Good Vibrations (21 page)

I was glad on the whole that we'd met the two human mistakes in the Last Chance Saloon. Things had been going almost too smoothly on the social front since my encounter with the smalltime drug pushers in Tennessee, and it shook me from a silly complaisance that everyone in America must be the sort of person you'd like to know. There were plenty more ghouls under the same dirty stone.

Two hundred rugged miles later, we camped by the town of Hungry Horse below the mountains around Glacier National Park. Hard by the Canadian border, the neighbours proved more amenable than the boys from over the hills. Through the woods from our tent was a trailer in which a girl called Renee lived alone with her large timber-wolf/husky cross. One snarl from Greta would have deterred any interloper, unless armed with a machine gun, but when you got to know the beast, she wasn't so bad. Perhaps it was the ancient domestication in her sledding half that made her desperate for a rub on the stomach.

The best part of the day in Glacier proved to be its beginning. In order to make the distance and be back to our tent before nightfall, we hit Going-to-the-Sun road in the crisp air of first light wearing full leathers over fleeces. Ten miles on, the sky flushed pale pink as we crackled to a halt at the park barrier, but the pole was up and the ticket desk unmanned. I nurse a deep-rooted objection to paying for experiencing the undisturbed works of the Lord, and was delighted to read a sign that announced that the staff would not be turning up before eight. There was nothing that said, ‘No admittance before breakfast', and no honesty box gaped hopefully at me, so we breezed full ahead through the gates and wished the guardians of the mountains a comfortable lie-in. Not a vehicle disturbed the peace as we stopped by a lake for a sandwich. The road stayed quiet until later in the morning, giving us a ride to cherish for a lifetime, despite a nasty brush with the seamy side of tourism towards lunch. Rounding a sharp bend, we simultaneously spotted what had to be ‘The Greatest Mountain Valley View in the West' and crunched to an unscheduled standstill in a gravelly pull-off. We propped the bikes by a number of other vehicles and I shed a layer or two of clothing while Roz fished out her camera.

‘Why don't we pop down there a little way,' Roz nodded towards a steep trail disappearing through a copse of twisted pines, ‘the angle will improve… Shame about that disgusting motor launch,' she added. My own eye had also been upset by a square, unlovely vessel plodding across a stretch of otherwise unsullied water far beneath us.

Fifty feet or so below, we arrived at the exact spot to capture an image, only to discover four other photographers setting up their gear. Unlike Roz with her travel-worn SLR, these guys had spent serious money and were out for value. Tripods proliferated, with exposure meters and hardware I didn't even recognise. We bade the chaps good day and nipped further down the slope in front of them for a picture which, while not losing the offending craft's unruly wake, would at least mask the unspeakable boat from the lens.

‘Would you get the hell outta my frame!' a corpulent individual shouted from up at the viewpoint. ‘I've been waiting twenty minutes to get that cruiser dead centre.'

Roz smiled thinly at him and clicked her shutter before we headed off into the bushes to take care of a more pressing requirement. One problem with motorcycling in chilly conditions is that however conscientiously you have abstained from drink, each approaching rest-stop takes on such an urgent importance that you hardly have time to cross the legs after dismounting.

Having dealt with the necessities of nature, we toddled back up to the bikes and scooted off, leaving the quality photographers still pondering over their meters. In due course, Roz's snapshot produced a picture she could have sold to any discerning manufacturer of boxed chocolates.

As the day progressed, the snow peaks, deep valleys and blue lakes grew increasingly spectacular, while bend-swinging the tough gradients fed us exhilarating helpings of that dynamic oneness with gravity that the folks looking out from cars could never know. Pressing onwards and upwards, the narrow roads became gritty and challenging, but the rear tyres dug in well under the chain of command leading via drive belt, gearbox, crankshaft and con-rod to our throttle hands. Wheel-spinning a powerful machine under these conditions is all too easy; it is also emphatically not what you want, so it's ‘gently on the throttle' as the bike winds her way up the hairpins. An aware rider can feel the rubber biting, and a really good one will sense that critical millisecond before it lets go under hard acceleration, backing off the power just in time. Controlling a Harley-Davidson on a rough road is less demanding than a hard-revving sports bike, but it still requires concentration and nerve. The nicest aspect of the business is the massive torque of the V-twin engine. Travelling uphill at well under 30 mph, I could trickle the gas into Black Madonna in fourth gear and, instead of sulking, she pulled smoothly from impossibly low revolutions. Each individual power stroke made its own thumping statement, while her exhausts delivered the classic ‘one-bang-every-lamp-post' rhythm that only the mechanically heartless could fail to appreciate.

We returned, exhausted but well-satisfied, to our camp after sunset, passing through packages of freezing air sliding down the slopes straight off the snow. The bears, cats and infinitely more dangerous rednecks did not put in an appearance that night, perhaps because we were in Greta's territory, but we lit a fire and built it up again after supper to be on the safe side. Some sort of weather front ran through after dinner, shaking the tent as we tried to sleep, but we must have nodded off in spite of it. I awoke at two in the morning with the wind blown out and the moon picking up the distant glaciers on the peaks. The bikes cast monstrous moon-shadows in the clearing and our fire had subsided to a smoulder. I left it to die completely. The small beasts of the undergrowth were still under the huge sky. The night was too beautiful to disturb.

Two days later after breaking camp at Hungry Horse, we were crossing the high plateau of Washington State with the sprawling town of Spokane and its Harley-Davidson dealership well behind us. One of the many hidden expenses of a big motorcycle is that the painfully pricey rear tyre will typically run bald every 3,000 miles. Betty Boop proved an exception to this rule, but Madonna made up for her. Equivalent power to a medium-sized car ripping up the road through a few square inches of soft-compound rubber is not a formula for high mileage, especially with a 240-pound Brit plus full kit adding to the load.

The Spokane dealer had his spread on the main drag into town, a never-ending, stop-go road with traffic lights, inadequate signposting and multiple lanes of heavy traffic ganging up for a bike-swatting mission. The stress volume was further turned up by a busy railroad with freight trains rumbling and clashing by only yards from us. We missed the ‘H-D' sign the first time and were saddled with two U-turns to set matters straight. By the time we swung in outside the air-conditioned showroom, Roz had already blown much of the confidence she had worked up hacking over the mountains, so I treated Betty to a full fluid change and general check-over while we read the papers and Madonna received her new tyre. Betty came out with flying colours but I knew I was going to have to give further cities a resounding ‘miss' and pray for an easy passage down the California freeways into San Francisco. I was nursing a real concern by now that the switchback of Roz's spirits would go into terminal decline there, causing her to bail out of the trip at the Golden Gate.

Out on the far-stretching fields of eastern Washington, such fears were banished to the back burner. Mile followed mile in a steady, easy flow across soil little better than powder baking under the pounding sun. Surface water was non-existent and dust was everywhere. Dust in your boots, dust in your eyes, dust in your morning coffee. Dust storms roamed the low hills climbing out of the high plain while whirling dust devils noiselessly stalked the fields, the lonely burial grounds and the roadsides. When we stopped the bikes every hour to drink the warm water from our packs, the wheat ran clear up to the unfringed tarmac at our feet. In contrast to English cereal crops where little or no earth can be seen between the tight-packed stems, half a foot or more of arid soil separated each stalk from its brothers. Just as huge tracts of Nebraska struggled to support herds that a couple of hundred acres would handle in a more comfortable climate, farm buildings in this harsh country stood vast distances apart for the same reason. As the land flickered by in 100-mile stretches, small, weathered farmsteads, blurred by the heat, would appear amidst trackless sections of thin wheat.

One of our rest stops came at the high junction of two perfectly straight roads. A hundred feet below us and more than a mile away was one of these groups of simple buildings. It was so remote that I could see no trail leading up to it and for a moment I took it for another derelict witness to enterprise defeated by the ever-changing climate of economics; yet this one bore the distant signs of working. Its wind pump spun away the years to the relentless drive of the bone-dry breeze, while a tractor, smaller than a child's toy in the distance, moved out of the deep shadow of a low barn, catching a second's light in a glint of metal or glass. Immense irrigation machines crept imperceptibly across a field beyond the house and I realised that they must be the secret of economic survival, but as to where the water originated I had no notion. I glanced across at Roz who was inspecting the map, propped my bike and peered over her shoulder. We were discussing which road to take south-westward into Oregon when out of the corner of my eye I saw the words, ‘Columbia River' and ‘Grand Coulee'. They tugged at some ancient memory under the litter of my mind, but for a few seconds they meant nothing. Then I realised they were an echo from childhood back in the 1950s, when the self-proclaimed ‘King of Skiffle', Lonnie Donegan, had recorded a hit single called the ‘Grand Coulee Dam'.

I relaxed on my saddle, giving the near-forgotten phrases a chance to stitch themselves together. Suddenly, like a zoom lens pulling into focus, the refrain thudded back to me, powered by the insistent beat of common time set by a long-gone washboard.

In the misty crystal glitter of the wild and windward spray,

I fought the pounding waters, and met a watery grave.

When she tore their boats to splinters and she gave men dreams to dream,

On the day the Coulee Dam was crossed by the wild and wasted stream.

That a British rocker should choose such a subject is less improbable than one might imagine. The number arrived only ten years or so after World War Two, a period when the developing rock 'n' roll movement was heavily influenced by American themes, including ‘The Battle of New Orleans' and ‘The Rock Island Line'. I never heard the song from anybody else, even in America, but it goes on to glorify the damming of the great river and spell out the benefits to the populace. The delivery was one of the triumphs of an era when ‘pop' music was branded as subversive by a parental generation, yet often consisted of nothing more sinful than three or four teenage musicians shuffling on stage with an acoustic guitar, a washboard and a tea-chest base.

Forty years later, in Washington State, Roz and I had already missed the main turn-off for the dam, thinking in strategic terms of Oregon and California. But the ‘Grand Coulee', which was surely supplying the irrigation hereabouts as well as power for much of the North-West, was a mere 40 miles away via a thin blue line on our map. Lonnie Donegan was shortly to receive a belated OBE and for the sake of the pleasure he had given my generation, I couldn't miss it. Sweeping aside any considerations of additional distance, I swung Black Madonna on to the side road, told Roz I'd see her at the dam, and opened the throttle. We had only just fuelled and at 90 mph I'd be there in less than half an hour, so I let the bike rip, ever higher across the wide wheat-fields and away into the semi-desert above. As we pounded off the miles, more of the music came beating back:

Now the world holds seven wonders that the travellers always tell,

Some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well,
But now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam's fair land,
It's the big Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam.

The dam came into view on a down-grade from the plain, the man-made blue of the vast lake stretching away eastwards. So enormous was its grey, curving bastion that, like the prairies of Montana, its true magnitude was masked from the eyes of someone from a smaller, tighter country. When it was completed in 1942, the Grand Coulee Dam was the largest concrete structure in the world. Apparently it still is, and its width is such that four ships the size of the Queen Mary could lie in line astern along the top. Power lines criss-crossed the cobalt sky, sagging from immense pylons as they fanned out across the plain. So far below that even thinking about it made me dizzy, the barely tamed Columbia River plunged off down its gorge towards the Pacific, churning in rage at the bold interruption of its journey.

Few tourists passed this way, so I stood alone, gazing, until Betty Boop sizzled up alongside, ten minutes behind me. By the time she showed up I was sunk deep into the surreal aspect of this massive feat of engineering. From somewhere in the depths came the deep, understated whine of a gigantic generator delivering its life-force of volts to the cities in the north-west.

Washington and Oregon, you can hear the fact'ries hum,

Making chrome and making manganese, and white aluminum…

All powered by the same Columbia River that was watering otherwise unusable fields. Although the place seemed deserted, it was the beating heart of this end of modern America. A catharsis of natural force harnessed by superhuman endeavour. Add a pinch of artist's licence and many whose lands were not drowned in the new lakes would agree with Lonnie Donegan, hymning the dam as ‘the greatest wonder in the world'. By rights, his song should have swept America and he ought to have retired rich on the back of that number alone. But those were the days when football players earned little more than coal miners, and a hit single was not yet an automatic passport to unimaginable wealth.