Good Vibrations

by Tom Cunliffe

  The state line at the far side of the bridge heralded a surprising change in conditions. Straight away my bike started bouncing on rougher roads and soon my butt was feeling the strain. Every so often I had to swerve to dodge a pothole. Roz kept right on going ahead of me, but I was curious about how she was faring. Road surfaces can pass almost unnoticed in a car, but to a motorcyclist they are the beginning and, in the worst cases, the end of everything. Within a half-hour, I had stopped to remove my riding leathers as the afternoon temperature cranked a notch higher than even Washington had served up.

  Opening the throttle to catch Roz, I enjoyed a few minutes of free riding, passing cars and trucks and letting my engine sing for a change instead of chugging. Soon I was back in her slipstream, following down an uncharacteristically twisty road through 50 miles of forest. She was taking her time, leaning gently, getting used to negotiating bends on the Harley that a modern sports bike wouldn’t have noticed. I had a black moment when she lurched sideways to avoid a huge crack in the tarmac only to twitch back again double-quick to leave breathing space for a speeding truck coming the other way. The humidity must have been turning her to liquid inside her black jacket, until final meltdown came at around about the 92-degree mark.

  ‘Take it off,’ I suggested tactfully as we dismounted at our next drink stop, pointing out my own protective cowhide strapped across my pillion pack. Roz, of course, had been suffering this massive discomfort to give her some chance of escaping injury in case of an unscheduled meeting with the grit. Nonetheless, she was giving my proposition serious thought when two young lads wandered over from a car filling up at the adjacent fuel pump. They looked like adverts for ‘what the well-dressed city kid is wearing’ in their baseball caps and sloppy T-shirts. Or louts, depending on your perspective.

  ‘Brilliant bikes,’ observed the small one with frogs on his trainers.

  I eyed him, wondering what was coming next.

  ‘Of course,’ this connoisseur of two-wheeled transport continued with a patronising leer, ‘when I’m a little older I’ll ride a Honda Fireblade.’

  ‘And jolly good luck to you,’ I congratulated him on the subtlety of his taste for the ultimate sports bike. You can’t argue with a ten-year-old who knows his mind. ‘You’ll enjoy doing 150 mph on these roads.’

  The larger of the two exhibits was more down-to-earth.

  ‘What happens if you blow a front tyre at seventy?’ he demanded bluntly. I had a feeling I should be ignoring him, but I let him win.

  ‘You’re in trouble.’

  Roz’s mouth turned down at the corners. She’d been trying not to think about such unpalatable features of the motorbike.

  ‘Yeah. But what happens?’

  ‘The tyre goes flat, but you don’t see much of that sort of thing these days with modern rubber.’

  ‘OK, mister. But what happens to you when the tyre goes flat, even if it doesn’t go flat often?’

  ‘You fall off and slide down the road at high speed.’

  ‘Great!’

  The pair mooched off to a nearby soda machine to keep their weight up, while Roz turned her back on temptation. She zipped up her leather and never rode without it the whole summer, not even in Death Valley. The kid had a point, she decided, and she’d rather broil than bleed.

  The inhabitants of the eastern states are well spread out compared with teeming Britain. A happy result of this was that we and anyone else who happened to be around rolled along at the speed limit. Occasionally we had to overtake, but the roads made the job so easy and safe that even a still-nervous Roz could manage without having to dig deep into her reserves of ‘bottle’. This rendered travelling extremely restful compared with the standard European practice of tearing about the place at breakneck speed, eyes fixed in the mirrors to spot the police before they nick you. The key to the general quietude on country byways seemed to be that almost anybody below the unwritten cruising speed pulled hard over to allow faster vehicles to pass. It’s intelligent, it’s friendly and nobody suffers. Things can be very different on a busy interstate highway.

  We worked steadily upward towards the easy foothills of the Appalachians through the remains of the afternoon. The traffic thinned out even more, farms came back to replace the forest and delicate blue flowers filled the roadside ditches. Lazy butterflies flitted around us like psychedelic autumn leaves as we lay beside the hot tarmac taking hourly breaks, then at about five o’clock we rounded a small bluff and right ahead lay the mountains. That blue ridge has been the first milestone on many a westbound trek out of Virginia, and already Annapolis and the insurance mania seemed a long way behind us. We gave our aching bones a rest and pulled off the highway near the attractive traditional town of Culpepper. There in the woods, we found the first of many campsites from the crypt.

  Neither of us has ever liked tents, but with three months ahead of us and even the crummiest shelter charging $25 per night, spending a proportion of our nights under canvas was a necessary option.

  Roz’s dislike of camping is entirely rational. Apart from a reasonable desire to sleep on something other than the cold, hard ground, there is always the question of the bugs and larger wildlife whose immediate motivations may not coincide with hers. Within minutes of pitching our ‘Khyber Pass’ double-walled, totally insulated masterpiece and lighting up the snappy little stove, mosquitoes were zooming in. ‘Oh, God,’ Roz blasphemed, smacking her neck and fastening up the net door screen, ‘here they come!’

  Mosquitoes are not my favourite creatures, but they drive my wife insane. They are pleased enough to take a meal off me but, offered the choice, they’ll fill their tanks from her every time. How the early settlers coped with them I cannot imagine, and I’ve noticed they don’t feature in any of the films about life in the developing US. Heroes of both sexes are depicted prevailing against Indian attacks, starvation and white men so evil that you fear for your sanity, yet Public Enemy Number One never gets a mention. To fight off the storm troops of human wickedness only to face a lifetime of defeat by an indefatigable insect assailant must have seemed cruelty in the extreme.

  Survival is assured today because homes are fly-screened; bars, cars and Winnebagos air-conditioned, and the few souls brave enough to front up to the untouched wilderness with a backpack can lather up with bug repellents to make life tolerable. Leave the chemicals at base, though, and the hiker is in difficulties.

  The situation was as serious here in Virginia as it had been in Maine where we had once arrived in our boat, looking forward to peaceful evenings in the cockpit enjoying the fabled sunsets. Not a bit of it. The only safe place to be from sundown minus thirty minutes until around plus two hours was battened down below. We never once saw the sun hit the pines, because the mozzies kept the show for themselves and woe betide any romantic who forgot who was boss.

  Expecting no quarter therefore, we oiled up with ‘Off’, and Roz skulked behind her netting while I scrabbled together a snack. The bikes had clinked their way down to normal temperature as I cleared away under the rising silver moon. The conifers whispered in the light breeze, the heat had eased off, the bugs went home and we cuddled gratefully down into our lightweight sleeping bags craving the righteous sleep of the exhausted. The moon peeped in through the tent flaps and in the dying moments of the evening I relaxed at last, until Roz began ruminating about the possible presence of wild animals. I’d been trying not to think about this. All the statistics indicate that the chances of being eaten on a designated campground by anything heavier than a mosquito are far slimmer than the likelihood of running under a truck out on the highway, but statistics hold no water with me when it’s dark and things start rustling.

  All manner of major beasts run free in the wilds of the United States. Moose of a tonnage that would make a Hereford bull look lightweight toddle around the forests, while hungry bears with a taste for tourists are alleged to maraud through state campgrounds sizing up the inmates for a square meal. Add to this duo the mount
ain lion, plus an occasional snake snuggling up through the canvas to keep its blood warm enough to make an early start on the campers, and you will see that sleeping out is not for the faint-hearted. Nonetheless, because of its untamed nature, the wilderness holds great charm for many who are well-prepared. Emotionally, at least, we were not.

  As the dark hours dragged by and the ground grew lumpier and harder, the breeze dropped and the frogs began croaking. They rasped and bellowed without stopping, with the foreman making a noise like a dying donkey. In a sense, the frogs were comforting because they couldn’t hurt us and they kept their distance, so I drifted off to sleep until well after midnight, when loud snufflings around the tent convinced me that the bears had arrived. Roz awoke and we both lay frozen to the groundsheet by the wildest surmises, not daring to speak until what sounded like a large dog suddenly barked brazenly by Roz’s ear.

  Dogs Roz can cope with, so she started beating the canvas.

  ‘Sod off!’ she spat while I privately hoped the visitor was a family pooch and not a night-hunting Rottweiler. At this point, there came a snarling scuffle like a minor dogfight outside the back of the tent, after which all was silence save for the bullfrogs, which never stopped their chorus.

  An hour or so later, the snuffling returned and I broke a lifetime’s habit to peer out of my flap into the moonlight. Staring me boldly in the face was a racoon: bulbous eyes, striped tail, the whole works. Racoons don’t bother you if you don’t bother them, we’d been told, but I waved my fist at him anyway. He sneered at me and trotted off into the trees. I turned over on to a sharp stone to contemplate my own dislike of sleeping under canvas which stemmed, I concluded, from more sinister roots than Roz’s.

  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.