We spent the past few days starting to break in the engine of the Kestrel in preparation for taking it out to the desert, which is now going to happen with the Vincent when it's finished in September.  Our friends, the uber talented Travis Shinn and O.T.M.F.C (one tight mother fu*king crew - minus Sash, who was in Vegas) came along to shoot video, which is great, becuase if I'd done it, it would have looked like crap...


Jeremy & Sean
Travis and the guys got a permit for Ian to ride the bike through the heart of an industrial corridor, the concrete oasis of the L.A. River. It sounded great down there, roaring over the echoes of the train tracks.


Fab & Keith


It's surreal to think that the L.A. River,  a wide, sloped sided concrete channel with rail yards and high-voltage power lines along its banks, used to be the primary source of water and food for the hunter/gatherer Gabrielino Indians, who lived off the fish, small mammals and acorns from the oak trees along the river's path, for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish.


Bobby
Unpredictable, devastating floods plagued it well into the 1930s, when the Army Corps of Engineers to begin their ambitious project of encasing the river's bed and banks in concrete, leaving only a trickle of water flowing down its middle. We were down there all afternoon on Friday, Travis said that he'd learned in boy scouts that when water had algae in it, it meant it was clean/fresh... (I'm not so sure I want to send our kids [when we have them] to boy scouts any more...)


Travis Shinn
I wondered what Father Juan Crespi, the Franciscan priest who named the river, when he accompanied the first European land expedition through California in 1769, would have thought if he could have forseen that 241 years later, Ian would be flying past Travis' lens at 70+ mph, on a mechanical horse/kestrel with an engine begging to go faster, and that was being reigned in by Ian, becuase this was only it's third time being fired up, and he wanted to take it somewhat easy... necessary when breaking in a new engine.


O.T.M.F.C.  know their stuff -  and I can't wait to watch that day  condensed through their eyes into a minute.

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