Good Vibrations (4 page)

Argue with my primitive self as I may, I never can entirely defuse a feeling of insecurity that creeps up with the twilight as I lie in my flimsy bivouac. I have heard many theories as to why strong men should be haunted by imagined horrors in the darkness. My favourite is that ancient peoples dreaming out the long nights of the ice ages walked in permanent terror of predators stalking the blackness. Outside the cave and the protection of the fire, sabre-toothed tigers prowled the gloom. The remains of anyone they caught were still there in the morning for all to consider. Thousands of years of living with this grim truth must have forged it on to the gene code of Palaeolithic man. Time has swept away the tigers, but the darkness remains and I seem to have more than my share of genetic leftovers.

Reclining on my personal brick after the racoon returned to his family, I recalled a night of prostrate dread when, aged eight, I had opted to sleep out in the suburban garden of my childhood home. All went well until my slumbers were shattered by what I later realised was a screech owl perched on the ridge of my little tent. I had no idea then what the noise was and could only assume that the Dark Angel himself had come for me. The idea of looking out to reconnoitre was stifled by fear of being seen by the demon, so I followed the policy of craven cowardice which has served me well ever since, pulling the covers over my head and hoping the predators would go away from the mouth of my cave.

Back in the USA of today, the welcome grey dawn and the scented air of night's departing finally crept in through the tent netting. Both of us were suffering from lumbar pain and contemplating the alternative comforts promised by the Great American Motel. Outside in the half-light, the bikes gleamed dimly, the morning smelled of pine and dry earth, the frogs had gone home for a good day's sleep and the only sound was the echoing song of the forest birds. Away through the woodland a fellow camper had lit a fire beside his motor home. I clambered stiffly into my jeans and sauntered over. He was at peace with the world.

Like most American travellers, my neighbour had sensibly tackled the outdoors from the beast-proof and bug-resistant security of a well-appointed ‘RV', as recreational vehicles are universally known. This remarkable example had expanded in all directions once off the road, so that it now had two bedrooms hanging off its sides and a comfortable sitting area laid out behind a neat erection of fly screens.

‘Pretty mornin',' our neighbour said companionably. He had the face of a pioneer, but probably worked in a Chicago office. ‘You folks sleep good?'

‘Like a pair of logs,' I fibbed.

‘You from Australia?'

‘Why should you think that?'

‘It's your accent, I guess.'

‘I'm English, actually.'

‘Yeah. You guys from those parts all sound pretty much the same.'

For a moment this shook me, but I gathered my wits and politely pointed out that my accent has no more in common with an Australian's than an Alaskan fisherman and a Louisiana field worker. He handed me a cup of excellent black coffee and asked whether someone from London, England would be able to tell my pair of hypothetical Americans apart, should he come across one of them alone on a bus to Tower Bridge. I knew that he wouldn't, and began to understand the dangers of making snap judgements about other people's insularity. The fire sent a column of blue smoke into the trees above us and inside the wagon people were moving around, their footfalls hollow on the carpeted metal as they prepared for a new day on the road.

Down at the tent, Roz and I cleared our site, knocked back an aspirin apiece with a cup of Harrod's best tea and started up the Harleys. The din shattered the stillness of the dawn glade and I imagined chipmunks and the last of the lurking 'coons diving for cover.

We rode out past the RV man, whose wife was now perched on a lounger by the fire.

‘Beautiful bikes,' they called with a matey wave as we swung by up the rough track, creating a dust storm and noise pollution fallout that would have called down the curse of Cain in any European camping site.

Nice people, Americans, I thought, as we regained the blacktop gratefully and hauled away for the mountains.

4
QUESTIONS OF TIME

Detailed route planning was deliberately not our strong point on this journey. Within certain rough parameters we preferred to let the road lead its own way towards the distant ocean. The first decision was to make our initial westing parallel to the coast down the Appalachian Mountains, then strike out across the continent from some point south of centre.

Early in the faraway summer that had led to Marian and the Buick, I had flagged and bussed my way across from New York City to California. I found no surf, failed to make out as a film star and soon limped back to the East Coast by ‘Greyhound' bus. Many of the details of this jaunt have faded, but the fantasy factor in names like Deadwood, Santa Fe, Dakota and New Mexico have clung like snapshot memories. As the decades passed, the fire in them refused to die. The lure of the desert, said to burn somewhere inside every Englishman, has always called loudly to me. So has a fascination that the massive migration across heartland America, one of mankind's greatest, has taken place almost within living memory. History is so close here, it gets under your fingernails. At the outset of the journey, such vague notions provided motivation enough to press forward, searching for the essential romance that is the United States.

An hour after breaking camp on this second morning, we were at the 4,000-foot gateway to the ‘Skyline Drive', being hit for $6 each. After reflecting that the road was part of a national park, I dipped into my pocket on the assumption that since the scenic route along the ridge of the mountains served no commercial purpose, it must be paid for by those there for the spectacle. Serious travellers use Interstate 81 down in the Shenandoah Valley, but we imagined that our investment would buy us a look at an America unsullied by the roaring four-lane highway.

Once inside the barricades, we tried our luck in a visitor centre, but found nothing about hill people today, only brochures with pictures of folks long dead. Fearing that we had made a wrong turning across the often ill-defined line dividing travel from tourism, we swung away down an endlessly twisting route controlled by a nerve-jarring 30-mph speed limit. In fairness, it must be said that the views were glorious and the surface excellent. The tragedy of the place was that even to the eye of one come to marvel at them, once you had seen one mountain vista of pine trees and receding blue ridges, you had seen them all.

We crept mesmerically along the escarpment, stopping only to goggle at more of the same from the official viewing points while craving for a cup of tea. I was leading by now and trying to discover a pull-in without a theme park sign in which to brew up, but failing wretchedly. In defeat, we finally climbed off and stretched ourselves at a manicured lay-by, deliberating how soon we could coast back to life as it is lived.

According to the map, this was going to be another couple of hours or so. After our sleepless night, the possibility of literally dropping off the bikes was lurchingly immediate, so we let the tea bags stand in the cups long after they had given their freshest in the hope of a serious belt of caffeine. We were just taking our first shuddering sips when four bikers buzzed smoothly into harbour, paired up aboard a Honda and a Suzuki. They stopped 10 yards from us, all grey ponytails and lightweight leather jerkins, but they didn't say hello. The boys in Harley-Davidson of Annapolis had pointed out that considerable political tension exists in America between devotees of slick, fast, imported motorcycles and the faithful who have stuck to the only patriotic machine. In Harley circles, owners of rice-burners are often assumed to be the sort of moral derelicts who would allow the US flag to touch the ground when lowering it. Out West, there were rumours of Angel bars where Japanese bikes are hung from trees for small-arms target practice.

‘Do you really think that “rice-burners” don't talk to Harley people at all?' Roz asked.

Since not knowing the answer to this question could conceivably prove injurious to our health, I sized up the opposition out of the corner of my eye. Like me, the men had been around long enough not to court trouble for its own sake, and the women had little of the hardcore ‘biker's moll' image in their outfits, so I left Roz with her plastic mug and wandered across to ask how things really stood.

The two men pointed out that, as truckers on vacation from Ohio with their wives, they generally found little in common with the ‘tattoo brigade' who, they thought, rumbled around incessantly on lumbering Harleys, but that it wasn't automatically a question of war. I offered them tea in throwaway cups, which they probably hated but nobly downed without flinching, while telling us fearsome tales of bikers decapitated by tyre treads coming adrift from trucks in the heat of the plains. I hoped the stories were apocryphal, because Roz was turning distinctly pale, showing that occasional capacity for self-doubt that the new world of motorcycling seemed to be bringing out. I changed the subject by asking what a man did to keep his mind off his troubles sitting in a 50-ton eighteen-wheeler on a straight road for weeks on end.

‘I listen to Agatha Christie books on tape,' said Bob promptly.

Another illusion shattered. But we didn't have to probe far to discover that he drove with a gun as well as his tape deck, so hope for red-blooded kings of the road remained alive.

Late that afternoon we coasted into the official park campground immediately above the first exit from the parkway. No sooner had the engines been killed than the sound of 1,000 light bombers presaged a mosquito blitz that would have been the envy of Hermann Goering. A visitors' book outside a ranger station advertising inflated prices for pitching a tent was full of jolly wildlife observations:

‘Bear chasing deer through campground.'

‘Rattlesnake run over on road (not by me).'

Roz had seen the flat snake and had already had a close encounter with a deer so tame it almost knocked her off her bike. The happy campers were locked safely behind the windows of their Winnebago wagons and the mountain air was loud with the roar of air-conditioners, so we pulled on our helmets and cleared out for the world beyond the park gates.

Crassly assuming that the bugs would back off nearer sea level, we stopped in the trees for a drink of water and to rest our seats. I rambled through the dusty pines to watch the chipmunks scurrying around while Roz sat on the ground for some refreshing yoga, but within fifteen minutes we were beating off a strafing so persistent that we had no choice but to take to the highway. We immediately blew our navigation and found ourselves on the interstate, where any speed less than 70 mph spelt dire danger from overtaking trucks.

I'd been concerned about how Roz would cope with the higher velocities that sooner or later must come, so I encouraged her to lead on the divided road so as to make the pace. Speed feels like the proper thing on a motorbike. No sound and wind insulation shields the rider, who is almost literally flying through the air. There's no defence if the bike runs out of road either, which, I suppose, is why going like a banshee is such a blast.

In charge of a car, Roz is more than competent. I once sat in the passenger's seat as she drove a huge Pontiac at an average of almost 100 mph through the winter forest night across the backwoods highway from Maine to New Brunswick. Fear at speed isn't normally part of her curriculum, yet the bike was definitely having some subliminal effect on her, because so far she had resisted all my attempts to crank our speed above 55. As we hit the interstate, she wound herself on an extra 10 mph but it was not enough. At 65 mph, Roz faced a dilemma. Either she cranked up to a strategically safe 75, which still felt faster to her than a motorbike ought to go, or she settled for her ‘comfort zone' speed and risked being flattened by the traffic. Neither alternative appealed, because she turned off at the next exit and gave me a hard time for taking her on there in the first place.

Thoroughly rattled, we rode onwards in search of rest and quietness down one of the forgotten routes that often run parallel to the interstate system. Within ten minutes, the highway madness was far behind as we slipped into the country road again like a comfortable overcoat. On a site close to where, 130 years before us, Stonewall Jackson had crossed the ridge with 25,000 men on the way to his last fatal clash with the Yankees, we discovered a cameo from a bygone era.

The Greenwood Motel was a throwback to the 1950s. It sat on rising ground by the lazy highway that, in the heyday of them both, had carried much of the east-west traffic of the nation. Two single rows of rooms with metal-framed, plate glass windows, flanked a taller, shingled house. Back on the highway, a neon sign proclaimed ‘vacancies', though no guests' cars were in evidence. We ventured in, curious as to what the price might be. The $60 or more per night demanded by the average Days Inn was way over budget.

Still wearing my leather jacket, I propped Black Madonna and knocked on the door. There was a longish wait and we had just decided the place had closed down when a curtain twitched and a face peered out. I stepped back to minimise my intimidation factor as the door opened.

‘Have you a room for the night?' I asked the shortish, middle-aged man who opened the door.

‘You guys from England?'

I said we were and he nodded absent-mindedly, glancing at the shining Harleys.

‘Nice bikes,' he said, rubbing an unshaven chin, ‘come on in.' The office desk stood under a high ceiling at the base of a heavy staircase, but it was hard to take in anything but the ticking. I once saw a movie whose central figure lived in a room surrounded by clocks, but the actuality of the ones in the Greenwood Motel outnumbered the fantasy of the scriptwriter by three to one. There were grandfathers with steady ticks like scythes shearing dry wheat, frantic cuckoos whirring up to their half-hourly flurry, elegant French carriage editions marked the minutes discreetly on a mantel shelf, and busy office clocks from a slower age strode through the hours in contempt of the wage slaves who had toiled in their thrall.

As we filled out the guest forms, something approximating to the hour came up. Carillons played tunes, Westminster chimes sang out, miniature soldiers banged cracked gongs then ducked back inside their sentry boxes, and from somewhere upstairs, the deep tolling of a large bell boomed out into the dusty air.

‘Is this your own collection?' enquired Roz.

‘Mother loves clocks,' responded our man absently, before moving back unexpectedly to the subject of our Englishness.

‘Did you know,' he continued, ‘that although the 1980 US census counted fifty million Americans of English descent, forty-nine million others were of German origin and the forebears of another forty million had fled from the mess your people made of Ireland? Take me, for example, I'm a bit of most things, but I'm German and Irish mostly.' He looked at us mischievously, waiting for a reaction to the presence not only of the old enemy, but also of the one nation the Brits have always failed to understand, and they our closest neighbours too.

He didn't get one. ‘I'm also at least 128th part Cherokee,' he said with a straight face, ‘and a bit of English too, I'm afraid. So you see, I'm not anything. Nothing I can call a nationality. You guys, though, you know exactly who you are.'

‘But you're one hundred per cent American.' I was sure he was winding us up like one of his clocks.

‘And what do you think that's about?' he retorted. ‘Being American doesn't mean anything at all. Haven't you noticed that there are Irish Americans and Italian Americans and African Americans and Native Americans, but no English Americans? What do you make of that?'

I didn't know what to make of it, or of our host either, but he took us up to meet his mother anyway. This excellent woman was tall, thin and bore herself with a straight back. She led us into her clock-lined sitting-room and was soon discussing an antique specimen bearing the legend,
Beatus qui Partitere
. She had never met anybody with Latin in the fifty or so years she had owned the clock, so I gathered together the skills of a lost childhood and took a stab at the motto. ‘Blessed is he who divides,' was the nearest I could approach to a translation, for although I could not in my life conjugate the third word, it surely had something to do with partition. It was good enough for Mother.

Many a Latin maxim is obscure taken out of context, but I couldn't help remarking that this one applied in perfection to the proprietor himself, a man with a truly advanced sense of the banality of nationalism, but we were now swimming in ever-deeper waters, so we pleaded the need for a shower and scuttled off to our room.

‘Number 3' proved to be an apartment straight from a black-and-white movie. Outside was its own small porch equipped with traditional wooden chairs in which to whittle, spit and to enjoy the afternoon. The decent-sized bed chamber featured Venetian blinds and an antediluvian air-conditioning unit inserted as an afterthought into the rear window. The shower room was beautifully tiled throughout and boasted plumbing fittings of a quality that today's contractors would go broke trying to install. The fabric of the building might not have been exceptional, but the piping and the appurtenances would last a thousand years.

Roz took a shower that gushed forth like Niagara before collapsing on the bed complaining of a bad shoulder. She had torn something straining to hold the bike up when it had slipped beyond the balance point as she dismounted after her test spin, watched by the assembled troops.

‘I'd rather have ripped my arm off than dropped Betty in front of that crowd,' she announced. I rubbed her upper back with ‘Flexall', a sports muscle relaxant she'd discovered in a pharmacy and without which she had decided motorcycling could not be tolerated.

Leaving Betty Boop to take a well-earned rest, we rode Madonna through a wooded darkness singing with insect life to a nearby town in search of food. Here, Polly of Polly's Pizza asked us what we were about. We chatted pleasantly of this and that, and she glided away to her kitchen, all soft white tennis shoes, soft voice, soft blonde hair and plump, welcoming body. A wholesome girl.