Back when I lived in Europe and worked from home I would periodically work from not-my-home. Travel between countries there is pretty affordable, as is guest lodging. So I would spend my work week somewhere fantastic: Athens, Lisbon, Vienna, Venice. It might seem on the face of it to be frustrating: I’m staying in some amazing new place and I’ve got to stay home and write unit tests? But actually I found it relieving. There was no pressure to make the most of my time. I wasn’t spending much money, I was still earning money, even. So if I found a good place to get dinner, I could just go back the next day. I didn’t need to try all the places, make the most of it. If the museums were crowded or expensive, or closed on a Monday, so what? Skip it. Every moment of beauty, surprise, and wonder was a naked experience, not measured against the expectations built up while the big vacation was planned out. “The Eiffel tower, what’s that?” said no tourist ever. But wouldn’t it be fun to not know, somehow, and stumble upon it? Obviously the Eiffel tower could never be a surprise, but in Vienna I walked into a truly giant glass house containing full sized trees, tropical plants, and free roaming butterfly swarms. And a bar. The bar was a fancy white tablecloth sort of place, but had no distinct walls or roof and just merged somehow with the larger tropical forest space. A delight. The world contains magic. I’ve been back on these shores for a few years and though we have our own share of beauty and wonder over here in the states, I’ll never manage to take such shots as I got effortlessly with my camera in Venice. It’s just the way it works. But now I’m trying the old tourist not tourist thing again; taking my beloved motorbike Roxy on an early spring road trip down the coast on Highway 101, Highway 1, and back up again. I’m staying in small towns and cheap motels for the week, getting my work done, and then riding the bike through amazing terrain on the weekends.

And you know it still works? I spent my first week in Gold Beach, OR. If you’re driving down the coast on a road trip and stay in Gold Beach, it’s because you got tired and had to stop. In the morning of course you head on: The redwoods beckon. Crater Lake beckons. San Francisco beckons. I stayed in a motel in Gold Beach for a whole week. Every night the motel lot was full, but every morning by 11 it was empty again. Just Roxy sitting there gloriously while I wrote unit tests. I came to recognize the motel staff, learned where the homeless camps in town were, saw some amazing sunsets on clear days and on other days watched the fog roll over the town like ragged clumps of polyfill drifting along in zero gravity.

The work days in Gold Beach were perhaps less scenic than the ones I spent in European capitals, but when the weekend came around and I headed south again it was through such amazing country. Like the Del Norte redwoods, just south of Crescent City. I knew there were parks worth visiting in northern California, but I hadn’t done any research. Highway 101 just dives right into the Del Norte redwoods. Mile after mile of old growth giants, unimaginably large, and the forest canopy - there is just so much more of it for trees of this size! The roads through this forest are steep and twisting so you can almost imagine that you are a bird flying through as you dive and rise in a world where scale and proportion have just gone crazy. The sense of involvement in your surroundings is more pronounced on a motorbike, but also the danger: how do you not just fall off your bike? How can you take it all in at 55mph? I barely made it, crying out at the grandeur but then forcing myself to pay attention as the yellow road signs loomed and the semis overtook. The experience was one of unparalleled naked wonder. If I had expected it I couldn’t have expected it, and I didn’t expect it.

People have waxed philosophical about motorbikes before and it’s all a bunch of pretentious nonsense and I won’t give in to the temptation. But riding a motorcycle is like life. I think for me the heart of the thing is that the riding itself is all consuming, it takes real attention and work. You see amazing stuff but you miss stuff that you don’t want to miss. You want to go back but you can’t, or maybe you just don’t. And something unexpected happens and you almost die but then it all works out… Then you are freezing your ass off and then you are too hot and man you need to pee but where? All in an hour. It’s absurd and completely pointless. A speed run version of our whole lives.

Why bother? Couldn’t you just stay home and immerse yourself in a VR simulation? Then you could go anywhere, even fictional places, instantly. If you wanted the thrill of danger you could have an assistant fire a partially loaded revolver at your head every now and then. Well? No! That it is actually happening to you matters. That the world is real and there are no assurances and maybe the gun isn’t loaded or maybe there is a round in every chamber and will any of a million things that could go wrong actually go wrong? Will the spinning metal contraption between your legs continue to create a series of perfectly timed explosions thousands of times a minute? And while you dwell on those concerns, an ancient redwood picks that moment to collapse over the road seemingly in slow motion and it’s so real it looks fake. And the crack of the trunk is so loud it hurts your ears and then the smell of acres of freshly crushed redwood needles rush into your nose and you think how lovely is that smell instead of “I should hit the brakes” and there is suddenly a giant tree blocking the road and you smash into it and die. It’s all so detailed, so specific, so embodied. You could simulate that exact experience, maybe? But no simulation could mix the endless stretches of boredom punctuated by wild, unexpected wonders that is our waking life. Say what you will about reality, but it is surprising, and it is real.

I took the weekend to drive through the Lost Coast and get down to Fort Bragg, CA. I didn’t hit a redwood tree and mostly stayed on my bike. I did crash one time at around 10mph on what the locals call the Wildcat and you can’t say they didn’t warn me because a guy named Kent literally did. He pointed to the spot where I actually crashed when I asked him where to be careful. I credit his warning with the crash happening at 10mph, not 20 or 30. My jacket got a small tear and Roxy’s left side valve cover guard got a good scratching. Otherwise I just got back on and we kept going. The road was worth it, a lonely stretch dropping by way of hairpin turns (with the wrong camber and no guardrail) down what amounted to grass covered cliffs. As the road dropped down it had unbroken views out over the open Mattole valley and of the ocean there at California’s westernmost elbow (Cape Mendocino). I saw so much passing through that forgotten terrain - the abandoned pot farms, the guy with face tattoos giving me fist bumps as I rode by - every mile of the trip in all of its specificity made the world bigger for me. And on a day when a worse crash might have taken me out, the motel parking lot at the end of the day felt like a safe port after a storm.

In Fort Bragg the place I stayed proclaimed that you can hike to the Pygmy Forest right from your door. So that was the local Eiffel Tower. One evening after work I took the advice and hiked up away from the ocean. A poster in my room explained it: every now and then tectonic forces pushed the earth up all at once, moving the wave-eroded face of the shore up about 100ft. This happened again and again every 100,000 years, so as you walk up the hillside each plateau is another 100ft and 100,000 years. The Pygmy Forest is found in the part of the plateau with miserable wet acidic soil over iron rich rocky substrate. The plants are all suffering and stunted and the signs tell you how wonderful it is. When I got there it was sunset and the light was lovely and the frogs were singing. But it wasn’t that lovely. I had built up my expectations and, faced with the reality of it, the Pygmy Forest just didn’t seem like a big deal.

Roxy is an air cooled BMW (often called “airheads” because the cylinder heads stick way out left and right so they cool in the wind). The lineage of this bike design goes back to 1923, with the R23. It was BMW’s first vehicle (they started out making aircraft engines). All of the key elements of Roxy are also present and located in the same place on that ancient bike. On the R23 and Roxy (an R100/7) the parts of the engine that coordinate air intake and exhaust are pretty noisy and the bikes are sometimes compared to a sewing machine. Some say: “A tappy valve is a happy valve” and “Loud valves save lives” (That last one is an in-joke on Harley owners). I noticed that Roxy’s right side valves were being a bit noisier than I liked, and though I knew they should be loud it bothered me anyway. Since I had my tools with me I adjusted the valves there in Fort Bragg. Having changed something about the air intake I also adjusted the carburetors. These changes gave me a zippier, notably more powerful bike (and worse mileage). Almost a thousand miles into the trip and she still had surprises for me.

Carburetors (carbs) used to be ubiquitous in cars. My Mom talked about how she’d notice her VW bug was running rough and adjust the idle fuel/air mixture screw. That’s not a level of involvement anyone’s mom has with her car these days. Instead if you have a car you probably have computer controlled fuel injection. It’s easy to understand computer controlled fuel injection: a computer tracks how fast the engine is going, how much of the fuel going into the engine is getting burned, how fast the driver wants to go, and then uses an algorithm to decide when and how much fuel to spray into the engine the next time around. The carb is a bit more surprising. It manages to make those calculations based on its shape. When the piston moves down the cylinder it sucks air in, and that air is sucked through the carb. The carb has a baffle to control how much air makes it in (this is how the driver asks to go faster…), and the air goes through various passages with small holes and a pool of gas gets drawn up into the holes and mixes with the air and just the right amount of fuel and air is available in the piston to go boom the next time around. Most of the time.

This makes a carburetor an analog computer. Analog computers compute the answer to something without first abstracting it and representing it via a conceptual model. The classic example of an analog computer is one that answers the question “what is the shortest path on roads between point A and B”. This may not seem like a hard problem in the age of Google Maps, but they’ve done very clever things to reduce the scope of the problem. They probably don’t know if they’ve really found the best route, and even with their vast array of computers it can take some seconds to find long or unusual paths. An analog approach always responds instantly, no matter how complex the road network. The problem is the setup: you represent the road network with a bunch of strings, each string the length of some road and you tie the strings together at the right spot to represent road intersections. Then you pick the two points you want to travel between and pull them away from each other. The tight strings are the shortest route.

If that original BMW R23 had software (never mind there were no computers then) the programs would not be useful to Roxy. Whatever inputs and outputs they expected would not exist. Their exacting calculations would have been just that - exact for exactly one case. But in fact I could get either bike to run with the other’s carbs using some duct tape or other such affordance. They wouldn’t run well of course, but that gradual failure springs from their analog nature, their in-this-world reality. All of that extra detail in their structure has its uses. The string from that analog route planner can also be used as actual string. How up to date does your phone need to be to run Google Maps? The abstraction is eternal in the sense that it is an idea, but it is only one unchanging idea that is left behind at the first change in the real world. Consider that we can still read cuneiform tablets from the dawn of human writing, but struggle to preserve video games from the 90s.

“The ship of Theseus” is an idea proposed by Plutarch, meant to represent how things in the real world maintain an identity even as their parts change. The story goes that the people of Athens kept the ship of their former king and hero Theseus, repairing it over the many long years so that eventually no part of the original boat remained, yet everyone agreed it was still the ship of Theseus. A related idea from an even earlier Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, is often stated as “you can’t cross the same river twice” (maybe you can in the ship of Theseus?). I think we often take the saying as “you can’t go back again” or some other meditation on the arrow of time, but Heraclitus meant something closer to Plutarch: what of the river that you saw a minute ago remains now? Surely every part of it has changed? Or to state it for things other than rivers: You can never look at the same friend twice. You never pull a fuel air mixture through a carburetor the same way twice.

After Fort Bragg I headed north again. I had a long day which got me up to Florence, OR. Then the next day I continued on to Astoria, OR. In the parking lot of the motel in Florence I was next to a Tesla. I was still fiddling with my carbs, trying to perfect the new balance after my work on the valves in Fort Bragg, trying to keep the extra power but get back some mileage. The Tesla owner was bummed to find out the charger in his spot didn’t work. I observed how funny we were as a pair, me working on my ancient machine and him with the cutting edge. He was grumpy: I think he thought I was trying to talk politics or something, a problem I’m sure Tesla owners are tired of dealing with by now. But I noticed he couldn’t reach the other charger and needed to be in my spot. I rolled the bike out of the way for him and we were more friendly after that. Which is good, because after the long ride from the day before Roxy smoked more than usual on startup. A cloud drifted over the Tesla. I felt guilty. EVs are much cleaner than fuel injected vehicles, and fuel injected vehicles much cleaner than carb’d ones. If everyone drove old motorbikes the air would be a lot worse than it is.

But Roxy is 50 years old! Still going strong. Imagine trying to get a 50 year old EV to work. What would power the smart screen? What kind of charger dongle would it use? What sort of batteries would replace the certainly dead originals? Would it be possible to plug in the old models to the new chargers along the way? Teslas became reliable about 9 years after they were released, with the model S circa 2017. That model has been discontinued now, about 9 years after that. They made Studebakers for about 55 years, and though I doubt many are still on the road, parts are probably equally scarce for Tesla roadsters and Studebakers. Also Studebakers don’t have any software to install and you can still fill them up at the pump. You know that box full of old cell phones and various wall warts and usb cables you’ve got tucked away in the closet? What does that look like on the scale of an auto wrecking yard? These abstractions make things better in the short term. They can be perfect for a given purpose at a given time, but they also make everything so brittle, so temporary. The Tesla of Theseus would be an abandoned hunk of junk dumped on the outskirts of Athens while Theseus was still king.

On the way back up to Astoria I hit rain, pretty heavy rain, and I didn’t have much choice but to press on. There was a leak that let water into the area where the electronic ignition detects the right time to make a spark. The ground connection there passes from the board through its mounting screws to the aluminum engine block. Enough aluminum oxide built up there that the connection became weak, and finally when the water got in, the module just stopped working and Roxy came to a stop, nearly to Astoria and my bed for the night, just north of Wild Daffodil Way on the side of Highway 101. At the time I suspected water in the fuel (because of the rain, and the way it failed gradually… running better for a while at least at higher RPMs). When I found that wasn’t the problem I just got a tow to the motel in Astoria where I eventually fixed it properly by using a bit of sandpaper to clean off the aluminum oxide. Rust never sleeps.

It took the tow truck more than an hour to get to me. As I waited I walked down Wild Daffodil Way to get away from the relentless Sunday afternoon traffic along 101. The space along the highway and along Wild Daffodil Way was a sort of shallow swamp covered by low stubby deciduous trees. Below the tiny tree canopy, ducks swam in the water and the first spring flowers bloomed on tussocks covered with plants that could survive in this dim, wet, nutrient poor environment on the side of the road. I had nothing but time, didn’t know when the waiting would end, and so I stared into this miniature water world endlessly, this pygmy forest overlooked by everyone. It felt like my secret. No signs proclaimed its wonderful attributes. When I got to the motel that night I kept thinking back to that spot. I could see it with my eyes open. Something about the cars going noisily by at 60mph, unable to see under the canopy to the beauty there, haunted me. It felt eternal in a way that the Fort Bragg Pygmy Forest with all the posters and signs didn’t. This one is here even though it is ignored. It’ll probably be like that forever.

We won’t be anything forever, of course. You can shorten the time you have above ground by doing something stupid like riding a motorbike around, but the time is short either way. They managed to make the ship of Theseus new for centuries but our own bodies only manage perfect replacement up until we are 12 years old or so. Then the parts get worse and worse, and then when you are 80 or so they get worse real fast. A bad end certainly awaits. It’s not a cheerful thought and I think the abstractions of the VR goggles are appealing. Those abstractions are evergreen. Your online character is forever. There are plenty of zombie Facebook accounts, the account owners long since worm eaten, where they still appear to be smiling, still have “friends” and “likes”, still get birthday wishes from the somewhat more distant friends who never got the news.

It’s hard to take. I feel like I get little wins against this unfeeling doom when I fix Roxy up. When I sanded away that rust and she started again, she at least got a little younger. She at least could live forever. The airhead of Theseus. There have been a few credible attempts at constructing a philosophy that supports us in the face of mortality. I’m not counting Christianity (Dying in this place is how you get to some next place… What is this, an elaborate egg? And why would existence be more meaningful in the next place?). Buddhism seems to be onto something with regard to expectation and desire being the cause of suffering. A visit to the Eiffel tower is probably full of suffering for most tourists, but that one who got there not knowing about it at all had a great time. “Dude, what is THAT thing?” Expectations are a bit like our online personas: they are abstractions disconnected from the real world. “I imagine I will have a great time at the Eiffel Tower”. Then you get there and find that your abstraction was brittle and fell out of step with the much more complex real world, where there are long lines and high winds and the trash is flying through the air everywhere because the local garbage collectors are on strike. Desire too: “You know I wish that I had Jesse's girl…she's lovin' him with that body, I just know it.” In reality, I bet Jesse’s girl is real high maintenance.

The Buddhists profess that this life is full of suffering and you are born again and again until you learn how to escape suffering and then you can die for the last time and so be enlightened. Dark! Maybe those plants in the pygmy forests are almost through their suffering and after this stint they won’t have to do it anymore. Suffering is a key concept for the Buddhists and they use an old word for it, duḥkha, which means a wheel that isn’t round so it rolls badly. I’m not the first to wax philosophical about a vehicle.

By far the most convincing view I’ve encountered is the existentialist view: you come to be, and then become aware of the world, and you are stuck with it until you once again cease to be aware of it. It’s not clear why this is happening, or what you should do. You might just decide to end it, and you can, but the world is too complex to predict: how else will you find out what happens next but to stick around? That seems right to me - that the value of living life springs from the surprising complexity of reality itself.