The Final Tour

So. What happened with BEHEMOTH?  There is quite a disparity between the development to adventure ratios of the three bike versions. The difference, I have come to realize, is partly due to the Roberts Law of Applied Mobile Gizmology: If you take an infinite number of very light things and put them together, they become infinitely heavy. It's also due to a more subtle problem: I never took the atlas to the bathroom during three years of BEHEMOTH development in Silicon Valley (the last half of which was in a lab sponsored by Sun Microsystems). Back in '83, when all this began, the underlying motive was adventure and romance. The atlas was my bathroom reading; I pored obsessively over bicycle-touring books. The bike was an essential tool, a streamlined and simple system for accomplishing one basic need: taking an office on the road during an extended bicycle tour. 10,000 miles of magic and adventure proved the success of this approach, and it's detailed in my book Computing Across America. The Winnebiko II was similar in spirit, though much more complex in implementation. The road fantasy still prevailed -- with the new twist of sharing it with my sweetheart. 6,000 miles on both coasts once again demonstrated that our hearts were in the right place. (Miles with Maggie) But an odd thing happened during the BEHEMOTH project... the road moved to the background. The bike itself became the obsession -- a techno-fantasy, a standalone statement. Not once during the entire project did I lose myself in dreams of the road... I was instead studying trade journals and spec sheets. And I never even noticed until I was once again Out There... sweating profusely in the Iowa sun with my 580-pound load. A radical recalibration of philosophy occurred during the summer of 1991. While I did have a few notable adventures in that 1,000 mile jaunt through Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, it became clear that practicality had taken a back seat to interesting system architectures and the obsessive desire to integrate everything into one machine (a phenomenon now known around here as The BEHEMOTH Effect). As I was pedaling along the Lake Michigan shore, trying to figure out how to deal with this problem, a strange thing happened. I started gazing out over the water, imagining the bike as a ship. No hills. No crazy drivers (or at least, not too many). Quiet when I want it. Open- ended wandering. Beaches. Hmmm. Thus preconditioned, and entertaining various aquatic adventure fantasies, I met Christina during Spring '92 Interop in Washington, DC. This jazz singer and unix system administrator had what she openly called her "man trap" -- a pair of sea kayaks. A few weeks later we had a rendezvous on a lake in the Adirondacks... and the moment I slipped into one of the tiny boats and glided across the water under paddle power I knew my life was about to change...