Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 24 (June) – Days when you should not ride the PCH?

You got it. June gloom days. Attempt the Pacific Coast Highway, if at all, with many layers of clothing, and prepared to see almost nothing. When it’s a hundred degrees or more inland, this heat sucks moisture off the sea in the form of a cold fog. Anyone see John Carpenter’s The Fog? (I know; there’s a remake; never saw it.) Like that, only without the pirates. And with cold. We saw it coming in the distance (photo, left). By the time we reached Morro Bay you couldn’t see the tops of the Morro Bay power plant’s smokestacks. Hearst would never have built San Simeon if he’d first seen the coast this way.

Eventually I cut back up to Rte 101, a beautiful ride across the mountain folds. Once you get to 101, it’s death by boredom. Lots of grapes, though. And hot as hell. But Rte 1 was cold as a witch’s tit. Some choice. I hate heat, and we’d already done the desert. But gritting my teeth through 150 miles of cold fog was more than I could face. And eventually the heat on 101 lessened as the day waned; followed by something out of movie special effects – it was like being in The Wizard of Oz: approaching Salinas, a tornado sky rushes in, yellow-grey and so low you feel you could touch it if you reached up. Cold, too. Same every year, Salinas folk told me. Some of the weirdest weather I’ve ever experienced. Distracted me completely from the bike and the petrol gauge and I just reached a place called Wild Horse Road in time to refill.

The one on the left is for my oldest friend, I mean my friend of longest standing, Steve Wilson, novelist supreme and prince of bikers – and the reason this tour is taking place at all (50 years ago he introduced me, enduringly as it turned out, to motorbikes). Here’s to you, Contender – a name we both adopted, a good few more than 50 years ago, from Brando’s words in the celebrated Waterfront taxi scene with Rod Steiger. Steve’s birthday tomorrow. He’s beating me to 71. As ever. And the image in the photo, specially for him, is the original San Miguel Mission bell, the very thing itself, as in the song, our old favourite, ‘Manuel…close the door.’

I felt the thrill, setting out this morning, of the engine’s roar and the freedom of choosing a place on the road. A child-sense of freedom. Added to this, at high speed in racing traffic, taking delight in poise and grit – something of war in it.

Today’s meditation, an odd one but born perhaps of crossing the continent. America as a classroom. At the front, the smart kids. At the back, the cool kids. Lumpen America in the middle. Picture it as geography: the cool kids go West, are the West, Californian. The smart kids head East, are the East, New Yorkers. And the Jews own both Hollywood and New York. How does this look, from the middle of the class?