Road Warrior Finds Rest in Boulder City

(Day 2, the end)

Just East of Vegas, I got some gas and set up my laptop to see where I was: nearly to Boulder City.  It was too far to Williams to make it before it was completely dark, so Boulder City would be my stop for the night.  I ate some road food: beef jerky and granola bars, then started to look for a room.

I came into Boulder City at sunset and pulled up to a motel.

I have to admit, renting a room near Vegas seemed weird.  I know that stereotypes are rarely accurate, but the idea of being in a city where rooms are regularly rented by the hour made me wonder about staying here.

As I parked the bike at the motel, there was a recumbent bicycle with a trailer parked out front.  I recognized that bike.  When I stopped for gas, I watched as a person rode that bike past the gas station.  It was being pedaled by a wiry and sun-hardened woman who might have been 50, but looked 70.  The hair was the give-away… it was still dark brown with wisps of gray beginning.  The proprietor and another man were discussing her.

“Oh yeah, she’s in trouble… no idea where she is or where she is going, or how to get there,” Said the man behind the counter.  His assessment of her was eerily close to describing me.  The man behind the counter was probably the manager.  He had the hair that was short, but sculpted up with gel.  He had a wide mouth prone to smile quirkily.

“Right, but are we just going to make her sleep outside?” said the other man who was leaning forward on the counter like a figure from an old Western, you know, the man leaning into the bar.  I think he was the grounds man, “I can watch her, she can clean for a room.”

“Alright, but just a few nights, at most.”

“Good by me.”  The groundsman smiled.

The manager turned to me and smiled, “Do you want a room?.”

“I do, as a matter of fact, how much?  I only need a bed and a shower, so your cheapest room will do.”

“My cheapest is $45.” He said.

I considered trying to argue the rate lower since it was 8:30 already and the place had plenty of open rooms, but I decided this was my best place to stop and the rate wasn’t out of line.  “Done.” I said and started filling out the form.

“Are you here to play or on a trip?” asked the groundsman.

“Actually, I am traveling.  I am on a motorcycle trip from Santa Cruz to Auburn, Alabama.”

“Geez!’ the manager looked up from his forms, “What convinced you to do that?”

I looked out at by bike parked in front of the office.  Across the parking lot was the recumbent bike with the trailer.  “I realized I was becoming predictable.”  I looked back at the manager and the groundsman.

They didn’t say anything but their faces told me that they knew exactly what I meant.  I wonder if this is a normal desire in men to not be the same as everyone else.  I wondered, then, and still do, “What is it within us that makes us want to be just outside the norm?”  We don’t want to be really weird or bazaar, but just different.

I know this is not a firm generalization.  I have known many men who want to be predictable and respectable.  I think I want to be dependable, although I fall short, and I want to be honorable, short again, but I am not attracted to the idea of the white paladin who is the knightly version of Dudley Do Right.  The ideal me, in my mind, is a good man who is a little bit of a rascal.  I would like to be a man that can do something wild and unexpected.  I kind of want people to wonder about me.

The bike I bought is outside the norm.  The way I bought the bike is unusual as well.  The trip is certainly not the way many have traveled the country.  This whole adventure is about shaking it up, but why do we need to shake it up?  Why do I need to?

I think the spirit of a man is romantic and adventurous.  We go to the same job, drive the same car, pay our bills, make sure the garbage can was not left at the curb over night and all the while we know in the depths of our mind that we have just wasted minutes of our lives by being what everyone else wants.  We need to risk and fight and possibly loose.  Too often we play it safe and predictable and have not taken any risk… by playing it safe we are killing the romantic warrior inside us.

The woman with the bike came in at that moment as we are all just standing there, deep in thought.  I had the feeling that the same spirit was on her… that sense that there was a person desperate to save the adventurer within.  I felt that there could be a kinship here in this thin and wrinkled woman.  I wanted to ask her why she was here, but then I thought I’d rather believe the best; that she was on her own quest for adventure.

I took the room and rode the bike back to the rear of the parking lot.  There was a large gardenia bush on the way back to the room.  It smelled wonderful.  It was the first smell on this trip that reminded me of the Southland.  The sun was completely behind the mountains by now and the sky was a rich red.  The rocky landscape reflected the color of the sky.  I sat there, on the back of the motel site, and watched the desert glow until the suns light faded.

The room was a 1 bed affair with a Jacuzzi completely flanked with mirrors.  Vegas.

The room was clean and quite, though and I spent a night of deep sleep.

Lost and Crazy

(Day 2, part 3)

Tonopah was on a hill and the road descended down, back to the floor of the desert.  As I road along looking left and right, I was marking the mountains which I was passing through.  They were grey and red and some were a strange bluish gray-green.  Not sure how that is possible, but there you have it.  The floor was flat and rocky and sandy with squat shrubby little plants.  If you wanted to stop and camp, there was hardly an area to put a tent.  There was an ancient utility pole line parallel to the road and it looked for all the world like one of those "spaghetti western" telegraph line poles.

The road itself was smooth and straight.  There was moderate traffic.  It seemed to me that in these desert roads, people either drove excessively slow, or ridiculously fast. Traveling 70 mph in a 65 zone, I either was routinely passed or was flying by others.  85 mph or 50 mph seemed to be the only choices.

I was planning on riding the shortest distance across Nevada and stopping in Utah, just north of the Arizona border.  I set my odometer and waited to see the next town come into view … but the town I expected didn’t come… which is strange behavior in a stationary object, like a town, to not be there.  Weird.

The road stretched on some more, 60 miles, 70, 90, at 98 miles out of Tonopah I saw an RV trailer park. As I pulled into the park, I took one look at the driveway and I pulled in real slow.  The parking area was crushed red rock. The rock was sharp and it was thinly spread with hard-packed clay beneath.  The park was sectioned off with cedar split rail and there was a tiny little office all by its own under a tree.

I put Betts, I had named the bike Betts in honor of her previous owner, in front of the door to the office and got off the bike.  I looked around the park.  There were about 10 or so trailers parked here and there.  The little office was sheathed in rough cut cedar and had a tiny window unit air conditioner mounted through the wall.  The only sound was the A/C purring along.  I looked back along the road and noticed a billboard which said “Death Valley Resort”.   Hmmmm.

Since I was riding eastward toward Utah, and Death Valley is actually southward, in California, this didn’t seem possible.  Then I realized that it was about 11:00 when I got into Tonopah, I was there 30 minutes and it was now just shy of 1:00… hard to tell direction by the sun in the desert at high noon.

A trembling realization came over me and I knew: I had taken a wrong turn… in the DESERT!  Visions of a man staggering through the desert, delirious from the heat and thirst, with vultures dogging his steps came to mind.  Funny thing: I didn’t see the first vulture in the desert… where do they come from in the movies?

Anyway, here I am, in some remote corner of the world, only miles from Death (DEATH) Valley, with no firm idea where I was… well, I knew I was lost, but lost is not a specific place on a map.  I like specifics.  As the panic rose inside me, a thin, sun-browned woman stepped around a trailer and headed straight towards me.

“Heya sugar?  You lost?”

Was it that obvious? Lost… at least not boring.  “Um, well, I was intending to be in Caliente on my way to Kanab, Utah… I take it this is Death Valley?”

“Utah, huh?”  she said Utah like "ooootah," “Almost in Death Valley… might as well call it Death Valley.  Where you coming from?” she asked.

“I rode from Santa Cruz, California, through Yosemite.” I said, “My next big stop is the Grand Canyon.  So where am I?”

“You are halfway between Tonopah and Las Vegas. Just east of Death Valley” She said Tonopah like tan-nop’-ah.

“Death Valley?  Man!” I hung my head and tried to sort out what my next step was.

“Easy now honey, fear doesn’t make anything better… it just makes everything worse.”  She smiled at me after saying that.

It is kind of unnerving because, as I am writing this down, I'm remembering the movie "Rango" which I didn't see until I got back home.  Seems like if I had looked out the window I could recall an alabaster golf cart with Oscars or Emmy’s in the back and a man strikingly like Clint Eastwood standing in the blazing sun.  This was a weird vision because she didn’t look anything like Clint Eastwood.

“well, what should I do?”  I asked.

“Here, let me take that map you have.”  She took my map and threw it in the trash.  “Take this.”  It was a map.  “Look, you are here, in Beatty.  Keep going down 95, right through Las Vegas until it hits I-40 at Kingman, Arizona, then on to Williams.  Grand canyon is North.  ‘Course, you are close to death valley… ought to see it, don’t you think?”

There is something about people who live where people shouldn’t be able to survive… they have a calm.  Its like they think “Heck, I oughta be dead already, what’s the big deal?”  She had me in a fixed stare.  “So, you gonna see the Valley?”

“Not sure.  I am trying to stay on somewhat of a schedule, but I would like to.”

So this lady… no name, no title… a pre-apparition of the 'Spirit of the West' from a movie I had yet to see, hands me a map and directions and inspiration.  I wish I could find the number to that little park.  I’m sort of afraid to search too hard… I might find out that that park was burned to the ground years ago along with a thin, sun-browned woman of calm wisdom.  Maybe she was the Spirit of the West.  Maybe that wasn’t a dust devil at all, maybe it was her.  Then again, I think she was a 50 something trailer park manager who just has a good head on her shoulders.

Back on the road heading due south on 95, I looked to my right coming into Beatty and had a mild shock.  There was a purple brothel just off the highway.  I had been stationed with the Air Force in Kunsan South Korea and had seen legal prostitution, but it is still was a jolt to see it so prominent.  It just looked like a motel, nothing really brothel-ish about it.

I stopped at a gas station/convenience store, filled up and enjoyed the A/C.  Here in the Death Valley area, unlike the area of the country dominated by SEC football, the biggest display of any commodity was water.  In the SEC it is beer, but not here.  With conditions here as they always are, water is the drink of choice.

Skirting the edge of Death Valley, the temperature rose into the upper 90’s.  I took off the windbreaker I was wearing and hit the road to Las Vegas.  As I rode, my shirtsleeves blew up on my arms leaving my wrists exposed.  By the time I felt the burn, a 3” band on each wrist was burned into my skin.  My gloves covered my hands and were the gauntlet style but the skirts on the gloves were not enough to make up for the wind brushing back my shirt.

High altitude, sun, and wind are a powerful mix.  That was not all… out west, you are able to see weather from a long, long way off.  As I was riding in the desert, I was cursing my bad luck and preparation when I noticed the rain up ahead.  Really?  Rain in the desert?  What are the odds?

Pretty good, it turns out.

I reasoned that a cool rain would do me good.  True that, unless you have a raging sun burn that you have no lotion for and the sleeves just don’t stay up.  The mix of the strong wind from the storm, the sand that the wind was whipping up off the desert floor and the torrential, pelting rain dropping at 32 feet per-second per-second, combined with the bike driving through said pelting rain at 60 mph head-on was akin to being in a hot air dryer, a sand blaster, and a car wash with pressure washers, all at the same time.  On the fresh sunburn, the sensation was exhilarating.

Soaked, shaken, frustrated and disoriented, I pulled into a gas station.  I learned my lesson from previous gas station stops and didn’t ask the attendant for directions.  The guy at the counter looked like the dude from the movie Gross Pointe Blank who worked at a convenience store.  He took in my pile of wares: Gold Bonds Powder; granola bars; beef jerky, baby wipes; sun screen; aloe vera; water and Gatorade.  I was glad I didn’t have any Vaseline in the pile.

He smiled and shook his head.  I hated him already.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“Alabama.” I said.

“Hmmm.  Really?” he focused his laser stare on me and asked “Where you starting from?”

“Santa Cruz.” I said.

“California?”

“Yep.”

“Wow.” He said and I started to warm up to him, “that’s a crazy stupid idea.  Why in the world you doin’ that?”

I looked at him and said, “because I’m dying and thought I’d live it up.” And left with before he could get a response out.  Partially true, we are all dying right?  Feeling partly pleased with myself and more than a little guilty, I mused with the idea of going back in and setting the story straight, but the guy was already putting his ear buds back in and was drumming on the counter, unfazed.

I decided that lost and crazy might fit my nature… still, at least I wasn’t boring.  I mounted up and pulled out on 95 South.

It rained pretty much all of the way into Vegas.  I had come to terms with the sunburn and the goofy wrist bands etched into my skin as I rolled into Vegas.  I actually entertained the idea of going into a casino just to say I had.  I pulled off 95 and snaked my way through town and up to the Bellagio.  I imagined myself as 007 pulling up to the casino on my BMW.  The same model bike was in a Bond movie.  I re-assessed the effect of an oddly burned 47 year old man on a 12 year old bike with a haphazard 85 pound duffle strapped hodgepodge on the back of the bike and decided that Vegas is a silly place and would be just that much sillier with me riding up in my present state.

Leaving Sin City behind, I got back on 95 and headed out.

Into the Desert

(Cross Country Journey, Day 2, part 2)

Making my way along the north drive, I peeled off on 120 and climbed up the mountain slope.  The road was a blast to run, curvy and steep with tunnels and fantastic vistas looking south and west.  The attitude in the valley was hushed… the mood on the hillside was festive.  Lots of bikers were on the road and they were very talkative.  I met one biker named Carl who runs the road about once a week.  We sat on a rock wall at a bend in the road a few hundred yards from the first tunnel in the hillside.  He said he used to run the road fast, leaning his bike into each turn, but now he takes it slow and, in his words, “I used to take the road and make it my own… now I sorta join the road, and let it take me instead.”

You see, the rush of riding can be the danger and the need to conquer the road and to excel past the other riders.  As the art of riding sinks deeper, the connection from rider to the earth matures.  Speed enjoys the immediate connection of the road and the fear of leaving the road, but if you can open yourself up to more than pavement and gravity; if a person can do that, then light, temperature, smells, color, terrain, and other riders comes into play.  There is a great ballet which, when young and in-experienced, is dominated by the quick and powerful, but as we learn the patterns of the dance, we begin to notice those dancers who travel in the wake of the powerful… and craft the power of the dominant into something greater.

It takes talent and ambition to conquer, but to conquer, all you have to do is master your own self, and surpass all others.  To complement talent other than your own, you must master yourself, and the talent of the others with whom you share the stage, or the road.  Speed is fun, but to drink in the surroundings and become a part of the ballet of nature, you have to look at more than the road.  You have to see where the road is, where it has been, where it is going, who is on it with you, and why you are on the road.

Riding is more than transportation.


I left Carl and continued up 120.  There is an intersection at the top of the incline where you can head back West, or turn East towards Mono Lake.  There is a gas station there as well.  I gassed up, since it was an hour, at least, to the next station.  My headache was nowhere near leaving, so I went into the shop to look for some pain killer.  There was an ATM in the store whose alarm was stuck on.  A very nice attendant, whose eyes were blurring from the incessant and shrill screech, was kind enough to fill my water bottle with water so I could take my aspirin.

I met a guy from New York who used to ride, and we talked about bikes.  Another man, from Pennsylvania walked up who also rode.  I noticed that the French and Chinese and Japanese accents were gone.  This is officially off the beaten path.  We talked for about 10 minutes until their wives were sending ‘looks’ our way.  We shook hands and headed out.

120 East is a beautiful road.  It was the early part of July, but there was still snow pack under the canopy of the trees.  I put the leather work gloves away, and pulled out my winter gloves.  The air was cool and clean… it was heavily scented with pine.  As I road along, I noticed the road was not rough, but it seemed as though it was not very even.  It reminded me of the roads built in Michigan in the swamps in the 1800’s.  Those road were built by laying tree trunks down in the mud and mire across the road and sandy clay was laid over the logs.  Eventually asphalt was added and voila’ a road.  Over the years, the logs settled and the road has a wavy surface.  120 felt ‘wavy’.

The backside of Yosemite has a turn out which gives you a view of half dome and el capiton.  To get there, you have to wind through high sierra mountains.  There is a section which is bald rock all around.  Winding along the road, there are peaceful meadows, impatient mountain streams full of snow melt, vistas of grand mountain peaks, hairpin turns and graceful windings of a road seemingly in no hurry to get you anywhere, but content to unfold nature in front of you.

There is a lake called Tenaya which rests at the bottom of a descent.  It was calm and clear when I got to the lake, right about noon.  The lake was an impossible color of blue with dark green coniferous trees all about and a dark blue, high altitude sky reflected in the cold water.  I was actually disappointed that the lake is artificial, but I reasoned that we are a part of nature so it was ok.  Beautiful, none-the-less.

From 7:00am to 12:00 I had been riding in Yosemite and the green and water was all around me.  As I descended through Tioga Pass, in the span of less than a mile, it seemed, the water disappeared.  The pines gave way to scrub oak and the ground dried.  I rounded a bend and a hot, dry blast of air hit me.  I rounded the turn and the mountains gave way to the plain and a turquoise lake greeted me.  Mono Lake.  There is a gas station right there where 120 hits US 395.  I stopped for gas and some Gatorade.  There must have been 60 bikes there.

I spoke with a man who was riding a Suzuki, about a 1980’s GSX.  All of the bikes were pre-1990.  They were a part of a riding club from Fresno.  One of them came up to me and said “Man, I’ve never actually seen one of these in person… do you like it?”

“I hope I do.  I will be in this saddle all the way to Alabama.”

“Dude!” was all he said.

I pulled the BMW up into their group and we drank water and Gatorade and ate granola bars and beef jerky for about 30 minutes.  I told them they would need cool weather gear and they told me about the weather out East some and South.  Hot was the word.

I was apprehensive as I left the gas station.  A sign told me that it was 127 miles to Tonopah.  The bikers assured me that there was gas and water in Tonopah, but having never been to Tonopah, I only had faith in their word, no tangible evidence.  The movie quote “Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line”… only I needed to change it from a Sicilian, to the desert.

395 headed south out of Lee Vining, near Mono Lake, and 120 peeled off east at a right angle to 395.  As I road east, the road snaked through dry land, then a piney area.  The road twisted left and right through the trees.  I was traveling at about 60 miles an hour, but had to drop the speed since the road also has drastic vertical curves.  I rounded a bend, and, suddenly, the desert plain opened up in front of me.

I always imagined the desert to be still and quite and blinding bright with no life and no color.  It was really windy.  It was bright, but as I was riding along, I was struck by the stark lines drawn on the floor by clouds.  When a cloud passed over, it made the ground look black as coal compared to the sun-lit sands.  I looked left and right and wondered at the strange things I saw in the distance.  I stopped the bike on the side of the road to pay attention to the weird clouds or something I was seeing.

About 300 yards away, with a rocky hill as a backdrop, there was what looked like a giant striding along the desert.  It moved like a woman rolling her hips so that her legs swung out in a straight line.  Left, right, left, right.  The torso of the giant was draped in a poncho looking affair which blended in with the lands so that she appeared to come in and out of focus.  I can see where the Indians believed in spirits and other mysterious beings in the wild lands.  I stared at the ‘giant’.

As this strange thing came nearer to the road I realized that it was a dust devil.  It had formed two funnels and they were twisting around each other in a hypnotic dance.  I took my eye off of her, and scanned the desert.  As the sun heated up the floor, there were about a dozen funnels that I could see.  The desert, I decided, was realy alive, but it was life unlike what we are used to.

I drunk in the sight and was acutely aware of how out of my element I was.  No cell phone signal, limited water, no shelter.  I knew, without a reservation, that if my bike were to break down, I was in real life and death peril.  Suddenly, the romance of being like Clint Eastwood, or Frank Perkins, the lone Traveler, crossing the desert with just his grit and wit, just vanished like a dust devil.

The Yosemite captivated through its grandeur.  The desert captivates you in its stark beauty and the sheer brutal reality that it can kill you by just being who it is.

With my new respect and fear of the desert, I got back on the bike.

The roads in the desert floor have no reason to wander.  They are straight.  Roads so straight and flat that approaching vehicles appear as a shimmering dot in the heat waves coming off the pavement.  Some of the cars had head lights on.  The first sight of a traveler driving west-bound is tentative, “is that a car, a bike, a truck, or nothing?”  As they come closer, I could make out light, possibly, from driving lights. At first I thought it was another bike, but then the lights separated, and I saw it was a car.

A sign on the side of the road said “DIP”.  I wondered at what kind of dip when a pickup truck suddenly disappeared.  I counted 3 seconds and suddenly the truck popped back up.  I had just enough time to think “Wow, that was a DIP!” end then the ground dropped away beneath me and the panorama of the desert rose above my view as I sunk into the dip.

Understand, I had 85 pounds of gear strapped to the back of a 500 pound bike doing 65 miles per hour.  The telelever suspension on the BMW completely extended and the tires, while still kissing the pavement, were not really holding the pavement.  The ‘dip’ bottomed out and I thought, on my way down, of hitting the breaks, but the bottom of the dip was covered in sand and light gravel… no breaking here.  As I zoomed up out of the ‘dip’ I thought about breaking, but I was unsure of what was over the crest, so, clutch pulled in tight, I topped the crest and the bike momentarily left the ground.

There is a moment in a near death experience, that excitement and adrenaline overcomes reason. As the world came back into view and I felt the vibration of the road stop due to the fact that I was no longer touching the road.  I was thrilled at the moment.  No thought other than “YEAH!” going through my mind.

Then, a split second later, the bike touched ground and settled back into the rumble and thrum of road and engine.

“DIP”, I realized, means slow down.

The next time I saw one of those dips coming, I slowed and stopped the bike.  There was a dry wash heading to the dip and then the bottom of the dip had a light coating of sand in it.  The dip is really a place in the road where the infrequent rains would create a very temporary river.  There is no cost effective way to bridge all of these drainways, so the engineers simply follow the nape of the earth with the road and allow nature to go where it will.  Sometimes it is better to follow nature than fight it.

There is a deeper rule here: sometimes our decisions have us at a rate of speed unsafe for the road.  By the time we realize that we are in over our head, its really too late to make a change… we just have to hold on and run the consequences.  Once you are in the middle of the results of a poor decision, it is not always time to stop in your tracks, sometimes you have to follow a poor decision through.

Collecting my wits, I continued along the bleak desert.  Pretty soon a range of hills came into view.  Winding through the hills, I began a descent into a town.  Actually, there was not much in the town.  It was called Benton Hot Springs.  It had some neat old western buildings.  As I moved down through the elevations, the temperature rose quickly.  As the hot air hit my shirt and pants, pin pricks of heat, like the ones you get when your arm falls asleep, started.  I was worried that I was going into heat stroke, so I stopped and drank some water.

I really don’t think I was even slightly de-hydrated, but the stop was nice.

There were trees bunched up here and there in Benton.  I’m not sure where they got water to survive, but they seemed pretty happy to be where they were.  There was a home site with tall trees shading a dirt yard.  It looked like a homey old-timely western home… lots of out doors stuff to do and little threat from outsiders like me.  We just pass on through and, likely, never return.

120 runs right into US 6 in Benton.  Old Benton looks homier than Benton itself.  It was flatter than the old part and had a new looking highway with a post office and some sad looking buildings.  I headed North on 6 away from Benton’s irrigated fields.  Maybe it had more to see, but I was wanting to get to my planned stop in Kanab, Utah, and the day was wasting.

6 ran along the base of some impressive mountains to my right.  As I followed the mountains, I was lead into a rocky pass.  It felt good to be in the hills.  Somehow, mountains feel cooler than the flat open plain, but that was not to last.  Rounding a tight bend, the flat, brutal desert opened up again.  The road straightened out and ran level.  You could see for miles, and you can tell that all there was in front of you is desert and road… nothing else.

It seemed like the builders of the road knew there was nothing to see or avoid.  The trick was to get over this barren land as quickly as possible.  Waste no time… just get there.  I was keeping a close eye on the odometer and the 130 mile point was approaching fast.  My bike has about 200 miles in a tank, so at 150, I start to worry.  Just as the tinges of worry were rising up, I saw the signs of a town.

If ever there was a town that makes me wonder why it is there, Tonopah Nevada is one of those towns.  Silver mining got it there in the early 1900’s and it was a boom town with lots of money, but there doesn’t appear to be much silver mining going on now.  So here is this town 100 miles from anywhere.  I stopped at a shell station at the intersection of US 6 and US 95.  The people at the station who worked there were pretty business-like, but the people pumping gas were all very out-going.  There were three people on bikes heading back to Colorado.  I talked with them for about 15 minutes.  They had been in Yosemite as well and were heading back.  One of them had a GPS and checked it for me.  335 miles to Kanab Utah.  A long ride, but doable from here.  I headed back on the road, but wanted to stop at the McDonalds to check the wifi… no deal.  Either they didn’t have wifi, or it was down.  I checked a gas station beside the McDonalds for a map, but the attendant was dour looking.

Maybe it was the weather, but nobody who lived in Tonopah seemed happy.  I got out of the parking lot and turned left, following the road that had lead me into Tonopah.