by Tom Cunliffe
After the Little Bighorn, the ‘California-bound’ feeling firmed up. I felt I could almost smell the sea. We expanded our daily runs, and without any prompting I found myself humming an obscure folk song I once heard sung by two middle-aged sisters. It is the story of a woman dreaming of leaving New York State – her ‘home away from home’ – pleading to go with her man to the paradise of the northern California coast. The heart of the message is the desire to travel alongside him to Mendocino. Closing her eyes she hears the sound of the sea, and nothing else matters any more.
The roads we chose were poor in surface, but as the foothills of the mountains approached, the vistas grew and grew until it seemed we were seeing the world through a fisheye lens. I swear the plain tilted up at each edge, so vast was the area we were trying to take in with our small-scale English eyes. Despite the pitted roads, we were both running at 70 mph or more now, Roz watching for every bump and niche, me keeping an eye open for the now common deer or antelope which can snuff a rider as efficiently as a rifle bullet just by leaping out of a ditch under his front wheel. Every bartender had a tale of some poor brother who ended up in deadly embrace with a buck that fate sent his way at the wrong moment. A ‘fashion biker’ crawl made some sense in this respect, but the high plains of Montana blew such considerations to the winds. The craving for freedom that is an integral part of the speed illusion drove us on with open throttles. After a while, I became almost drunk with the unfolding scenery which must surely be among the world’s finest, retreating to my California fancy with the McGarrigle Sisters, their journey seemed to parallel our own as they passed South Bend Indiana to career across the Western Plains, ultimately tackling the distant barrier of the high Rockies.
One more sagebrush-scented day gave way to the mountains rising in majesty across the skyline. Climbing steadily, we negotiated ‘Suicide Pass’ and rode over the Great Continental Divide less than twenty-four hours after traversing the incredibly wandering Missouri for the last time. From now on, the rivers would be trending westward. More fuel to the California fire.
Still coming to terms with the downhill feeling, we stopped at a railroad barrier shortly beyond the Divide where a locomotive had come to a temporary halt. When it had pulled its unusually short train away with the standard roar of exhaust, rippling clank of couplings and whistle of turbos, we were confronted by the Last Chance Saloon across the tracks. I wheeled into the forecourt of this low-slung, tarred shanty at the foot of a steep, wooded incline to stretch my legs and was shortly being interviewed by a large man who had burst out of the batwing doors into the sunshine.
He ignored me for a moment as he perused Black Madonna, then he spoke.
‘Where you from with them plates on your bike?’ His breath was pure Budweiser.
‘England.’
‘Thought so.’ He deliberated this improbable information with agonising slowness, then concluded, ‘holy shit,’ so deliberately that each syllable took a full second to fall from his lips. He clamped his ‘Mom’s Donuts’ hat hard over his eyes and drove away on a red tractor. Although not talkative, he seemed a nice man, so I concluded the bar couldn’t be as bad as it looked and persuaded Roz to break her ‘no beer’ principle while riding. Although the days had cooled off with the rising altitude, even at 6,000 feet it was still 90 degrees in the midday sun, so selling the idea wasn’t hard.
‘Just the one…’
Inside, the place seemed as dark as night, probably because there were no windows. Accustoming my eyes to the gloom, I made out two spare stools at the bar. The bartender scored high marks for not opening with, ‘We have…’ and listing a dozen types of bottled beer, none of which I had ever heard of. This conventional politeness pervades American eating and drinking establishments and after the novelty has worn off it can drive a traveller to booze. Such courtesies were not on the agenda at the Last Chance, so I tried my cool US biker act.
‘Gimme two Coors.’ It sounded extraordinarily rude to me, but our man clearly expected nothing else. He served them up without comment.
‘You guys from England, did I hear?’ The man beside Roz was leaning across her. His mate on his far side was also taking an interest. I had seen them walk by during the crux of our conversation with the Mom’s Donut man outside.
We confirmed that we were.
‘You ridden all the way on them fancy rigs?’
Roz’s glance flickered my way.
‘Depends what you mean by all the way?’ I responded carefully, suspecting this to be a wind-up that might need slick handling.
‘Like, from your door to Montana.’
I looked hard at Roz and let her reply.
‘We had to fly the first bit, you know,’ she said, ‘and the bikes came over on a boat, but we’ve ridden from Baltimore.’
The hillman nodded, reassured to have us placed.
‘Figured you’d never have biked it from England. How it is here, you see, we’re suffering sore from them states back East.’ He was sure now of the nature of his audience and was readily backed up by grunts from his sidekick.
‘Suffering?’
‘Sure. Suffering. First, we got them comin’ out here an’ buyin’ up all the best properties. Montana’s our state, but they’re tryin’ to turn it into some goddamn National Park.’
I had no problem sympathising with this, but the man looked at me suspiciously, convinced already that I was some sort of subversive from Massachusetts, or Rhode Island, or England.
‘This Clinton’s the worst of them,’ he continued. ‘Taxes are crap. Gas is huge money…’
‘It’s five dollars a gallon where we come from,’ I said, getting fed up with this. I’d just filled up at $1.35. Petrol hadn’t cost as little back home since the 1970s. ‘Besides, you have no sales tax. You must be one of the few states that can say that.’
‘That’s all shit,’ he rambled on. Five dollars for gas was the tallest tale he’d ever heard, his expression said. ‘The worst of it is, Clinton wants to take our guns. That’s fine for him livin’ safe in a city back East, but he don’t have to face no grizzlies or cats in the backwoods. How we supposed to defend ourselves if we ain’t got no guns?’
The barman brought more beer for our advisors, though I saw no order pass between them, nor money on the table. I thought about the firearms and the nights waiting for the hitman back in New York City. I almost laughed, but the drunk was still talking.
‘Them grizzlies’ll eat you for pleasure,’ he went on, warming up as soon as he saw Roz flinch, a classic bully, feeding on the signs of vulnerability. If only he knew, I thought. ‘And the cats…’
‘Cats?’
‘Yeah. Cats. You know – mountain lions. They take twenty, thirty kids a year.’
‘Two or three, I heard,’ I interjected, having read the handout offered free at the state line.
‘You’d ’spect politicians to say that,’ put in the second redneck with a sneer. ‘They don’t want to put off no tourists, see?’
‘Anyways,’ continued his mate, ‘you folks wanna watch out for bears in these mountains, ’specially with a woman. They love the smell of women. Particularly at what you might call “that time of the month”.’
‘An’ they love the stink of sex,’ Roz had clearly had enough as ‘number two’ made his play for ruining her trip, ‘’course, if you’re properly armed, bears ain’t no worry…’
Roz finished her beer, setting the bottle down with eloquent dignity.
‘I’ll speak to the Governor,’ she said evenly, watching their eyes drop from hers, ‘because after what you’ve told us, I can’t believe all state parks don’t already have large ‘No Sex’ signs at the entrances.’
We left in tight order and camped that night by a rushing river in the impossibly named ‘Deadman’s Gulch’. No grizzly, puma, or any other wild thing disturbed our uneasy slumber, but as usual we hung our victuals in a tree rather than bring them in the tent with us and encourage unwanted animal visitors.
> Despite recognising the rantings of the Last Chance drinkers for the rubbish it was, even Roz was shaken by our encounter with redneck Montana. I lay beside her on my crippling airbed, listening as ever for the dreaded rustlings in the trees, casting my mind back to a graphic statement by another American upset by President Clinton’s attack on the gun culture.
Back in Kansas, not far from Dodge City, we had discovered a strange crop on a dead-flat field. Instead of corn, squash or alfalfa, the land was sown with closely packed plywood statues representing leaders of the nation. These brightly painted cartoon sculptures were, according to the accompanying sign, the work of one M. T. Liggett, an artist so confident of receiving no hate messages from the passers-by that he even left his phone number. President Reagan was let off lightly. His caricature was unflattering, but the legend was simple. ‘Best,’ was all it said. President Clinton did not receive such generous treatment from this pithy social commentator. The most powerful man in the world was depicted as ‘Bubba Bill’, all pink bare flesh, pot belly and striped red boxer shorts. A pennant with the word, ‘Hero’, dangled from exposed, diminutive ‘privates’ and he wore a yellow hat. The attached sign read, ‘Commander-in-Chief – Yellow Beret Draft Ducker.’
Further down the long line of images, beside a cryptic representation of the popular maverick candidate Ross Perot, was another burlesque of Mr Clinton, this time with a full written indictment:
‘The right to own a gun is being lost to a yellow-livered cowardly jackal that was too damned gutless to carry one during the Vietnam War. More than 58,000 men died with guns in their hands while the lousy bastard dodged the draft at Oxford. Character doesn’t matter???’
We hoped that Mr Liggett loved his neighbours and that they put up with him, because this extraordinary assertion of the right to say what one thinks had left us gasping. Free speech is one thing, but it was hard for us to believe that this sort of massive licence wasn’t somehow illegal. But if it was, the sheriff obviously agreed with its content and looked firmly the other way.
I was glad on the whole that we’d met the two human mistakes in the Last Chance Saloon. Things had been going almost too smoothly on the social front since my encounter with the smalltime drug pushers in Tennessee, and it shook me from a silly complaisance that everyone in America must be the sort of person you’d like to know. There were plenty more ghouls under the same dirty stone.
Two hundred rugged miles later, we camped by the town of Hungry Horse below the mountains around Glacier National Park. Hard by the Canadian border, the neighbours proved more amenable than the boys from over the hills. Through the woods from our tent was a trailer in which a girl called Renee lived alone with her large timber-wolf/husky cross. One snarl from Greta would have deterred any interloper, unless armed with a machine gun, but when you got to know the beast, she wasn’t so bad. Perhaps it was the ancient domestication in her sledding half that made her desperate for a rub on the stomach.
The best part of the day in Glacier proved to be its beginning. In order to make the distance and be back to our tent before nightfall, we hit Going-to-the-Sun road in the crisp air of first light wearing full leathers over fleeces. Ten miles on, the sky flushed pale pink as we crackled to a halt at the park barrier, but the pole was up and the ticket desk unmanned. I nurse a deep-rooted objection to paying for experiencing the undisturbed works of the Lord, and was delighted to read a sign that announced that the staff would not be turning up before eight. There was nothing that said, ‘No admittance before breakfast’, and no honesty box gaped hopefully at me, so we breezed full ahead through the gates and wished the guardians of the mountains a comfortable lie-in. Not a vehicle disturbed the peace as we stopped by a lake for a sandwich. The road stayed quiet until later in the morning, giving us a ride to cherish for a lifetime, despite a nasty brush with the seamy side of tourism towards lunch. Rounding a sharp bend, we simultaneously spotted what had to be ‘The Greatest Mountain Valley View in the West’ and crunched to an unscheduled standstill in a gravelly pull-off. We propped the bikes by a number of other vehicles and I shed a layer or two of clothing while Roz fished out her camera.
‘Why don’t we pop down there a little way,’ Roz nodded towards a steep trail disappearing through a copse of twisted pines, ‘the angle will improve… Shame about that disgusting motor launch,’ she added. My own eye had also been upset by a square, unlovely vessel plodding across a stretch of otherwise unsullied water far beneath us.
Fifty feet or so below, we arrived at the exact spot to capture an image, only to discover four other photographers setting up their gear. Unlike Roz with her travel-worn SLR, these guys had spent serious money and were out for value. Tripods proliferated, with exposure meters and hardware I didn’t even recognise. We bade the chaps good day and nipped further down the slope in front of them for a picture which, while not losing the offending craft’s unruly wake, would at least mask the unspeakable boat from the lens.
‘Would you get the hell outta my frame!’ a corpulent individual shouted from up at the viewpoint. ‘I’ve been waiting twenty minutes to get that cruiser dead centre.’
Roz smiled thinly at him and clicked her shutter before we headed off into the bushes to take care of a more pressing requirement. One problem with motorcycling in chilly conditions is that however conscientiously you have abstained from drink, each approaching rest-stop takes on such an urgent importance that you hardly have time to cross the legs after dismounting.
Having dealt with the necessities of nature, we toddled back up to the bikes and scooted off, leaving the quality photographers still pondering over their meters. In due course, Roz’s snapshot produced a picture she could have sold to any discerning manufacturer of boxed chocolates.
As the day progressed, the snow peaks, deep valleys and blue lakes grew increasingly spectacular, while bend-swinging the tough gradients fed us exhilarating helpings of that dynamic oneness with gravity that the folks looking out from cars could never know. Pressing onwards and upwards, the narrow roads became gritty and challenging, but the rear tyres dug in well under the chain of command leading via drive belt, gearbox, crankshaft and con-rod to our throttle hands. Wheel-spinning a powerful machine under these conditions is all too easy; it is also emphatically not what you want, so it’s ‘gently on the throttle’ as the bike winds her way up the hairpins. An aware rider can feel the rubber biting, and a really good one will sense that critical millisecond before it lets go under hard acceleration, backing off the power just in time. Controlling a Harley-Davidson on a rough road is less demanding than a hard-revving sports bike, but it still requires concentration and nerve. The nicest aspect of the business is the massive torque of the V-twin engine. Travelling uphill at well under 30 mph, I could trickle the gas into Black Madonna in fourth gear and, instead of sulking, she pulled smoothly from impossibly low revolutions. Each individual power stroke made its own thumping statement, while her exhausts delivered the classic ‘one-bang-every-lamp-post’ rhythm that only the mechanically heartless could fail to appreciate.
We returned, exhausted but well-satisfied, to our camp after sunset, passing through packages of freezing air sliding down the slopes straight off the snow. The bears, cats and infinitely more dangerous rednecks did not put in an appearance that night, perhaps because we were in Greta’s territory, but we lit a fire and built it up again after supper to be on the safe side. Some sort of weather front ran through after dinner, shaking the tent as we tried to sleep, but we must have nodded off in spite of it. I awoke at two in the morning with the wind blown out and the moon picking up the distant glaciers on the peaks. The bikes cast monstrous moon-shadows in the clearing and our fire had subsided to a smoulder. I left it to die completely. The small beasts of the undergrowth were still under the huge sky. The night was too beautiful to disturb.
Two days later after breaking camp at Hungry Horse, we were crossing the high plateau of Washington State with the sprawling town of Spokane and its Harley-Davi
dson dealership well behind us. One of the many hidden expenses of a big motorcycle is that the painfully pricey rear tyre will typically run bald every 3,000 miles. Betty Boop proved an exception to this rule, but Madonna made up for her. Equivalent power to a medium-sized car ripping up the road through a few square inches of soft-compound rubber is not a formula for high mileage, especially with a 240-pound Brit plus full kit adding to the load.
The Spokane dealer had his spread on the main drag into town, a never-ending, stop-go road with traffic lights, inadequate signposting and multiple lanes of heavy traffic ganging up for a bike-swatting mission. The stress volume was further turned up by a busy railroad with freight trains rumbling and clashing by only yards from us. We missed the ‘H-D’ sign the first time and were saddled with two U-turns to set matters straight. By the time we swung in outside the air-conditioned showroom, Roz had already blown much of the confidence she had worked up hacking over the mountains, so I treated Betty to a full fluid change and general check-over while we read the papers and Madonna received her new tyre. Betty came out with flying colours but I knew I was going to have to give further cities a resounding ‘miss’ and pray for an easy passage down the California freeways into San Francisco. I was nursing a real concern by now that the switchback of Roz’s spirits would go into terminal decline there, causing her to bail out of the trip at the Golden Gate.
Out on the far-stretching fields of eastern Washington, such fears were banished to the back burner. Mile followed mile in a steady, easy flow across soil little better than powder baking under the pounding sun. Surface water was non-existent and dust was everywhere. Dust in your boots, dust in your eyes, dust in your morning coffee. Dust storms roamed the low hills climbing out of the high plain while whirling dust devils noiselessly stalked the fields, the lonely burial grounds and the roadsides. When we stopped the bikes every hour to drink the warm water from our packs, the wheat ran clear up to the unfringed tarmac at our feet. In contrast to English cereal crops where little or no earth can be seen between the tight-packed stems, half a foot or more of arid soil separated each stalk from its brothers. Just as huge tracts of Nebraska struggled to support herds that a couple of hundred acres would handle in a more comfortable climate, farm buildings in this harsh country stood vast distances apart for the same reason. As the land flickered by in 100-mile stretches, small, weathered farmsteads, blurred by the heat, would appear amidst trackless sections of thin wheat.