Good Vibrations

by Tom Cunliffe

  ‘You two go ahead,’ Roz said, unconcerned, ‘I’ll follow on behind.’

  I reorganised my kit somehow and the girl, no mean weight, hopped up on to Madonna’s buddy seat. She hugged me around the waist as I kicked the bike into gear and opened up for the West End of town. I could see Roz in my mirrors, a light and a yellow flash. She was a long way astern.

  By the time we reached our turn-off, the way my passenger was pressing into my leather-clad back was hinting that perhaps a pow-wow was one of those affairs where ‘anything goes’. There’s no doubt that bikes do things to some women and unfortunately a Harley engine, even a smoothed-out Evolution version, can act like an overpriced vibrator to anyone straddling the buddy seat. Fearing the worst, I held back, willing Roz to give it some throttle, but she had disappeared temporarily from my field of vision and the girl behind me was raring for action.

  ‘Come on!’ she urged, breathing in my ear, leaning forward and nudging my right elbow with a helping of unmistakably female chest, ‘it’s just at the bottom of this hill and across the field.’

  Filtering in from the side, an endless convoy of ponies, trucks and ancient cars, mainly American, was lurching down a long, steep slope, rutted and deeply muddy, towards a water-meadow studded with trailers, tents and a handful of tall teepees. Slipping the clutch and riding the back brake judiciously to stop the heavy bike sliding from under us, I hung on as we jolted down the slope. The V-twin growled sexily as I blipped the throttle to avoid a series of potential collisions. The frame responded with its wicked high-resonance shudder. I dreaded to imagine what the monster was doing to the ancestral hormones.

  At the bottom of the incline, we set course for a group of teepees on the far side of the wide pasture. By the time we got there, any semblance of tread in my road tyres was crammed with mud and the traction was reduced to zero, but the chief’s great-granddaughter was getting a bang out of hollering to her chums. If we’d collapsed in a greasy puddle I don’t think she’d have minded one bit.

  As the pair of us dismounted, I peered anxiously astern for Betty Boop, feeling like a wagon train survivor praying for the cavalry. To my exquisite relief I saw Roz riding precariously through a crowd of appreciative but well-oiled young braves. Not only was the Sportster still on her feet, despite the abysmal going but Roz’s arrival lifted me from what had all the makings of a diplomatic disaster.

  There was no sign of the elders keeping a lid on the action. The teepees were empty, the trailer crowd was ripping into the firewater and heavy metal music was reverberating around the valley from hidden speakers of major proportions. Despite the carnal attractions of my passenger, I had been hoping for some serious discussion about the life of an Indian in today’s United States, but fate and the bottle seemed to be conspiring against such enlightenment. Roz searched for a patch of ground hard enough to support Betty’s side stand as I tried to engage my passenger in meaningful exchange, but she had lost interest and was proposing a lift back to town. Perhaps this was because of Roz’s persistence; more likely, I thought, my presence was no longer required now that she had made her triumphal arrival on site. Whatever the reason, I was persuaded to mount up, pop her on the back once more, and drop her where I had picked her up. Roz muttered something about seeing me there. As I hacked away across the boggy field with the Indian girl’s powerful thighs once more clamped around my hips, I reflected that I’d have been much better off with Laverne’s trail bike than the heavy, skidding Heritage. Despite the non-event now subsiding to its anticlimax, I couldn’t help speculating disgracefully on the potential outcome had I been a lone rider. But that was one thing I’d never know. The dark-haired beauty hopped off at the gas station, awarded me a warm, wet kiss and was last seen deep in conversation with Sid Half-Head over a can of Coke.

  I waited five minutes for Roz. After ten, I was seriously worried and had just started the bike to go look for her when she arrived from around the corner covered in mud. Seeing her reappear from those direst of straits made me realise how much I loved her, but she was not in a mood to be told. Instead, she indicated for me to follow, opened her throttle and blasted away eastwards across the plain at an unprecedented speed, ground-up dirt spitting from her tyres. She didn’t falter until we were twenty minutes outside the reservation. Only then did she stop on a swell of the sunset prairie, miles from anywhere.

  ‘Sometimes I really wonder about you,’ she said, her eyes steely. ‘The first sniff of a girl and you gallivant off into some God-forsaken jamboree with me tagging on like a spare part.’

  Still filled with admiration for her nerve, I tried to remonstrate that to refuse would have been rude, but this was no acceptable excuse.

  ‘And then you leave me in what looked like a World War One no-man’s-land surrounded by drunkards. The bike was totally bogged down. If she’d gone over, God only knows what would have happened. I’ve strained my back holding on to Betty, so I’d appreciate the fanciest berth in Dakota for tonight. I need a hot bath and a comfortable bed.’

  Ten miles on we pulled in at the tourist joint we had turned our backs on a week before. Travel had been a tough option that day and, as a mollified Roz pointed out, tourism has its place in a secret corner of every journey. We parked our filthy Harleys among the polished motorcars and tucked into a proper dinner surrounded by vacationers from everyday jobs. These were the people whose faces we’d seen peering through vehicle windows that afternoon. The following morning, I chatted with some of them in the lobby and was not really surprised to discover that they were ordinary folks from Middle America out to see their country. Their Pine Ridge experience had been dramatically different from ours. Many of them were now pressing on to the Little Big Horn battleground, or into the Black Hills to visit giant statues of the heads of Washington, Lincoln and other presidents at the Mount Rushmore monument. Sturgis was being avoided like a plague city. Since no one seemed interested in Wounded Knee, we decided to go there.

  As soon as we re-entered the reservation on the secondary route leading to Wounded Knee, the pot-holes became so deep and erratic that some stretches of road represented a major undertaking. Set back from the track, shabby trailers and basic houses were surrounded by wrecked automobiles, rusty cookers and other debris, an untidy contrast to the neat homes of white farmers a mere 30 miles away. ‘Low morale’, would be a simplistic deduction, yet when we stopped by the roadside to take in the scene of poor soil, buttes and shallow canyons, two beaten-up local cars had swung by within five minutes to check brightly whether we needed help. Both drivers were Sioux, the second a woman.

  ‘We’re fine, thank you,’ Roz reassured her. ‘We just stopped to admire your beautiful country.’

  And it was true. The deeply scoured valleys and gulches might have been unproductive, but they were lovely in the cool morning.

  ‘Beautiful country, yes,’ responded the woman, arms wide, ‘this is sacred ground. The Black Hills and all this land are the burial place of our ancestors. It was given to us and will always be holy.’

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Roz remarked after she had driven away, ‘is that if the place is so sacred, why dump rubbish everywhere like modern-day gypsies? Why is there no respect for the environment?’

  I could only suggest that perhaps nomadic Indians, and gypsies too, had always left their refuse behind, but that in pre-industrial times, everything must perforce have been biodegradable. Perhaps when they came back to a summer camp after a six-month absence, their leavings had more or less returned to the earth. Living free with the land and its creatures as a part of the whole order, rather than being forced to subsist on its surface as consumers, must have cast a very different perspective on such questions. A hundred years is a short time to change a path of thinking that was part of this nation’s genetic framework long before the army ground it into irrelevance at gunpoint with government approval.

  Perhaps the last word on the Indian philosophy of land ownership should go to Crazy Horse. ‘One doe
s not sell the earth on which the people walk.’

  At Wounded Knee, we stood alone at what must be one of the most dignified monuments in the United States, a Stone Age people’s equivalent of the wall memorial in Washington to the dead of Vietnam. A small enclosure has been cordoned-off above the shallow valley where, a day or two before Christmas 1890, the army opened fire with field guns on a final group of free Indians under Black Foot, who were actually in the process of handing in their arms and coming on to the Pine Ridge Reservation. One of the few survivors was Black Elk:

  I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with my eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream… the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no centre any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

  From 4-foot withies driven into the hard earth, a few scraps of coloured cloth floated on the summer breeze. One or two simple statements were carved on low stone tablets and a plain stone monolith marked the centre, but the essential message is in the fragments of material caught in the endless wind. What the fluttering fronds mean to the people who maintain them I do not know, but for me, they mark a position fixed in time; the watershed between a philosophy that accepted the land as it was and the new one of recasting it to accommodate man’s special needs.

  Our next stop was to be Whiteclay to replenish our booze. Alcohol sales are forbidden on the reservation and this settlement immediately off Indian Territory was said to fill the gap in the market. Riding the bumpy road to the drink store, I deliberated the impressions of the Sioux. My thoughts centred on the confusion of identity that seemed to beset the most famous Indian nation of them all. The stark perfection of the Wounded Knee memorial failed utterly to gel with the drunks at the pow-wow, and it was clearly true that for many Native Americans, in this area at least, liquor provided an important life support system. In the absence of sales points on the reservation, the hamlet of Whiteclay has given itself over to servicing this requirement. It consists of little more than a sun-beaten open space with the right stuff on sale. As we trundled to a halt, the place smelt as though something had died around the corner and been left there for vultures who had not fancied it. No habitation, no church, no doctor’s surgery and no school disturbed the seedy dispensing of booze.

  When we shut off our engines, a small gathering of sullen men rose to their feet from benches outside the stores and came lurching over towards us, weaving from drink but distinctly menacing. Roz glanced at me for confirmation, then she thumbed her starter button and we turned tail. Facing up to strangers in circumstances that imply a potential threat always takes moral fibre, and I for one had run out of the commodity for the time being. It was a sad end to a remarkable two days, but rather than face a meaningless conversation or something worse with these ruined men, we sped towards the wilderness of the Badlands into which Crazy Horse’s parents had carried their son’s body. His grave was never revealed.

  15

  STYLE OR

  SUBSTANCE?

  We chose the least-used route through the thousand-odd square miles of the Dakota Badlands. In the hot afternoon, it took no imagination to work out that before the trail was driven through and the odd motor vehicle passed by, dying of thirst or exposure in the wildly decayed wilderness of cream-coloured clay would have been simple. The division between the marginally cultivable Indian reservation and the totally unworkable Badlands was dramatic. The grass petered out while the terrain took on fantastic shapes as though painted by Salvador Dali. Wide, flat-floored valleys and narrower canyons carved out by the weather spanned the miles between almost vertical, stratified cliffs rising to the surface of the plain above. The low-lying areas were littered with crazy towers of clay and flat-topped ‘mini-mesas’ a hundred or more feet high that cried out to be explored.

  Immediately inside the southern boundary, a dust track wandered off across an area of sparse, coarse vegetation to a tiny wooden church. Roz rode on along the partially metalled road as I, always a pushover for a chapel or a bar, pulled over to investigate. Seemingly irrelevantly placed miles from any habitation, I doubted whether even the coyotes came to church here. As I parked Black Madonna, I took off my shades to get the full effect of the still-high sun, but the light shining back from the pale-coloured cliffs and the peeling white clapboard of the walls was so strong it hurt my eyes. I slammed them back on again and forswore reality.

  The chapel bore the same signs of semi-regular use one notes on the churches of country parishes in England, where ecclesiastical cutbacks require vicars to service three or four congregations. Notices announcing ‘Holy Communion, third Sunday in the month,’ and ‘Flowers next week, Mrs Tidy,’ were absent, but the timber steps were in good repair. The heavy door was unfortunately locked, but the board announced to any who should pass by that this was the church of ‘Our Lady of the Sioux’. It was my last fleeting connection with the modern-day survivors of the tribes of the northern plains, but no priest appeared to explain why the building existed in so obscure a location, or who were the worshippers who made the stupefying journey to mass.

  Back on the road, the tarmac was shimmering in the midday heat. I strapped my leathers across the back of the bike and gave Madonna the gun to catch up with Roz, only to succumb to another dirt track 10 miles later weaving away into a narrow canyon. The dust had been pounded hard and flat by storms, so riding wasn’t too difficult, although over-confidence would soon have had me off because the stark light was not picking up any holes and corrugations clearly enough for me to anticipate at over 15 mph. I stopped my engine in a side gulch, and stood for a few minutes experiencing the totally lifeless nature of the place. Nothing whatever moved and the only sound was the bike cooling off a fraction from running temperature to the blood-boiling ambient heat of the surrounding air. My black, studded machine was in perfect harmony with this outrageously American scene, and I reflected that if you threw in a friendly rattlesnake the picture would make the cover of a Harley-Davidson brochure.

  I could have sat on my haunches all afternoon watching the shadows grow, but Roz was running further away each minute and as usual, we’d no contingency meeting plan other than that we’d be in Sturgis that night. This typically loose arrangement, however, was going to be even less use than usual. We hadn’t seen a bike apart from Sid Half-Head’s since we’d entered the reservation, but there had to be thousands of them 50 miles north of us. Unless Roz stopped to wait for me, which there was no guarantee of her doing, finding her in town was going to be like looking for a small bolt in a well-stocked workshop ‘bits box’. Reluctantly, I fired up and gave the engine all the gas it could guzzle.

  I was soon seeing double from the high-speed throbbing of the engine, but even so there was no glimpse of the black and yellow flash far ahead until our obscure track ran into the main drag at the imaginatively named junction of ‘Scenic’. As we merged with the highway that led through Rapid City to bikers’ Mecca, we at last filtered into a river of spotless motorcycles which grew ever denser as it flowed westwards.

  For any lover of traditional American engineering, the sheer mass of steel, chrome and tooled leather pouring westwards was worth a long, hard road to be a part of. Founded in 1903, Harley-Davidson’s history is older than many parts of the modern country, and even the spread-eagle logo could serve as a national call to arms. Harleys prevailed here by an overwhelming percentage, with cool dudes lounging back on customised ‘choppers’ riding as easy as Captain America himself; grizzled veterans in ancient leathers barrelling along with grey beards flying in the wind; smart city types cruising on ‘store-bought’ one-offs, while an occasional ‘rat-bike’ wreck surged along in defiance of the laws of mechanical ageing.

  ‘Highway pegs’ in lieu of c
onventional footrests were standard equipment, allowing the feet to ease out almost to the front wheel. The resulting laid-back mode makes for comfort in a straight line, but can be so unsuited to ambitious bend-swinging that the attitude has given Harley riders in Britain the reputation for posing. Removed from nationalism and prejudice, the unadorned fact is that so long as it isn’t taken to the sort of extremes that are normal in Sturgis, the position is safer than it looks assuming you aren’t in a hurry. Out West where the roads run straight all day and half the next as well, the tables are squarely turned on the sport-biker. In ‘Marlboro Country’, it is the man crouched over a high-speed ‘crotch rocket’ that seems vaguely ridiculous, on a mission to prove something.

  The one thing that struck us immediately as we joined the stream was how slowly everyone was riding; 50 mph, maybe 60 for a treat, was maximum. To me and to Roz too, now that she was starting to relax, travelling on a powerful motorbike so slowly seemed somehow rude to the machinery, and so we blatted merrily on, overtaking almost everyone in a non-aggressive sort of way.

  As we passed each bike, hearing its booming thunder as the sun sparkled on chrome-work and coloured the flying leather tassels, I couldn’t help but check out what our brothers and sisters were wearing. In sartorial terms, I felt like a farm boy at a society wedding. Most of that remarkable procession was togged up in fashion gear, and I had to admit it caught the eye of the beholder a whole lot more effectively than our fundamentalist leathers. It also assisted the air-cooling of the suffering body, but the protection factor of a thin sleeveless jerkin, a headscarf and a pair of jeans with rips across the knees approaches absolute zero, even against grasshopper attack. The truth was probably that nobody rode at a sensible speed simply because it hurt too much, even if you stayed on your wheels. Actually sliding in the gravel in such kit would be too damaging to contemplate. Yet for all my long-faced British common sense, the boys and girls rolling down that road were as great a sight as their machinery. The disdain for crash helmets was universal, but stylish hats or caps, flying ponytails, brawny arms showing off acres of tattoo, neck chains and cowboy boots with huge ring buckles were uniform for the younger men. The old-timers were better covered and looked as if they had ridden farther, but it was the women who really seemed to have a death-wish.