Good Vibrations (22 page)

Cranking up and heading back southwards, we sweated through another 70 miles across the plain before dropping a thrilling 2,500 feet down a deep, rock-strewn gully into the Columbia River Valley. Here, incongruously after the all-American farmers grittily growing cereals in the baked fields above us, a grinning Mexican boy handed us peaches from his roadside stall. He was selling them by the piled-up crateful.

‘How much for just a couple?'

‘Qué?'

‘We just want to buy one peach each.'

‘Why you want only one peach? A box is cheap. Try them.'

I gestured to the bikes.

‘We just want one to eat now. It's hot.'

The Mexican saw our transport problem. He ruffled his black hair.

‘Not so hot as yesterday. Take two each. No charge.'

The peaches were full of juice and no fruit ever tasted better.

This little scene seemed the first breath of the West Coast, but before the cool Pacific breezes and the projected idyll of Mendocino, we still had to cross the desert of northern Oregon and the coastal ranges of the Rockies.

We started out at 5.30 in a pleasant 51 degrees as the first crack of pink was flushing the eastern sky. In the penetrating beams of our quartz-halogen headlamps, the unashamed near-desert featured the ubiquitous dust of America, dressed up with sagebrush clumps and spiced by the occasional pair of reflecting red eyes as some unidentified creature sloped off home before sunrise. As the sun came nearer to breaking the horizon, we began to make out escarpments and distant hills. Soon we were riding down a dead-straight road that must have run for 10 miles on a flat plain between the Squaw Butte Mountains. Exact mirror-image crags stood ahead on either side. We passed between them as the sun appeared, casting impossibly long motorbike shadows alongside us, and climbed off at an isolated fuel stop that announced its incorporation as ‘Wagontire, Population 2'.

The altitude of this remote settlement is around 4,500 feet and in the crystal morning air the whole operation would have served well in a television advert for aftershave. The next gas promised to be at least 100 miles away, so we filled up and clumped into the diner-kiosk to pay. We still hadn't seen a vehicle on the road since rising, but a useful Honda cruising bike was parked by the door.

Inside, a handsome, middle-aged man in biker uniform with headband but no tattoos was wolfing hash browns, bacon and eggs. The food smelt great, but we were saving money and clung to our resolve to picnic later by the roadside. I did buy a coffee, however, and Roz sat down to a glass of canned juice served up by one of the town's two inhabitants.

‘Didn't I see you guys at Sturgis?' opened the lone rider.

‘I can't believe you can recognise us, but we were certainly there,' I responded. ‘Are you heading back to California?'

‘Nope. I been down there already. I'm heading back up towards Seattle.'

‘Lot of miles. Aren't you off-course so far inland?'

He chuckled. ‘I go where the Lord sends me,' he said. ‘Got the call to come this way. Guess I'm on course to meet someone, but I sure don't know who. Perhaps it's you?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I got a small disability pension,' he waggled a hand that was short of a few fingers, ‘so I don't have to work all year. I cruise the highways and help out where I can. Spread the Lord's word too, among the brothers.'

‘Wouldn't you get more ready acceptance from the doomed if you rode a Harley-Davidson?' I asked sincerely, then kicked myself because the ‘witty' remark sounded like a modern-day Pharisee mocking Christ. The man's response would surely have pleased his leader.

‘I used to ride a Harley,' he said, ‘had a nice shovel-head, but I've found that pitching up on a Honda creates just that touch of controversy. It got you spiked up didn't it?'

I had to admit that I'd been ready for a touch of word-fencing.

‘Sometimes, it works out good,' he continued, mopping up the last of his eggs with a forkful of potatoes. ‘One time last year I ripped open my rear tyre. It was a write-off. The only bike dealer within range was H-D, and the gentle soul who ran the joint refused to let my rice-burner in through the door. He'd take my money for a new tyre all right, but he wouldn't touch the job. Not even on his forecourt. His guys thought it was all very funny, but they were OK and in the end they persuaded him to let me do it myself out back, using the shop's tools.

‘But that wasn't the end of it. Being a Harley man, he had no metric wrenches. Wouldn't let them under his all-American roof. Said once you invited those things in you might as well burn the flag. I said nothing, because “half-inch” ain't so far from “thirteen millimetre”. You can always make 'em fit.'

‘I suppose he had the neck to charge you for the use of his tools?'

‘He wanted to, but his fellas wouldn't let him. So just before I left, I tipped him twenty bucks. Nearly drove him crazy, he was so mad.'

‘You didn't convert him then?' asked Roz.

‘You get to know the right time for preaching, and that wasn't it. Expounding the Word to folks you just ripped one out of don't usually work out. I saved him for later. Actually, he ain't so far from here. Maybe you guys were sent to remind me about him…' He scratched his head.

As we left, our friend gave us his benediction.

‘Ride with God, and watch out for rednecks.'

‘Best of luck with that sinner!' called Roz over her shoulder as we opened the creaking door and walked on to the forecourt.

Back out in the desert, the heat was building fast as we cruised south through the 10,000-square-mile arid emptiness of Lake County. Occasionally, a track would wander into the wilderness, marked by a mailbox on the corner. All these had been the subject of successful target practice by passing motorists and were full of holes, as were the occasional road signs and warnings. We pulled off for breakfast at a box that had been blown clean off its post by something with the punch of a howitzer. It had not been replaced and from the way it lay half-covered with whitish dirt in the shallow ditch, its owner had long since lost interest in the morning papers. As we trundled up the lane into the sagebrush, dust clouds streaming off our tyres, the macabre thought struck me that perhaps he had received the same treatment as his name board from some ill-wisher. Nobody would have heard the shots, and it would be many hours before help could arrive, even if summoned by telephone.

After a mile, the ungraded surface became impassable to road bikes, so we dismounted at a pile of consumer rubbish which included a cooker and a large refrigerator on its side. We used this as a table to lay out our crackers, ‘squeezy cheeze' and fruit, setting up our stove on the ground. The selected item of kitchen furniture was of the heaviest grade, looking as if it had been built with resistance to machine-gunfire in mind, but even this monumental chunk of industrial architecture had received the attention of the local marksmen. With grim fascination, I inspected how the heavy-calibre slugs had punched through both sides, cleanly on the entry face but jagging open the steel where they had exited. There was something graphic about this manifestation of firepower that strengthened my resolve to do almost anything a man with a gun asked me to, should the situation ever arise.

Just in case I forgot, I took a photograph of our table, using my expensive 24/80 zoom lens. I packed away the camera body, placing the lens neatly on the fridge in its fine leather box. I only realised I'd left it there when I wanted it for a panoramic view two days later. By then, retrieval would have involved a round trip of 800 miles and we decided to let it go. It looked as though it never rained on that refrigerator and I doubt that it is visited from one year's end to the next now that it has been shot to bits, so anyone else who breaks his fast on its pocked worktop will be one lens the richer, particularly if his camera has a Nikon bayonet fitting.

By the time the lens fiasco was discovered, I felt we were on the last lap, with only hundreds of miles left to the coast and Mendocino. The route we had chosen for the final leg twisted through the smoke of summer forest fires, ever upwards through steep-sided woodland. The smoke went on for two days, yet we never saw the flames. Winds were light at this time, so rather than billowing in clouds, it took the form of a thin brown mist smelling of camp fires that pulled visibility in to 3 miles or less. Somewhere, devastation was in progress, but not where we were. The road, meanwhile, was giving away nothing by way of peace of mind. Precipices plunged first on one side, then the other, regular earthquakes left serious damage not dealt with promptly enough by Uncle Sam's road gangs, and gravel stretches abounded. Gas stations were anything up to 150 miles apart and human activity was almost non-existent, although signs here and there warned of bears. To add to her troubles, Roz reminded me that she was now at the lowest ebb of her monthly cycle. I tried to be sympathetic, pointing out that at least the smoke had at last cleared but, like most men at such times, I failed to get it right.

She was near despair after dropping Betty Boop, mercifully without significant damage, on a hideous stony bend in front of a view of Mount Shasta she should have been soaking up. ‘I never get to enjoy the scenery. Always it's the damned road surface. Look at this place. I swing around the bend and half the tarmac has been ripped away by a 'quake. In case you can't see it from behind your shades, there's a 200-foot drop right here where I'm lying. They probably had railings before the road fell off the cliff.

‘And the nights are worse. Trailing around looking for some crummy motel full of fleas, or praying a bear won't snap me up when we sleep in the open.'

I tried to cheer her up, reminding her we were well into California with the coast so close we were feeling the cool air from the sea.

She ignored me.

‘The whole thing has degenerated into an endurance test,' she groaned. ‘I get up in the morning, I'm still aching from yesterday, we load up the bikes for the hundredth time and then I grit it out all day. And it goes on and on. We're six weeks out from Annapolis and we haven't really stopped. I don't want to play this game any more!'

‘Well, we're going to rest soon,' I responded, making an instant decision based on fantasy. ‘We'll find a quiet place north of San Francisco, up by Mendocino on a beach. We'll move in there and just unwind until you're ready to go on. It'll be half-way. You'll be so glad you've achieved the crossing you'll forget all this stuff.'

I don't know if I believed it. From her expression, Roz certainly didn't, but there was no option for her. I too was aching badly across my shoulders, but according to the map we must soon see the Pacific. Like Xenophon 3,000 years before us, watching his Greek infantry craving a view of the Aegean after their long wanderings in Asia Minor, I hoped to God that it would change the mood.

Wearily, we crested ridge after wooded ridge, each time expecting the ocean, and always seeing more mountains until even I was mesmerised by the insistent throbbing of my bike.

Down a slope, engine comparatively quiet, brakes squealing occasionally from dust in the pads, popping sounds of backfire set up in the exhaust by the altitude. Up the next grade, throttle open, pistons working, blatter of exhaust echoing back from the forest or the rock walls. Another summit. Still no sea. Shut the gas down, ease on to the big footbrake pedal, forget the front brake. It doesn't do much on a Harley, and if you lock up the wheel on the gravel you'll be sliding in the stuff. Body weight thrown forward by the braking and the downgrade, handlebars bucking through the potholes, wrists screaming. I felt for Roz, but left her to her pain. The only way to keep my own mind from slipping down my neck was to shut off my head, watch out for the long drops and the busted lengths of highway and wander into the dreamland of northern California, the journey's end for the McGarrigle sisters. Here, their character lived out the remainder of her life, still looking westwards as the evening light died away across the ocean. Her satisfaction was perfected by each subsequent dawn over the redwood groves behind her, the woman rising with the sun until one morning her song was stilled and she rose no more.

Where, oh where were these immense, legendary trees, harbingers of the Pacific, the greatest and almost the oldest organisms on Earth? Surely we must be into them soon. Desperate for Roz's sake to be finished with the escarpments and hairpins so as to cruise in among these marvels, I kidded myself that each of the progressively tall pines we passed must be one of them. It was true that the conifers grew loftier with every 50 miles, and as we lost altitude for what must surely be the last time, we were passing trees taller than any I had seen anywhere. These must be them, I convinced myself, marvelling at their girth. But they were not. They were merely hefty Douglas Firs of the type that had once made the West Coast famous for its mast-making timber. The experience of riding into our first redwood grove was different altogether.

Towards evening, we were spinning through varied woodland along the foot of a valley. Suddenly I had the eerie sensation that I was cruising into a fish tank charged with air instead of water. The sound of the bike seemed muted and the light was plunged into a restful green. Motorcycling into this unmistakable aura, I looked around for its source, and slowly became aware that I was moving through trees as tall as modest New York skyscrapers. I think I had not recognised them because the girth of the redwood trunks was not comparable with any tree in my experience, including the ancient oaks of the New Forest. The height beneath the canopy dwarfed the neighbouring primary growth firs. I shut down the bike, listened to the stillness and gazed aloft for several minutes to readjust the meaning of ‘tree' in my mind.

Like most of the redwood groves, which have survived the frantic onslaught of nineteenth and early twentieth century lumbering, this one had a small visitor centre and a tiny campground. Two families were pitching their tents almost shyly. The small timber buildings were tasteful, unobtrusive and in keeping. I hardly noticed the people. In the context of trees 350 feet high, they practically disappeared.