In fact, it’s so lovely I’m a little surprised nobody lives out here now.

Susanville was amazing, and it was with heavy hearts we bid farewell to it and started the long hike back to the Adventure Van.

As fantastic as Susanville was, still more wonders waited in our future, though we had to pass through stark terror to get there. That story will come in time.

2015: The Year in Review; or, Bugger Off and Good Riddance

Here we are, nearly two weeks into 2016, a land of promise filled with mistakes yet to be made and nascent errors still unhatched. It is customary, as the calendar ticks over from one arbitrary designation to the next, to look back upon the road traveled and ask questions like “what the hell was that?” and “how in the name of God did I get here?”

In the spirit of that tradition, allow me to take a moment to offer a retrospective of 2015, a year that can well and truly fuck right off.

To be fair, it wasn’t all bad. Indeed, many parts of the year, taken on their own, were quite joyful. To help separate the good from the bad, I will be using a thumbs up icon for the bits I liked and a red X for the bits I didn’t, because I’m told clarity in communication is a virtue.

In matters such as this, it is difficult for any of us not to be an unreliable narrator. We are, after all, only imperfectly aware of how others see the world, and even of how others perceive the events in which we take part. That said, I will endeavor to be as objective as I can about the massive suck that made up an unfortunately disproportionate part of the year now past, and to polish what nuggets of win I can find amid the rubble.


Mechanical Difficulties
The year started with replacing the engine in Zaiah’s car, a four thousand dollar expense necessitated when Jiffy Lube installed a defective oil filter and then refused responsibility for the error, causing catastrophic destruction of the engine. Always a nice way to start the year. Lesson learned: Jiffy Lube is not a place where one should do business. This turned out to be a theme; hang onto the thought, I’ll get back to it.

In the meantime…


Seclusion and Murder
2015 (woe be unto it) started on a good note. I spent some time in the same remote wilderness cabin where we wrote More Than Two. It’s a lovely place, far from…everything, really. It’s a lovely place with a lovely (if murderous) cat and a great way to spend the first days of a new year filled with promise and the hope of a bright new future. And the murder of small furry animals by an adorable feline, but you have to take the bad with the good, or so they say.


Carelessness of the heart
I spoke at a poly conference, which was a lot of fun save for the fact that I met a delightful woman whose interest, initially quite mutual, I feel I handled poorly. I was not appropriately cautious and became aware of significant incompatibilities too late to avoid hurting both of us unnecessarily.

So, yeah, lesson learned. Mindfulness at all times in all interactions with other people? It’s a thing I need to do.

This was also when I began to fully grasp the weird–and often dangerous–ways that the one-sided intimacy inherent in being a writer and speaker who offers up bits of one’s inner life for public consumption can distort human interactions, especially with new acquaintances. Another lesson learned: Flirting with fans is a dangerous game, and is a risk I’m no longer willing to take on myself or expose others to.


Bionic penises
The next few months of 2015 were relatively calm and reasonably normal, at least for those values of “normal” as one might expect. Hmm. Normal. There’s a word I use only cautiously, and perhaps should consider striking from my vocabulary altogether, except insofar as it has a negation in front of it…but I digress.

The first third of the year was all about bionic cock. I got serious about launching a business to investigate producing the dildo that provides sensory feedback to the wearer. I enrolled in a business accelerator competition that brought us together with investors and mentors and taught both of us how to say “penis” in a room full of people without blushing–a valuable business skill, it must be said, if one’s aim is to develop a bionic penis.

Penis, penis, penis. See? Hardly a twitch.

It turns out that business accelerators are a lot of work. We did market research about penises. We built business plans around penises, and had our penis business plans examined, dissected, critiqued, and torn into teeny tiny shreds by a procession of investors and business leaders. We built value chains focused on penises. We constructed penis value propositions for penis market segments of folks who want to know what having a penis feels like. I’ve run my own business since about 2001 and I learned more about how to run a business between February and May of last year than in the ten years before.


Sick kitties
My cat Kyla has never been terribly healthy. Shortly after she adopted me and declared me hers, when she was still a very young kitten, she got a respiratory infection that nearly killed her. I spent long nights awake with her, holding her and rubbing her chest, and she eventually recovered.

While I was away in Canadia-land dodging Kurgan raiders, she got sick again and very nearly died.

Well, technically speaking, she did die. Twice. She stopped breathing, and Zaiah brought her back with kitty CPR.

She’s a fighter, Kyla is, and she really, really likes being alive. Kinda like I do. She got through it with minor damage to her balance that seems to be permanent, but she did bounce back. So I suppose on the whole that’s good, or at least better than the alternative, but it’s bad it happened.


Indiana Jones Goes to a Swinger’s Conference
2015 was the year I started getting more speaking conventions than we could hope to say yes to. One of those invitations was a swinger’s convention in Canada that wanted us to talk about ways to do non-monogamy beyond swinging.

Swingers have a problem. Since at least WWII, swinging has been the go-to style of non-monogamy for people outside the leather scene. But now it’s getting harder and harder for swing clubs to find new members, what with Millennials growing up witht he idea that polyamory and other styles of non-monogamy are just options among the many out there and TV shows about polyamory and all. You don’t need the structure and safety of a swinger’s group when non-monogamy just isn’t that big a deal.

So we said yes, hopped into a rented car, and were on our way.

We were driving along the Crowsnest Highway (insert appropriate Scottish joke about taking the crow road here) when from out the window of the car I spied with my little eye something beginning with “ooh, look, pull over, that looks like the ruins of an old mine shaft up there!”

Eve, familiar in the years we’ve been together with my many and varied eccentricities and often given to indulging me, pulled over. We looked at the mine entrance, a few hundred feet up the side of a slope.

“Think we can get up there?” I said.

“Sure,” she said.

So we started the scramble up. We climbed up an embankment, past a row of trees, up over another embankment, and..whoa. Serious Indiana Jones moment.

The detour cost us several hours, dirt all over our clothes, and more than a fair bit of hard physical labor, but man, was it worth it.


Have a nice trip!
I have long been something of a straight arrow when it comes to the many pleasures of chemical mind alteration.

I know, I know, hard to believe, what with me being an Internet sex gargoyle and all, but until I was in my late 40s I never once experimented with any chemical alterant beyond alcohol. I didn’t try any recreational drugs at all until I was 46, when I experimented with hallucinogenic mushrooms–an altogether positive experience, and one I’ve been thinking about writing about for a while. I didn’t even drink ’til fairly late in the game.

We arrived at the swinger event considerably dustier than we had been, and were offered ecstasy by a person who apparently quite likes the experience of swinging while on E.

Now, as I mentioned, I’ve not dabbled far into the ocean of recreational biochemistry, and in fact have barely gone so far as to build sand castles on the beach of recreational chemistry, the waters being not to my liking and even the sand being more coarse and gritty than is perhaps entirely pleasant, and the sun and sounds of the gulls are…where was I going with this metaphor? Anyway, I’ve never felt the siren song of pharmacologicals, but I will admit to a certain level of curiosity about ecstasy. So we accepted his offer.

Ecstasy is not an easy molecule to synthesize by any measure. It’s a complex, fiddly, two-day process that involves a lot of extremely close monitoring and very careful mucking about, and one of the waste products of a more popular synthesis pathway is elemental mercury. All of which means that what’s often claimed to be ecstasy in the dystopian nightmare that is the market for street drugs is anything but.

I’m still not 100% sure what it was we took. Google suggests it was methamphetamine, based on its color, consistency, and the absolutely miserable night we had.


Ten carbons, fifteen hydrogens, one nitrogen, all the rage and hate of Lucifer after the Fall

I want to impress upon you, Gentle Readers, exactly what “miserable night” means. To do this properly, I will wander off for a moment into a story about a bucket of chicken. When I had first met my former wife, she and I were kinda sorta in what kids today might call a “quad” with two close friends of mine, and we spent many a night doing things to make a bishop blush, often with a video camera. We got some bad chicken at a KFC one evening–salmonella, I believe the diagnosis was. My friend’s girlfriend and I spent about three continuous days on the bed together barfing our guts out more or less nonstop. It was a waterbed, see, so whenever she would start throwing up, the waves in the waterbed would start shaking me, and then I would start barfing too, and that would set her off, and…you get the idea.

I describe this because I can now say it was the second most miserable time of my life.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, not every moment of the experience was bad. The first four hours were great, seeing as how we both had turbocharged libidos and couldn’t get enough raw animal sex, and raw animal sex is not something that I’m normally on distant terms with–Internet sex gargoyle, remember?

But after that…

The closest I can come to describing what the rest of the night was like is I had the visceral experience that there was something in my body that hated me and wanted to hurt me. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t stop moving…I don’t often use the word “evil,” and when I do, it’s not usually about organic molecules, but meth is an evil, evil molecule. I can not comprehend why any human being would knowingly take that stuff in full awareness of the ride it was going to give them. Dante’s most vivid descriptions of Hell are a walk across a breezy tropical island compared to what meth feels like, assuming that is in fact what it was. Without hyperbole, I can state with confidence that I would rather get hit by a bus than experience anything like that ever again.

One star. Do not want. Should you, Gentle Reader, ever want to go down this road, learn from my example. Do not trod this path without a testing kit, which if you’re in the US you can find here and if you’re in Canada you can find here. Wish I’d’ve known about that sooner.

The weeks following the swinger convention were a whirlwind of chaos, the kind of chaos only two chaosbunnies in the same place can create.

My sweetie Maxine came into town, and we spent weeks traveling the deserts of the Pacific coast photographing ghost towns. Mining towns, railroad towns, logging towns, you name it, we visited it–a journey I’m still in the process of journaling.

Maxine and I are both chaosbunnies, so the two of us together is pure concentrated chaos. Into any such maelstrom good and bad must go. I will touch only on the hilights here, some of which I have not yet documented.


Camping in the Wilderness
This is, as it turns out, something Bunny has become quite adroit at, with a set of mad camping skills that’s little short of awe-inspiring. Seriously, when the Big One hits and civilization collapses, I hope I happen to be on the same side of the pond as she is. Build a campfire in the pouring rain, armed with nothing but a flint and a soggy roll of toilet paper? She’s the one to do it.

We had a fantastic time, even if there was rather less sex than perhaps there could, or should, have been. (Note to self: next time, plan a less ambitious schedule and leave more time for the horizontal mambo.) It was fantastic to spend some quality time with her in the deep desert.


Break a rib!
It is telling, I think, that when you make a list of all the things that went wrong during the year, you keep forgetting “oh, yeah, I broke a rib.”

If I could go back in time and give information to the younger me, I would definitely tell myself “don’t try to cross that stream on that slippery fallen log.” Well, first I would tell myself the Powerball numbers, but after that, I would definitely tell myself the thing about the log. Well, okay, the Powerball numbers, the stock price for AMZN throughout the second half of the year, and then the thing about the log.

But I lack access to a time machine, and so the younger me said “hey, look, a log across a stream! That seems a reasonable thing to walk across!”

Fast forward a few seconds and I was tumbling into ice-cold snow runoff, pausing just long enough on the way down to whack my side against the log.


The desert defeats us
One of the stops on our tour was an old lead mine, closed in the mid-1800s and since left alone, high atop a mountain in the middle of Black Rock Desert.

Or rather, one of the stops on our tour was supposed to be an old lead mine, closed in the mid-1800s.

It took us rather a long time just to find the old road–little more than a narrow, rutted dirt track, really–branching off the paved road in the direction of the mountain. It took us a couple of hours to crawl along that road, such as it was, to the base of the mountain. It took us another hour to climb halfway up it, then two minutes to realize that the grade had become so steep that the van simply would not move, even in low gear–and, for that matter, the wheels wouldn’t spin either. Another minute after that convinced me that any additional tilting at that particular windmill would only destroy the transmission, which was already slipping.

From there, it took five minutes to realize that turning around was an absolute impossibility, five minutes to realize that the van could not back down the grade as heavily loaded as it was without the back bumper digging into the earth, twenty-five minutes to unload everything onto the side of the dirt track, half an hour to back cautiously down to the point where a wide spot afforded opportunity to turn around with only a moderate chance of tumbling off the edge of a cliff, and half an hour to load everything back into the van again.


Black Rock desert. That thin dark line in the lower left is the “road” we came in on.

I still haven’t fixed the damage to the van’s transmission. The shop says the transmission needs to be replaced. So far, they haven’t been able to come up with an estimate. I’m not optimistic.


Bored and Terrified…at the Same Time
Our misadventure in Black Rock Desert was merely the appetizer for the main course of mechanical suck–the price, I suppose, of adventuring in a 23-year-old camper van.

We set out on the last leg of our trip straight over a mountain that Siri, in all her passive aggressive navigational glory, didn’t think to send us around. That particular part of the adventure will most likely get a blog post all its own, filled as it was with ominous signs and squadrons of US Marines, but the hilight, which I will briefly mention here, was definitely the trip down the far side, during which with a thump and a cloud of foul-smelling smoke the van’s brakes failed.

We were, at the time, in a remote area unserved by cellular signal–indeed, it’s quite likely that most of the natives were entirely unfamiliar with any communications technology more advanced than the telegraph, or perhaps smoke signals–and 70 miles from the nearest town.

Therefore, with no other options availing themselves, we spent almost the entire night on a white-knuckle journey across seventy miles of narrow and windy mountain roads in first gear at about ten miles an hour with no brakes, relying on engine braking to manage our speed.

I did not, prior to that night, realize it was possible to be both utterly terrified and completely bored at the same time.

The next day, we found a Les Schwab service center. I’d never heard of Les Schwab before I moved to Oregon, but Zaiah swears by them. “Great customer service!” she told me. “Awesome warranty!” she told me. I was skeptical, but when I bought the van I had the brakes serviced at a Les Schwab.

It took them an hour just to work up an estimate–never a good sign when it comes to brakes. They gave me a number. I choked. “Well, we need to replace everything in the front,” they said. “…” I said.

“We looked you up in the computer. You still have a thousand miles left on your warranty,” they said. “It will all be no charge.”

“…!!” I said.

Sometimes, fortune favors the foolhardy.


Uterine Thunderdome
June decided to continue the theme of random bodily injury started with the rib thing in May, because why mess with what works, amirite? And so it came to pass that I ended up with weird pain that left my doctor scratching his head and muttering about the possibility of a kidney tumor, that got worse and worse until eventually I ended up in a CT scanner shot full of contrast that made my eyes feel like they were melting.

The CT scan was illuminating, both as to the nature of the problem (appendicitis) and to why it was tricky to figure out. Apparently, my internal geography is as unorthodox as my romantic life.

More distressing, perhaps, was finding out that such unusual innards are often the result of a situation whereby a person becomes pregnant with twins, one of which absorbs the other early in development in a kind of uterine Thunderdome–two fetuses enter, one fetus leaves.


I have no idea if Tina Turner was there or not. It was too dark to see.

But hey, there’s a silver lining. From now on, if anyone gets all up in my face, I can say “don’t fuck with me, man, I ate my twin!”


O Canada
Eve, in her ongoing attempt to make me more self-sufficient in the nutrient procurement department, has been encouraging me to learn the dark arts of cooking and baking, by whose secret alchemy ingredients are transmogrified into food.

As part of that ongoing effort, she had me decorate a cake for Canada Day. I must say, I think it turned out rather well.

A most excellent representation of the spirit of Canada, if I do say so myself.


The Big Book of Franklin Gets It Wrong
2015 is the year my memoir, The Game Changer, finally saw the light of day.

Writing it was rough. For years–decades, really–I’ve written about polyamory and kink and relationships, but I’ve never really told my story. I’ve talked a lot about the things I believe, but not very much about how I got there. The Game Changer was a new kind of writing–one that’s not very comfortable for me.

It also tells the story of things I’m not proud of. It’s about the mistakes I made and the people I hurt, because those are the experiences that led me where I am. In fact, while I was writing it, I called it The Big Book of Franklin Gets it Wrong.

The response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive, and it’s reached a lot more folks than I expected it to. I am deeply grateful for that, no matter how hard it was to write.


Dancin’ the Blues
One of the many things I’ve been working on this year is learning to blues dance.

I’ve always quite liked to dance–generally more gothy than bluesy, and without a partner–but partner dancing is new to me. Eve’s been teaching me, and it’s turned out to be rather a lot of fun.

In the fall, I went to Northwest Recess, which is rather like Burning Man only with fewer flamethrowers and a lot more dancing.

A whole lot of folks got together in the middle of nowhere, set up tents, and spent several days dancing without the distractions of civilization, like Internet, television, or potable water. And it was absolutely lovely. How come nobody ever told me how much fun blues dancing is?


More bionic penises
2015 was the Year of Travel and Presenting. Most of the presenting revolved around polyamory, but we took just enough time from talking about the whys and hows of multiple lovers to talk bionic cocks at Arse Electronika.


The second-generation prototype lacks the glowing lights, sadly

We were told we’d won the Golden Kleene Award for tech in sex, but weren’t able to pick it up as we had to depart for the airport immediately after our presentation to head to Europe. That right there ended up becoming the theme of the next five weeks.


Roads go ever ever on, over rock and under tree
The book tour. Ah, yes, the book tour.

What to say about it? The book tour was very, by which I mean parts of it were very good and parts of it were very bad but none of it was mediocre.

I started touring with The Game Changer a couple of weeks before the European leg with More Than Two. I also ended up in urgent care midway into the second week, diagnosed with bronchitis.


The bunny ears are mandatory. The bunny ears are always mandatory.

As for the European bits…

We miscalculated, we did. During last year’s book tour in Canada and the US, we lived in the back of the Adventure Van traveling from town to town talking about polyamory. We packed our European schedule with the same density of events, neglecting to consider that:

  1. We would be on foot or relying on public transit for most of the tour;
  2. We would be dragging all our luggage with us everywhere we went; and
  3. We would be dependent on the schedule of the trains for our schedule.

They say good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from poor judgment. If that’s true, we’re now so absolutely brimming with good judgment we should be on the Supreme Court and at least seventeen less supreme courts.

Meeting people was amazing. The folks we met on the trip were absolutely wonderful. And I don’t think I’ve ever been so utterly exhausted in my life. By midway through, we were hanging on by the skin of our teeth, putting one foot in front of the other, and all those other cliches that one resorts to when one is too damn tired to be able to think.


This is how most mornings started: double-fisting cups of tea.

And it was still unbelievably amazing.

One thing we never did get used to: no cats. Such a dearth of cats, in fact, that on no fewer than three occasions we were forced to seek company of the feline variety in various cat cafes across the European continent.

We spent our last night in Paris atop the Eiffel Tower, drinking champagne and looking out over the city. I got to cross “spin poi in front of the Eiffel Tower” off my bucket list.


I didn’t even know it was on my bucket list.

We flew home the day before the terrorist attacks in the city. When we hit the ground in San Francisco, we both had a bit of a freakout about it.


Oh, you wanted to breathe with those lungs?
On returning, finally, to Oregon, I visited my doctor to follow up on the bronchitis thing.

He did the poking and prodding doctors do, and then welcomed me to the wonderful world of adult-onset asthma, the result, apparently, of the pneumonia I had in Atlanta a few years back and the more recent spell of bronchitis.

If there were a god, I think he or she should have made us from something a bit more durable than meat. Just sayin’.


The last twist of the knife
2014’s last fuck-you was the destruction of Zaiah’s engine by the incompetent boobs at Jiffy Lube. Not to be outdone, 2015 had to get in its last little dig in the same spirit of giving, when the radiator in her car–the same one we’d only just put a new engine in–erupted in a cloud of steam.

Fortunately, this was a far less expensive fix. Still, they say it’s the thought that counts.

So that’s the way it was, the Year of Very. I still hold out some hope that 2016 will be a bit less very, though I have a feeling that this year will be a bit of a roller coaster as well. And I don’t even like roller coasters.