Authors: Tom Cunliffe
âIt's like this, mister,' he replied unemotionally. âIt's a free country, and I've got the franchise. You either pay what I ask or take your chance out there.' He nodded south towards where the salt pan swam beneath impossible cliffs and a brazen heaven. âThirty people still turn into leather here every year. Most folks choose to payâ¦'
We stumped up, and we took double Cokes. They proved a prudent investment, but I swear they steamed inside us as they hit our throats. Since we were such good customers, the proprietor let us fill our water bottles for free.
Pressing on under the sun towards the salt pan, the heat became more intense than any we had yet experienced, including equinox on the Equator. Within half an hour it was virtually unbearable and we stopped to rest as the great plain of salt opened out across the valley. A nattily dressed group of tourists stepped out of their air-conditioned car, exclaiming excitedly about the temperature. They greeted us, hung about for a brief few moments, their activity level slowing down visibly by the minute, then they dived back into the power-assisted shade of the vehicle and drove off.
There was absolutely no shade of any description at midday, and the temperature must have been up around 130 degrees. It was August and if we had ever doubted before that the motorcycle was a favoured way of experiencing the truth about America, we certainly didn't now. The folks in the car were seeing almost as much of Death Valley as we were, but they weren't suffering the power of the sun, hour after hour. They might have thought about the miners from before the air-conditioning revolution, prospecting so desperately that even this godforsaken wilderness held hope, but they can have had no clue as to how they might have felt. Occasionally, a family travelling to California would wander into this kiln either by mistake or in a madcap attempt to save time and distance. There is no record of how many did and which of them survived, although there are stories of groups pooling their water, setting up a rudimentary shelter up on the cliffs and sending one man for help. They must have imagined themselves already in the Inferno.
Carried away now in my desire to wallow in the raw beauty and murderous conditions, I decided to walk across the dry salt lake and see how things looked a mile from the road.
âYou can go on your own,' said Roz with certainty, adding, âyou must be barking mad.'
So we parked the bikes a few feet apart and rigged an awning between them so Roz could lie in the shade, I drank a litre of precious water and marched out to the west. Two hundred yards from the road, I had lost 50 feet or more in height and was on the beginnings of the salt. I had never walked a salt flat before and had imagined it to be hard and smooth. What the others are like I cannot say, but Death Valley proved a surprise. I had kept on my heavy leather boots against the remote possibility of snakes, and soon was glad I had done so. The going was surprisingly soft under a crunchy surface covering of white salt that reminded me for all the world of thin ice setting off above tidal mud. For a few minutes I trod gingerly, in fear that I was crossing the floor of some diabolic cauldron which might at any moment cave in and send me to the Devil. I didn't fall through, however, and crunched forward with slowly increasing confidence.
I decided to walk for thirty minutes, heading straight for a distant cleft in the cliff wall so as to maintain a known course. I worked on the basis that at my slow rate of progress half an hour would take me a mile or more from the bikes, and I didn't look back. I had no fear of getting lost, because I had worked out a contingency plan in case I couldn't see Roz when I turned around. In fact, finding my way back proved the least of my problems. The enemy was, of course, the heat and the unbelievable dryness of the air.
When the bleeper of my watch told me my thirty minutes was up, I stopped. The opposite side of the valley towards which I had been hiking for maybe a mile and a half looked no closer than when I had begun.
The glare from the salt was so intense that the mind-numbing heat seemed to come from all angles, not just the sun. I suppose the Sunday joint feels similar as it sizzles in the oven. My body was desiccating. No sweat came or, if it did, it was instantly vaporised by the tumble-dryer air. I had noticed that wet clothes hung out on the bikes in this climate were ready to wear within a half-hour. Now, the same was happening to me.
I stood up and turned so that my datum cleft lay exactly behind me. The road had disappeared, so had the bikes, so had Roz. Whether they had blended into the fast-reddening cliff or sunk into the mass of shimmering air lower down I could not tell. By now I felt noticeably weaker. After quenching my thirst back at the bike, I had foolishly not carried more water with me. We packed only 3 litres in all. Normally this was plenty for a day, but here, drinking it was like pouring it on to the sand.
I squatted down on my haunches deciding whether to rest or to return as quickly as I could. As I scratched idly in the ground with my fingers, the salt broke away in quarter-inch crystals. I pulled out my knife and hacked out enough to fill a film cartridge I found in my pocket. We can season our fries with it, I though wryly. Then I stood up, overcame a dizzy spell and began the trudge back.
Keeping my landmark behind me for the first ten minutes, I watched for any improvement in the visibility. The mirage danced on. It occurred to me that I could have been there 100 years before with no road, no awning, no welcoming woman, no water and no magic carpet called a motorcycle to spirit me away to a cool motel. Perhaps then I'd have had only a stumbling mule for company, the pair of us dying by the hour.
After fifteen minutes I had floundered twice and was really feeling the pinch. Craving water, I reminded myself again that I'd drunk my fill less than an hour earlier. It helped a little, but I realised that although it meant extra distance, I was going to have to veer off to the south to cut my chances of failing to find the bikes to nil. If I'd struggled on straight ahead and not been able to spot Roz when I arrived at the road, I wouldn't know which side of me she was and which way to turn to reach her. If I made sure of missing her to one side or the other, there would be no question about what to do when I reached the tarmac. I might walk a little further, but in this basic sea-fog navigation policy lay certainty. If I took a chance and it didn't come off, I might stagger down the road for another hour hoping I was going the right way. If I'd guessed wrong, I would have to decide at some arbitrary stage that the bikes could not possibly have been this far north or south, then reverse my steps. By then Roz would assume I had broken a leg out on the salt and be facing a nasty dilemma.
Still with the cleft behind me, I now chose an unmistakable fold in the east wall that was around 30 degrees off my imagined direct track. Noting the time, I altered my heading, keeping my new landmark ahead as my legs steadily turned to jelly. As I clambered up to the track after a further quarter-hour, there was still no sign of Madonna and Betty Boop, but I took a left on to the melting blacktop, following it around a bend and through a pile of boulders 100 yards away. There, glinting in the distance, were the bikes.
I joined Roz under the awning and gulped down what she had left of the water. Pahrump Nevada was 80 miles away. This morning, such a distance had seemed insignificant. Now, I had a different perspective. There wasn't much traffic and it had struck me forcibly out on the pan that our air-cooled motorcycles had so far only had to run downhill or on the flat in Death Valley. To get out, they had to gain 3,000 feet, a very different task. Having seen what the place did to my body, I was concerned lest they overheat and perhaps seize up, leaving us in dire trouble if nobody happened by with bottles of sweet, cool water. I remembered the conversation with Red and the crowd back in Branson Missouri about the problems of air-cooling the back cylinder of a Harley-Davidson V-twin. The poor thing had to breathe red-hot wind blowing off its sister right in front of it. Well, we were about to find out the truth. A pity, I thought, that we wouldn't be seeing the boys and girls again to set the matter to rest, one way or the other.
Climbing out of the deep valley, we used the gearboxes carefully to maintain modest revs and kept our right wrists gentle on the throttles. As we gained height, we left behind the worst of the heat until the sun dipped and the temperature fell to what felt like the usual 105 degrees. The buzzards flew over us once more and the bikes had taken the whole experience without flinching. I never complained again when my Harley-Davidson service manuals told me to change the engine oil at 3,000-mile intervals. That lubricant worked harder for its living than any oil in my experience.
Back up on the Nevada valley floors with the stark mountains rising from them like islands in the sea, we bummed a fill of water from a lone trucker who had plenty, then found a dirt road and cooked our supper in the wilderness. We fried a clove of garlic and a few chopped chillies in the bottom of the pan, used a pint of precious water to activate a packet of excellent Mexican rice, lobbed in a can of black beans when the rice was cooked and finished the creation off with a sprinkling of Death Valley salt. The sun was setting by the time we had scraped our tin plates clean and were relaxing on our selected rocks to finish our well-warmed bottle of red wine. Jupiter was rising between two peaks, and the air was so clear I thought I could make out a couple of his moons with the naked eye.
Starlight took the edge off the blackness of the early night as once more I set out from the bikes to walk into the desert. The air was cooling nicely although the boulders were still hot, but I was thinking one more time about the people who passed this way 100 years before. As a seaman, I have often marvelled at the hardness of the men who carried out regular commerce from wooden ships under sail alone. You have to try it to understand how tough and heartbreaking it can be. Trekking on foot across such country with no clear idea of where one was going to end up required similar fortitude. Perhaps it was even worse for the landsman, because at least the sailors knew how life was going to be. Their fathers had been there before them and they grew up expecting no more and no less. They understood from childhood that what to us seem virtually impossible feats of endurance would be within their everyday capacity. There was no alternative, easier way to tempt them, and this was surely half the secret. For wanderers and even organised operators in the unknown parts of south-west USA, increasingly heavy, unpredictable demands on physical and moral resistance must have come on a regular basis. The survivors were a breed apart.
The last 20 miles to Pahrump by motorcycle were a romp through the blessed high-altitude cool of the late evening. As we breasted the final rise, the town spread out beneath us. According to our information, its population had risen from a single ranch community providing beef and provisions for the mining camps in 1876, to 18,000 assorted inhabitants today. From our vantage point, the place looked enormous but, with one area of exception, ill-lit. We could discern a dim chequer-board street pattern at least 5 miles square; in the distance, Highway 160 was visible as a row of lights heading south towards Las Vegas, but it was all low wattage stuff except for a single focus of shining floodlights illuminating the grandest US flag I had ever seen.
This glory of the desert, the bunting equivalent of a Harley-Davidson, a Pontiac GTO or a Flying Fortress, undulated gracefully in the beginnings of a night breeze in the centre of town, fully 3 miles away. The bold, beautiful banner marked the town better than a lighthouse beacon. After our traumatic day in Death Valley, and surrounded as the symbol was by barren land and a town with no features, I was surprised to find myself positively moved to see this grand statement of American identity.
No nation on earth is so in love with its flag as America, and I have seen strong men weep as it is lowered to the strains of âThe Star-Spangled Banner'.
As we rode slowly down the long, dark and dismal streets towards the flag, all the buildings seemed low in contrast to the shining, modern edifice beneath it. This turned out to be the casino, heart of many a Nevada town, and beside it we found the first of a short series of casino hotels, the best rooms of the whole journey.
Lying on clean sheets in the cooling draught of an a/c system that for once whispered instead of rattling and roaring, I gazed out of my window at the mighty flag filling the frame against the night sky. Understanding this business of the sacred colours is a basic requirement for travellers in America, where unpatriotic behaviour in any form is despised, from stately government offices and leafy suburban streets all the way to San Quentin prison, where dead men walk as they await execution for first-degree murder. These days, it is becoming acceptable to incorporate the national logos in garments and other diverse artefacts, but when Harold Wilson tried to crank up morale back in 1960s London with his âI'm backing Britain' campaign, the Union Jack underpants that proliferated found no American equivalent. Any US male who allowed the sacred patterns anywhere near his personal tackle would have been deeply ashamed. The Peter Fonda âCaptain America' Harley in
Easy Rider
was further out of order for its time than most foreigners realised. It wasn't just Fonda's vagrant lifestyle and Dennis Hopper's caricature cowboy appearance that outraged the rednecks, it was the fact that they represented a different America, a movement that shook more than the trees with its slipstream.
Morning showed the truth about the temporary town of Pahrump. Apart from the casino, a couple of hotels and a few modern businesses strung out along the Vegas road, the community consisted almost completely of trailers parked on generous square lots delineated by grid-iron dirt streets. The place had gone on to mains electricity in 1963. Telephones did not arrive until 1965, even though the road in and out had been paved way back in 1954. What all these people did to fill their day was obscure, for we saw few of them. Our hotel had been more than half-empty and even the gambling house had seemed quiet. Perhaps the extreme weather kept folks indoors. It would hardly be surprising.