Friendly Reassurance

Locals go to Miami Subs for cheap and speedy food. There used to be a place on Caroline Street called PT's, named for Paul Tripp, whose slogan was "where locals go to eat" as though trailing after residents is what visitors should aspire to when considering eating out. If you follow me to Miami Subs you'll eat okay but you probably won't get lucky, unless your date is into stark formica, severe lighting and plastic cutlery.The wife and I met Robert for dinner a couple of nights ago at Miami Subs, on the Boulevard across from Garrison Bight Marina. The founder of the chain was the son of Greek immigrant who settled in Miami, thus the chain offers foods that include the proper ethnic touches- gyro lamb with yoghurt/dill sauce alongside the burgers, fries and ice cream. His business ethic was a bit shady and he ended up gunned down a couple of years ago in splendidly scandalous style in the streets of Miami. His ethnic chain lives on, and in Key West its somewhere I like to park the Bonneville from time to time for a gyro platter or two.

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Robert moved to the Keys in 1976, in time for the bicentennial, and he came as many did (and still do) seeking a nautically based change. He lived on the water and knew many early characters who did the same, and his stories of living in the Keys in the 70's are the stuff of history. His stories have also reinforced my conviction that i was right not to settle in Key West when first I visited in 1981. This was not a genteel resort in transition, it was a dusty, fishing village comatose eight months of the year and raucous for the other four leavened by a heavy military presence and a great many people who could barely function on the level of simple daily living. Boredom writ large in my jaundiced opinion. But the stories make an excellent accompaniment to a meal.Robert himself has lived a few lives, working at lots of jobs, making the life in the Keys one reads of and dreams of to while away a cold Midwest winter. He worked for years as a commercial fisherman, he captained tourist boats, he opposed the creation of the National Marine Sanctuary and then realising his error championed it, and now works full time for NOAA promoting their conservation rules out on the water. "I get paid to be out boating!" he laughs, setting aside the years of scrounging his way to his current eminence, a canal-front trailer, a couple of spare lots and boats on his seawall. A successful self-sufficient life navigated through the treacherous waters of drink drugs and bankruptcy that trip up so many dreamers in the Keys. He was in a reminiscent sort of mood the other night, after packing away his grilled chicken salad and settling in with a bottomless diet Pepsi.

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"I remember Jimmy, when I first got here. He was anchored out in Boca Chica Bay and he lived aboard kind of sparsely. He was living on a Hobie cat." I tried to picture someone living through the current cold snap on the tramp of a beach cat anchored out. Then i thought of summer rain and mosquitoes and windy, sloppy waves, and all my middle class mediocrity rose up in me.

"He lived on a Hobie cat? How?" I asked, and Robert shrugged, his blue eyes twinkling.

"I guess he needed a place and the cat was just where he slept and no one bothered him." And that was the payoff back in those days. No one bothered you, which is a philosophy that one tries to keep alive in a time of encircling condos.

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Those were the days they came up with Fantasy Fest as a response to a major domestic disruption downtown where a business couple took their knock down drag out fight onto Duval in mid October after a particularly empty summer. Sheer boredom convinced Tony Falcone of Fast Buck Freddie's to start a parade. Or so he told me.

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Robert's Key West was a different one, plugged in not to tourist season or hip bars, but to water temperatures and fish spawns and all the rigging and paraphenalia of a waterbourne life. He toured the country, found Key West and determined never to live north of the Seven Mile Bridge. In a town that promotes water activities and teems with residents who never dip their toes into the bowels of a boat, Robert has set his own clock to the time of the tides and the state of the breeze.

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I remember anchoring next to a couple off Rat Key, he I had known since we had met anchored off St Petersburg a few years before, she was his new interest and he set her up with her birds and her dog in an old wooden motor cruiser (sans motor). The Chris Craft's previous owner, a water rat, had thought to preserve the aging hull with an unconventional choice of bottom paint which was actually roofing tar. This gave the home afloat a rather menacing air, a matt black finish lightly disguised with curtains and a parrot cage dangling in the shade of the cockpit. Unfortunately the tar, owing perhaps to a faulty compound that may have made it cheap enough to buy, failed to set and anyone approaching the boat in a nice white dinghy had to fend off madly and was lucky if they came away only with a couple of fists full of oily tar. Dinging the hull left long dark streaks on anything it butted up against. This was her home for a couple of years afloat and perhaps the execrable state of her vessel led the woman to a new and more stimulating life ashore. Salt water will do that.

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Robert and I go back almost twenty years when we met sailing in the Bahamas, we remember the meerting differently but it was somewhere in the Exumas and we kept meeting along the way. We talked about the old sailing days and what a pain it is to get from here to there under sail, the lack of wind, the wrong wind, big seas, crap waves and all the rest. I expressed relief that I don't have to deal with it anymore, or at least until I want to again, if ever.

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"We can grow old ashore," Robert said, " and we can afford to settle down without regrets. We've done lots of things lots of people only ever dream of doing. This is our life," and I was startled by his philosphy spilling out as we tramped across the parking lot, "and its okay." Sometimes I need reasurance thatenjoying falling into the work-commute-weekend trap is acceptable, when much of the first world treats work and routine as four-letter words.

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I guess it is, when someone as Conchy as Robert says it is.

New Lamps For Old

Buy a Vespa and you'll get told all about how Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck rode around Rome on a Vespa half a century ago.

Buy a Modern Classic Triumph and what you'll get is a misty eyed memory of Steve McQueen's escape from the Stalag or a slender youthful Marlon Brando asking whats on the menu to rebel against- a wild one meeting a doe eyed waitress in dusty Hollister, California. (I should point out here that even though Steve McQueen is credited with wanting to leap the barbed wire on his camouflaged Triumph {camouflaged to look "German"}, the stunt was performed by the legendary Bud Ekins who died recently).

The modern Vespa doesn't cut it as a Vespa to the aficionado of the original two stroke, geared putt putts of the Hepburn era. The modern Vespa has no gears, a powerful four stroke engine and no spare wheel. The modern Vespa is designed to survive and flourish in the modern traffic conditions in over crowded modern megalopolis's. You can argue endlessly about the connection to the old Vespas but there is no doubt it is very sophisticated motorcycle that neither Audrey Hepburn, nor the princess she played, would never have dreamed of- nor Gregory Peck for that matter. Nevertheless walk into any Vespa store in the US and there you will find an enormous picture of them on their 40mph 125 cc Vespa of yore. Alongside them you will see an oversize poster of Charlton Heston in a toga Ben Hur-ing it on a Vespa at the lot of Cinecitta, the hub of Italian movie making in the 50s.

Equally, a modern Triumph Bonneville has absolutely bugger all to do with the Triumphs of the 60s. Back then they were the symbols of rebellion, powerful, noisy rugged and rough. They roared their message through barely existent mufflers, their riders wore leathers, boots and white fisherman's socks turned down over the tops of the boots. I used to dress like that when I rode (an Italian bike) in the England of the seventies. We pretended to be rebels and stomped around on reliable modern, mostly Japanese bikes; no one but eccentric nostalgics wanted a Triumph. We, modern rockers, intended to get where we were going when we took trips.The old Bonnevilles looked a million bucks aside from leaking oil, but what was worse was they had crap electrics and vibrated like you wouldn't believe. The vibrations snapped the wiring harnesses and they stopped, or their headlights died- not for nothing their electrics supplier was known as Lucas- Prince of Darkness. Very droll I'm sure but a pain in the ass when you're planning on getting home at night to sleep in your own bed. But there again people , men, who rode Trumphs back then were tough, and yes, quite likely rude. Imagine that. They didn't take shit, they dished it out and their motorcycles reflected their devil-may-care attitudes. These days we tend to care, perhaps a little too much, about not just appearances or electrics but electronics and vibration dampers and 12 volt accessory outlets and all sorts of extraneous crap. Never mind oil leaks.The modern Bonneville is a pansy machine by comparison, it doesn't even come with a proper kickstart! Just like Gregory Peck and Vespas, Steve McQueen would never have recognized the modern Bonnie, a well behaved, reputedly reliable, purring pussy cat. Just the way I have always liked it, as it happens, though even I should have liked a kickstart... For a lot of Triumph freaks the modern Bonneville is a museum piece to be kept as close as possible to the T120 its based on, wire wheels, chain drive and LOUD. It strikes me as odd, because if they really want the genuine Triumph of their hobbled nostalgia they can go and buy one, fully restored, for the same money as a new Bonneville. Instead they buy the modern classic, enjoy the comfort and reliability and bitch at heathens like me who just like to ride, and often, on a modern machine that just looks retro.

I feel privileged to have grown up when I did, because mine is the generation that wallows in nostalgia and creates demand for superb machinery in all fields; the generation that also requires the recreation of the visual cues that set us off to reminiscing; the generation that demands engineering function that is completely up to date. The Bonneville looks 1960 but runs 2007.

The best of all worlds indeed. Steve McQueen be damned!

The Other Highway One

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.