Eric Smillie | Writer

Winter in Tomales Bay

It turns out that winter is a great time to visit Tomales Bay, an hour north of San Francisco. Which was a surprise since I tend to write the season off as cold and wet. But when I went there in January to research a travel story on Tomales Bay for VIA magazine’s November/December issue, the days were clear and warm. And that wasn’t a fluke. “When it’s not raining, this is the most beautiful time of year here,” a bed and breakfast owner told me, and other people I talked to backed her up. (The nights were another story, by the way. I was glad to have a warm jacket.)

With ranches on the eastern shore, Point Reyes National Seashore to the west, and oyster farms and Tomales Bay State Park in the middle, it’s beautiful country, especially when you think how close it is to the city. Here’s a view east from the Tule Elk Reserve on the northern point of Point Reyes:

As peaceful as it looks, this bay has been a battle ground between developers and conservationists since the early 1900s, and it still kind of is. The whole story (going back to the Coast Miwok) is laid out in this history from the National Parks Service. Things were especially hot in the middle of the century. The West Marin General Plan of 1976 slated the eastern side of the bay for a city of 125,000 people, complete with a golf course, schools, a freeway along the waterfront and man-made recreational islands in the bay. The land was worth more as building tracts than it could produce as farmland, making it tempting for owners to cash out.

As developers began to buy parcels and plan developments, conservationists strategically purchased neighboring lots in an effort to block access to the water and to likely routes for roads. Environmental groups also lobbied the government and eventually the general plan was repealed. To preserve the farmland, much of west Marin was zoned with a limit of one house per 60 acres. Between 1972 and 1975 the number of building sites in the watershed went from 1.2 million to 3,000. Great news for tourists, migrating birds and people who wanted to keep ranching, but not so great news for those land owners planning to sell.

To try to make up the difference for ranch owners, and to further conserve the land in case the zoning is ever revised, the Marin Agricultural Land Trust buys development rights from ranchers. Owners keep their land and continue working it and the trust ensures that the property will never be turned into subdivisions. Meanwhile, the region’s appetite for fancy foods—grass fed beef, organic milk, fresh oysters, small-batch cheese—seems to be opening profitable niche markets for ranchers. And it makes for good eating. Check out the story for lots of recommendations. It’s on the website (if it asks for your zip code, try a northern California one, maybe 94600) and in magazine layout in the digital edition, with beautiful pictures by David Collier.

Is a city a disaster?

What about those abandoned or otherwise forgotten spots that get squeezed between developments, or covered over by highways?

I’m catching up with the radio show 99% Invisible and I liked the episode about New Public Sites, a project by Graham Coreil-Allen to come up with a typology of overlooked and left over features of the urban environment. Stuff like vacant lots and traffic triangles, except that by Coreil-Allen’s definition, the former is a void or possibly a distribution pit, while the latter might be a pastoral island, a triangle crossing, or even a lost space.

There are lots more handy names there for things city dwellers look at every day, yet don’t always see. But my favorite part of the radio segment is when Coreil-Allen justifies calling these spots beautiful. I like it because they’re not places or vistas that we usually consider pretty or even interesting, except perhaps in a punk or ironic kind of way. Coreil-Allen’s definitions of these elements are a bit tongue in cheek, but he’s entirely earnest in his defense of their value. We have to love them if we want to adopt them and activate them as democratic spaces. In other words, if we want to reclaim these places from the urban lost and found bin and make them our own or put them to use, we cannot look away and ignore them.

Of course, some people might rather not to reclaim them, and I think that’s sad and a waste. Which is how I felt about the spots in my disaster tourism guide, spots that are much larger than a threshold periphery.

And what could possibly come of these places? For just one example, I just saw a great story on the Keret House, a narrow home built in the empty space between two buildings. The interior is just 35 inches wide.

Give the 99% Invisible episode a listen:

Rebuilt Raleigh Sprite bicycle

I rebuilt a Raleigh Sprite bicycle, one of the old step-throughs, circa 1976.

Unlike the Raleigh Record I built up, I replaced most of the old parts, and kept just a few that worked fine and had some charm, like this torn seat.

The biggest upgrade was swapping out the old bottom bracket and cottered crankset for a new Velo Orange threadless bottom bracket and triple crankset. The old ones were heavy, had a lower gear range, and I mashed one of the cotters taking them out to clean them up.

The genius of the threadless bottom brackets is that their two ends screw together and expand to fill the bottom bracket cavity in the frame–you don’t need to use the existing threads and you can choose from a variety of lengths. Compared to the other bottom bracket replacement options, it’s easier than rounding up perfectly-sized cotterless old stock and cheaper than going the phil wood route. I knew that if I tried to put cotter pins back in, my obsessive side would kick in and I’d end up buying a cotter press. Not worth it for a single use.

There was some angst over which length threadless bottom bracket to choose. This review was super helpful, as was this VO blog post. The Raleigh Sprite’s bottom bracket cavity measured 71 mm and I went with the 116 mm threadless bb and it fits nicely.

Here are some views of the chainline.

On the second chainring, the chain is straight when it’s on the fifth sprocket in the back.

This is an all-purpose city bike, and the rider likes versatility and is no big fan of hills, so I put a megarange mountain bike freewheel with a giant granny gear on the back. The other day I was at the Golden Gate Bridge gift shop and I saw that the classy-looking Public Bicycles special edition International Orange step-through has the same freewheel on it.

Between the 34 teeth on the rear sprocket and the 24 on the smallest chainring, you can go pretty low on this bike.

Last bonus pics: the original front brake, cleaned up just enough to keep a little patina.

And the handlebars.

Best brewery tours in the West

Brewery tours can get pretty redundant. Some grain, some hops, some giant tanks full of fermenting ale. I bet lots of people spend them dreaming of tasting the free beer at the end, like this guy (photo by Jessica Curtin).

I have no problem with free beer. But when I rounded up eight of the West’s best brewery tours for VIA magazine, I looked for craft breweries that offer something extra, be it a ride down the slide at New Belgium that you can see in this photo by ElCapitan:

Or a peek into the sensory tasting room at Deschutes, where trained workers take one for the team to help stay on top of quality control. It looks like serious business.

What else makes for a good tour? At the small breweries, it could be the chance to talk to a brewer or to taste an experimental brew. At a bigger operation, such as Full Sail, it might be seeing how the brewery shaves water use through an on-site treatment plant.

And then there’s the free beer. No need to change that part of the formula.

Nerd fights

Seems like everything gets turned into a competition these days. I wrote about four unusual battles royale for the March issue of Wired. Artists hustle before a live audience to draw the best pictures and the winner basks in the light of glory (as in the photo above) at Super Art Fight. Do-it-yourselfers race handmade and hand-powered cars down railroad tracks while wearing period costumes at the Great Handcar Regatta. Butchers hack up a steer into valuable steaks at the Eat Real Fest. And hardy crazy people run all night and day in the mountains of Vermont with breaks to chop wood, reconstruct Lego sculptures, and translate Greek into English while standing waist deep in freezing water at the Death Race.

They say you might die during that race. For more on that, here’s an entertaining video from the New York Times:

Surviving the Death Race

Built to destroy buildings

Who says insurance isn’t exciting? In this picture, the Institute for Business & Home Safety’s new research center is hard at work, blowing a house to smithereens with 140-mile-per-hour winds generated by 105 5.5-foot fans. I wrote an article in Wired magazine about the facility and the hail bombardments, inundating rain, burning embers and radiant heat, and Category 3 hurricane winds it is subjecting buildings to—all in the name of safety and reduced insurance claims. Think of it as crash testing for houses.

Want to see the winds in action? Watch this video:

There’s another video with audio, plus more photos, at the IBHS site.

So how large of an array of fans is that, and how huge does this place have to be to fit two houses so easily? I could tell you it’s half an acre, but just look at this picture by Ian Allen:

That’s one of a series he took for the slideshow with the article. For some extra large versions, check out Ian Allen’s portfolio.

Beer’s tasting rooms

One of the benefits of being a home brewer (see more about that at my other site, awesomepickle.com) is that you have license to try a lot of beer, and a lot of different kinds of beer. In the last few years a new kind of store has popped up to help beer lovers discover beer’s many styles, a lot like wine bars and tasting rooms have done for wine drinkers. I wrote an article in the New York Times about five such tasting rooms for beer.

Say you want to know more about what distinguishes a Kolsch (which is in the bottles above, photo by the inimitable Phil) and a Helles than Wikipedia and BeerAdvocate can tell you? At these stores you can taste the difference. With education as their goal, they stock hundreds of kinds of bottled craft beer and keep a constant rotation on the tap. They’ll recommend beer and food pairings and they tend to be liberal with the free samples, too. But don’t tell them I told you that.

The Crap Caper and other GOOD writing

I have been writing, mostly for GOOD magazine. For starters, I wrote about a group in Chicago that has saved 1,500 gallons of precious human waste and is turning into compost. It’s not legal, and if you read the Crap Caper, you’ll discover a technique for hiding a barrel of poo in plain sight. The project’s mastermind, Nance Klehm is a renaissance woman. Please go to her website because she’s doing loads of cool stuff.

I had a lofty plan to create a one-page how-to that urbanites could use to compost their business. Unfortunately, I didn’t succeed. Making humanure is complicated and I’ve never done it, so I couldn’t draw on experience to make my own guide. Check back with me in two years, which is how long it takes to turn human waste, mixed with sawdust or other carbon-rich material, into rich, loamy soil that is free of human pathogens and other bad things. (Nance can do it in a year, because she’s good at it.)

Done right it is safe. But do be careful. If you do want to try your hand at it, you can get started here:
-A general how to in MAKE magazine.
-The Humanure Handbook, the ultimate guide.
-The Handbook on the sterilizing effects of heat and time.
-How to make a sawdust toilet and a box for it.
-Some dos and don’ts.

While I failed to produce a soil-making onesheet, I did write close to half a dozen other how-to stories for GOOD’s past two issues. In the Slow Down issue, read my impassioned defense of time off and find cooking tips and ways to take a vacation from digital communication. May Wired’s editors forgive me; some days I just don’t want to be a cyborg at all.

For the Neighborhoods issue, I learned how to share my yard with the neighbors without getting into a shouting match and how to be a regular. Lastly, I talked to artist Ted Purves about the Reading Room, a storefront he opened with Susanne Cockrell in Oakland, California, to distribute free local fruit and collect local history about the neighborhood’s origins. The place took on a life of its own and Purves’s advice on how it happened falls somewhere between tips for a small business owner and tips for an art experiment. For more on the project, go here.

My sauerkraut in a San Francisco art show

My homemade, unpasteurized sauerkraut (and photos of it) will be on display and up for trade at the exhibition Non*Mart at Y2Y Gallery in San Francisco from November 6 till January 15, 2010. See more details about eating some at the opening at my post about it on awesomepickle.com or at the show and gallery links. Click the pic for a bigger flyer.

Pickles are awesome

Friends, I have another website on this fine internet of ours. It’s called awesomepickle.com and it’s dedicated to the awesome world of fermented food and drink. The contents are mostly recipes for pickling food at home with the help of live microorganisms Food prepared this way is very healthy. It also tastes delicious and never fails to impress friends and strangers alike. I recommend you go to the wbsite immediately, make some sour dills or sauerkraut, brew some beer, and then enjoy the fruit of your labors with a grilled cheese sandwich.

Although I haven’t had much to put up here for the past few weeks, I swear I’ve been working. Editing doesn’t deliver the bylines the way writing does. There are some articles are in the works, though.