Good Vibrations (3 page)

Clark's agent gave me the same answer as Harley but was less polite about it. I began to feel a dark foreboding.

Roz tried next, with a company plucked from the Yellow Pages. She gave her man the cultivated, low voice on the phone line, all sweet reason. Not at all like me, now flat on the sofa with smoke coming out of my ears. It made no difference. Several calls later the message was crystal clear.

We had a serious problem: two motorcycles ready to go, a major investment in time and money, and no apparent way of making them legal. I have been in one uninsured accident in the US; it involved a boat, a man in New York City rich enough to take responsibility for his misjudgements but too proud to acknowledge them, and a lawsuit. It was not an experience to repeat.

‘What happens with aliens who live and work here?' I asked the next agent in the book, but was handed a similar fistful of mould.

‘If you're a diplomat or a student or are in the Armed Forces you can have insurance. Otherwise you have to get a local licence.'

‘How do we do that?'

‘That's easy. You just present your out-of-state licence to the Department of Highways and they'll give you one for a few bucks.'

‘How does it work?'

‘You take a four-hour course on drug and alcohol abuse, then you get asked questions about road safety. If you come out clean, you're issued with a temporary driving permit. Three weeks later you can take a driving test. Pass it, and you're entitled to a Maryland driving licence.'

I was delighted with the idea of the drug and alcohol abuse course. Perhaps we'd pick up a few useful tips, but further digging revealed the sad fact that as aliens we couldn't hold a Maryland driving licence anyway. You couldn't insure until you had a licence, but you couldn't have a licence whether you were insured or not. I'd been hearing for years that the United States had become a haven for bureaucratic idiocy, but as a passer-by had never experienced it. Now here it was. Red in tooth and claw, and it had us by the throat.

I sat on the sofa in growing despair, cursing deeply and roundly. Already, I was scheming about selling the bikes to Clark for $1 and letting him insure them, but I had a feeling it wouldn't be that simple. Roz ignored me and proposed a trip to town to rattle a few cages in person, to let these nameless faces hiding behind their telephones see with their own eyes that we weren't road-rage inspired serial killers. We could also grab a spot of lunch.

Down near waterfront Annapolis we discovered the Moon, ‘a global cafe' where the sixties lived on without a hint of self-consciousness. I left Roz reading something inscribed in flowing script on the wall and strolled over to the gents. The men's room was decorated with planets, stars and optimistic visions of a distant future like images from Neil Young's ‘After the Gold Rush'. I parked myself on the throne to wonder how, so soon after the hippy movement had promised sweet reason to all, mankind had arrived at such a bankrupt pass. Before I had an answer, an anxious fellow-sufferer started battering the door down, so I let him in and returned to the late 1990s. Roz had claimed a window table, where she was contemplating a menu of vegetarian marvels. Behind her, above the glass, was a quote from Oscar Wilde. It slotted in well with the images in the ‘john'.

‘Yes, I am a dreamer, for a dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world.'

Our waitress skipped up wearing brief shorts of blue denim and a weenie bodice of the same material. I guessed she would be brown all over, but she wasn't born when I was picked up hitching on the Massachusetts Turnpike in 1967 by a girl who looked a lot like her. Marian had been all thick, dark hair, cheekbones and wandering brown eyes. The difference in my case was thirty years and a thickening around the waist; in hers, no flowers in her hair, no coloured beads cascading down her front, and of course, it wasn't really her.

The waitress started her ritual of reciting the day's specials, and my mind drifted away, past the insoluble problems of insurance, back through hazy decades to the sunshine summer when Marian had squealed to a halt in her full-sized convertible Buick. She had a couple of pals with her, but we all jammed into the inviting front bench and blasted off towards Cape Cod at 7-litre speed with the oversize radio speakers spilling out Country Joe and the Fish.

Now if you're tired and a bit run down,
Can't seem to get your feet on the ground,
Maybe you ought to try a little bit of LSD.
Only if you want to…

Marian had married at eighteen and had loved her man. He had been drafted to Vietnam with the rest of his generation and had stayed there longer than even Uncle Sam had hoped; so long in fact that he would never be coming home.

Come on mothers, throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam;
Come on fathers don't hesitate,
Send your sons off before it's too late;
You can be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box. 

The Buick had been bought with money the government awarded her and she was driving out looking to forget and maybe start again. No more the straight life for her. She had rubbed herself off the voting register and signed on with the funsters of those days, when America was less worried about its health and more concerned with immediate issues, such as villagers being napalmed for what somebody else believed in, and the nuclear bomb. Arguing about whether or not you could become addicted to marijuana was irrelevant in times when annihilation seemed a day-to-day possibility.

Marian and her friends took me under their collective wing and together we cruised New England in a heady mix of freedom, serious conversation, insane ramblings and licence of a different kind altogether to that which was now making my adult life a misery. The Buick introduced me to the highways and the girls showed me how you could love a lot of people at once. We picked up strangers on the road, stacked up in desperate motels, ate very little and drank less, but we smoked grass in moonlit graveyards and made love on midnight tombstones while a brasher, mainstream America rushed by on either side.

My face must have betrayed my departure from the present, because our waitress had finished her long list of delights while I daydreamed and was now asking me for my selection.

‘I don't think I'm up to any more decisions,' I said hopelessly.

She sensed my mood.

‘Choose your lunch,' she said with infinite gentleness, ‘and be calm.'

It was impossible to imagine such an instruction being given under similar circumstances in Britain. The girl really wanted to be a hippy of the old school. For a moment I entertained unworthy thoughts along the lines of, ‘Who are you to patronise me? You're young, white and American, and I'll bet you hold a Maryland driving licence!' but her sweetness probably did well up from the bottom of her privileged heart, so I ordered soup and a ‘close-to-the-earth roll' with soya spread. I enjoyed it when it came.

Roz had the same, but instead of sliding off the rails like me, she was plotting her way past the abstract bastion that towered across our road west.

Her first plan involved a full-frontal attack on the State Insurance Investigator, a person whose existence had been hinted at by a number of our tormentors. This harassed official held court in a dusty office strewn with papers somewhere at the back-end of town. He thoughtfully introduced us to what he called the ‘No-hopers Insurance Society', an outfit which specialised in covering the uninsurable. I don't recall their official title, but they wouldn't touch us with a long boathook. Gloomily, we trudged back to Harley-Davidson of Annapolis, where Betty Boop was straining at her locking chain and Gary, the dealer, was keen to see her away.

Scott was horrified at our tale. Like Clark and most of the younger generation, he had had a gutful of this sort of nonsense. He abandoned his coffee and almost cooked the phone wires trying to fix us up. Roz and I sat around drinking endless cold Cokes and reading bytes of wisdom framed in embossed letters on the manicured walls.

‘God does not deduct from Man's allotted time those hours spent riding a motorcycle.'

The country seemed suddenly full of wise words emphatically not backed up with action. The chance to prove the complacent poster right would have seemed a fine thing. In the end, Scott succeeded, but only at $3,000 per bike and that through Harley-Davidson, the people who were going to do the job for $600 the pair.

The working day was now over. With our heads well down, we cruised back to Clark's in the pale Oldsmobile. There is nothing like denial for fanning desire, and our sole interest was now to climb on our bikes and get going. The idea of grabbing a fistful of throttle and squirting Black Madonna out across the Mojave Desert was all I wanted in the world. Even Roz had set aside her reservations and was itching to boot Betty into gear. The way things looked, however, it was going to be cheaper as well as a sight more comfortable to surf across to the far coast in the Oldsmobile, yet this was too bland a result to contemplate; an insult to the pioneers, the desperadoes, the gamblers and the ordinary, hardworking families emigrating west. For all the exposure to deepest America the rental car would give us, we might as well view the place on video. Out there, the land was only four generations away from plains Indians, virgin forests and driven men ploughing the deserts for gold. Beyond the far-distant Sierra Nevada, the fertile coastal regions had been more easily reached by clipper ship until the Irish Army built the first railroad across the wilderness. Marian's snorting Buick had been a car worthy of such a backdrop, but not our current smooth-running impostor. The following morning, our friend the State Insurance Investigator threw up his arms when he heard about the offer from Harley-Davidson and told us that if we paid that amount we were even more stupid than most bikers. Then he made his considered professional recommendation.

‘Why do you want insurance, anyway?' he asked, leaning forward intimately across his cluttered desk. ‘The easy answer is just to ride out of here.'

‘You mean that's legal?' demanded an incredulous Roz.

‘Well,' he picked his words carefully, ‘it's not so much what's legal and what isn't. That may vary from state to state. The question's more concerning what happens if you hit somebody, or some guy steals your bikes.'

‘Yes, but… that's the point, isn't it?'

‘Not really. It only becomes the point after it happens. What you do is proceed with due caution, lock 'em up nights, and make damn sure you stay out of trouble.'

‘Thanks for the advice,' I said, and the interview terminated.

That was Friday. Eased only slightly by some dedicated drinking, the weekend dragged by in a mixture of frustration, doubt about whether the trip was on at all, and embarrassment at infesting Clark's place for far too long. ‘Fish and friends – off after three days' is a maxim only rarely wrong. In addition to these up-front agonies, there was also the hateful spectre of skulking back to Britain having failed at the first obstacle. Plenty had said we'd never make San Francisco and back. Either the deserts would fry us, or we'd be mugged, we'd crash, or the bikes would break down (‘Hardly Ablesons', one engineer friend had brutally dubbed them), but not even the most cynical prophet had considered this angle for creating a non-event. The prospect of an ignominious retreat was too humiliating to face.

The new week dawned even hotter than its predecessor, but the sun rose on the decision to let optimism triumph over experience and to ride uninsured if that was what it was going to take, even though we couldn't afford to lose the £20,000 tied up in the bikes to bandits or catastrophic accident. We had sailed the seas without a policy for twenty years and had mostly survived. Maybe we had to chance it again, now that the State Inspector himself had implied that getting caught didn't mean immediate consignment to the Tennessee State Penitentiary, or some other similarly dismal resting place. Buoyed up by the lighter hearts that came with a problem set aside, and resolved to ‘underwrite our own insurance', we trundled down to the dealership to take delivery of Betty Boop. Because he offered, we gave the indefatigable Scott a last chance to work a miracle with his telephone manner.

Scott ignored the out-of-hours service at the Harley-Davidson insurance brokerage and sat out the long morning until the light grew over Carson City, Nevada. Then he gave it another hour for the power in that far land to have swallowed a second cup of Harley-Davidson coffee before he hit the lines and waded in. I shall never know what Scott said to the high-ranking lady who made it all happen, because he is a modest man who would quietly shrug off having moved Mount Washington half a mile to improve the view, but when he handed me the phone fifteen minutes later, a creamy voice said that it was sorry for my trouble and, of course, Harley-Davidson would not see two of the faithful stuck. She then sold us the promised policies at the right price as though nothing had happened. Shaking with relieved stress, I collapsed into Scott's chrome-and-leather executive chair. Roz ordered another round of Cokes to celebrate and Gary gave me a T-shirt.

Marking Scott down as the man to sign on if ever we found ourselves on a sinking boat out of sight of land, we rescued Black Madonna from the pound after explaining to the customs men why we needed a second release document. They exchanged glances, hesitated, then gave us one. I often speculated about the fate of the crooked cop, because in the UK the Revenue is mightier than the Law. I hope he got canned.

Dumping the crushing financial burden of the Oldsmobile was like being cold-chiselled out of a ball and chain. That night we revisited Uncle Remus and in the dewy sunshine morning we loaded up the bikes to follow the waning moon westwards into Virginia.

3
WILD BEASTS,
CAMPING AND
TOURISM

I settled back into my deep, studded saddle and watched as Roz heaved Betty Boop gingerly off the side stand. She looked far from secure as she folded the strut away with her left instep, but she managed to hold the Sportster upright as the mass of steel crackled into throaty life. All yellow enamel and black leather, she accelerated away from a shaky start. I kicked Madonna into first with the heel of my boot, enjoying the deeper beat of her exhaust, then followed Roz into the trees down Route 2. Before long the traffic and the woodland thinned out, and suddenly we were throbbing across the green open spaces of southern Maryland. Unbelievably, we were on our way.

The weather was fine and not too hot as we cruised onwards at the 55 mph required by the speed limit. Our policy for the early part of the trip was to avoid cities. This was less to steer clear of the crime than to protect Roz until she had gained enough self-assurance to tackle the frenetic traffic in the streets. She was still very much a learner. On this first day, we swung south and west through park-like farmland, admiring picture-book wooden homesteads where the retired cut their modest yards sitting on lawnmowers that would have done service as small farm tractors in southern England.

Apart from the garden machinery, everything seemed on a smaller scale than we had expected. In glades of cottonwoods, black families sat on the porches of ‘two-down, nothing-upstairs and half-out-back' clapboard cottages. In contrast with the prosperity down the road, the paint was thin and cracked. Elderly gents in crumpled trilby hats, cotton vests, and slacks held up by suspenders gossiped in the growing heat. One raised a hand, flashing by as the sun climbed high behind us. The bikes thumped their music into the quiet air; the gleam of their chrome appeared at odds with the softer cameos beside the route, yet they and the passing scene were equally at home in the American July morning.

By lunchtime, I was feeling a stiffness across my shoulders and Roz was more than ready for a break, so we parked up at the small town of Newburg just short of the bridge into Virginia, pulling in at the local ‘strip' of restaurants and drive-in stores. We opted for fast food primarily because the air-conditioning in the likes of Taco Bell was as perfect as any on the planet. We also discovered at the outset that the two of us could refuel reliably and nutritiously for $3 or even less, so long as we only drank tap water.

Noël Coward, that great philosopher and dietary expert, recommended his public, ‘Never be tempted by water.' Under different circumstances, I would concur with this, but midday alcohol intake is not smart under these temperatures, even to mad dogs, and any alternatives mass-produced in the US are too sweet for our taste. Iced water is therefore a seductive option, especially as it is free. The Latino youth serving us observed that while it might be tasteless, a glass from the kitchen faucet was at least
mas economico
. The last time I had heard this natty phrase had been from a bum in a tatty poncho extolling the benefits of B & B under a Bolivian market stall in preference to facing the cockroaches in the local doss-house.

With lunch inside us, we crossed the wide Potomac into Virginia. The first useful chart of this waterway was drawn by John Smith of Pocahontas fame in 1612, by which time it was carrying ships servicing the early colonial plantations, yet even in this most historic region of America, the paradox of its newness compared with my own land was always with me.

Bursting out over the dappled water from the noonday heat was bliss. The bridge was engineered from typical open girders, looking like the sort of structure every British schoolboy used to build with his Meccano set. Beneath us, the navigable waterway was defined by buoys, the very business of my other life. An osprey nesting in the topmark of a navigation beacon far below peered up at me. Normally, he would have been part of my world. Now, I squinted at him like a tourist as I rode steadily by, pressed onwards by the flowing traffic.

The state line at the far side of the bridge heralded a surprising change in conditions. Straight away my bike started bouncing on rougher roads and soon my butt was feeling the strain. Every so often I had to swerve to dodge a pothole. Roz kept right on going ahead of me, but I was curious about how she was faring. Road surfaces can pass almost unnoticed in a car, but to a motorcyclist they are the beginning and, in the worst cases, the end of everything. Within a half-hour, I had stopped to remove my riding leathers as the afternoon temperature cranked a notch higher than even Washington had served up.

Opening the throttle to catch Roz, I enjoyed a few minutes of free riding, passing cars and trucks and letting my engine sing for a change instead of chugging. Soon I was back in her slipstream, following down an uncharacteristically twisty road through 50 miles of forest. She was taking her time, leaning gently, getting used to negotiating bends on the Harley that a modern sports bike wouldn't have noticed. I had a black moment when she lurched sideways to avoid a huge crack in the tarmac only to twitch back again double-quick to leave breathing space for a speeding truck coming the other way. The humidity must have been turning her to liquid inside her black jacket, until final meltdown came at around about the 92-degree mark.

‘Take it off,' I suggested tactfully as we dismounted at our next drink stop, pointing out my own protective cowhide strapped across my pillion pack. Roz, of course, had been suffering this massive discomfort to give her some chance of escaping injury in case of an unscheduled meeting with the grit. Nonetheless, she was giving my proposition serious thought when two young lads wandered over from a car filling up at the adjacent fuel pump. They looked like adverts for ‘what the well-dressed city kid is wearing' in their baseball caps and sloppy T-shirts. Or louts, depending on your perspective.

‘Brilliant bikes,' observed the small one with frogs on his trainers.

I eyed him, wondering what was coming next.

‘Of course,' this connoisseur of two-wheeled transport continued with a patronising leer, ‘when I'm a little older I'll ride a Honda Fireblade.'

‘And jolly good luck to you,' I congratulated him on the subtlety of his taste for the ultimate sports bike. You can't argue with a ten-year-old who knows his mind. ‘You'll enjoy doing 150 mph on these roads.'

The larger of the two exhibits was more down-to-earth.

‘What happens if you blow a front tyre at seventy?' he demanded bluntly. I had a feeling I should be ignoring him, but I let him win.

‘You're in trouble.'

Roz's mouth turned down at the corners. She'd been trying not to think about such unpalatable features of the motorbike.

‘Yeah. But what happens?'

‘The tyre goes flat, but you don't see much of that sort of thing these days with modern rubber.'

‘OK, mister. But what happens to you when the tyre goes flat, even if it doesn't go flat often?'

‘You fall off and slide down the road at high speed.'

‘Great!'

The pair mooched off to a nearby soda machine to keep their weight up, while Roz turned her back on temptation. She zipped up her leather and never rode without it the whole summer, not even in Death Valley. The kid had a point, she decided, and she'd rather broil than bleed.

 

The inhabitants of the eastern states are well spread out compared with teeming Britain. A happy result of this was that we and anyone else who happened to be around rolled along at the speed limit. Occasionally we had to overtake, but the roads made the job so easy and safe that even a still-nervous Roz could manage without having to dig deep into her reserves of ‘bottle'. This rendered travelling extremely restful compared with the standard European practice of tearing about the place at breakneck speed, eyes fixed in the mirrors to spot the police before they nick you. The key to the general quietude on country byways seemed to be that almost anybody below the unwritten cruising speed pulled hard over to allow faster vehicles to pass. It's intelligent, it's friendly and nobody suffers. Things can be very different on a busy interstate highway.

We worked steadily upward towards the easy foothills of the Appalachians through the remains of the afternoon. The traffic thinned out even more, farms came back to replace the forest and delicate blue flowers filled the roadside ditches. Lazy butterflies flitted around us like psychedelic autumn leaves as we lay beside the hot tarmac taking hourly breaks, then at about five o'clock we rounded a small bluff and right ahead lay the mountains. That blue ridge has been the first milestone on many a westbound trek out of Virginia, and already Annapolis and the insurance mania seemed a long way behind us. We gave our aching bones a rest and pulled off the highway near the attractive traditional town of Culpepper. There in the woods, we found the first of many campsites from the crypt.

Neither of us has ever liked tents, but with three months ahead of us and even the crummiest shelter charging $25 per night, spending a proportion of our nights under canvas was a necessary option.

Roz's dislike of camping is entirely rational. Apart from a reasonable desire to sleep on something other than the cold, hard ground, there is always the question of the bugs and larger wildlife whose immediate motivations may not coincide with hers. Within minutes of pitching our ‘Khyber Pass' double-walled, totally insulated masterpiece and lighting up the snappy little stove, mosquitoes were zooming in. ‘Oh, God,' Roz blasphemed, smacking her neck and fastening up the net door screen, ‘here they come!'

Mosquitoes are not my favourite creatures, but they drive my wife insane. They are pleased enough to take a meal off me but, offered the choice, they'll fill their tanks from her every time. How the early settlers coped with them I cannot imagine, and I've noticed they don't feature in any of the films about life in the developing US. Heroes of both sexes are depicted prevailing against Indian attacks, starvation and white men so evil that you fear for your sanity, yet Public Enemy Number One never gets a mention. To fight off the storm troops of human wickedness only to face a lifetime of defeat by an indefatigable insect assailant must have seemed cruelty in the extreme.

Survival is assured today because homes are fly-screened; bars, cars and Winnebagos air-conditioned, and the few souls brave enough to front up to the untouched wilderness with a backpack can lather up with bug repellents to make life tolerable. Leave the chemicals at base, though, and the hiker is in difficulties.

The situation was as serious here in Virginia as it had been in Maine where we had once arrived in our boat, looking forward to peaceful evenings in the cockpit enjoying the fabled sunsets. Not a bit of it. The only safe place to be from sundown minus thirty minutes until around plus two hours was battened down below. We never once saw the sun hit the pines, because the mozzies kept the show for themselves and woe betide any romantic who forgot who was boss.

Expecting no quarter therefore, we oiled up with ‘Off', and Roz skulked behind her netting while I scrabbled together a snack. The bikes had clinked their way down to normal temperature as I cleared away under the rising silver moon. The conifers whispered in the light breeze, the heat had eased off, the bugs went home and we cuddled gratefully down into our lightweight sleeping bags craving the righteous sleep of the exhausted. The moon peeped in through the tent flaps and in the dying moments of the evening I relaxed at last, until Roz began ruminating about the possible presence of wild animals. I'd been trying not to think about this. All the statistics indicate that the chances of being eaten on a designated campground by anything heavier than a mosquito are far slimmer than the likelihood of running under a truck out on the highway, but statistics hold no water with me when it's dark and things start rustling.

All manner of major beasts run free in the wilds of the United States. Moose of a tonnage that would make a Hereford bull look lightweight toddle around the forests, while hungry bears with a taste for tourists are alleged to maraud through state campgrounds sizing up the inmates for a square meal. Add to this duo the mountain lion, plus an occasional snake snuggling up through the canvas to keep its blood warm enough to make an early start on the campers, and you will see that sleeping out is not for the faint-hearted. Nonetheless, because of its untamed nature, the wilderness holds great charm for many who are well-prepared. Emotionally, at least, we were not.

As the dark hours dragged by and the ground grew lumpier and harder, the breeze dropped and the frogs began croaking. They rasped and bellowed without stopping, with the foreman making a noise like a dying donkey. In a sense, the frogs were comforting because they couldn't hurt us and they kept their distance, so I drifted off to sleep until well after midnight, when loud snufflings around the tent convinced me that the bears had arrived. Roz awoke and we both lay frozen to the groundsheet by the wildest surmises, not daring to speak until what sounded like a large dog suddenly barked brazenly by Roz's ear.

Dogs Roz can cope with, so she started beating the canvas.

‘Sod off!' she spat while I privately hoped the visitor was a family pooch and not a night-hunting Rottweiler. At this point, there came a snarling scuffle like a minor dogfight outside the back of the tent, after which all was silence save for the bullfrogs, which never stopped their chorus.

An hour or so later, the snuffling returned and I broke a lifetime's habit to peer out of my flap into the moonlight. Staring me boldly in the face was a racoon: bulbous eyes, striped tail, the whole works. Racoons don't bother you if you don't bother them, we'd been told, but I waved my fist at him anyway. He sneered at me and trotted off into the trees. I turned over on to a sharp stone to contemplate my own dislike of sleeping under canvas which stemmed, I concluded, from more sinister roots than Roz's.