Otto Gravel

At the culvert

The footpath from Switchback Ridge station to the lower houses has a low wall that bulges in three places before it turns toward a culvert. Otto Gravel surveys old stone for the footpaths office and repairs the work the wall can take. The first time he went alone, he wrote that a line of stones low in the culvert had drifted. An older surveyor went down there at lunch, tilted his hat back, and showed Otto where an old builder had fitted a step against the direction of the flow. Otto crossed out the word drift and went back to eat his sandwich standing in the cold. He wanted to see what the water did against it all afternoon.

Aya, his neighbor, has been doing the same walk after lunch since her hens started getting restless halfway through the day. She met Otto when he was halfway over the wall reaching for a dry bag he'd put on the other side. At a practice one weekend she brought a folding stool and asked if he could describe the course in the time it took her to put it up.

Between the little flags

Otto was running the Porsche 1985 911 Rally on a closed section with three small bumps and a corner that seemed to go away from him as he approached. On the first two passes he aimed to take all three bumps out of the drive. He shifted his line to avoid the first rise and asked for another correction before the wheels had come down. A few inches of choice vanished by the time he got to the third. The car moved more under him where he'd been steering than it had when the wheels crossed a rise on a straight.

Aya walked the section and called him over. She pointed where the course had width at both flags and where he had actually spent it. They set three pebbles out on the route card. The two low rises felt nearly the same under a thin sole. The third was closer to the turn than he had remembered. He drew that one on the card and put the other two in his pocket.

He used one on his way back to hold down the map where it wanted to curl.

Low end near the rail

He asked Cam Berr to look down the same section from the low end. Cam saw a little slant in the support where Otto had been seeing a series of bumps. On one afternoon that mattered more than knowing where each of them stood. Rev Reynolds found Otto examining the last verge and offered him a folding flag so the marshal could see where he was before opening the practice lane. Otto likes to draw the track between two fixed positions now. On the first version of this one he'd been standing wherever the latest bump made him stop.

Back at the wall

Otto wants to take the Porsche through the third bump without losing the steering pressure he needs at the corner. He has a regular practice morning in mind, but Aya needs him to look at a little loose wall by her coop before he leaves. She says she can see a gap from where she puts down the feed bucket. Otto has decided to bring his folding stool down there before he tells her what he can see from above it.