Who would've thunk that riding a motorcycle mattered so much to me? I feel as though a boil has been lanced and a new sense of completion and contentment sweeps over me. My Bonneville. Harumph.
I am embarrassed from time to time about my attitude, that of a curmudgeon and I try not to slip into the belief that the good old days were actually better old days than today. But my Bonneville reminds me of one of my favorite cycles from years past, the Yamaha SR 500, a motorcycle that lacked an electric start and taught me to kick a big single into life. It had character in spades just like the modern Bonneville and it handled lightly and smoothly just like... oh, never mind. I have lots of crazy memories, especially of being cold, that come to mind.
I gave up my motorcycle willingly when I realised it was keeping me from spending time with my dog. Besides I was never too excited by that huge 1200cc Honda Goldwing. It was like riding a very large sewing machine, and if anyone ever asks you can be sure and tell them, on my authority, that 600 pound sewing machines do not corner very easily. I lost a lot of interest in motorcycles as the importers courted younger riders with impossibly fast machines that require a level of crouching that would leave me aching. I took to sailing, and kept myself cold on the waters of Northern California.
One evening my wife and I took the Goldwing up the coast for dinner at Duarte's tavern in the village of Pescadero, a 30 minute ride up Highway One (the other Highway One, the California state Highway celebrated in the bridges of big Sur). After dinner we walked through the village in the dying rays of the sun and window shopped the antique stores; junque stores, really, but yesterday's ironmongery is today's "collectible."
The ride home was a horror. We should have worn electric vests I'm sure, but after dinner we were immersed in bands of fog sweeping in off the beaches, we were cold and wet, my teeth chattered, the windshield was insufficient, only my feet were warm, nestled behind the flat water cooled cylinders.
"We should have taken the convertible," my wife ground out through chattering teeth as I maneuvered the mastodon across the gravel in our driveway. Next time we did.
A few years earlier California's coastal Highway One, known to Southern Californians as "The PCH" had nailed me again. I was riding the Pacific Coast Highway north from Santa Monica, completing a trip to Santa Cruz from my previous home in Fort Myers. I had bought a fully dressed Yamaha Maxim 650 to improve the quality of my tedious life in southwest Florida, and conceived the notion that life would be better in California once again.
It was a splendid trip, my shaft driven four cylinder 650 ran like a top, I listened to the radio as I rode, a grotesque first (and last) for me and I even took a tent and used it, most memorably on a star-lit night in the grasslands of the Oklahoma panhandle. A grizzled Harley rider shared the empty park campground and we sat and sipped and he looked at my rice burner and nodded thoughtfully. "She'll get you there," he said slowly, acting more like Sam Shepherd than the actor ever did in one of his own plays. I appreciated his approval.
The Other Highway One nailed me on the long ride north from San Luis Obispo. I was returning to my home in Santa Cruz and it was a sentimental journey, a return to my emigrant roots, a fresh start, a place to call home. And I wanted to return along the most famous, photographed road in the world, the twisting bridged path through Big Sur. In real life it's a Big Pain in the Ass as traffic is endless and slow.
My romantic visions of swinging along the Highway in a California blaze of sunlight were dashed by bad timing. I had to be in Santa Cruz tomorrow afternoon reading the news, and my new deadline meant I had to ride at night. Big Sur is over 100 miles long from Cambria to Carmel and there isn't a drop of gas along the way. At night the villages at either end are pretty much closed too so I filled a quart soda bottle with gas and sat it up in the pouch inside my huge windshield at the last open Seven Eleven in town. 20 miles into my overnight odyssey I poured the gas into the tank hoping there was no Mountain Dew residue, and took on the darkened road.
It was cold and damp. I've sailed the Big Sur coast a few times and I have frozen my ass on those overnight trips, but even though a sailboat travels at walking speed you can duck into the cabin, warm up and heat water. On the motorcycle I just kept going, wiping the moisture from my beard, trying to see the road ahead and watching as my speed slowed as my concentration faded.
finally, around midnight I was a popsicle and when the Julia Pfeiffer State Park hove into view I turned off the Highway. I remembered the park as a dirt open space with a trail head. That was then, this was 1992. The Park was clean and asphalted and there were restrooms and a bus shelter which was the perfect place to spread a sleeping bag and lay down and listen to the slowing of my chattering teeth.
Why do people think California is a tropical paradise? Florida is tropical, and paradise is a green Bonnie in a place where winter is the occasional cold front on a windy afternoon. Now I'm settled my rides are my adventures, and remembering all those chaotic plans and wild optimism is an activity kindled by the simple act of gripping the handlebars and taking off, corporeally to work, but spiritually down the highways of the past. That's why riding is so important to me.
