by Tom Cunliffe
One of our rest stops came at the high junction of two perfectly straight roads. A hundred feet below us and more than a mile away was one of these groups of simple buildings. It was so remote that I could see no trail leading up to it and for a moment I took it for another derelict witness to enterprise defeated by the ever-changing climate of economics; yet this one bore the distant signs of working. Its wind pump spun away the years to the relentless drive of the bone-dry breeze, while a tractor, smaller than a child’s toy in the distance, moved out of the deep shadow of a low barn, catching a second’s light in a glint of metal or glass. Immense irrigation machines crept imperceptibly across a field beyond the house and I realised that they must be the secret of economic survival, but as to where the water originated I had no notion. I glanced across at Roz who was inspecting the map, propped my bike and peered over her shoulder. We were discussing which road to take south-westward into Oregon when out of the corner of my eye I saw the words, ‘Columbia River’ and ‘Grand Coulee’. They tugged at some ancient memory under the litter of my mind, but for a few seconds they meant nothing. Then I realised they were an echo from childhood back in the 1950s, when the self-proclaimed ‘King of Skiffle’, Lonnie Donegan, had recorded a hit single called the ‘Grand Coulee Dam’.
I relaxed on my saddle, giving the near-forgotten phrases a chance to stitch themselves together. Suddenly, like a zoom lens pulling into focus, the refrain thudded back to me, powered by the insistent beat of common time set by a long-gone washboard.
In the misty crystal glitter of the wild and windward spray,
I fought the pounding waters, and met a watery grave.
When she tore their boats to splinters and she gave men dreams to dream,
On the day the Coulee Dam was crossed by the wild and wasted stream.
That a British rocker should choose such a subject is less improbable than one might imagine. The number arrived only ten years or so after World War Two, a period when the developing rock ’n’ roll movement was heavily influenced by American themes, including ‘The Battle of New Orleans’ and ‘The Rock Island Line’. I never heard the song from anybody else, even in America, but it goes on to glorify the damming of the great river and spell out the benefits to the populace. The delivery was one of the triumphs of an era when ‘pop’ music was branded as subversive by a parental generation, yet often consisted of nothing more sinful than three or four teenage musicians shuffling on stage with an acoustic guitar, a washboard and a tea-chest base.
Forty years later, in Washington State, Roz and I had already missed the main turn-off for the dam, thinking in strategic terms of Oregon and California. But the ‘Grand Coulee’, which was surely supplying the irrigation hereabouts as well as power for much of the North-West, was a mere 40 miles away via a thin blue line on our map. Lonnie Donegan was shortly to receive a belated OBE and for the sake of the pleasure he had given my generation, I couldn’t miss it. Sweeping aside any considerations of additional distance, I swung Black Madonna on to the side road, told Roz I’d see her at the dam, and opened the throttle. We had only just fuelled and at 90 mph I’d be there in less than half an hour, so I let the bike rip, ever higher across the wide wheat-fields and away into the semi-desert above. As we pounded off the miles, more of the music came beating back:
Now the world holds seven wonders that the travellers always tell,
Some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well,
But now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam’s fair land,
It’s the big Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam.
The dam came into view on a down-grade from the plain, the man-made blue of the vast lake stretching away eastwards. So enormous was its grey, curving bastion that, like the prairies of Montana, its true magnitude was masked from the eyes of someone from a smaller, tighter country. When it was completed in 1942, the Grand Coulee Dam was the largest concrete structure in the world. Apparently it still is, and its width is such that four ships the size of the Queen Mary could lie in line astern along the top. Power lines criss-crossed the cobalt sky, sagging from immense pylons as they fanned out across the plain. So far below that even thinking about it made me dizzy, the barely tamed Columbia River plunged off down its gorge towards the Pacific, churning in rage at the bold interruption of its journey.
Few tourists passed this way, so I stood alone, gazing, until Betty Boop sizzled up alongside, ten minutes behind me. By the time she showed up I was sunk deep into the surreal aspect of this massive feat of engineering. From somewhere in the depths came the deep, understated whine of a gigantic generator delivering its life-force of volts to the cities in the north-west.
Washington and Oregon, you can hear the fact’ries hum,
Making chrome and making manganese, and white aluminum…
All powered by the same Columbia River that was watering otherwise unusable fields. Although the place seemed deserted, it was the beating heart of this end of modern America. A catharsis of natural force harnessed by superhuman endeavour. Add a pinch of artist’s licence and many whose lands were not drowned in the new lakes would agree with Lonnie Donegan, hymning the dam as ‘the greatest wonder in the world’. By rights, his song should have swept America and he ought to have retired rich on the back of that number alone. But those were the days when football players earned little more than coal miners, and a hit single was not yet an automatic passport to unimaginable wealth.
Cranking up and heading back southwards, we sweated through another 70 miles across the plain before dropping a thrilling 2,500 feet down a deep, rock-strewn gully into the Columbia River Valley. Here, incongruously after the all-American farmers grittily growing cereals in the baked fields above us, a grinning Mexican boy handed us peaches from his roadside stall. He was selling them by the piled-up crateful.
‘How much for just a couple?’
‘Qué?’
‘We just want to buy one peach each.’
‘Why you want only one peach? A box is cheap. Try them.’
I gestured to the bikes.
‘We just want one to eat now. It’s hot.’
The Mexican saw our transport problem. He ruffled his black hair.
‘Not so hot as yesterday. Take two each. No charge.’
The peaches were full of juice and no fruit ever tasted better.
This little scene seemed the first breath of the West Coast, but before the cool Pacific breezes and the projected idyll of Mendocino, we still had to cross the desert of northern Oregon and the coastal ranges of the Rockies.
We started out at 5.30 in a pleasant 51 degrees as the first crack of pink was flushing the eastern sky. In the penetrating beams of our quartz-halogen headlamps, the unashamed near-desert featured the ubiquitous dust of America, dressed up with sagebrush clumps and spiced by the occasional pair of reflecting red eyes as some unidentified creature sloped off home before sunrise. As the sun came nearer to breaking the horizon, we began to make out escarpments and distant hills. Soon we were riding down a dead-straight road that must have run for 10 miles on a flat plain between the Squaw Butte Mountains. Exact mirror-image crags stood ahead on either side. We passed between them as the sun appeared, casting impossibly long motorbike shadows alongside us, and climbed off at an isolated fuel stop that announced its incorporation as ‘Wagontire, Population 2’.
The altitude of this remote settlement is around 4,500 feet and in the crystal morning air the whole operation would have served well in a television advert for aftershave. The next gas promised to be at least 100 miles away, so we filled up and clumped into the diner-kiosk to pay. We still hadn’t seen a vehicle on the road since rising, but a useful Honda cruising bike was parked by the door.
Inside, a handsome, middle-aged man in biker uniform with headband but no tattoos was wolfing hash browns, bacon and eggs. The food smelt great, but we were saving money and clung to our resolve to picnic later by the roadside. I did buy a coffee, however, and Roz sat down to a glas
s of canned juice served up by one of the town’s two inhabitants.
‘Didn’t I see you guys at Sturgis?’ opened the lone rider.
‘I can’t believe you can recognise us, but we were certainly there,’ I responded. ‘Are you heading back to California?’
‘Nope. I been down there already. I’m heading back up towards Seattle.’
‘Lot of miles. Aren’t you off-course so far inland?’
He chuckled. ‘I go where the Lord sends me,’ he said. ‘Got the call to come this way. Guess I’m on course to meet someone, but I sure don’t know who. Perhaps it’s you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I got a small disability pension,’ he waggled a hand that was short of a few fingers, ‘so I don’t have to work all year. I cruise the highways and help out where I can. Spread the Lord’s word too, among the brothers.’
‘Wouldn’t you get more ready acceptance from the doomed if you rode a Harley-Davidson?’ I asked sincerely, then kicked myself because the ‘witty’ remark sounded like a modern-day Pharisee mocking Christ. The man’s response would surely have pleased his leader.
‘I used to ride a Harley,’ he said, ‘had a nice shovel-head, but I’ve found that pitching up on a Honda creates just that touch of controversy. It got you spiked up didn’t it?’
I had to admit that I’d been ready for a touch of word-fencing.
‘Sometimes, it works out good,’ he continued, mopping up the last of his eggs with a forkful of potatoes. ‘One time last year I ripped open my rear tyre. It was a write-off. The only bike dealer within range was H-D, and the gentle soul who ran the joint refused to let my rice-burner in through the door. He’d take my money for a new tyre all right, but he wouldn’t touch the job. Not even on his forecourt. His guys thought it was all very funny, but they were OK and in the end they persuaded him to let me do it myself out back, using the shop’s tools.
‘But that wasn’t the end of it. Being a Harley man, he had no metric wrenches. Wouldn’t let them under his all-American roof. Said once you invited those things in you might as well burn the flag. I said nothing, because “half-inch” ain’t so far from “thirteen millimetre”. You can always make ’em fit.’
‘I suppose he had the neck to charge you for the use of his tools?’
‘He wanted to, but his fellas wouldn’t let him. So just before I left, I tipped him twenty bucks. Nearly drove him crazy, he was so mad.’
‘You didn’t convert him then?’ asked Roz.
‘You get to know the right time for preaching, and that wasn’t it. Expounding the Word to folks you just ripped one out of don’t usually work out. I saved him for later. Actually, he ain’t so far from here. Maybe you guys were sent to remind me about him…’ He scratched his head.
As we left, our friend gave us his benediction.
‘Ride with God, and watch out for rednecks.’
‘Best of luck with that sinner!’ called Roz over her shoulder as we opened the creaking door and walked on to the forecourt.
Back out in the desert, the heat was building fast as we cruised south through the 10,000-square-mile arid emptiness of Lake County. Occasionally, a track would wander into the wilderness, marked by a mailbox on the corner. All these had been the subject of successful target practice by passing motorists and were full of holes, as were the occasional road signs and warnings. We pulled off for breakfast at a box that had been blown clean off its post by something with the punch of a howitzer. It had not been replaced and from the way it lay half-covered with whitish dirt in the shallow ditch, its owner had long since lost interest in the morning papers. As we trundled up the lane into the sagebrush, dust clouds streaming off our tyres, the macabre thought struck me that perhaps he had received the same treatment as his name board from some ill-wisher. Nobody would have heard the shots, and it would be many hours before help could arrive, even if summoned by telephone.
After a mile, the ungraded surface became impassable to road bikes, so we dismounted at a pile of consumer rubbish which included a cooker and a large refrigerator on its side. We used this as a table to lay out our crackers, ‘squeezy cheeze’ and fruit, setting up our stove on the ground. The selected item of kitchen furniture was of the heaviest grade, looking as if it had been built with resistance to machine-gunfire in mind, but even this monumental chunk of industrial architecture had received the attention of the local marksmen. With grim fascination, I inspected how the heavy-calibre slugs had punched through both sides, cleanly on the entry face but jagging open the steel where they had exited. There was something graphic about this manifestation of firepower that strengthened my resolve to do almost anything a man with a gun asked me to, should the situation ever arise.
Just in case I forgot, I took a photograph of our table, using my expensive 24/80 zoom lens. I packed away the camera body, placing the lens neatly on the fridge in its fine leather box. I only realised I’d left it there when I wanted it for a panoramic view two days later. By then, retrieval would have involved a round trip of 800 miles and we decided to let it go. It looked as though it never rained on that refrigerator and I doubt that it is visited from one year’s end to the next now that it has been shot to bits, so anyone else who breaks his fast on its pocked worktop will be one lens the richer, particularly if his camera has a Nikon bayonet fitting.
By the time the lens fiasco was discovered, I felt we were on the last lap, with only hundreds of miles left to the coast and Mendocino. The route we had chosen for the final leg twisted through the smoke of summer forest fires, ever upwards through steep-sided woodland. The smoke went on for two days, yet we never saw the flames. Winds were light at this time, so rather than billowing in clouds, it took the form of a thin brown mist smelling of camp fires that pulled visibility in to 3 miles or less. Somewhere, devastation was in progress, but not where we were. The road, meanwhile, was giving away nothing by way of peace of mind. Precipices plunged first on one side, then the other, regular earthquakes left serious damage not dealt with promptly enough by Uncle Sam’s road gangs, and gravel stretches abounded. Gas stations were anything up to 150 miles apart and human activity was almost non-existent, although signs here and there warned of bears. To add to her troubles, Roz reminded me that she was now at the lowest ebb of her monthly cycle. I tried to be sympathetic, pointing out that at least the smoke had at last cleared but, like most men at such times, I failed to get it right.
She was near despair after dropping Betty Boop, mercifully without significant damage, on a hideous stony bend in front of a view of Mount Shasta she should have been soaking up. ‘I never get to enjoy the scenery. Always it’s the damned road surface. Look at this place. I swing around the bend and half the tarmac has been ripped away by a ’quake. In case you can’t see it from behind your shades, there’s a 200-foot drop right here where I’m lying. They probably had railings before the road fell off the cliff.
‘And the nights are worse. Trailing around looking for some crummy motel full of fleas, or praying a bear won’t snap me up when we sleep in the open.’
I tried to cheer her up, reminding her we were well into California with the coast so close we were feeling the cool air from the sea.
She ignored me.
‘The whole thing has degenerated into an endurance test,’ she groaned. ‘I get up in the morning, I’m still aching from yesterday, we load up the bikes for the hundredth time and then I grit it out all day. And it goes on and on. We’re six weeks out from Annapolis and we haven’t really stopped. I don’t want to play this game any more!’
‘Well, we’re going to rest soon,’ I responded, making an instant decision based on fantasy. ‘We’ll find a quiet place north of San Francisco, up by Mendocino on a beach. We’ll move in there and just unwind until you’re ready to go on. It’ll be half-way. You’ll be so glad you’ve achieved the crossing you’ll forget all this stuff.’
I don’t know if I believed it. From her expression, Roz certainly didn’t, but there was n
o option for her. I too was aching badly across my shoulders, but according to the map we must soon see the Pacific. Like Xenophon 3,000 years before us, watching his Greek infantry craving a view of the Aegean after their long wanderings in Asia Minor, I hoped to God that it would change the mood.
Wearily, we crested ridge after wooded ridge, each time expecting the ocean, and always seeing more mountains until even I was mesmerised by the insistent throbbing of my bike.
Down a slope, engine comparatively quiet, brakes squealing occasionally from dust in the pads, popping sounds of backfire set up in the exhaust by the altitude. Up the next grade, throttle open, pistons working, blatter of exhaust echoing back from the forest or the rock walls. Another summit. Still no sea. Shut the gas down, ease on to the big footbrake pedal, forget the front brake. It doesn’t do much on a Harley, and if you lock up the wheel on the gravel you’ll be sliding in the stuff. Body weight thrown forward by the braking and the downgrade, handlebars bucking through the potholes, wrists screaming. I felt for Roz, but left her to her pain. The only way to keep my own mind from slipping down my neck was to shut off my head, watch out for the long drops and the busted lengths of highway and wander into the dreamland of northern California, the journey’s end for the McGarrigle sisters. Here, their character lived out the remainder of her life, still looking westwards as the evening light died away across the ocean. Her satisfaction was perfected by each subsequent dawn over the redwood groves behind her, the woman rising with the sun until one morning her song was stilled and she rose no more.