by Tom Cunliffe
There’s plenty of gold so I’ve been told,
On the banks of Sacramento.
So many ships were abandoned here that a number were given up by their owners and turned into warehouses. One even became a famous hotel.
The traffic started again and our local batch of the 100,000 vehicles said to cross the bridge in a single day jerked forward. To our discomfort, they did so too slowly for even first gear to run sweetly, so riding our clutches until our left arms ached, we negotiated the city itself and out on to the Bay Bridge. Eventually, we made it to Alameda where my mate was in charge of a major sea school. A management training day was just finishing with a group of smart executives coming ashore. In my sailing time I’ve handled a number of these sessions, but right now, thinking of my best lens sitting on a bullet-mashed fridge in Oregon, the Wounded Knee prayer rags fluttering in the prairie wind, the farmer whose crop was dashed by hail a day short of the harvest, and the moonshiners back in Virginia, I couldn’t take the adult games seriously.
‘Ever thought of just issuing the customers with motorbikes and sending them up 101?’ I asked David. He looked at me oddly. He’s a sailor through and through. I don’t think he understood how throttle-happy you can get after two months in the saddle.
That night we telephoned around the bay and rounded up a few more salt-caked sailors. Everyone brought enough booze for a week and as we drank into the night, Ray stoked himself up and began to talk of the days when he worked The Free Store at the centre of the hippy movement. I watched his familiar oval face in the lamplight, deep-tanned by many an ocean crossing. Long grey ponytail and moustache, big man, big spirit. I never knew whether he would be tough in a tight corner, or if he would just walk away from a confrontation in memory of the year-long love-in. I still don’t. Sometimes it’s better to keep people guessing.
‘Nineteen sixty-seven, I suppose it would be,’ he said. ‘We traded most things in that store down on Haight Street. Someone had spare food, they brought it in for the shelves. Clothes they didn’t need, nails, mattresses, books; in they came. We could fill most needs. Whatever you had a requirement for, you just asked for it. And everything in the place was free. Even the money.’
‘What money, if it was all free?’
‘Every so often, one of the brothers or sisters would find they had cash. Maybe they did some job for a square, or perhaps they just arrived with some then found they’d no need of it. They’d pass that in as well.’
‘Jesus!’
‘You say so, but it worked. For a while. Folks was so straight, one guy came in and asked for twenty bucks. Of course we gave it to him. Never enquired why. Not our business. Our job was to hand it over. Next day, in he comes with a ten-dollar bill and presents it to me.
‘“What’s that for?”
I ask him. ‘“I needed it to pay for a neighbour’s rent. He was broke. I thought it was twenty but it was only ten. Here’s your change.’”
David swung back on his wooden chair.
‘You can’t imagine that happening today, can you?’ he said.
Ray leaned forward, sadness and an ancient enthusiasm mixed in his eyes.
‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘but that’s how things were then. It couldn’t last, I see now. Commercialism crept aboard, and where people are that plain good there’s always some greedy asshole screws things up. But for a while, it was cool.’
Thinking of this generosity of soul, I contrasted my own experience in Santa Monica, Los Angeles in the same summer as a student. I’d travelled to LA looking for some imagined sun-and-sand ‘Beach Boys’ paradise. I’d taken a job washing up in a foreshore diner and met a couple of girls who showed up in a black Chevelle SS. The car was the business. Seven litres of all-American oomph, carburettors like tunnels and a ‘four-on-the-floor’ gearbox. Ci-ci, the owner, had some money and didn’t need to work. She was also beautiful. Her friend Kay was literate, plain and fell in love with me while I, being young and foolish, yearned for the immaculately-presented Ci-ci.
I moved into the girls’ apartment, about which I recall little except that it had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a peach tree outside the living-room window. Ci-ci’s father paid the rent and it seemed like heaven on earth to a lad from the North of England. Kay read to me from W. B. Yeats. Ci-ci drove me nuts but wouldn’t soften to my lewd advances. After three or four days, our trio arrived at an amicable equilibrium and Ci-ci was more than happy for me to stay on until I was ready to split for the East Coast in a few weeks. The days were golden as we cruised the Hollywood boulevards in the Chevelle. We swam, the girls shopped and I carried on with my washing-up. Not a stimulating lifestyle, but we liked it, and so it might have continued had not Ci-ci’s official boyfriend returned.
Craig’s code didn’t run to his ‘date’ putting up long-haired foreign men in her apartment. In his check Bermuda shorts, white polo shirt, white socks and loafers, he was so clean he squeaked when he walked. He was as good-looking as Ci-ci in a ‘Thunderbirds’ sort of way, and just for a moment it occurred to me that maybe they deserved each other. But Ci-ci was still warm and human and she hated it when he had her throw me out. It never occurred to him that she’d argue, but backed up strongly by Kay, she made such a fuss that in the end Craig temporarily installed me in his local fraternity of the high-powered UCLA. There, he and his intelligent chums could keep an eye on my subversive activities.
The fraternity house was denominated by three letters of the ancient Greek alphabet. I don’t remember what they were, but I recall asking Craig what they signified. ‘Drink more beer and chase more tail!’ he replied.
In this house of learning, I discovered all there ever was to know about old-fashioned male chauvinism. No ‘peace and love’ in this flop-house. It was shags chalked up on bed-ends with names and ratings, including my friend Ci-ci; there were vile jokes and a great deal of binge drinking. Of the serious conversation British and Irish students experimented with in those days there was no sign. Life was a giant kids’ party with a table stacked with cream cakes. All you had to do was help yourself, and anyone fool enough to ask questions was laughed to scorn.
In the UK, my crowd rollicked into the typically profligate sex-lives of the period, but even at the time I couldn’t recall such a lack of respect. From where I stand now, it is hard to believe that the denizens of that academic fraternity house were not all homosexual misogynists, so afraid were they of women, but at the age of twenty I was not equipped to draw any conclusions at all. I put up with the place for two nights, then I bought a bus ticket for Boston and left my new acquaintances to their training for running the world. If I’d originally wandered into San Francisco instead of Los Angeles thirty years earlier, I might have met Ray, not Craig. My life could have been very different.
Roz and I stayed a further three days in the city. Betty Boop was garaged at David’s place and we cruised the hilly streets two-up on Black Madonna. As only a city can, San Francisco drained money out of us at an alarming rate, handing out a heavy beating to our budget. Sitting over lunch in The People’s Café on Haight, I did some rapid workings on my napkin.
‘We’re going to have to be back in Annapolis within a month,’ I said, expecting Roz might feel pressed by this.
‘How far is it?’
‘Depends on the detours, but if we take in Death Valley, Las Vegas, Flagstaff and New Orleans, it’ll be 4,000, maybe 4,500 miles.’
‘How much is that each day?’
Maths was never Roz’s strong point.
‘Taken straight it’s only 150, but we’re bound to rest up every so often. We might have to make some 300s, or even more.’
‘That’s six fifty-mile hops. If we only choose roads that are good, we’ll eat it. Perhaps,’ she added as an afterthought, ‘we ought to make a start?’
18
FLAT OUT TO
DEATH VALLEY
The urbanisation of the Bay area soon gave way to a modest coastal range of a different character to it
s counterpart behind Mendocino and points north. We crossed it on the scurrying freeway almost without noticing it. Next came a long haul across a wide expanse of flat farmland. As the sea receded behind us, normal service was resumed on the heat machine. By afternoon, the altitude had risen further, but so had the temperature, which now nudged 100 degrees at Copperopolis, a sometime one-horse mining settlement high in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The mineral-powered boom years were history and even the solitary nag had either trotted away or was taking an afternoon nap.
Back on the coast, we had lost some of our painfully developed resistance to living in an oven, so we poured ourselves into the local store to buy larger bottles for our water. One thing was sure. We might cool off over the 9,000-foot pass the following morning, but the climate was going to deteriorate considerably in a day or two as we rode into the wastelands of America, where the idea of rain was an empty hope. There was a great deal of zigzagging coming up but, as the eagle flew, we were only 200 miles from the north end of Death Valley.
From Copperopolis we wound on up the mountains, increasing forestation growing in response to precipitation on these oceanfacing slopes. The long first day’s leg ended at Sonora which we had innocently imagined to be far enough from Yosemite to furnish affordable lodgings for a pair of honest travellers. A major error. The accommodation was expensive and crowded. We found nowhere suitable to camp or sleep rough and in the end we dug deep in the communal wallet, annoyed to be paying for luxuries of which we had no need and to part with three days’ budget in a single night. But we were tired, hot and our rip-off resistance was low, so we handed over the blood money and bedded down in clean sheets.
If there had remained a ghost of doubt, Yosemite was now definitely off the travel plan. We did not need discuss it. America has landscape in abundance and we craved solitude, or at least the company of people living in their own environment. We skirted the park on its north side at dawn, crossed the Sierra Nevada watershed at the Sonora Pass, ate snow by the side of the battered, winding road and began slowly to lose altitude towards breakfast.
Breakfast in America is every bit as comprehensive as those served in England or Ireland. No continental milk-sop junk for the full-blooded Yankee, Westerner, or Southerner. Across the continent and back again, we made breakfast a main meal whenever we could, tucking in to the most reliably cooked eggs in the world, crispy bacon, spicy sausage meat and glorious fried potatoes. Nothing touches it at nine o’clock after two hours on the road. The company is good at the bar of a truck stop or a small-town cafe, the multiple mugs of weak coffee grow on you once you’ve learned to take it black, and the whole experience gives the morning the boost it frequently needs. Plus, of course, for six or seven dollars you have fuelled your body for the day. After breakfast, lunch becomes a mere strategic stop to shelter from the heat with a light bite to make it seem worthwhile. Even dinner can be a carefully selected snack if nothing more substantial offers itself. This throttling back on appetite is something to do with never feeling chilly except perhaps first thing in the morning. A long ride in an American summer is a great way to lose weight.
Route 167 dropped several thousand feet in short order, then went straight as a gun barrel directly away from Yosemite towards Nevada. At one point I stopped the bike to stretch my shoulders and looked behind. The cracked tarmac with its worn yellow centre-line ran like a ruler until it climbed out of sight into the snow-capped Sierra 15 miles away. Far ahead, still on the same direct bullet-flight, it disappeared into a cleft like a gunsight into an impossibly distant ridge. As we cleared out of California, the last of the trees and brightly coloured flowers gave way to the browns and pinks of the dried-up Nevada mountains. Cruising down the straight, gently sloping valley floors into the heart of their country, the sierras became progressively more lunar in form, their deep folds unsoftened by even a hint of vegetation, the sharp desert light picking up every detail. Sparse clumps of dried-out sagebrush looked as though they hadn’t seen rain in years, but the bikes loved it.
In full-on desert at last, the Harleys rose to their work like troopers. I calculated that the average altitude hereabouts must be between five and six thousand feet, the sun was high and the road stretched out, totally deserted until it faded out miles ahead. I glanced at the speedometer on my tank and discovered, rather to my surprise, that in the widened perspective I had been steadily speeding up without realising it. The needle was hovering around 90 mph. It seemed rude not to give Madonna her head, so I opened her up and waited. At exactly 100 she topped out and would do no more.
As the sagebrush flashed by and the distant hills grew rapidly closer, I decided that this lack of top-end poke was probably accounted for by the altitude. The bike’s set-up hadn’t been materially altered since it was last tuned at sea level. Six thousand feet is a substantial drop in oxygen content, but even so, ‘one ton’ and no more from almost 1,400 cc of motorbike didn’t seem like very good value.
The roads were so lonely that I’d given up looking in my mirrors. Indeed, where flashing blue lights are not an issue, travelling at 100 or more renders mirrors as redundant as they are in New York City traffic. There, the only way to survive is to ignore everything except what is happening right in your sights. I was considering these paradoxes when a crackling roar over my shoulder gave me a serious fright. For a split second I had no idea what it was, then the yellow bike pulled alongside me, Roz leered across from behind her visor and twitched her right wrist. Betty Boop, the bike the lads back East had shaken their heads over, actually accelerated and left me standing.
I caught up with Roz 10 miles further on when she stopped for water. She was laughing fit to bust and I knew she’d finally worked out what it was I like about motorbikes. She never overtook me like that again, but we kept up high speeds when it was safe and there were no representatives of the sheriff’s office at hand. It helped move things along, nipped off any incipient boredom and I’m absolutely sure she grabbed a charge out of it. At that water stop I sat comfortably, sidesaddle on the Heritage. My legs stretched out and my bootheels in the deep dust. The sun was well past its height now, and the striations in the mountains were becoming dramatic in the early evening light. The valley floor was pancake-flat and there was no impression of altitude. I had to check the map to see that the naked crags rose to eight and nine thousand feet. The heat remained intense, but the air was bone dry and it was not difficult to bear so late in the afternoon. Not a breath of wind disturbed the stillness, and no flying bugs spoiled the peace. The sky was bluer than I had ever seen it and still not a car, a truck or a living soul appeared. It was incredible that the same morning we had left a wooded town so full of wealthy visitors we had struggled to find a bed.
Where were they all? Why weren’t they here? The beauty of the place was awe-inspiring, but the people were crowded together somewhere else.
‘Good luck to them,’ said Roz, ever practical. ‘If they’re there, they can’t be here, so we get it to ourselves. What do you say to pressing on to Tonopah for bed?’
‘Why Tonopah?’
‘Because anywhere with a name like that must have something going for it. Besides, it’s only seventy-two miles. We’ll be there in an hour if we don’t run out of fuel…’
Back on the bikes, we revelled in the stunning splendour of our surroundings. We’d cross one enormous valley, rise up over a pass in the moon mountains and drop down into another dip, always with a flat bottom and a straight road. We flew by Pilot Peak and Emigrant Peak, and finally found ourselves in a series of desolate passes as Tonopah approached. A couple of pick-ups went the other way, then a shining truck from Albuquerque. With the town in sight several miles ahead we stopped again to decide what to do.
‘Shall we save money and sleep rough?’ I suggested. ‘There’s nothing out here to hurt us, and we’re hardly going to be shot for trespassing.’
Roz kicked at a dead rattlesnake some vehicle had run over. It was still flexible and clearly wasn’t
long gone to its reward.
‘What was it that guy back in Kansas said about rattlers cuddling up to you in the night to keep their body temperature up for an early start?’ she asked. ‘And what about the scorpions? You sleep out here if you like, but I think I’ll squander resources, take a nice cold shower and watch TV in bed. You’ll be able to see the Weather Channel…’ she added like a carrot to a dying donkey.
‘There isn’t going to be any weather until we reach New Mexico and Texas,’ I responded. This was true. The only item of meteorological interest out here in high summer was the academic issue of exactly how hot each succeeding day would actually be, but I capitulated without much struggle. After the long day I didn’t honestly fancy the hard ground and the plummeting night-time temperature either.
Tonopah was a classic Wild West mining town. It seemed to hang absurdly at the brow of a hill with an industrial complex at the apex. A hotch-potch of buildings lined the road and prices in general were back to normal. The lady at the Mexican restaurant told us to turn on the TV at nine.
‘There’s a show about women bikers,’ she announced. ‘It’s really important. It’s on the national channel and everyone will be watching it. Folks are dying to know about that stuff.’
And so we tucked ourselves up at the appointed hour, opened a pint of Jack Daniel’s and watched agog as a troupe of five Barbie-doll women pranced through a very short motorcycle trip doing a lot of talking and acting like fashion models all the way. They were obviously getting off on the power symbols, the big bikes, but we noted that the ladies were never hot, there were no flies and, of course, none of them ever fell off. The last item was a mercy because if they had, they’d never have looked so pretty again, wearing only their flimsy gear. The exception to this frippery was one girl who favoured a very fast Kawasaki ‘crotch rocket’. She was kitted out properly and, we thought, put up with the Harley babes with saintly patience. Every so often, boredom would overtake her and she’d open up her ‘Kwacker’, disappearing over the horizon in a thrilling 10,000 rpm howl, blowing the rest into the weeds. She turned out to have ridden some major distances and Roz admired her attitude. As to the rest, Betty Boop’s owner helped herself to ice from the machine outside and topped up her drink.