Good Vibrations (24 page)

‘It was like that on the bike just now, but I think I finally understand what that churchwarden in Finland was trying to explain to us about the sailing ships hanging in the rafters of the nave.'

I looked blank.

‘We met him on the trip to Russia. He said they were to remind people that life was like a long voyage. You have to take each day as it comes, because it's a vital part of the whole. The point was you can't climb off a boat on to the waves, so there's no way you can give up on life just because you don't like it. Remember what he said about jet aeroplanes?'

I had asked how his theories related to today's time scales. He had responded that air travel was not a journey in the full sense, it was the spiriting of a person from one place to the next. Within our inherited framework of time and distance, its brief span has no meaning. A sea voyage, on the other hand, especially one that is inevitably slow, forces its people to reflect and observe. They are obliged to accept the passing weeks as part of life, to be lived for better or worse.

‘Travelling endless rough roads on a Harley-Davidson comes under the same heading…' Roz concluded.

We did not mention motorcycles in the context of the vastness of the American continent again for several days.

Late in the afternoon, we were considering making the short trip south to the town of Mendocino itself, two-up on Madonna in search of a meal, when Otto knocked on our door and invited us to join him and Thelma.

‘Our friend Rose is here. You'll enjoy meeting with her.'

We did.

As we sat back after dinner, Rose told us the tale of her family. She was sophisticated in a particularly European sort of way. Even her spectacles had style. She seemed more French than anything, yet her accent was local. Her story could have been any one of a million in America.

‘In many ways, I'm exactly the person Joan Didion was thinking about when she wrote about this state,' Rose observed. ‘I remember the essence of what she said because it always seems just right. “California is the last stop for all those who came from somewhere else, for all those who have drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.”'

Rose's parents had arrived in Ellis Island, New York, from French-speaking Switzerland in 1914. Someone on the boat had taken a shine to them, or maybe it was a hustler looking to engage talented people in a factory in the Midwest. Whoever it was, however, he had done the young couple well when he advised them to hang back when steerage berths were being allocated. Finally, the cheap bunks were all taken and the Swiss were ‘up-graded'. This benefactor also saw them through the difficulties of non-English speaking immigration in the dreadful, confusing queues, from where many were sent home again. Next he put them on a train to Indianapolis, advising them of work in a factory only three blocks from the railroad station. Then he disappeared.

Rose's father was immediately hired in the glass works, where he discovered a small community of French-speaking Swiss from near his home, some of whom he actually knew. He built his family a house with his own hands from cinder blocks he and his mates made from factory waste. It had a kitchen, two further rooms and no electricity. Inside water, outside toilet, and wine with every evening meal. Here, Rose was born, but hard times in the thirties brought further moves, and young Rose ended up in California.

Rose and our hosts seemed like living history when they mentioned the depression, remembering Steinbeck's families from
The Grapes of Wrath
arriving from the dustbowls of Oklahoma and Kansas. Such scenes had parallels with the Tyneside shipyard workers' march on Downing Street during the same period, but at least the Jarrow Lads had homes to return to. A migrant clan driven from their few dried-out sections by foreclosure, wandering this land of plenty without work or hope was the very stuff of tragedy.

Otto and Thelma told of a very different set of travellers who passed their place in the ‘Summer of Love', when San Francisco was the centre of the world hippy movement of love and peace.

‘There was always someone on the road in those days,' Otto smiled wistfully. ‘I recall one girl, walked all the way from Mexico City with two Siamese cats. One feller came by bound for Canada on a skateboard, and another guy rode in on a donkey. Looked just like Jesus Christ. Probably smoked more grass than Our Lord, though.'

‘What about that group who arrived at midnight in a hearse, coffin and all?' Thelma broke in. ‘They crept into Room Five and stayed the night. They looked so weird we didn't bother them. In the morning they'd gone, and they'd piled the sheets up all neat. Not a mark anywhere. Not like the two elderly schoolmarms from Colorado. They drove up in a nice car, sweet and charming. Booked in for one night, and nobody, but nobody ever trashed a room so totally as they did. They must've chopped pink grapefruit into halves, scooped them out then filled the husks with vodka. They went on drinking till they fell over, I reckon, from the number of quarts that they left empty. Then they had a pillow fight, pulled down the curtains, ripped up the mattresses and did some other stuff that wasn't so nice. You can't ever tell with people from how they appear on the outside.

‘Do you remember Mad Marvin?' she turned to Otto.

‘Jesus, that was some crazy,' her husband agreed. ‘Tiny little guy in XXXL dungarees. They darn near smothered him. He kinda mooched around outside all day. Finally, he comes into the office and he says in a funny voice, “Gimme a room. Then you'd better call the cops 'cause I don't know what I'll do.”

‘We gave him food and treated him kind, then told him to sleep in the room you two're in. We didn't call no cops, but he locks himself in and doesn't come out again. He was in there three days, so finally we had to call the sheriff. Here comes the sheriff with his deputy and his squad car and they ask him nicely to come out, but he looses off a couple of rounds at them from something heavy and they dive behind the house. Then we have a siege. Goes on for another day. Finally, Marvin gives himself up. The sheriff takes him away in 'cuffs, and as he's leavin', he swears he'll have our lives, Thelma and me.'

‘What was his problem?' I asked, fascinated that such people should be walking the streets.

‘Marvin was one of those guys let loose from the loony house under Reagan's ‘community care' deal. Turned out he was armed to the teeth, but by their lights he wasn't a criminal, he was just crazy, so they let him out again after three days and me and Thelma lived in fear he'd be back.'

‘And was he?'

‘No, thank Christ. We was jittery for months, but he never showed. Perhaps he'll come tonight,' Otto turned to Roz, his eyes all laughter. ‘Might be wanting his room back, he liked it so much. Better put that chair behind the door.'

The following evening, after another welcome day of cliff walking and just breathing the clean sea air, we were all sitting around outside enjoying the moonrise. One of the guests, a cyclist from over the mountains, handed around a sweet-smelling joint which Otto and Thelma politely refused. Everyone around here seemed to smoke socially. Why not them?

‘We tried it once,' said Thelma. ‘A guy with no hair at all left a huge one with us one day. We thought it was a gift, so we put it in a drawer. A week or two later we smoked it while we were in bed. Just for the devil of it. I guess it was kind of good. We giggled all night anyways. Following morning the fellow came and asked for it back. I couldn't believe it. “Too late,” I told him, and he went away. We haven't bothered since.'

It seemed common knowledge on this coast that marijuana was big business and that extensive fields of America's most profitable cash crop waved in the hills. We were advised more than once not to walk far east of the road, unless we knew where we were going. To happen upon a plantation, even innocently, could lead to incidents with armed guards. Occasionally intruders are shot and their bodies disposed of. There had been one pitched battle with the ‘Feds' in which at least one person had died.

Intimidation was also commonplace, such as the incident of the school teacher who had inadvertently messed with a grower's daughter and returned from an assignation to discover his car riddled by gunfire. He left without fuss. So did the suspected informer whose house was machine-gunned from under him while he cowered upstairs in bed. Both were considered lucky.

The general feeling was that somebody with serious power was turning a blind eye to the trade. The local sheriffs certainly didn't have the clout to ignore it on their own initiative and keep their jobs. An unknown official far higher up the pecking order was receiving the pay-off. Nobody we met knew or cared who this might be, because apart from the odd mistaken identity or occasional outsiders finding themselves in the wrong place, the farming had no effect on local life at all, other than to spin off some good grass and obliquely boost the economy. Many middle-of-the-road Americans I know are of the opinion that out of the generally available narcotics, marijuana at least should be legalised, at one stroke doing away with a major sector of crime while bringing joy to the world.

Three days after arriving at the Pacific, Roz turned to me as we sat on the beach below the Westport Inn. I had been deliberately avoiding the issue of what was to happen next. The question of whether Roz was going to tackle the eastbound leg or would be satisfied and give up now that she had fought her way to the West Coast was unresolved, in my mind at least.

‘Do you think we should be moving on soon?' she asked.

Time to grasp the nettle.

‘How do you feel about the trip home? Do you really want to make it?'

‘Well,' she responded, ‘I won't say I'm not still frightened by traffic, and to be truthful I wish there was some way we could miss out San Francisco, but I said I'd ride here and back, and that's what I'm going to do.'

Beginning to realise that I had lost Roz's plot somewhere, I put it to her carefully that she shouldn't do this for my sake, although I'd miss her if she went home without me.

‘It'll be fine,' she replied almost indignantly. Then she made it clear that my doubts about her seeing it through were of my own making.

‘I've never had any intention to quit half-way. I've developed my own little fantasy, actually, and I have to cross the deserts and all of Texas to live it. I want to ride through Baton Rouge past the Lakes of Pontchartrain and down into New Orleans. And if I've gone that far, I might as well run off the last thousand miles and sell the bike back to Gary at Annapolis. I can't wait to see their faces in the dealership when Betty rolls in through the door!'

She knocked hard on wood for her bike and grinned at me, confounding my dark suspicions.

‘Just don't leave me behind on the eight-lane, that's all.'

My whole world lightened up, but I said no more. Never disturb the Bulldog Spirit.

And so we loaded up, said farewell to the people of Westport and rejoined Route 1. Our whole little community came out to bid us adieu. Even the Mexican tart showed a leg and waved her bandana. The rocky coast led us to a vegetarian lunch in Mendocino town, but the relaxation of that whole area, together with the dreamland vineyard country further south faded in a long afternoon as we filtered into the real-time horror show of the California freeway system.

We joined US Highway 101 around 70 miles north of San Francisco. This turbulent river of steel runs from Oregon to Los Angeles by way of the Golden Gate Bridge across the narrows at the entrance to San Francisco Bay. The pleasant, leafy city of Alameda where an old shipmate promised rest and recreation lies on the eastern side of the Bay in the shadow of highly urbanised Oakland and Berkeley. To reach it, one must cross the Gate, negotiate downtown San Francisco then hack all the way over the 7-mile bridge which crosses the enormous bay itself. Thousands of commuters make the same trip every working day, but for us, swinging into the automotive hurly-burly out of the space of central North America, it was a major trauma.

Even after living in the States, I can never come to terms with the semi-legal practice of overtaking on either side of a slower vehicle on a divided highway. Anyone who passes ‘on the inside' in England is immediately branded as a lunatic, subject to public vilification and liable for prosecution, yet throughout the US, otherwise sane individuals make it their daily habit. And nobody seems to mind. Perhaps we avoid it because, knowing our nearside is safe, we can concentrate on our offside mirrors and so decrease the likelihood of anyone running into us from the back as we change lane. Anywhere in America, it is vital to check both mirrors, particularly the right one if you are moving into a ‘slower' lane. The fact that overtaking is not subject to any lane discipline encourages lazy drivers to cruise along at sub-speed-limit velocities in what should be faster lanes. This in turn sends quicker drivers lurching into the inside streams of traffic, causing those already in them to brake, sometimes violently, sending shock waves back for hundreds of yards. Add to the whole dynamic mess a dense heat haze, one of the world's heaviest traffic loads, trucks the size of houses, ill-maintained cars that would not be allowed on any northern European road and the fact that many drivers simply do not bother to use their direction indicators; then you start to understand that this is the jungle. It is certainly no place for two motorbikes in convoy, especially if the leader is trying to find unknown exits and the follower is struggling to stay in touch.

The surest formula I know for staying alive on a motorcycle is to assume that every other being on the planet, human or animal, is making a well-planned effort to kill you. Once this is established in your craven mind, it takes only a modicum of skill and self-discipline on a busy highway to make sure that none of the bastards get close enough to hurt you. Out in the country the discipline bit is more difficult, because there you must presuppose that each gate in the hedge hides a tractor and trailer poised to trundle out just as your brakes are past the point of no return, or that the woodland you are belting through at 90 is full of moose, one of which is limbering up to leap at you, spelling a rapid departure from this life for all concerned. Working this principle on the California freeways would have been fine for me on my own. It was a nightmare for two.