From: steve@bucolix.ece.ncsu.edu (Steve Garnier)
Subject: Aged Ambrosia Rev.5
Reply-To: steve@bucolix.ece.ncsu.edu (Steve Garnier)
Organization: North Carolina State University
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 14:53:40 GMT

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Y'know folks, it just keeps gettin' better.  What follows
is unedited, unabridged, unadulterated brucer.  Enjoy.
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From: brucer@druwy.ATT.COM (RobinsonB)
Newsgroups: rec.motorcycles
Subject: Anecdote #4
Summary: wherein brucer whigs out in the desert southwest
Date: 19 May 89 17:58:46 GMT
Organization: AT&T, Denver, CO
 
There is a timelessness pervades the desert southwest.

Motorcycles kept out of the sun last seemingly forever.
It's dry, there is no salt in the air, and except for Phoenix,
the air carries few toxic pollutants or corrosives.
The Arizona "Cycle Trader" is replete with ancient iron,
all allegedly in "great" condition.

Riding the open desert highway is an ethereal trip.
There is little distraction; scant traffic, few radar traps.
The roads are good, the speeds are high, the ride is magic.
Your spaces within, cramped and warped by days and weeks and
months and years of offices and commuter-packed freeways,
expand and explode and empty into the spatial infinity of
the desert.  Schedules and clocks and the tense little
frantic beta-rhythms of get to work, perform, get home,
socialize, sleep, get to work, perform, and on and on,
fracture and dissolve and vanish in the desert wind,
and leave behind silence and speed and only this moment.

I was on Norton out of San Rafael in Marin.  We had battered
our way out of the city, across the bay, through Sacramento,
out highway 50, over Echo Summit, and were just starting down
the other side. Me and Norton were clipping along pretty good,
leaned into an outside left sweeper when a California Highway Patrol
officer, passing an old red pickup truck from the other direction,
decided to occupy my little piece of road.  All in a day's work,
my friends.  I put Norton's tires on the paint strip at the right
edge, looked straight ahead, ignoring the yawning chasm beneath
my right boot, flipped the chippy a birdman salute, and just
rode it out.

A few miles later we pulled over onto a dirt road, bashed a few
miles into the wilderness, and threw down for the night.
I jerked the plugs and examined them under the magnifying glass,
made a note in Norton's log book that at that altitude we were
running a bit rich, then made supper on soda-pop, horse-cock,
and cheese.  Into the sleeping bag, feet pointed east by south-east,
to watch the show; that awesome parade of stars and satellites.
The next morning, brush teeth, breakfast on orange juice and
cheese, preflight inspection on Norton, then back in the saddle,
down that high-speed twisty into the desert below.

When I was young and stupid, I used to think that all hunters
were bad.  Now I know that some people are bad, and that some
bad people are hunters.  We had just turned south onto 395, just
getting up to the top of second gear, when yet another pickup truck
heading north, carrying a couple of bad hunters, came abreast.
With a great big shit-eating grin on his face, the driver leveled
what looked like a 45 caliber revolver right at my head and
pulled the trigger.  Kaboom, the sound of that gun going off has
echoed in my mind for the past 15 years.  Fortunately I had pulled
the trigger about a half second before he did, and Norton shot me
out of the line of fire, and man, we ran like a scared rabbit,
and there's no pickup truck made that could've caught up for a
second shot.

Don't ask did I report the incident to the police.
Shit, a goddamned cop had tried to kill me just a day earlier.
I have come to believe that I am not welcome in the state of California.

Highway 395 is one of my favorite roads for just easy cruising.
Spend the whole day just loafing along taking in the views.
Whenever I'm running up or down that road, I always stop in two places.
One is Convict Lake, where I went with my grandparents every year from
the time I was three, to fish for trout and scuff around looking for
arrow heads and pieces of obsidian.  My other stop is nowhere.
I guess everywhere is somewhere, actually, but there's nothing
and nobody around this place to tell you where it is.
Heading south on 395, about 300 miles out of Tahoe, this place
is a little ways before you get to the intersection of 395 and
highway 58, which runs between Bakersfield and Barstow.

Off to the right there used to be a military installation, I think
it was an army radar station, since closed down.  Just past their
front gate there's a road off to the left.  I don't know why it's
there; it's just a sand road the runs along under some power lines.
Probably a service road of some kind.  Two years before, heading north
out of Barstow in a car, I had turned down this road, drove for
exactly three telephone poles, and stopped for lunch.  After a lunch
of soda-pop, horse-cock, and cheese, I smoked a joint (this was when
I was still young and stupid, remember?), then wrapped the roach in a
gasoline credit-card receipt, stuck it under a scrap of two-by-four,
put a rock on the top of the two-by-four, and drove off.  Why?  Hell,
I don't know, but I left it there and drove off and didn't think
about it again.

Until this trip.  I guess I was feeling nostalgic; I turned Norton
down this old sand road, went down exactly three telephone poles, and
there, just like I had left it, under that rock, under a scrap of
two-by-four, was the roach, wrapped in a gasoline receipt.  Well,
I had my lunch of, you guessed it, soda-pop, horse-cock, and cheese,
took a couple of celebratory tokes from that roach, put the old
gasoline credit-card receipt, still legible, back under the scrap
of two-by-four under the rock, and rode off.

You know, I've back to that nowhere place two or three times.
I've even taken Jayne there to marvel with me at the timelessness
of the desert.  That gasoline receipt is still there. It will probably
still be there when the Great Pyramid of Cheeops has been reduced to a
dusty mound of dirt in the sand.  Mute testimony that gasoline
was once 59 cents a gallon.

	66
	 >
	 ^ ...................... brucer
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Steve Garnier - 1979 Yamaha XS1100SF Special with 156,000 miles and *climbing*
DoD #00000005 - KotF (The Daemon's Byte and Keeper of the Flame), NC Chapter
Internet:steve@bucolix.ece.ncsu.edu  UUCP:{?,gatech,uunet}!mcnc!bucolix!steve