Good Vibrations (23 page)

Walking among these colossal plants, a sense of deep peace descended on us. Roz's angst was soothed and my own anxieties about the rest of the journey seemed to fall away. The very ground in this dim, green place was soft to our tread, with clean bracken and the gently decayed needles of centuries of autumns. The trees grew sometimes singly, more often companionably in close groups of two or three, their shafts soaring straight through a verdant vault higher than the greatest cathedral nave, to where the coniferous branches spread out far above, cutting out direct sunlight and completing the impression of protection. We walked on tiptoe and spoke in whispers, leaned on the trunks and touched their foot-thick bark. The youngest of the fully grown trees might well be 500 years old. The gnarled elder statesmen, their top hamper riven by countless lightning strikes, could have been standing tall when the Romans still ruled Britain. The century and a half since the California Gold Rush has flowed by them almost unnoticed. Our own waxing and waning could never be more than a rustle in their eternal branches.

As I sat on the dry, sweet-smelling mould, breathing in this enhanced perspective on my own length of days, I recalled the sense of a lesson learned at my father's knee. I had not been picked for the first team football at my junior school. Sport was everything to me then, and to be confronted with my own mediocrity was almost more than a child could bear. As I wept out my disillusion, he sat me down and said simply,

‘I know it's hard to understand, but remember that however bad things seem, nothing that happens to you will change the way the world will be a hundred years from now.'

Surprisingly, it helped. Even at the age of ten.

Dad had died two years before Roz and I set out across the States. He had striven for a fairer society all his days, and I had suffered worse failures than my first ever selection board, but the giant, slow-breathing redwoods hadn't even noticed. Secure, until recently, beyond the mountain ranges and the windward passage around Cape Horn, the fleeting years steal by them in decades and centuries as they grow from cone, to sapling, to adult majesty. Even their dying takes hundreds of years, sinking finally to the ground without sadness, complete only in their return to the soil.

We lay down amongst the trees that night and awoke in the shining, verdant dawn, readier for the road and the last day to the Pacific.

17
CHANGING
TIMES ON THE
WEST COAST

The morning was clear as we packed up our sleeping bags under the floating roof of the trees, and the early rising sun never managed to superheat the day as it had been doing across the continent thus far. We motored out into the open at low revs in our leather jackets, revelling in the champagne quality of the air. We were still wearing them when we entered a contrasting redwood grove many miles nearer the shore, beside a more frequented highway. The disparity with our night stop was positively alarming. Here were queues of RVs, a kiosk demanding money, fast food, litter and, above all, noise. Instead of being allowed to speak for themselves, the trees were being thoroughly exploited, and a cavity had been hacked in one so that a sizeable vehicle could be driven through its trunk. It cost $1.50 for a tripper to endorse this final insult, but because Roz had seen the tree in a childhood encyclopaedia she was determined to submit to the full experience.

While she waited her turn, I stood aside and talked to a grey-haired biker in a Breton sailor hat and an ex-navy pea-jacket. He looked more like a New York tugboat skipper than a Hell's Angel. It was odd, I thought, that he too had just ridden through. He wasn't interested in the metaphysics of carving holes in eternal woodwork, but he told me that the best grass in the whole world was grown just down the road in Mendocino.

‘Go there,' he urged me with faraway eyes, gripping my biceps like a vice, ‘and score some.'

Then he reverently drew a roach out of his shirt pocket, lit it with a petrol-soaked Zippo at serious risk to a fine moustache, kicked his ancient Harley into gear and rattled away through the tourists.

‘How was it?' I asked Roz as she pulled out of the line of vehicles returning from the Big Tree Experience.

‘I had the distinct impression that the tree was laughing at us,' she said. ‘It's like the thing with Salisbury Cathedral; you drive up in your car, roof down, shades, cool hat; you feel you're quite something. Then it strikes you that the building was there six hundred years before even the railway came to town. Motor vehicles have been around for less than an eighth of its life, and the place will still be standing long after we're all forgotten and our descendants have discovered a better way to get around. It makes you irrelevant.'

‘Yes, but what about the butchery of the tree?' I was determined to extract a confession, or at minimum some sort of remorse.

‘At least it hasn't been chopped down for house-building or pulped for cheap paper,' she responded. ‘Ninety-five per cent of them were, you know. There's photos up there of heroic lumberjacks crowded on to the stumps, thirty of them or more. Now that really is disgusting. OK, so the management are screwing it for all they're worth, but in a sense the redwood has the last laugh, because if just one tourist out of ten thinks beyond the fact that they've just driven through a tree, it's done more for the cause of reason than all its felled brothers put together.'

As we descended the last few miles to the cliffs, huge, snorting log trucks began to proliferate, heading for the great cities of California. Was their cargo still plunder, or was it sustainable farming nowadays? I thought about the one-off ‘harvesting' of the redwoods and began to consider all the unimaginable natural riches that America has ripped from her heartland over the past century and a half. Before the continent was settled, the Indians hadn't disturbed it in a millennium. They took exactly what they needed, wasted nothing and made sure there would always be enough for next time. Not so the European. Arriving from an already tired continent, the opportunities for short-term wealth offered by an untouched world would have been massive, and only a very few would even have considered resisting the opportunity. This ultimately finite abundance is the source of one well-established world image of the United States, ordering more food in the restaurant of life than it can possibly eat, then watching without remorse as the rejected excess is tossed into the garbage can. I have seen even thinking Americans do this. It is as much a part of the nation as England's soccer hooligans, or inhuman treatment of veal calves by the French.

With these gloomy thoughts filling my head, I almost forgot about the sea, so when it appeared, finally, azure blue, calm, with a distant fog bank obscuring the western horizon, I almost dropped my bike in amazement. We had just wound around a tight bend at the foot of a steep slope somewhere south of Cape Mendocino. The pines were crowding in as usual, when suddenly there were no more trunks to the right of us. Instead, there was a sheer drop and, 50 yards ahead, a pull-off.

Without needing a word or a signal we stopped, unzipped our leathers and scrambled down a rocky path to a tiny cove 100 feet below. The black, volcanic beach was deserted except for two sea-smoothed tree trunks very likely carried on the current from Kamchatka. Life existed beyond America, and the Pacific was ours.

Like a couple of kids, we stripped off the last of our clothes and ran through the gentle surf into the ocean. The water was seriously cold, but we shouted for pure joy as it shocked away our breath. I swam straight out for 100 yards then turned, treading water, to look back at California. The last ridges of the coast range rose steeply, covered in trees, the road was invisible and the noonday sun was slightly muted by atmospheric moisture that felt as if it might later turn to fog. Roz doesn't enjoy cold water and was already back on the beach, a great sight towelling off with the yellow T-shirt she often wore for riding. Raising her arms to tousle her hair, she gazed out to sea. Even from this range I could feel her satisfaction and I felt a wave of admiration for the courage that had driven her on this far.

As for me, I was surprised at my own elation. After all, I reasoned, swimming slowly back to revel in the undertow sucking the sand from around my feet, the true heroes were the bikes. They had come 6,000 winding miles through hot, hard conditions, often on the poorest of roads, and neither had missed a solitary beat of their iron pulses. You'd expect no less from a 1990s Japanese whizzer, but these were thorough-going motorcycles in the traditional sense. They were personal. They revved so slowly that you were aware of each of the interdependent moving parts and I marvelled that nothing had broken, that no weak link in the chain of metalwork let the rest down.

So far, so good, then. Nobody had expected Black Madonna to fail, but Betty had put a few ghosts to rest by cruising from sea to shining sea with no more maintenance than a couple of oil changes and a freshening of her drive belt tension. But it wasn't over yet, for me, at least. Not by a long, long way. I was already game for riding back to Annapolis, but I feared Roz must be considering abandoning Betty here on the coast, then flying home. The logical way back east lay across the great deserts of the South-West, the legendary lands of New Mexico and West Texas, then the Deep South. I was hungry for them all, especially the deserts, but San Francisco was crucial to a balanced journey. I had friends there, yet I knew that the thorniest obstacle in Roz's way was the California freeway system that was now unavoidable.

All that would keep until tomorrow, I decided as I walked, dripping and fresh, out of the sea, renewed by its familiar salt tang. Today would be lived for its own glorious sake and nothing more. We agreed to find a place we both liked, and stay there until the stress had eased off. Ten miles down the road we discovered the secret township of Westport and paradise on Earth.

Westport. My diary describes the community as a comfortably spread-out cluster of wooden houses strung along a low cliff fronting a rock-strewn shoreline, a small store with a post office and creative delicatessen, a pretty wooden motel right over the sea, and a whale's vertebra by the roadside. It is a fair description. There is also a black beach, a conspicuous lack of neon and a house at the end with a sign, ‘One nice person and one old grouch live here.'

Outside the motel, two ladies of between sixty and seventy were taking lunch at a cleanly painted picnic table under a wild parasol. I stopped and wished them good day, still in my saddle.

‘Is it too late to order?'

‘You can't order,' responded the one who somehow looked like the owner. ‘We don't serve meals. But if you wander over to the store, they'll fix you up. Bring your food over here to eat and I'll make you a pot of coffee.'

In the shady shop opposite, a woman about my own age who had watched us arrive from her beaded doorway made us up burritos from heaven. She wore a loose, psychedelic top and sold all manner of herbs. Flowers were everywhere and a tinkling wind chime picked up the young sea breeze. Back to the sixties.

‘You go back over to Thelma to eat,' she said in a rich, unaffected voice that sounded as if it never wished anyone anything but the best of fortune. ‘Enjoy your lunch, and stay awhile. You look like you could do with a rest.'

And so we signed up with Thelma and her husband Otto. ‘Two nights to begin with, and see how we feel.'

Life in the Westport Inn turned out to be different from any other lodging house in our American experience. Perhaps it was because the large, airy rooms had no air-conditioning, no television and were stocked each day with fresh flowers, but it was notable for its lack of the urgent, must-get-on, today-is-just-the-prelude-to-tomorrow feeling that had pervaded everywhere else. The lack of air-conditioning was a plus so far as we were concerned, because the climate for once did not demand it. The cool breeze off the sea kept the day temperature in the high seventies and gave rise to nights when at last we slept snug beneath extra quilts as the land breeze settled in to blow offshore until soon after dawn. I missed my Weather Channel, but on the whole we were blessed by evenings without the futile search through trash-stacked stations for something decent to take our minds off the road. The flowers went right along with Thelma's offer of coffee to two total strangers, and in the resulting quietness, we and the other guests were able to get to know her and her family.

Nobody seemed to stay at the Westport for one night, then move on. The total lack of anything inappropriate seemed to entice people in and keep them there. On one side, our neighbours were a tall blonde widow in her sixties, travelling slowly with her son in search of a new home. He was an ex-tennis professional, declared by Roz to be the ‘Hunk of the Trip'; she, the complete artist. Willowy build, spaced-out manner, gauzy scarf, sun hat and eyes always on the next world. Her loving son had given up the courts to generate a modest income for them from his oil paintings. We stood together on the first evening, drinking champagne with Thelma under a particularly ancient tree on the cliff edge. As the sun slipped away to warm the beaches of Hawaii, Roz asked her what type of tree it was.

‘This is the Westport Tree,' she responded. ‘It's famous all down the coast.'

‘Yes, but is it a cypress? A cedar? What is it, that it's lived so long?'

‘You know, dear, I can't tell you. I could have once. But the person in charge in my brain won't open that file any more. It's just the Westport Tree now. Doesn't really matter if you can't put it in a category, does it?'

Just then, the people in the room on our other side arrived in a jacked-up pick-up. A young man jumped down with a distinctly sheepish glance at us, then he helped his girl from the passenger's side. He was bronzed and blond and could have been a student with a trust fund, she was surely straight from a bar in Mexico. She looked me up and down provocatively, then wiggled after him.

‘Sweet couple,' Thelma said with only the shadow of a twinkle. ‘On honeymoon, the boy said.'

I observed to Roz later that the girl had to be a hooker who had landed a week's contract. Whether the relationship was amateur or professional, however, the peace was shattered towards midnight by some of the noisiest honeymoon activity I'd heard since the enthusiast renting the room next to me in downtown Southampton years before had laid into a girlfriend with his belt, apparently enjoying her eager connivance. The difference was that while the Californian drove a pick-up, my sometime fellow-member of the tenants' association was a soft ice cream salesman whose van bore the improbable legend, ‘Victor's Super Whip'. Remembering Victor, Roz and I chuckled at the sexual excesses and snuggled down companionably as the lace curtains blew gently inwards on the first of the night wind.

Creeping out of bed early, I gave the bikes a general fettle while Roz slept in. There were cables to oil, spark plugs to sharpen up, carburettor mixtures and dust-choked air filters to attend to. I was totally content working on those lovely machines, because I'm the sort of simpleton who needs to indulge in menial mechanics as much as my motorcycles like me to. Except that you do it alone, in its way it's as satisfying as singing a good Elizabethan madrigal. If I'd had a torque wrench I'd probably have lifted a cylinder head or two and cleaned up the valves, enjoying the spotless interior of a healthy internal combustion engine, but my tool kit didn't extend that far. Besides, Betty and Madonna had run so sweetly this far that I prudently held back my primeval urges. I replaced their gleaming tweakable parts carefully and took Roz a cup of herbal tea from over the road.

She sat up in bed, stretched and gazed out the window at the ocean.

‘I feel as though I've just completed an ocean crossing,' she remarked, taking a sip in the morning sun. ‘I can't really believe that a whole phase of my life is over. The ride wasn't like a car journey with a beginning, a quick middle and an end. It was a thick slice out of my life. It was far more than a hiatus between here and there…

‘Do you remember when we thrashed down the Greenland Sea from Iceland to Canada?'

I recalled it only too well. It had been distilled misery. I thought it would never stop. Nineteen days in big square waves without more than three hours sleep at a time, wet, literally ice-cold and the boat in danger of breaking up.