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 02 2010

Full-timer: Homeless by another name

One of the fun parts about being Editor of a magazine is that I get to meet all kinds of interesting writers. One of the writers to recently join the Airstream Life team is Becky Blanton, a very interesting person. Becky is a middle-aged single woman and accomplished writer with several awards to her credit, who just happened to become homeless late in life. She has since turned circumstances around again, so that now she is able to live as she pleases, but she chooses to continue as a “homeless” person while she writes for Airstream Life and many other publications.

Becky recently raised the question in a provocative blog entry over at Change.org: When she travels and lives out of her rickety old van, is she “homeless” or is she a “full-timer”? She makes the point that homelessness is an attitude, not a condition, because it is not defined by “living in a van” but rather by choices and status.

This resonated with me because we spent two years “full-timing” in our Airstream with no home or apartment to come back to. The Airstream was our home. We often told people that we were “homeless by choice.” It was less expensive to live in the Airstream than the house we previously owned, but we didn’t move to the Airstream because it was cheap. We wanted to improve our lives. Along the way, we tried to help people understand that having or not having a house is irrelevant, and could even be a detrimental factor, to having a good life.

Homelessness is descriptor that defines nothing. You can be living in a trailer or van and having the dream adventure of your life, or you can be down-and-out and addicted, or anywhere in between. Quality of life is a factor that, barring mental or physical illness, is within our control. After selling our house in Vermont and going on the road in 2005, I realized that I regarded myself as more successful and happier than I had ever been before. Eleanor and I traded the trappings of success for freedom. My startup business, Airstream Life magazine, was not able to pay me a salary for years. Our living quarters encompassed a measly 240 square feet — for three people. So why was I so much happier? As we said many times along the way, “We are paid in lifestyle.”

Coming back to a house, it was obvious that we could easily get caught in any number of house ownership traps again, so we did what we could to avoid it. We bought a small, moderately priced house that could be left empty for months at a time, should we choose to go traveling again. We refused to get into the trap of buying furnishings and other stuff to make it into “house beautiful.” (Our living room is still so empty it looks like a zen garden.) We have fought hard against accumulating “stuff,” especially stuff that doesn’t fit into the Airstream, on the theory that if we can go six months without missing it, we don’t really need it.

Even now, it’s still unclear which is our primary home: the house or the Airstream? But it’s just academic. A stripped-down life on the road brought us back to the things that were really important to us, and now we have a better perspective on the choices that lie ahead. Homelessness — or at least the positive mental attitude about having more with less — can be a factor to improve one’s life, under the right circumstances. Whether you live in a Malibu beach home, or a van down by the river, the bottom line is, “Are you happy?”

Jun 27 2010

Mt Wrightson hike

When we bought our house in Tucson while we were still full-timing in the Airstream, I explained to everyone that we never intended to spend summers here. Now, three years later, here I am in ARIDzona in June, when daytime relative humidity runs in the single digits and every day is 100 degrees or hotter.

But I really don’t mind, as it turns out. Yes, it’s hot, but I don’t spend my days standing in the direct sunlight. And in Arizona there’s always a cool respite at the top of a nearby Sky Island, high above the desert floor.

Brett is in town for a few days. We have to head out for business this week, but it is traditional that when he comes to town I abuse him as much as possible by taking him on a tough hike. He lives in Florida you see, and as such he is altitude-deprived. No mountains. Last year I took him up Picacho Peak, which is a short (2 mile) but challenging trail, especially when the temperature is above 100 during the hike, as it was that day.

He survived that and came back again, so this time I brought out the big guns. I’ve wanted to hike Mt Wrightson ever since I first read about the trail to the summit. It’s about 30 miles south of Tucson, not far from Green Valley. The hike starts at 5,400 feet and ascends rather steeply and steadily up to 9,453 feet. In addition to being a hike that “everyone should do once,” according to one hiking guide, it would also be the first time I’ve climbed a mountain over 6,000 feet. Brett, for his part, was game for anything.

Being at relatively high elevation, the temperature at the trailhead was only about 80 degrees when we started, and for the rest of the hike things never got much hotter, since we were ascending most of the day. That was the good news. The bad news was that the dryness of the air only gets worse as you go up. We both consumed about 100 ounces of water, and ran out about halfway during the descent. All of that water went out through the pores and we were never sweaty, thanks to immediate evaporation.

Mt Wrightson was almost my undoing. I haven’t spent much time at altitude lately, and I haven’t been hiking much lately. At about 8,500 feet I started to hit the wall, and the problem was simply that I couldn’t get enough oxygen. My rest breaks become more and more frequent. Suddenly, I felt rather old, and it didn’t get better when the 20-something hardbodies from the local university started passing us like we were geezers. It worse when, during a gasping break around 9,000 feet, a woman passed us on her second complete ascent of the day. Now that’s just wrong.

As people always say at the end of a brutal hike, “the view was worth it.” But I’ll be honest with you. The view was spectacular in every direction, but it wasn’t worth it. What made the strenuous 10.6 mile hike worth doing was simply the feeling of achievement. Now I’ve hiked to nearly 10,000 feet. Now I’ve seen a hundred-mile panorama from the tiny summit of Mt Wrightson: Tucson to the north, Patagonia and Sonoita to the east, Green Valley and the copper mines to the west, and the mountains of Mexico to the south. Now I don’t ever have to do it again.

Hiking down again, of course, is much easier. But I could have done without running into the woman who was on her way back up for a third complete ascent in one day. At that point Brett and I were both feeling every bit of the late-40s man, complete with twinges in the knees and muscles begging for Advil. The uber-hiker woman didn’t look too happy either, on her way back up again, but she at least had the excuse of being (A) about 22 miles into it; and (B) obviously, completely insane.

When we landed back in Tucson, it was about 102 degrees but we were told we missed the real heat of 109 earlier in the day. So I guessed we picked the right place to be on Saturday. The rest of the evening was recovery: showers, re-hydrating, a quick trip to Bookman’s for cheezy paperback sci-fi novels to read during evenings of our business trip, a pair of burritos from Nico’s Taco Shop, and a really early bedtime.

Jun 22 2010

Take a walk in the sun

I once read in National Geographic of an experiment involving a French scientist and a deep cave. He was left in there with all the comforts of home, except for a clock. He found that without the natural signals of daylight and night to cue him, he gradually evolved to very long periods of being awake, followed by proportionally long sleeping periods. Basically, he worked like a crazed squirrel and got a little loony in the process.

This is exactly what I’m trying to avoid.

I came back to Tucson alone with the primary goal of getting a lot of work done, and that part is going well. Every day I wake up about 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. (trying to stay close to Eastern Time, for convenience) and air out the house for an hour or so while the morning temperatures are in the low 70s. Work starts immediately, even before I dress or eat. I work steadily through about 3 or 4 p.m., mixing in a little housework just so I’m not at the computer all day. If things are busy, I’ll work right until 6 p.m., four hours after the east coast has left the office. I drink a lot of water to combat the very dry air (typically single-digit percentages of relative humidity), and eat very little.

The problem is that I’m in the house alone all day. So each day I also build in a little time to go do something, anything, that get me out into the Tucson sunshine. This is probably why I don’t mind the intense heat of the day. Every day this week it has been between 100 and 105 in the afternoon, and I like how walking around in the sun recharges my mental batteries. Of course, minding Bill Doyle’s admonitions about sun safety, I wear my broad-brimmed hat and light colored clothing, and slather plenty of sunscreen on the exposed parts. (I only go out in my full-coverage hero costume if heroic measures are required.)

On the other hand, it is turning out to be a pretty fun arrangement for me. Eleanor and Emma are with me via telephone and occasionally video chat on the computer, so although I miss them I get to see them regularly. The rest of the time I’m free to do whatever I want. For example, yesterday I broke free of work at 3:30 to go shopping at the local hiking store and then see a screening of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (very well done, intense, thriller, foreign language with subtitles). It’s amazing to experience the complete freedom of Temporary Bachelorhood: no consideration of other people at all, no worries about schedules, eat when I want, sleep when I want, etc.

In other words, the good and the bad of this situation are the same: solitude. I still wake up at night looking for Eleanor in bed. There are times that the house is too quiet. And there are times when in a moment of boredom I find myself doing things I wouldn’t normally do, like shopping.

The shopping in particular can be dangerous to one’s wallet. Normally I’m fairly immune, but lately I feel rather vulnerable to suggestion. On Sunday Fred sent over a link to a limited edition Pendleton blanket featuring what we call The Man In The Maze icon, and the next thing I knew, I’d bought it.

The symbol is properly known as the I’itoi Ki, the sacred symbol of the Tohono O’odham, who live near here in the southwestern Arizona desert. The blanket can only be purchased through the Tohono O’odham (they have outlets in Tubac, AZ and Sells, AZ). I love the blanket and it will definitely travel with us in the Airstream next winter, but I think I should probably try to avoid eBay for the next few weeks.

I did don my TBM costume to do a few minor manly tasks. I dealt with the weeds in the yard, swept off the back patio, cleaned the bathroom (in a very manly way, I assure you), etc. The dishwasher had a sort of residual stink after washing the three moldy plates that had been “stored” in there since early May, but I resolved that in a classic TBM way: I ran it again. Problem solved.

Since Brett is coming here on Thursday, and he is planning to sleep in the Caravel in the carport, I plugged it into 30 amp power and fired up the air conditioner for a test. That AC unit hasn’t been run since 2004, so there was a legitimate question of whether it would work. It did, so well in fact that the interior of the trailer was soon meatlocker-cold despite outside air temperatures of 99 degrees at the time. (Of course, that was in the shade of the carport; it wouldn’t do so well in full sun.)

It is still a challenge to have a list of things to do outside the house, so that when I’m ready to break from work I have something to do in mind. I take about half an hour each day to browse the local Events calendars and collect possibilities. There’s a certain discipline involved in not becoming a shut-in. A computer is a great communications tool, but eventually you have to go outside and walk in the sun, too.