Here is some of the stuff I wrote about the site as I started pimping it on misc boards:

Hi guys,
I thought I’d refer some of my friends from Mud over to a newish community I started called “Hazard Assembly” – Hazard Assembly – The Ultimate Place for Dirtbag Adventuring. It is more oriented towards the guy who sort of does all sorts of adventures so the cruiser is sort of “the tool” rather than the being and the idea is we’ll have skiers and kayakers and MTBers and ideally lots of good times. It’s sort of eco focused to an extent and is really about just having a good time. I figure as the site takes off we should start seeing some really good stories and interesting or hopefully riveting adventures… The irony is we probably have about a couple dozen cruiserheads there already. The whole site is on an old New Mexico license plate… I’ve met a lot of you at particularly Cruise Moab, guys like Beno . I figured it would be right up the alley of a bunch of us…

Hazard Assembly – The Ultimate Place for Dirtbag Adventuring

We also have a gear giveaway going on. Post in this thread.

Cheers, Andre

And here is some misc Hazard Assembly photostream. A little bit of everything…

What is a TBIC site?

Hazard Assembly is the first of a few sites I plan to develop called “TBIC” sites, short for “topic by Internet Community.” It’s basically a publishing platform powered by lots of people, not just a few.  In the case of Hazard Assembly, it is simply a blog that has several users, but the community provides the bulk of the data.  In the long term TBIC will be a software platform that extracts quality data for publishing.

In Comb Wash, where they found Everett Ruess

Also RIP Michael Jackson, devastating because I liked his music so much. It did shape my life and the music here, sort of as the ‘first taste.’ I played that album from when I could work the record player (3 or 4 maybe?) all the way through college, wearing the grooves through the vinyl… I feel he is in a better place as he was sick physically and mentally to have become the person he was. Sad to see him go…

______________________

Quotes directly stolen from:
http://classiclit.about.com/od/ontheroad/a/aa_ontheroadqu.htm

On the Road is an autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac, with a stream of consciousness style. The work is associated with the Beat Generation. Here are a few quotes from On the Road.

• “I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Ch. 1
• “They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 1
• “Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 1
• “Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 1
• “And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about.
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 3
• “I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 3
• “The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 7
• “They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 9
• “We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess–across the night…”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 9
• “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk–eal straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 10
• “A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 12
• “LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 13
• “The stars bent over the little roof; smoke poked from the stovepipe chimney. I smelled mashed beans and chili. The old man growled… A California home; I hid in the grapevines, digging it all. I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 13
• “We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 13
• “Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child, believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome, grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 13
• “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 3
• “The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 4
• “I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 4
• “I want to be like him. He’s never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he’s the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 4
• “Life is life, and kind is kind.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 5
• “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of the time, move.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 6
• “Why think about that when all the golden land’s ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 6
• “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 8
• “It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness of the late afternoon of time.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 9
• “And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels…”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 10
• “I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 10
• “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ectasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 1
• “Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins…”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 1
• “Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 4
• “Our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 5
• “They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there–and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 5[li”Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 5
• “Our battered suitcases were were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 5
• “You don’t die enough to cry.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 5
• “Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety — leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 10
• “Here were the children of the American bop night.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 10
• “Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 10
• “Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done–whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 11
• “What difference does it make after all?–anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 11
• “What’s your road, man?–holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 1
• Here was a young kid like Dean had been; his blood boiled too much for him to bear; his nose opened up; no native strange saintliness to save him from the iron fate.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 2
• “We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it’s maddest. Hotrods blew by. San Antonio, ah-haa!”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 4
• “Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 5
• “In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean’s figure, and he looked like God.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 5
• “I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, “Go moan for man,” and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimmage on foot on the dark roads around America?”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 5
• “So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it… and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 5

Dean and I went to see Shearing at Birdland in the midst of the long, mad weekend… Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers… They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to “Go!” Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. “There he is! That’s him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

I remember that moment and that passage. It was one of those moments where you occasionally skip a beat and have to read the section or page 2 or 3 times to get a good grasp of it. I hadn’t heard of the old blind Shearing yet. Honestly probably because he was white (hehe, reverse discrimination)..

But I remember the quote. I remember old Dean Moriarity, I could see him rippin and roaring in that jazz club, the tunes coming out and the sweat…

If you’ve ever been down to the village in New York, Birdland is a jazz club in New York named after Charlie “Bird” or “Yardbird” Parker, the alto saxophonist, who a lot attribute as the “father” of Bebop. Bebop is that slower, smoother, more powerful jazz music. Less instruments, 3 to maybe 6 guys, smooth, more free flowing. If you ever get a chance to go down there, check out this place and maybe see a show or two. It’s still there, as awesome as that is, know that the greats shed their sweat down there too…

This was back in college.   We were maybe 19 or 20 at the time…  Two good friends and I went to Taos, New Mexico for a month-long ski trip over winter break. Pretty quickly it became the worst ski trip ever. The first day out, Sean tore his ACL only to go home a couple days later. Evan developed brutal food poisoning (after recently returning from Ecuador), and I snapped a ski first or second run out.

We were all close to best friends from boarding school and this was our last real adventure together and really the last time all three of us would be together. It is funny how even the best of friends can grow apart from each other.  More about this below…

It never snowed beyond the 6″ that first day, making for a piss-poor early winter when were were there. So we basically resorted to bumming around there and Las Vegas New Mexico and a little village called Rociata where Evan’s family had just moved to from Connecticut. In the end, it was a neat trip, but really long and slow and sort of painful for a variety of reasons.

About the second week in, growing up back east (its funny how things like this can be so rare for some people) I had never seen a rare FJ55 Toyota Land Cruiser before and sure enough there was one on the side of the road right in downtown Taos.

FJ55 Toyota Land Cruiser

I was driving at the time and screeched to a halt to check it out as we had nothing better to do. We started poking around and it was really funky… It was completely covered in NM red clay, bald and worn and totally beaten up but still running, New Mexico style.. Huge holes through the front fenders that you could put your arms through but not that bad. Or so I thought…

We poked around some more and sure enough it was actually for sale, there was a sign that had fallen off the dash under the front bench seat long ago. It’d probably been for sale for months I imagine with little to no one paying attention to it, including the owner. It had badly expired plates, but looked like it was fully functional sitting in a little dirt pad just off the side of the road. It was a ’72 or so, the old 3 on the tree style shifting transmission. And old school Land Cruiser, the famous old work horse station wagon from Toyota.

We called the guy up and it belonged to some NM riff-raff and it turned out the cruiser was sort of like the village bicycle, even belonged to some guy called “Kramer” at some point the guy kept mentioning for some reason. But in my eyes (I owned a beat up FJ60 at the time, in college in Vermont) it was a gem. The rear window was busted or blown out so someone had built a wooden barrier behind the back door with a piece of plexi glass to see with your mirror. And when we started it it had a bad rod knock. But ran and drove with a max speed of about 25-30 at max power and piss poor if not non-existent old cruiser drum brakes front and rear (they sure don’t make them like that any more).

So we negotiated, I tried to trade my back pack but the guy luckily said no (I still have and love the backpack) and ended up getting it for close to what we had to our names I think, I bought it for $225 with the agreement that me and the friend with food poisoning would split it later. Also, we had to return our borrowed Jetta shortly and would be without wheels (which had become our lifeblood with no snow), so it was actually exactly what we were looking for.

The cruiser eventually became the highlight of the trip. For example I am a die hard skier but really remember little of Taos the ski area. I remember meeting the author John Nichols (who wrote the Milagro Beanfield War), who is old friends with my old man, at a cheap diner, with the cruiser..  He had just married and divorced his 5th wife I think, a 20-something Mexican and she’d taken him for everything he was worth. He was driving a beat up old late 80′s small Dodge pickup.  He arrived wearing jeans he’d probably been wearing for 5 days, it looked.  I remember from the few times I met him when I was a kid that he took out his upper retainer which held 2 or 3 fake teeth, from when he played hockey at Loomis Chaffee Academy in New England.   He was older than I remember him, at this point in his late 50s or early 60′s. And I remember he was awesome, and so down to earth versus what I had come to remember from only distant childhood memories of the great writer John Nichols, and what an honor it was to meet him in all of his humbleness. And he also dug the old cruiser and our little adventure; he really thought it was cool that we had bought and were tooling around in this old POS…

And I remember the funky New Mexico land scape, and how barren it was. The encroachment of box stores like Block Buster into the funky down and out town of Las Vegas. I remember the little adobe house Evan’s family was living in, which had the address “House behind Church, Rociada NM.” And I remember most of the days there oddly having a cold, hazy and cloudy feel.  Odd for New Mexico.

Anyway, the Land Cruiser basically saved the day. We eventually returned the borrowed Jetta and the Land Cruiser was our only wheels.  We ended up spending most of our time bombing around Taos related to the no snow, and stayed at a family friends of Evan’s parents near town. This family was very cool, modern back east New Mexico hippie transplant types, but authentic and not phony. Where they lived they had a lot of land, off a gnarly road to the north. They already had a parked fire truck and a number of old non-rusted decrepid vehicles they had acquired which was also cool.  So we cruised around, and the day we were supposed to leave Taos (with this hairbrain idea to drive the cruiser down to Las Vegas to Evan’s parents place–a bad idea with an engine with a knock), the engine had a significant loss of power and change in noise and we knew it was about toast. It limped down to about 15 mph max and could not longer make it up the mildest hill. So we called the family with the fire truck and asked if we could store it there and they said yes. The Jetta and Evan’s parents reammerged to pick us up and we actually used the extra power of the Jetta to get the cruiser to the property of these people and parked it. That night, I flew home and returned to college in Vermont (’72 FJ55 even dotted my sig for several months on some of the Land Cruiser sites & boards).  But I eventually forgot about it all…

*   *  *

Years go by and Evan and I had long lost touch.  Sean, the guy with the torn ACL, had his own bouts with the desire to ski from the year he lost from the ACL tear, that this trip took from him too.  He eventually took a year off college to live in Crested Butte and ended up living in Lake Tahoe, and we still keep in touch regularly.  We were also roommates my senior year at college.

I had lost complete touch with Evan and still thought he was in Siberia still (literally), finishing his masters degree.  He is crazy enough to actually get his masters degree in Siberia.  He’d perfected a dialect of Russian, he reported last time we spoke, that was good enough that most people thought he was from a different part of the country.  This is funny because this is how he carried himself at boarding school with a Southwestern accent and a big belt buckle, even though was from Connecticut.  When we next spoke, probably 4 years later, he told me the story of having to headbutt a Russian in a bar fight he’d started by accident over some beautiful woman, to escape with his life.  In Siberia.  And today, he is an assistant professor at University of Kansas in some sort of foreign studies.

Anyway, post our last discussion, I had received an email saying something along the lines of, “oh yeah, you remember that old Land Cruiser?”   I had forgot about it enough that I didn’t even remember to ask about it.  I also assumed it was probably still up on that property in Taos, New Mexico.

“A couple of months after you guys were out, we went up and pulled it off of the property.”   And he went into the specifics of actually repairing the damn thing.  Little did he know old Land Cruisers had become a life obsession for me by then (I’ve already owned three more of those old rare FJ55 wagons).

He said he’d bought a little mig welder and started cutting out panels here and there.  He’d basically gotten almost completely done with a complete frame off restoration on the pig back to original 1972 specs!  The only thing he’d done beyond stock was a modest swap to a 3 on the floor instead of on-the-tree which is beyond understandable.   He wrote, “you have no idea how much time and labor I put into it.  FJ55′s as you know have a flimsy roof so I cut the roof out of an old Ford van with ribbing in it and installed that into the FJ55.  It is all primered and I have the engine all ready to go and to put into it.”   And he sent pics…

The old bomber from Evan Emmott...

*   *  *

So, I should have known and suspected as much because his Dad and older brother had an old MG British Sports car, at the time, at his parent’s warehouse.  They sell/sold at the time yarn out of a warehouse in Las Vegas New Mexico and had the car stored there.   They’d restored the MG to about 90% but never put back together other than the shell of the car.  We were checking it out back then, I recall, and I remember thinking how cool it was and admiring the quality of their work.

And..  They did the same with the old cruiser.   Last we spoke Evan in Kansas and it was still in that restored minus final paint, ready to go back together, oddly in about the same shape as that old MG.  He had learned how to use an english wheel, which is the ultimate metal worker’s tool and the pinnacle of metal forming ability in my opinion; what the motor cycle builder Jesse James uses to build gas tanks from scratch, and a tool from the early last century.   He’d sucessfully and cleanly adapted the ribbed Ford van roof into the FJ55 roof to give it some structure, and the photos showed really good work…

And he wrote “I forgot, I still owe you $112.50!,” which I had completely forgot about meaning that in a sense I still sort of “own” this old beast…     Payback’s a bitch Evan if you’re still out there.  Just kidding, it would be my pleasure to give you this old FJ55 after the work you have into it.

*     *     *

And basically that’s about it..  Someday, when I finish this next round of restoring my old FJ55, I plan to cruise on down sometime when Evan is home and check out that old FJ55 and see how its going, and maybe help get it running again if its not yet.

The old email from Evan when we first got in contact again…

Dear Andre:

Howdy! I was looking on the internet for a new carburetor for the FJ-55 and I saw your name pop up a whole bunch of times on Birfield, which I still don’t fully understand how to use, so I thought I would see what’s up.

I am an instructor in the History Department at Kansas State University for Modern European and Russian history while I work on finishing up my Ph.D. That’s going OK. I was in Moscow for the summer, and got to do a bit of traveling around in the countryside, and then in the Caucusus, too. The Caucusus was great–bought a couple of nice tribal rugs, which are really pretty, and tried to stay away from menacing bearded men with Kalashnikovs.

I attached a couple of pictures of the Iron Pig out in NM. I am almost finished, but I have only been working on it sporadically as time and money allows. The lastest thing I did was replace the roof, since the old one was terribly stretched, and pretty rusty, and basically just a piece of junk overall. I skinned a roof off of a junk-yard Ford Econoline van because it had a series of parallel ridges pressed into it for strength, which the 55 series does not. After just getting the roof skin, I cut out ten inches of width from the middle and then about a foot in length, and pieced it back together so that the roof fit onto the Pig, and then it was glued and welded back together with a spot welder so as not to distort the metal. I wasn’t sure if that would really work, but since the roof was already off the Pig, too, I figured at worst I could always put a rag top on instead. But, it worked out fairly well. Other than that did a lot of metal-patching to fenders, quarter panels, replacing floor panels, inner fenders, basically just about 40-50 percent of all metal in the entire vehicle. But, I got a lot better at welding. So, it’s getting there…

The motor is totally rebuilt and key-starts, but I need a new stock carburetor. Do you know where I could find one? I don’t really want a rebuild, or a new aftermarket type, like a weber, but the original for a F-series engine. I would appreciate any help you could give me.

Let me know what’s going on with you.

Best,

Evan