Good Vibrations

by Tom Cunliffe

  Mara is a highly independent woman, someone who knows exactly who she is. When she left her last husband and the easy life of the East Coast, she travelled with her family straight to Flagstaff, a place that feels like a frontier town surrounded by desert and mountains despite its position of importance in Arizona. She was waitressing in a small cafe on Route 66 when an unusual-looking fellow came in for lunch. He had dark eyes, dark bushy hair tied back, a small beard and his casual gear failed to hide a fine physique. They looked at one another over the menu and not a word was exchanged, but they both knew that this was It.

  Mara, Fred and the kids now lived in a tiny apartment in a one-storey block. The communal rear pathway was a sort of social centre where the plain people of America could air their views. There was a hint of greenery, vehicles approached with difficulty and the yard might have been a haven of peace if not for the neighbours’ dogs. Several of these beasts lived a crazed half-life caged up next to Mara’s patch. The animals were clearly not fed properly and were apparently never walked, so they howled and barked continually. I looked out of the window to analyse a particular crescendo of canine anguish and saw a small girl stretching out of a broken window tormenting the beasts with a stick.

  Fred leaned back in a chair.

  ‘I spend my life teaching martial arts,’ he said to my surprise. ‘Sure, a lot of it is high-contact physical stuff. Showing people how to react and take care of themselves. A few of my folks go on and make the grade in the sport. But a lot of what I do is about encouraging people to be at peace with themselves. You can’t fight, even in a stylised way, until you have respect and have shed all bullshit. These guys here,’ he angled his head, ‘some of them are missing the point.’

  The girls walked out to the supermarket and Fred and I stayed behind with Mara’s twelve-year-old son. Small, like his mother, but equally well-formed, the lad was a model of what a boy should be. He was enthusiastic and joined in when he had something worth saying, otherwise he listened. The rain soon cleared and the three of us went outside to check over Betty Boop. She had been misfiring in the wet and I assumed she had moisture somewhere in her guts. As we worked, we talked, as men will at such times. Partly our minds were on the puzzle of the misfire, but we were also getting to know one another. For some reason I asked Fred if he kept a gun, as most people seemed to in these parts. Unlike many, he did not proudly reel off a list of his weaponry.

  I told him about the ‘Bubba Bill Clinton, Yellow Beret Commander in Chief’ caricatures in Kansas, expecting the usual supportive reaction to the artist. Instead, Fred looked at me sadly.

  ‘The president is an unusual man,’ he said, ‘but he wasn’t dodging the draft while he was over the Atlantic. He spent a deal of time in Russia talking with the Communists, trying to foster the start of a greater understanding.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Just as well as those rednecks seem to know he was ducking the draft. They want us to believe he’s a coward and a treasonist, but I don’t buy it. He might not be a saint, but he’s the only president who’s had the balls to stand up to the ‘right to bear arms’ lobby. In the end, his is the only sensible way, and the sooner people realise it, the better for America.’

  I looked at his strong, competent hands as we wrestled Betty’s carburettor out from between her mud-splashed cylinders and thought how safe Mara must feel living with this even-mannered, up-together man. He lifted off the float bowl and emptied it carefully into the dirt.

  ‘No water in there,’ he said, showing the tiny metal container to the boy as I upturned the body to hunt for the main jet. I blew that out and together the three of us tooth-combed the delicate mechanism for dirt. It looked as though it had been spotless all along. The induction seals, however, looked past their sell-by date.

  ‘Common problem up here,’ said Fred. ‘They don’t look too bad, but it might be the answer. The combination of altitude and poor-quality gasoline on the Indian reservations burns them out. You’ll be able to get replacements at Harley-Davidson on Route 66 west.’

  I’d never heard of such a thing, but I sped down the road on Madonna, made it to H-D just as they were closing, and returned to Betty with the goods.

  ‘Maybe she’ll be OK now,’ said Fred as we tightened up the final bolt, ‘you never know what you’ve fixed, sometimes.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ I agreed. We flashed Betty up for good luck. She started with a will and ran sweetly on her short test run.

  The bike was cleaned up and back on her stand by the time the girls returned, and we men were setting ourselves to building a barbecue fire. Something about Fred’s presence even calmed the evil dogs in their cages. They piped down and we enjoyed sitting out, breathing in the damp ground scent we had missed for so long. The neighbours made an appearance and shared a beer, but I suspected that they would not agree with Fred’s views on either the president or his hand-gun initiative. Much later, Roz and I went to bed in Mara and Fred’s room which they lent to us, bunking themselves down on the sofa. Joss sticks burned, while candles shed a gentle light over Mara’s tapestries and Indian dream feathers. As we settled down Roz whispered,

  ‘It’s great seeing Mara in her own place. She and I had such a time just now and – no offence – but it was lovely being with a woman for a change. We went and had a drink in the bar as well. She asked me about Sturgis, and I told her how the whole business was such a strong statement of style, much, much more than any motorcycle or boat rally would have back home, she said something really interesting…’

  Roz fell silent, as though turning over Mara’s comment in her mind. Stopping in mid-sentence was a habit I had developed and at this time it was driving Roz crazy. Perhaps she was picking it up. I hoped not, but waited to see.

  ‘Out here,’ she finally continued, having marshalled her thoughts, ‘culture is only paper-thin. It’s because apart from the Indians and some Spanish, these lands have only been settled for two or three generations. The effect is a deep need for roots and something to hold on to. The bike thing is typical. It helps people belong.’

  This was certainly a new angle. Right or wrong, like most broad-based statements that sound plausible it had a basis of justification, but when I considered the individual bikers we’d met, it didn’t stack up all the way. Steve and Nell certainly weren’t in search of an identity. On the other hand, the public image of the Western motorcycling world with its style, badges and clubs, fitted neatly into the theory. The conundrum was like that of individuals and nations. I thought how often I had caught the mean little Brit who lives in the back of my head thinking archetypally derogatory thoughts about the French as a whole, only to shame him by recalling some of the excellent French men and women I have known. There are too many exceptions to rules about human alignment to classify people into neat armies. I saw what she meant, nonetheless.

  Silence for a while. The wind had gone down with the sun.

  ‘How on Earth does Mara manage in winter?’ Roz spoke again. ‘It must get really cold this high up, and there’s no sign of any heating in here at all. But Fred’s the perfect dishy lover. I expect he’ll keep her warm.’

  I told her how Fred and I had enjoyed playing at ‘guys’ with Betty Boop and Mara’s lad, then my gaze wandered to the moonlit window recess. I doubted the wall was more than 3 inches thick. The whole building was totally uninsulated and probably made of reinforced concrete. Imagining the blast of the February gales roaring down from North Dakota around the Alpine height of this outpost city, I shuddered for Mara and Fred. No doubt they had some way of coping, but as I went comfortably to sleep in the perfect night-time temperature of August, I couldn’t see it.

  ‘If you’re going east to visit the Hopis up on the mesas, you’re stuck with Interstate 40 or Highway 15,’ Fred gazed into his morning coffee. ‘The 15 is what they call an Indian Service Road. The surface’ll be lousy but you’ll see some magic country. It goes straight up through Navajo land. Or you could try the
remains of Route 66,’ he looked up. ‘I don’t know how far you’d get…’

  We came out of town on Interstate 40, cutting off at the first interchange and heading east down the service road that runs into the historic trail. The fabled Route 66, migrant route west for so many dispossessed families in the 1930s and more recently the subject of a sixties Rolling Stones hit, did not feature on my map at all. Rendered redundant by the superhighway, it now runs only in sporadic bursts, left behind to provide access to businesses and the occasional homestead that would otherwise be out in the cold. Initially, we found it close alongside its successor; later, the four-lane disappeared from sight, and ultimately, the almost mythical road veered off into the wilderness.

  We ricocheted along the steadily deteriorating surface into the desert with Roz listening for Betty’s engine to start missing again. I don’t think she really could believe the carb was fixed, and after the bad-mouthing the low-capacity Sportster had received from numerous H-D experts along the way, I could hardly blame her. Had Fred and I actually managed to sort her out? Was it really just the poor quality fuel sold on the Indian reservations coupled with fast running at low oxygen levels, or was it in truth the beginning of the end?

  But Betty’s strong steel heart never skipped a beat all day, and Roz hung on with increasing confidence. From the comparative security of Black Madonna’s wide saddle, I watched with an affection that surprised me as the yellow machine bucked gamely down the remains of Route 66 towards a distant mesa. Choosing Betty was turning out to be one of our better decisions. Despite the prognosis of doom from the experts, the rattlesnakes couldn’t catch her, the worse elements of the Sioux missed their one chance and the wire-snared tyre treads flying off sun-fried trucks at ballistic velocities had rocketed by on both sides. Against the odds, she had also turned out to be faster than my full-blown giant. Zipping up to a ton was no challenge for Betty. Any quicker than that on a Harley and you’re in the wild woods. Riding this dusty strip of history, I felt deep down that she was going to be a winner all the way. A lucky bike.

  Much of Arizona, ceded to the Indians by the government and uncultivable without major irrigation schemes, is a vast, stony plain burned by the sun with all its features in the far distance. The flat top of a mesa stood clear ahead, perhaps 10 miles away. On our right, individual buttes of non-eroded rock wavered on the super-heated horizon. This at last was the scenery of a thousand Western movies.

  The road seemed to be of cement construction rather than tarmac. It had not seen a maintenance gang in decades. Fractures of ever-increasing severity dogged progress until we were riding around them one after another at an average speed of 10 mph. Soon, even the weather-shattered concrete gave up and we were lurching along an ungraded dirt track into nowhere. There hadn’t been a signpost for miles, and not a single vehicle had passed in either direction since we left the hardware stores and motels behind us on the outskirts of Flagstaff. Route 66 had become a ghost highway. We picked our way down it for at least an hour and were burning up gas at a high rate in low gear when suddenly it gave out altogether. Ahead, only a vague depression in the plain offered any hint of where it might have been.

  Roz took off her helmet. I had not worn mine all morning as the likelihood of an accident other than a minor low-speed tumble was zero. We turned off our ignition and listened to the wind, waiting for spectral migrants in Model T Fords to come rattling and creaking out of the wild. In a way they did, because the place had a strong atmosphere, as though the people who once struggled this way to California had left some of their burden along the roadside. Perhaps an unmarked grave hid its low mound nearby, for many had not survived the terrible journey. Nothing tangible could be seen. The extremes of seventy summers and winters had reduced any human debris to powder, but it was impossible to miss the ambience.

  Retracing our own very visible tracks almost to Flagstaff, we gave up the struggle against progress and filtered on to I-40 to make up some time.

  Within five minutes I remembered why interstates are a lousy selection for a motorcyclist with any instinct for survival. Crashing over a 4-inch drop that stretched clear across the road, I cursed the often-poor surfaces that provide a throughway for innumerable speeding trucks carrying the nation’s commerce. Roads such as I-40 are also heavily populated by private cars with a seasoning of RVs, many of which run up to the size of a double-decker bus. Apart from the deadly crevasses, such highways are dangerous for motorbikes for two main reasons. First, intermittent turbulence from the colossal trucks buffets like a vindictive gale; secondly, the biker is at great risk from the bunching created by that most sinister of modern car features, the ‘cruise control’.

  In the frenzied conditions of the California freeways, the survival principle that everyone was trying to do us in had proved eminently workable so long as we maintained 100 per cent concentration. Not a problem when surrounded by maniacs. Out in the country things were not so easy, because the boredom of riding a wide, featureless carriageway saps the mental strength. Everything goes fine while there is no traffic. Then, even on a motorcycle, the only problem is falling asleep. The ever-present danger comes with the gaggles of cars.

  Particularly on quiet sections, automobiles find themselves bunching together at exactly the speed limit, creeping ever closer to one another with mind-boggling slowness because the drivers have all set their cruise controls to what they fancy to be 65 mph. Most will not disengage these handy aids to dangerous driving for anybody, especially a silver-studded phantom running up behind them attempting to keep close enough to the speed limit to fool any lurking cops. As the driver swanning along in the outside lane studiously ignores him, the biker is working hard at maintaining clear blue water between the motorcycle and a comatose zombie closing up inches from his rear mudguard. Meanwhile, some drunk who has actually fallen asleep at the wheel boxes him on the inside lane.

  This may not sound like a terrifying scenario, but after it has continued for minute after agonising minute while you concentrate on the road, surrounded by the same representatives of the undead nominally driving but actually eating hamburgers, drinking scalding coffee, arguing with their wives on the cell phone, raising both hands to emphasise some point you don’t care about at all, or tuning their radios to yet another moronic substation, you can carve through the stress with a blunt hacksaw.

  It is possible to cross America in three days on Interstate 40 without so much as a single interruption from a traffic light, and as we cruised up it at snail’s pace, I pondered on the achievements of the ‘iron-ass’ motorcycle brigade. These fine role models for the young biker annually roar from New York to San Francisco non-stop, presumably to reassure themselves that they still have no central nervous system. And the Best of British Luck to them, I thought.

  We pulled off the main highway as soon as we could to ride in glorious sunshine through more Clint Eastwood country up to the heights of Second Mesa where, standing proud between First and Third Mesas, the Hopi Indians still lived. On the way we stopped at a trading post run by the Navajo for fuel and water. Like all the permanent Navajo buildings we had seen, this one gave the impression of being tidier than the Sioux equivalent so far away to the north. Neither the storekeepers nor the hangers-on were drunk, and the dogs were friendly although, like Mara, how they and their masters kept warm in winter behind the matchboard walls of their shacks remained a mystery.

  Further north-east across the huge desert land of the Indian reservation, we passed a scrapyard with a group of full-sized automobiles lined up under a tall red butte. The ‘scrappers’ were unattended, but the barbed wire fence that would inevitably surround them in a city was absent. So was the black, serial-killing German Shepherd that goes with it.

  On close inspection, many of these redundant heroes were punched through with bullet holes, and though past road use, it was going to be decades before they rusted beyond recognition in the dry climate. The fact that someone had bothered to collect up their remains adde
d another piece of subliminal evidence to the impression that the local Indians took pride in their barren, impossibly beautiful country.

  We covered the remaining 20 miles to Second Mesa in fifteen minutes and were rewarded from even half-way up by a vast desert panorama. Adobe houses clung all around the steep slopes and as we banked carefully on the cobbles up to the summit, we found ourselves in a tidy square, built around the rocky tabletop. By now it was early afternoon. Another friendly little mongrel dragged himself up from his post-prandial snooze and trotted across for a pat and a scratch of its belly.

  These Arizona mutts were way out of line with the rest of the canine world when it came to attitude. Motorbikes and dogs are traditional enemies. I was bitten on the calf by a foul example in the streets of Liverpool as a youngster, for no better reason than revving up my Matchless at Penny Lane traffic lights. The brute’s fangs went clean through my leather boot and having taken a good look at the state of them, my next stop was the hospital for a tetanus jab. You live and learn. Since those days I have often been pursued by Man’s Best Friends while riding slowly enough for them to keep up. It’s no use kicking them; they just chew you harder. The only answer is a solid twist of the throttle and ‘Goodbye to all That’.

  The short-haired little charmer in question led us across the small plaza to the door of a house marked ‘Pottery for Sale’. There was no other indication of a readiness to do business and not a soul was in sight. Now squarely under the influence of the Spanish settlements of nearby New Mexico, I decided everyone must be at siesta. This certainly made sense, but we knocked the door anyway. It was opened by a healthy-looking Indian woman of around Roz’s age. We indicated the sign and were ushered in without hesitation.

  Frances stood around 5 feet 3 inches, wore white and her broad, pleasant face looked at the world through round spectacles. We explained from the outset that we were not in the market for buying her wares, as there was nowhere to stow anything on the bikes, but her open demeanour did not falter. She led us through the front room to the back kitchen and made us coffee.