September 18, 2012
First of all, phooey on you, Google. They’ve enforced yet another “improvement” to this blog posting site that accomplishes nothing but annoyance. There is no improvement, it is worse. You’ll note extra blank lines and such. Why can’t you Google people just leave well enough alone. There is no need to continually dumb-down everything you do.
A late start and some work on the Honda means I made 340 miles today. That compares well, but extends my trip another day. I found the primo used motorcycle part store in Muskogee, the “Cycle Center”. I said parts. The owner can and did take one look at your ride, tell you what’s wrong, and sell you the parts to fix it. Yourself, although he’ll lend you small tools. Quite the interesting system. I was back on the road at a fifth the cost of what I estimated if I had to buy a starter.
In fact, the problem seems to be that the electronics won’t let the machine start unless the transmission is in neutral. It worked before, but I can live with this quirk. Again, the motor is sound and runs fine, so the remainder of the repairs are necessarily minor. And I’ve already begun studying the electrical. The same owner (Tom D.) says it is lucrative to learn small motor repair. Take that to mean not working for somebody else.
I left Vinita bundled up against the morning chill. There is a drought in the area, but no way to tell by looking. Don’t expect a dust bowl, the area is totally green and the smallest creeks have more water than the Colorado rivers. I rode down 69 through little towns like Pryor, happy to find so few trucks on the road. Forgetting to set my clock ahead, I arrived in Muskogee at lunchtime. Instead of waiting, I visited the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame. Worth the two buck admission for a quick guided tour (courtesy Michael R.) featuring a small collection of posters, signed guitars and hats, and what looks like some authentic copies of gold and platinum LPs.
They have a large wall of fame with bios of I’d guess some sixty entertainers who spent some time in Oklahoma. Many I did not recognize but the haircuts placed them well before my era. Carrie Underwood was born here in 1983 (wow, is she already pushing 30?) and I like her looks, except when she is plastered with old lady makeup. She missed meeting me today, poor thing, but since she was the American Idol before the show sank into the stink pit, I’ll give her another chance. She needs me stop all her songs from sounding the same.
I drove through completely unfamiliar territory, gradually going from light forest in Nebraska and Kansas, to wooded hills east of Muskogee and into the rolling hills of Arkansas. It is strange to see a lumber mill on one roadside (timber, as in hardwood and softwood), the across the way a bayou swamp right out of a 1950s movie set. I found the fields between the hills perfectly flat, then I spotted rice fields. They are draining swamp land, leveling it with a laser, and growing rice. During a drought.
It was Interstate time, which helped the mileage today. I drove I-40 from the Oklahoma frontier to east of Little Rock, a little town called Lonoke. Where I am holed up for the night, wondering why my motorcycle battery isn’t charging right. Hey, at least I know it isn’t the starter. This is roughly my tenth day of sidecar “camping” since this journey began, so I’ve got it down to basics. Lonoke dies at sunset, so here I am drinking coffee, eating noodle soup and chicken sandwiches in a comfy budget motel north of town. Everything hot was cooked in the microwave using the motel water cups.
Here is a photo of another defunct factory, this is also in Muskogee. I don’t know the history, but these buildings are not that old. In recent memory, these were thriving and it is clear somebody had once invested millions. One expects a certain lot of rural decay, but Muskogee is a big city. And I might add a clean-looking one as well. The downtown and surrounding residences are “spiffy”. But what happened to all the people and jobs in a plant this size?
Ah, the sharper-eyed see my mittens on the handlebars. Yes, officer, that is how I always dry my laundry. These I bought at Granby Mtn, a supplier in Aurora where the cheapest merchandise was $20, even pairs of socks. The mitten lining came loose within a week.
That wraps up the day. From Nebraska, where the horizon is the same in all directions, to Arkansas, where the trees along the roadway provide more myopic monotony. There is seriously nothing to do that does not involve spending money. I toured the state welcome center for a cup of terrible coffee and it was like a small library of advertising brochures. I could not find even a few that outlined what was free, though I’m sure something must be. Oh, I might point out that I am far from the only tourist not keen on the idea of tax-supported parks hitting me for an admission fee. Wake up, DC, people hate that.
Other things I have not seen in years are grasshoppers, slow sunsets, water towers, horse pastures, and runaway kudzu. The highest gas price of this year to date was $4.30 in Altoona, Kansas. I hoofed it along at nearly 70 mph most of today, hoping to make Memphis, but again the dark and cold drove me indoors, ready to migrate at dawn. It will be an early winter by the feel of it.
ADDENDUM
I’ve finished “Golden Ship”, and have formed a strong opinion about treasure hunting I did not have before. Recently I laughed at the Spanish-Portuguese claims on a deep water wreck and I now consider it a shame that the courts even allow such ownership assertions under the circumstances. There are legal factors I don’t understand, but at what point does not attempting to recover property amount to abandonment? I say three generations, or sixty years, and even then only by those with a bona fide interest. And by that I don’t necessarily mean a direct descendant.
A team of lawyers, immediately after learning of the discovery, filed a suit saying that the gold belonged to the insurance companies that paid for the loss of 1857. Funny, they didn’t file their claim back then. Fortunately a judge with some brains who understood the years and millions spent on the salvage awarded 90% to those who did the work. But America is no place to gamble you’ll get a judge with some brains—these frivolous suits tied up the courts for seven more years, until 1995.
I have a thorough understanding of what it means to have an accomplishment destroyed by the lazy and jealous using covetous argument alone. The insurance lawyers instantly claimed their 10% was part of the recovered booty, not within the gold lying 8,000 feet underwater. It took another round of expensive hearings for (fortunately) the same judge to say the 10% meant only of the part of the claim they can prove they paid back in the 1850s, which they could not do.
But notice the judge avoided ruling they had no claim at all, which would have been the right thing. To me, the value here was not just the gold, but the value of effort expended. The lawyers were not really claiming 10% of the gold, but to 10% of what others worked for. At that point it isn’t even important that it was gold. Even those who prove a share should have the going rate for work done deducted from their portion. (The epilog stated the judge saw eye-to-eye with me on that one.)
When one considers that salvaging the gold was a far more difficult proposition than originally mining it, plus the passage of 130 years, there is a point which the contentions of anyone who didn’t participate in the recovery should not even be entertained. Countersuits should be allowed for instances of outright speculation. I would make certain exceptions for recent losses where claimants could pinpoint the location or attempted to find or retrieve it on their own, but this was not the case here.
My solution? Strengthen the privacy laws. The court should not have released the location of the first find. That’s when all the trouble materialized. I see in the end, the salvage chief smartened up and quit filing any papers until after he had the goods, raising the gold only at night, and barring all the vessel crew from the unloading area. He won not because the law did him right, but because he kept a secret. And I support people’s right to keep others from nosing into their affairs.
Those legal issues that arise only after the other party has committed are nothing more than an attempt to write the rules as the game progresses to prevent the other side from winning. Only the victims of such travesty could know my feelings on this one.
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