Guy

How to Equip a Bicycle in All Latitudes and Climates

/ Texts, Transportation

Woman mounting a bicycle

One day Uncle Édouard got the brilliant idea of going up to the Genitron office to sound out the possibility of a little job for me. He had another reason, he wanted to consult him about his bicycle pump . . . He'd known de Pereires a long time, since the publication of his seventy-second handbook, the one that people still read more than any of the others, that was most widely distributed all over the world and had done the most for his reputation, his fame: How to equip a bicycle in all latitudes and climates for the sum of seventeen francs ninety-five, including all accessories and nickel-plated parts. At the time of which I am speaking this little manual published by the specialized firm of Berdouillon and Malarmée, on the Quai des Augustins, was in its three-hundredth printing! . . . Today it is hard to conceive of the enthusiasm, the general craze that this piddling, insignificant work aroused when it came out . . . But around 1900 How to Equip a Bicycle by Courtail-Martin des Pereires was a kind of catchism for the neophyte cyclist, his bedside reading, his Bible . . . Still, Courtail never ceased to be shrewdly self-critical. A little thing like that didn't turn his head. Naturally his rising fame brought him bigger and bigger mountains of mail, more visitors, more tenacious pests, extra work, and more acrimonious controversies . . . Very little pleasure . . . People came to consult him from Greenwich and Valparaiso, from Colombo and Blankenberghe, on the various problems connected with the "oblique" or "flexible" saddle . . . how to avoid strain on the ball bearings . . . how to grease the axles . . . the best hydrous mixture for rust-proofing the handlebars . . . He was famous all right, but the fame he got out of bicycles stuck in his craw. In the last thirty years he had scattered his booklets like seeds throughout the world, he had written piles of handbooks that were really a good deal more worthwhile, digests and explanations of real value and stature . . . In the course of his career he had explained just about everything . . . the fanciest and most complex of theories, the wildest imaginings of physics and chemistry, the budding science of radio-polarity . . . sidereal photography . . . He'd written about them all, some more, some less. It gave him a profound feeling of disillusionment, real melancholy, a depressing kind of amazement to see himself honored, adulated, glorified for the stuff he had written about inner tubes and freewheeling . . . In the first place he personally detested bicycles . . . He'd never ridden one, he'd never learned how . . . And on the mechanical side he was even worse . . . He'd never have been able to take off a wheel, not to mention the chain . . . He couldn't do anything with his hands except on the horizontal bar and the trapeze . . . Actually he was the world's worst butterfingers, worse than twelve elephants . . . Just trying to drive a nail in he'd mash at least two of his fingers, he'd make hash of his thumb, it was a massacre the minute he touched a hammer. I won't even mention pliers, he'd have ripped out the wall, the ceiling, wrecked the whole room . . . There wouldn't have been anything left . . . He didn't have two cents' worth of patience, his thoughts moved too fast and too far, they were too intense, too deep . . . The resistance of matter gave him an epileptic fit . . . The result was wreckage . . . He could tackle a problem in theory . . . But when it came to practice, all he could do on his own was swing dumbbells in the back room . . . or on Sunday climb into the basket and shout "Let her go" . . . and roll up in a ball to land when he was through . . . Whenever he tried to do any tinkering with his own fingers, it ended in disaster. He couldn't even move anything without dropping it or upsetting it . . . or getting it in his eye . . . You can't be an expert at everything . . . You've got to resign yourself . . .

-- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, tr. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions, 1966), 331-33.

A Kink in the San Andreas Fault

/ California

San Gabriel Mountains

The continuous tectonic front is where the North American and Pacific Plates are sliding past each other -- where Bakersfield moves toward Mexico City while Burbank heads for Alaska. Between Bakersfield and Burbank like the San Gabriel Mountains. With the San Bernardino Mountains east of them, they trend east-west, forming a kink in the coastal ranges that come down from San Francisco and go on to Baja California. The kink conforms to a bend in the San Andreas Fault, which runs along the inland base of the mountains. The kink looks like this: 

        \
         \
          \_____
                 \
                  \
                   \

It could be a tiptoeing h. It resembles a prize-winning chair. Los Angeles is like a wad of gum stuck to the bottom of the chair. The mountains are one continuous system, but its segments are variously named. The upper stretch is called the Coast Ranges. The lower leg is called the Peninsular Ranges. The kink is called the Transverse Ranges.

My hieroglyph represents, of course, not only the mountains but the flanking San Andreas Fault, which comes from the Gulf of California, bends left around Los Angeles, then goes on to San Francisco and north below the sea. . . . The East Pacific Rise, the ocean-basin spreading center away from which the Pacific Plate and other plates are moving, sinuously makes its way from the latitude of Tierra del Fuego all the way north to Mexico, where it enters the Gulf of California. The East Pacific Rise has splintered Mexico and carried Baja California away from the mainland -- much as the Carlsberg Ridge has cracked open the deserts of Afro-Arabia and made the Red Sea. Baja is not moving due west, as one might guess from a glance at a map, but north by northwest, with the rest of the Pacific Plate. The cumulative power of this northward motion presses on the kink in the San Andreas, helping the mountains rise.

That much has long seemed obvious: as the two sides of the San Andreas slide by each other, they compress the landscape at the kink. It has been considerably less obvious that a compressional force accompanies the great fault wherever it goes. In the past, the building of the Coast Ranges and the Peninsular Ranges was in no way attributed to the San Andreas Fault. A paper published in Science in November, 1987 -- and signed by enough geologists to make a quorum at the Rose Bowl -- offers evidence that the San Andreas has folded its flanking country, much as a moving boat crossing calm waters will send off lateral waves. The great compression at the kink is withal the most intense. The Coast Ranges and the Peninsular Ranges are generally smaller than the Transverse Ranges. The San Gabriels are being compressed about a tenth of an inch a year.

Why the kink is there in the first place is "not well understood." Just to the northeast, though, in the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada, the earth's mantle is close, the earth's crust is thin and stretching. In hte past few million years, the geographic coordinates of Reno and Salt Lake -- at the western and eastern extremes of the Great Basin -- have moved apart sixty miles. This large new subdivision of the regional tectonics is in every way as entrancing as it is enigmatic. Almost all of California may be headed out to sea. Already, the east-west stretching of the Great Basin has put Reno west of Los Angeles, and it may be what has bent the San Andreas Fault.

-- John McPhee, "Los Angeles against the Mountains," in idem., The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989), 226-8.

Torn Limb from Limb for Pickles

/ Food, Texts

Jar of pickles

None of the brats came back from Easter vacation. There was nobody left at Meanwell but Jongkind and me. The joint was a desert.

To save on housework they closed off a whole floor. The furniture had gone, they sold it piece by piece, first the chairs, then the tables, the two cupboards, and even the beds. There was nothing left but our two beds. They were really liquidating . . . There was more to eat though . . . Quantities of jam . . . all we wanted . . . we could take seconds on pudding . . . The food was plentiful, what a change . . . that was really something new . . . Nora did the heavy work, but she prettied up all the same. At the table she was perfectly charming, almost playful . . .

The old geezer didn't hang around long, he'd fill up in a hurry and start off again on his tricycle. Jongkind kept the conversation going, all by himself. "No trouble!" And he'd learned another word: "No fear!" He was proud of that, it made him jump with joy. He never stopped saying it. "Ferdinand! No Fear!" he kept saying to me between mouthfuls.

Outside I didn't like to be noticed . . . I gave him a few kicks in the ass . . . He got the drift, he left me alone . . . As a reward I gave him pickles. I always took a supply with me, my pockets were full of them . . . They were his favorite delicacy, that way I made him behave . . . He'd let himself be torn limb from limb for pickles . . .

-- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, tr. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions, 1966), 254-55.