Good Vibrations (5 page)

We were halfway through a huge ‘Western Special' with extra cheese when she slid up to us quietly.

‘I don't want I should alarm you, or anything,' she purred, ‘but if you folks are ridin' out to the Midwest, y'all ought to be real careful out there.'

‘What's the problem?'

‘Thing is, once you're west of the mountains, you'll find some pretty strange people.'

‘What about round here?' I asked her gently, and making sure not to offend, I glanced meaningfully at the assorted group gathered around the black Heritage out on the shadowy sidewalk.

‘Those guys are OK,' she assured us. ‘They're all from round here.' Which made it all right. ‘Don't get me wrong, I ain't sayin' nothin', but in some of them states out West terrible things happen, and the folks is weird…'

We didn't tell Polly where we were staying when we paid the bill. I'm not suspicious by nature and she surely meant nothing but good, but she couldn't have checked out all those guys sizing up my motorcycle. One of them just might have been from out of state, and careless talk costs bikes, especially after dark away in Nowhere Land. So we roared off into the velvet night and returned to base by a roundabout route.

As I waited for sleep in the comfortable bed, I thought on Polly's remarks and recalled being warned by an otherwise perfectly sane lady back at the Annapolis dealership not to travel through Tennessee, our next state after the mountains.

‘That place is full of hicks.'

As always, a chance remark made in daylight grew into horrors by the early hours, so I crept out to look around. All quiet, but just to be sure, I locked the bikes together with a large chain I'd lugged over from Britain and pondered on what folks out West must make of Easterners.

Roz slept late the following morning, still beaten up after her first two full days in the saddle. I slipped out of Room 3 without my boots hoping for breakfast with the clock man.

I was in luck.

The kitchen walls were as beset with timepieces as those of the rest of the house, but the coffee was far stronger than normal in the US and the waffles Olympian. Mine Host had obviously passed a disturbed night considering the enigmas of ethnic bonding and collective business responsibility.

‘This country's full of fragmented national groups,' he said, taking a hefty draught of the thick, dark, un-American coffee. ‘They're consumed by mutual suspicion and often they hate each other.'

‘Surely all that went out seventy years ago – apart from colour down South?'

‘Never believe it.' He wiped his mouth and poured maple syrup on a waffle.

‘The other problem comes from big business. Taxes have multiplied in my lifetime, and big business is taking over everything worth having. People are so busy squabbling over the petty differences of their ex-nationalities that they don't see the genuine bandits coming. So they lose their freedom and the capacity to do things for themselves.'

‘And who are the bandits?'

‘Multinationals, and politicians on the make. The time's long gone when a little guy like Eli Terry can survive by building better clocks.'

‘Who's he?'

‘Eli was what you might call the last craftsman and the first industrialist. He set up in Connecticut back in 1807. Contracted with a major furniture maker to produce four thousand grandfather clock movements at four dollars apiece in three years. Everyone said he was mad. A quality movement took two or three weeks to knock together in those days. Manufacturers charged fifty dollars apiece.

‘Eli set up one of the first mass-production units. Fabricated the parts out of hardwood instead of brass. Like your man Harrison. Now there was a clockmaker!

‘Eli used a water wheel for power and produced three thousand movements in his first year. Made it possible for everyone to own a clock. But he never grew so big he got lost in his own outfit.'

‘Lost in his own outfit?'

‘Today's companies are so gigantic nobody's responsible for anything. The big shots hide behind “the times” when the company has to start screwing people. The man who throws you out of your home isn't to blame, you see. Oh no! Nothing personal. Things are changing and there isn't anything he can do. Think about it.'

I did.

That morning we worked our way back into the hills through the gap in the ridge at Waynesboro. Giving tourism the slip for the time being, we steered off the map so as to see the country, always making west-south-west along the grain of the land. With the bikes vibrating solidly under us we swept down green valleys flanked by soft, wooded hills. The slopes were partly cultivated by self-contained farms that cannot have changed much since the time of the settlements, except that pick-ups have replaced ox-drawn carts on the dusty driveways. Horses flicked their tails idly in shady corrals and small groups of dairy cattle grazed contentedly in the lush fields. When we climbed off to stretch our legs and ease our eardrums, there was ringing silence and birdsong. The heat was strong, but less so up here than down on the eastern low ground, and the bugs were taking a well-earned siesta. The valleys of the lower Appalachia are a rustic paradise.

Hardly a car appeared on the smooth, narrow road, no motorcycles and never a highway truck. Only farmers occasionally pulled out, gave us a wave, trundled a mile or two along the road, then turned back into the mystery of their lives down the side tracks, leaving us clear ahead for some of the world's finest riding. Long, fast straights punctuated by gradients, bends of all degrees of tightness, clear visibility, a decent surface and not a Volvo in the county. The best morale-builder Roz could have dreamed of. At one stop I definitely saw the familiar glint in her eye as she remounted and kicked Betty into gear.

‘Come on then!'

The only thing to overtake us that day was the sun, starting its long dive towards the Rockies, but as it passed, it drew a blanket of high cloud in its wake.

‘That'll be Bertha,' Roz observed as we stopped in a riverside campground by a main highway. All the talk in the towns had been of Hurricane Bertha, currently beating up the Atlantic beaches, and of whether her attendant wind and rain would reach so far inland. Bertha was out of time, because hurricanes don't officially become a threat until August, but here she was in early July, making a mockery of man's fine predictions. The cloud mass had a defined linear structure running athwart its progress, evidence that what we could see was the leading sector of the monstrous circulating system of the dreaded revolving storm. West of it was pure sky, now tinged with sunset pink, behind the line lay the possibility of motorcycle-stopping rain and high winds. Bertha was the first hurricane of the East Coast season. She wouldn't be the last.

You can, of course, use a bike in the rain, but I hate it. In days gone by, when two wheels represented my sole transport, I rode through everything that came. It taught me all about deep-tissue hypothermia, the horrors of sliding on wet, oily surfaces and blind riding with an opaque visor into the spray of a million trucks. In the learning process, I penetrated the deeper canyons of fear and misery, swearing that in a Utopian future, which to my surprise I now found myself almost living, I never would ride wet again. Some hope!

Hurricanes must have warm sea water to feed their atmospheric engine so, hoping that by morning Bertha would die of thirst from the drier air as she came ashore, we secured the tent in a seamanlike manner. To maintain a handle on her progress, I took a relative bearing on the cloud edge from a boulder by the river and we eased our backs by taking a stroll up the steep valley by the water's edge. Two hours later the storm front hadn't moved, so we unzipped the tent and gave sleep our best shot.

No wild animals tonight, only freight trains chattering and whining down the line across the river. The sound of a locomotive blowing its lonely siren into the darkness calls direct from the beating heart of America. That night I heard them from the bottom of a deep, deep sleep. I heard Johnny Cash at San Quentin prison, singing his song about a convict driven mad by the sound of the free railroad trains outside the walls, and roaring like the Orange Blossom Special.

Far from Folsom Prison, that's where I wanna be.
But that train jus' keeps on blowin', an' that's what's killing me.

Twenty-five years after one of the century's most visionary concerts, the echo of the amplified bass still thuds out its alternate fifths to shake the throbbing sadness of a new audience.

At dawn, a grey mist was rising off the water. The river still flowed clean over its stony bed, the railroad was empty and Bertha covered the sky.

5
RUNNING THE
STORM

Back on the byroads of Virginia, it was half-way to lunchtime before the message sank in that we were unlikely to find breakfast in the tiny settlements that flashed by at 15-mile intervals. Many of these did not feature on our map at all and the ones that did had nothing to offer the hungry, so we gave up the search and motored up a deserted gravel track to heat up our last can of pork and beans.

Suddenly a sharp bang cracked the cloud-deadened stillness, followed by a single echo.

‘Christ, what was that?' Roz jumped, although we both knew it was a gunshot. We gulped our beans faster as more shots followed and a man in a battered pick-up materialised to check out our victualling habits. Just to keep us on our toes, a steady series of vehicles followed. I suppose a couple of smart Harleys propped up in the forest beside a pair of Brits eating from the pan made an unusual diversion, but the words of wisdom we'd been offered so freely were taking a vigorous exercise gallop around my brain.

‘Watch for weird people out West,' or, ‘… full of Hicks,' had just been samples. I recalled the fate of the two archetypal bikers in the film
Easy Rider
, blown to kingdom come by a redneck with a hunting gun, and grinned reassuringly at the passers-by. None of these guys had spruced up to peer at us and several of them carried rifles, but they nodded in a neighbourly way as they rattled slowly by. In the end, I concluded that their interest was mainly curiosity and asked myself who was afraid of whom in this country, and why.

The morning heated up in earnest soon after we had eaten, and we were not outrunning Hurricane Bertha. The cloud marched ahead of us down the road and always the blue sky was chasing away behind the rounded hills ahead. The Appalachian valleys stretched long, narrow and gentle as we hummed along, but the humidity climbed with the threat of rain and we stopped for relief by an antique Lutheran church on a wooded mound, immediately west of the tiny village of Sharon. Still in regular use, the white, weatherboard building dated from a different world. It was raised in 1817 when Indians roamed their ancestral woodlands in growing confusion and settlers from Europe began to clear the first fields.

Roz collapsed beside her motorbike to rest. I pushed open the chapel's heavy door and entered the calm twilight within. It was cool and so still that my ears buzzed with tinnitus from two hours of undiluted Harley. The air had the same odour of antiquity that one finds in a healthy vintage boat, and I remembered the vessel whose sale had made this journey possible. She had been over eighty at the end and I will recall the rich complexity of her smell to my grave. You can look at pictures of ancient buildings, but until you have breathed their air, you cannot hear them speak.

Two timber lecterns stood on either side of the shallow chancel, each bearing an ancient, gilded Bible in the 1611 King James version. No modern translation here to make light of the thunder of God's word. One was open at the book of Jeremiah, offering the casual reader a glimpse of a nation's future as the prophet tells that Judah will be carried away into Babylon. He concludes with a memorable cry of despair:

‘Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?'

Whoever had set these Bibles was in a dark mood, for the second offered little comfort after the gloom of the first. I found Isaiah in the blackest moments of his prophecy:

‘We wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness. We grope for the wall like the blind… we stumble at noonday as if in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men.'

Hoping I was committing no trespass, I turned the crackling, gold-edged page in search of something more positive and was richly rewarded.

‘Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.'

I made myself comfortable in a front pew for half an hour and tried to extract some sense from what I had read. My brain filled with jumbled images of people in pilgrim costume sitting in these seats, deliberating on the meditations of a preacher whose mind probably knew no doubts and whose bones now rested in the adjacent graveyard.

It is the nature of mankind to daydream when sitting in church. God knows where the thoughts of the inaugural congregations had wandered. Perhaps they centred on the valley, the village and the steady striving to raise living standards for those whose journey west had stopped here. My own kept returning to my bike, the road, and my modern-world view. All we had in common, it seemed, was our language and the thin, unbroken thread of religion. Or so it would have been, except that decades of spiritual idleness have so worn down my capacity to pray that even here, where the past was plainly in evidence, it was hard to probe deeper. I left as peacefully as I could, unwilling to disturb the ghosts I had almost awakened, but my boots clumped heavily on the oak floor as I walked to the door.

In the shady graveyard, a tablet of stone reminded the passer-by that this settlement was once wiped out by dispossessed Indians. A solitary child had survived to tell the tale. It is said that the little girl hid behind a bush and escaped detection, somehow surmounting this unimaginable trauma to grow up a healthy woman. She went on to contribute her full share of offspring to the expanding white population who, by virtue of nothing more than numbers and industrial energy, would inevitably displace their antecedents. To the casual traveller at least, the Native Americans have vanished from these early-settled hills like the smoke of their fires, leaving only stone arrowheads buried deep in the leaf mould as evidence of their existence.

Meanwhile, a light drizzle had begun and Roz was clambering into her weatherproofs. At least there was no traffic to dash spray on to her visor or my shades. The only moisture would be falling out of the air or flying from our own wheels. Bertha rumbled and flashed around the hills but never really got going that afternoon. She managed a few heavy showers, yet unlike the situation in Britain where temperatures rarely rise above 75 degrees, showery weather in the American summer is of little consequence to the biker in no hurry, because the road steams dry within fifteen minutes of the day brightening up. All you have to do is find a handy tree under which to wait. There was still no proper rain by mid-afternoon, but the clouds were weeping and boiling above us. Bertha was drawing back to gather her strength. Even at the death, a hurricane can deliver a spiteful blow.

The tarmac was beginning to glimmer in the sun's final halfhearted effort as we cruised a drawn-out dip labelled ‘Fertile Valley'. Reflecting its name, the land looked as productive as a freshly ploughed Devon field. We stopped to fuel up at a general store run by a young woman with brown hair done in braids, the smoothest skin in the world and strong, unusual features. Two elderly gents drank beer at a dark corner of the wide, U-shaped mahogany counter. They peered through the window at our bikes and ignored the flickering images on a large television set where a man in jail was receiving a thinly-disguised blowjob from an enthusiastic young female on the right side of the bars. A pair of children were similarly unimpressed by the rhythmic action, as was the lady's assistant, a teenage girl.

Trying to divert my gaze from the huge screen, I paid for the gasoline while Roz struck up a conversation. Pots of spicy stews simmered on a hob on top of the counter. The women were discussing the contents, one of which was a chilli of some sort called ‘Sloppy Joe'. In short order we were on first-name terms with Shannon and ordering an unscheduled meal which cost us next to nothing. The chilli was served promptly but we were certainly not eating ‘fast food'. I could feel my system soaking up some serious benefit. Just as I was turning to leave, an energetic new arrival announced himself as Shannon's husband. Earl was older than his wife, and his accent was so deep in the hills that until I had tuned in to its music I had to try hard to follow his tale about a domestic electrical circuit he had patented. This was all set to transform the civilised world and make him a few bucks into the bargain. He was installing one in the neighbour's store in the next hollow that very afternoon and would we care to swing by and expand our minds by checking it out?

‘Sure.'

‘Follow me then.'

Earl didn't bother to put on his shirt. He just swept Shannon into his well-used car – V-8 American, I was pleased to note – sank his foot into the carburettor and snarled away. We chased him at a gallop. I could see Roz in my mirrors, hanging on to Betty Boop reaching never-before-attempted angles on the curves as both of us watched for stray gravel. This lurked on hidden corners, either washed off the hillsides by the rain or thrown on to the road by the tyres of drunken, midnight home-runners. Gravel is the end of the line for a bike cranked over on a bend. On four wheels, you can always try opposite lock as you go into a slide. On a motorcycle, your only hope is that you land the right side of the bike and don't hit anything hard as you grind down the road. Tailgating a fast car on an unfamiliar, twisty trail can therefore have ugly consequences.

Tucking in behind another bike is better, because either the leader knows his stuff and will be watching for loose surfaces, leaves, horse-shit and anything else that induces a skid, or he doesn't and won't be. He'll also take the sting out of any tractor or boy racer that comes speeding around the next bend on the wrong side of the road. So long as he concentrates, you are in good shape. If not, you have two positive chances. Either you're both in luck and the road surface is smooth, or he loses it and hits the slitheries or the tractor. When it's the latter, your unhappy leader gets wiped out first, leaving you with a sporting chance of either stopping or dodging his remains. I contemplated these facts of life as we swung the bends, praying that Roz wouldn't lose her bottle and drop the bike, while feeling glad that I'd done the decent thing making sure I was the first to follow that car.