Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 19 (June 4) – per ardua ad Californiam

300 miles to go to the Pacific (and our 4000-mile mark). Today Joe’s bike made it to the Harley store on Route 66, and a new battery was prescribed & installed. Then Joe went on ahead to the Grand Canyon (‘Amazing,’ was his summing up, as I’m sure it was mine when I saw it, and everyone else’s, plus, with a smirk, the old standby: ‘the biggest hole I’ve ever seen’.) Meanwhile the Harley mechanic on duty replaced with a whole new footrest a broken heel-part on my right-hand Kuryakin footrest peg. The effect was incredible. My spasming, aching right leg suddenly returned to me whole and responsive – just because there was metal under its foot again. A magical change, as was Joe’s other purchase, a change of seat, giving his coccyx an easy ride for the first time. Two happy campers hooned along (Aussie for ‘went fast’) through the desolate scrubland east of Kingman, Arizona. (I should add regarding the Grand Canyon that there are clearly exceptions to your fearless explorers’ snobbish indifference to official ‘sights’: in my case it would be the Blue Mosque in Isfahan. I think it’s the one remaining place, aside from old beloved haunts, that I yearn to see.)

Abandoning the deep questions, as in Why-Didn’t-Paul-etc? (see yesterday’s blog), I set my mind to challenging the widely accepted rule that no one sings a song better than its originator, and began a list of truly appalling originating recordings of songs later rescued by others. Seven Bridges Road. (Ever hear Steve Young’s version?). One Step Ahead of the Blues. (JJ Cale mercifully many steps ahead of Roger Tillison.) Love Hurts. Soon my mind wandered back to Taos, the most numinous spot we’ve visited. Christina, whom we met on the ‘Big Meadows’ campsite in the Blue Ridge Mountains, has become an email pal, and calls herself ‘Big Meadows,’ a rather titillating nom de email; encouraging us to ride Hwy 1 up the Pacific Coast (we need no encouragement – we’ll be doing it) she mentioned an encounter with a man at a particular spot on the coast road while she was biking it North to South (best way to keep the sea close), a man who may have been a hallucination, she says, but seemed to be a combination of Jack Kerouac and John Muir. I promised we’d look out for him.

Hallucination – this took me back to our Taos visit. It was where my Kuryakin footrest broke (and I knew this was Queen Mabel’s revenge for my mocking words about her), drawing a crowd including a friendly local policeman. After the policeman left, a tanned, slender fellow approached me. ‘Dude,’ he murmured, ‘Did I dream it,’ (he did), ‘or was there a red pickup here just now with a woman who delivered a package to your bike while the cop’s back was turned…?’ (There wasn’t.) ‘And some coincidence that the cop was here, right?’ A whole imagined scenario of drug-delivery romance; and yet something strange happened that day, because over the next 48 hours small replaceable objects kept going missing from our bikes. It serves me right for my shameless sallies about life chez Mabel Dodge Luhan. She was a woman of power; her husband Tony was a match for her – he arrived on her property, set up a tepee, began drumming, drummed day and night until Mabel came and begged him to stop. He refused, saying he would stop only when she joined him in his tepee. (Love Hurts!) This she did, dismissing her husband and marrying Tony. You want romantic?