The West Coast
Aug. 21
Yakima, Wash.
We arose at about 8:30 a.m., mid-morning by Uncle Pete's schedule. Aunt Lee made us coffee, and over cereal Pete told us he'd like to take us for a ride through the canyons and, maybe tomorrow, into the Cascades and up to the top of Mount Ranier. Aunt Lee opted to stay behind; maybe she had ridden enough with Pete over the years.
I told you Pete took his driving seriously. I had seen him in action before behind the wheel, and his approach to driving was simple. Ty Cobb once said, "Baseball is war." Pete looked at driving the same way.
I mentioned in passing to Bet as we climbed into his pablum-tame, grandfatherly blue AMC Hornet that she could forget what the car looked like because she was in for a thrill well beyond anything she'd experienced in the 4,500 miles we'd ridden so far on our motorcycle trip. She just looked back, not understanding. She would.
The sun shone brightly and the sky was pure blue as we meandered toward Canyon Road. On a two-laner, Pete caught a glimpse of a semi rig in his rear view, and that set him off. The truck was well back but gaining ground on us.
"Where are Dixie's Boy Scouts now?" he said, in reference to the governor and her highway patrol. Instead of speeding up or pulling off, he tapped his brakes. The rig pulled frighteningly close to our rear before Pete finally sped up, satisfied that he had taught the trucker a lesson.
To other drivers going either too fast or too slow, he bellowed instructions and epithets, pulling up names that didn't necessarily match gender: "How now, Constance!" To another driver who came too close, he warned, "Not so fast, Nell!" He took exception to one driver _ I distinctly saw a male _ who was attempting to pass him, it seemed legally, on the left.
"Come on Nancy, come on Nancy, come on Nancy!"
Bet saw what I was talking about. I just smiled, glad that someone else was driving for a change, even if it was Pete.
Finally, we pulled off the road and followed the drive up to a ranch owned by Pete's inlaws, the Doughertys, who had bought the place 10 years earlier. I recalled a ride out here in 1968 when the Doughertys' sons, Pat and Mickey, took my cousins and me up into the mountains in a Jeep, an early version of "four wheeling" that ultimately got us hung up on a boulder. We were able to push the battered Jeep off the huge rock and rumbled back to the flatlands, but it still didn't measure up to a ride with Pete.
We visited with the Doughertys, very gracious people, and filled them in on the family back East before heading back. On the way, we toured the "Indian Village," of which I remember zilch, but took the opportunity to send a mess of post cards back home.
Aug. 22
Mount Ranier, Wash.
The designated Mount Ranier day was cloudy, but we decided we would make the trip anyway.
I offered several times to drive, and Uncle Pete said, sure, he would take a break in just a while, but he could never let loose of that wheel, keeping both fists wrapped tight as Saran Wrap at the 10 and 2 o'clock marks and sweeping his eyes to and fro for highway miscreants and Dixie's Boy Scouts.
The road through the woods leading up the mountain were gloomy in the thick fog, but we could see that the drop offs to the side were killers. Pete took on the hairpin turns as if they each _ and there were plenty _ challenged him personally. We sat quietly, our silence only interrupted now and again with offers to drive.
"In a bit," Uncle Pete said calmly.
We made it to the top of Ranier, but were in a wet cloud and could barely see across the parking lot to a restaurant and tourist center. We stopped inside and had some lunch, and midday brought some clearing of the haze around us. We could finally see some peaks through breaks in the clouds.
Once again, I offered to drive, but Pete said he was refreshed and it was OK. I really didn't think he trusted my driving, even if I had made it across a continent on a motorcycle with nary a mishap. We made it back to Yakima at about 9 p.m. and got to bed, knowing we'd be back on the road the next morning.
Aug. 23
31,936 miles on the odometer
Time for a money check: We has $530 left in travelers' checks, and all of the cash we had brought along was spent, save $25. Easy math: We had spent a total of $345 so far for gas, food, and all of the other luxuries we had indulged along the way.
We said so-long to my aunt and uncle. It was one of the last times I saw Pete. He had a heart attack and died in the aftermath of Mount St. Helen's eruption. The thick ash covered the roof of his house and he became ill while shoveling the stuff off. He is not a person who is easily forgotten, truly one of a kind.
From Yakima, we crossed the Lost Horse Plateau on U.S. 97 down to Klickitat and followed a tiny, beaten back road (Route 142) to the southern edge of Washington. Now on Route 14, we followed the Olympia River as it made its westerly course between tall mountains to Vancouver, where we crossed into Portland, Ore. on I-5.
Keeping true to my promise to avoid interstates, I found Route 18 that heads southwest toward the coast. Along this stretch, we found that Oregon is not a translation for hospitality, or good weather for that matter. Rain started to fall off and on and we pushed forward until we had to get something to eat. We stopped at a restaurant and took off our leather jackets as we went inside. The special of the day was steak, and we were ready to get our seats and order. But the hostess at the counter was having none of that.
"Your hair is below your collar," she said.
"You mean mine?" I asked. Bet's long, flowing red hair was almost to the middle of her back.
"I won't serve you."
"You're kicking us out then?" I said.
Silence was her answer.
There was nothing to do but get back on the bike, get our jackets on and move on. And give her the finger.
We found a diner that had no problem serving us, but then hit steady rain once we got rolling again. At Lincoln City, we got on the coastal U.S. 101 and started looking for a motel, something in the price range that Uncle Pete would approve. We found just that spot, a dank, dreary little flea bag that charged $11. But it was better than being out in the rain.
Aug. 24
32,216 miles on the odometer
One thing was clear in all this rain: Oregon's not a fun place. I'm not sure of the derivation of the name, but I got to thinking it must be something like Ore, meaning rain, and gon, it's never gone. All we cared about at this point was getting out of this place and on to California, so we set out at about 9 a.m. under broken clouds and headed south on U.S. 101. The skies ahead didn't look too promising, and sure enough, we soon hit drizzle, and finally steady rain. We made it across the state line to California, but the rain kept pounding down, making driving miserable. In Crescent City, we pulled into a little motel, a bit nicer than the flea bag the night before and it should have been for the princely sum of $20. We peeled off our soaked clothes and strung them around the room to dry, then took hot showers.
Aug. 25
32,484 on the odometer
The sky was blue as we finished packing our gear, and we hit the highway bound for San Francisco. We put in about 100 miles before stopping for a big breakfast. Moving south on Route 101, we found ourselves in the shadows of giant redwoods, whose looming presence locked out the sky and held moisture from earlier rains on the road surface.
It was beginning to feel like we were in California, but then a setback: The sky grew cloudier and it started to spit rain about the time we turned off on to California Route 1. The tight curves along the wet coastal road made for treacherous driving, especially with an R-V appearing around about every other curve. We kept on and gradually it got clearer and clearer until, finally, there was not a cloud in the sky.
The temperature warmed up a bit and it turned into a glorious day for riding. Here we were: We'd made it from beyond the eastern reach of the U.S. in Atlantic Canada to the Pacific Coast.
Just inland from where we glided along was Ukiah, Jake and Elmer's first California destination a half-century earlier. Little is left of anything Jake wrote along his 1928-29 tour in their Model T, but in a letter he wrote 60 years later Jake reminisced about their arrival in Ukiah, a town about 125 miles above San Francisco.
Sepia photos provide a more telling story about their many stops along the way, showing them peeling potatoes and eating meals alongside their car, modified with the chuckwagon box mounted along the side.
Other photos show the platforms mounted on the vehicle to serve as their beds, and a large tarp covering it all, giving the odd appearance of a huge tent on wheels. Their rig no doubt provided much better protection when it rained than our motorcycle and the claptrap lean-to and tent we brought along, but by the 1970s we had the relative luxury of cheap motels along the way where, if the weather refused to cooperate, we could hide out.
With the dismal weather that had greeted our arrival a day or two back, Bet and I never stopped to consider any kind of celebration on making it across the continent. Maybe the celebrating was in simply motoring on. Or maybe our arrival has flipped a switch on our brains that turned the challenge to getting back, completing the loop back east.
For Jake and Elmer, their arrival in California meant a chance to find work since there was none back East. They were so broke when they arrived that they barely made it across the San Francisco Bay from Oakland. Jake recalled that Elmer wanted a cigarette so badly along the way that he told his friend to go ahead and buy some. He did, and the two of them ended up a dime short of their fare so a kindly gentleman who took pity on them made up the difference.
Elmer Caldwell did have an uncle out this way, and the two of them spent some time working in the vineyards, likely in the area we passed through after the redwood forests gave way to the open fields and wide valleys.
With the weather still holding into mid-afternoon, we reached the Golden Gate Bridge and made our way into San Francisco. We rode along the wharf and cut over to a street that goes straight up one of the city's renowned hills. Luckily, all our gear stayed on the bike.
It was time to walk, so I found a garage to park the Beemer and we hit the sidewalks in Chinatown. We found a restaurant and for $6.60 had a perfectly delightful, if not especially elegant, dinner as we talked about what we'd seen and where we'd go next.
As the sun began to set, we walked around some more, but after a while the bug bit again: What was across the next bridge, around the next curve, over the next hill? I asked Bet if she was ready to move on, and she nodded in agreement.
We fetched the bike, slipped our jackets on and made our way back to Route 101, watching as the lights of San Jose began to take their place in the darkening sky. The air was cool but comfortable even as I opened the throttle a bit beyond my customary 55-60 to keep up my place in the slow lane. The city lights faded and we were again in a plain of farms. I was beginning to tire out and we started to look for a place to sleep for the night.
Bet spotted a sign for a camping area and I swung east toward Watsonville, but we never found the campground. At last, we reached Route 1 and the coast. A pier reaching toward the water blinked the first welcoming sign we'd seen in miles _ Budweiser _ and we stopped in. It wasn't a homey crowd like you might find in the upper Midwest, but not especially threatening and no one there was going to ask a biker to get out. We had a beer and asked around where someone might crash for the night. The bartender said the beach just south was as good a place as any, just take the trail to the end of the tar, and keep an eye on your bike.
A round later, we straddled the bike and followed the barman's directions, at last pulling the sleeping bag from the bike and crawling in. Above us, the sky was bright with stars and an occasional comet. It was easy to get to sleep on the soft sand, and my worries about the bike soon ebbed as if with the retreating tide.
Aug. 26
32,976 miles on the odometer
The bike was right there, just as I'd left it, when we woke up at 7. A thick fog had rolled in and we lingered for a few minutes, but hunger soon got the best of us and we packed up and hit the road.
The sun dissolved the fog and was shining brightly as we cut in and out of Monterey, the whole time the words of the song "down in Monterey" playing incessantly in my head. This is one of the downsides of biking. Since there's not much talking, you're prey to any pop lyric or childhood ditty that may randomly blow into your brain.
"Down in Monterey!" I was half-singing from the first sign I saw. Bet must have thought I'd lost it by this time, but at least I had avoided having other pop songs of the '70s, like "Baby Come Back" and "Stayin' Alive", trapped in my head. What makes it worse is the thumping of the tires on joints in the highway providing a beat and the sound of the engine making a background hum. It all adds up to an inescapable rhythm in whatever song is housed in your brain.
We stopped for breakfast in a place called Fernwood at Big Sur and then moved on for what was one of the nicest stretches we'd been on, with sweeping curves, little traffic to contend with and a good highway, not to mention nice, cool, clear weather.
The tank ran onto reserve and at last we found a filling station where they were charging an atrocious 89 cents per gallon. I filled the tank and while topping off the oil couldn't help to notice the poor mope filling his Winnebago's tank at that awful price.
Soon, the road straightened out and pulled us inland a bit, but every so often we were back out at the edge of those cliffs the dropped straight down a couple of hundred feet to jagged rocks. It was hard not to take in the view as I was taking the curves, sometimes a little faster than the posted speed limit. Pushing south, we passed the Hearst Castle _ a glamorous sight across a valley off in the distance to our west _ and a thousand ranches as we got closer to Santa Barbara. Then through Oxnard, the place Johnny Carson was always talking about, Santa Monica and finally Los Angeles. By now we were hungry and were getting focused on making it to San Diego, where we would meet Bet's Uncle Jim and stay a few days. So we stopped in L.A. and found a little Italian restaurant and had dinner.
But Los Angeles was a much bigger stop _ and a much smaller place _ for Bet's granddad Jake when he made the trip a half century earlier.
Aug. 26, continued
"Winding the odometer back"
The little Italian restaurant in Los Angeles was just a block or two from the ocean. The area was quite built-up and busy by this time of course, but one of Jake's old photos shows a different setting altogether.
Taken from a hill somewhere "near Los Angeles," as Jake wrote on the back, the photo shows railroad tracks hugging the shoreline, and a scattering of small buildings far in the background. Most noticeable are the lines of oil derricks along the beach and rising from piers jutting into the ocean.
The picture suggests a "Wild West" scene, but it wasn't all that when Jake and Elmer passed through.
One well-preserved photo shows a sizeable collection of Model T's and their black contemporaries parked outside a gleaming Los Angeles County Building.
Color stand-alone postcards and postcard packets, which must have been popular at the time, reflect Jake and Elmer's tours to the ornate Grauman's Chinese Theatre and elaborate stage sets in Hollywood.
One of the post cards shows Douglas Fairbanks, dressed in a white suit, complete with white knickers, on a stage next to a 6-foot-long megaphone as he directs "Robin Hood," "one of the most stupendous productions ever filmed." The set in the background is a replica of Nottingham Castle, and standing before it are legions of "extras" hired for the filming.
Jake also sent post cards showing the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the grand mansions of Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Norma Talmadge, and the rest of "the beautiful homes on Sunset Boulevard."
The image of the Beverly Hills Hotel shows palms and flowers lining a dirt lane leading to the tile-roofed edifice, and flag-topped turrets marking the main entry to the white-walled structure.
A booklet of photos Jake sent back depicts the roads, tunnels and bridges, primitive by 1970s standards, connecting Los Angeles and Bakersfield, showing vast emptiness beyond the dirt, two-lane passages cut through mountainsides.
Somewhere along the line, Jake and Elmer's fortunes ran dry as the parched landscape around them, and their once-amply supply of food in the Model T's cupboard was bare. Jake told the story of being down to a single lemon, which the two friends divided. Elmer ate his half, but Jake, distraught over his plight, put off by the tart taste or probably a combination of both, threw his half away in disgust.
Wherever the lemon episode happened, it's clear that Jake and Elmer entered California from the south and made their way from Los Angeles toward San Francisco and the farm and vineyard country of central California, where their luck seems to have turned around a bit.
Bet and I entered the Golden State from the north. Our paths a half-century apart must have crossed at some point, perhaps several. It could have been somewhere in the mountains or desert east of here, but I had a feeling it was somewhere along that oceanside highway in L.A. where Bet and I stopped for dinner in the little Italian restaurant this August evening.
With plenty of daylight and some energy left, we decided to make for San Diego, first on Route 1 and then on Interstate 5. We rarely used an interstate, but this evening we opted to make time rather than meander our way along a regular highway. Maybe I was too used to bumbling along or had spent too much time with Uncle Pete, because I seemed to be moving almost backward compared to the other drivers on I-5. At least one school bus blew past me like I was cemented to the road.
We finally wound our way to San Diego, stopping somewhere along the way to talk to a guy who had ridden his Moto-Guzzi from Arizona. The trip, from Philadelphia to San Diego, had claimed its first and only victim on my bike: my low-beam headlight had burned out. The odometer showed 33,458 miles.
We had ridden 6,507 miles to Bet's Uncle Jim's doorstep, and had only one burned out low beam to show for damage of the mechanical kind, not bad. Bet's nose had taken something of a beating too. All those hours of sun had left her with a rosy beak and forehead to match, and I was a bit red too. Aunt Anna, whose syrupy skin contrasted with her white hair, took pity and from there on was our self-appointed servant.
Aug. 27
San Diego
Anna made it clear through her slight Samoan accent that she wouldn't let me pick up a plate, wash a dish, do anything that resembled housework; she wanted to treat us as guests and we did our best to fill the role properly. Their house was a one-story bungalow in a cookie-cutter neighborhood, with a nice old Pontiac and Toyote sedan, Jim's beater, parked in the carport. There was a neatly trimmed little back yard just right for cookouts. The only other member of the household was Jim's old cat, which he affectionately called "The Bomb," why, I don't know.
Jim, tall with a square jaw and short military-style haircut, reminded me of a John Wayne from the East. During his Navy years he had wound up in California and fell in love with the place, which he considered Eden despite the big J-mar or some such department store whose mammoth brick presence had risen sometime along the way just across his back fence.
He liked to reminisce about his early days there, telling stories about
fixing a flat tire along one of the back mountain roads leading toward San
Diego, and one time getting stranded at a bus station while waiting for the
bus to La Jolla. He waited and waited for a bus he thought should have been
marked "La Holla," the way the town is pronounced, but it never showed.
You can't beat the weather here, Jim kept saying, and he was right this day: bright blue sky, mid-70s, with a slight breeze cooling the air.
After breakfast, Jim and Anna put us in the Pontiac and took us out to see the sights, and riding in the back seat of that old Pontiac was some treat after days in the saddle. Our first stop was Point Loma on the far side of the bay, where we took in a spectacular view of the city and Jim's beloved Navy base. He walked us to the Navy cemetery and we walked up and down a couple of rows before he stopped at one of the markers and silently looked down. It was an old Navy buddy of his. As if he was striking up a conversation in a neighborhood tavern, Jim said a few words to Charlie who lay under the green sod, said good-bye and we moved on.
Our next stop was the beach. I hadn't set foot in the Pacific for nearly 10 years, since my cousins Bob and Rich and I crossed the country in the '59 Rambler. But for Bet it was the first time. We splashed around for a while like kids and she said it was like the Atlantic, "only the kelp was stringy."
That night, Jim treated us to dinner at the Chief's Club on the Miramar Navy Base, which was really quite a treat. It was nice to have a good meal with a couple of beers, knowing we wouldn't have to get back on the bike and search for a place to spend the night.
Aug. 28
San Diego
Aunt Anna had more plans for us this day. She took us to the world-famous San Diego Zoo while Jim, I suppose, spent a few hours working on his golf game, his passion. Later, Bet went along and watched Jim bowl. I needed to spend some time changing the old Flying A oil in my bike and replacing the headlight in preparation for our days ahead.
Aug. 29
San Diego
Another picture-perfect day in San Diego, just like Jim said. Aunt Anna, ever the hostess, took us to Sea World, where we saw Shamu and the rest of the cast. Later in the day, it was our trun to treat, and seeing the Philadelphia Phillies were in town, we took Jim and Anna to Jack Murphy Stadium to see a Padres game. Larry Bowa took a rest from shortstop that night but the Phils, but thanks to some poor defense by the home team, the red team glided to an easy 9-5 triumph. Jim was disappointed, but I'm not sure if it was with the Padres' play or Bowa's absence from the lineup.
Aug. 30
33,462 miles on the odometer
At 7 a.m., we said so-long to Jim and Anna and went over Jim's directions out of town one more time. The bike purred nicely along I-15 and we were in San Bernardino by 9:30 a.m. The sun now higher and blazing over the desert, we moved on to Barstow, where the thermometer was reading 107 degrees.
At Baker, we pulled into a bar where we might have been the first customers of the day, judging from the empty dirt parking lot. Feeling like a cowboy tying his horse in front of the saloon, I put the bike on its stand and we walked under the shaded overhang and into the place, which seemed pitch black as our eyes adjusted from the bright sun outside. Someone finally appeared behind the bar and we cooled off with a beer, giving some time for the bike to cool off a bit too. At the town of Jean we stopped again, this time at a casino to waste a few quarters.
Now I don't know if Jake and Elmer ever passed through on this route, but
they must have motored in their Model T somewhere across the desert, because
they had saved pictures showing long lines of timbers laid side-by-side to
form a one-lane roadway across the sea of sand. One photo shows a siding of
sorts, a kind of ramp off the wooden roadway, where, Jake explained, a passing
car could pull aside so another could pass.
Jake's limeed picture shows little else but desolation to the horizon.
As we rolled through 50 years later, I felt a sense of foreboding as I saw an occasional car broken down on the side of the road, no one around. That couldn't happen to us, I thought. Hoping not to bring on misfortune, I put the thought out of my sweaty head.
Torpedoing into a wave of heat, we pushed on, coming to a crossroads that where a sign pointed the way to Death Valley. I remembered the place from the 1968 road trip in the Rambler, where we at least had shade over our heads even though air conditioning was not even an afterthought in a car this old. My cousin Rich, hoping not to make his chariot an offering to the sun gods, cranked the heat up to full blast for a stretch to give the engine a small break. After all, we had had to have the radiator fixed after blowing a hole in a seam back in Virginia earlier in that trip.
We had stopped somewhere in the desert to pick up a hitchhiker, an old coot with a white cowboy hat, denim short rolled up at the sleeves and a big smile on his Col. Sanders face, complete with white goatee and moustache. The geezer claimed he was a prospector and asked us somewhere en route to death Valley to stop the car.
"Ease her on up, now, ease her on up," he directed Rich, who was behind the wheel. Rich stopped the car in the middle of a grand patch of nothingness and the old guy got out, just as if we'd stopped at a street address, and shambled up a rise. He dug into some of the hard packed sand and produced a gallon milk jug, what was in it I do not know. We mumbled back an forth about leaving him there, but decided against it and waited for him to return.
The prospector didn't offer any clues as to what he found so interesting in the jug, as he sidled up to the rear wheel well of the Rambler and used it for a urinal.
On the way into Death Valley, we spotted an old saloon in the middle of nowhere and Rich mentioned he'd appreciate a six pack of beer. I was 17, he was 18 and Bob, as I recall, was a day shy of 21. The prospector cheerfully agreed and made the run for us. We were surprised when he returned and dutifully turned over a rack of Olympia beer. It was all gulped down in due course, maybe three minutes, and we were off to Death Valley. I can't recall where the prospector jumped off, but he was soon gone as fast as he had appeared, like a bizarre spectre sweeping in and out of a weird dream.
The thoughts came back as I looked at the sign to Death Valley. I asked Bet if she'd like to sample Hell's Kitchen and the relics of old mining days I remembered. She answered with a look that needed no words: You must be crazy.
No argument there. We headed on toward Las Vegas.
