Daydreams of Mojave (and The Long and Open Road)

The rain, at first a delicate honey trickle illuminated by the suns descending gaze, grew in its boldness and soon became a steady and all-encompassing deluge that fell from an indifferent sky. We continued our search, riding our motorcycles from campsite to campsite, but were met with a familiar rejection at each. No vacancy. No vacancy. No vacancy. Only rain, and an encroaching darkness that lead both Zack and I to begin fearing that we may be without even humble accommodations for the night. We pulled off into a sprawling gas station complex that hugged the entrance to the park and milled about in a shared frustration as to what we would do next.

It's funny how our concepts for the future never quite unfold in the ways we expect them to. I’m coming to find that nearly all of my life’s adventures have followed a similar script. And yet, as I examine each, one by one, I am reminded (and comforted) by the fact that they have each turned out to be grander and more rewarding for unfolding in the ways that they ultimately did. It’s almost as if providence, serendipity, or whatever you want to call God, has a hand in the unravelling of our own personal stories and adventures.

It makes me wonder, what does that say about our anxieties if our conscious designs and plans are almost guaranteed to unfold in ways that are different than our mammalian imaginations prophesize.

But enough about anxiety. This is a story about motorcycles, and mine in particular. Her name was Mojave, and she was a beautiful machine. It was one of those creations that lead one to consider the possibility that Man had been crafted by Gods hand for the sole purpose of assembling its parts.

I remember the day I bought it. I was stationed at Camp Pendleton at the time, and my friend Zack had recently purchased himself a slick Sportster. After hearing him talk at length about the romance of his rides, I was sold, and had to get one for myself. As was the style of my youth, I got in over my head quicker than I could say traumatic brain injury and I homed in on a bike on Craigslist that was way too powerful for a first-time rider.

“They’ll sure hear ya coming, and that’s a safety feature in itself,” I remember Zack saying confidently.

It was as 1600cc Harley Softail and it hummed like a cheetah. I remember sitting on it for the first time and feeling the heavy vibration of the engine reverberate up my spine. I rolled back the throttle and everything became nothing but crisp American Rumble. God have mercy...

I took out a loan that I had no business taking out and purchased the bike even though I still didn’t know how to ride it. Zack rode it home for me while I followed behind in my Jetta, which left a considerably less imposing impression upon my senses.

Thankfully, though, I wasn’t the first young man in the Marine Corps to get such an idea, and the Corps made it mandatory that any Marine that purchase a motorcycle undergo a week-long motorcycle training course on base. It was an invaluable experience and I very well might have ended up on the side of a road someday if it wasn’t for that class. With its conclusion, I at last added the coveted ‘M’ on the endorsement block of my drivers license.

On the weekends Zack and I took to zipping around the area like we were running from something terrible chasing us. We rode like a pair of toddlers possessed through the streets of Escondido, Temecula, Oceanside, Fallbrook, Carlsbad, San Marcos, etc, and in private company we called ourselves the Devils of Escondido. All we were missing were the leather jackets. Personally, I blame classic rock, as the Bluetooth speakers in my helmet and the music that I played while riding were likely bad influences upon my decision making. But goddamn, if ‘Money’ by Pink Floyd isn’t a jam while riding a hog.

Now cruising around the gentle streets of Southern California was fun and all, but it wasn’t the reason I had bought the motorcycle. I had dreams of long hauls through the mountains and riding along ridgelines that overlooked vistas that would take anyone’s breath away.

But so far, I had only ridden through the community side streets as I hadn’t yet the need to ride on the freeways. And if I was being honest with myself, I was afraid to do so. Anyone that has ever had the displeasure of navigating the category five rapids that is the I-5 or I-15 of SoCal knows exactly what I’m talking about. If not, envision a five-lane freeway constantly in rush hour with half of the cars piloted by blind muskrats while the other half are competing amongst themselves to beat the land speed record. It’s madness with a view.

And that alone kept me and Mojave tied to the immediate area for some time, that is, until one late Friday afternoon when a wild hair grew inward instead of out, weaseled its way into my skull, and whispered sweet nothings to my frontal lobe. “You should ride up to Santa Barbara tonight”.

“That’s a great idea, wild hair!” I said in reply. I had a cousin up in that direction that was reliably good company, and so I strapped on two jackets (thinking that that would protect me), and hit the road. At first, the freeway wasn’t as bad as I had imagined it to be, but the higher speeds certainly were fear inducing. But that fear was a good thing. It likely kept me alive to tell this story to you now.

But by the time I hit Dana Point, all five lanes bottled up into a utter standstill. I might have waited in line, but it was getting late and I didn’t want to be riding in the dark for any longer than was necessary. Plus, lane splitting was legal, and I had likely placed an unreasonable amount of emphasis on what some of the car’s occupants might have thought of a motorcyclist not taking advantage of the open bike corridor between each lane. And so, on my first freeway adventure, I leaned left and split the lanes to begin sliding past a thousand cars per minute as the sun began to set on the western horizon.

All went well for the first handful of miles, until suddenly, I leaned a little too far to the right and BAM! The right edge of the throttle smacked a rear-view mirror. I hesitated for a split second, then ripped down on the throttle and accelerated away. I’m sure that the mirror had simply collapsed in on itself as they’re designed to do in such circumstances, but regardless, it is scared the life out of me in the moment. An inch further to the right and the mirror would have snagged the handle and pulled me to the asphalt in a fury. Thankfully that wasn’t the case.

The hours went by and I eventually made it to Santa Barbara unscathed. The visit was worthwhile, as were all of my visits to see cousin Chris. The following day I made a relatively uneventful trip back to Camp Pendleton, this time without splitting any lanes, and for better or worse, my fear of riding on freeways and highway diminished quickly after that.

I began to feel a growing itch to tackle the ultimate beasts of my romantic designs. So, Zack and I began planning a trip to Yosemite for the upcoming Forth of July weekend. Now, if we had done a halfway respectable job of actually planning the trip, we would have likely reserved a campground... Or a hotel.... Or anything!! But our “planning” likely involved only which routes would be the most scenic and what hand signals we would come to use while communicating on the highways.

Come the day of the trip, the first four or so hours of the ride northwest toward Muir’s granite playground were a slog to say the least. It was a hot day, and I came to understand why so many motorcycles have windshields. Mojave, of course, didn’t offer such protection (I thought it diminished the aesthetic of the bike) and the wind pressing against my chest oriented me to the harsh realities of aerodynamics. For four straight hours my hands grew numb as I gripped heavily onto the handlebars while the bike flirted with 80 mph.

We took the 15, 215, and eventually the 395 that ran parallel alongside The Sequoia National Forest, The Golden Trout Wilderness, Mount Whitney, and the John Muir Wilderness respectively. ‘The Wall’ was the soundtrack to much of that portion of the ride, with cascading mountain ranges rising into unseen glories on our left while long unspeaking deserts drug on forever to our right. The vast difference between our separate peripheries was both utterly uncanny and vertigo inducing while the wind continued to push on my chest and the engine continued to purr.  

You see, the underlying beauty of riding a motorcycle on the open highway boils down to the vast exposure that you come to sense flowing all around you. In contrast to driving a car, where you are within a cage and embrace a degree of separation between yourself and the world through which you travel, the motorcycle rider comes to feel as if he is gliding unencumbered through the unbridled and wide-open spaces of the world.

You come to know those spaces in a more personal manner in such circumstances.

And to me, lucky, lucky me, those wide-open spaces just so happened to be the American West, specifically the Eastern curvature of the Sierra Nevada mountains. While doing so, I came to feel as if I were speaking with God every time I looked to my left, to my right, and when I felt the painful numbness in my fingers. It penetrated everything that I came to touch and know in those fleeting moments of sudden clarity, and when I came to marinate and examine those thoughts as if to dissect them, they would disappear like a fading dream, and I would look up to see Zack pulling off onto a rest stop at the next exit.

Now like I said, we didn’t exactly plan meticulously for our visit to Yosemite. We figured that we would let serendipity guide us, and we would find a place to camp wherever it’s whims saw fit. And so, as we began to approach the park, we began stopping at each campsite within 50 miles of the park’s entrance hoping to stumble upon a vacant campsite for us to settle into.

But each and every site that we visited was at max capacity. I remember one site manager laughing us out of his office in a thick Jersey accent. “On Fourth of July weekend? Are you insane?! Hey Tony, get a load of this guy,” he yelled across the room as we walked back to our bikes with our tales between our legs.

And so it went for hours. And then the rain came, just as the sun started its flirtation with the western horizon. Things were looking dim, and Zack and I pulled into the same gas station complex where this story began.

We got ourselves some gas station burritos and sat around, not quite sure of what to do next. The rain continued on, it was getting dark, we were 400 miles from our homes, and we hadn’t even a car to sleep in. In a last-ditch effort, Zack approached the cashier to ask if she had any leads on campsites nearby that might be willing to offer us some respite from our predicament. She said that although she didn’t know of any official campsites with vacancy, she had heard of an off-the-grid campsite down the road that some locals had mentioned in passing. All she could say was that it was down the road a couple of miles, and to look for a single lane dirt-road turn-off into the brush.

And so, we got back onto our bikes and followed the bread trail that she had laid out for us. And sure enough, two miles down the road in the direction of the park, a narrow dirt road led off into the darkness of the forest. Now, if this were a horror story (maybe it will be some day), this is where things would turn precarious. But not in the true story of this telling. This time, we followed the road, and found that it led to an utterly gorgeous and uninhabited campsite beside a creek that gurgled just beyond.

We dismounted our steeds and examined our surroundings in disbelief. It was truly providence incarnate, or whatever you want to call it. The rain stopped too, and we began to unravel our effects and pitch our tents for the night to come.

But then, just as we were preparing to settle in for the night, the sounds of an unknown motorcycle approaching threatened to upend our utopian circumstances. Indeed, a lone motorcycle rolled into the campsite. Its engine ceased as it parked a short distance away, and the rider dismounted slowly. Zack and I stood anxiously by, and I even considered reaching for my knife in its sheath nearby. But I decided not to, and instead waited to see what the rider would do. He took off his helmet, and called to us in a friendly albeit heavy Russian accent, “Hello friends! I’ve been searching for a place to camp. Might I share this camp with you?!”

And so, a night of jovial cultural exchange ensued as Zack and I contributed the Jameson and Jack from our Harleys while Oleg pulled Vodka from his BMW. And as we stared into the thousand billion stars that came to replace the clouds that had at last departed, I came to feel lucky that we had let serendipity plan our trip and our humble accommodations for the night. We couldn’t have done it any better ourselves.

Mojave and I went on a handful of other similar adventures together. We camped in Borrego Springs, circumnavigated the Salton Sea, visited Lake Bartlett, and cruised along the beachside in Oceanside more than a few times. The following year, as I was preparing to leave the military, I decided to sell the bike to make room in my debt ceiling for music making equipment. It was a sad day when I signed it over to another young rider, but I was glad to do so with my head still attached and the memories that it had given me.

I doubt I’ll ever get a bike again. I’ve come across too many riders face down in the street to see past the dangers anymore, and my wife Mary has a firm grip on the veto card. But nonetheless, every once in a while when I roll down the window in my (new) Jetta on a particularly beautiful day, I think back to the crisp rumble and fear that dovetailed like rain and sunset on the Eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.