Yesterday a longtime Internet friend who’s doing a cross-country trip from Vermont arrived at noon on his fully packed old Harley, and so we went to lunch at Café Trieste in Sausalito and I escorted him over toward Highway One up Bolinas Road from Fairfax. We rode through the Mt. Tamalpais foothills growing dryer and more golden with the summer drought, up and down and around and by lakes and trailheads through fields and redwoods and madrones and manzanitas. It was a gorgeous day, we kept shedding jackets and vests and headscarves as we made our way from the cool, breezy bay into the inland heat. As we corkscrewed our way into the wilderness it was fun to witness someone seeing his first redwood trees and admiring the amazing region I live in. Joe is from Vermont and he emailed me years ago, horrified that I had missed riding through New England on my American Borders trip, and has cooked up a plan to take a group from Vermont up to Newfoundland next summer and I hope I can go, then he’ll be remembering and I’ll be taking it in all anew.
We turned left on Ridge Road to ride up to the East Peak parking lot, the end of the road for vehicles, but you can walk a hundred feet up a trail and get to the top of this sacred mountain to admire the view, or say your prayers or to wonder what it looked like when the Miwok Indians lived here thousands of years ago or just to say you’ve been there.
I’d walked up to the top of the mountain the week before in a circumambulation starting at Muir Woods on the Dipsea Trail. It was a ritual Buddhist meditation walk, a tradition begun in 1965 by beat poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Whalen. We stopped many times at prescribed points to recite the sutras and some poetry and to ring bells and blow a sacred Tibetan Buddhist conch. Six hours later we were here at the top despite the fact that several of us wondered if our knees would hold out.
But when I’m walking I like walking and when I’m bicycling I like bicycling and when I’m motorcycling I like motorcycling and I was enjoying this day on Mt. Tam as much as when I was doing anything else here. Joe and I were rumbling up the mountain on two wonderfully unique old bikes just taking our time and soaking up the scenery, me remembering when I had passed this redwood grove or sitting on that outcropping of serpentine, and he taking it in all in for the first time, wondering what might come around the next corner.
CAUTION FRESH OIL the sign said and just there was a turnout to a beautiful view of the Pacific and San Francisco, which was just poking out of the fog-covered bay, so we pulled over for a photo op and to assess the road conditions.
After the photo was taken I noticed that FRESH OIL was all over my back tire and I looked at the front, and then at Joe’s bike but his they were all clean so I checked the dipstick and, just as I had suspected, there was no FRESH OIL in my crankcase. The parking lot was not far away so I poured some of the FRESH OIL from the quart of 20-50 in my saddlebag into the crankcase and motored on up to the top where we called for a tow and waited. At one point Joe started laughing about being witness to a classic Carla King Breakdown Episode. Has it all come to this?
Waiting for the tow truck we sat for an hour on a wooden bench in the dry summer sun listening to the cicadas and while the fog covered the bay and crawled over the foothills. There were only a few other visitors on a Thursday afternoon: a couple of bicyclists, a German couple in a camper. I sat and fretted about the bike off and on and about the time I was losing on a writing deadline and worried about Joe getting back on the road (because he wouldn’t leave before the tow truck came), but I was finally able to then relax because being alone like that and witnessing that kind of awesome sight of nature doing its thing puts you right into that small space of wondering at the miracle of how it deigns to allow us to exist alongside it.
When the tow truck arrived I sent Joe off to Highway One at Point Reyes to continue on his journey to Alaska, then east home to Vermont, and the tow truck driver drove me into Mill Valley where I know a mechanic. We found a hole in the timing case that the oil had poured out of, plugged it up, and I rode the back way through Sausalito to make sure the plug wouldn’t bust out before I risked crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in the dark. They hate it when you break down on the bridge and the dollar amount on the breakdown fine proves it. I kept thinking maybe I should quit these old bikes with personality and get something with tighter specs, that was faster and more reliable, but high-maintenance machines, like high-maintenance boyfriends, are hard habits to break.
These days I am reading a collection of the Victorian traveler and writer Isabella Bird’s letters to her sister Henrietta that describes her “ravages” around the world. The poor woman was a seriously hopeless invalid every time she landed at home in Great Britain, but when she was traveling she was mostly in good health. Interestingly, the more difficult the circumstances the better she felt. The height of her good health so far (I’m only halfway through the book) was when she was on horseback in Hawaii at the mouth of a volcano roaring with fire and her horse’s eyes rolling and the poor thing was splattered with blood up to its knees from the sharp lava they were crossing over and she slept without cushions in a tent right on the lava field chilled to the bone and on the verge of fainting from toxic fumes but full of the thrill of adventure and the pulse of life. Another high point is a series of solo traverses through snowstorms on a high spirited horse through the high mountains of Colorado falling through icy rivers and finding her way in the dark on faint trails to homesteads spaced leagues apart. Men were wild about this forty-something Victorian spinster invalid, and somebody was always proposing to her along the way. Maybe adrenaline is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
The tow truck driver who hauled me down the mountain was chipper longhaired mostly toothless good-old boy in his fifties I guessed, just as good-natured as could be. When we settled into the cab and headed down to Mill Valley he thanked me for breaking down in such a lovely spot, he’d just started his shift at 4 pm. Said he hadn't been up here in a long time, had forgotten about the view. Maybe he’d bring his girlfriend up here some night soon, a bottle of wine and watch the stars. They’d been together a decade, off and on, and she still took his breath away every time he looked at her. Yep, it was a fine first day back on the job; he was just back from a four-month hospitalization and recovery from a brain aneurism operation. His biggest worry now was about the cat he’d adopted from the SPCA because today was the first day she’d been left alone. She was a big calico, a bit ornery but had been in a cage the longest, which is why he took her home.
Earlier that day I’d had a litany of worries rattling around in my brain. The ride up Mt. Tam had knocked some loose and now on this trip down the mountain they just evaporated entirely. I think they probably won’t come back at all.
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