What Rough Beast Slouches Toward Arcata?
MAKE goes to the World Championship Kinetic Sculpture Race.
Photography by Karen Hansen
WHILE IT COULD BE NAVIGATED FASTER, it usually takes at least eight hours to drive up Highway 101 from San Francisco International Airport to Arcata, Calif. If you go, it’s worth taking your time, because this road takes in a lot of interesting society and scenery changes along the way.
At the start, you cross the heart of downtown San Francisco, slowly cruising up Van Ness Avenue northbound across the Golden Gate Bridge toward the congested freeways traversing the Bay Area’s northern suburbs. Soon, though, the milieu changes for the better as you pass through bucolic Sonoma County; the vineyards of California’s wine country are wonderful viewing even at freeway speeds. Farther north, the Japanese and German luxury cars of wine country become less dominant, their space on the highway usurped by pickup trucks and far, far older Fords and Chryslers. Winding on, the 101 slows down, speed limits changing in inverse relationship to the height of the redwood trees flanking the road. As it morphs into the main drag of the small towns of Laytonville and Willits, the 101 slows to 25 miles per hour. Finally, the highway meanders north and west through Rio Dell, Fortuna, and Eureka before reaching the tranquil burg of Arcata, the starting point of the World Championship Kinetic Sculpture Race.
As twisty, turny, and motion-sickness-inducing as the 101 can be in redwood country, kinetic sculpture racers will tell you that it’s nothing compared to the road they traverse from Arcata to Ferndale. In fact, it’s not a road at all. It’s a 42-mile ordeal of land, sand, muds, and suds. The race starts and ends on pavement, but in between, the course encompasses dirt tracks, 30-foot-high sand dunes, open water, and gooey, sloppy mixtures of mud and muck.
Every May in the redwood-friendly moistness of the Northern California coast, a wonderful exhibition of true maker determination and creativity takes place. Approximately 30 racing teams and thousands of spectators descend on eccentric and unconventional little Arcata to attend what might be the most interesting sporting event in the world, at least to the eccentric and unconventional kind of people who read this magazine.
Below Dead Man’s Drop, emergency medical technicians wait, ready to deal with breaks, blood, and twig-pierced eyebrows.
The size and time invested in such an outré event defy easy understanding. On the morning of race day, two-and-a-half dozen human-powered sculptures assemble in the town square. Watching and waiting, the great throng of onlookers stands six deep along the streets.
The elaborate mechanicals and their maniacal makers wait for the blast of the town’s noon whistle. At the sound of the klaxon horn, all begin to circle the town square once, twice, and then a third time until the exit gate is flung open and the racers begin the marathon quest for glory. The crowd cheers them, then heads off to its favorite viewing points along the route. For the next three days, the racers pedal their vehicles up hills and down sand dunes, across the waters of the Eel River and Humboldt Bay, and through the towns of Manila, Eureka, and Loleta.
It’s grueling work, but the harsh conditions are offset by post-race basking in the personal triumph that comes from merely finishing, and in the wry sense of humor that permeates the entire event. That has to be enough, for there’s absolutely nothing to motivate the racers except the glory of participating and crossing the finish line in Ferndale three days later. Luckily, there’s plenty of glory to go around.
Polymaths, All
What sets this event apart from other competitions with a homebuilt component is that it celebrates the polymath instead of the specialist. To understand this event, and to excel at it, one can’t be only a sculptor, or a mechanical engineer, or a cyclist. One needs to be all three, for the final judgment depends on the sum total of the builder’s artistry, engineering, and physical fitness.
This is an event for polymaths, of the sort that Leonardo Da Vinci, Blaise Pascal, and Buckminster Fuller would enjoy. It’s not just about having overdeveloped leg muscles, and pedaling fast and long. The best, most glorious participants must be clever technologists, designing gear trains and vehicle superstructures that can finish the marathon-anda-half-long course of diverse terrain.
Some of the racing machines weigh more than a ton fully loaded, and a fair amount of engineering is required to make such weightiness sufficiently mobile to be pedaled across the many conditions encountered. Typically, this involves designs incorporating swing-down pontoons, differential gear boxes, variable-angle recumbent seats, and most important of all, massive drive trains, with more gear ratios than you can shake a Cannondale at. The pilots of kinetic racers often have more than 600 different gear ratios from which to choose.
And even that isn’t all. To be competitive, a racer has to be beautifully sculpted as well. Builders must have artistic talent, for skill and brawn mean little without artfulness.
The Racers
It’s the artistry, whimsy, and imagination that the designers and builders incorporate into their machines that make the experience what it is. The best machines are true works of art, evocative of the sculpture of Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, and Jean Tinguely.
June Moxon’s racer is called Skaredy Kat, but she most certainly is not one herself. The year 2006 marked her 24th year of competing. During that time, she’s powered herself across a lot of territory. In fact, she and fellow racer Ken Beidleman once pedaled a racer across the United States.
A map of the 42-mile course, which traverses pavement, sand dunes, mud, and water. For a more detailed account of the course, visit kineticsculpturerace.org/map.shtml. Image shown on previous image: Flash Gourd’n.
“In 1989, Ken and I left Ferndale on our racer with $200 in our pockets, and we survived by donations and doing odd jobs,” she says. “Each day on the road was different: heat, snowstorms, steep hills, rain.” Eventually, they pedaled all the way to St. Augustine, Fla.
Skaredy Kat is, as June describes it, “a ginormous, black and white, spooked-out, kinetic kruising kitty kat.” More specifically, it’s a 500-pound tandem tricycle with an immense gear ratio and a sophisticated system of pull-cords that allows June and her co-rider to move the puppet parts of Skaredy’s head, eyes, whiskers, and tail while riding.
June’s boyfriend, Ken Beidleman, is equally enamored of kinetic sculpture racing. A metal sculptor from Redding, Calif., Ken first became interested in the activity back in 1987 when he volunteered to work with the event’s founder, Hobart Brown, on his racer. Beidleman has participated more or less continuously since then.
“Every year I try to come up with something new,” he says. “For instance, I’ll say, let’s do something contemporary, a racer [with a theme based] on a current event or movie.”
In the past, that line of thinking produced the machines he named Watermelon World, Hog Wild, and Nightmare of the Iguana. The 2006 entry was Flash Gourd’n, an upgrade of an earlier year’s Gourd of the Rings, but Flash Gourd’n has better steering, fewer squeaks, and reduced weight.
The night before the race, builders work into the wee hours making final adjustments. At the Arcata Kinetic Lab, some pause to chat with the curious. Others are furtively focused behind drawn curtains. In the back corner, sculptor Duane Flatmo is hard at work, putting the final touches on a comically scary, bug-eyed, four-person tricycle.
Extreme Makeover is a heavy beast, weighing 1,200 pounds when fully staffed. A good portion of that weight is invested in teeth and eyeballs. Once the race starts, it’s the scores of gear ratio choices that allow the pilot to take it over water, turf, asphalt, and even sand dunes.
Like fairy tale creatures, the racers lumber along the beach, making the best time they can before attempting the more difficult parts of the race. The hardest obstacle is a high, steep, and perilous sand dune called Dead Man’s Drop.
Atop the dangerous dune, sunburned, mosquito-plagued spectators call out encouragement as racers make the tough climb at tortoise speed. Below Dead Man’s Drop, emergency medical technicians wait, ready to deal with breaks, blood, and twig-pierced eyebrows. As the racers plunge over the edge of the dune, the crowd follows in their wake, cheering each guts-and-glory descent.
For what it matters, the 2006 grand champion was East Shark, a two-person land submarine designed by high school students from Eureka. They finished the race in under eight hours of actual pedaling time. Flash Gourd’n and Extreme Makeover finished respectably in the middle of the pack, taking about 20 hours. And Skaredy Kat? It, too, finished. Eventually and gloriously.
MAKE Contributing Editor William Gurstelle wrote the rubber-band ornithopter project (MAKE, Volume 08, page 90).
Clockwise from top left: Skaredy Kat, June Moxon in Skaredy, Stag Party, Brain Power, Pear Country Chopper, East Shark, Mardi Gras, and Extreme Makeover.