Weeks 56-57 - Chiriaco Summit, Phoenix

Getting out of Los Angeles took a while but it was easier than I expected. I got right on the interstate, but traffic was light and the speed limit was 45 so I could actually keep up with it. As I cleared the outskirts, there were fewer lanes and the speed limit ratcheted up to 70, but having a vague impression that California cops were sticklers for the law, I stayed in the rightmost lane rather than riding the shoulder. Traffic became pretty heavy and included more tractor trailers than I'd seen so far. After a while a highway patrolman pulled me over. We established that it was technically legal for my motorcycle to go on the interstate, but he pointed out that I was disturbing the flow of traffic, and that it might be better for me to use the shoulder. With official permission granted, I did just that, and it certainly felt safer although not particularly pleasant. Apart from the turbulence of passing trucks and the boring scenery, the shoulder was littered with debris of all kinds, and I had to put a lot of effort into spotting and dodging it. But I made it to my chosen stop at Chiriaco Summit without further incident. What drew me there originally was the free campground, but from the map I could see there was also a restaurant, a museum, and a trailhead to Joshua Tree National Park. When I rolled into the campground a little before sunset, there was nobody else there but the host. He asked if I was planning to stay for more than one night, in which case I needed to register, and although my original plan had been to continue on to Phoenix in the morning, the place felt nice enough to stay longer.

I wound up staying for three nights, which turned out to be a great decision. During the day I worked from camp, with my tarp pitched as a lean-to for shade, one corner held up by Sugar and the other by my single tent pole. It blew down a lot in the wind until I finally managed to secure it sufficiently. Down the road was the gas station, with a convenient water tap outside, and across the street from that was the diner. The food was generic diner fare with some Tex-Mex options, but its best feature was a lovely outdoor patio surrounded by shade trees and big potted plants, with a large altar to some incarnation of the Virgin Mary in one corner strewn with offerings of flowers and coins. A burbling fountain completed the peaceful oasis atmosphere, and I really enjoyed all my meals there. On Monday afternoon I went to the museum, which is dedicated to General George Patton, who founded the Desert Training Center nearby to prepare tank crews for the harsh conditions of North Africa in World War II. I learned a lot from the exhibits, and got to wander around the numerous tanks parked outside. On Tuesday afternoon I decided to hike into Joshua Tree National Park to the Lost Palms Oasis. The trail followed the remnants of an old dirt track, then gradually climbed through a wide wash that became narrower and narrower until the only way forward was to scramble up a cascade of massive granite boulders. It was challenging enough that I almost turned back, especially after slipping and scraping my leg a little. But I decided to push on, and was rewarded with the sight of big palm trees springing up from rocky ravines, their old fronds hanging down around them like ankle-length grass skirts. The slanting golden light of late afternoon picked out the contours of the outcroppings overhead and created a vast sense of space. I stopped to eat a snack and headed back down, and luckily the going was much easier because I found ways under a lot of the boulders I'd climbed over or around on the way up. As I reached the bottom of the wash, the sun was setting behind a nice bank of clouds, the first really colorful sunset I'd seen in the desert. By the time I got back to camp it was nearly dark and my feet were sore, but I'd seen big-eared desert rabbits, running birds, and hyperactive ants, and learned the names of a few trees like the Jerusalem thorn with its striking green bark and the desert willow with its fragrant blossoms.

On Wednesday morning, after breakfast at the diner, I decided to make the push to Phoenix. The morning's ride was uneventful, and about 100 miles from my destination I stopped for lunch at a remote exit with just a truck stop, a tire shop, and a taco truck. As I was getting back on the road, the steering felt a little strange, and when I stopped the bike to inspect, it turned out the rear tire had lost a lot of air. I pulled out four staples that had done the damage, but to stop the leak I had to fix the tube, which required taking off the back wheel, which required removing all my luggage. Trying to work quickly in the hot sun, I got everything pulled apart, then decided to install my spare tube, since the old one was punctured in so many places that patching was going to be iffy. An Arizona highway patrolman stopped to tell me that being on the shoulder by myself was dangerous, as if I was there for pleasure. But eventually I got everything back together and was back on the road. Now I was going to need to make good time to reach Phoenix by dark, but it seemed possible. Then, just a few miles down the road, as I was passing a rest stop that was closed for construction, I heard the sound of sheet metal going under my wheels, and seconds later the steering went rapidly out of control and I hit the pavement at something like 40 miles per hour.

I got up, switched off the engine, and checked for injuries, but the combination of a light bike and good safety gear had worked wonders. My left glove was worn through and one of my elbow pads was showing its guts a little, but I myself had gotten away with only the tiniest of scrapes on palm, elbow, and knee, and, as I later learned, a painless bruise on my hip with a waffle pattern from the inside of the pad. I picked up the bike, saw that the back tire was completely flat, and pulled a 2.5 inch sheet metal screw out of it, which had gone in so deep it hit the inside of the rim and bent. Someone must have reported the incident, because two more highway patrolmen rolled up to make sure I was okay. After they left, I inspected Sugar for damage and it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. A piece had cracked out of the plastic headlight bucket, the road had grated several holes in the left side of my luggage, and the front mudguard was bent but easily straightened out by hammering on it with a rock. There was nothing to prevent me from riding except the flat tire, but it seemed clear I wasn't getting to Phoenix by dark. I rolled the bike off the road to a flat place between the shoulder and a chain link fence and weighed my options. The rest stop was closed to cars so I wasn't likely to be able to hitch a ride in a pickup. Truckers were still using it but they generally weren't allowed to carry passengers and few had a good place to carry a motorcycle anyway. I went over and talked to the construction workers, but none of them were going to Phoenix because they were all sleeping on site. I looked up a motorcycle towing service in Phoenix and gave him a call. He said he already had a lot of calls in and might not be able to make it out until the next day, but at least I had a fallback plan in case I couldn't fix the problem myself.

I spent the rest of the daylight hours trying to get one or the other of the tubes to hold air. A lot went wrong, including pinching a tube while installing it, failing to patch properly, and finding another staple that I'd somehow missed which made multiple small punctures right next to a seam. I did learn a lot of little techniques and got much quicker at putting the wheel on and taking it off. I sweated a lot and ran out of water, but luckily there was a spigot at the rest stop. By the time the sun went down I had a tube that I thought might just hold air, even though in one place it had one patch on top of another to seal that leaky seam. Feeling a bit downcast, I called my friend SE in Montana for some support, and she reminded me that the journey I was on was really a spiritual one, and my apparent mistakes and setbacks weren't of much consequence as long as I could learn to love myself through it all. As we were talking I watched a storm roll in, lightning flashing a few miles out in the desert. I got off the phone and tarped over everything as best I could in the stony ground. The weather report said the storm cell might contain hail, torrential rain, and 55 mph winds, and I watched the radar closely to try and see which way it was headed. Hadn't there already been enough challenges for one day? Miraculously, the menacing clouds passed slowly by on either side of me, while all the while I could look straight up and see stars. I made my bed next to Sugar and slept better than I thought I would between the lights and noise of trucks passing on either side of me, rushing past on the highway or pulling slowly into the rest area.

First thing in the morning, I inflated the tire. It reached 26 psi and held steady, with no hissing. Half an hour later it hadn't lost any pressure, so I mounted the wheel back on the bike and was just adjusting the back brake when I heard a sudden hiss and it went flat. I was disappointed that one of my patches had failed, but also relieved that I hadn't been riding when it did. I'd done all I could and it was time to call for help. When I called the tow guy again, he said he had five jobs in front of me and wouldn't be able to get out until the afternoon. Apparently with the weather cooling off a bit, lots of people were riding for the first time in months and maybe found out the hard way about that rat that had been chewing on the wires or whatever. I told him no problem, wheeled my bike around the fence to a good pickup spot at the rest area, moved my luggage under the shade of a tree, and sat down to work for half a day. Having plenty of food and water, sun, shade, internet, and help on the way, I was quite content. When the tow guy arrived, he had a really neat truck with a platform that lifted off and sat down flat on the ground to load, then returned to the truck bed once the motorcycle was secure. We had a great conversation on the way to Phoenix, and he even called a friend at a motorcycle shop near my hotel to see if they would help me out and give me a discount. He dropped me off at the hotel and I managed to check in just before they started to give rooms away to people on the waiting list. When I got my bags up to my room, I started to feel how tired I was. After two days of hiking, riding, crashing, and fixing, I was definitely going to need a rest.

Luckily I was in a great place for motorcycle maintenance. I went to Nash Powersports, which was in walking distance of my hotel, but they only had one tube of the size I needed, and referred me to Screwie Lewie's, which was a bus ride away (free like in LA), but was able to sell me two very heavy duty tubes, a bottle of Ride-On (which balances the wheel and seals punctures), and a new set of tires which would arrive the next week from their California location. I decided to go with street tires this time, because they would last longer and the vast majority of my riding was on pavement anyway. On Saturday I went on a sort of pilgrimage to Bob's Used Motorcycle Parts, the largest motorcycle salvage yard in the country, which was in walking distance of my hotel. When I got there an older man behind the counter asked what I was looking for. "You can find the CT90s in the third yard," he said, "but they've been pretty picked over by now." I followed his directions to the third yard and found a large cluster of CT90s from many years in red, yellow, and orange. He was right, they'd been picked over pretty well, and what parts weren't stripped off the frames tended to be fairly damaged by wrecks, electrical fires, sun exposure, and rust. I'd decided to look for one of the silicon rectifiers that Honda started using in '72. Although I didn't strictly need one, since the modern unit I got online was working okay, having something to look for made it into more of a fun treasure hunt. I was also looking for a new mirror to replace the one that got smashed, which might come from any kind of bike, but they were few and far between, being such a fragile part. After I'd looked over the third yard without finding anything, I wound my way through the other two as if I were in a museum of models from many makers, styles, and eras. With five acres of bikes, there was plenty to explore, much of it along narrow weedy paths where I had to step carefully over obstacles. Gleaming chrome exhaust tubing was stacked into intestinal piles, and racks of two-stroke expansion chambers looked like metal stomachs. As I was wandering aimlessly, a distinctive yellow frame caught my eye, and it turned out to be a lone CT90 separated from its flock. I dug into the electrical box and sure enough it had just the rectifier I wanted, a little muddy but otherwise in good condition. I removed it with the toolkit in my backpack and brought it inside to pay for it. The special thrill of finding a treasure among piles of junk!

I took Sunday as a day of rest, and over the remainder of the week I worked from nearby parks and explored the local restaurants, like a fried chicken joint with Kool-aid "on tap", a Japanese-Latin fusion restaurant, and several excellent Mexican places. My tires came in and I spent some time repairing and upgrading Sugar. The new tubes and tires felt far sturdier than the old ones, which was reassuring. I wasn't about to take any more chances with blowouts. I also ordered and installed some unbreakable mirrors, bent the mud-guard back into something resembling its original shape, and covered the hole in the headlight bucket with a piece cut from a red plastic canister I found on the side of the road, which originally contained masks for children. When cut out and glued on, the superheros printed on the side formed a kind of abstract design reminiscent of a Hawaiian shirt print. Sugar was no longer the pristine-looking collector's item that I'd bought in Montana, and somehow that made me feel more attached. Maybe it was also that we'd been through something together and survived.

Things I Learned

• There's a conspiracy theory that George Patton, who died shortly after the European victory from an injury sustained in an apparent car accident, was actually assassinated, complete with a tell-all by one of the supposed killers. It does seem like some people would have liked to keep him out of post-war politics, as he tended to follow his own path. The museum had a wall of Patton quotes and one of my favorites was: "If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."
• A little bit of lubricant around the bead of a tire makes it way way easier to get on and off the rim.
• Arizona is a good place to find rugged tubes and tires because they have so many things to puncture them: spiny seeds they call goatheads, sticks covered in two-inch thorns, sharp rocks, and so on. "Everything out here is dangerous," said the guy at the shop.

Wonderful Things

• A tiny hummingbird sipping from the flowers of a desert willow in the twilight.
• Finding green sprouts springing up from the desert sand and gently easing off the seed cases that were holding their two little leaves together. It's not too often you get a chance to help out a wild plant.
• Finding a meal I liked so much that the waitress started asking "same?" when I sat down.