whole coastal country so different from any other mountainous region in America that it brings out the word. Here, a little farther south, is where all our good wine comes from. The hills are somehow tucked and folded differently… exquisitely. The road twists and banks and curlecues and descends and we and the cycle smoothly roll with it, following it in a separate grace of our own, almost touching the waxen leaves of shrubs and overhanging boughs of trees. The firs and rocks of the higher country are behind us now and around us are soft hills and vines and purple and red flowers, fragrance mixed with woodsmoke up from the distant fog along the valley floor and from beyond that, unseen… a vague scent of ocean. —
– How can I love all this so much and be insane? —
– I don’t believe it!
The mythos. The mythos is insane. That’s what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!
And in Aristotle and the ancient Greeks he believed he had found the villains who had so shaped the mythos as to cause us to accept this insanity as reality.
That. That now. That ties it all together. It feels relieving when that happens. It’s so hard sometimes to conjure all this up, a strange sort of exhaustion follows. Sometimes I think I’m just making it up myself. Sometimes I’m not sure. And sometimes I know I’m not. But the mythos and insanity, and the centrality of this… this I’m sure is from him.
When we’re through the folded hills we come to Medford and a freeway leading to Grants Pass and it’s almost evening. A heavy head wind keeps us just up with traffic on upgrades, even with the throttle wide open. Coming into Grants Pass we hear a frightening, loud, clanking noise and stop to discover that the chain guard has become caught in the chain somehow and now is all torn up. Not too serious, but enough to lay us up for a while to get it replaced. Foolish to replace it, perhaps, when the cycle will be sold in a few days.
Grants Pass looks like a big enough town to have a motorcycle place open the next morning and when we arrive I look for a motel.
We haven’t seen a bed since Bozeman, Montana.
We find one with color TV, heated swimming pool, a coffee maker for the next morning, soap, white towels, a shower all tiled and clean beds.
We lie down on the clean beds and Chris just bounces on his for a while. Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.
Tomorrow, somehow, all this can be worked out, maybe. Not now. Chris goes down for a heated swim while I lie quietly on the clean bed and put everything out of mind.
29
In the process of taking stuff out of the saddlebags and cramming it back ever since Bozeman, and doing the same with the backpacks, we’ve acquired some exceptionally beat-up gear. Spread out all over the floor in the morning light it looks a mess. The plastic bag with the oily stuff in it has broken and oil has gotten onto the roll of toilet paper. The clothes have been so squashed they look as if they have permanent, built-in wrinkles. The soft metal tube of sunburn ointment has burst, leaving white crud all over the machete scabbard and a fragrant smell everywhere. The tube of ignition grease has burst too. What a mess. In my shirt-pocket notebook I write down: “Buy tackle box for squeezed stuff” and then add “Do laundry.” Then, “Buy toenail scissors, sunburn cream, ignition grease, chain guard, toilet paper.” This is a lot of things to do before checkout time, so I wake up Chris and tell him to get up. We have to do the laundry.
At the Laundromat I instruct Chris on how to operate the drier, start the washing machines and take off for the other items.
I get everything but a chain guard. The parts man says they don’t have one and don’t expect to get one. I think about riding without the chain guard for what little time is left but that will throw crud all over and could be dangerous. Also, I don’t want to do things with that presumption. That commits me to it.
Down the street I find a welder’s sign and enter.
Cleanest welding place I’ve ever seen. Great high trees and deep grass line an open space in back, giving a kind of village-smithy appearance. All the tools are hung up with care, everything tidy, but no one is home. I’ll come back later.
I wheel back and stop for Chris, check the laundry he’s put in the drier and putt along through the cheerful streets looking for a restaurant. Traffic everywhere, alert, well-maintained cars, most of them. West Coast. Hazy clean sunlight of a town out of the range of the coal vendors.
At the edge of town we find a restaurant and sit and wait at a red and white tableclothed table. Chris unfolds a copy of Motorcycle News, which I bought at the cycle shop, and reads out loud who has won all the races, and an item about cross-country cycling. The waitress looks at him, a little curiously, and then at me, then at my cycle boots, then jots down our order. She goes back into the kitchen and comes out again and looks at us. I guess that she’s paying so much attention to us because we’re alone here. While we wait she puts some coins in the jukebox and when breakfast comes… waffles, syrup and sausages, ah… we have music with it. Chris and I talk about what he sees in Motorcycle News and we are talking over the noise of the record in the relaxed way people talk who have been many days on the road together and out of the corner of my eye I see that this is watched with a steady gaze. After a while Chris has to ask me some questions a second time because that gaze kind of beats on me, and it’s hard to think of what he’s saying. The record is a country western about a truck driver. — I finish the conversation with Chris.
As we leave and go out and start up the cycle, there she is in the door watching us. Lonely. She probably doesn’t understand that with a look like that she isn’t going to be lonely long. I kick the starter and gun the engine too hard, frustrated by something, and as we ride for the welder again, it takes a while to snap out.
The welder is in, an old man in his sixties or seventies, and he looks at me disdainfully… a complete reversal from the waitress. I explain about the chain guard and after a while he says, “I’m not taking it off for you. You’ll have to take it off.”
I do this and show it to him, and he says, “It’s full of grease.”
I find a stick out in back under the spreading chestnut tree and scrape all the grease into a trash barrel. From a distance he says, “There’s some solvent in that pan over there.” I see the flat pan and get out the remaining grease with some leaves and the solvent.
When I show it to him he nods and slowly goes over and sets the regulators for his gas torch. Then he looks at the tip and selects another one. Absolutely no hurry. He picks up a steel filler rod and I wonder if he’s actually going to try to weld that thin metal. Sheet metal I don’t weld. I braze it with a brass rod. When I try to weld it I punch holes in it and then have to patch them up with huge blobs of filler rod. “Aren’t you going to braze it?” I ask.
“No”, he says. Talkative fellow.
He sparks the torch, and sets a tiny little blue flame and then, it’s hard to describe, actually dances the torch and the rod in separate little rhythms over the thin sheet metal, the whole spot a uniform luminous orange-yellow, dropping the torch and filler rod down at the exact right moment and then removing them. No holes. You can hardly see the weld. “That’s beautiful”, I say.
“One dollar”, he says, without smiling. Then I catch a funny quizzical look within his glance. Does he wonder if he’s overcharged? No, something else — lonely, same as the waitress. Probably he thinks I’m bullshitting him. Who appreciates work like this anymore?
We’re packed and out of the motel at just about check-out time and are soon into the coastal redwood forest, across out of Oregon into California. The traffic is so heavy we don’t have time to look up. It’s turning cold and grey and we stop and put on sweaters and jackets. It’s still cold, somewhere in the low fifties, and we think winter thoughts.
Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat and when we checked out
