Yes – June 18 – not July (Charlotte kindly reminded me that Bastille Day isn’t for another month!) – and we started off with breakfast in an unbeatable eatery, the Elephants Delicatessen in Portland. What a city this is: it’s up there in my estimation with Berlin as a city of comfort & delights. What alas it shares with the rest of America is hopeless road signs; it could be that this is the result of absent-mindedness in town planning offices, but it seems more likely that good old Amurrican xenophobia is shining through the casualness about sustaining road-sign directions. If you don’t already know your way, you’re a stranger; what are you doing here, stranger? Who are you, exactly? An alien, a terrorist, a vagrant? Go back to where you know where you are. Escaping Portland on 84 requires turning down a side-street where there are no lights and no sign to alert you. In the end we did it and were launched on a wonderful ride through the Columbia River Gorge, its waterfalls and forested mountains. The river compares – briefly, for 60 miles or so – with any of the great rivers, more majestic than the Hudson I love so much, and of a grandeur that somehow evokes the ‘metre Columbian’ favored by Longfellow. Abruptly, 70 miles inland, the landscape turns parched and barren, and yields to desert – a kind of moorland, uniformly yellow. After a little over 200 miles, in Washington State now, we found our KOA kampsite, a wilderness of RVs. A far cry from our redwood glade campsite. We sit, mourning the loss of, and feeling utterly spoilt by, our wonderful Portland hosts.

The long straight roads permitted me to dream a little about my monumental novel-project, Where Every Stranger (Is a Ghost). Yesterday’s contemplation of the Ulysses first edition in Powell’s bookstore put me in mind of the celebrated scene in the bar with Stephen, Cranly and others, where Stephen punningly anatomizes the Bard by reference to the plays (triple-punningly maintaining that Will ‘drew Shylock out of his own long pocket’). One of the 5 novels in Where Every Stranger dramatizes a first-ever visit to London by Ann Shakespeare – Joyce compared the effect of Elizabethan London on a provincial to that of ‘corrupt’ Paris (perhaps pre-revolutionary Paris? Or subsequent ones too?) on a later generation of innocent visitors – bearing a dark mission. She is searching for her husband; but her husband is going through a dark period of his own and is not to be found, at least not under his own name. She has come to bring him the news of the death of his only son. Joyce speaks of this, describing the death of Hamnet Shakespeare as seeding the immortality his father summons up for Hamnet’s all-but-namesake. (There’s also the input of the death of Will’s father, but for reasons of his own Joyce’s Stephen is more interested in the effect of the Oedipal trio of Ann, Will, and Hamnet on what was to be the most celebrated play ever penned.)

Bastille Day over, and now Bloomsday over; we’re girding our loins for Idaho, via Washington. Yesterday the Road King’s tail light was replaced, and today its left side rearview mirror. We toured East and North Portland (thriving – lovely neighborhoods full of art stores & cafes with sidewalk tables), had an ice cream at Travis’ workplace, the Cool Moon ice cream store, and walked around Powell’s, the giant bookstore at the heart of Portland. A propos Bloomsday, the rare books room at Powell’s had a 1922 first edition of Ulysses, the celebrated ‘green one’ (I’ve always wondered – did the publisher intend to evoke a murky sea-green, the ‘snotgreen’ sea of the book?), tattered (and not all that rare) but still $1000.00 to purchase. Beyond price (to me at any rate) was an edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, one of a quite beautiful limited edition of 60, with a letter, inside, from General Allenby, T.E.’s former commander, to ‘Nathan Shaw,’ in New York, maintaining Lawrence’s military alias and thanking him for New Year good wishes, which he returned. Embossed on the cover: crossed Arabian swords and between them the jaggedly handwritten motto, ‘The sword also means clean-ness + death.’ Or perhaps ‘in death,’ though it looks like a ‘+’. Lawrence’s handwriting, presumably. And the source (Arabic?), unless it’s T.E. himself?

Returned with Kara and Victor to their home, and picked raspberries growing wild in their yard, always a compulsive pastime ever since I spent summers with John Mills (later Sir John) and family (including little Hayley, whose fame in time eclipsed her father’s) and roamed the fruit cages in their Rickmansworth garden, outside London. When harvesting even the most desirable fruit I’ve always found acquisitiveness overwhelms gluttony (this is not meritorious, and defies common sense), and I can’t eat a single berry, for fear of diminishing the pile I’ll be bearing triumphantly home. Since the picking of the raspberries (now being made into a pie by Sonia), the blessed internet has unlocked the riddle of the T.E.L. cover: the phrase, with the ‘+’ meaning ‘&’ as it did for so long – ‘clean-ness & death’ – comes from one of Lawrence’s letters, talking of the Arab cause. But this is a small step on the road to a true riddle, the identity of ‘S.A.,’ dedicatee of the Seven Pillars. Was it Salim Ahmed, a ‘donkey-boy’ whom T.E. loved? Did it stand for Sword of Arabia? Did it stand for both (Lawrence loved riddles and cyphers)? Much ink has been spilt, as we used to say, on the matter.

Day of rest, in Kara’s ‘closet’, in Portland, Oregon. Perfection. Yesterday Joe mentioned Stephen King, and I raised the matter of how King claims to be unable to recall writing some of his novels, written under the influence of… he doesn’t say exactly what mind-altering substances. I speculated whether it mightn’t be easy enough to forget having written things, including those composed without benefit of drugs. Lying awake this morning I suddenly recalled (for no apparent reason) Pierre Viallet’s obscure, almost-forgotten novel set during Castro’s Havana coup, ‘Juliette, ou L’Insolation,’ which it occurred to me that I might have translated 40 years ago and subsequently completely forgotten. My agent at PLR gave it to me, I remember that much. Turns out that there was an English translation (‘Juliette: Or, Sunstroke’ – the very title and punctuation I’d’ve chosen) but nowhere can I find the translator’s name. Abebooks, last refuge of the bibliophile, has one copy. $5 + $4 postage. That’s too much, just to find out if you’ve done a Stephen King.

In the first photo, our good friends, Giant (standing, left), better known to the world as Victor, and Kara, third from left, with Esme and Travis, extreme right, two of Kara’s four (the other two, Kieran and Griffin, are at furthest left and furthest right in the second photo), plus two visitors, Sonia Ruscoe, second from left, and Joe (and also Ben, in the second photo, 2nd from left), on a day of NorthWest weather, alternating sun and rain. Sweet peas, and raspberries in profusion, grow in their back yard like weeds; this is the state that bequeaths the rest of the country its grass seed, the greenest state, along with Washington, in the union. There’s always food aplenty at Kara and Victor’s, and people and musical instruments and time to sit and talk – today, at length, about the cellphone culture and the perils technology brings. Travis, most radical of the clan (he owns no phone) nonetheless weighs in against alarmism. Esme, unperturbed by talk of the toxicity of a world of apps, sketches Hitler on her iPad. After brilliant sunshine, the rain begins to fall again. First a thunderstorm, then a hailstorm. This was a good day not to be out on 2 wheels.

A month and 5500 miles into our trip, we set off from Florence, Oregon, in a mild drizzle, which soon gave up and left us heading inland in – at last – a pleasant breeze. No more freezing wind! My left-hand wing mirror gave up the ghost overnight and will no longer stay in any position at all. Enter the gaffer-tape doctor himself. Even gaffer-tape couldn’t entirely solve the problem, and although my right-hand wing mirror is excellent, I don’t want to bike further without a proper left-hand one, which Portland will provide – after I’ve spent about 36 hours in the prone position, a much needed rest. Kara and Victor’s house is gloriously full of young persons – 5, in fact – and food, and sweet peace, in what seems like an exceptionally lovely city on first sight. Rather thorough first sight, because I got lost (which I mercifully don’t too often do) and I had to learn to navigate downtown, full of one-way streets, before I found my path.

Before reaching Portland we stopped at ‘Coffee It Is,’ an unprepossessing roadside venue next to a Dairy Queen, on Route 18. Inside was a sweet Ali Baba’s cave of local cookery: miniature home-made pies – we ate one between us and brought two to our Portland hosts – and the best lattes, Joe declared, that we’ve sampled anywhere so far. Oregon, so green, so fruitful, revels in the delicious tastes it makes available. Another reason to love Oregon. These surprises, like ‘Coffee It Is,’ have been the joy of the trip, along with the strange folk we meet. They range from the man who insisted that I was Mick Fleetwood (of Fleetwood Mac) and demanded to know what Stevie Nicks had been like in bed (I got a blank stare when I replied, ‘Can you spell ‘narcissistic’?’), to the woman who accosted Joe at a Motel 6, declaring that she was Olivia Newton John and requiring Joe to close his eyes. He did and she gave what Joe says was a very plausible impression of ONJ singing. But although she looked rather like her, she wasn’t Olivia (I rather hoped she might be), come down in the world. That’s Joe’s story and he’s sticking to it.

Well, last night was comfortable, under the redwoods. But extremely cold. Two pairs of socks, long johns and jeans, 4 layers above, woolly hat down to below my eyes. Then 2 sleeping bags, one inside the other. Still perishing. Thinking tonight I might add my gauntlets to keep fingers warm and wear my motorbike helmet (face freezing otherwise). Camping can be wonderful; and motels are expensive; but the downside of very cold camping is: peeing in the night. (Sing to the tune of ‘Strangers in the Night.’) You need to, but you just don’t want to. I forgot to mention yesterday – we saw an (1) elk. This is a pretty feeble fauna count compared to, say, Steve’s African bike trip 5 years ago. But still. The elk was quietly munching, surrounded by cellphone camera-snapping tourists as if it was the Loch Ness Monster.

If last night was cold, biking was even colder, on the gorgeous Oregon coast. In Port Orford we stopped beside the celebrated Battle Rock where the first 9 white settlers held off the native population before slipping away under cover of night. (And returning with 61 more settlers and plenty of guns.) We’ve left the redwoods behind; Joe says he’s over the redwoods now. In Port Orford I was able to phone in to Roll on the Radio on whvw.com, my own usual Saturday gig, and speak on air to my super-sub, Tom Grasso, editor of Roll Magazine, our sponsor. I didn’t like to say so on air but getting out of California into Oregon is like… well, to me California is a species of giant leech. Oregon revives my spirit. A place that gives rather than takes. First thing that happened was that we stopped for gas at a Chevron station and out strode two young men to fill our bikes for us. Nowhere in America have we experienced this blast from the past (nor expected to). Oregon is another planet. Calm, quiet and not devoted to scamming the world and draining its money in exchange for Tinseltown fool’s gold.

5000 miles in, and Joe and I have developed a humorous form of twosome biking: our very different bikes determine it, Joe’s a frisky beast liberated by interesting, twisty curves, mine a tortoise at ease only on dull straightaways. We overtake each other at irregular but frequent intervals. When Joe overtakes me he roars away into the distance until he finally waits up for me to catch up; when I overtake Joe he drops way back to give himself a sporting challenge and see how long it takes him to catch me. Joe agrees: 101 is one of the best designed roads we’ve ever ridden – designed for speed but weaving glorious curves and dallying in small towns. The sight of Oregon logging depots takes me at once to a young Ken Kesey returning home from college in Sometimes A Great Notion, one of the longest and dullest books ever written by a great writer. It could at least have spawned a skin moisturizing cream called Sometimes A Great Lotion. Among my school pals the book was known as Sometimes A Great Motion, for reasons that should not grace a polite blog.