Good Vibrations

by Tom Cunliffe

  ‘Some people just eat their way from a vague unhappiness into total misery. They start out thinking they’ve a sharp appetite, but soon they get into the spiral and it’s too late.’ So he said, while ordering, ‘Coffee, black, no sugar, to go.’

  During dinner and even as we returned to our room, we heard the intermittent roar of motorcycles streaming north towards the next bridge over the Mississippi. I remembered the carpenter mentioning Sturgis and consulted my Harley-Davidson literature to find that it is a township in South Dakota in the shadow of the Black Hills. Once a year, it is awakened from its slumber when a quarter of a million bikers with a ragged army of hangers-on take over its one street for a week of racing, drinking, fornication and general mayhem. Sturgis seemed an event only the bankrupt of spirit would miss, but Roz wasn’t enjoying her motorbike so much that she wanted to spend a week being deafened by thousands of others; especially as the night-riding gangs going early were joining with the pain in her shoulder to rob her once again of any worthwhile sleep.

  Much later, I awoke to hear the thunder of a big ‘chapter’ dying away. Roz was at last breathing evenly. Out in the moonlight, the headlights were snaking away towards the river and the Great Plains beyond. The undressed romance of it all bit me in the gut.

  Across the yard a single lamp was burning in the hotel office. In the pool of light, our hostess was totting up her books. A complex woman to be sure. I couldn’t imagine what voyages she had taken to arrive in Dyersburg. She was on the Lord’s side now, but she’d been dancing to a different tune when she’d learned to size up a man the way she did.

  By nine o’clock, the day was already shaping up into a scorcher. When we said goodbye to the Madam, she unpredictably relented her hard-line stand on discounts for nobodies. Flashing a glance that left me drained of all but lechery and holiness, she gave me ten bucks off the room and directions to the Walmart hypermarket, defusing my fantasy by declaring it the best place to buy hardware.

  ‘You ride carefully, now,’ she said strictly. ‘Look after your wife. And the Lord be with you.’

  I staggered out to join Roz in the sunshine as she watched us crank up and swing out to buy a pair of rain slickers that did not leak.

  The motorcycles were still booming up Route 51 as we wended our way to the shopping plaza through suburban lanes called ‘Hummingbird Road’, ‘Burger Alley’ and the even more improbable ‘Girl Scout Road’. The checkout lady in Walmart, a blousy brunette in her late thirties, noted our biker gear and our purchases.

  ‘You guys headin’ up for Sturgis?’

  I glanced at Roz and responded.

  ‘Probably not. Besides, it’s half the country away.’

  The lady glowered.

  ‘Where are you going, then? You ain’t from these parts.’

  ‘San Francisco.’

  ‘Listen up,’ she was clearly not amused. ‘If you’re goin’ to California, you might just as well hang a right an’ take in Sturgis. If you’re ridin’ those two Hogs out there,’ she gestured at the bikes outside the glass doors – ‘Hogs’ are Harleys in popular US parlance – ‘you jus’ can’t come all this way an’ not be there. Jeez, my ol’ man an’ me ride, but we ain’t never got the time off work to go, and you cross our country like God Almighty an’ don’t even bother. It ain’t right.’

  It shouldn’t have been difficult to put her straight with what appeared to me sound logic. Despite the signs we were seeing of early life, the event proper didn’t start for another fortnight and, in any case, Sturgis was 1,000 miles from Dyersburg as the buzzard flew. How far it might be following our meanderings was anybody’s guess.

  The brunette wasn’t hearing me. We had trespassed on her dreams in heavy boots.

  ‘So what’s bein’ free all about? A mile here, a thousand there. What’s the difference when you’re ridin’ out?’

  Roz came to our rescue.

  ‘A lot of people have said we should go,’ she said. This bit was straight up. Our inquisitor was at least the tenth. Now Roz became tighter with the truth to avoid a scene and make a friend. ‘I expect we’ll end up taking your advice. But you know how it is when a man gets stuck on some road he’s decided on…’

  I almost choked, but this masterpiece of hypocrisy had the desired effect.

  ‘Make sure you do, Honey. Get him up there. An’ have one for me.’ The lady patted Roz on the arm like a conspirator.

  She took $3.50 for the leggings after breaking them out of the $10 pack they shared with a waterproof top.

  ‘Damaged stock…’ Then she charged us for one set of instant photo prints when we’d had two made.

  As I walked out into the heat, I began to wish the lady who had told us to watch out in Tennessee could have travelled here with us. We had certainly seen one or two ‘hicks’ and had been warned yet again about others, but the state was emphatically not ‘full’ of them. We’d felt uneasy once or twice, but the only gratuitously dangerous characters we’d come across were as foreign to the area as we were.

  The Mississippi was our second major milestone after the Cumberland Gap. At this point in our journey, we had made no decision about where to cross the Rockies, still 1,000 miles up the road. I was itching to head north-west to Sturgis, but was receiving scant encouragement from my partner. Beyond the wide, muddy stream lay Arkansas and Missouri, then Kansas, Oklahoma and the Great Plains. Further north, in its incarnation as the Missouri, the river penetrates deep into the Wild West, remaining at least partly navigable all the way into the last Indian territories. Custer took passage aboard a riverboat for a section of his catastrophic expedition to meet Crazy Horse under the huge skies of the Little Big Horn, and sharp-dressing gamblers from New Orleans plied their trade on stern-wheel showboats in the days when Oregon and Washington states were barely settled at all.

  Until recently, there was no bridge across the river between Memphis and Cairo, 130 miles northwards in a straight line. Dyersburg lies about half-way. The distance is more like 200 miles on the winding water which, in a European perspective, is the length of the English Channel from the Dover Strait as far as Plymouth. On the eastern margin of the waterway, the semiredundant US Route 51 runs south from the Great Lakes past Dyersburg to Memphis, then on to New Orleans. West of the river, Interstate 55 now carries the through traffic from Chicago to the central Gulf, taking in St Louis on its stressed-out way. For the inhabitants of west Tennessee and eastern Arkansas gazing across the water, never the twain did meet until a new bridge with interstate standing was constructed.

  This system of soaring girders offers direct access to the west, but Roz and I had determined to avoid it. Crossing the Mississippi on a six-lane highway was not what we had left the New Forest to do, so we scrutinised our state map and discovered a remote ferry where a minor road disappeared into the river.

  We set out from town after lunch, a bad mistake, because by the time we had dropped down on to the alluvial plain 7 miles short of the water, the temperature must have been nudging 100 degrees. Riding a 10-foot-high levee across fields as flat as a pool table, we could feel rather than see or smell the river. No wind stirred the air and the heat blurred everything more distant than half a mile. Beyond fields of melons, copses heaved and squirmed like faces in a Hall of Mirrors, while the few isolated farmhouses were surrounded by acres of mirage-generated ponds that shook into baked earth as we approached. Far away, a group of immense storage tanks grew slowly in stature as we crept up to them at 30 yards per second. From a couple of miles off they looked more like a spectral temple than a utilitarian necessity of rural life.

  Not a single vehicle swam into view to break the spell. No friendly signpost encouraged us to press on; only the ever-narrowing levee pointed into the distance towards an acre or two of woodland, a few shacks and what looked like a bend in the road at last. The final farm before the end of the metalled track was abandoned and as we swung round the corner down to the river, the tarmac suddenly ran out and we careered too fast on to a
rutted gravel trail. We braked gingerly as the bikes bucked and slid underneath us in a welter of loose stones, but we kept them on their feet as the river opened up through a gap in the trees. A derelict concrete slipway 50 yards wide sloped in crumbled ruin to the water’s edge, so we parked the bikes at its upper margin by a wrecked Chevrolet, stripped off everything we wore except for modesty’s demands and walked, sweating and dizzy with the heat, down to the brown swirling stream.

  Old Man River was a mile wide as he poured steadily southwards under the sun, inexorably emptying the continent. The far bank was wooded and out in the middle a long, low barge was punching its way north to St Louis. Close to where we stood, a pair of tugs were worrying half-heartedly at a dumb barge that was fast aground, totally ignored by three or four men of assorted colours absorbed in their fishing. The foreshore was the dried mud and sand of half a continent, lapped by waters gliding relentlessly seawards.

  One of the fishermen squinted at me from a stool pitched squarely not 10 feet from a 2-foot catfish, belly-up, in the medium stages of decay.

  ‘Pretty day, mister.’ He seemed not to notice the humidity as his sweat dripped on to his large basket.

  ‘We thought this was the ferry,’ I said, although it was already obvious that the idea had been a hopeless pipe dream.

  ‘Ain’t been no ferry here since the bridge,’ the fisherman replied, casting out into the current. ‘Place has silted right on up in any case,’ he finished, indicating the stranded barge and turning back to the water.

  I kicked some sand and walked slowly away.

  Just then, a pick-up skidded on to the ramp with five kids jostling in the open back. They poured out and ran noisily down to the water where they set about investigating the rotten fish. A handsome young couple hopped from the front drinking bottled Budweiser.

  The man was tall and slim in Levi’s, a loose, checked shirt and the inevitable baseball hat advertising some unknown brand of cattle feed. The woman was lithe, with an uncompromisingly beautiful face. She reminded me of the actress Meryl Streep.

  Meryl inspected the bikes in detail, then walked over to where Roz was leaning in the shade of a wilting tree.

  ‘The yellow one yours?’ she asked.

  Roz said that it was.

  ‘More women should ride their own,’ Meryl continued, ‘and that is one cute machine.’

  They handed us a beer each from the bottomless depths of their cooler, tossing the caps into the undergrowth.

  ‘You folks local?’ I asked, getting the hang of things.

  ‘Sure,’ replied Randy, introducing himself. ‘We live up the road, but I’m a trucker. Away more ’n I’m home.’

  ‘Do you drive for yourself, or someone else?’

  ‘Christ, I wouldn’t drive my own truck in this country. Hauling’s the most inefficient industry there is. It’s OK if you just sit up behind the wheel like I do and collect your pay, but if you have to jack up the loads as well, you’d never get started; what with the insurance and the worries about lawsuits and some guy getting aggressive ’cause you’re operating his favourite pitch, and all the rest.’

  Another barge a quarter of a mile long steamed slowly by from left to right.

  ‘Cotton goin’ north,’ Meryl remarked to nobody in particular, pushing the hair back off her sweat-damp face.

  ‘Too early yet for cotton,’ Randy contradicted gently, ‘but if it ain’t cotton, I dunno what it is, ’cause that barge is deep down in the water.’

  So it was, but Randy had already lost interest. He threw his empty bottle into the trees as naturally as if it had been a stone, then pulled out another and one for me. He topped his and handed me the opener, keeping up the litter barrage with powerful dedication. Meryl lobbed her own bottle after her husband’s then offered the same for Roz, but one beer on a hot day with an empty stomach and a motorbike to be ridden was enough for her.

  As the kids paddled in the mud and the heavy, unhurried afternoon cooked up way past blood heat, Meryl was still anxious to learn. She wanted to know exactly why Britain continued to support a royal family when the rest of the world had opted for the republican persuasion. I took a life-saving swig of the ice-cold beer and began attempting to explain the inexplicable. The unelected constitutional monarch, universal and unquestioned allegiance to whom is a vital factor in individual freedom left her unimpressed, and after a minute she interrupted to demand that we dish the dirt on the Prince of Wales’ sex life.

  ‘You probably know more about that than we do,’ I said. It was true. Every corner shop in the US carries a selection of pocket-sized ‘human interest’ newspapers such as The National Enquirer. These creative publications will give you the facts about men from Mars enjoying kinky sex with TV stars, massive ladies who lost 140 pounds in two weeks and, of course, up-to-the-minute data about sultry nights down at Buckingham Palace. They are a lively read in a lonely motel room, so long as you don’t bend your head by making a habit of it. I’ve no doubt that Randy brought an occasional copy home from the road to keep Meryl abreast of developments.

  Pouring clouds of half-burned fuel oil from the deep throats of their exhausts, the two tug boats now decided to buckle down to a full-power heave. They churned up the riverbed in a boiling stream of thick mud, their hawsers creaking and dripping as the water was squeezed out of them by their 40-ton bollard pulls. After a protracted float-or-bust equilibrium, the barge came off the mudbank and was towed out to safety in the main stream.

  Turning to Meryl, I observed that it was difficult to imagine how a professional barge skipper could strand his vessel so comprehensively in what must be one of the world’s better charted rivers.

  ‘The channels shift all the time,’ she said, screwing up her eyes against the glare, ‘I’ve been coming down here to swim ever since I was fifteen. Sometimes I’ll work out towards the middle in the full current, then suddenly I’m standing in two feet of water. The next week, the bank’ll have gone again. The pilots out there have a tough job.’

  An hour later we crossed the river into Arkansas on the interstate, slumped off the bikes and tottered into a diner, more for the air-conditioning than the prospect of an afternoon snack. The Harleys were so hot that it hurt to sit on them. After a round of double iced waters, Roz spread out the map on the Formica. There were numerous routes from here to Kansas. They all looked the same and they all looked like a long way on a burning saddle.

  9

  MUSIC OF THE

  OZARKS

  A traveller’s state of mind when riding a motorcycle depends entirely on the road. If this is challenging, as it invariably is in Britain, it fills your head. Either you are setting the bike up for the next bend and moulding your body into the machine to hit the power and the shift of balance just right, or you are concentrating so hard looking out for flashing blue lights or the gravel slurry that you have no time for anything else. In the States, however, particularly in the vast tracts between the Rockies and the Appalachians, it is normal for the straight roads to demand less of you than walking down a country lane. The all-important surface quality varies, but any bike-slaying cracks are generally visible well before you arrive. In a car you click up the air-conditioning and the cruise control, turn on the radio, play your favourite tape until you are sick of it, or talk the sanity out of your companion. The bike offers none of these options for evading the main issue. You are alone, surrounded by nature with time defined by the scrolling highway. Your consciousness is in freewheel to follow what track it will.

  One thing I never ask Roz is, ‘What are you thinking?’ This includes what was in her mind when riding. We both lived inside our own heads. For me, this often meant speeding along with my ears full of phantom music. Much of this took the form of ‘country’ numbers, some was ‘rock’n‘roll’ from the simplistic world before Sergeant Pepper, but right now and all the way through the Appalachians, my personal bubble resounded with traditional mountain music. At Haggerd’s place, I felt I could reach out an
d touch the Carter Family with their ageless values and Mother Mabelle’s spine-crawling accent. Thinking of the Virginia clan as I rode down the road, the droning nostalgic truths of ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken?’ sang intermittently. Later, contemplating the awful realities of a smashed automobile with freshly mangled bodies spilling out of it, the cracked tones of a pensioner I had heard somewhere came droning back:

  There was whiskey and blood run together,

  All on the road where they lay.

  I saw the wreck on the highway,

  But I didn’t hear nobody pray…

  Running across Arkansas towards the Ozark mountains, I recalled an album on tape that I had been given in the mid-seventies by a man called Ambrosio. The cassette looked as though someone had been sleeping on it and it must have been at least the fifth rerecord from the original, but it became a part of life aboard the boat I had then.

  Roz and I had run out of luck in Charleston, South Carolina, but found a snug haven up a muddy creek alongside the shrimp boats. Here, we fell in with a mixed community of fishermen and freelance engineers with a sprinkling of out-of-work hippies who styled themselves ‘The Hungry Neck Yacht Club’. The fishermen were hard, but they gave us a crab pot that fed us night after night. The engineers sorted our mechanical problems which had defied the best brains in the North Atlantic basin. The hippies gave us a music tape.

  Ambrosio wore the classic ‘freak’ outfit of ragged jeans, flower shirt, beads and a beard that would have been the envy of Moses as he turned the Nile to blood. This not-so-young American lived aboard a no-hope yacht of around 35 feet overall length. His partner in the enterprise was a girl of fiery temper and hair so carroty that if it hadn’t been genuine it would have been unbelievable. She was said to be the owner of the vessel. Then there was Ricky, who squatted with an extensive stash of grass in a rusted-out Cadillac Eldorado that had once been pink, a mad Irish farmer busted out from Oklahoma and a lawyer called Suzie who was right on the edge. Suzie lent us a $50 Plymouth in which you shifted gear by pressing buttons. It was a wild car that was even nearer falling over the cliff of polite society’s bitter end than its owner.