Good Vibrations (29 page)

We ricocheted along the steadily deteriorating surface into the desert with Roz listening for Betty's engine to start missing again. I don't think she really could believe the carb was fixed, and after the bad-mouthing the low-capacity Sportster had received from numerous H-D experts along the way, I could hardly blame her. Had Fred and I actually managed to sort her out? Was it really just the poor quality fuel sold on the Indian reservations coupled with fast running at low oxygen levels, or was it in truth the beginning of the end?

But Betty's strong steel heart never skipped a beat all day, and Roz hung on with increasing confidence. From the comparative security of Black Madonna's wide saddle, I watched with an affection that surprised me as the yellow machine bucked gamely down the remains of Route 66 towards a distant mesa. Choosing Betty was turning out to be one of our better decisions. Despite the prognosis of doom from the experts, the rattlesnakes couldn't catch her, the worse elements of the Sioux missed their one chance and the wire-snared tyre treads flying off sun-fried trucks at ballistic velocities had rocketed by on both sides. Against the odds, she had also turned out to be faster than my full-blown giant. Zipping up to a ton was no challenge for Betty. Any quicker than that on a Harley and you're in the wild woods. Riding this dusty strip of history, I felt deep down that she was going to be a winner all the way. A lucky bike.

Much of Arizona, ceded to the Indians by the government and uncultivable without major irrigation schemes, is a vast, stony plain burned by the sun with all its features in the far distance. The flat top of a mesa stood clear ahead, perhaps 10 miles away. On our right, individual buttes of non-eroded rock wavered on the super-heated horizon. This at last was the scenery of a thousand Western movies.

The road seemed to be of cement construction rather than tarmac. It had not seen a maintenance gang in decades. Fractures of ever-increasing severity dogged progress until we were riding around them one after another at an average speed of 10 mph. Soon, even the weather-shattered concrete gave up and we were lurching along an ungraded dirt track into nowhere. There hadn't been a signpost for miles, and not a single vehicle had passed in either direction since we left the hardware stores and motels behind us on the outskirts of Flagstaff. Route 66 had become a ghost highway. We picked our way down it for at least an hour and were burning up gas at a high rate in low gear when suddenly it gave out altogether. Ahead, only a vague depression in the plain offered any hint of where it might have been.

Roz took off her helmet. I had not worn mine all morning as the likelihood of an accident other than a minor low-speed tumble was zero. We turned off our ignition and listened to the wind, waiting for spectral migrants in Model T Fords to come rattling and creaking out of the wild. In a way they did, because the place had a strong atmosphere, as though the people who once struggled this way to California had left some of their burden along the roadside. Perhaps an unmarked grave hid its low mound nearby, for many had not survived the terrible journey. Nothing tangible could be seen. The extremes of seventy summers and winters had reduced any human debris to powder, but it was impossible to miss the ambience.

Retracing our own very visible tracks almost to Flagstaff, we gave up the struggle against progress and filtered on to I-40 to make up some time.

Within five minutes I remembered why interstates are a lousy selection for a motorcyclist with any instinct for survival. Crashing over a 4-inch drop that stretched clear across the road, I cursed the often-poor surfaces that provide a throughway for innumerable speeding trucks carrying the nation's commerce. Roads such as I-40 are also heavily populated by private cars with a seasoning of RVs, many of which run up to the size of a double-decker bus. Apart from the deadly crevasses, such highways are dangerous for motorbikes for two main reasons. First, intermittent turbulence from the colossal trucks buffets like a vindictive gale; secondly, the biker is at great risk from the bunching created by that most sinister of modern car features, the ‘cruise control'.

In the frenzied conditions of the California freeways, the survival principle that everyone was trying to do us in had proved eminently workable so long as we maintained 100 per cent concentration. Not a problem when surrounded by maniacs. Out in the country things were not so easy, because the boredom of riding a wide, featureless carriageway saps the mental strength. Everything goes fine while there is no traffic. Then, even on a motorcycle, the only problem is falling asleep. The ever-present danger comes with the gaggles of cars.

Particularly on quiet sections, automobiles find themselves bunching together at exactly the speed limit, creeping ever closer to one another with mind-boggling slowness because the drivers have all set their cruise controls to what they fancy to be 65 mph. Most will not disengage these handy aids to dangerous driving for anybody, especially a silver-studded phantom running up behind them attempting to keep close enough to the speed limit to fool any lurking cops. As the driver swanning along in the outside lane studiously ignores him, the biker is working hard at maintaining clear blue water between the motorcycle and a comatose zombie closing up inches from his rear mudguard. Meanwhile, some drunk who has actually fallen asleep at the wheel boxes him on the inside lane.

This may not sound like a terrifying scenario, but after it has continued for minute after agonising minute while you concentrate on the road, surrounded by the same representatives of the undead nominally driving but actually eating hamburgers, drinking scalding coffee, arguing with their wives on the cell phone, raising both hands to emphasise some point you don't care about at all, or tuning their radios to yet another moronic substation, you can carve through the stress with a blunt hacksaw.

It is possible to cross America in three days on Interstate 40 without so much as a single interruption from a traffic light, and as we cruised up it at snail's pace, I pondered on the achievements of the ‘iron-ass' motorcycle brigade. These fine role models for the young biker annually roar from New York to San Francisco non-stop, presumably to reassure themselves that they still have no central nervous system. And the Best of British Luck to them, I thought.

We pulled off the main highway as soon as we could to ride in glorious sunshine through more Clint Eastwood country up to the heights of Second Mesa where, standing proud between First and Third Mesas, the Hopi Indians still lived. On the way we stopped at a trading post run by the Navajo for fuel and water. Like all the permanent Navajo buildings we had seen, this one gave the impression of being tidier than the Sioux equivalent so far away to the north. Neither the storekeepers nor the hangers-on were drunk, and the dogs were friendly although, like Mara, how they and their masters kept warm in winter behind the matchboard walls of their shacks remained a mystery.

Further north-east across the huge desert land of the Indian reservation, we passed a scrapyard with a group of full-sized automobiles lined up under a tall red butte. The ‘scrappers' were unattended, but the barbed wire fence that would inevitably surround them in a city was absent. So was the black, serial-killing German Shepherd that goes with it.

On close inspection, many of these redundant heroes were punched through with bullet holes, and though past road use, it was going to be decades before they rusted beyond recognition in the dry climate. The fact that someone had bothered to collect up their remains added another piece of subliminal evidence to the impression that the local Indians took pride in their barren, impossibly beautiful country.

We covered the remaining 20 miles to Second Mesa in fifteen minutes and were rewarded from even half-way up by a vast desert panorama. Adobe houses clung all around the steep slopes and as we banked carefully on the cobbles up to the summit, we found ourselves in a tidy square, built around the rocky tabletop. By now it was early afternoon. Another friendly little mongrel dragged himself up from his post-prandial snooze and trotted across for a pat and a scratch of its belly.

These Arizona mutts were way out of line with the rest of the canine world when it came to attitude. Motorbikes and dogs are traditional enemies. I was bitten on the calf by a foul example in the streets of Liverpool as a youngster, for no better reason than revving up my Matchless at Penny Lane traffic lights. The brute's fangs went clean through my leather boot and having taken a good look at the state of them, my next stop was the hospital for a tetanus jab. You live and learn. Since those days I have often been pursued by Man's Best Friends while riding slowly enough for them to keep up. It's no use kicking them; they just chew you harder. The only answer is a solid twist of the throttle and ‘Goodbye to all That'.

The short-haired little charmer in question led us across the small plaza to the door of a house marked ‘Pottery for Sale'. There was no other indication of a readiness to do business and not a soul was in sight. Now squarely under the influence of the Spanish settlements of nearby New Mexico, I decided everyone must be at siesta. This certainly made sense, but we knocked the door anyway. It was opened by a healthy-looking Indian woman of around Roz's age. We indicated the sign and were ushered in without hesitation.

Frances stood around 5 feet 3 inches, wore white and her broad, pleasant face looked at the world through round spectacles. We explained from the outset that we were not in the market for buying her wares, as there was nowhere to stow anything on the bikes, but her open demeanour did not falter. She led us through the front room to the back kitchen and made us coffee.

The house was dark, cool and had been around a long time. Its rooms were around 14-foot square with heavy rafters supporting the flat roof. Simple clothes hung under the beams to dry. The plaster walls betrayed no roof leaks and the atmosphere inside was fresh. The only ornaments, apart from colourful pottery, were the Indian-design rugs on the stone floor. A gas cooker stood in a corner and the furnishings were completed by a television, a table and a couple of hard chairs. The single window, with its staggering view across America, looked in need of a handyman.

Frances was a Pueblo Indian from Santa Clara in New Mexico, where she had lived until five years previously when she met her husband at her grandfather's wake. She had dated him as a teenager but had not seen him in twenty-seven years. He was an active member of the Hopi tribe and the house on the mesa belonged to his family. He was so heavily involved in Indian festivals and the work of the tribal council that they found it hard to achieve anything as a couple, so she had reverted to her former trade as a potter. Her vases were beautifully painted with symbolic figures, black for rain, white for earth, four directions and four winds.

We sipped coffee from heavy earthen mugs and swapped life stories. Frances was amazed at the motorcycles and the length of our journey, but unlike the men from the Last Chance Saloon who had never travelled anywhere, she was fully aware of world geography through her pottery exhibitions which had taken her as far as Washington. She was undoubtedly in closer touch with the mainstream activities of the nation than some of the Indians we had met further north. Even her features were more European, but whether this was due to ancient intermingling with the Spanish, or just because she was native to a different part of North America and from a very different tribe, was unknowable. Unlike the natives of the plains, the Pueblo Indians, so called by the in-comers because they lived in villages with permanent dwellings, were not nomads.

The sun had marched around into the early evening by the time Roz and Frances exchanged addresses and we walked out into the glare. Bucking down off the mesa in second gear, our chum the dog followed us, picking up a couple of his mates as he ran. Anywhere else on Earth we'd have been accelerating frantically to leave them behind before they took a nip out of us. We liked what we'd seen of the Hopi and the Pueblo peoples, and we loved their pets.

A day later we had crossed into New Mexico and the transformation from the USA to something more like rural Spain was complete. Small, pink adobe houses turned their flat roofs to a sun tempered by altitude. Ancient mission churches with twin towers open to single iron bells nestled in green valleys. At Chimayo, eighth-generation Navajo weavers clicked away next door to a
‘sanctuario'
which outdated everything we had seen in Nevada and Arizona by several centuries. Inside, its ageless shade was illuminated by the flickering light of a thousand candles burning for joy, for gratitude, for thankfulness, for grief, or just in hope of better times. They might have been shining for the diversity of the American people.

Winding our way onwards, we were still less than 100 miles due east of the wide spaces of the reservation when we parked outside the Cowgirls bar in the old city of Santa Fe. Clumping across the scrubbed boards in my heavy boots, I ordered two Lone Star beers. We each took a pull and sank down gratefully on high stools beside a blond man in his late thirties who looked like a refugee from a Beach Boys' album sleeve. He was drinking with an Indian woman.

‘Hi, I'm Billy,' said the surfer. ‘This is Nez. You come from far?'

‘From England via San Francisco.'

‘Oh, Sweet Jeeesus! You hear that, Nez?'

Billy grabbed half a handful of what I hoped was salt from an ashtray, stuffed it in his mouth and washed it down from his Lone Star bottle. Then he started talking so fast his words couldn't keep up with his mouth, but there was no hot air in him. Within five minutes he seemed to have introduced us to the whole bar, many of whom were lesbians. Hence, I presumed, the ‘Cowgirls'.

One of Billy's cronies was a dark-haired young man with a fine-cut profile whose grandfather had been, he assured us, the Earl of Shrewsbury.

‘Coulda had the title for myself when he died, but I was born here in the United States and this is my country. We don't have no m'lords here, so I turned 'em down. You guys ever hear of some king called George?'