St. Valentine's Kyôsaku

"We are all surprised when when we read a story about two people who fall in love and marry even though one is terminally ill. It seems to require great love and courage to risk such a frightening and painful journey, to decide to love someone who you know will be taken from you soon. Yet isn't that what all of our lives are? We live day after day, and love other human beings with a tenuous hold on life. Doesn't this require great courage and love?"

Philip Martin

Hermitcraft: Fudos, Pt. 3: Lord of the Rings

One day's walk in town

Collecting fudo rings is an object lesson in greed. First you pick one up by chance. Then you become acutely aware of every washer in the vicinity, in service or out. Soon you're dodging four lanes of traffic to get to the hardware on the median, and waiting for the guard dog to round the corner so you can scale the truck yard fence. When you start fantasising about the explosion at the fuel dock that would score you those awesome mooring rings, you officially have a problem.

Fact is, life is full of rings. Mostly washers, with a scattering of et ceteras. And there's nothing like that Epic Find. The rust-latticed, potato-chipped gutter washer; the big bronze bearing; the giant log boom ring. Ask any birdwatcher or ham radio operator: these things can put you in a good mood for days.

Where to look

Collecting beach rings

The short answer is "everywhere," but some wheres are more generous than others.

o Any place work is going on. Construction sites are good. Demolition sites are better. Where machinery is parked or repaired, it's "eyes low." Breaking yard? Jackpot! Public works are gold, too. You can find serious iron around recently replaced light poles, highway retainers, etc.

o Rich = stingy. (As much with rusty washers as everything else.) Poor neighbourhoods offer better pickings, because we fix our own crappy cars outside our own houses. And our streets are paved and swept less often. If you find yourself on such a street, watch it. (The street, I mean.) Hardship, depression, and desperation generate fudo rings. I could get all metaphorical on your backside, but you get it.

Street lamp base

o Cities. Best prospects: former accident scenes, busy corners, industrial districts. Any place the road is rough shakes down hardware by the tonne.

o Beaches, though you have to have the tools to free them. But the selection is excellent: chain links, net rings, malleable dock washers, and all manner of small hardware. All generally well-harmed by Earth's least metal-friendly environment.

o The entire nation of Guatemala. The combination of alleged "streets", screaming poverty, and perpetually reconditioned buses, trucks, and tuk-tuks fills your pockets daily with the strongest, bad-assedest fudo rings on the

Fifteen ring day
in the city!

planet. I swear it rains bodhisattva bronze in that country.

Wherever you find them, gathering up fudo rings is fun. It makes every walk a potential catch, and turns boring, drab, depressing surroundings into pastures of plenty. It also makes for great stories. Remind me to tell you about the time a winter storm threw up a seine that had sat on the sea floor for decades, so impregnated with sand that it ruined three pairs of shears before giving up a grapefruit-sized black concretion that I had to kiln in the woodstove overnight before smashing it with a hammer to discover five breathtaking rings.

Never mind; guess I already did.

Four hours' work on the beach

WW: Night on Capitol Hill

WW: Seattle's other icon

Street Level Zen: Specialisation

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, coöperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, programme a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialisation is for insects."

Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein)

Vital Ordnance

Through the evening I repeatedly heard a loud, snarling buzz, like a tiny chainsaw, at floor-level. It was always on the far side of a divider, and always gone when I investigated.

What was my surprise when I noticed, first, a tiny Anna's female perched on a branch of the walnut, watching intently, waiting for me to piss off. Later, I caught a glimpse of her hovering one wing-length above the barn floor, fixing the powdery dirt, sawdust, and manure with laser intent. She was not gathering nest material; Anna's hummingbirds nest in December, and she was far too bent upon this errand for that.

I would see this behaviour throughout the first half of the ango, ending only when the birds themselves became scarce in August. And I would eventually learn what they were up to: hummingbirds, while often thought to run on sugar and water, are in fact ultra high-tech

aircraft with exacting requirements. Among these are molecular amendments of calcium, magnesium, potassium, and electrolytes absent from the nectar and insects they burn like booster rockets. I've even had hummingbirds hover hungrily over my stream while I urinate; atomic metabolism makes the gush of trace elements hypnotic. (No takers to date, though.)

Hence my little neighbours' fascination with the barn floor: they were shipping minerals from a standing hover, their threadlike tongues flicking in and out almost faster than the eye could see. Vital ordnance, no doubt.

(From my notes for "100 Days on the Mountain," copyright RK Henderson.)

WW: Small metal Stonehenge