Archives for 2010

Aug 17 2010

A night of lightning

On Sunday night I was out photographing neon again, when an enormous set of thunderstorms rumbled through over the Rincon and Santa Catalina mountains. I grabbed my last picture (Mama Louisa’s Italian Restaurant on Craycroft), and headed home to get some photos.

I’ve been waiting all summer for a really good lightning storm to show up. The year-round residents promised me a light show like I’ve never seen before, if I would only stay through the monsoon season. This year has been a bit of a bust so far, but Sunday night made up for it. There were hundreds of lightning strikes visible from our neighborhood in a couple of hours.

I’ve never photographed lightning before, so I played around a little and shot several hundred images. (About 80 of them can be viewed on my Flickr site.) Conditions were perfect where I was standing: no rain, no wind, and a clear sky with great views to the storms.

My technique was fairly simple. To maximize my chances of catching a lightning bolt, I used the super-wide angle lens (Tamron 10-24 mm) set to 10 mm. This allowed me to capture a large swath of sky. I mounted the camera on the tripod, set the ISO to 100, and manually fixed the focus at infinity. Rather than choose a pre-set exposure, I let the camera choose but I dialed in three to four stops of underexposure to make the lightning bolts show up. I have no idea if this is similar to the technique used by professionals, since I just made it up, but it worked well.

The real trick of lightning photos seems to be patience. It’s basically a matter of aiming the tripod where you think the bolts are most prevalent, and pushing the shutter over and over again. If the storm cooperates, you can frame up a nice image in advance, using foreground objects to set the scene. But storms don’t cooperate with anyone, so you have to stick with it until that lucky confluence of preparation and timing occurs. My exposures ran about 5 seconds. If there was a strike in that time, I’d get it. But most of the time the lightning was obscured by clouds, which resulted in a well-lit sky but not a visible bolt.

If you try this, get ready to hit that Delete key a lot later. Most of the shots I took were duds. Don’t pause to edit on the camera — just keep shooting. If you stop to delete photos from the camera, you’ll miss that great lightning burst, guaranteed. This means a big memory card is also an asset, to store hundreds of photos.

This is the sort of storm that Eleanor and I were watching a few weeks ago when we were tent camping up in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. We were fortunate that storm never reached us. (We would have been much safer in the Airstream, thanks to the protective aluminum shell and the “skin effect“.) Watching the fury of these summer lightning bolts on Sunday, I was grateful that I was safely near home, and not in a tent. The monsoon may have been mild for Tucson most of this summer, but one night like this demonstrates just how fierce it can be — and what fun it can be if you happen to be standing in the right spot for a view.

Aug 14 2010

The Sonoran Hot Dog test

My friend Bill says that Tucson is famous for Sonoran Hot Dogs. And here I am, alone again in Tucson with a week left before I am reunited with my family, never having tasted one of these artery-clogging specialties. What’s a Temporary Bachelor Man to do?

Of course there’s only one response to that. On Saturday I recruited my neighbor Mike to be wingman as I crossed the threshold to this medically-cautioned treat, plunging headlong into a sea of mayo, mustard, and jalapeno sauce. We piled into the old Mercedes diesel and clattered our way across to 12th Street on Tucson’s south side, where the two undisputed champions of Sonora hot dogs can be found: El Guero Canelo, and BK Carne Asada & Hot Dogs.

El Guero Canelo’s name refers to the founder, “the blonde Mexican guy.” I have no idea what BK stands for, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the owner’s initials. Both of these restaurants have opened other locations in Tucson, but both keep their original 12th Street locations as well, almost directly across the street from each other. The hot dog business must be good.

BK was our first stop. An open-air restaurant, it features a tall, happy (and apparently suicidal) hot dog welcoming you to come and eat it. Perhaps this hot dog is smiling because it knows that real Sonoran dogs are smothered in ingredients. Nobody’s going to eat that naked thing. It’s almost perverted to think of a hot dog so undressed when you are expecting the rich, fat taste of one wrapped in bacon and buried beneath beans, onions (grilled and fresh), tomatoes, mayo, mustard, and jalapeno.

We decided that the BK dogs would be best with a “Mexican” Coke (meaning, in the original style green glass curved bottle that you hardly ever see in the USA anymore). A bottled soda tacks $1.75 onto your tab, but even still the meal of a Sonoran dog plus a Coke comes to less than $5.

The Sonoran dog, whether it comes from BK or El Guero Canelo, is a minor work of art. The sauces are decoratively zippered across the top, providing fair warning to those who attempt to eat them. As with the Double-Double with extra sauce at In’n’Out Burger, you WILL need a napkin. And possibly an angioplasty.

Being old guys, Mike and I both anticipated this glorious pig-out and ate lightly for the previous day. We were hoping to earn cholesterol credits (at least in our minds) that would offset the highly unbalanced (but delicious) meal of a hot dog wrapped in bacon and doused in mayonnaise. I think the only way we could have really earned these would be to have jogged all the way across Tucson, but being 104 degrees today, we weren’t even considering that.

The BK dog had a definite jalapeno bite to it. Three bites later, however, and my taste buds were so busy struggling with the unaccustomed “full fat” flavor that I stopped noticing the jalapeno. No doubt my tongue was also coated by then, protecting it from the sharpest of the spice.

Five or six bites later, it was gone. My brain said, “MORE!” even though these things are surprisingly filling. I was ready to call it a day after my first Sonoran dog, but Mike insisted on pressing onward. We had come all this way for a hot dog trial and we weren’t going to shy away from the challenge now. So we fired up the Mercedes again and drove all of 300 feet to El Guero Canelo for Round Two. (Exercise was definitely not part of the plan.)

Like the competition across the street, El Guero Canelo on 12th Street is an open-air place with a roof for shade. I like the extremely casual atmosphere of the place. It’s somewhere between a street vendor and sidewalk cafe, on the ambience scale. If you want a Sonoran dog, you can get one at dozens of locations in Tucson, but still plenty of people from all over Tucson come down to 12th Street to eat at one of these two restaurants.

For the second dog, I switched from Coke to Jarritos orange soda, and found there’s absolutely no impact on the dog-eating experience. A Sonoran dog will overcome anything.

I did like the El Guero Canelo touch of a roasted pepper on the side. But overall, I couldn’t decide whether I like BK or El Guero better.

They say we are hard-wired to love fats and sugars, as a survival instinct. If so, it will always be hard to resist the lure of a Sonoran dog and a sweet soda. Eat it, and not only do other tastes fade away, but soon you can’t even remember what was bothering you earlier. You float gently on a raft of lipids, and your biggest challenge in life seems to be chasing those baked beans that rolled away. It’s a bit of escapism in a bun.

I think that in a year or two I’ll have earned enough dietary credits to have another Sonoran dog. I wouldn’t recommend them as part of a regular diet, any more than I’d recommend the dreamy chocolate cake that Eleanor left in the freezer, but as a treat they are pretty special. It may well be, as Bill implied, that eating a Sonoran dog is an essential part of the Tucson experience. I may start recommending them to people who visit — or at least, those who don’t already have heart conditions.

Aug 11 2010

Tucson’s historic neon signs

While I’m in Arizona enjoying the summer monsoon season, one of my projects is go out at sunset and take pictures of signs …

I’m co-authoring a book with Carlos L., a local architecture enthusiast here in Tucson, about historical neon signs in Tucson. Tucson’s stock of historical buildings is vastly depleted due to years of careless re-development. Carlos runs a Yahoo group called “Vanishing Tucson” that tries to document places that are about to get torn down, and work with the community to save things when they can. Recently they were involved in the re-purposing of the massive handmade sculptures at Magic Carpet Golf. (Many of the sculptures have been saved and a few are now permanently installed elsewhere.)

We still have a good stock of historical signage in Tucson, but it is severely endangered. Most of the signs are neglected, dysfunctional, and non-conforming with current law. Once they come down, they can’t come back. And they can’t be fixed unless they come down! Catch 22. So activists in the city are working on a Historic Sign Amendment that will protect and grandfather those signs.

Just before sunset, when the desert heat is beginning to abate, we go out on photo safaris to find the signs and capture pictures of those that are lit. On weekends, we make daytime trips to the signs that are no longer lit (which, sadly, is most of them). Others are badly maintained and only partially lit, like the famous Tucson Inn sign pictured below. I drive the car and jump out to take pictures, while Carlos rides shotgun with his laptop and updates his database of signs with details about their current condition.

Before the Interstate, the main entrance to Tucson was a highway from Phoenix that became Tucson’s “Miracle Mile.” Strung along it were scores of motels, restaurants, and other businesses, lit up with signs and beckoning the hot desert traveler with “Refrigerated Air,” swimming pools, and Color TV. The road continued down what is now Drachman Street, 6th Avenue, and out to Benson Highway. Of course, the arrival of the Interstate changed all that, and now huge swaths of this formerly dramatic and bustling road are degraded, disregarded, and even disconnected from the former alignment.

Still, a lot of the historic signs have held on through the years, advertising apartments, “motor courts,” markets, and steakhouses. They are a largely under-appreciated resource of Tucson and many other cities, perhaps because old neon signs are associated with seedy parts of town. But most of these signs are in front of thriving businesses. If the Historic Sign Amendment can be passed, over 100 signs will be eligible for preservation. Hopefully then the owners will be able to take them down temporarily and have them refurbished to their former glory. I could even see this amendment spurring the founding of new local neon restoration businesses. There’s plenty of work to be done.

We’re doing this only because it is interesting to both of us, and it’s really needed. We hope that the book will raise awareness and appreciation of historic signage, and perhaps provide inspiration for people in other cities that also have a historic sign resource worth preserving. It’s a long term project with no specific completion date, but I hope we’ll be ready to publish in about a year.

Anyone who has old pictures of signs in Tucson as they appeared in their heydey, or information to share about signs, please get in touch with me by clicking here. We’d welcome contributions and acknowledge them in the published book.

Aug 05 2010

The hunt

The fun is in the hunt. I don’t know if it’s cave man instinct, or the human ability to problem-solve, but there’s something very satisfying about analyzing your prey, pursuing it, and capturing it. Has there ever been a hunter who hasn’t been grinning (at least on the inside) while dragging home their latest acquisition? It doesn’t matter if it’s a deer, an antique Chesterfield, a car, or (in Eleanor’s case) a fine salmon from the fish market. You feel a sense of pride in having bagged the right one, especially after a long and grueling search.

That’s where I find myself right now. For the past several months, I have been hunting a fairly common quarry: the Mercedes 300D, built between 1976 and 1985. Being based on the famous Mercedes W123 chassis, they’re everywhere — literally millions sold worldwide — so, like wild turkeys, it’s not rare to spot one, but it is rare to spot and bag the “right” one.

I’ve been looking for one for complicated reasons that probably deserve an entirely separate blog entry. Suffice to say, I’m intrigued by something about those old diesels. One car reviewer described them as “the automotive cockroaches: they’ll eat the grease out of your dirty frying pan, and you can’t hardly kill them.” Like the 2009 GL320 we use to tow our Airstream, the 300D is a 3.0 liter turbodiesel, but the resemblance ends there. The Mercedes 300D is a solidly-built touring car, beautifully engineered, but the 5-cylinder engine used in it is a loincloth-wearing primitive compared to the ultra-complex electronic GL320 spaceship.

The GL320 has a bunch of computers in it to run everything from climate control to trailer lights. The 300D uses vacuum hoses from the engine to control nearly everything, including the door locks and transmission shifts. It’s like comparing email to a pneumatic tube.

The GL320 is barely audible at idle, while the 300D exposes its diesel truck heritage proudly and loudly. This is one of the things that I like about it. The GL320 doesn’t sound like we all expect a diesel to sound, thanks to super-high-pressure computerized fuel injection. When I’m in a campground and trying to make a quiet getaway at 7 a.m., I appreciate that, but I have to admit there has always been some disappointment that the GL320 doesn’t sound just a tiny bit more musical as it runs.

Three decades lie between the technologies of these two vehicles, and yet the 300D is still a remarkable car to drive, a real pleasure as it serenely — and reliably — floats down the road. It’s not fast (zero to 60 in 14 seconds), it’s not powerful (125 hp, 170 ft-lbs torque), and it’s not sporty. But it’s a marvel of its time, and a car I could only dream of when it was new and priced at well into the $30k range.

The 300D and many variants (such as the very common 240D) were all built on a common chassis, called “W123”. In this video, Mercedes says 6.7 million of them were made worldwide, although the official Daimler press release says 2.7 million. Regardless, the combination of incredible durability, economy (in fuel), quality, and relatively low resale cost has made them very popular, and many people collect them. When fuel prices go up, so do the values of W123 diesels, because they convert fairly easily to run on Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) or Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO). (Interestingly, the resale value of WVO or SVO converted Mercedes cars is pretty poor, at least from my experience. Perhaps this is because aficionados believe that running veggie oil shortens the life of the engine, and the conversion, with necessary gauges and switches, decreases the originality of the car.)

In Europe, the W123’s were often taxicabs. Rather famously, a Greek cabbie set a world record for durability, logging 2.8 million miles in a 1976 Mercedes 240D (with eleven engine swaps). It’s a great story, but it was on a W115 chassis, not a W123. Not being highly concerned with accuracy, eBay sellers love to tell a mutated version of the story in which the record-holder is a W123. This is probably why you can see auction after auction on eBay claiming that “these cars often run a million miles or more!!!” — which is hogwash. Most of the W123’s in North America died from owner neglect, accidents, or rust. If you treated yours well, kept it garaged, didn’t drive it in winter, and adhered strictly to the maintenance cycle (with valve adjustments every 5,000 miles, etc.), it would last.

Most people didn’t take such care, and so those cars are gone. Or worse, they’re for sale right now. I can’t tell you how many really crummy examples of sadly abused W123’s I’ve seen in the past few months. Craigslist is a rich source of horrific 240D’s and 300D’s in brutalized condition, with delusional sellers who think they are Teutonic gold mines. Well, they are holes in the ground, but not the right kind of holes I’m afraid.

The eBay sellers are particularly dangerous. Pictures taken from 20 feet away reveal very little about the condition of something as complex as a car. The seemingly beautiful car in the photos can become a rusted nightmare when you take delivery. “Car flippers” who don’t know or don’t care to share the history of the vehicle will take your money and smile.

So in the pursuit of the right 300D, I enlisted the help of friends when I could. Dr. C was instrumental in teaching me the fine points of classic Mercedes — and especially how to recognize the warning signs of troublesome cars. Thanks to him, I can glance at a 300D from 50 feet away and tell you what problems to expect on the inside.

Other friends took the time to visit the cars that were far away, on my behalf. The red 300D pictured above was investigated and photographed by my friend Todd H up in the Phoenix area. The dark blue 300CD (door pictured above) was investigated and photographed by my friend Andy G in the Boston area. In both cases, their on-site inspections revealed several serious defects that the sellers failed to photograph or acknowledge in their ads. I can’t believe people buy cars from thousands of miles away, just on the basis of a few eBay photos and some breezy seller promises (“everything on this car is primo!”), but they do every day.

The hunt finally ended last Friday, and amazingly the car was found just five miles from my house. A tip from a local Benz independent mechanic led me to a lovely couple in their eighties who were preparing to downsize to a smaller house across the country.

They had a beautiful, one-owner 1984 Mercedes Benz 300D that had been garaged for 22 years and driven regularly. They’d maintained it as if they were going to keep it forever (which they very nearly did!) Best of all, they were very fair on the price. They were the rare type of people who really did want it to go to a good home and weren’t concerned with making a killing on the sale.

So I bought it. I need a third car like I need a third Airstream, but I bought it anyway, and now it sits in my carport. And it’s beautiful. I could sell it tomorrow for double what I paid, but I’m not going to. I’m going to drive it, and take it to car shows, and listen to the diesel engine with the sunroof open, and when I’m not driving it I’ll keep it under cover in the dry Arizona climate so that it lasts another 26 years. In six years, I might even let Emma drive it.

The only small disappointment in this is that I had expected to find a car far away, at least in California. Part of the thrill of the kill is dragging home the prize. I had envisioned a wonderful one-way bonding roadtrip, just me, the car, a sleeping bag, and the open road. A breakdown along the way would have made a good story, too. But this trip back to the cave required only fifteen minutes (plus a stop at the DMV for a Historic Vehicle plate). After I get the oil changed, I’ll have to invent a trip just for the sheer pleasure of it.

Aug 03 2010

A very wet hike in Arizona

I’m in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, during summer. All around me is nothing but sand dunes and shimmering waves of heat, right?

Well, no. Actually we are blessed with beautiful “sky islands” in southern Arizona, which are tall peaks that rise from the desert and provide blissful cool forests and completely different ecosystems to explore. Just north of home base are the Santa Catalina mountains, probably the more accessible range because of the excellent road that winds to the top, and the multiple hiking trails.

I’ve talked about this range before. From our home base, it is the first thing we see every day through the window, a stunning range of brown (down low) and green (up high) frosted with white peaks in the winter. Everyone who I’ve talked to, even the residents who have lived here for their entire lives, says they never get tired of the Catalina view.

My friend Brent from the Phoenix area invited me to do some tent camping last weekend. Like us, he owns an Airstream Safari 30 “bunkhouse,” and like us, he sometimes wants to get back to the basics once in a while. There’s something about tenting that makes you really feel the experience. Just you, a thin shield of nylon, and an outdoor fire.

During the preceding few days the summer monsoon had finally kicked in, and I had been watching huge thunderstorms sitting atop the Catalinas, so it was a pretty fair bet that we’d get rained on up there, but what the heck. Tucson averages just 12 inches of rain per year, so a little rain would be a somewhat novel experience. Besides, for a New England camper like myself it would just be an average camping trip. Or so I thought.

There are several campgrounds located along the Catalina Highway. In the summer, most people avoid the two National Forest campgrounds that are below 5,000 feet (because they are too warm), and head for the three that are located at 6,000 feet or above: General Hitchcock, Rose Canyon, and Spencer Canyon. On weekends, that means you’d better show up early if you want to snag a spot.

When we arrived on Saturday morning, the camp host told us that terrifying thunderstorms had plagued the campground the night before. Some people bailed out and drove back down to Tucson, apparently leaving their gear to fend for itself. One camper told us he slept in his car, probably to avoid getting fried by the frequent lightning strikes. We figured we were in for more of that on Saturday night, so we quickly set up our camp and anchored the tents as best we could.

The minute we left the campground, the rain started. At the trailhead, just five minutes later, it was a steady drizzle. Being tough hikers, we decided to plow through. “A little rain won’t hurt us!”

For a while, the rain was intermittent and I captured a few shots during the drier moments, but that was not to last. The rain poured down, so much that our conversation turned to rain forests we’d visited in Washington state and Puerto Rico. There were no views except dripping plants, the occasional mushroom, and fog.

Soon our “water proof” gear began to surrender to the relentless rain. My hiking boots soaked through and flooded, leaving me “squinching” with every step. The sleeves and edges of my Gore Tex rain jacket became soaked, and the water migrated by capillary action up the sleeves and onto my forearms. My exposed hands became chilly from being constantly wet, and the rain was growing colder.

The cotton shorts I’d worn for the hike turned out to be a particularly big mistake. As hikers up north say, “cotton kills,” because once it gets wet it starts to leech your body heat. Normally this isn’t a problem in the southwest, but in these mountains the temperature was only in the upper 60’s, and the humidity was 100%. We were in the hypothermia zone, and those soaked cotton shorts were chilling my body rapidly.

By this time we’d turned around and were climbing up a steep hill, so my concern was minimal, but it was still a sobering revelation that, if something went badly wrong, one of us could die in these conditions. People die in the summertime from hypothermia. Imagine having a serious sprain that left you unable to hike out. In these conditions, you could easily suffer severe hypothermia while lying on the trail, waiting for help to arrive. The cold ground would steal your body heat, while the constant rain would ensure no chance to warm up.

Imagine the irony of dying of the cold just a few miles from Tucson in August. I told this to Brent to cheer him up — it didn’t work. He said, “I’ve never been this wet before in my life.”

Rather than head back to camp, we drove further up the mountain to the village of Summerhaven, where there is a little pizza and cookie restaurant in a log cabin. Looking like two people who had jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed, we recovered from our adventure while eating pizza and dripping water all over the floor.

Of course, the rain stopped completely once we got back to camp, and the skies were clear all afternoon and night. The cumulative rain total for the preceding 24 hours was 4.5 inches.

You know how good it feels to get out of cold wet clothes and into dry ones? Well, it feels even better when you’re camping in a tent. Those little pleasures are amplified by the starkness of your resources.

So we set up the fire and ate leftover pizza for dinner, told stories, and let the world revolve without any help from us at all, until late at night. There’s no exciting ending to this story. We just hung out, slept in our tents, and got up the next morning for some hot cocoa. It wasn’t long before we were talking about how we’d like to do it again soon. That’s good camping.