Switzer Community Garden

I stopped off here the other night when I saw some folks there working in the evening.

The Switzer Community Garden is, in my not remotely humble opinion, the best of class among KC's community gardens. There's one by the new Kauffman center that is more high tech, but unless you're talking Mission Hills (where the Kauffmans lived), most communities lack the resources to do most of that stuff.

This garden, though, it's in the West Side neighborhood and it's not operated by any pharmaceutical robber barons.

I was impressed by the rain barrels. Both because they're pretty (this garden does more artsy fartsy stuff than the usual, probably a lot of why I think they're the best garden in town), but also because they were still watering the beds from rain collected in these barrels off an impossibly small shed roof.

This is rain that fell before the worst drought to plague our region in decades. They still have some of that rain to water their crops, so take note you Army Corps characters. We may need to do this on a wider scale, and soon.

I was also impressed by the bee hive. I've kept bees, it's like having thousands of high maintenance girlfriends who throw stuff at you when you're only trying to help. Well, like that but without sex.

I still have honey I mean to make into mead from my last crop, 2002. I do still have a huge soft spot for the hobby, or agribusiness or whatever you want to call it. Still have my protective gear and my copy of The Hive & The Honey Bee.

I guess what I lack is enthusiasm for backbreaking, hotter than hell work with minimal rewards that's like as not to sick the neighborhood association on you to boot.

The only bright spot is most of the nay-sayers and don't-dos have no idea they're looking at a hive when they see these white boxes.

Most of them will claim to be allergic to bee stings, but people who say this are often only 'allergic' if you count dislike or fear as an allergic reaction. There haven't been wild honeybees running around since late last century, and tame or wild, none of them give a shit about people unless we're pulling the lid off their house to steal their food. Even 'Africanized' bees won't seek you out and sting you just to be dicks.

Anyway, the gesticulating woman in the bright plaid shirt is one of the people that made this garden happen. She shies away from accusations of being in charge.

She doesn't hold back on her enthusiasm for the whole project. She wanted to make sure I knew about the bees, about how they'd re-queened the colony lately, chickens and whatnot they had down below.

Every once in awhile I meet someone who is truly a pillar of their community, and this woman (Marcelle?—I think that's what I heard) seems to be exactly that. Someone with the energy and interest to truly expand what's possible in a neighborhood, who gets people to do what they wouldn't otherwise do and do it cheerfully.

Sticker

Mo loves her some stickers.

Her step-mother, my wife, took her out today and stopped by a dumpster she knew might have stickers. They got back with a mother-lode.

 Mo couldn't even keep her eyes open, it was too exciting.

Which I guess brings me to the point: I counted on the stickers to distract Mo while I worked. When I came up to check on her, she'd resorted to prying open some framed artwork to sticker over. But, I think I could see her logic, everything she defaced with stickers was her artwork.

Her logic wasn't entirely faulty. Yes, I was pissed she'd defaced art I found worthy of a frame, but it wasn't as bad as the time she opened up my framed photographs and covered them over with stickers I'd made to label things in the garden.

Dance Walk

This was one of those evenings when I planned to ride 'straight home.'

The details, as far as why I needed to get home directly, are lost to me now, but it probably had to do with being slort of sheep in the first place and having some stuff I needed to get done at home before I could hit the sack.

This happens to me quite a bit. Bike commuting is slightly more time consumptive than car commuting if you just look at the travel time. I can make it from house door to work door in about 35 minutes if I don't run into much traffic in the car; my best bike time is little over double that. Call it an extra 45 minutes.

Round trip, that's an hour and a half, not that bad if you figure car people often drive to a gym in the evening and work out for an hour. I may get behind on pruning/tying my tomatoes, but on my bike commute days I can at least cross 'work out' off my to-do list.


The biggest menace, though, is not the ride itself. It's the social interactions that almost inevitably happen. Like, say, you're coming across the Plaza on Broadway and you spot a bunch of costumed people getting ready to cause a ruckus.

The ruckus turned out to be a 'dance walk.' I whipped out my camera and started shooting, of course. One girl said something vaguely apologetic about the whole affair, and I said, "Are you kidding me? You guys are the funnest group I've encountered since I stumbled on the Hash House Harriers in the River Market."

I think the girl with the really bright tights was the one who piped up with the answer, "Yeah? My sister is a Hasher!" You don't say.

And then they were off, boogieing their way through the Plaza like a small, pedestrian Critical Mass.

West Bottoms Gallery

Stuck behind a train? More like given the opportunity to appreciate some art.

Trash Boat Regatta

This was the fourth annual running of the Trash Boat Regatta in Kansas City. Last year was sort of messed up, the flooding on the Missouri made it impossible to hold the event on the usual Kaw Point to Glow in the Dark Park river route, so it was moved to Big Eleven Lake, which isn't big at all.

I doubt Big Eleven would be the site again, even in a flood year. We learned that day that it is a body of water only if you count empty beer bottles, discarded guns and cholera as 'water.'

Still, the event was so much fun, we had to do the regatta this year. Had to.

I say 'we,' but really, Brian and Corinna did the work. Brian was forever bringing things to our house that he'd found that would be 'perfect' for the regatta. Big blocks of styrofoam, the lid to a hot tub, 55 gallon plastic drums. A two man raft with oars.

Try as I might, I couldn't figure how we'd get them all put together into a boat.



An even bigger challenge, how to get them all into a wagon that could be towed by bicycles.

My biggest contribution to the design of the boat was pointing out that an early configuration of wheels might be stable as far as supporting the weight of the boat, but there was no way it would track behind a bike.

The rules say no motors, and the boat needs to be mostly refuse. Budget is capped at $100, which we stayed well under even if you count a case of beer and a bag of ice.

A couple of our original team bailed on us, but I managed to persuade my friend Jill at the last minute to come join us. Then Corinna recruited three more people down at the dock.

Getting the boat to the launch was the biggest challenge. For one, part of the frame up by the trailer broke before we left the yard. This didn't inspire confidence in Jill who was already dubious about the whole enterprise.

Towing this monster up the hills of Minnesota Avenue, the idea had been that cyclists surrounding the boat could hold straps, but they were too low to the ground to stably do that. Especially from my backup bike, an ill-fitting mountain bike I picked up cheap off Craigslist (I wasn't putting my Surly with its Brooks saddle out on a river). We were a one-float parade, and the 'detour' sign was perfect for telling folks in cars exactly what they needed to do if they wanted to go faster than three or four miles per hour.

Me and Jill ended up hopping off our bikes and walking up the hills, one hand on the boat, one hand on our mounts.

Then we got to Kaw Point and Brian's back wheel tacoed from the weight. This is a 40-spoke touring wheel, stock 1980s Schwinn, but still, it takes a lot of weight to warp something like that.

As I say, Corinna recruited more people to float with us, more people than I thought we should try to take. I'm not sure where she came up with the magic number seven, but she figured we had capacity for at least seven riders.

It was pretty precarious when we loaded on, me sitting on the cooler, shifty my weight to counter as various people hopped on. But my weight was too high being up on the cooler, and as we shoved off, we started rocking and once one person fell or jumped off in panic, there wasn't anything to be done except hope your dry sacks were sound.

Not a complete success on the dry sack front, and that's part of why I have so few photos from the actual float trip. My camera (my old Canon PowerShot, not my D7000; same reason I wasn't riding my Tall Pale Hooker for this expedition) started to get hot, and the moisture in the dry sack was bad enough that I went ahead and popped the battery out of my phone as well just to be safe.

After the capsize, we moved Jill and James to the two-man raft and piled all the bikes and Brian's trailer on the mother ship. Except for James' bike, which he wanted to leave locked at Kaw Point, and Tom's bike, which he sent for a flat repair with someone who offered to meet him at the other end all fixed up.

I thought that was amazingly trusting, he'd just met this person, but sure enough, at the end of our voyage, his bike was waiting with a new tube in the back tire.

It kills me I can't share pictures with you of the underside of the ASB bridge, for instance. Lots of things, you really should float down the Missouri sometime and get a new perspective on Downtown Kansas City.

A pot luck dinner consisting largely of alcoholic beverages and junk food was waiting for us at 'Glow in the Dark Park.' The sign says River Front Park, actually, so I'm not sure why the organizers call it the more colorful name, but they do.

Getting the USS Detour home was another issue. We managed to get what we had to take home with us strapped to bikes and Brian rode off on his compromised bike (Joel whacked his wheel into a more or less round shape that could limp him home) to get a pickup truck. So for next year we either need a lighter boat or sturdier wheels. The cast-off InStep trailer we used for the back wheels of the boat is rated for something like 100 pounds maximum, and we were easily three or four times that.

Future Inmates of America Convention

You have interactions when you commute by bike.  I suspect this is true even if you're not a gregarious, social sort of person.

Me, on the other hand, yikes.  I left work on time with the full intention of coming straight home, catching up on my blog (yes, Anonymous, more 'foodie' posts will come; I still cook a lot but I don't get around to photographing and documenting it here lately—I want to, though).  Oh, and get to bed by, oh about eighteen minutes ago.

That was before I stopped at Frizz and talked to M who's learning Japanese and Dr. G. who says I need a more beat up bike to play Frizz on.  But I only stayed for one beer because, like I say, I wanted to get straight home.  Plus, I'd forgot my phone charger when I left for work and the battery was low enough I had powered the phone clear off just in case I needed to make an outgoing call at some point.

Then, I stopped and took pictures and talked to the folks at the Switzer Community Garden, which I pass regularly but never when anyone is around.  Marcella (sp?) and company were so hospitable and engaging, it turned into a bit of a photo-shoot and interview (a separate post, I'm sure).

Descending Beardsley, I turned my phone back on just in case, and sure enough, my ex tried to call me about a seizure Mo had.  And my wife had texted me about testing the trash boat (another post, that, too).

While I was on the phone, I spotted some tags I'd seen but not shot, and a couple I hadn't ever noticed before and the next thing I knew, Alice (with me in the role of Alice) was down another hole.

After I'd shot some tags and gotten a lot of burrs on my socks and shoes, I emerged and commenced to go 'straight' home.  Then, on the bridge I got married on, I passed a horde of kids.  I'd guess their ages from seven or so to twelve or thirteen.  BMX bikes.  Seven kids and six bikes, I think, with one kid riding the back pegs and holding the shoulders of a rider.

I rang my bell in greeting as I rode past them, the squirts heading over the river into the West Bottoms.

Then I ran into a cable.  I saw it about the time I hit it, and it didn't really catch me, but they'd either cut the cables or found one already broken and strung it across the trail like a garrote.

If I'd been riding downhill in the dark, with minimal or no lights (as many do on this bridge), it could have been pretty ugly.

I turned around and the kids were high-tailing it off on the trail towards James.  I decided, okay, this is on.

I think they imagined they could out run me with their tiny wheels and one gear, but besides the fact they outnumbered their mounts, I'm on a 700c wheeled bike with 24 speeds and I was pissed off.

When I got close to the first one, he called out, "Something fell off your bike."  It wasn't true, but he was caught and knew it.

I said, "Something's about to fall off your bike: YOU!"

"I didn't do it!" he said.  "It was them!"

Bullshit, of course, but by then I was closing on the next kid who said he didn't do it.  These were young kids.  And a couple of them looked slightly terrified.  The oldest one, though, he was too cool for school, and I'll bet he's not even in his teens yet.  He figured I had too much to lose to hit him (unfortunately true), and when I asked him if his parents would like to defend him on this one he told me his parents were in Mexico.

I'm not one of those anti-immigrant types, but you can deport his punk any second as far as I'm concerned.  He has prison-bound written all over him, has no fear of anything, and is the primary bad influence, as far as I can tell, on these other kids who seemed decent enough once I actually got to talk to them about how dangerous what they did potentially was.  They're all squirrelly and unsupervised, but take that oldest kid out of the picture and the others might have something to offer the world.


Postscript:

I spoke too soon. The following evening, I passed one of the regulars I see at the James Street food drop, who told me about how he was flying down the bridge in the dark on his bike when all of a sudden...

It fucked him up pretty good, as I told those useless, piece of shit children, it could. I realized that those same punks had to have gone back after my encounter with them and strung the same line up again. And this time, they tied it tight.

I told the guy they got, he has permission as far as I'm concerned, to beat any kid on a BMX he finds in a two mile radius of that bridge. Beat them, drown them in the river, throw them off the bridge, whatever. The only thing they have to offer the world is bad gang tags, destructive and dangerous vandalism, and fathering more human detritus when they catch up to the female version of themselves. I know, it's not what Jesus would say, but it's true.

Heat Stroke

The forecast for Saturday said it would reach 105ºF (not the 'heat index' but the actual temperature). I don't think it got there.

But it was hotter than hell anyway. So naturally we accepted the invite to an alley cat race. Start at YJ's, 17th & Wyandotte at 4:30, race to be confined to the Crossroads, Westside and West Bottoms. No whining.

We figured we know the neighborhoods in question as well as anyone, and with a short alleycat, routing is everything.

Plus, it'd be fun. And it was.

The checkpoint (I thought Jevin said 'first' checkpoint, but it was the only one) was the bridge Corinna and I got married on.

Of course, I saw the All Star Game stuff going on downtown and stopped to take a picture or two, not smart strategy for racing.

The end point was a park up by the FBI building.

I went up to 12th and bombed the bridge to the bottoms, taking James around to the bridge. Then I saw where we were supposed to finish and I had to tip my hat to Jevin for his sadism. As promised, the most direct route would involve lots of hot climbing: going back up that 12th Street bridge.

Alternately, I reasoned I could go up Beardsley to 17th, up to Summit, but the altitude, in terms of total ascent, would be the same. And the shallow route would be less direct.

Thanks to Big Dave taking a wrong turn and two other guys who flatted out without a spare and walked their bikes in, I didn't finish DFL, or 'dead fucking last.' There were beers and white likker for all at the top of the hill, and a good time was had by all.