Good Vibrations

by Tom Cunliffe

  From here to the Rockies, we saw these systems wind themselves up, drawing damp, tropical air masses into the heartlands from the remote Gulf of Mexico. Towards lunchtime on a typical storm day, the unsullied blue of the distant sky puffs up into fluffy white cumulus. An hour later, groups of these have crowded together into cumulonimbus giants full of evil potential. By 3.30 their undersides have turned grey and the tops are bubbling to impossible heights in undisciplined cauliflower confusion. Dismount to watch one and you can see it churning aloft to the very edge of space as the heat engine exhales in a colossal convection. Somewhere up there in the unbreathable stratosphere, the cold becomes too much for the cloud to hold on to its moisture and it collapses into deluging rain, accompanied by a tumult of thunder and lightning whose capacity for heavy damage is made plain by shattered trees and occasional gravestone inscriptions.

  American summer downpours bear absolutely no relation to the ‘soft, refreshing rain’ of England. They can drop their load in the form of devastating hail that flattens a crop and ruins a farmer in fifteen minutes, but even in the rain mode, they make driving an automobile extremely dangerous, so dense is the water in the air and on the ground. Anyone caught out is drenched in seconds, as thoroughly as if he had jumped into a river. Motorcycling while a summer storm cloud is venting its anger is unthinkable for all but the clinically insane.

  Our first downpour trapped us immediately west of the Cumberland Gap in the town of Middlesboro. We had been searching the pitted streets for the poste restante and news from home when lightning split the afternoon and the initial spots of precipitation heralded an imminent insanity of falling water. The bikes were standing outside the large, square fire station and I was across the street returning from the mail drop when I saw Roz start up Betty Boop and cruise boldly through the huge open doors to worm her way into the cave between two red trucks. Fire stations in America are holy places into which I could not imagine pushing even a dinky car without being consigned to the electric chair. The whole scene is decidedly macho and since it involves ‘the safety of life’, a subject in which America takes an even more morbid interest than Britain, it would be a foolish biker who risked getting in the way.

  Worried, I dashed across, only to discover Roz chatting with a fireman who was urgently beckoning me to pull my monster under cover before the rain. I had almost made it back to my bike when the sprinkling drops suddenly turned into marble-sized projectiles. Black Madonna might as well have been under the fireman’s hose by the time I squelched aboard, but she started up nonetheless and I threaded her gratefully into the echoing dryness of the garage. There she sat above a growing puddle, her engine and exhausts steaming, alive with the nostalgic pungency of the hot, wet de-greaser I used to clean her engine.

  In their cultural impact, the fire trucks were like oversized six-wheeled Harleys; their paintwork a deep, scarlet gloss, their chunky chrome buffed to a markless finish and the externally visible machinery that gave them their butch character was heavy on shine and ready for action. Like our motorbikes and the enormous trucks out on the interstate, these were unashamed examples of US engineering at its best. Their mentor was proud of them, delighted that we appreciated them, and awarded us the freedom of the station.

  We didn’t take up the offer of a shower, but we did venture into the mess room where the ‘watch on deck’ were enjoying a raucous game of cards. It was clear from the dexterity of the dealing and the sharpness of the decisions to hold, draw or fold that these servants of the community spent weeks honing poker skills that would have been the envy of a riverboat operator in Maverick’s day. Coffee and ‘donuts’ perched on the side, so we loaded up. The foreman sat out the next deal and after expressing surprise, came to terms with the fact that our accents were English and not from the northern outback of Queensland.

  I spotted a large television in the corner, spewing out nothing of value.

  ‘Why does everybody in this country think we are from Oz?’ I asked him. ‘I know the accents are similar to you, but there are so many more Brits than Aussies. Your chances of meeting one of us are far greater.’ I glanced towards the screen. ‘Do you watch a lot of Australian soaps?’

  ‘Ain’t never seen no soaps from outside the US,’ he confessed. ‘I guess it must be that guy Crocodile Dundee. He was a major hit a few years back. You sound just like him.’

  I reflected on Winston Churchill, the Beatles, Her Majesty the Queen and Benny Hill, to name but a few famous British voices. The awful truth was that each of them had been eclipsed in the American vernacular mind by a fictitious Australian with a large knife, a funny hat and endless resources of survival cunning. Thankfully, the fireman was the last person to put us through this particular interrogation. Perhaps Crocodile Dundee had been banned by the authorities beyond the Cumberland Gap on suspicion of not using a gun.

  The land continued to open out after Middlesboro, although it remained largely wooded, keeping any distant views under some sort of control. Ever since the West Virginia hollow, evidence of heavy community involvement with Christianity had been building up. Churches and chapels were everywhere, and in greater profusion than bars, which comes as a surprise to an observer from heathen Britain. National churches such as Episcopalian, Lutheran and Roman Catholic were rarely seen, but sectarian meeting houses proliferated. People here said grace before every meal, and casual radio stations socked out Jesus as we surfed the dial for something worth hearing. Tub-thumping sermons from passionate orators were broadcast on television and they made compulsive viewing. We had rumbled into the Bible Belt, where peeling black letters on yellow plastic hoardings rivalled one another for the punchiest one-liner to lure sinners into the clinical insides of the missions.

  ‘Jesus wants one Bride, not a Harem’ blared a ‘wayside pulpit’ on a clapboard chapel whose preacher was clearly sick of his congregation’s adulterous tendencies. I chugged by, recalling a Virginia mountain folk song.

  They had a big meetin’ on the Cumberland drag

  An’ the people gathered in.

  The preacher preached till his tongue wouldn’t wag

  But he couldn’t stop their sin…

  It seemed that little had changed.

  Along the road in the same town we discovered another man of God with similar problems, reminding the faithful that, ‘The law of sowing and reaping has never been repealed.’

  Still at the Lord’s work, the Free Will Baptist warned readers in red letters 2 feet tall that, ‘The worst company for a man is when he gets into a rage and is beside himself.’

  The best tracts of the day, however, were nothing to do with hot gospel. These secular offerings came a couple of hours later on a street lined with knee-high hoardings encouraging those of voting capacity to take part in the democratic process:

  ‘Elect Pam O’Grady for another great term in Municipal Cleaning’, and ‘Vote D’Eath for Sheriff and keep crime underground’.

  Ten miles out of town we were running a wide, straight road through scrubby pine woods when Roz slowed to a halt alongside a house parked on the back of a truck. Tired and sagging, it sat on the flatbed uneasily, looking as though it might fold down on either side. I wheeled my bike around and we parked in the dirt. Half a dozen men were guzzling sodas in the shade of the gable end.

  ‘Is the house coming or going?’ I asked a tall, rangy individual in brown overalls who stepped forward.

  ‘She’s coming,’ he replied.

  For a while, we talked of the pleasures and pitfalls of moving house with our man, who was the owner. Literally shifting your dwelling from one location to another is a realistic possibility in parts of North America where land is cheap, construction comparatively inexpensive and houses built of timber can be hoisted off their foundations and shunted around in one piece. Some builders specialise in movable homes. These are thrown together on spec, sold by house salesmen from lots like used cars, trucked to the site of your choice, with erection on the spot as part of the deal. T
hey come fully wired and plumbed. You plant them, hook them up and it’s ‘home, sweet home’. Many are well put together, remarkably roomy and a sensible option where carting bricks across a distant field is going to be pricey. The building on this truck had nothing in common with one of these miracles of engineering.

  Listening in to our conversation, the gang slowly gathered around to admire the bikes. One stepped forward. Pants dragging on the road, cream shirt work-weary and torn, unshaven for three days at least, and the most beaten-up straw hat this side of Arkansas. He looked like the hickest hillbilly in the West.

  He held out his hand. ‘Geoffrey Whitehead from London,’ he announced in pure cockney.

  This was bizarre in the extreme.

  ‘How do you come to be here?’

  ‘I was in the Army in Aldershot back in 1988 when I was called by God to Tennessee.’

  His nearest mate chuckled. ‘One of the Lord’s saddest mistakes,’ he remarked sagely.

  I looked at the sign writing on the side of the truck.

  ‘Maranatha House Moving Co.’

  The only time I heard the word ‘Maranatha,’ it was the name of a nineteenth-century pilot cutter from Bristol, owned by a Calathumpian lay preacher who brought ships to safety between bouts of dedicated God-bothering.

  I told Geoffrey about this obscure connection. He’d never heard of a pilot cutter and had not been to Bristol, but he asked if I knew what the word meant. I had no idea.

  ‘Even so, come Lord Jesus.’

  Two brown and white puppies were panting quietly in the shade, being fed bologna sandwiches on white bread by one of the workmen. They belonged to the house owner. His bitch was lashed up in a makeshift kennel under a tree. Roz unzipped her leather jacket and bent down to fuss the pups.

  ‘She had eight, but she lost six by leaving them out in the heat.’

  I understood how the poor things must have felt. By now we were up to 95 degrees and the afternoon smelt distinctly Mediterranean. The clouds were starting to look as though they meant business and I knew from bitter experience that if we hung around I’d end up having a thrash-out with Geoffrey about either transubstantiation or the Holy Trinity, so I tore Roz from the doggies, wished the owner well and pressed my starter.

  Twenty miles down the road we stopped at a dilapidated gas station to tank up the bikes and take on a swift pint of iced water apiece. The woman in charge was incongruously dressed in a tweed frock. She had a hunted expression and was clearly hiding from something in her air-conditioned comfort zone. Glancing sideways at the usual group of guys in baseball hats with their heads together at her coffee table, she advised us to stay inside after sunset.

  ‘I don’t go out after sunset at all now,’ she said, her voice low.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Roz, for whom the dark is pretty much as the light.

  ‘’Cause these crazies around here’ll just run you off the road an’ shoot you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘They’re after your money, I guess, but some of them just do it for kicks. Years ago they’d never do nuthin’ like that. Nowadays, they don’t even ask you to hand over your pocket-book. They just shoot you.’

  More talk of violence. Yet we still hadn’t actually met anybody more threatening than the gentle-natured Christian house-mover. I considered the video stores in every town offering nightly entertainment in which nice people have their heads hacked off by maniacs armed with chainsaws, or muscular superheroes machine-gun the forces of darkness with graphically devastating effect. The toll of televised violent death is shocking. ‘Only when you know how to die can you know how to live’ had declared the Church of God earlier that afternoon. At the time, this had seemed like muddled thinking compared with the reassurance offered in lunchtime’s burger joint that, ‘We wash and sanitize our hands.’ Now it didn’t sound so soft. Somebody must believe all this stuff, I thought. But who? It certainly wasn’t the mountain men, the clockmaker or my friends back on the coast. Nonetheless, I felt vulnerable on my bike as we started up again.

  Later that afternoon we were again beaten by the rain. Storm clouds had been marching on either side of us since soon after lunch, and two major contenders had run parallel to our track for an hour or more. As we soared up the crest of a ridge, they altered course without warning and began converging. The air underneath them was opaque with precipitation and as I watched their relative motion with a sailor’s eye, I knew that we were for it.

  Thirty seconds before the deluge, a gust grabbed a pick-up driving along in front of us and hurled it to within a wheel’s width of the ditch. I feared for Roz, gripped my own bike firmly between my knees and hung on. The downdraft hit like the sudden breath of a freezer. Surprisingly, it had less effect on the motorcycle than the truck, so that by leaning hard into the wind I kept Black Madonna on the road. As the first hammer blow passed, I glanced behind to see how Roz was faring. Betty Boop was taking it full on the beam, but Roz was reacting correctly and seemed in no particular trouble, although cranked well over. I remembered reading a discussion in the correspondence columns of Motorcycle News back in England, on whether or not one should lean into a cross-wind. In this wilder, wider land there was no question of scientific analysis. We responded like a pair of dinghy sailors scrabbling for the ‘high side’ as their unsteady craft is heeled to the point of capsizing by a sudden blow. As with most questions of balance on a motorbike, the answer is not to think but to feel, and to marvel at the magic taking place in the dark tunnels of the inner ear which were never designed to handle the additional quotient of 70 mph.

  I slithered up a side track into the trees as the first drops fell, but long before we found shelter, water was sloshing over us in a near-solid curtain. We jumped off the bikes under a thick, leafy oak and cowered behind a pair of retired tractors that had been there for a long time, judging from the foliage poking up through their vital organs. Our lightweight rain gear seemed almost superfluous, but we struggled into the useless things anyway. Roz’s leaked.

  ‘I’ve been drier on the foredeck in thirty-foot seas,’ she remarked as we resigned ourselves to a soggy wait under a rusty engine.

  After five minutes or so things calmed off to what the BBC Shipping Forecast would have described as ‘Continuous Heavy Rain’. We huddled in our makeshift hide and listened as the popping of the rapidly cooling V-twin engines mingled with the steady drumming of the deluge on the tractors and our fuel tanks. Cleaning a Harley properly is half a day’s work. Even tarting one up for the road can take the best part of an hour, so keeping the bikes dry had become a private obsession. Despite our brush with Bertha, I was still living with an unrealistic horror of being caught in the wet, but now that there was no avoiding it, I recalled a favourite sailors’ maxim: ‘If you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have signed on!’

  Leaning back on the perished tractor tyre, I inspected Black Madonna. To my surprise, the rain was giving her a new dimension.

  As the clear drops ran off her waxed tank to drip over the shining complexity of her power plant, each one carried an image, a tiny world that lasted only long enough to land on the smooth black gloss and run to the edge. Letting go its despairing hold on the underside to tumble on to the cylinder fins, its doom was sealed as surely as that of an iceberg sailing down from Labrador to meet the warm Gulf Stream by the corner of Newfoundland. The droplets hit the hot chrome and evaporated with a hiss, leaving nothing but invisible vapour, where a second earlier had been a fish-eye image of the tractor, me and the oak tree.

  An hour later we were at the junction again, soaked through and desperate for a motel room, preferably with a veranda to hang out our kit in the last of the afternoon sun. This had now returned in splendour, the heat had been wound back up and, except for the still streaming road surface which for once had not instantly dried, the world had returned to normal. As we waited beneath the huge sky for an easy gap in traffic that the storm had bunched together, a procession of pick-ups, small trucks and m
odern cars swished by. Their windows were shut tight against efficient rubber seals and their inhabitants peered gloomily at their half-world through fogged-up glass. As we penetrated further from the East Coast, we had noted Japanese imports thinning out. This was a loud statement of heartland foreign policy, since, with the clear exception of the full-sized American cars, the only true difference we could finger between ‘Tokyo trashers’ and the home-grown puddle-jumpers was that Detroit cars were less efficient.

  Suddenly, a pair of bright lights pierced the muddy spray that hung like a shroud over the tarmac. They were wider apart than the puddle-jumpers’, but too low for a truck. As they approached, a motor car materialised behind them, long, wide and curvaceous; jacked up just high enough above its broad, chromed wheels to give it flair. Its mock radiator grill was divided in the centre and, as it swept closer, immaculate orange paintwork glowed through the filthy road-haze like a beacon of hope.

  An early seventies Pontiac GTO.

  I don’t know when Detroit stopped making these sports saloons, but it was a sorry day for America. This one sailed by like a Wagnerian heroine riding the wings of the storm. Its exhaust pipes growled the discreet message that at 60 it wasn’t working at even half-burn, and its pillarless side windows were wound into the doors so that we could see clear through to the woodlands on the other side. The driver turned to glance at the motorcycles through his shades, raised a hand in salute and rumbled on, lost after a few seconds into the mist of his wake. We kicked the bikes into gear and followed him with lightened hearts.

  We had seen the Spirit of the Eagle.

  8

  OLD MAN RIVER

  Still soggy, but steaming dry in the comparative cool of the evening, we rode into the bustling tobacco town of Springfield, population 11,277. A feeling of run-down decay pervaded the untidy streets as we cruised along, aching all over, searching for lodgings. Tourism was not a factor hereabouts, so campgrounds were out of the question. Rough camping was also a non-starter because all land in America tends to be owned by somebody, and after the warnings from the lady in the gas station, we weren’t interested in taking the chance of upsetting anyone.