Good Vibrations (9 page)

My relief was almost painful when I came across the yellow Harley sitting demurely on her stand 5 miles back, with Roz crouched down by a small pond holding her right shoulder.

‘You OK?'

‘No, not really. We were doing nearly seventy when I hit that bump back there. My shoulder took a wrench. It felt as though someone had run a knitting needle through it.'

I propped my bike and walked around to hunker down beside her.

‘I expect it'll be all right,' she was saying, ‘but I've had twinges across my back all afternoon. I think we're trying to do too much.'

I had been afraid something of this sort would happen. We were not, in fact, riding great distances, but neither of us were used to spending day after day in the saddle. I too had been feeling tight across my upper back, but we had to keep up at least the modest pace we were setting or we'd run out of time, or money, or probably both, before the trip was half completed.

Pointing this out to Roz, who knew it as well as I, would have been a bad idea, so I offered no comment.

‘Have you noticed how dragonflies are on the increase?' she changed the subject.

I had, and we sat motionless in the reeds by the water for half an hour watching blue biplane insects of tropical proportions darting over its glassy surface. The weather was cloudless, washed clean by yesterday's storms. At length, a tiny frog swam by. Roz watched him disappear under a tuft by the bank.

‘I think he's gone home for his tea,' she remarked. ‘Let's see if I can make it to Dyersburg.'

We carried on at a modest 60. It felt like a snail's pace on that road, but I thanked the gods of motorcycling that we were using Harleys and not the Japanese sports bikes we'd have been hugging ourselves on to back home – the same speed on a large capacity Kawasaki urges you in some mysterious way to go for much more and would have been maddening. Travelling anything other than fast aboard such a machine is barely tolerable on the twisting lanes of Britain, but on a 10-mile straight it would drive me silly. A Harley engine is happy in top gear at any speed from 40 up to around 90. Thereafter, the operator feels at risk from low-flying push rods. In some mysterious way that has nothing to do with speed limits, most of the US just doesn't encourage careering along at such velocity, so the bike suits the conditions to a tee. Sixty is extremely comfortable on a Harley-Davidson, so for the sake of Roz's shoulder and peace in the valley, we stuck with it for a few days more.

The combination of the previous night's threatening atmosphere and the hard-core rednecks of the day before had driven home the need to sidestep the seedy side of life for a night or two. In Dyersburg, we splashed out on a privately run inn on Route 51 as it bypassed the town. The place was presided over by a handsome, ageless woman with a Scarlet O'Hara voice.

She was probably in her middle fifties, but she could have been anything from thirty-eight to sixty-five, depending on how you felt and the way she reacted. With her looks and rig, she might equally have been welcoming a congregation to morning worship or soliciting a sailor into a high-class bordello so, hoping she was presently in the former mode, I gave the British charm full power and tried for a cheap deal. It availed me nothing, but at least she had a room for us on the second floor fronting on to the highway, and a table for dinner. Funds did not extend to smart meals out on a regular basis, but we needed a treat so we signed up.

The room cost more than double those of the recent horror show, but it was comfortable and furnished with taste. In contrast to our last neighbours, the folks in the next apartment were a middle class couple travelling to visit their son in another state. While Roz was showering, I decided to pop into town to buy beer. As I passed through the check-in I noticed a polished wooden desk with an open Bible and a bowl of flowers flanked by a pair of tiny US flags. It was lit by an oil lamp. Artistically propped alongside the Good Book was a prominent pair of reading glasses, just in case the casual snooper had spent all day looking at the road half a mile ahead. I had done, so I put them on. It was Psalm 119: ‘My soul cleaveth unto the dust.' How had she known? I sidled back half an hour later with a cold six-pack concealed inside my shirt.

That night, we discovered the American salad bar. All you can eat; of such quality and variety that one and a half circuits makes for a full and satisfying meal. This is not to say that the locals, who were packing the dining room, did not give the main menu a thrashing. We were in fat-boy country here, with more large people to the week than a foreigner would expect to see in a year anywhere else. Perhaps predictably, the overweight index fell as we travelled on, dropping to almost zero in the deserts of the Wild West. If the source of the complaint is glandular, as some would like to believe, it is very area-specific. A man in a drugstore told me that while a few unfortunates simply couldn't help it, for most, it was to do with being basically unsatisfied with their insulated lives. Good food is cheap; bad food is almost given away on every street corner.

‘Some people just eat their way from a vague unhappiness into total misery. They start out thinking they've a sharp appetite, but soon they get into the spiral and it's too late.' So he said, while ordering, ‘Coffee, black, no sugar, to go.'

During dinner and even as we returned to our room, we heard the intermittent roar of motorcycles streaming north towards the next bridge over the Mississippi. I remembered the carpenter mentioning Sturgis and consulted my Harley-Davidson literature to find that it is a township in South Dakota in the shadow of the Black Hills. Once a year, it is awakened from its slumber when a quarter of a million bikers with a ragged army of hangers-on take over its one street for a week of racing, drinking, fornication and general mayhem. Sturgis seemed an event only the bankrupt of spirit would miss, but Roz wasn't enjoying her motorbike so much that she wanted to spend a week being deafened by thousands of others; especially as the night-riding gangs going early were joining with the pain in her shoulder to rob her once again of any worthwhile sleep.

Much later, I awoke to hear the thunder of a big ‘chapter' dying away. Roz was at last breathing evenly. Out in the moonlight, the headlights were snaking away towards the river and the Great Plains beyond. The undressed romance of it all bit me in the gut.

Across the yard a single lamp was burning in the hotel office. In the pool of light, our hostess was totting up her books. A complex woman to be sure. I couldn't imagine what voyages she had taken to arrive in Dyersburg. She was on the Lord's side now, but she'd been dancing to a different tune when she'd learned to size up a man the way she did.

By nine o'clock, the day was already shaping up into a scorcher. When we said goodbye to the Madam, she unpredictably relented her hard-line stand on discounts for nobodies. Flashing a glance that left me drained of all but lechery and holiness, she gave me ten bucks off the room and directions to the Walmart hypermarket, defusing my fantasy by declaring it the best place to buy hardware.

‘You ride carefully, now,' she said strictly. ‘Look after your wife. And the Lord be with you.'

I staggered out to join Roz in the sunshine as she watched us crank up and swing out to buy a pair of rain slickers that did not leak.

The motorcycles were still booming up Route 51 as we wended our way to the shopping plaza through suburban lanes called ‘Hummingbird Road', ‘Burger Alley' and the even more improbable ‘Girl Scout Road'. The checkout lady in Walmart, a blousy brunette in her late thirties, noted our biker gear and our purchases.

‘You guys headin' up for Sturgis?'

I glanced at Roz and responded.

‘Probably not. Besides, it's half the country away.'

The lady glowered.

‘Where are you going, then? You ain't from these parts.'

‘San Francisco.'

‘Listen up,' she was clearly not amused. ‘If you're goin' to California, you might just as well hang a right an' take in Sturgis. If you're ridin' those two Hogs out there,' she gestured at the bikes outside the glass doors – ‘Hogs' are Harleys in popular US parlance – ‘you jus' can't come all this way an' not be there. Jeez, my ol' man an' me ride, but we ain't never got the time off work to go, and you cross our country like God Almighty an' don't even bother. It ain't right.'

It shouldn't have been difficult to put her straight with what appeared to me sound logic. Despite the signs we were seeing of early life, the event proper didn't start for another fortnight and, in any case, Sturgis was 1,000 miles from Dyersburg as the buzzard flew. How far it might be following our meanderings was anybody's guess.

The brunette wasn't hearing me. We had trespassed on her dreams in heavy boots.

‘So what's bein' free all about? A mile here, a thousand there. What's the difference when you're ridin' out?'

Roz came to our rescue.

‘A lot of people have said we should go,' she said. This bit was straight up. Our inquisitor was at least the tenth. Now Roz became tighter with the truth to avoid a scene and make a friend. ‘I expect we'll end up taking your advice. But you know how it is when a man gets stuck on some road he's decided on…'

I almost choked, but this masterpiece of hypocrisy had the desired effect.

‘Make sure you do, Honey. Get him up there. An' have one for me.' The lady patted Roz on the arm like a conspirator.

She took $3.50 for the leggings after breaking them out of the $10 pack they shared with a waterproof top.

‘Damaged stock…' Then she charged us for one set of instant photo prints when we'd had two made.

As I walked out into the heat, I began to wish the lady who had told us to watch out in Tennessee could have travelled here with us. We had certainly seen one or two ‘hicks' and had been warned yet again about others, but the state was emphatically not ‘full' of them. We'd felt uneasy once or twice, but the only gratuitously dangerous characters we'd come across were as foreign to the area as we were.

The Mississippi was our second major milestone after the Cumberland Gap. At this point in our journey, we had made no decision about where to cross the Rockies, still 1,000 miles up the road. I was itching to head north-west to Sturgis, but was receiving scant encouragement from my partner. Beyond the wide, muddy stream lay Arkansas and Missouri, then Kansas, Oklahoma and the Great Plains. Further north, in its incarnation as the Missouri, the river penetrates deep into the Wild West, remaining at least partly navigable all the way into the last Indian territories. Custer took passage aboard a riverboat for a section of his catastrophic expedition to meet Crazy Horse under the huge skies of the Little Big Horn, and sharp-dressing gamblers from New Orleans plied their trade on stern-wheel showboats in the days when Oregon and Washington states were barely settled at all.

Until recently, there was no bridge across the river between Memphis and Cairo, 130 miles northwards in a straight line. Dyersburg lies about half-way. The distance is more like 200 miles on the winding water which, in a European perspective, is the length of the English Channel from the Dover Strait as far as Plymouth. On the eastern margin of the waterway, the semiredundant US Route 51 runs south from the Great Lakes past Dyersburg to Memphis, then on to New Orleans. West of the river, Interstate 55 now carries the through traffic from Chicago to the central Gulf, taking in St Louis on its stressed-out way. For the inhabitants of west Tennessee and eastern Arkansas gazing across the water, never the twain did meet until a new bridge with interstate standing was constructed.

This system of soaring girders offers direct access to the west, but Roz and I had determined to avoid it. Crossing the Mississippi on a six-lane highway was not what we had left the New Forest to do, so we scrutinised our state map and discovered a remote ferry where a minor road disappeared into the river.

We set out from town after lunch, a bad mistake, because by the time we had dropped down on to the alluvial plain 7 miles short of the water, the temperature must have been nudging 100 degrees. Riding a 10-foot-high levee across fields as flat as a pool table, we could feel rather than see or smell the river. No wind stirred the air and the heat blurred everything more distant than half a mile. Beyond fields of melons, copses heaved and squirmed like faces in a Hall of Mirrors, while the few isolated farmhouses were surrounded by acres of mirage-generated ponds that shook into baked earth as we approached. Far away, a group of immense storage tanks grew slowly in stature as we crept up to them at 30 yards per second. From a couple of miles off they looked more like a spectral temple than a utilitarian necessity of rural life.

Not a single vehicle swam into view to break the spell. No friendly signpost encouraged us to press on; only the ever-narrowing levee pointed into the distance towards an acre or two of woodland, a few shacks and what looked like a bend in the road at last. The final farm before the end of the metalled track was abandoned and as we swung round the corner down to the river, the tarmac suddenly ran out and we careered too fast on to a rutted gravel trail. We braked gingerly as the bikes bucked and slid underneath us in a welter of loose stones, but we kept them on their feet as the river opened up through a gap in the trees. A derelict concrete slipway 50 yards wide sloped in crumbled ruin to the water's edge, so we parked the bikes at its upper margin by a wrecked Chevrolet, stripped off everything we wore except for modesty's demands and walked, sweating and dizzy with the heat, down to the brown swirling stream.

Old Man River was a mile wide as he poured steadily southwards under the sun, inexorably emptying the continent. The far bank was wooded and out in the middle a long, low barge was punching its way north to St Louis. Close to where we stood, a pair of tugs were worrying half-heartedly at a dumb barge that was fast aground, totally ignored by three or four men of assorted colours absorbed in their fishing. The foreshore was the dried mud and sand of half a continent, lapped by waters gliding relentlessly seawards.