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.