Indian Street Food and Harley Sound

Sometimes you need a good reason to throw a leg over a motorcycle and plot a course. A jaunt to a food truck is one such reason. So on a cold evening, I set out on a ride to find a food truck that would serve up chaat. My Apple map shows at least four, so I pick one and ride several miles on the Lawrence Expressway that runs for a couple of miles at a time, between each set of lights—just perfect for cafe racers. 

Cafe racing was a motorcycle subculture that evolved in the early sixties in Britain where rebellious rockabillies raced custom bikes—lightened up with chopped-off fenders and fitted with swept-back pipes and conical megaphone mufflers—between the droopy traffic lights of London. And yes, Triumph motorcycles were at the thick of it.

I turn into Homestead Road and pull up just under a mile from the one-mile circular spaceship headquarters of the most valuable company in the world and about two miles from Homestead High that graduated its iconic founder and most famous student, Steve Jobs. 

At the corner of a convenience store lot, a food truck bears stripes that proudly make up the colors of the Indian flag and stands in the shady swath of a sleepy willow. New Delhi Chaat is its promise and I stop at the counter to check things out. 

A helpful young lady listens patiently as I succumb to the lure of the menu and change my mind several times, even as I remind myself that chaat always renders my eyes bigger than my belly. Payment must be made inside the store, so I step in to hand my card over to the cashier.

We start talking and I find out that he's a Pashtun from the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar—due east of the Khyber Pass on the ancient Silk Road connecting East and West and the conduit for over two millennia of invasions into the Indian subcontinent—from Greeks, Persians, and Turkic-Mongols. Britannia, of course, ruled the waves and took the sea route!

The cashier spoke Pashto and Urdu, unlike his Afghani blood-brothers across the border who speak Pashto and Dari. We talk cricket and that invariably leads to World Cup winning cricket captain and current Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, also a Pashtun.

I walk back out and the girl offers me a hot masala chai—on the house. I clutch it for warmth and watch a Hindi movie playing on a TV screen mounted at the side of the food truck that aims to keep a customer's eyes as busy as their jaws.

I look at the menu again as I wait for my takeout and the dahi batata puri catches my attention. A gear clicks in my brain as I realize I have the perfect way to explain the distinctive sound of a Harley Davidson motor. Here's how it goes.

b-a-T-a-T-a! 

Say that aloud. Go loud on the Ts and stay soft on the As and the B. Try it again and listen to yourself as you speed it up. 

Congratulations! You are now mimicking a four-stroke Harley V-twin engine. 

The aural magic comes from irregular timing: the second T quickly follows the first and there's a gap before it starts over again. That's exactly how Harley twin cylinders fire: unevenly.

The staccato you hear from any motorcycle engine is actually a series of sonic pops that come from puffs of exhaust gas as they get squirted out of the combustion chamber at the end of each cycle. This is the T in the baTaTa. When the pops are evenly spaced, you're listening to a common motorcycle; when they're uneven, you're losing your hearing to a thundering Harley. 

If you have trouble visualizing a piston engine, look no further than down your leg. Imagine riding a bicycle, standing up. Your thigh is the piston and it reciprocates by going up and down. Your knee is the wristpin that turns this into rotary motion and your shank is the connecting rod that delivers this turning motion to the pedal. The pedal spins a crank which drives a chain to rotate the rear wheel. That's exactly how a motorcycle works. 

The difference of course is the power. Since you'd rather slurp dahi batata puri than sip octane, you're condemned to deliver puny human-power, instead of brawny horsepower.

Your legs are also constrained to work so that one thigh goes up when the other goes down, since they are connected to diametrically opposing pedals. A two-cylinder motorcycle engine does not suffer this constraint since each piston is connected separately to the crankshaft that it can independently turn (using its own crankpin). However, they are usually timed to be opposed—when one piston is at the top, the other is at the bottom—to keep forces balanced, vibration minimized, and the rider's gonads intact. 

The pistons in a Harley Davidson V-twin have 45-degrees between them and connect into a single crankpin (imagine a single pedal on your bicycle for both legs), so they are constrained to move together in a manner that one cannot be fully up when the other is fully down. So one cylinder fires shortly after the other and they both wait restively for a while until the next cycle. 

It is this drama that sends baTaTa pops into your ears and rastaman vibrations into your pants. 

That's the Harley way! Just have your children early.

An Observatory Called Lick

This story starts with the improbable James Lick who was born in Pennsylvania in the early 19th century and chased every boy's dream of becoming a piano-maker, in the manner a boy today might want to become a YouTuber: by just doing it. 

Lore has it that he didn't stop there and was tickling something more than mere piano ivories, for he got a mill owner's daughter pregnant and received such a sound thrashing for his impetuosity that it forced him to bail out of the country of his birth and take his skills to the place where his pianos were being bought in large numbers: Buenos Aires. 

Escaping Portuguese imprisonment while returning from a trip to Europe, Lick moved his craft to Chile and then onto Peru to escape political disfavor, before leaving once again to complete an epic arc around the Americas, moving for the last time—along with his piano tools, thirty thousand dollars in gold, and six hundred pounds of Peruvian chocolate—to the little port town of Yerba Buena that would soon change its name: San Francisco. 

Lick was known to be a surly man but his chocolates went over so well with the gold rushers that he decided to open up this opportunity to his buddy back in Lima: Domenico.

That chocolatier Domenico—like his fellow Genoese Christopher Columbus more than three hundred years prior—had similarly set sail across the Atlantic, but with the more prosaic intent of setting up a coffee-and-chocolate business in Uruguay rather than discovering India, before moving that business to Peru and now, responding to Lick's scrupulous market research and audacious proposition, moving it once again along that same epic arc across the Americas that would end up in that town of several hundred by the Golden Gate, where he installed his fledgling chocolate business and bestowed it with his last name: Ghiradelli.

But let's not lose track of the prescient Lick who started buying real estate in that small rechristened town that grew twentyfold in two years when the gold rush really hit, only to double down by entering the hotel business and setting up Lick House on Montgomery Street—the best hotel west of the Mississippi until it would be consumed by the big earthquake of 1906—and then buying even more land far down where his ambitions grew, even as the peninsula ended: San Jose.

Laid down by a stroke and presumably wreaked with introspection, Lick spent his last three years considering how he might spend his considerable fortune, giving up the idea of erecting a pyramid in his own honor in San Francisco that would be larger that the Great Pyramid of Giza and opting instead to fund a mountaintop observatory with the largest telescope ever built by man, that would be installed in his name atop the tallest mountain in the entire bay area: Mount Hamilton.

So what has all this to do—you may rightfully ask—with what you came here to read: Motorcycle monologues?

Well, the Lick Observatory is my destination and I leave early in the morning so I might ride across the entire city of San Jose in minimal traffic before joining up with the serpentine route 130, constructed exactly over the same track laid down almost a century and a half ago to convey building materials, cement, and presumably large refracting telescope parts across twenty miles and three hundred and sixty five curves and switchbacks, but with a slope never exceeding six degrees so it may comfortably be ascended with the best propulsion of the time: Horses.

My ride today is tougher than usual, the challenge having less to do with the terrain and more with the punishment meted out by the rising sun that flashes sharply and unexpectedly between the countless turns and tall trees on the mountain road, taunting my vision and rendering futile my sunglasses and visor, for my ride this morning—unlike recent others—has put me in a new direction: East.

Pointing the motorcycle at the large white dome of James Lick's largesse, I reach the summit a bit before nine, park the bike under the Olde Astronomers Dining Hall and dismount with that urgent singular intent that yearns for privacy, only to spot a lone cyclist rubbing his hands to bring some warmth into the cold morning and gently shifting his feet with that powerful suggestion of identical intent, before he looks at me to allow our eyes to confirm exactly what our bodies seek: a Bathroom.

There are many households at the summit for the astronomers doing duty, with explicit signs reminding visitors to lower their tones but not their zippers, for daytime is when their denizens sleep and the neighborhood is where their children play, when they are not attending that single-roomed institution that shuttered as recently as 2005, after operating for well over a century: The Mount Hamilton School.

The steep driveway to the observatory is blocked off by a locked gate that will only open at noon and just as I accept the utter disappointment of that last-mile denial and prepare to dolefully ride back down the mountain, a staffer appears in a white pickup truck and warmly agrees to open up the gates, allowing the two of us to ride up to use the bathrooms and soak up the spectacular views that—on a clear day like this one—can sweep 270 degrees counterclockwise from due north to due east: Mount Diablo to Yosemite National Park, arcing through the valley of Silicon.

A dozen riders wearing blue Viet Cycling Team jerseys arrive red-faced and panting at the end of the unrelenting six-degree climb to the summit that has taken them almost three hours from the crack of dawn and I chat with a few of them and take some group photos while getting recommendations for restaurants in Vietnam Town in San Jose—the city with more Vietnamese residents than any outside Vietnam—where I plan to stop for my favorite type of sandwich: Banh Mi.

About an hour's ride later, I stare down at a long banh mi that starts with a baguette derived from that country's French colonial past and stuffs it with tofu, mushrooms and avocado instead of Vietnamese pork, as a concession to veg-friendly California, then adds cucumber slices, coriander, pickled radish and carrots in a spicy chili sauce to deliver that perfect amalgam of western bread filled with eastern zing, that I now send down with sips of plain water, for I have declined that thick brew where an ultra-bitter decoction would feud in my palate with super-sweet condensed milk: Vietnamese coffee.

The Fame and Infamy of La Honda

The Younger Gang—outlaws and co-conspirators of the infamous Jesse James—once hid out here, presumably with their stash. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters lived communally in a redwood cabin here where they held their light-and-sound psychedelic LSD-fueled parties, seeking to expand the consciousness of mankind. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—chronicle of the roots of the hippie movement and among the best-cited works of the New Journalism style—got its raw material here. The Grateful Dead played here. Which means the Hell's Angels rode in on their thundering motorcycles. Hunter Thompson and Neil Young lived here too.

I'm in La Honda—a tiny forgotten mountain town with less than a thousand residents—that I reach around nine on a recent morning. The ride, along Alpine Road, winds west for many miles over long stretches of frequent tight turns through nature preserves and creeks, leaving the motorcycle raucous and impatient in second gear. 

At low gear and speed, a motorcycle gets hot very quickly and will dutifully let your legs know. Early motorcycle engines were air-cooled and depended on metal fins around the cylinders to stick out into the airflow to give up their heat. Then liquid cooling came along using water's superior thermal properties over metal to soak up engine heat. But liquid cooling needs a big radiator up front to dissipate heat from the water itself and that mucks with the aesthetics of motorcycle minimalism. It is for this reason that most Harleys are still air-cooled even as their riders atop are willfully slow-cooked, like the frog in the fable. Harleys also persist with V-twin layouts that puts one unlucky cylinder at the rear and in the hot slipstream of its happier twin ahead. 

Bad science! Bitchin' sound!

I stop at the La Honda Market—the town's only store—with supplies, beverages, and a sandwich counter that looks barren. A man in a blue plaid shirt takes my money and points to the large coffee carafe. 

Tiny 50 oz. bottles of Jack Daniels and Smirnoff stand tidily against each other like soldiers in a parade, ready to move for $2.99 each. A framed old poster on the wall offers a $500 award: 

Wanted Notorious Outlaw—Belle Starr. 

Belle Starr was a rare woman outlaw from the post Civil War period and an associate of many of the notorious Missouri-born criminals, including the Younger Brothers who had moved to La Honda. But she must have lacked their keen bloodlust, for the poster warns us thus: 

"Though not a killer she is known to carry two Pistols and has a reputation for being a Crack Shot!"  

Shot to death at the age of forty-one, Belle Starr lives on in many movies, books, and songs from musicians like Woody Guthrie and Mark Knopfler.

I take my coffee to the small porch outside and settle down on one of the tables overlooking the road. The coffee lid frustratingly lacks an air vent and the enjoyment from the beverage is rudely annulled by my constant anxiety from trying to get at the coffee while fighting a possible spill at every sip. Tired of fighting nature's abhorrence of a damn vacuum, I finally remove the lid and throw it away.

A cyclist pulls up, leans his bike against the rail, and goes in. Two large water bottles sit on the triangular bike frame, like V-twins on a Harley. He comes out with a sandwich and I find a way to start up a conversation. Turns out that he's on an 85-mile bike ride today that will take him across the mountains, to the beach and then back again—which I believe might partially explain why he didn't come out brandishing one or more of them 50 oz. bottles for two-ninetynine apiece. But he makes me curious about the fuel requirements for his arduous trip and so I ask him what he's eating. 

"Ham and cheese is what I usually get, but they are out of it today. Don't know what this one is," he says as he peels back the wrap and digs in. Small semicircular cutouts appear rapidly on the round fat bun that soon disappears. 

We leave together and I'm happy to be the one on the motored bike. He slips his feet into clipless pedals to become one with his bicycle, waves and rides away with striking ease.

I cross the street and walk over to the rustic shack diagonally across. This is Apple Jack's—a roadhouse and watering hole—that has quenched bandits, horsemen, stagecoach travelers, beatniks, bikers, hikers and techies, over 142 years. The facade wears an exhausted droop and the tall redwoods that surround and dwarf it appear to have taken over the responsibility to prop the place up and keep it standing. The saloon still comes alive every weekend with live blues, rock, and country music that floats around, adding bounce to the dusty feet dancing away on the creaky floorboards, before wafting down the mountains and dissipating into the valleys.

I get back on the bike and ride down a narrow side road looking for Ken Kesey's restored cabin, but can't find it. Kesey was supposed to have written parts of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, his first novel, on the bathroom walls and I wonder if they might have been preserved. The road ends at a trailhead leading to the newly created La Honda Creek Preserve and I disappointedly turn the motorcycle around and ride back out. 

I head out north for a few miles on highway 84 to get to the junction with highway 35, marked by the iconic Alice's Restaurant—a building from the early 1900s that was turned into a restaurant in the 50s and proclaims to be "little slice of bliss among the redwoods". Motorcycles and low-slung sports cars fill the irregular lot in the middle of the four-way junction that it occupies. A single retro gas pump with an analog readout gurgles away, in stark contrast with a biker in a mod red-and-white leather suit fueling his fiery red Ducati. 

I turn south onto Skyline Drive and follow the road over the ridge of the mountains for about fifteen miles, before descending down in a flurry of bends.

Newts and Ghost Towns

This morning's ride takes me around the Lexington Reservoir, a few miles from Los Gatos. The Alma Bridge Road runs completely around this waterbody, creeping around its nooks and crannies as it passes trailheads and overlooks. I stop nostalgically by the boathouse of the Los Gatos Rowing Club where my daughter used to row, to look over at the teams pulling furiously in the water.

Lexington Reservoir was created in the early 1950s by damming the Los Gatos Creek in an attempt to replenish the groundwater depleted by the expanding orchards in the county. The reservoir submerged the two towns of Lexington and Alma that had grown to support travel—first by stagecoach and then by railroad—across the mountains to Santa Cruz. 

Lexington was a halfway stop for stagecoaches to take on two extra horses to get over the treacherous mountains and was best known for the grisly 1883 murder of an elderly resident to get at his stashed gold. Gentler Alma ran a large hostel for travelers that amicably served grizzly bear meat.

Since remnants of the ghost towns may still be seen today when water levels are really low, I stop and observe a few times but only see water, eroded banks, and the occasional driftwood bleached out by the sun. 

I pass a sign that reads: Newt Xing. Several species of newts (a type of salamander) are native to the area and come down from the hills in winter to breed in the water. This road cuts right through their migration path and thousands are run over each year. Newts have a lifespan of around fourteen years, long enough that an annual massacre could decimate a local population.

I recall The Ancestors Tale where noted evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins presents the concept of a ring species—a connected series of neighboring populations, stretched around a ring, that can successfully interbreed with their neighbors, until you reach some part of the ring where genetic differences have accumulated sufficiently to make adjacent populations too distantly related to interbreed. I've always found this a breathtaking illustration—almost a proof—of evolution and speciation, that demonstrates across space what is usually enacted over time.

Dawkins had cited a certain species of California newts as an example of a ring species, leaving me wondering if the little guys that cross this road might be able to do it with their neighbors across the mountains.

Riding back though Los Gatos, I see the white tent roofs of the busy Farmers Market and decide to stop by and take a look. 

One of the nicest reasons to ride a motorcycle is the ease of finding parking spots. The bike takes up little space so you could just turn towards the street and back it in between two parked cars. Your exit remains easy. Not sure about the cars. Or you could just park in any no-parking red-zone area and no one really throws a fuming fit. 

Now there are two easy ways to squeeze some extra performance out of a motorcycle, short of turning yourself into a grease monkey and letting loose on the mechanicals. 

Fuel additives is one way. Should you look around, you will find plenty of products: octane boosters, enzyme fuel treatments, fuel system deep cleaners, and hydrocarbon boson actuators. OK, I made the last one up, but you get the idea. No! Higher octane gas does nothing for an engine, unless it is already pinging or knocking. Any engine with a specific compression ratio needs a minimum octane rating to prevent combustion before ignition, due to high compression and heat. Thus high compression engines sip high octane gas. But adding anything above what's asked is about as clever as dropping dollar bills directly into your tank and expecting escape velocity.

There are more scams to part bikers from their money than there are actual bikers. 

A second and simpler path to performance is to fuel up the rider and that's the one I take. I stop by the Mexican stall and stand in line to get a tamale. When asked, I spring for the spicy sauce which I assure you is worth at least one octane upgrade. I sit on a park bench and watch kids and dogs frolic in the morning sun. 

A cute family is sitting in front of me: a boy under two, along with his parents and a grandparent. I wave at the little fellow and despite his mother's encouragement, he doesn't wave back. He's wearing a tiny 49ers Future Draft Pick jersey, his father dons a red Joe Montana shirt, while his mother's got the hat. Like medieval knights, this family is wearing their fealty, although I must admit that from where I sat I couldn't tell what grandma had put on.

The original Forty Niners were lucky gold miners because time had sandwiched them between 1848 and 1850, two dates of considerable significance. The former marked the start of the California Gold Rush, while the latter marked the year California became a state and miners now had to contend with taxes and land rights. Thus the Niners were early enough to avoid competition and could simply stick a pan into a river bed and pull out gold that was theirs to keep.  

So when California got its football team almost a century later, it could have done far worse—than 49ers—to pick out a name that would confer good luck and ample fortune.

No Farmers Market is complete without a stand-up musician and I can hear him now. He's been moving easily across genres and periods. But he's also considerably off-pitch and had he not been standing still, I might have graciously pinned it on the Doppler effect. 

Earlier, he was doing Luis Fonsi's Despacito, then Billy Joel, and now he's singing an unlikely song that I recognize as Land Down Under by an 80s Aussie band called Men at Work. 

My brain associates songs with time and specific people. When I hear Billy Joel's You May be Right, I always think of Amar, my good friend and dorm neighbor, who depended on the Piano Man's tunes to get him through problems sets in structural mechanics. Land Down Under reminds me of quick-witted Murali, a hilarious college mate who played it incessantly and fatefully wound up teaching Down Under for some years. Despacito evokes my older daughter from her senior year at high school, improvising the piano.

I walk over to the musician's tent and see him accompanying himself on a guitar, while a tenor sax stands up on a floor stand. So that was him playing the sax too! Now that takes talent. I chide myself for my prior hasty judgment and drop a dollar into his donation box as a token of my contrition.

I stop by at Great Bear Coffee to get a cup of their proud roast and call it a morning.

A Bridge Worth the Ride

Today's destination: Felton—a town of about four thousand, founded as a logging town in the latter part of the 19th century and nestled away in the Santa Cruz mountains. It serves today as one end of the Roaring Camp and Big Trees Narrow Gauge Railroad whose steam engines from the 1890s still ply tourists up steep grades in the redwood forest.

The fog hangs low this morning. Swishing through it, the motorcycle's windshield becomes a catchment area that traps smoky vapor at the top and coalesces it into tiny rivulets that converge again before rushing down into one large stream at the bottom—a microcosm of how even the world's mighty rivers are born. It also directs some of that mist onto my head and I have to crack open my visor a bit, letting in both the cold mountain air and the rolling boom of the big parallel twin engine. 

Motorcycles are like spirited steeds. They love to be ridden as long as you leave them alone. Just put them in the right stance—speed and lean—and they will take the mountains on their own. Keep messing with the brakes or tussling with the handlebars and they will take the fight to you. This is all easily said but a rider must practice this on every ride, so the two can act as one.

A big sign with a flashing light announces that the road to Big Basin Redwood State Park is closed four miles ahead, thanks to the fires of 2020 that destroyed many magnificent trees, among the largest living things on our planet. I turn left and head south.

A scenic half hour goes by in a continuous blur of advancing trees, broken by isolated mountain homes marked by inescapable blue trash cans standing up like sentinels by the roadside. 

I ride past the Brookdale Lodge that hides a deep history behind its nondescript row of three-storey cabins. I had little idea that, in its day, it hosted the rich and the famous and among its visitors were Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, and Rita Hayworth. Clear Creek passes right through Brookroom—its main dining hall—and President Herbert Hoover loved fishing right off the dining room bridge, perhaps to take his mind off the Great Depression that loomed over his Presidency and ultimately doomed it. The lodge also housed some of the delegates of the San Francisco Conference that resulted in the formation of the United Nations, back in April-June of 1945. 

I make a mental note to stop and poke around the next time.

A few miles before Felton, I turn into a rutted road that leads into a county park. The motorcycle's Pirelli racing tires don't like this one bit and all that love of being ridden starts to fade, as the union of one rapidly begins to turn into a scuffle between two. There's a large green meadow ahead, segregated into three or four small soccer fields. It's Saturday morning—tournament time for little tots.

In the foreground, the Blues are playing the Pinks: teams of young girls about five or six. I drop down the kickstand to lean on the bike and watch for some time. Excitable parents in jackets are huddled on camp chairs by the sidelines, clutching coffee cups that send up wisps of steam. 

"Go Laura!"  "Come on Ashley!"

Watching six-year-olds play soccer is watching Brownian motion in the large. The ball darts around aimlessly and randomly, colliding repeatedly within the forest of short legs, until mere chance brings it near a goal. A plucky little leg might dart out from the melee and tap the ball in, whereupon the field ruptures: "Goooooal!" 

I was a timely witness to one of them and watched about half the parents stand up in lusty cheers. It was the Pinks this time and they promptly secured my loyalty.

In the tiny leagues, there's always that one precocious kid who's way ahead of the others through some combination of skill, flair, size, or sheer chutzpah and runs the ball in circles around the others. I spotted that one girl today in stripped blues, weaving around like a miniature Maradona. A raucous pair sitting right by the sideline clapped at everything she did and I cleverly concluded she must be theirs.

I reach Felton and stop by The White Raven that promises "Peerless Coffee & Tea, family roasted since 1924". I settle down at a street-side table and watch people go by. A Dalmatian shows up, dragging her owner behind. She stops and repeatedly sniffs at my boots, making me genuinely wonder if motorcycle grease and dog poop hit precisely the same sensors inside a dog's prodigious nose. Mindful of a simpler explanation, I turn my boots over just to make sure. The dog bounds along, rams into the next table and drops it, along with several chairs. Her charge pulls at her as he tiredly picks up everything in her wake, with a resignation that can only come from weary habit.

I'm tempted to use my motorcycle analogy to ask him to go along with the beast, rather than try and conquer it. Common sense thankfully prevails and I sip my peerless coffee instead.

I get back on the bike and decide to visit the Felton Covered Bridge, an 80-foot long wooden structure over the San Lorenzo river and a California Historical Landmark. For years it was the roadway to get anything into Felton and now it can only be pedestrians. I meet a father and son and request them to take my photo against the bridge. The kid happily accepts my phone and takes the shot. I wonder if he would have had the same zest had I handed him my old bulky Nikon with its badass lenses and tiny viewfinder. The father asks me if I had come all the way to see their Bridge. I don't have the heart to disagree.

It's time to get back home. I stop and check the status of my recent oil leak. It's holding up, for now. The oil filter on a Triumph screws vertically up into the crankcase right at the bottom of the bike. To replace one without hoisting up the bike is work for a contortionist on the ground—a task I had attempted without any prior circus experience. Without a clear line of sight, I had screwed in a new oil filter on top of the old stuck gasket that I should have first removed, instead of artfully wedging everything tightly and stubbornly inside that tight space. 

The bike now displays its displeasure by leaving a few exasperating oil drops on the garage floor after every ride, not unlike an unhappy and pernicious cat that might deliberately dribble on your plush Turkish rug. Well, that's a problem for another day.

I decide to take a faster route back on Highway 17 that I usually avoid. This is among the most dangerous highways in the state, with a combination of blind curves, sharp banked turns, venturesome deer, critters determined to end up as roadkill, and drivers who imagine they should be drafting like Junior Johnson rather than getting back to their damn coding. 

I ride conservatively, watchful for mistakes and roadway bravado, rolling in home shortly before noon.

Triumphant Men

Riding a motorcycle in the mountains before the sun comes up is a tranquil experience. There's a bit of fog and almost no one around. The bike eats up the road ahead and spits it out behind, past the fat rumble of the exhaust pipes.

I took a motorcycle ride early this morning to the town of Boulder Creek about 25 miles from home. Boulder Creek is a logging town from the late 19th century that was set up with a rail line to transport logs down to the Santa Cruz coast. The town today has just under five thousand residents and five notable citizens, says Wikipedia. When I stopped by a cafe on Main Street, it was about eight in the morning.

A bunch of old timers are sitting on chairs by the side of the road, clutching coffees and talking away the morning. One of them, likely in his eighties, sees me and shuffles up as I get off my Triumph and cap my helmet over the bar-end mirror. With no preamble whatsoever, he starts to describe in great detail the 1965 Triumph 650 that he still owns. 

Over the next few minutes, I would learn how to tell a 1965 Triumph 500 from a 650 by just looking at the cooling fins. Or the mods one can make to the seat and tail to make it look like a flat-track bike. 

I listen patiently. I got time. 

He actually pulls out a print photo of his bike and tells me he bought it new in 1965, along with a 1957 Ford pickup (“the first Ford with the wrap-around windshield,” he insisted) as soon as he came back from the War, which of course was Vietnam. My mind wanders off ten thousand miles for a bit, before I reel it back in and tell him that I was born the year before! He smiles, almost dotingly. 

I'm sitting on a single plastic chair on the street outside Jenna Sue’s Cafe, a tiny warm cafe with five flavors of freshly brewed coffee and eight varieties of bagels, that has somehow managed to stay in business despite Covid and the great fire of 2020 that ravaged this mountain town by the redwood forests. A pleasant girl in her twenties works the counter and another cheerful one handles the register and they might have had something to do with it.

A biker walks up and kicks up the stand of an off-road motorbike that's parked next to mine and is caked with mud. Both bike and rider evoke the wild side.

“That Triumph yours?” he asks.

“Yeah!”

“That’s a good rig.”  

My smile is humble acknowledgment of his good taste. I find out that he lives in the mountains and has come to buy some spare parts. 

"Have a safe ride," I say.

"Keep the rubber side down," he grunts as he starts up and pulls away. A completely bizarre car pulls in to take his place.

One of the Triumph guy's buddies gets up from his group and ambles up to me as I dig into my bagel loaded with way more cream cheese than my poor arteries deserve. He looks a bit like Clint Eastwood, just dialed down a turn or two. Turns out this guy is from the Boston area. I tell him I lived there as well, ages back—in Cambridge, as a matter of fact. This may have loosened his tongue but I wouldn't hasten to assume all credit.

“Let me tell you something about Harvard,” he begins and launches into a long story. Over the next ten minutes, I learn that back in 1971 he had signed up to take a course in Astronomy at Harvard because Carl Sagan taught it. When he showed up to find some other teacher taking up the stage, he realized that Harvard had just fired Sagan, which upset him no end since learning from Sagan was his entire motivation. He still bristled from that wily ivy bait-and-switch.

“Harvard did not deserve Sagan,” he tells me. “He thought differently and that’s one thing you couldn’t do at Harvard! In fact, I knew right away I’d get a B minus in the course because I challenged everything. I once asked if the speed of light was determined by the mass at the Big Bang and they wouldn't answer that." 

He leans forward to drill his next point directly into my skull: "B minus is a flunked score, you know?" 

"Princeton listens to youngsters, Harvard doesn't. They think they know it all,” he finished. 

All done, he walks around his old car and just as he's about to open the door, he retraces back and asks me:

"So, what's your name?"

"Vijay!"

"Veejay?" 

"Yup!"

"I'm Rick."

He walks back around the Mazda and drives away, waving at me. I start to get ready to ride back over the mountains and join my wife and some friends for lunch a few hours later. It’s been some time since we had chaat, so I had put that down as my preference earlier.

The senior crowd near me is breaking up. Time for me to finish my long-cold coffee, get home and read the newspaper before chaat time.