Coefficient of Fiction

It began as a wiggle, an inkling of looseness, an ineluctable but unspoken desire to escape. Then a liberating crash in the right place, followed by the deadly rattle of bumpy pavement, conspired to make the final push for freedom. Now my bike’s left bar end shifter had fallen out of the bar, dangling pitifully, hanging on by only the cable it was supposed to control. Worse, the parts that were supposed to hold it in place were nowhere to be seen. They must have rolled into a gutter by now. The remaining half a shifter taunted me, never staying in place, like a skeleton jester who keeps detaching its skull, just to scare the children.

So, on Saturday, I went to the San Francisco Bike Kitchen with hope, and I came out with a successfully repaired bar end shifter.

Here’s what bar end shifters look like. The cylindrical piece (the post) goes into the bar end. It’s an expansion plug: the two silver pieces are around a screw that goes into the black piece. Tightening this screw pushes the pieces up until they have nowhere to go except out, which is what normally holds the shifter in place. Apparently my shifter’s screw had been several turns too loose; had I understood this at the time, I could have fixed it without, say, waiting for it to fall out entirely. But now I was in a pinch, because Shimano doesn’t want to sell you just the expansion plugs, or even a single shifter; nay, bar end shifters come only in pairs.

It was my first trip to the Bike Kitchen that went beyond standing outside, gawking in wonder. I went inside to ask if I could look for random parts that might be able to be hacked together. Sure enough, there were lots of bins of random parts, but about all I managed to do was find a matching diameter screw for the screw hole. A bin labeled “bar end shifters” sadly only contained one thing; it like an incompatible expansion plug-type piece.

It was incredibly lucky that the next Bike Kitchen volunteer who asked me if I needed help was the right person. He’d actually picked up a stray bar end shifter off the street last week! Having no use for it, he’d brought it in to the Kitchen. It did take us about 10 minutes to find. It was exactly the right size.

I began to disassemble the half a shifter I had. In the picture, what looks like it might be a flat screw head is in fact a screw. It goes into a little plug on the underside, which holds in place the plainly visible lever and a more invisible piece, resembling a washer, square on one side and circular on the other. These 4 parts I set aside.

Next, I took the expansion plugs and screw from the spare shifter. The screw had a hex head, but on the tail end. It took me a moment to understand why. The head holds the plugs in place; the tail, which goes into the shifter body, is the only exposed part (through the screw hole in the shifter body) once the shifter is inserted into the handlebar. So it has to be tightened from that side of the screw.

It was pretty straightforward to put back together. Insert the shifter post into the handlebar; tighten it; put the rest of the shifter back together. Unfortunately, there was a semi-literal snag in the plan, as the square-circular washer only wanted to orient itself in one particular way on both sides, requiring the lever to be impossibly high up, pulling too much tension in the cable. So we had to take the cable off the derailleur to get it to work.

Then, to restore the cable, we had the help of such tools as a cable tensioner, useful for pulling on the cable with more grip than human fingers provide. But we made a few incorrect attempts before a more experienced mechanic told us how we were doing it wrong. One must take the slack out of the cable where it’s loosest, which at least for the front derailleur is in the lowest gear. Otherwise, you could end up with zero tension in a looser state, which is hardly effective. As we put the cable back into the groove from whence it came, I could see it beginning to fray.

I emerged from the Bike Kitchen safer, by a range of gears previously rendered inaccessible, older, by an hour and a half, and wiser, by a few fewer black boxes I no longer didn’t understand.

Unfortunately, the security of HTTPS is only as strong as the practices of the least trustworthy/competent CA.

–The EFF SSL Observatory

In the wake of DigiNotar’s extreme incompetence at managing a compromise, in which fake SSL certificates were created and used in man-in-the-middle attacks in Iran, we’ve discovered this truth anew, but CAs issuing certificates that they shouldn’t is not a new problem.

The underlying problem is: Whom do you trust?

SSL’s identity is based on delegation. You can trust a website is really google.com if the certificate it presents is signed by someone you trust. And whom do you trust? You trust everybody in your root store. As long as it’s signed by one of them, no problem!

On my Mac, there are 154 certificates in my System Roots > Certificates list. Which one gets the honor? Which ones?

The problem is there’s no affordance for Google to say that google.com’s real certificate is signed by Thawte, not DigiNotar. This is why one weak link in the CA list can bring the entire house of cards crashing down.

SSH’s identity, on the other hand, is entirely different, and relies on consistency, not delegation. You can trust a server is really coeffiction.net if it presents the same host key you saw last time. Whom do you trust the first time? In practice, you blindly answer ‘yes’ when SSH asks you if you want to connect to the unknown server and hope for the best.

As long as a network attacker cannot always intercept your traffic, you will eventually notice if you have suffered a man-in-the-middle attack. Contrast this to SSL, where if suddenly the certificate for google.com is completely different from what it used to be, as long as it’s signed by some CA, it’s all peachy.

One recourse I propose is to adopt SSH-like memory for SSL certificates. It’s too hard to tax the human brain, so let the browser do the work instead. Remember what certificate you saw the last time you saw google.com. If that certificate hasn’t expired, but the new certificate is different, something is suspicious, and you should warn the user. I’d expect this could be implemented even as a browser extension (though Chrome’s extension APIs do not yet support the necessary functionality).

To know how well this approach would work, we’d have to understand how often SSL certificates change in the wild. The SSL Observatory appears to have snapshots from 2 dates. Are there other sources of such data?

This last weekend I went for a bike trip in Sonoma County with my friend Phil Sung, Phil’s friends Sue-Ting Chene and Ed Lee, and Ed’s friend Erik Volkman visiting from Illinois. It turned into an epic, and I mean it in terms of the tribulations of Odysseus. We’ll see elements of winds blowing us off-course, angry sea gods, and even people whose hospitality keeps us separated from our friends. No giants were slain, no witches turned us into animals, and most importantly no long years passed before our safe return; but the rest is close enough.

The original plan was to stay two nights at the Guerneville Lodge, with a longer ride on Saturday and a shorter one on Sunday. Then we could return to Ithaca the Bay Area. Not everything turned out as planned…

My preparations began Wednesday, when I bought a Zimbale saddlebag from Galloping Bicycles so I could carry touring loads. It bears an uncanny similarity to a Carradice bag, except that it’s not perpetually out of stock. I also got Viva saddlebag loops for saddle attachment points for the straps. I had it assembled by nightfall.

On Thursday, to test out my arrangement, because I had an early interview, I took the train down to Millbrae and rode to work from there, with a full load: a 15″ MacBook Pro that I managed to fit into it somehow. This test of the bag succeeded, though it revealed a bit of “spreading under load” as Pardo described.

Friday was rainy, so I loaded my bag with my worldly possessions for the weekend and my bike onto the Google shuttle. Halfway to work, I realized I’d forgotten my cycling shorts. I also knew by this point that the weather report was looking grim, and from just 10 minutes of collecting road grime on wet roads Thursday night, I recognized the utility of full fenders. So I had now two excuses to go to the REI across the 101 from Google. They were kind enough to let me install the fenders there, borrowing their tools. Back at Google, Phil was ready to go with the van, which was already full of 4 bikes, but fit a 5th comfortably. We drove down to Mozilla to pick up Ed, Sue, and Erik, all of whom seemed to have a lot more luggage with them; in Erik’s case, he had just arrived from the airport, and as a late addition to our party, he wouldn’t have a bed to sleep on, so we had a sleeping bag for him too. (For my part, I hadn’t really thought through the implications of having a base at a hotel, so all I packed fit in my saddlebag.)

The rain seemed to yield somewhat as we made our way north. By the time we stopped in Santa Rosa for dinner at a Thai place, it wasn’t raining at all. Here I was able to dispense the advice that if a dish has “on fire” in its name, and you fear spicy food, it might just not be for you. But rain seemed to return as we made the unpleasant walk through a mall parking structure to reach the local board games store. Many games of Magic and one game of Smash Brothers in the gaming table space (without which no games store is complete) were the reason they stayed open late, till 11pm. Sue and Ed ended up acquiring Acquire, to add something distinct to their home collection.

As we drove west to Guerneville, Sue remarked she was not going to ride in the rain, with an air of finality about it. Fortunately, the rest of us observed, it didn’t seem to be raining right then, and if the weather held up till the next day, she wouldn’t have to sit out. I think she was not the only one apprehensive about riding in the rain all day, but she was the only one comfortable enough with her fears to express them. At the lodge, we checked into our 2 rooms, with a single bed in each, and Erik set up his sleeping bag on the floor. Then three of us visited the hot tub, five of us visited the extremely wooden library and played a game of Acquire, four of us observed the dismal lack of cell phone coverage (the exception had Verizon), and then five of us went to bed. The blankets were rather thin, the night was chilly, and I’d neglected to bring pajamas. In the morning we all discovered that neither room’s occupants had figured out to turn the heat on until morning.

Now it was looking dry enough, so we’d do the King Ridge ride. The Safeway down the road conveniently provided breakfast and lunch for us. Phil drove us out 8 miles to the starting point, at Duncans Mills; occasional spatters of rain gave us some pause. A passing driver wondered whether we were part of the larger mob of cyclists he’d seen earlier in the area, but we never found any evidence of such. But as we reassembled our bikes at the parking lot, water stayed away from us. Phil and Ed both had Carradice bagmen to support their Carradice bags; between us, the 3 bags were the totality of our luggage. It was there we learned that Santhosh’s borrowed bike was way, way too small for Erik, so he rode Ed’s bike and Ed rode Santhosh’s. Sue was committed, too. By about 10, we had done all the pedal-swapping, food-packing, bag-attaching, and tire-inflating we deemed necessary.

And we were off! And portentously it began to rain slightly, but the first miles to Cazadero along a swollen Austin Creek were well-sheltered. Soon the path we were taking looked very familiar to me: back in October, in hot sunny weather, I had ridden Levi’s King Ridge Gran Fondo along much of the same route for the day. As the day went by, I would recognize places: the Cazadero general store, the site of a rest stop where I changed a flat on that century ride; the steep gradients of King’s Ridge, the place where I’ve never seen more cyclists walking their bikes; the end of King’s Ridge, a field reduced from its onetime glory of a lunch stop swarming with hundreds of hungry cyclists to a lone tree providing meager shelter from the wind. This time, the clouds never stayed far from view, although the rain was just a passing fad to experience in the short downhill stretches between the dry tree-covered climbs.

How about a note on equipment? I was actually wearing nearly everything I’d brought with me: a Firefox jersey, a Craft synthetic fleece to keep me warm, a synthetic longsleeved piece of Google schwag on top, and a vintage Mathcounts 1999 “Virginia Champion” shell jacket for rain/wind. I didn’t have legwarmers. During the climbiest parts of King’s Ridge, when it was nice enough not to rain on us, I took some of these off, but wore them for the remainder. Phil wore 5 or 6 layers, it seemed. Sue and Ed somehow hadn’t needed Phil’s advice and had either cotton gear or not enough layers, and would find themselves cold; I ended up lending Sue my armwarmers, which I wasn’t using. Erik only had a jersey and a thick fleece, but he seemed to turn out mostly okay, though by the end of the day he was colder than I.

I climbed the fastest in our group, which meant that at regroups I waited the longest, and lost the most body heat, necessitating an effort to warm up again, with the net result of being in front all the time. So I experienced most of King Ridge in solitude, with only the cows and horses on the side of the road to stare at me unnervingly. It was good to see everyone making decent time, though. Despite the intermittent rain, I found it more enjoyable than the stark heat of the last time I’d been up there. The views were nice too — the world having changed from brown to green since my last visit — as the clouds stayed above the ridgelines. It got windier as the slope became exposed, until we reached the end of the road.

Here we had a choice: take the Hauser Bridge Rd to the left, plunging across cattle grates and a slippery metal bridge, up another climb, and down the awfully steep Meyer Grade; or take Tin Barn Rd to the right, to Stewarts Point. The comical choices were laid out by the helpful signs: 6 miles of narrow winding road to the left, 16 miles of it back the way we came, or… no advisories at all, to the right. We headed toward Stewarts Point, where a grocery store would await, and here we left the route of the Gran Fondo. Not too far down, we found a grove by the road where the trees kept out both the light rain and blustery wind, and we stopped for our first lunch of the day, squirting our complimentary mustard and mayonnaise packets into our prepackaged Safeway sandwiches. Even after we’d been riding for hours, the sandwiches were still quite difficult to get down, a testament to their quality or lack thereof. (However, Erik, our designated vegetarian, seemed to have no trouble with his egg salad sandwich.)

This road was ups and downs, but straightforward. It came to a T at the road between Stewarts Point and Skaggs Springs (helpfully marked as an emergency evacuation route), with a few rustic houses nestled around it, and the smell of gunpowder in the air. It wasn’t rainy but still cold enough that I sometimes had to curl my fingers, which looked purple from time to time, possibly from the color of the gloves leaching out. I saw the only other cyclist all day, going west. Later, I would see her climbing back. It was here that we also saw the first sign of trouble; Santhosh’s bike’s derailleur had eaten itself while crossing a cattle grate, and Phil had to go ahead to meet up with us, borrow a chain tool from Erik, and go back 2 miles to save Ed. Meanwhile, the rest of us went ahead to the Stewarts Point store.

At this junction, Erik seemed to disbelieve that we were still at over 1000 feet in elevation. However, the plunge was steep (and indeed a “narrow winding road 4 miles” sign was posted). My brake pads were definitely disintegrating, and the roads were still quite wet. Eventually I realized it meant I should not be taking things slowly, but rather, I should be going as fast as possible. “As possible”, of course, includes considerations for staying in control. It was about 3pm when I got to the store, seeing the coast at last. The whitecaps on the waves below looked remarkably uninviting, but at least it wasn’t raining.

Sometimes a really profound discovery may shake you, as out of sleep. At Stewarts Point we profoundly discovered indoor heating, as well as hot tea. The store itself, apparently a family operation, was remarkable, seemingly the only evidence of human population for miles around. Neighbors (from miles away, of course) came by for their grocery needs with warm greetings, and a few travellers in cars stopped for food and gas. The best part was that because it was in California, even in a place this remote, it had the Californian aesthetic. Loosely put: California is fresh; most of America is processed.

Since the store had a phone, we figured we might as well try to call Ed, the only one with any hope of cell reception, but it was to no avail. Since the store had a water tap, the first water since Cazadero, we filled up. Then we sat down to have our second lunch, consisting of much tastier sandwiches for the meat-eaters and potato salad for Erik, plus some salty bags of chips. Here I discovered that Sue had only a cycling jersey and a rain jacket on. No wonder she was complaining about being cold! I dug out my unused armwarmers and gave them to her.

We’d just about run out of ways to entertain ourselves, like wondering whether Phil and Ed were smart enough to flag down a passing car if the field repairs didn’t work, when they at last came down the mountain, almost an hour later. Santhosh’s bike was converted to a single-speed, which meant that over the wildly varying terrain we covered, Ed had to walk in places. They too discovered the wonders of indoor heating, shelter from the wind and cold, hot drinks, and real food.

Despite our respite, we weren’t sure how to proceed. It was 27 miles to Jenner, plus another 3-4 miles inland to the car, by the locals’ estimate, and 3-4 hours by Phil’s estimate. Ed and Sue weren’t feeling great, in part due to their choice of clothing (cotton the heat-sucker); they would have loved to stay at the store, waiting for the rest of us to go ahead to the car and drive back to pick them up, but the store was closing at 6. So our general plan was to send the faster people ahead to get the car to come back for the slower ones. In theory it was a great idea, but our implementation left much to be desired:

• We had no cell phone reception, so no communication at a distance. Thanks for nothing, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon!
• Actually, Phil had the car key. He wasn’t going as fast as I and Erik.
• Our plan was subject to change based on how people felt. We didn’t have any designated stopping points or regroup points.
• In fact, the road turned out to be so desolate that there was pretty much no shelter from the rain. Luckily, there were some establishments in the Fort Ross area.
• Erik and I happened to have the room keys to our rooms in Guerneville. (This fact only surfaced later; we did not realize it at the time.)

Ominously, as we left Stewarts Point, the rain had begun in earnest, and we could sense the wind coming off the mountain was not out of the usual northwest, owing to the low-pressure system. It was also nearly 5pm, and with sunset before 7:30pm, suffice it to say our chances did not look promising.

Well, it was wet and windy. Very wet and very windy. I can’t really say that I’ve ridden in such conditions before, unless you count a 2-mile commute in Boston. We had left just in time to meet the brunt of the storm on the road, and gush was it happy to see us. We departed in waves as we were ready, Erik followed by me and Phil followed by Ed and Sue. The winds oscillated between crosswinds from land and crosswinds from the ocean, and it was slow going over the gently rolling terrain. Occasionally the road ventured a little into the forest and sheltered us from the wind somewhat. Soon, Erik was the only person I could see; we stayed together for a while, until I passed him. I ended up stopping after about 8 miles, in an indentation into the deep forest, and after 15 miles, around the bend of the last dipping curve across a streambed (I became able to recognize these well for their protection), for long enough to Erik to catch up.

At the last of these regroups, we paused with some concern for the rest of our group. Ed and Sue were certainly not going to make it to Jenner by dark. I’d kept an eye out for places where they could have stopped on the side of the road to wait for the van to rescue them, but they seemed scant. There was more than one place of lodging, though, including one at Timbercove Road (where our route sheet said we could go up an 18% grade for 2 miles, ha ha). With no sign of Phil either, we hoped he was wise enough to get a ride from a passing vehicle if needed. We at least set a plan to meet up at Jenner and to hope the others would do so as well, arriving by hook or crook.

Up until now, the road hadn’t been what I would call dangerous. The curves and gradient changes were gentle, but most importantly, we didn’t seem to remain at the cliff’s edge for long. That would change for the worse. The next 6 miles would make great material for back-in-the-day stories to tell to my grandchildren; by that time it will have suffered some embellishment. “Arrrr, that was the day I lost me friends to that road on the edge o’ hell. We rode through blasts of drivin’ rain to burn your face, howlin’ wind to pitch ya overboard into Davy Jones’s locker, and in parts, nay, we couldn’t ride, we walked, uphill both ways, and we liked it!” (Fine; we didn’t go both ways, and I may or may not talk like a pirate in my later life, but the rest is not made up.) I lost sight of everyone, and it was just me, the road, infrequent passing cars, the cliffs above, the water below, the gusting headwinds, the pelting rains. Eventually even the cars seemed to stop coming. The wind had shifted into a full-on headwind, and I struggled to stay upright. At least around some inside corners, a shoulder of mountain would block some of it, but as soon as I rounded the corner, it returned in force.

In the preceding miles, I had even felt a little warm glow from having brought just the right amount of clothing. Now, everything I wore was completely and hopelessly drenched. My lower back cried out in pain, and eventually I gave up trying to find a dry spot to stop to eat a Clif bar, taking a rest at “vista points” and turning my back instead of my front to the forces of nature. And yes, I found it very prudent to walk in those parts with no guardrail and an unyielding wind. That was definitely the longest hour of the day. My bike was fine, my body was fine, and I had plenty of food, so I had no doubt I’d make it to Jenner at least, but the sky only grew darker. As for my compatriots, I feared the worst. If it was this hard for me, would it be impossible for them?

Finally, when it was already twilight, I came upon a familiar sight: the Sonoma State Beach sign at the junction with Meyers Grade. From here, I knew the road ahead was (mostly) downhill, and my will strengthened. I had to get to town and find some aid for my friends, to make sure they could return alive. Who knew what kind of search-and-rescue parties could be summoned in these kind of remote lands? The road took sweeping descents at first, and then ascended somewhat. I stopped on the uphill side in almost exactly the spot where I’d had to stop for a break during the Gran Fondo, with a nice view over the beach and cove. That time, it was sunny, my legs were cramping, and dozens of cyclists passed me on the way up. This time, it was dark, still a little rainy (much better than before), I felt fine, and the road was completely empty. After the little bit of uphill, it was again mostly downhill into Jenner.

I didn’t realize it could still get any darker, but the last bit of light in the sky vanished as I saw the first sign of civilization, a yellow street lamp. Soon there was some kind of lodging place on the right, dark and brown and moody. I called out everyone’s name, but no familiar people or bicyclists were to be seen. Okay… the road continued downward, so I followed it. The next establishments I saw seemed to mark the end of Jenner — a gas station and another inn. Well, the gas station looked like the kind of place I could count on tired and hungry cyclists to stop at. I set my bike beside the building — in retrospect, perhaps not the most visible location from the road — and went inside.

Inside the store were two Indian gentlemen, brothers, looking at me. I explained to them how I was looking for some friends who were probably still behind me somewhere, and I was getting extremely worried, because it was totally dark outside and still raining and getting colder. One of them said, yes, my brother (gesturing at the other) just came from that direction in his truck and he saw them, they were together, just a few miles behind. Wow, that was good to hear! It was enough to put thoughts of emergency vehicles out of my head. Unfortunately, I think he told me what I wanted to hear, or he’d seen us far too far back, or something. They were content to let me shiver for a good 15 minutes or so inside, dripping water from every extremity, watching car headlights come from and go to the north, as I drank some Gatorade from their supply.

Not too long passed before I saw a single tinier light coming down the mountain. I ran out to wave it down. It was Erik! But only Erik. He too came inside and employed superior ideas for warming up, like hot drinks and a hot burrito. But though we were equally soaked, he looked much worse than I; he could barely hold onto his coffee without shaking it all over. The store owners were kind enough to let him sit directly in front of the heat lamp, which he did, shivering, for the next hour. Again, the brother who had been in the truck maintained that they were not more than a mile or two behind us, but his account was looking unreliable, as I stood watching, with fading hope, seeing no bicycle headlights. And they would have to close the gas station at 9pm and head home.

A few customers, locals who knew the owners and chatted with them, did come in during our recovery period. Around 8:50, a man driving a pickup actually offered us a ride in the Fort Ross direction, saying he knew from experience how much it sucks to be stranded, an experience we were certainly not pleased to be internalizing. Unfortunately that was the opposite direction for us, but he did do us the favor of keeping an eye out for our missing friends. He would call back to the gas station if he saw them. He did not call.

Now the gas station was closing up. The owners did offer us a ride to Duncans Mills, which was on their way home, but it wouldn’t help, since Phil had the car key, and who knew if he had already made it back somehow and whether the car would still be there? Somehow, we felt a duty to stay here and look out with hope upon hope for our friends coming down, even as the night grew longer and their chances of making it dwindled. With nowhere else to turn, we went up to the Jenner Inn, where the innkeeper was in the process of turning out the lights when we walked up.

She mentioned that she was closing up, as they closed at 9pm as well. But she must have taken enormous pity on us cold and miserable cyclists, bringing us indoors. When we asked if we could make a phone call, she began to hesitate, with a constraint on her mind, but quickly changed her answer to “yes”. We first tried to call Ed, but without luck. Then, somehow it occurred to me that we could call the Guerneville Lodge, especially since it seemed highly dubious that anyone would be sleeping in our rooms there tonight. In the paper phone book, we found its number and called. A woman answered. I said we were trying to reach our cyclist friends in our room numbers, and she said, right, I just got your message. What? So, they had managed to leave a message for us? Indeed, she told us, a female (presumably Sue) had called to say that they were all safe and on their way home. I quickly explained that we were the other half of the group, and in turn, we had a message for them, that we were at the Jenner Inn. At this point I guess we hadn’t thought it through, so we did not say we were committed to staying the night, but really, without room phones or working cell phones and with the inn closing up, how could they possibly find us? Nonetheless, we told the innkeeper, since we couldn’t wait in the lobby, that we’d just book a room and maybe not actually use it if they found us. She gave us a discount.

Around we went to a side building, leaving our bikes outside in a little gated space, and into a little room, which we learned the next day was the cheapest in the house. It had the bare comforts like a queen bed, a space heater, a TV, and some chairs and end tables. More importantly, it had a well-kept and spacious bathroom with a hot shower, which interestingly had a skylight. Erik went to shower immediately while I attempted without success to find the Weather Channel. Then the innkeeper knocked on our door to bring us her leftover food! Sourdough, cheese, salami, muffins, cookies, falafel things. It does seem that when you’re in as desperate a situation as we were, good people will really go out of their way to help you, heart’s cockles be warmed. After Erik had showered and I had eaten a bit, we traded off. The shower was quite amazing, but I don’t have any details to share. A slight problem was that all of our dry clothing was in Guerneville and everything we had was very wet; we made do by just wearing bike shorts, which were the least damp, and hiding under the comfortably heavier blankets. We splayed the rest of our wet articles all over the hangable surfaces of the room.

Erik did find the Weather Channel. As we ate, we managed to sit for almost a whole hour, watching it, observing the bright splotchy colors over California, gawking at the seemingly familiar 35mph winds measured at San Francisco, and noting the edges of thunderstorms touching Erik’s hometown of Champaign. I’m not too clear on what I wanted to learn from it, perhaps the next day’s forecast? I think we were just letting the relief that our friends were safe finally sink in. Before we’d split from Stewarts Point, Phil had talked seriously about doing a shorter ride Sunday, but I was pretty certain now that not a one of us would be enthusiastic.

Out of boredom or exhaustion, just before 11pm, we turned the lights out and went to bed. Right then, it seemed, voices appeared at our door, and a knocking. I sprang up and fumbled with the lock for a bit. It was Phil, Sue, and Ed! It seemed miraculous that they had managed to find us, but I don’t blame them for reacting to our message by coming out and searching. At this point, Erik and I had made ourselves comfortable enough in the inn that we decided to just stay the night, so we arranged for them to come back at 10am. Oh, one last thing: the Guerneville Lodge room keys? Right, they had been in the saddlebags Erik and I had carried.

In the night, the storm was louder than ever before, but the building held fast. Apparently the power went out, too, and having to get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I had an aha moment, realizing the night sky through skylight was the sole source of illumination in there. Since both the temperature and our exhaustion was higher, we slept more soundly than the previous night.

Ants! Some of our uneaten food now had tiny ants crawling over it. Thanks, ants. I did my best to stamp them out. As it was a bed and breakfast, we put on our slightly less damp jerseys and walked outside our cottage to find the thrilling second half. I saw the road crawling up the hill actually had houses on both sides for a ways up, a little detail I’d completely missed in the darkness of the previous night. Down we went to the main dining area, best described as extremely classic. Through the full wall window facing the Russian River estuary, we saw the broad water calmly wending its way to our right toward the Pacific, and the mocking sun, having finally deigned to show its face. The shelves held all manner of books and some conventional games, including Therapy, the game where you go to psychosis (some nearby guests explained they had tried to play it last night and regretted it). We poured ourselves some tea (coffee was out due to the power outage), glanced over the tsunami inundation maps in the local paper, and waited for our quiche with croissant and fresh fruit slices.

Without much to do, we returned to our room, packed up, and waited under the blankets. Minutes almost stretched into hours… not quite an hour behind schedule, Sue knocked on our door. We scrambled out to find Ed and Phil already preparing to take our front wheels off to fit our bikes into Phil’s van. They had smartly brought our dry clothing from Guerneville, which we were quite happy to change into. We offered them our leftover ant-free leftovers, but they had luckily found the Guerneville Safeway to be open 24 hours and had improvised some dinner after all. In the yellow morning, along the swollen river, we drove home.

In the car, we finally heard the full story from the other half of our party. Phil had tried to keep going, but was making slow progress and was still in the middle of the brutal exposed cliff section when night fell. At that point he found a sympathetic driver with a pickup truck, who gave him a lift back to the van at Duncans Mills. By this time I would have been at the Jenner gas station; Phil did look for us on the road from the passenger seat, but didn’t see us. Sue and Ed had stopped early, as they predicted, and walked into the Timber Cove Inn, a pretty nice place, dripping wet, cold, and brightly colored. However, they were made to feel absolutely welcome. In the pub area, they warmed up by the fireplace with alcohol and an Irish band for company. They apparently had Internet there, so Sue managed to send out an email indicating where they were and how they’d pointed their headlights toward the road should someone come looking for them. However, it went out to a larger group than just the 5 of us, leading to some entertaining “OMG are you guys all right?” responses for us to read the next day. Miraculously, Phil’s phone had synced at some point on the road, and he was able to read Sue and Ed’s message. He drove back to Timber Cove Inn to get them; as they were on their way out, a very concerned bar patron wanted to check that they were not planning to do any more biking. They all returned to Guerneville, where they didn’t see us but found our cryptic message; then they dashed over to Jenner, stumbling in the dark until the innkeeper (not yet asleep) noticed and pointed them at our room. The storm caused power outages at both the Timber Cove Inn and the Guerneville Lodge, too. Phil’s account is probably the more faithful story to read.

Our Android-powered search for a suitable brunch spot brought us to Dierk’s Parkside Cafe in Santa Rosa. I remembered now we (I and my fellow SF2G motel room sharers) had stopped for coffee at this place on our way to the start of the Gran Fondo. While waiting for seating, I looked for the park it was supposed to be beside, and explored the Luther Burbank gardens a little bit. Food was delicious and toasty and large.

On the drive back, it was again sunny, but rained in patches just enough to quash any wild thoughts in my head of biking back to San Francisco. I learned with some amusement that my fellow cyclists were from deep enough into the South Bay that they didn’t know which mountain was Mt. Tamalpais. I also learned with some embarrassment that I am from east enough in San Francisco that I didn’t know that it is not possible to make left turns from Park Presidio or 19th Ave.

The casualties of my bicycle components were manyfold. One of the front brake pads has disintegrated down to nothing (and there’s probably something maladjusted, since it wore away unevenly). Also, that I noticed only upon arriving home, the chain is unbelievably rusty in the rollers, and even the SPD pedals are looking rusty.

Here are the GPS tracks I recorded on this odyssey:

A few nights ago, I had dinner with a Santa Clara Valley Water District person, from whom I learned fascinating things. For example, Palo Alto is its own special snowflake and doesn’t subscribe to the rest of the Peninsula cities’ water system, or other utilities, for that matter. In most places, if there’s a big fire, you should avoid drinking the tap water, because the firefighting water comes from the same source, and they have to turn on lower-quality wells to keep pressure up. But San Francisco isn’t affected, because it has separate high-pressure water pipes, although this somehow means that fire trucks from the Peninsula cannot handle the pressure. Also, the meltwater from the Sierra, pumped to us by way of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, has trace amounts of asbestos in it.

Asbestos? Yes, it’s present in small amounts in serpentine, the state rock of California. It only harms you if you breathe it in as dust, though. And of course there is serpentine in the Sierra! After all, the whole ophiolitic sequence can be found in those mountains. Perhaps I should explain…

On a visit to the Strand in New York, I picked up John McPhee’s book Assembling California and learned the history of modern geology, a very interesting account since I had just also started reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn describes normal science as that taking place within a scientific paradigm (he coined this use of the term). Pre-science happened before the scientific community agreed on a paradigm. With a paradigm, or a generally agreed-upon theory for how things work, research can be better focused and directed, and progress is faster. But maybe new experiments or discoveries happen that can’t be explained by the current paradigm, and eventually normal science gives way to revolutionary science, or a paradigm shift, as a new paradigm arises to better explain things. Some adherents of the old paradigm carry it to the grave, while converts and newcomers bear the new one forward.

It is just so with geology. McPhee follows Eldridge Moores of UC Davis around California and the world in search of evidence for the then-new geological paradigm of plate tectonics. In elementary school I was taught plate tectonics, but I never learned that it had only been the prevailing scientific paradigm since the 1970s. Prior to then, the paradigm was that the world’s terrain had arisen from mysterious wrinkling forces, like that of a fruit peel drying out, and mountains were formed by mysterious unexplainable “orogenic” forces. But evidence accumulated that certain groups of seemingly unrelated rocks that often appeared together had actually formed in the oceanic crust. From peridotite and serpentine in the mantle layers, through gabbro and diorite dikes, up to pillow basalt lavas and sediment on the ocean floor, this sequence together called ophiolite appeared in various places, but was most visible in mountains like the Sierra Nevada. The development of ophiolites at spreading centers in the ocean floor and their subduction or accretion at trenches near continental plates became one of the most important pieces of support for plate tectonics.

Armed with this knowledge, I can be as justifiably outraged as any geologist about the bill to remove serpentine as the state rock of California (which appears to have languished last year and never passed). After all, serpentine is not just any rock; it’s part of the ophiolite that we have to thank for our current scientific paradigm. Not all serpentine contains asbestos. And just as well, the asbestos you get in the water isn’t at all a health hazard, contrary to the text of the bill, which is simply a scientifically ignorant piece of work, and few classes of things are more upsetting than that.

Now here we see the connection to my favorite disease, mesothelioma, a cancer generally caused by asbestos inhalation. I know it because it’s unbelievably profitable to be a lawyer specializing in suing on behalf of mesothelioma victims. Ads run on expensive television channels. Ads with famously high cost-per-click appear on Google. There’s so much money in mesothelioma lawsuits that one would think it wouldn’t be necessary to stir up more controversy by attacking the state rock, but sadly, there seems to be no depths that the politicians and lawyers won’t sink to. I just hope they find some opportunity to sink back to that place miles below the surface, in the mantle, where serpentine is formed.

You sound the way you do because you sound like the people you speak your language with. You learn their pronunciations, their jargon, their catchphrases. Recursively, the same applies to them!

I’ll use Chinese in the examples here because the varieties have had more historical time to diverge than English has. People generally speak the local dialect, and use Mandarin when necessary, but that Mandarin is inflected by the local dialect. (Some people only speak the local dialect, which can make for fun times.) Mandarin is the higher prestige language. Wikipedia tells me this situation is called diglossia.

A language gained:

On the train from Hefei, the railway seating plan is to put everyone with the same destination in a common train car. Dialects in the southern Anhui hill country vary from town to town, so it’s a relief for most folks to be able to converse comfortably, in their native dialect, with people who speak the same. In Taihu county, it’s a variety of Gan Chinese. Unfortunately my Taihuvian abilities extend only as far as listening, not speaking, but it was enough to learn that one couple seated near us consisted of a man from Taihu who had married a woman from Hunan province, who had moved to Taihu and picked up the localspeak in, apparently, the last 2 years; their young son was speaking it too.

A language lost:

My mother grew up in Chongqing in a large family. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, she left Chongqing to go to college in Nanjing, and then left for the United States. People in those places don’t speak Chongqingese. And not having lived someplace where they do for the last 30-odd years, she no longer does either. She can still understand locals, such as taxi drivers, much better than I can, but Mandarin is her only spoken Chinese now. Many of her sisters live now in other parts of China, but for whatever reason, perhaps one of proximity, they haven’t lost their Chongqingese as much.

A language dying:

Schools in China teach in Mandarin; official government programs come in Mandarin; the only endorsed language is Mandarin. So in Chongqing, sitting at my uncle’s house watching television, I asked if there were any TV programs in Chongqingese. My aunt flipped through some channels from the local TV station (unlike most American stations, it provides multiple channels, and it also has a monopoly on local TV); it took a while, but eventually we found a Chongqingese drama. Sure enough, the actors were speaking Chongqingese; it was fascinating to try to follow. At one point a mother was telling her son not to tell her any lies. To lie was “sha huang”, and my aunt made an interesting comment on this: that someone of my grandfather’s generation would have said “ce huang”, but even her generation would probably say “sha huang”, which of course comes from Mandarin. And though my Chinese reading level is deplorable, I could still tell that the TV program’s subtitles were actually Mandarin translations rather than transliterations, e.g. okay “yao de” was translated to “hao”.