Chrome Won't Get You Home

A Borrowed Harley Sportster from Vail to
San Francisco and Back the Long Way

July, 1994

That's what the sticker says on the side of the borrowed helmet I'm wearing. Living in Europe, I'd planned to take a month to tour Spain and Portugal on my 1957 Jawa 350. Coming back to the states to visit my wife plowed those plans under for this year. Susan lives in Vail, Colorado and when I'd mentioned that I hated to be this close to friends in San Francisco without seeing them, there was the silence appropriate to deciding whether or not to loan me her Harley Sportster, then the offer.

A big dependable motorcycle, after the constant 'side of the road' maintenance typical of my Jawa and the chance to see a big hunk of the American west on back roads was an offer not to be refused. I was excited. I'm always excited by bike trips and this one promised to be a three thousand miler.

Moderately tricked up with leather touring bags, Screaming Eagle carburetion and a few goodies like tassled hand grips, the Sportster gleamed black and chrome at me and champed at the bit to be gone. No windshield and an open faced helmet would make this trip a blast, figuratively and actually. Kim and Kevin, best friends and Jeremy, best writer friend from Prague were just thirteen hundred miles away.

Tuesday, June 27th, 8:40 AM in Vail and all systems go. Susan takes a picture and I'm off up Route 6, headed west to hit 131 toward Steamboat Springs. It's bright and clear, the kind of weather these mountains specialize in, a good icon and my past experience with cycle trips leads me to value a good start. By 10:40 I've made Steamboat and the Harley's running fine, fine, fine.

The country has opened and closed and opened again, from the pine and aspen covered mountains at Vail, to the open rough sage covered country to the north, then narrow timbered gorges and finally the wide green meadows of cattle country. This bike is made for tight turns and winding roads and I have to remind myself not to kick her too hard in the ass, as we're still getting to know one another. She's got plenty of ass to kick.

Good roads, leaving behind the overfed overrich of Vail to honest cow country and then sliding into overrich Steamboat. These part time residents seem drawn to pine rather than sagebrush.

West on Route 40 and the country quickly begins to flatten, through Craig and Maybell and on toward Dinosaur, the last Colorado town before the jump to Utah. But the country's changed before the state line, to high desert and multiple crossings of the Yampa River. Everyone who can runs irrigation and to hell with whoever needs water downstream.

My heavy lined jacket comes off at noon at a roadside rest stop, which I will share with a Mormon couple headed east from Salt Lake. The place is uncrowded, but they pull up behind the Harley and start a conversation. Years ago, he owned a big one, when it was called the Seventy Four. A classic and he yearns to ride again. It's amazing how often during the trip I'll see that wistfulness, that wanting to ride again by old bikers. At fifty nine, my response is always the same, a grin and the encouragement to climb into the saddle once more and let her fly. Eyeing my gray hair, he asks me how she handles, hears I'm San Francisco bound and tries to like his new Thunderbird.

Off again in just a turtleneck and vest. It's hot at these rest stops, but cool enough riding and the headwinds begin to build, gusting to 40 mph. Jensen and Vernal, Roosevelt and Duchesne---Utah now and the turtleneck and vest are stowed as the temperature reaches for 95 in the shade and nothing grows higher than my knees.

At five in the afternoon, she runs out of gas, 157 miles into a tankful. Susan said she usually gets well over 200 and I'd counted on that, too confident to check the tank and not allowing for the headwinds adverse effect on gas mileage.

I lock her up by the side of the road and stick my thumb out. I've been here before with the Jawa, but the Harley runs smooth, powerful and dependable. Guess they all need fuel though.

The third pickup stops, a local who looks like an original local, with the solid good looks of an Indian and a wonderful smile. Not a gladhander smile, but the look of a man at peace with himself. Takes me six miles to his home, gets a gas can and funnel and then drives all the way back to the bike, with the comment that this is desert country and they don't leave anyone stranded in the desert. Try to find that philosophy when you're stuck in Chicago or St. Louis or Cincinnati. Just laughs at the offer of money, wishes me a good trip and tells me the next miles through mountains will be lovely. He's right, the road winds through steeply forested foothills and a badger and I play chicken, as he scurries across the road. I think it was a badger, we were both in pretty much of a hurry.

Below Orem, on Utah Lake there's a Park Service campground and I pass it before realizing, wheeling the bike around and turning back to see if they have room for a guy and his motorcycle, no tent, just a sleeping bag.

"No problem," says the smiling Ranger.

"You have showers," I ask?

"Yep," says he.

"Sounds like Heaven," I say, noting the 402 miles on the trip odometer.

"Heaven is only nine bucks," he tells me and grins again.

The sun is closing over the mountains, as I unroll the air mattress and pull my sleeping bag from its stuff sack. The sky is streaky orange and the last powerboats are leaving the lake, a few campground swimmers still in the water as I walk through the complex to stretch tired leg muscles and work a few kinks out of my back. Been a good one, except for my foolishness with the gas, but even that worked out and allowed a personal kindness to pass between strangers. It's cooling off beautifully, a good night to sleep out and count stars.

Wednesday, June 28th, 4:30 AM and just beginning light as birds start to chatter and I roll over until quarter to six. The guy with the huge motor home and portable garden is already up.

Did I tell you about him? He and his wife are from Florida and have a rig as long as a semi, towing a small truck behind. They were all set up last night when I pulled in and I've seen some big time rigs, but this one had a flower garden all along the side, all kinds and varieties in portable planters and looking like they'd been there three weeks. Maybe they had, they obviously belonged to that group of itinerant retirees, who spend a week or so in various friends driveways or dropping in on the kids. I admired the flowers in passing and allowed as how he probably couldn't get his wife away from the garden at home.

"That's my garden," he replied in a tone that left no doubt. Then the smile softened, "pretty, ain't they?" Another sexist assumption, shot all to hell.

Pulled out at 6:30 and tried to sneak away without waking anyone, which is no mean trick on a Harley with straight pipes. The early road winds up and through an explosion of mountains and I'm riding the chill and climbing canyon, alongside a wild trout stream that pulls me to thoughts of which dry fly will match the evening hatch. I could probably pull one of the flattened insects off my goggles and match it to a Dolly Varden.

Just past Wedding Veil Falls, a lovely five hundred foot tumble of water, I turn on the Interstate for the short ride to Provo and the spell is broken by early commuter traffic, each driver's face set with mid week determination. It's over before long and thirty minutes later, after breakfast in Payson, I break west on Route 6 into a series of flat bottomed desert bowls, surrounded by the surreal.

It's more a seascape than a landscape, as the temperature climbs toward 120. This land was once all ocean and it's easy to picture that way, the ground as barren and scrub as a dry aquarium. Each bowl is 50 to 80 miles across, edged with rock battlements, castles and pyramids. All the heroic constructions of man become just a mimicry of this vast natural ocean floor.

The road is a blazing asphalt slash and the headlights of the few oncoming cars wink like loose electrical connections, blinking in heat waves. The monotony and building headwind somehow tightens my fingers on the handgrips, until numbness reminds me to ease up. It's a conscious thought, instead of a reflex.

Climbing out of another desert bowl, the sky becomes the surface of the water in my mind and I imagine smaller fish near the top. Then down, down to the ocean floor, where bigger fish swim murky depths beside the road kill. Two antelope linger along the roadside, I slow and honk and they bound away in the graceful leaps of no effort. Porpoises in my marine world.

"Next Services 40 Miles," says the green roadside sign and reality drops my hand to unscrew the gas cap and check. Looks okay, but I can't stop thinking about it until I pull into The Border Inn for gas and lunch. Nevada now and the place is full of slot machines. I try to win my lunch money back and don't.

Applying a little 45 sunscreen to my nose, I'm off. Lucky for me, at 60 mph the wind chill (and I use the word advisedly) brings the 120 degree temperature down to about a hundred, give or take a few degrees. It's hot. Wind is in part generated by hot air rising and this big hot country generates heroic winds. It's a headwind of forty, maybe fifty miles per hour and the steady sixty of the Harley amounts to hour after hour of facing a hot 110 mph wind with an open helmet.

The bike is running smooth and steady at 3200 rpm, but bending a curve in the pass with the throttle held steady at sixty, a prolonged gust slows me to fifty like a soft gloved hand. The lean is suddenly taken out of the curve and reversed into the wind. The winding road down to another valley has been extensively patched with tar closing the cracks and, taking a stiff curve at normal speed, I feel the bike suddenly begin to slide out from under me. She catches at the solid surface, but it's unsettling as hell and I drop to an almost upright 35 mph until the ten miles of tar patch is over. They say there's only two kinds of riders, those who've layed 'em down and those who will, but today's not going to be my day.

Thunderheads and rain squalls sweep the valley but never touch the ground. I've never seen that before, riding under visible sheets of rain that evaporate in this hot dry air, teasing a scorched desert.

As I climb west from Ely, Nevada the high meadows turn green and I catch the edges of thunderstorms, needling my face but too brief to stop for raingear. This is sheep country and through the same storms the land reaches up to catch the water before it's gone.

A strange and beautiful and merciless land few outsiders see, missing it all at 35,000 feet on a jet into Vegas or San Francisco. I wonder at the hardiness of pioneers who came this way behind ox and mule teams, brutalizing their way across each pass to face yet another desert, another mountain, then more and yet more. Just a brief stop to give birth or bury the dead, then jolting on. One gets just a slender idea in an air conditioned car, a wider but still too narrow slice on an open motorcycle and none at all from a plane.

I stop for a glass of iced tea and a welcome moment of air conditioning at Eureka to jot these notes, then throw a leg over the Harley into an afternoon that's cooled to 95.

Fifty miles west of Eureka, over the Hickson Summit, a whole broad valley opens below me and it catches my breath, so I park the bike to look it over. It seems a hundred miles north to south, floored in golds and rusts, surrounded by a wall of mountains, deepening to endless shades of blues and grays in the afternoon sun. Hyperbole runs rampant out here and the sucking in of breath comes with vista after vista, each with its own set of perfect circumstances. I ride into the sunset, not as John Wayne, but literally. As another set of mountains deepen the shades of blue to silhouette black, the ridgeline becomes a golden band, not fading but strangely intensifying over the last hours before dark.

This country's too big, I've ridden too long looking for a campground and the heat makes a shower too important to sleep in the desert. I cruise into Fallon about 9:30, the headlight tired of sleeping roads and wakeful insects, gratefully taking a motel room. Five hundred forty five miles today, against crushing headwinds, a hundred too many.

Thursday, June 29th. What a difference a day makes. Pulled out of Fallon straight into billboard city, the America I'd left behind for nine hundred miles of unspoiled country. Casino gas stations, casino groceries and car washes, one wonders if there is a casino funeral home when the last ace is drawn. Route 50, "America's Loveliest Highway" is a tumble of lumberyards, strip shopping centers and leaning faded signs offering "Lots From $9990" as it gasps the last twenty miles north to Interstate 80.

I breakfast at Silverado, a casino cafe where hash and eggs is $3.95 and I clear four bucks on the quarter slots. Plastic seats, woodgrain Formica, a sixties wild west decor and a head waitress who smiles at all the patrons and frowns at the help. A young couple in shorts are forcing a vacation smile while their two kids take turns at getting attention. I pay the check and head west on Interstate 80.

This is desert as one expects it, all sand and seemingly lifeless rock hills, no doubt teeming with plants and critters it takes time and understanding to find. Little critter country, slithering, slow eyed, unblinking, scurrying country. It's already blasting hot and windy at 10 am.

Fifty miles and Reno flashes by, billboards and heat and office towers strangely out of place, begging good times off 80 for gambling, divorce and remarriage. Scenery changes quickly as I cross the Truckee River and climb into mountains lightly, then heavily forested with conifers. The climb is beautiful and hopeful once again, the same hope that lured the Donner party from scorching desert to that final horror of entrapment in winter mountains. Donner Pass is benign this day in late June from a motorcycle. No threat now, we've whipped this land with ski resorts and turned it into a plaything.

California now, and dropping out of the mountains, 80 begins to pick up lanes along with temperature and at the floor of the Sacramento Valley it's a murderous divided twelve lanes, swelling to fourteen at turnoffs. The valley is many things, State Capitol, salad basket of the country and beginnings of those long Reagan years, whatever your politics. Identical to the barren and starkly beautiful Nevada valleys and cupped the same way in the hands of mountains, but this one has water and in the west, water is everything. Power, wealth, greed, anger and bounty all derive from the same circumstance of water.

Beauty and peace reside in those wasteland Nevada valleys, but America is here in the Sacramento for better or for worse. Far behind now, the casual wave of a passing rancher's pickup, strung out at five to ten mile intervals. The pickups here have a suburban gleam and traffic is a competitive sport, played out six lanes across, bumper to bumper and all jaws clenched. Eighteen wheelers boil up whatever's on or near the road and it's a gritty stinging serious ride, with no time out for farmland behind billboards.

Dennys, Neon Palace, El Camino Homesites, Single Family Homes With Large Lots, the message is shouted. 100 Outlet Stores, Everyone Needs An Outlet screams competition to the highway signs that warn the two right lanes are Route 5 to Los Angeles. San Francisco 67 Miles and I thread my way left through the blowing grit and clenched jaws.

The Harley begins to climb out of the valley now and the first welcome sniff of Pacific air drops the temperature. Faces of passing drivers relax a bit. We're in suspended animation now, between the business of the Valley and the big business of San Francisco.

Air begins to chill over the hump of low mountains ringing the valley and these hills are colored softly buff, clusters of low dark green trees forming patterns that curve and sweep, a horticultural inkblot test. That lovely buff color is grass, tinder dry and starkly combustible. Interstate 80 is picking up the lanes it left behind in the valley as we swing down to Berkeley and San Francisco and friends. Three hundred thirty two miles and a pretty easy day, but then it's always easy pulling in.

July 1st through 4th, the four days of visit, the time set aside to kick back and spend in quiet conversation, catching up on lives. Kevin is in the Masters program in Architecture at Berkeley and these days find him with a summer job in a San Francisco design firm. Kim is an interior designer with a San Francisco firm, they both spend a lot of time on the BART from Berkeley, but it's a good system and the commute is nearly door to door. She takes Friday afternoon off and we meet for lunch, spending what's left of the day just enjoying one another. I peel away most of Sunday to spend with Jeremy on his self constructed houseboat on Channel Street. We talk of times and friends in Prague and he gives me thirty chapters of his nearly complete novel to read on the plane back to Europe. Kevin and I, as is our habit, share the early morning hours for conversation, when everyone's gone to bed.

There are stories to these dear friends, but they're private stories and this is a motorcycle story. We walk streets, catch a few beers, wander the city and nearby countryside and it's easy to see why they're all in love with the Bay Area and plan to spend their lives there, at least the foreseeable future of their lives. Leaving is like leaving always seems to be with people I love, a bit bleary eyed but smiling, hugging the long hugs of known time away, uncertain when or where we'll meet again.

Tuesday, July 5th and four days to get back to Vail. I'm slow getting on the road. Time to go and then the excuse of another cigarette to play out those lingering postponements, stretching all the moments, not knowing when they'll come again.

The planned route is up the coast to see redwoods, across Oregon, Idaho and down along the east slope of Wyoming, stabbing Colorado squarely in the middle of the back, a clean slice to Vail. But short term is the redwoods and the coastal highway with its twists and turns. The Harley is my pair of hot skis carving gates on the mountain, weaving and turning and leaning a shoulder to the pole. Same feel, same rush, asphalt instead of snow and a rhythm to both or either.

California 1 has decided to shroud itself in low clouds and I stop for coffee at the Sand Dollar Restaurant in Stinson Beach, inquiring after gas. There's a fire burning in the small hooded fireplace and it feels good. Gas at Point Reyes, I'm told.

Twenty miles north of Point Reyes and two simultaneous messages, my stomach begins to growl and I'm still cold. The wind is straight off the ocean and though I only glimpse it from time to time, as most of the coastal water so far has been bays and inlets, I know the color of the Pacific will be cold gray blue. A quick pull to the side of the road and into the sissy bar pack for a Patagonia shell, the one everyone is tired of seeing me wear, my near constant companion in San Francisco's July chill. I find it and pull things off to pull it on, restacking the layers and now pretty much wearing everything I own---tee shirt, cotton turtleneck, Patagonia shell, denim vest and heavy thermal lined denim jacket, six layers contrast with oncoming bicyclists, bare armed in tee shirts. They're working harder and going slower.

I downshift through Botega Bay and eyeball the seafood restaurants, making a mental reality check against the budget and knowing Kim has packed sandwiches. North of town there's a huge beach and cliffside car park, the first look at open ocean that runs all the way to Thailand. Lunch with an eye toward the Orient is perfect for warming up, calming a now raging stomach and getting over leaving friends. Sunbathers glance at my overdressed self, perched on a rock, getting myself under thermal control and listening to the surf. Medium, I would judge, of little interest to surf boarders, but a pleasant steady roar.

The lakes I am more used to make waves that crash individually, but this big lake is steady and unending, its conversation begun long before children came to wade in tide pools and girls to work on a California look. A young yellow Lab races the beach and plays tag with waves, making me laugh. A heady life on this beach of timelessness and unspooled thought.

One more cigarette and I climb the cliff steps reluctantly to the bike, unwilling and unready to leave, but a prisoner of schedules. Redwoods seem a distant goal as I edge my way up the map, unwilling to slide over to 101 and a more direct route. The coastal road ducks in and out of deep forested drops, alternating with high coastal plains, except that these are rolling and almost mountainous plains. Still, they have the character of Nebraska wheat fields, humped and pushed up out of the ground.

The road is suddenly banked by cypress, then open grassland, the ocean ever to the left. I'm making terrible time mileage wise, almost eight hours to ride 170 miles, but having a wonderful, if chilly time doing it. Occasional smoke breaks intercede, an excuse to enjoy high bluffs that overlook twenty miles of Pacific coast in each direction and a limitless view to the west. The roar of breaking surf becomes indistinguishable from the roar of the Harley.

Above Fort Bragg, Route 1 turns its back on the Pacific and literally dives into the mountains, forested now by occasional redwoods and other conifers large enough to compete. The sun is low over the ocean left behind and throws pillars of light through the trees, painting the lower branches blazing iridescent light green against the the deeper greens of tops that disappear above me. Broad horizontal shadows bar the road in patterns that skip by under the wheels and the sensation is almost physical.

This section, twenty seven miles that hooks up with 101 is the last and most snaky piece of California's Route 1 and it expires in an orgy of hairpins, a constant curving climb and descent, then climb again. I'm tired and ride it perhaps more conservatively than it deserves, but the analogy of running gates on skis returns. Miss a gate, you fall and eat a harmless faceful of snow. Miss one of these curves and you're dead, perhaps no one even noticing where the motorcycle left the road. I've got a Porsche on my butt and wave him by, not up to setting the pace. The bend and weave of constant curves is exhilarating and takes concentration, two things I need to fight fatigue. An awesome ribboning of asphalt, buried in the trees and I marvel at the building of this road, seeming to be meant for just this day and just for me.

Breaking out to 101 is really no breakout at all, as the mystery continues with a different number. The day's goal, Eureka, is marked at 88 miles and the light is fading as Standish Hickey State Recreation Area appears on the left. I take the opportunity as it comes this time and call it a day, opting for a campsite and morning shower. Tonight, Heaven has a fourteen dollar price tag and these notes are scribbled before turning in. A scant 240 miles in a ten hour day, not great mileage, but an incredible ride. Perhaps the big redwoods will show tomorrow by noon.

Wednesday, July 6th. Last night was black, the sightless black of deep forest with not a camp light anywhere and I awoke just once to find stars pressed close to my face, the Milky Way a broad streak. Counting falling stars, my memory is stuck at five. Nine hours of sleep was more than I really needed and the showers run endless hot water, so I squeeze all the available luxury from my fourteen bucks. On the road again at eight as campsites begin to stir.

Fifty miles up, I come upon the Humboldt Redwood Park and its too cute but aptly named Drive Of The Giants. Is this the place to nose in, or Redwood National Forest at the top of the state? I hedge my bet, pull in and it's a good choice with lots of information points and the most glorious winding roads among ancient forests that one could imagine. Uncrowded too and that's a pleasure added to the mid morning solitude. Superlatives come easily, but these are the world's largest and oldest living things and they command rather than demand respect.

I spend a couple of hours among these thousands year old creatures, take too many pictures of the Harley, dwarfed by this or that tree and pause at the section of log in the Visitor's Center. It had already stood 375 years when the Magna Carta was signed and my English forebears left the serfdom of the fields, proudly calling themselves "Freeman." The Charles Bridge in my adopted home of Prague is 900 years old and thousands each day linger there, inspired by such an antiquity. This tree was already 250 years old when the first block was laid and there are others in this forest older and still standing, still shading the ferns and mosses at their base.

Back again on 101 and leaving the park, the road is full of logger trucks and sawmills show me how the Magna Carta looks, subdivided to planks and two by fours, stacked neatly in a tribute to no tribute. It's terribly hard to keep a fair and equitable economic perspective having been here, something akin to watching elephants slaughtered for the carving of ivory.

Eureka is cold, as once again I touch the Pacific and feel the pull eastward to warmth and the last legs of the trip. Some legs, I am to find, are vastly longer than they appear.

The periodic question of course, and it's been asked as long as man has had a philosophy, is where exactly did God lose his shoes? Many locations have been suggested over time. I would advance the case for the 18 miles that is euphemistically identified as "sometimes one way road," east of Somes Bar, California along the north fork of the Salmon River. Suffice it to say that it took two hours to traverse this blacktop goat path, sheer wall on one side, sheer drop to the river on the other. Beautiful? You bet.

The itinerary, which seemed well mapped for a four day ride, now looks like it would fit more comfortably in five and I don't have five. Somehow or another, I'm two days out and still in California, a full day behind and fifty percent out of whack with schedules. It's obviously time for a new look at what I'm doing and a comfortably isolated log saloon in Callahan provides canned lemonade over ice, as well as local advice.

One of my consistent failings over the years has been taking too optimistic a view of what I can accomplish and it seems I have shot myself in the figurative foot once again. Who could have thought these simple light gray connections on the map would turn so subversive in their reality? Wilderness in the extreme, that which is not seen from the main road, comes at a price and I find myself too far in debt.

Oregon is out, except briefly at Klamath Falls and then quickly down across Route 140. Idaho is out altogether and reserved for another time. Wyoming would be a joke at this point. The only hope for a promised Friday evening arrival back at Vail is a quick descent down 140 to Minnemucca, Nevada where I can pickup the much less desirable but faster Interstate 80 and make tracks for Salt Lake City. If I can get there by tomorrow night, all will be well for an easy cruise in on Friday. The barman shakes his head, peers at the map and shakes it again, not a good sign but the maps are folded, the decision made sitting in a saloon sipping canned lemonade and wondering how I can possibly still be in California.

The road improves considerably during the next 37 miles to Gazelle, but I'm low on gas. Surely there'll be a station there. Surely not. Eleven miles to the next town, unimpressively named Weed, California and I can't even see gas in the tank when I rock the bike. An old fellow sitting in his grassless yard on an upended can grins up at me toothlessly as I coast in and cut the engine, telling him I'll be in real trouble if I can't find gas. His face goes serious and I have momentary hopes for something from the lawnmower or chain saw, but there seems little obvious use for either on his property. "Nooo," says he, drawing the word out like a line of poetry, "they got some pretty high priced gas down to Weed, but I reckon that's the only bet." He grins again and I thank him, thinking of the price of a long walk.

Pulling out slowly through the gears, I bring the Harley to a conservative and steady fifty, thinking that must be a fuel efficient speed. Mount Shasta rises majestically on the left, such a cheap word for so spectacular a mountain, snow capped and isolated. At the turnoff for Weed, I'm momentarily distracted by a Shell Oil sign and two deer I hadn't seen jump from the side of the road. No time for intelligent reaction as the big doe clears me in front and her young spike buck passes behind. We're all startled and my heart is still pounding when I coast in to the pumps.

The cashier tells me Klamath Falls is 73 miles and it's a lovely drive this time of early evening, then smiles and warns me to watch for deer. I smile back. 7:40 as I pull away and the sun will drop fast now. Route 97 sweeps grandly north when I need to go south, but that's the way it is out here, where mountains intervene with direct routes.

The country rolls, then flattens and rolls again through grassland plateaus filled with fat cattle and irrigated fields of hay and vegetables. The mountains so recently close are foregrounded now with Shasta, then lie in ordered rows, one behind another for what seems a hundred miles to the west. Blue upon blue upon blue, all varying shades as the last rays of sun throw golden splashes across fields of what I take to be winter wheat. It must be wheat, the color's too intense for a lesser crop.

Klamath Falls and the nearby Crater Lake take just over an hour at a steady seventy. 365 miles today and not bad considering the circumstances, but not enough.

Thursday, July 7th and first light at 4:15, at least enough that the stars have dimmed and I'm on the road at quarter to five. But what seemed just like good sleeping weather is bitterly cold at road speed and last night's low was 44 I'm told, when I finally find someone to tell me. There turn out to be 85 miles before an opportunity for breakfast and it takes two stops by the shoulder to warm some feeling back into my hands, holding them over the valve covers and trying to convince myself such an early start was a good idea.

Interesting though, what can be seen and heard and what sees and hears me at this early morning roadside. The sun is taking forever to clear the low hills and won't be with me for another forty miles. A pack of coyotes wail away from a distant patch of woods and neighboring ranch dogs alternate their disapproval of my having stopped. I glance toward the nearside barker and am startled to see a half dozen llamas, heads up and furry, looking me over. This is not Nepal, but southern Oregon.

The next wide spot in the road shows a small grocery and odds and ends store and it's open and they have coffee and even a few doughnuts. The sole proprietor tells me last night's temperature as well as the advice to go two blocks past where 140 turns in Lakeview, thirty more miles down the road, because Jerry's has the only good breakfast in town. He sees the Harley patch on my jacket, walks outside and circles the bike, then warms to the subject of the seven Harleys he's rebuilt, all old bikes, the earliest a '48 and the latest a '74. Never could get his wife to ride he says wistfully and when she finally told him it was her or the bikes, he just grinned and turned palms up. "She's been gone twenty years," he says "and I haven't had a bike for a year and a half." He shows me pictures of the rebuilts, all beautifully detailed. "Gotta get me another bike," he says "but damned if they ain't gotten expensive." He charges me forty cents for the doughnut, but won't take anything for the two cups of coffee, standing in the doorway as I take off.

By the time I pull into Jerry's Restaurant in Lakeview, the sun is full up and showing some warmth. 8 AM and already a midmorning break for some of the cowboys clustered at tables and Jerry's got a special on T-bone steak, eggs, hash browns and coffee for $5.99. A multiple shot of grease to keep me going and I'm reminded again that chrome won't get you home.

I clear the parking lot at a quarter to nine, circling back to 140, it's warm enough for short sleeves and a vest and man, that sure feels good. A hundred miles east, at a time of day when they ought to be elsewhere, I round a long curve in the hills to find four mule deer in the middle of the road. We eye each other, curiosity on their side, a sense of unreality on mine as I downshift and approach. They don't move until I'm doing about five miles per hour and bump the horn, scattering all four to the left ditch, where they bound along just ahead of me, leaping like pronghorn antelope for three or four hundred yards alongside my bike before bolting up a side gully.

Meeting up with Interstate 80 about two in the afternoon, I turn east and traffic is widely scattered, the road an open wound through the desert. This is mile eating country at a steady seventy and I need to eat miles. About five in the afternoon, twelve hours since my start, I see the first mileage reference to Salt Lake City, a heartbreaking 290 miles. The return across a more northern portion of Nevada seems wider, longer, the distances between low mountain passes more open and endless. But the wind is behind me now.

At five thirty I pull off at a rest stop to get my turtleneck from the sissy bar pack and meet the incredible UW tour bus. Three University of Wisconsin students are standing forlornly around their blue schoolbus of indeterminate vintage. The top portion of a purple Volkswagen camper has been welded to the roof, with an interior stair to this second deck. Incredibly, behind this a wooden room with windows and half log siding stretches the full width and about two feet beyond the end of the bus, overhanging a racked bicycle. This portion of the structure is stained a tasteful brown. Their immediate need seems to be a small can of radiator stopleak and I'm unable to help, suggesting they try among the truckers.

Just about a mile down the road, still smiling to myself over this dream machine, I have a sinking realization that I may not have resnapped the top net on the pack and, glancing back see it flying in the wind, my jacket and liner nowhere to be seen. Nothing to do but go back, to hope it hasn't been picked up if I'm able to find it at all. The center ditch is illegal as well as impossible to cross, so it's eleven miles down to an interchange, sixteen miles back and then three to the rest stop. Aggravating as hell with such a long way still to go and if it's gone, I'm done for night riding. Half an hour later I find it by the side of the merge lane from the rest stop, strap it down and hold to 75 for the next couple of hours to make up the time.

At 9:30 I stop again at the Bonneville Salt Flats, where the world's land speed records have fallen, one after the other over the years. Over the next half hour the sun drops behind low mountains, fronted by the vast white salt flat. The wrong side of the road for a photo, with too much man made foreground and I know the camera would capture a disappointment, unable to catch the subtle colors, the eerie white of salt and that glowing, sinking orange disc that changes the shadings moment by moment.

Nearly dark now and I cut back to sixty, glad of the jacket. The road is fine, but I'm tired and the headlight will give little warning of one of those huge broken casings the trucks throw when they blow a tire, so the riding takes on additional pressure, fighting to stay alert. Nearly all of the pleasures of motorcycling are for me, daytime pleasures and this is just a necessary grinding down of miles.

A stop for gas at 10:30 and the last fifty miles into Salt Lake City become a mirage of reflected lights across water that never seems to get closer and that I begin to doubt is there at all. A mystical city, a religious city and for me a withheld city. I'm running on sheer force of will now, reminding myself the day's run is now a matter of minutes rather than hours, promising myself a motel rather than a campground, running through my mind in minute detail, the feel of a hot shower and bed. It's over. 678 miles and too far a day by any standards.

Friday, July 8th. A great night's sleep, another shower, gas up, add a third of a quart of oil and linger over breakfast, reading the paper. There's been a hell of a forest fire at Glenwood Springs, which is just forty miles from Vail. A sudden wind switch and backburn caught the whole forty or so firefighters and nine were killed, including four women. There are fires out of control in California, Oregon, Colorado, Nevada and Idaho, all the states I've just traveled. The whole west is a tinderbox, dry lightning thunderstorms serving as the match in most cases. Fires are a timeless natural phenomenon in forests and grassland, but in this modern day they take an unnatural toll in blackened wild land and this time, blackened lives.

Salt Lake City is for me the gateway to the desert west and the late morning start takes me quickly to mountains more like those I know and love. Green forested mountains, with high lush meadows and scattered lakes, the kind of land that makes you want to stay, to build a shack and hang out for a decade or two, getting to know the elk. A place to lay a dry fly delicately above a stream pool and watch its drift. There is plenty of desert left to come, but it's softer and more amenable, a George Bush kinder gentler desert.

I pass a working cowboy, herding two or three hundred sheep and he sits his horse easily in a shortsleeved shirt, letting the mountain sun soak through his back, catching rays right to the marrow of his bones. I know the pleasure, because this is short-summer country and most of the year is spent tending cattle in heavy coats, fingers stiff and cold, the only warmth the horse between your legs and that's little enough. For now, the Harley is my horse and we share the same warm sun on our backs. As I wave, he nods and wheels his horse after a laggard sheep.

Yesterday's marathon has bought me the pleasure of today, the unhurried, head up, looking around, stop for a smoke kind of day that promises a relaxed end to a great trip. Rested and happy, the world looks pretty good from my rolling venue, deep blue skies and pillows of mounded cloudbanks. I'm back on Route 40 again, the same few hundred miles I rode on the way out and yet it all looks absolutely different in this direction. Unlike flat country, these mountains are a constant pleasure and surprise. I pass a couple of major burn areas that weren't there on the way out, but it's happened in sageland, so the damage is minor and I imagine even these burned sagebrush will leaf out again and recover quickly.

I call Susan from Steamboat Springs, about eighty miles out of Vail and leave a message on the answering machine that I'll be at State Bridge about eight in case she wants to meet me for dinner. State Bridge is available if you want to buy acreage just 23 miles from Vail, with a big log building that houses a saloon, dancehall and restaurant, as well as a dozen log guest cabins, a corral full of horses and a nice hunk of the Colorado River. Just $795,000, a bit rich for me.

The sun is low in the sky as I drop down through the remarkable cattle valleys below Steamboat and several amazing thunderstorms appear to be rolling through ahead of me. Maybe Glenwood Springs will get a good rain. Maybe I will too and I've been lucky with the weather so far, but I'd gladly pull on the raingear if these forests got soaked. I cruise into State Bridge at eight on the money, but no Susan. She answers this time, but her answering machine never took the message and there's a bunch of friends waiting, so why don't I just come on in?

Kicking back out onto a road I know well by now, I keep an eye on the gathering storms, but I seem to be ahead of them. One boiling set of clouds has created an absolutely vertical rainbow, a huge shaft of color that disappears straight up into the storm mass. A spattering of rain now on the goggles, but I think I can outrun this and I'm damned if I'll dig for raingear this close to home. A few broad patches of wet road show where narrow storms have already come through and it's a kick to play tag with the natural world. Finally there's a connection to Interstate 70 and I run the ten miles just ahead of the storms at a little over eighty. Then my turnoff, a one mile backtrack and onto the sideroad that leads to the cabin where Susan is staying.

I'm excited to be back, returning to a welcoming committee of sorts and I know they can hear the Harley from the hillside. The drive to the cabin is steep gravel, well rutted and curved. I can feel the rear wheel scrabbling in the gravel and it would be a hell of an embarrassing time to lay her down, but then I'm there and make a shaky and somewhat clumsy final turn to cut her off and grin. This lovely piece of chrome brought me home and now there's plenty of time for a few beers and the retelling.

It always gets better in the retelling.