Good Vibrations (13 page)

‘We'd come blastin' up that ol' New Jersey Turnpike in a convoy like an army on the move. Cost a grand every time we gassed up. One station was just short of the George Washington Bridge. We was fillin' our tanks an' nobody came to clean my windscreen. I gave them a minute, then I told them to quit pumpin'. We was headin' back out on to the highway when the guy comes chasin' after me, cool as you like, an' offers me a discount.'

‘You sure showed him,' said Kim.

‘I sure did, and I told that mean-minded sonofabitch that there's more in life than a few bucks. Old-fashioned manners is what this country needs. Them guys making that fuss jus' now, they didn't have no manners. If they had, they'd have gone outside to settle up, not bothered folks enjoyin' a quiet drink. This guy sellin' gas, he had no manners either. So we hauled on out and the next station cleaned our screens, swept our floors an' checked our oil without bein' asked. That's what you want when you do business…'

Jack suddenly broke off. I hadn't noticed, but Roz had faded right out.

‘Ma'am, you don't look so good,' he said gently. ‘Why don't I drive you an' your man back home?'

‘What about the bike?' I asked. My head felt like a pumpkin and Jack's offer sounded just the ticket, but I was determined not to leave our iron steed outside this bar all night, even locked to the stanchion.

‘I'll open both doors,' said Jim decisively, ‘crank her right on in here. The Guzzi can stop over too, Rich, if you want.'

And so Jim held open the batwing doors while I somehow wrestled Madonna up the steps and through the tables. Rich followed me in. He was in even worse shape and dropped the white bike on the porch. Willing arms dragged it up and soon the machines were on their props, gleaming in the low lights, smelling of hot oil and giving the bar-room a surreal air.

Jack led the four of us out to the Jeep, we piled in and whirled away down the night. As we fell out again in front of our cabin, Roz started throwing up. I put her to bed while the rest limped into the kitchen. We put our feet up and drank until the sun flickered over the window sill.

The following afternoon, I walked back to the bar to pick up Madonna. She was parked outside. No sign of Jim, no Guzzi, nobody there at all. Just a waiter I didn't recognise and a few dropouts hanging over the bar.

An hour later I was cleaning the bikes outside the cabin while Roz pulled herself around. We had to leave this place sometime, and tomorrow was going to be the day. The partner of the manageress stopped by to admire the machinery.

‘Saw y'all had a party last night,' he said with a twinkle.

‘We got a bit bent down the road and some guys ran us back.'

‘Everyone needs to cut loose now and then.'

He picked up a rag and started poking it between Betty's awkward cooling fins, squatting on his haunches. He was fit, clear-skinned and as true-bred Anglo-Saxon as his girl was Hispanic. As we worked together in the afternoon sunshine, we exchanged life stories. He had seen things I could only imagine.

He and his wife had married twelve years previously. They'd had a couple of children before drugs and hard liquor began to invade their idyll. Within a year, she was an addict and he a hopeless drunk. They'd fought, cheated and in the end divorced because, as he put it, their habits were incompatible and had become the pivot point of their existence. Still in love, they parted in despair and the children were taken into state care.

At his lowest ebb, he had somehow found himself in Branson and been given a job in, of all places, a rehabilitation centre. He was introduced to the church and began to take a grip of his life. Three years later he was sufficiently recovered to trace his ex-wife to a strip joint and persuade her to rejoin him. Under his guidance, she had straightened out and now the kids had been restored to them. They had, as my host said, given their lives to the Lord.

As I polished my crank case I thought what a success story this family was for old-time, Southern religion. The tracts in our room had seemed simple to the point of idiocy, yet here was the living proof. This man and his striking wife had been so deep in the gutter that all the experience of human behaviour would say there could be no scrabbling out. Now, in spite of everything, he was bringing up his kids in a clean little business someone had trusted him to look after. Neither he nor his wife had a hint of the ‘holier than thou' anywhere in them, and in the morning I rode out reminding myself that it is unwise to laugh at a whole group on the evidence provided by an outspoken few. The ‘Bible' Christians had done these people well.

11
RIDING THE PLAINS

‘Don't go to Kansas and Oklahoma,' had been the serious advice of many people as we proceeded west. ‘They're so boring you'll fall asleep on the bike,' or, ‘Once you've seen one cornfield, you've seen them all,' were typical reactions. After visiting Branson on the recommendation that it was a place not to be missed, we were starting to doubt advice of this type, though Branson had turned out to be a vital port in a storm despite itself.

Changes in American scenery come on a continental scale and tend to creep up on you. In a small island like Britain, they smack you in the eye. After 50 more miles weaving though the hills, we became aware that the land was slowly easing away into a gently undulating green infinity. We were dropping down on to the Great Plains at last. Ahead, dancing in the heat that was once more establishing a stranglehold, lay Oklahoma. To the north burned the vast expanse of Kansas, described by the historian Carl Becker as a ‘state of mind, a religion, and a philosophy'.

This, at last, was prairie country, where once the grass stood shoulder-high, where the endless herds of buffalo roamed in symbiosis alongside Native Americans who both hunted and revered them. Hawks and buzzards sailed the skies while the winds blew hot in summer and bitter cold in winter. Groups of cottonwood lived out their 100,000 days, surviving only if they escaped the axe of summer lightning or the tearing death of the tornado, while the tall grass rippled and waved through the centuries like the sea.

One hundred and fifty years ago, an Act of Congress declared the territory open to settlement. It would never be the same again.

The New World began here only six generations ago, but within two, most of the buffalo had been butchered as food for the new settlers and the army that protected their interests. The rest were slaughtered, an official policy designed to leave the Indians homeless, starving and bereft of the vital pillar of their culture. Much of the valuable carcass was trashed by the white man. The indigenous people had wasted nothing. Now they melted away like winter ice, retreating west and north. In the wake of this trauma a civilisation has grown up, and with it a radically altered landscape.
Ad astra per aspera
, is the state's motto, ‘Through the wilderness to the stars.'

Today, trucks and combines bowl by where once the buffalo was king; small towns have replaced nomadic encampments, but the snows still come, and the floods after summer storms. Tornadoes rip up houses, greedy for more than the trees, and giant hailstones pound down on tin roofs, leaving their mark as a reminder that modern man is only passing on the prairie breeze. Beneath the corn crops, the towering silos and the occasional sprawling city, the grasslands lie sleeping.

We rode out on to this mysterious expanse in late afternoon. The worst of the heat was over, the roads ran straight at last and the bikes responded, seeming to change up a gear. Before we knew it, they had eaten up 100 miles of freshly harvested Oklahoma and had crossed the Kansas line.

As the Harleys forged ahead, the journey took on a bizarre attitude, as though time were in suspension. For hours we floated weightless across infinite sunlit fields, only to be routed later in the day by monstrous rain and hail. The sense of being witness to a history so fearful and so close never left my mind, while the easier riding soothed Roz's difficulties almost out of sight.

In Kansas we came across the two extremities of historical monument presentation in a country which specialises in excess. The first was at eight after an early start from Coffeyville in the south-east of the state. The second came a day later in, of all places, Dodge City.

Even since Kansas arrived on our itinerary, Roz had been anxious to visit The Little House on the Prairie. For much of our daughter's early life, she was educated at sea by her mother aboard the traditional sailing boat that was our home. The exercise was successful, partly because Roz consistently presented the fact that life existed beyond the eccentricities of our immediate surroundings. Some of the vehicles for this leavening were the
Little House
books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, true stories of a pioneer family growing up in various frontier homesteads as the father tried to wrestle a living from virgin territory. Life in the Kansas cabin was precarious. Buffalo and Indians were still in residence and the wagon trains rumbled by, carrying those casting their lot even further from civilisation. A cottage has been reconstructed on the site where the family lived for one year.

We puttered down a lonely lane to the Ingalls' place across soft, undulating farmland. Not a cloud interfered with the sky and the dewy air was sweet with the scent of trees shading the cabin. It lay deserted in the morning sun, a statement of how to present heritage. Built of logs, caulked with mud and roofed with large shingles, it had a door at one end, a tiny window on each long wall and a stone chimney at the fourth side. It was secured with a simple padlock. A tasteful rustic sign gave a breakdown of the Ingalls' travels, while a small notice advised that the caretaker would arrive at nine. I was for taking a quick look around then pressing on, but Roz pointed out that we were in no hurry. So we eased our souls by lying in the still grass, gazing up into the endless blue. The bike engines cooled off, ticking and pinging, while an insect orchestra tuned up for a hard day's chirping as the players' juices warmed in the sun.

At ten minutes before nine, a pick-up stopped and a mature, weather-beaten man climbed down with a hint of arthritic stiffness. He walked with a stick, the complete plains farmer in blue denim dungarees and battered straw hat. His hands were broad, thick and work-hardened. Mr Hambling opened up for us and we brewed him tea on our bike stove which we all drank in the cool of the interior.

‘Reminds me of 1944,' said the caretaker slowly, ‘you Brits was always makin' tea as we battered our way into Germany.'

Mr Hambling fought with 101 Group Paragliders in Holland and onwards across the Rhine.

‘Funny thing is, my descent is half German, half Irish. You might ask why I was fighting on the side I was.'

‘And?'

‘My country wanted me. That was enough.'

Happy to talk about his war, he went on to say that as he had fought and watched men of several nations die, only the Brits had impressed him.

‘You guys are the only people we can rely on,' he said as we shook hands.

Heading towards Dodge City, Roz finally relaxed into riding at 70 mph. By midday the temperature was up around 100 degrees and the road took on the quality of a hallucination. The illusion of water began only 200 yards ahead, becoming denser towards the horizon so that the ever-narrowing strip of tarmac and the immense fields on either side of it swam in the heat. The handlebars and the soft twist grip of the throttle provided a link with gravity, our bodies baking above the scorching engines mirrored the surrounding austerity; but at these speeds, the constant throbbing hammer of the V-twin engines smoothed out to a humming, high-speed resonance that released the brain from the general discomfort, creating a weird sensation.

Small farms flashed by, mostly in the distance up dirt tracks. More often, we passed abandoned wooden homesteads, all their paint long since burned off by the cruel sun, roofs falling in, with greenery searching every crack for a place to grow. Insects thudded into Roz's leathers and my open shirt, smacking into us like pebbles as they burst, and every approaching truck rammed home the message that if either of us made a mistake, our own vulnerable bodies would receive identical treatment.

The first sight a plains biker has of a converging eighteen-wheeler comes when the truck is at least 3 miles ahead. It appears as a smudge of colour several feet above the road, probably breasting a rise in the distance. Maybe it disappears for a while behind the next undulation, but converging speed is around 130 mph, so it moves closer fast. After a minute, it has grown to a ridiculous height, its chrome reflecting the sun like flickering lasers, two stove-pipe exhausts belching heat and engine fumes at the angry sky. Soon, it stands 100 feet tall, teetering in the mirage and beginning to rock 'n' roll. As for forward progress, none is apparent on account of the zero perspective of the head-on meeting until suddenly, when it is as close as the length of a football field, it becomes deadly.

Massive and roaring, it is on you in seconds, swaying on the uneven surface as it rushes by leaving glimpsed impressions of its world. The sun glinting off the windscreen and the driver's shades, his shirt sleeve flapping at the open window, perhaps a split-second sighting of the name of a far-off town painted on the door.

‘Cheyenne.'

As it passes, it shoves a wall of hot air that picks up the motorbike and hurls all quarter-ton of it to one side like a broom sweeping a dead mouse off the back porch step. The blast is so thick you can feel it. Diesel exhaust, grit and gravel, with oblivion thrown in if you are napping on the job. Then it's gone, but every Freightliner carries a reminder of that slender thread by which we hang on in the land of the living.

Small communities clinging precariously to the road spun by as we ran due west immediately north of the state line. Straight, wide main streets, a few stores, a county police station with a ‘full-size' patrol car outside, a doctor's surgery, a lawyer's office and a church. Side tracks were built up for 100 yards before giving way to the fields that have replaced the prairie, many with the solitary ‘one-horse' oil wells which are to be seen everywhere in Kansas and Oklahoma. These bore-holes, anything from 100 to 1,000 feet deep, are milked by simple contraptions that look like small Victorian beam engines. On a quiet day, they can be heard alongside the birdsong, squeaking rhythmically as they slowly rock to and fro, generating wealth for the oil company and paying a percentage to the landowner. For some, the fruits of the arrangement cover the grocery bill. In a few cases, several units supply a farmer's retirement income.

Every so often, an active well will stop to let the head build up once more, so the inactive pump far away on the grassland could merely be dormant, or it might be as dead as the windmill nodding like a sleeping sentry outside any of the derelict homes out on the prairie.

One afternoon after lunch in a prairie township, I decided to give my bike her head. There was no chance of taking a wrong turning, because there was no significant junction for 25 miles. Roz accelerated away with the sun high on her left while I waited in the shade of the bank for five minutes, checking my oil and tyre pressures. When she was 6 miles up the road I pulled out, noting that the cops were still at lunch, their heavy-duty Chevrolet cooking in the glare.

Out of town, the smooth road stretched away straight down the latitude with the telegraph wires drooping from their tall poles and disappearing into the distance like an art school perspective exercise. I accelerated up to 80, listening to the staccato of the exhaust merge into a single drone, taking in the scene as Black Madonna got into her stride. All around, the baked fields reflected the burning sky like lakes. Parched trees floated on non-existent water, sunflowers flashed by in the ditches, and a group of bullocks stood in an ancient buffalo hollow, up to their flanks in what looked like a dewpond but was probably an illusion. Towering white clouds gathering for the afternoon storm painted their shadows over the land, while far away, tall grain silos glimmered like ghosts on the boundaries of perception. Lazy buzzards hovered, finger-feathers at their wings' ends eternally trimming their flight as they hung from the up-currents, seeking the casualties from the wild side that men do not notice.

At last the road was clear. Nothing in the mirrors but the shoulders of my faded cotton shirt. Time to open up. Without a hint of subtlety I wound my right wrist fully clockwise until the throttle hit the stop. Unlike a modern sports bike, the Harley didn't leap forward in a crazy adrenaline rush, she just sat down on her fat back wheel and steadily surged ahead; 85, 90, 100, 105, chasing Roz into the mirage of the highway. The bike was flat out now, nudging 110, all trace of the classic Harley-Davidson ‘chumpa-chumpa' sound lost in the wind noise and the deep roar of a big engine running as fast as it is meant to, freed for once of the fetters of speed limits. The wind was ripping me away from the handlebars but I held tight and let her go, high as an eagle. The familiar vibration of the bike rammed itself straight up my spine until she was part of me and I of her. No bends, no traffic, no cops, just the champagne of life on the edge, 10 miles north of the Oklahoma line.

It seemed no time before Betty Boop appeared ahead, a splash of yellow beneath Roz's black leather jacket, trundling along at 70. They were riding the heat haze fully 3 feet above the tarmac and I ran up behind them as though they were standing still.

Late that afternoon we rolled into Medicine Lodge. Directly westwards from here, the land falls away a little so that the town seems elevated. We were tired from the heat, but a mock stockade on the outskirts of town beckoned with the promise of a museum, so we stopped to find out what they had to show us. Like the glorious road that led to it, the museum was deserted except for the lady curator who asked us for $6 apiece. Twelve bucks would buy us a good dinner in these parts, so I expressed reluctance to part with the cash. The curator understood. Her own life was in limbo until she could save enough to get back to Alaska. Money was hard to come by and you had to keep hold of it, but it was still going to be $12.

‘Tell you what, mister, you take a look round and if you think it's worth it, pay me when you come out. If it ain't, just leave quietly.'

This sporting offer made me feel as mean as I was. I handed her the money straight away and did not regret it. Our attention was called to all manner of odd artefacts, but the item that was worth every cent and a good deal more just to look at was a peace treaty. This document hung in a glass case. It was signed by a representative of the ‘Great White Father in Washington' and a number of Indian chiefs on behalf of their people gathered around this stockade. The names of the dispossessed rang like the thunder that was beginning to rumble overhead. Black Kettle, Standing Bear, and Woman's Heart. The paper with all their marks on it in lieu of white man's writing looked almost fresh, hardly mature enough to be a museum exhibit. Dispassionate fate had been drawing its cruel curtain across this part of the prairies around about the time my grandfather was weaned in a Victorian manse in the security of central England. Not long after signing up to what Black Kettle hoped might be a lasting compromise with the white man, he was ridden down by Custer's soldiers and shot dead on his pony with his wife behind him.