by Tom Cunliffe
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 p
erfection 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.
We were halfway through a huge ‘Western Special’ with extra cheese when she slid up to us quietly.
‘I don’t want I should alarm you, or anything,’ she purred, ‘but if you folks are ridin’ out to the Midwest, y’all ought to be real careful out there.’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Thing is, once you’re west of the mountains, you’ll find some pretty strange people.’
‘What about round here?’ I asked her gently, and making sure not to offend, I glanced meaningfully at the assorted group gathered around the black Heritage out on the shadowy sidewalk.
‘Those guys are OK,’ she assured us. ‘They’re all from round here.’ Which made it all right. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t sayin’ nothin’, but in some of them states out West terrible things happen, and the folks is weird…’
We didn’t tell Polly where we were staying when we paid the bill. I’m not suspicious by nature and she surely meant nothing but good, but she couldn’t have checked out all those guys sizing up my motorcycle. One of them just might have been from out of state, and careless talk costs bikes, especially after dark away in Nowhere Land. So we roared off into the velvet night and returned to base by a roundabout route.
As I waited for sleep in the comfortable bed, I thought on Polly’s remarks and recalled being warned by an otherwise perfectly sane lady back at the Annapolis dealership not to travel through Tennessee, our next state after the mountains.
‘That place is full of hicks.’
As always, a chance remark made in daylight grew into horrors by the early hours, so I crept out to look around. All quiet, but just to be sure, I locked the bikes together with a large chain I’d lugged over from Britain and pondered on what folks out West must make of Easterners.
Roz slept late the following morning, still beaten up after her first two full days in the saddle. I slipped out of Room 3 without my boots hoping for breakfast with the clock man.
I was in luck.
The kitchen walls were as beset with timepieces as those of the rest of the house, but the coffee was far stronger than normal in the US and the waffles Olympian. Mine Host had obviously passed a disturbed night considering the enigmas of ethnic bonding and collective business responsibility.
‘This country’s full of fragmented national groups,’ he said, taking a hefty draught of the thick, dark, un-American coffee. ‘They’re consumed by mutual suspicion and often they hate each other.’
‘Surely all that went out seventy years ago – apart from colour down South?’
‘Never believe it.’ He wiped his mouth and poured maple syrup on a waffle.
‘The other problem comes from big business. Taxes have multiplied in my lifetime, and big business is taking over everything worth having. People are so busy squabbling over the petty differences of their ex-nationalities that they don’t see the genuine bandits coming. So they lose their freedom and the capacity to do things for themselves.’
‘And who are the bandits?’
‘Multinationals, and politicians on the make. The time’s long gone when a little guy like Eli Terry can survive by building better clocks.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Eli was what you might call the last craftsman and the first industrialist. He set up in Connecticut back in 1807. Contracted with a major furniture maker to produce four thousand grandfather clock movements at four dollars apiece in three years. Everyone said he was mad. A quality movement took two or three weeks to knock together in those days. Manufacturers charged fifty dollars apiece.
‘Eli set up one of the first mass-production units. Fabricated the parts out of hardwood instead of brass. Like your man Harrison. Now there was a clockmaker!
‘Eli used a water wheel for power and produced three thousand movements in his first year. Made it possible for everyone to own a clock. But he never grew so big he got lost in his own outfit.’
‘Lost in his own outfit?’
‘Today’s companies are so gigantic nobody’s responsible for anything. The big shots hide behind “the times” when the company has to start screwing people. The man who throws you out of your home isn’t to blame, you see. Oh no! Nothing personal. Things are changing and there isn’t anything he can do. Think about it.’
I did.
That morning we worked our way back into the hills through the gap in the ridge at Waynesboro. Giving tourism the slip for the time being, we steered off the map so as to see the country, always making west-south-west along the grain of the land. With the bikes vibrating solidly under us we swept down green valleys flanked by soft, wooded hills. The slopes were partly cultivated by self-contained farms that cannot have changed much since the time of the settlements, except that pick-ups have replaced ox-drawn carts on the dusty driveways. Horses flicked their tails idly in shady corrals and small groups of dairy cattle grazed contentedly in the lush fields. When we climbed off to stretch our legs and ease our eardrums, there was ringing silence and birdsong. The heat was strong, but less so up here than down on the eastern low ground, and the bugs were taking a well-earned siesta. The valleys of the lower Appalachia are a rustic paradise.
Hardly a car appeared on the smooth, narrow road, no motorcycles and never a highway truck. Only farmers occasionally pulled out, gave us a wave, trundled a mile or two along the road, then turned back into the mystery of their lives down the side tracks, leaving us clear ahead for some of the world’s finest riding. Long, fast straights punctuated by gradients, bends of all degrees of tightness, clear visibility, a decent surface and not a Volvo in the county. The best morale-builder Roz could have dreamed of. At one stop I definitely saw the familiar glint in her eye as she remounted and kicked Betty into gear.
‘Come on then!’
The only thing to overtake us that day was the sun, starting its long dive towards the Rockies, but as it passed, it drew a blanket of high cloud in its wake.
‘That’ll be Bertha,’ Roz observed as we stopped in a riverside campground by a main highway. All the talk in the towns had been of Hurricane Bertha, currently beating up the Atlantic beaches, and of whether her attendant wind and rain would reach so far inland. Bertha was out of time, because hurricanes don’t officially become a threat until August, but here she was in early July, making a mockery of man’s fine predictions. The cloud m
ass had a defined linear structure running athwart its progress, evidence that what we could see was the leading sector of the monstrous circulating system of the dreaded revolving storm. West of it was pure sky, now tinged with sunset pink, behind the line lay the possibility of motorcycle-stopping rain and high winds. Bertha was the first hurricane of the East Coast season. She wouldn’t be the last.
You can, of course, use a bike in the rain, but I hate it. In days gone by, when two wheels represented my sole transport, I rode through everything that came. It taught me all about deep-tissue hypothermia, the horrors of sliding on wet, oily surfaces and blind riding with an opaque visor into the spray of a million trucks. In the learning process, I penetrated the deeper canyons of fear and misery, swearing that in a Utopian future, which to my surprise I now found myself almost living, I never would ride wet again. Some hope!
Hurricanes must have warm sea water to feed their atmospheric engine so, hoping that by morning Bertha would die of thirst from the drier air as she came ashore, we secured the tent in a seamanlike manner. To maintain a handle on her progress, I took a relative bearing on the cloud edge from a boulder by the river and we eased our backs by taking a stroll up the steep valley by the water’s edge. Two hours later the storm front hadn’t moved, so we unzipped the tent and gave sleep our best shot.
No wild animals tonight, only freight trains chattering and whining down the line across the river. The sound of a locomotive blowing its lonely siren into the darkness calls direct from the beating heart of America. That night I heard them from the bottom of a deep, deep sleep. I heard Johnny Cash at San Quentin prison, singing his song about a convict driven mad by the sound of the free railroad trains outside the walls, and roaring like the Orange Blossom Special.