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.

My Bonneville

I have put 12 whole miles on my Goodwood Green Bonneville. What a ride! It was yet another rainy day, the skies filed with gloom and foreboding in that way that only Florida summer thunderstorms can fill the sky. In a flat state like Florida there's nothing to measure the castle in the air against, there are no mountain ranges, no forests to break up the skyline across the savanna of the Everglades, and the towers of downtown Fort Lauderdale look puny against the roiling castles in the sky that roll and reform, always more black, always promising a heavier cloudburst than went before.

In the sales office at Pure Triumph business was continuing as usual. An anxious motorcyclist perched in an uncomfortable chair across from a busy, debonair, successful salesman. A gleaming green Bonneville parked on the sales floor.

"Is that mine?" asks the motorcyclist, his voice fluting and tremulous as a schoolboy's waiting for punishment.

"Mmh-hmm," mumbles the debonair one shuffling papers. "Sign here, and here and initials for the DMV."

I could have signed away my kidneys in that moment had Jeff been a stereotypical south Florida surgeon in search of a donor. As it was he started writing slowly on a cardboard temporary tag.

I was staring at the gleaming green lump parked decorously in the shop window.

"Do you suppose I could go for a quick ride?"

"It's yours..."Jeff said with a slight note of puzzlement, he was dealing with a moron obviously. But lucky for him a moron armed with enough cash to pay for the lump.

I went out onto the showroom floor to get some relief from the paperwork and I stared in awe at this gleaming brand new speedometer with 0 miles on the clock.

A tall thin t-shirted firefighter (judging by his brand stamped on the cotton on his chest) was wandering around. He had white hair a white beard and he looked a like a professor of Economics looking for fun. He commutes 45 miles each way on freeways and wants Power."Nice huh," he said looking at the puny Classic Triumph. "Yes" I gulped, its mine." ("I'm its" would have been more accurate). He wanted a Tiger, the three cylinder "urban street fighter" which requires a very long inside leg, which he had.

He started showing me the modifications he wanted to make on a Street Triple he's thinking about. Then he started in on what I should do to the Bonneville, while all I could think was "Shit, I own this thing." Put on some bags and ride is what I want to do but he was rabbiting on about paintwork and headlight shapes and all that stuff. I got my wish, not the bags- the ride.

Out back Nuccio held the motorcycle out to me. "Don't worry about dirtying it," he smiled. "We haven't done the pre-delivery polish yet." He held a box of fork gaitors in his hand which he will install before I pick up the bike on Wednesday. I want to protect the fork sliders from the Keys' salt air. Plus the black rubber belows on the fork legs look retro and cool.

This bike oozes cool, which is a bit awkward as I don't. However in riding around urban Fort Lauderdale I learned a couple of things about it. It doesn't vibrate one bit at speeds up to 60 mph and car drivers won't stand a chance if I want to pull ahead. The engine is responsive and I feel totally comfortable and in control with my feet tucked under my hips and my arms in a totally natural position on the modest width handlebars.

I got back to the store with clouds still threatening, one compliment in my wake, one envious stare from an on duty cab driver ( my freedom on a work day or my gleaming ride I'm not sure), and no signs that this is not the perfect bike for me.

I am starting to feel better after all the heartache and searching the past few weeks. A lot better.

An Expensive Lunch

I had lunch with my wife today and we got swept up into the consumerism thing and an hour later we were out $8215 with the promise of a bottle-green Triumph Bonneville with two miles on the clock to be waiting for us at Pure Triumph Ft Lauderdale this weekend.
I am still in shock.
Now I need to get serious about selling the GTS.

Oh The Humanity

At work last week we had a transformation. The Trainee lost some of his humanity, and it all happened on receipt of one 9-1-1 phone call.

We were sitting around in the Communications center, the four of us, talking of this and that. I think I was reading a book, a travel tale about two men crossing the States on a couple of Heinkel scooters, the others were muttering about fashions or celebrity gossip or TV shows, about all of which i know nothing, so I keep my mouth shut. I have a lot of trouble when I'm training someone to answer the police phones, in holding back and letting the trainee struggle a bit, so in order to give my latest Trainee a bit of room I try to absent myself in a book between calls, and I distance my microphone from my mouth, so he gets to start the calls unobstructed by my voice.

A 9-1-1 line started to ring and the rule is when one of the eight red lines starts to blink and whine drop everything and answer it. The Trainee did just that. Anticipating a false alarm I kept reading but through my headset I heard the unmistakable tones of a true emergency. The caller's voice was off pitch and warbling as though he were struggling to keep control as he told The Trainee that there was a dead man in his neighbor's trailer.

I expected The Trainee to go into his usual freeze mode,unable to type, failing to ask the questions and I scrabbled frantically for my clip board so I could write down the details. However he calmly asked the caller to repeat the address, he entered it and started to type: " caller found white male sitting in chair..." And as the details got grosser, and they got pretty bad as death rarely comes clean and tidy, he kept on typing even as he toned the ambulance and gave them their instructions over the radio.

I knew there really was a dead man out there and The Trainee understood it too. We get lots of panicked calls about possible dead people lying on the sidewalks, but they generally turn out to be drunk and passed out in this party town. We know what questions to ask to get our pulses up when dead people really are dead. The Trainee took the call and dealt with it like a real dispatcher.

He was excited afterwards, focusing on his professional response to a crisis, running through his mind how he had dealt with the call. It took a while for him to remember that someone had died. In a weird way I felt good about it. He is building the carapace he needs to answer the phones, not to freeze up and start trembling.

The next day we got three ambulance calls all together and he dispatched therm by himself, putting each unit on the proper call, making notes in the computer and tidying everything up before he swivelled his chair to face the middle of the room and resume his interrupted conversation without even a reference to the bloody scooterist, tripped cyclist, or elderly woman possibly having a stroke. They were all being taken care of quickly and efficiently and he wanted urgently to know what his colleagues thought of his hair cutting plans.

Clearly he won't be The Trainee for much longer and all he can think about is signing up for overtime.

They never did tell us what the dude died of, but we're dispatchers, so we've long since forgotten the call.

How Not To Sell

What was he thinking? I said to myself as I turned the rental car round and headed for the highway 371 miles back home to my stilt house in the Keys. I couldn't wait to get out of the cookie-cutter, gated community,with golfing privileges, where the BMW was being offered for sale. He was a nice guy, with a dry sense of humor, perhaps someone I couldhang out with by the pool and talk about his interesting life. I could be friends with this man I thought.

The seller said he was an engineer, and clearly he's no salesman. The motorcycle was a fixer upper, which were it listed as such, would be no bad thing, but I couldn't imagine riding it home in the condition it was in. Worse than that, it clearly had never been loved, just used, and never cared for. Shame.

The day started rough with a massive thunderstorm dumping inches of rain on Islamorada, the purple island in Spanish ( pronounced, in English: isle-a-more-ahh-dah, which confuses wanna-be Spanish speakers). I love the rain in hot climates, it gives reason to pause, it cools things off and it rarely descends during the cold time of year when the presence of rain would make cold temperatures just miserable. This rainy season has proved to be old fashioned wet,("In the old days it rained all the time.") inasmuch as it is raining fit to drown our waterlogged peninsula. Water restrictions? We don't need no stinkin' water restrictions! (We do actually, as the mainland aquifer is way down, development continues along with consumption; but you can't sell the need for restrictions to peasants when the skies are flooding the fields).

The Highway became even more tenuous as it disappeared into a wall of water, part of which fell from the skies and part of which was thrown up by our tires and the third part was simply moisture saturation in the atmosphere. Even I was forced to accept that thirty miles an hour was quite fast enough in these conditions. A lot of people drive as though vehicle and tire technology hasn't progressed since the model T Ford, yet they forget to turn on their lights and they decline to pull over and stress themselves out way too much in the rain. Rain persisted on and off throughout my 800-mile day but it never again came down as hard and as long as it did in the Upper Keys. Lovely and spectacular it was.

Eventually I found my to an Orlando suburb, an agglomeration of Runs, Courtes and Shoppes, all winding landscaped streets fronted by 3,000 square foot mansions with pools (water! water!), garages and not a bum in sight or a leaf out of place. I live in the Keys and one gets used to different standards I suppose. The motorcycle was presented for my inspection as though parked a year ago and never cleaned since. It was sun faded, the paint actually photographs well, but when he lived in the Arizona desert years ago he left this poor beast out in the sun. A lot.

Candy apple red has become faded pink on the tank.

I took a test ride and it hesitated, I tweaked the enrichment knob and the cable almost fell out of the socket. There was sooty black residue around the end of the exhaust. The oil radiators had long dead bugs caught in the fins, the engine casing had splotches of oils and grease and yuck spread on it.

"I had new fuel injectors installed," he said. "Not by the BMW shop," I said. He agreed and I knew because in changing them they had spilled yellow fuel over the engine casing and they had failed to balance them at all properly. The engine surged and idled uncertainly.God knows how the motorcycle really handles because the front tire was so badly worn down one side it rode at a permanent lean. To add injury to insult, the bulbous fuel tank squashed my testicles with the seat in the lowest position, the position where my feet reached the ground.

To sell this thing he needs to take a lesson from a realtor: presentation!

I want to be riding again, and I want to write about the joys of the ride, but there it is. My goal is to buy something reliable, long lasting and fun. I can't lose sight of that goal, even as I wither and wonder if there is a real alternative to the Vespa. Like a decent lightly used Bonneville? There had better be, because the GTS has to go, as she-who-must-be-obeyed has made it plain. I sigh and and wonder how will I cope with a real crisis in my life, say a terminal diagnosis, bankruptcy or a satellite crashing in the canal?

Hopping Nostalgia

My wife and I try to take advantage of our layovers when we travel. We have eaten Greek in Detroit and explored snowy Windsor, Ontario, on layovers between California and the Caribbean. Amsterdam is the European hub of Northwest Airlines and that's an opportunity to eat genuine old fashioned Dutch food on a stop there (marrow bone peas anyone? rijstaffel? Yum...), and a few years ago I spent a happy day wandering Nice waiting for my onward flight to Corsica. Layovers can be the most memorable parts of flying.

On our return from the wedding in the snowy fastness of the Sierra Nevada mountains we took our first tour in many years of Alameda, California. Alameda is an island city connected by bridge and tunnel to neighboring Oakland, and for many years was a forgotten suburb, a Navy base with straight, tree lined streets and funky Victorian homes laid out like a stereotypical Mid Western town.

We got to know Alameda because we kept our sailboat in Marina Village and we spent happy weekends sailing the freezing San Francisco Bay. After yet another brisk journey across the Bay, alone or on a club cruise, we would repair to a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant and eat pork chops, lemongrass and shredded pork omelette. We were determined to eat at Vo's once more but there was only a hole where Vo's had once stood on Webster Street in Oakland's Chinatown.

Standing on the sidewalk in the last rays of the sun, feeling the cold, fog laden breeze I felt a mixture of sadness and comfort. Its not just Key West that suffers from incessant change and renewal. I doubt I will return to the restaurant that will arise in place of Vo's -"remodeling" the sign in the window promised- but I like to hope other people will make a stop there a routine in their busy lives.

We found a Chinese restaurant packed with Chinese diners and we took our place among them. We skipped the sizzling tripe and white chicken feet, for we are paid-up members of the bourgeoisie, and we took shrimp, ribs and chow mein.

We prefer the Szechuan school of spicy Chinese cooking and this adventure returned mixed results. The ribs were cut the wrong way and the slice of bony beef was covered in brown gravy over white Italianate pasta all too reminiscent of my English boarding school childhood. The shrimp were fried whole and smeared in...mayonnaise? That's what it tasted like, and the chow mein was littered with chunks of scallop too large to fit on the fork and pink pieces of what I suspected after I ate one, were cow hearts. It didn't taste bad but it wobbled horribly and pinkly when I speared it on my fork. One was enough, with my wife protesting "Don't tell me what it is- don't! Please!" as she bravely downed her piece. I remained silent and focused on the mayo.

We took a post prandial walk through the manicured grounds of marina Village, admiring the lawns, the order and the silence. Unlike the Key West Bight,which is always full of people and activity, Marina Village appears to be enforcing the no live aboard rules and of sailors there were none in evidence, just a thousand still and unattended boats, neglected by their owners who were nowhere to be seen on this sunny Sunday evening. The Gemini catamaran on the right looked just like ours all those years ago and it set off all sorts of memories, sitting there waiting for a sail. We sailed ours to Key West and I wanted to jump aboard and do it all again.

We walked and talked and remembered the excitement and fear of preparing to cast off on our epic sail to the Panama Canal at the end of the century. We walked the dogs, we sailed the boat we learned to trust each other. I was sad and I couldn't quite understand why. Nostalgia is all very well, but we are happy in the Keys, we don't miss the cold and the fog and the crowding of California, but a part of me wanted to roll back time and be ten years younger. I wouldn't change a thing but I wanted to re-live those crazy days. I wanted another go round. That's the first time I have felt that unreasoning, unreasonable demand for more time. For a man like me who has tried to live each phase of his life to the fullest, the feeling was unsettling.

The day was drawing to a close, and it was time to head towards the airport. We took a drive through downtown Alameda, a hopping place these days, fully recovered from the abrupt departure of the Navy. There were lots of stores and restaurants, lights, and people. It was charming.

On our way to the Oakland airport across a bridge, nostalgia struck another low blow and we turned into a business park where we used to take our dogs for long aimless walks after they had been cooped up on the boat all day. Debs, our husky, loved this field, it was wide open and filled with tall dry grass in which lived dozens of jackrabbits. I have this abiding memory of him leaping through the grass, ears flying wildly as he sought his prey (which always got away, luckily for my bourgeois sensibilities...). Emma the portly yellow Lab, followed along at a distance, running a bit and coming back to pant at my feet.

The field showed an open window on the Bay and across the grasses years ago we could see the illuminated San Francisco skyline as Debs wore himself out in the chilling Bay breeze. The sun went down in concert with the temperatures as the illuminations went up. It was magic and we never tired of walking the dogs in the jackrabbit field.

On our return last week we found the industrial park paved over, anonymous warehouses and blank faced offices occupying almost all the open space. The central area was bulldozed ready for any new tenant ready to buy the space. I sat in the car bundled up and stared out in the beams of the headlights at what was left of Debs' field. All gone I thought. Nothing stays the same. I'm slipping off into oblivion. The past can't come back. I was feeling nostalgic for my younger self.

We turned the car to leave and find our way in the darkness to the newer, improved and bigger airport. More land built over, more noise, more people, cheaper fares.

"Look! Look!" said my wife. And there on the grassy sidewalk hopped a big eared, gray jack rabbit. He paused, stared at us and loped out of sight into the brush between two office buildings.

"See," my wife said squeezing my hand. "He came to give us a message. They're still here, holding on." Aren't we all...