Your Memory In Segments

Day 18-21 – Kelowna, BC, Canada to Mackay, ID, USA – 4,981 km

If you have ever undertaken a trip like ours – one that spans many days and a range of country – you will have experienced how the route takes shape in your memory in segments rather than a flow. Maybe this is simply you recognizing the Universe’s ordered narrative, or maybe it is just a byproduct of your mind trying to sort disjointed pieces into an organized catalogue. Either way, I have found each segment is marked in my memory by some particular place or situation or person. There would be nothing extraordinary about this except that on reflection I often find that what marks the memory doesn’t seem particularly memorable for any reason except that it is what stands out in my memory. I don’t know why I think of this now except that, among the many miles of tarmac meandering among rivers and through colorful, autumn countryside, reflecting on this latest segment draws to mind a friendly man, two dogs, and a wagon wheel.

We arrived at Kelowna in the early evening after a long, pleasant stretch along the two-lane road that runs the west side of Okanagan Lake. The principle Highway 97, which runs a similar north-south line only a short ways to the east beside Lake Kalamalka, takes on most of the commuter traffic, while our road traced a mostly quiet, meandering course along the lakeshore. About halfway down the narrow, snaking Okanagan Lake, we crossed William R. Bennett Bridge into Kelowna. The small city is picturesquely nestled between the lakeshore and the surrounding hill country. On these hills are many of the vineyards that make Kelowna the Napa of British Columbia.

Merging onto the bridge, we connected with a rider evidently on his way home from an afternoon jaunt. He was on a BMW R1200GS, which is like the big brother to our smaller BMW enduros. Whenever I see someone on one of these bikes, my first instinct is still to ease back on the throttle in a momentary act of deference. But then, this time, I remembered that we are the ones with the foreign plates and luggage-loaded bikes and thousands of kilometers on our odometers. This made me feel every bit the equal of this rider even though he was on the bigger motorcycle, and, returning his wave, I enjoyed thinking of him as our escort into town.

It was too late for wine tasting when we arrived in Kelowna and, waking the next morning still eager to press on, it resulted that our experience of the British Columbia wine country was visual rather than viticultural. We spent that next day winding south through the mountains on the 33 until eventually we reached the junction with Highway 3 just a few kilometers from the US border. Here we went east and followed the 3 as it snakes among the Rockies in long, isolated stretched punctuated by an occasional town nestled beautifully in a valley by a river. This was how we passed Grand Forks, Castlegar, and Salmo until we finally came to halt for the night in Creston. Creston was another town nestled in a valley among the mountains beside a river and surrounded by farms and fruit orchards. It was a beautiful town and in some ways it seemed the embodiment of everything beautiful that we had seen in British Columbia. In this way, it was an ideal place for our last overnight before crossing back into the United States and beginning the long sweep southward.

The next morning at the border, Jess was first to advance to the booth to speak with the immigration official. I watched as she put her bike into neutral, pressed the engine kill switch, and removed her riding gloves. She handed her documents to the official inside the booth and waited. Then after a pause I watched her head and her hands move in animated fashion as, I assumed, she began to explain our travel situation. This went on for several minutes and I began to grow nervous because we had read a lot about U.S. immigration officials who did not like foreigners entering without an onward or return ticket. Eventually the official returned her documents, waved her through, and I pulled forward.

‘Ok, let’s see if your story matches hers,’ the border official said with a terse smile that was polite but certainly not friendly.

        After crossing the border we were in Idaho riding southeast and skipping from Route 1 to Highway 95 and then to Highway 2 until we had slipped across the northeast corner of Idaho and into Montana. Some half hour from the state line we stopped in Libby, Montana for a warm drink and a mid morning snack. I chose the place and it was quickly evident that I chose poorly because it was very cold and I had brought us to a halt at a drive-through café. But we were stopped and cold and plenty ready for a break, so after some grumbling we sat down at a picnic bench and rested outside in the cold, drinking hot chocolate and eating apple muffin tops.

       ‘Not now,’ Jess said disapprovingly when she saw me holding the camera. ‘It’s cold and you stopped us at a drive-through when we’re on motorcycles! This is why people think I’m always unhappy in the videos – you always film at the wrong times!’

       After Libby, we continued weaving southeast on Highway 2, slowing only for a stretch where the road seemed to give way beneath us. It was an area of roadwork where the tarmac was being repaved and the gravel was piled deep so that it was rather like riding through sand. This was our first slog through gravel on the trip and it was good to feel that my bike was mostly surefooted even though we were running road tires that are entirely unsuited for anything but tarmac. Jess skimmed ably through the gravel, occasionally extending her legs to either side when she felt unsteady, but mostly sitting upright and focusing her eyes far ahead to follow a good line.

       At Kalispell we merged onto Highway 93 south and then we crossed the Flathead River and continued south on the 35 along the east shore of Flathead Lake. Below the lake we reconnected with Highway 93 and continued until we reached Missoula at the junction of the 93 and the I-90. The next day, after a brief tour through Missoula’s historic downtown, we continued on the 93 as it follows the upstream course of the Bitterroot River. Most of the morning it was a lackluster slog because the highway follows a straight course through a valley between two sections of the Bitterroot National Forest. But shortly before the junction with the 43, the highway enters the mountain country of the national forest and winds along the Lewis and Clark Trail.

In the middle of this lovely, meandering stretch of highway just across the state line into Idaho, we took a break, which, in retrospect, might have been the paragon for all the rest stops we had taken during the trek through cold weather country. We pulled over at a gravelly turnoff overlooking the river and I dismounted. After I removed my gloves, helmet, and earphones, I turned to see that Jessica had dismounted but hadn’t removed any of her riding gear.

‘It’s too much hassle to take the helmet on and off and then replace the earphones and tuck the balaclava and the sunglasses and all that,’ she explained when I asked why she hadn’t made herself more comfortable.

‘Ok, but you know this is a rest stop and we’re gonna stay a while, right?’

‘Sure, love, I’m fine and we’ll rest a while,’ she said. ‘But really it’s too cold even to take off my gloves.’

I stood gazing down at the river, snacking on a granola bar, as I searched for the distinctive form of a trout.

‘I think this is the river from the Robert Redford movie, except it took place downstream near Missoula,’ I said without breaking my scan of the river.

After a few minutes I heard a rustling and then a crunching coming from behind me. I turned around to see Jessica working a granola bar out of its wrapper with her hands still in her riding gloves. Then I watched somewhat in awe as she raised the pieces of granola to where the raised visor allowed access to her face inside the helmet. She brought the granola close to her face at around her nose and then dropped it in small pieces between her face and the helmet and caught it – mostly – in her mouth.

‘I don’t know what’s funnier,’ I said after watching her carry out several rounds of this bizarre feeding process, ‘that you can’t be bothered to remove your helmet to eat or that you’ve concocted such a precise, intricate way to shovel food into your face without taking the helmet off.’

‘It’s cold and I’m hungry,’ she said dismissing my laughter with a sharp hand gesture, ‘and my way is working just fine!’

‘You know you have crumbs all over the cheek pads of your helmet, right?’ I said.

As she was finishing her granola bar, I set off walking into the bushes.

‘Where are you going?’ she called out after me.

‘To pee,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said.

‘What no?’ I said.

‘No, don’t pee,’ she said.

‘Why not? It doesn’t matter if someone sees me,’ I said.

‘No, you’re not allowed,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘Because I have to pee too,’ she said.

‘I’ll get the toilet paper out of my pannier,’ I said, starting back toward my bike.

‘No, it’s too cold to do it here,’ she said.

‘Ok, well then I’m going to go,’ I said.

‘No, just wait and we’ll both go when we get to the next town,’ she said.

‘Wait, so because you won’t go pee, I can’t go either?’ I said.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said.

‘So, we have to be miserable and uncomfortable not peeing together?’ I said.

‘It’s the only fair way,’ she said.

       After relieving my bladder, we were back on the highway and continuing through the mountains and then back into a valley and then into another meandering stretch through the mountains. In the afternoon we began ascending until suddenly we were surrounded by snow and the temperature reading on my display indicated that the temperature was near freezing. Here we reached Willow Creek Summit where the highway exceeds 2,100 meters in elevation and passes near Borah Peak, which is Idaho’s highest mountain. After the summit we descended out of the extreme cold but by the time we reached the small town of Mackay about 50 kilometers south we were chilled to the bone, hungry, and completely exhausted.

       Mackay ran the length of just a few blocks along the highway and, when we reached the end of the town and looked out on another long stretch of tarmac through the fading daylight, we doubled back and pulled into the Wagon Wheel Motel. Two enthusiastic dog greeted us at the motel office and, excited by this, Jess knelt down to be smothered in slobbery kisses. The man who owned the motel with his wife chatted amiably as we completed the registration and payment. He was very friendly without being overbearing and I would have liked to continue talking with him because he struck me as someone you wanted to ask about themselves and how they came to be where they were. But be were just too cold, hungry, and exhausted to hang about for a chat. So we took the room key, quickly unloaded our luggage from the bikes, and then scurried over to the only restaurant in town that stayed open on a Sunday evening.

Us Two Strangers Of The Tribe

Day 15-18 – Seattle, WA, USA to Kelowna, BC, Canada – 3,720 km

More than the motorcycle or anything else, I first noticed his tall, tanned boots like what you imagined a lumberjack wore. Then I noticed his Alaska plate as he pulled his Harley alongside the pump adjacent to ours and dismounted with more agility than you expected from someone so tall and hulking. He was probably a head taller than six feet and when he approached it hurt my neck to look upward at so steep an angle. He looked worn and grizzly and he wore leathers and thick canvas pants tucked into his lumberjack boots. He withdrew his skullcap helmet and sunglasses and rested them securely and just precisely on his bike the way all practiced motorcyclists do. He had the look of someone who lives on his motorcycle and felt comfortable on his bike like how you imagined the cowboys used be on their horse.

         ‘Cold day for a ride,’ he said. ‘Where are you coming from?’

         We replied and this began a conversation that went on as we each filled our bikes with petrol and fidgeted with the luggage rigging. We told him where we had been and where we were going and he asked how it had gone so far and we said it had gone very well but for the weather.

         ‘It feels like an early winter this year,’ he said. ‘Most years I can wander all about but right now a lot of the passes are snowed out.’

         ‘We hit snow back at Mt Hood and we’re not eager for more, so we probably won’t make it much further north,’ I said.

         ‘It’s a good plan,’ he said as he added an octane booster into his fuel tank. ‘I find these big V-twins ride better with a bit of this.’

Then he asked about our bikes because he saw that they were BMW and that they looked like were enduro but that he thought  BMW only made bikes with horizontal cylinder heads.

‘The big ones are like that but ours are smaller,’ I said. ‘Hers is 650 and mine is 800.’

‘That’s good for what you’re doing,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you get great fuel economy.’

I said that it was pretty good before you added the cases and duffle bag and then, as he replaced his gloves and skullcap, he named a few routes that he said were good riding and would take us south and east towards where we wanted to go. After we discussed the routes, he ignited his engine and said a farewell before he rode off.

         ‘Nice guy,’ I said, ‘though you wouldn’t think it to look at him.’

         ‘It’s like we have a tribe,’ Jess said.

It was something she had mentioned on a few occasions over the past few weeks after meeting other bikers. She had read about this camaraderie on the discussion forums and blogs while learning to ride in Liberia and I had tried to explain it, but she hadn’t experienced it until she came home and especially now that we were on our bikes so much of the time. In Liberia, motorcycling is mostly an inexpensive mode of transportation and most of those who ride are cabbies, not bikers. Now riding back home, she had seen how many riders salute you with a wave of the left hand as they pass you during a ride and how often another biker will strike up a conversation when they learn that you ride. Also, recently I had observed her return the salute.

‘Did you see them wave to me?’ she had said a few days back during a break for lunch. ‘I wanted to wave back but I couldn’t because my hand was on the clutch!’

I thought this was a very good sign because I remembered how long it took me to feel confident enough to remove my hand from the handlebar during a ride and especially at speed or through twisties as we had been doing during that particular morning’s ride.

Now we were at a filling station in Cache Creek along highway 97 in British Columbia, Canada. After leaving Seattle a few days before we had taken the secondary highways through northern Washington state to the Canadian border crossing at Abbotsford. There we bought a Canadian SIM card for Jessica’s iPhone because she had left hers back in Los Angeles.

‘I’m just not as neurotically organized as you,’ she shot back to my ribbing over the expense and particularly over the inconvenience because it was a cold, gray, drizzly day.

‘Fine, I’ll give you that,’ I said. ‘But maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad in this case.’

We were in McDonalds to use the free Wi-Fi so we could activate the SIM without paying the service provider 35 dollars to activate it for us. With our mobile data service activated, we quickly found a cheap motel and covered the 60 km to Vancouver to arrive just before dark that evening. We dropped our luggage at the motel but we hadn’t time to change into street clothes before riding downtown to meet Kristen at the Korean restaurant.

Kristen is a few years older than Jess and was a friend from down the street when they were growing up.

‘Jess was a terror when she was younger,’ Kristen said immediately before the conversation had really begun.

‘Nothing has changed,’ I assured her.

Jess shot us both a disapproving look and then she conceded, ‘Yeah, I was quite a shit disturber.’

Kristen told us about her plans to visit Iguazu Falls and a bunch of other places in Argentina and there was a flicker of hope that we might meet up but we determined that we would still be in Central America when she was there in November. She also satisfied my confusion for why Jess and her sister Lillian pronounce her name with a hard ‘e’ at the end as though it were spelled Christine.

‘Everyone from home calls me that because of how they pronounced it with their Filipino accent,’ she said, ‘but it was always a problem in school like when a substitute would come so as soon as I moved away, I told people to pronounce it the way it’s spelled.’

The next day was a rest day so that I could perform an oil change on my bike. I had intended to do it in Seattle with Jess’s but I discovered that it required a specialized tool to remove the oil filter without which things could get messy.

‘It says here that you can jam a screwdriver into the filter and use it to twist it but that’s the redneck way,’ Jess said after researching it on the discussion forums.

I felt stupid for not checking on this when preparing for this trip but I soon let it go because by now I had accepted that my pre-trip mechanical preparations were far less than exhaustive. The BMW dealership in Seattle did not have the tool I needed but the one in Vancouver did, so I decided to do Jess’s bike then and there and haul the extra motor oil in my luggage and do my bike once I had the tool. Now in Vancouver I bought the tool and set up to do the oil change in the motel parking lot but, before I got too far along, I discovered that the oil pan drain plug requires a 10 mm Allen wrench and my set only went as large as 8 mm. In total there were three visits to the Canadian Tire automotive store before I was equipped with everything I needed. This time the oil change went more smoothly than Jess’s had a few days before but it was still my first time on my bike and I belabored each step before and while it was made.

When I finished, Jess helped me to pour the used oil from the pan into the new oil containers. It was late afternoon now and most of the day had been spent shopping for tools and performing this routine procedure.

‘I thought it would go quicker,’ I said, apologizing because we hadn’t done any site seeing during this day off in Vancouver.

‘It’s fine, love,’ Jess said. ‘I expected it would take all day.’

I frowned at this and she clarified, ‘It’s your first time. You’ll do it faster next time.’

I washed up and, still smelling distinctively of used motor oil, we went two up on my bike to catch the sunset from Prospect Point where there is a beautiful view of Lions Gate Bridge over the harbor and of English Bay between the northern and southern portion of the city.

The next day we left and I felt bad for not having seen more of the city but Jess reminded me that we had actually seen quite a lot while running the errands for the oil change and also that the only thing we had to do was enjoy what we were doing. Leaving the city we followed Highway 99 north along the rocky, jagged coastline until the coast ended at Squamish and the Sea-to-Sky Highway continued inland rolling north through the mountains to Daisy Lake where it turned subtly eastward to Whistler. It was very cold but the sky was mostly clear and, as we ascended into the highlands, the air smelled alpine fresh so that you felt it was a great cleansing act to breathe in deeply.

At Whistler we took a hot lunch and we watched and commented on the young people with long, tangled hair and designer clothes made to look careless and torn.

‘But tell me this,’ I said when Jess pointed out a group that fit just this description, ‘how is that one wearing just a t-shirt when I’m sitting inside and shivering under three layers?’

From Whistler we continued north on the 99 but soon we discovered that the smooth, rolling tarmac that brought us here from Vancouver was now rougher and potholed.

‘They must not have repaved it here like I imagine they did below for the 2010 Olympics,’ I said when Jessica mentioned the difference during a rest break along the highway.

‘I was riding really fast through the twisties coming up to Whistler,’ Jess said, obviously very proud of herself. ‘Did you notice?’

‘Absolutely, I did,’ I said. ‘Partly it’s the good tarmac but also I think you’ve improved and now you’re noticing it.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said, uncompromisingly dismissive of her growing ability as a rider in case allowing even a gleam of confidence should invite tragedy. ‘It’s that the road is very good here.’

We continued through the mountain country, progressing more slowly now because the rough surface was also dotted with sections where gravel was strewn across the tarmac just at the pinnacle of a turn. In the afternoon we reached the town of Lillooet where we found an inexpensive hotel in the middle of the several blocks of downtown and where the youth at the counter invited us to pull the girls – our motorcycles – into the storage room in the back.

‘It has a population of 2,321 and is one of the southernmost cities in North America where indigenous people form the majority,’ Jess read from Wikipedia during dinner that night as had become our custom to inject some elementary facts into our otherwise purely sensory form of tourism.

The next morning we continued northeast on the twisting, uneven Highway 99 until we reached Cache Creek, which is where we had pulled over at the town’s lone filling station and met the tall, hulking, grizzly Harley rider who was clearly a ‘high roller’ – for the mileage he had obviously covered on his bike – and where he had inadvertently brightened our day by reconfirming our status as members of the tribe.

From Cache Creek we took Highway 97 to Kamloops. This was one of the lesser scenic routes that the burly Harley rider had recommended but we eager to reach what we decided would be our northernmost highlight and begin the sweep south towards warmer weather. In Kamloops we got turned around looking for the downtown and, deciding that we were not particularly loving what we saw, we decided to buy food for lunch at the Safeway and then make a go for Kelowna, which is the heart of the British Columbia wine country.

After lunch in the parking lot outside the Safeway a motorcyclist pulled up and on a new-looking V-Strom, which is an adventure touring motorcycle made by Suzuki. He wore a very high end touring jacket in high viz neon accenting. It was, incidentally, the jacket that I had originally planned to get when reviewing riding gear for hours on the Internet in Liberia.

‘Where are you coming from then?’ he said after he had dismounted, removed his helmet, and scrutinized our bikes and the rigging through a squint.

I told him that we had started in Los Angeles and this made him quite excited.

‘I just got back from a ride down to LA,’ he said. ‘It was a fantastic trip. The riding was excellent,’ he said and then he recited each leg of the route, which was more than I had asked for, and anyway sounded a bit too practiced.

‘Sounds like you hit a lot of good roads,’ I said when he took a pause.

‘Yeah, we did twisty roads the whole way there and back,’ he said with much satisfaction. ‘We probably didn’t do more than 100 miles on the interstate.’

He looked our bikes over again and then he said, ‘So where are you headed then?’

‘We’re going as far north as we can manage, which is probably not much further than here,’ Jess said, ‘and then we are going south all the way to Argentina.’

She said it through her helmet because she already had it on when he had pulled up and she hated taking her helmet on and off in the cold weather because of all the tucking and adjusting it required of collars, headphones, pony tail, and balaclava. Even through her helmet, she said it very well, I thought. I had noticed before how well she always said it because I paid very close attention each time. She said it in a way that that made you feel that she was more surprised and amazed by what we were doing than you could be so that you couldn’t possibly find any conceit in it.

I thought I always said it very badly because I tried to say so that I wouldn’t sound full of myself but somehow I thought this produced a nonchalance that seemed to come out full of self-conceit. So, when I had first noticed how well she said it, I had waited until we were alone again and I told her that she would always be the one to say it from then on when people asked about the trip.

She had balked that she shouldn’t always be the one to say it but, when I explained it in context, she eventually agreed.

‘It’s important that we say it well when we meet people because it might influence what follows – like if they will be friendly to us or offer us help or accommodations or whatever,’ I explained with much seriousness. ‘I do the mechanics and pitching the tent and all that. You do this best so it’s a contribution you should make to our trip.’

‘Ok,’ she said, laughing at me. ‘You do say it very awkwardly so I will do it and make this contribution to our trip.’

‘Hey! Actually I did a trip down to Argentina last year!’ he said after Jess had recited our destination.

We were surprise at the coincidence and, as he began to recite the details of his trip, we expressed the requisite interest to be polite.

‘We brought the bikes down to Baja where we met up,’ he said. ‘There were three of us to start but we met a fourth who wanted to do it but only he had three months. I wanted to take a little more time for getting to know places but I don’t mind a motivated ride if that’s what the situation calls for. So we did it in three months and we really did a good hauled through it.’

Then he described the route they had taken and the several can’t miss highlights they had visited along the way: Machu Picchu, Iguazu Falls, and the like. When he finished describing the trip he looked very satisfied with himself and I noticed there was a sort of glimmer in his eye for the pleasure he must of felt to relive it here, momentarily, with us two strangers of the tribe in the parking lot of the Safeway.

 ‘He sounded very full of himself, didn’t he?’ Jess said after he had wished us well and disappeared into the supermarket.

I thought he did too, though I didn’t think he had intended to present himself as he had, and I said so.

‘Well I liked the Harley guy from this morning much more,’ Jess said.

I said I did too and, as we rode off to reach Kelowna before sunset, I thought about the difference in the two riders we had met that day. Each acknowledged us as part of ‘the tribe’ but in very different ways and with very different results of what we thought of them. How do you talk about what you love and what you’ve accomplished without sounding full of conceit for it? I thought to myself because this was a question that had been nagging me long before today but had never been answered. How do you establish your credentials so that others who do and love what you love know who you are and that you belong but without them taking it the as conceit the way Jess had I had?

Surely there is an answer to this in the comparison of these two who we met today, I decided, and, as we merged back onto the highway and accelerated away from Kamloops, I was trying to recall the differences between the riders. I was certainly on the verge of an answer, I thought, but soon we were deep into the twisties and mountain scenery of Highway 97 and I lost my focus to the drum of the engine and the pitch and lean of the bike so that the answer slipped away and, at least for now, I left the unanswered question far, far behind.

The Good Ones You Meet

Day 11-14 – Portland, OR, USA to Seattle, WA – 2,736 km

When we arrived in Seattle in the early afternoon after a drizzly morning slog from Portland on Interstate 5, Tim met us at the 7-Eleven up the block from Megan and Marshall’s condo building.

Tim is a friend of Marshall’s from university days and he lives nearby in the Ballard neighborhood. Megan and Marshall are the couple I met in Belize several years ago during my first motorcycle trip. They were on motorcycles and we – along with Chris whom I had met a few days earlier in Yucatán – went for drinks and rode together over two or three days between San Ignacio, Belize and Tikal, Guatemala. When Jess agreed to do this trip with me, Megan and Marshall were immediately who I thought of and Marshall was the first person I contacted for advice – motorcycle and relationship – during the preparation.

‘Make sure you always have snacks,’ was the first and most important recommendation in Marshall’s email. ‘We realized afterwards that most of our arguments on the road were because we were both just hungry.’

I had contacted Marshall again a few days earlier to see if they were in town for a visit on our way through, knowing that their business has them on the road during half the year. They were on the other side of the country but quite matter-of-factly Marshall suggested that we stay in their place, use the car, and even take his bike out for a spin, and he connected me with Tim who let us in with the spare keys.

         ‘How long did you know them for on the trip,’ Jess had asked after she read Marshall’s email.

         ‘Just two or three days,’ I said.

         ‘Wow, that’s really nice. Say yes!’ she said.

         After Tim let us in and showed us around and we had arranged to meet up for dinner one of the next couple evenings, we changed into street clothes and took a walk through the neighborhood. The Ballard is a trendy section of Seattle with lots of nice restaurants, bars, and live music clubs. We got into the scene by going for tapas and wine. Then we took the bikes and met Nick and Katya for a late dinner. Nick is Jessica’s ex whom she hadn’t seen for some years and it was a very nice reunion and not at all awkward, I thought.

         ‘You never know how these things will go,’ I said as we mounted our bikes after dinner.

View from Megan and Marshall's condo

         ‘No, because Nick is a really nice guy just like I told you,’ she said.

         It was a cold ride back to Megan and Marshall’s and our GPS seemed to take us from one wrong turn to another until we turned it off and navigated by what we remembered from coming into town earlier in the day.

‘It’s like Google Maps is against us,’ Jess said when we were pulled over and deciding to figure it out on our own.

Back at the condo it felt great to have our own private space that was a home and not a motel room. Through the large window in the living room we could see the lights and the dwindling activity across the city.

Seattle Great Wheel and harbor from Pike Place Market

The next day we rode two up on my bike to Pike Place Market, which is near the harbor piers. We visited the first Starbuck’s, which didn’t make much impression on us, and then we strolled through the market. We tasted almost everything there was on offer: jams, cheeses, and such a variety of infused oils until one was practically indistinguishable from another.

         ‘My taste buds are rubbish,’ I said after the first wave of tasting. ‘I can’t really tell the difference between all these subtle flavors.’

         ‘I know, love, that’s why I don’t let you get the good things,’ Jess said. ‘My mom does the same to my father. Like how she won’t buy the good juice because he’ll chug it down just the same as the bad juice. It’s the same with you.’

I just love these hanging chili pepper decorations

It was the same when I tried the hot sauces. I could detect that the flavors were different but I had no ability to articulate them or distinguish the flavor’s origin. But I did appreciate the burn they made in my mouth, maybe because the burn is a blunt taste and requires no refined detectors. I tasted the sauces up to the second hottest and, with my dander up, I would have gone all the way but the vendor, who thought he was setting the hook, scared it right out of my mouth.

         ‘This is the true badass, right here,’ the vendor said pointing to the smallest bottle. ‘It has a Scoville rating of 2 million. That is liquid fire. I mean it doesn’t get any hotter than this. One-sixteenth of drop and you’ll be feeling it for more than an hour.’

         At this description my belly went cold. I deferred from the final taste and excused us away from the booth.

On the second pass through the market we bought peppered beef jerky for Jess, who is uncompromisingly carnivore, and various locally grown fruits for me because I had hit my lowest weight in years a few months before in Liberia and have been trying unsuccessfully to get back to it ever since. Later, when Jess saw the Swiss sausages called Landjäger hanging in a display, she was suddenly very excited.

‘We used to eat these all the time when we visited family in Switzerland,’ she said as she fished in her wallet for the dollar-fifty she needed to buy one.

After the market, we went down to the pier and we rode the Seattle Great Wheel to see what the city looks like on a beautiful, clear day. Then we were tired and we walked back to the parking lot to get the bike and ride back to the condo. At the bike we pulled our gloves and helmets on and then mounted and I slowly pulled out of the space. As we inched forward, the bike suddenly seized and then began to pitch uncontrollably to the ground, spitting us off as it keeled. The bike struck the ground on the right side crash bar and the rubberized corner of the pannier so that it was as gentle and nondestructive a fall as there could be. Shocked into action, we were immediately back on our feet and I righted the bike without difficulty. When the immediate jolt had passed, Jess started laughing.

View from the Seattle Great Wheel

‘What happened?’ she said.

I looked up and down the bike feeling very confused and – I don’t know why – thinking that someone had played a joke. Then I remembered that I had put the disc lock on when we had parked and, turning my scan the front wheel I saw that I had never removed it before we started off. A disc lock secures to the disc brake so that any attempt to turn the wheel to which the disc is fastened will eventually collide the lock with the brake caliper and prevent the wheel from turning further. This is meant to make it more difficult for a would-be robber to simply roll the bike away.

I explained to Jess why the fall had happened and I told her how very foolish I felt. She tried to console me that it was her fault also for forgetting about the disc lock but that didn’t help because we were riding my bike and right now I was the pilot.

‘The same thing happened to me during my first trip,’ I said as I checked for damage to the disc and the brake caliper once my frustration and embarrassment had subsided somewhat. ‘Only then I was in a crowded plaza in a small town in Mexico and I had started off very fast because I was feeling like a badass for being a foreign gringo – you know – wearing a leather jacket and doing a motorcycle trip and that. I went over just like that only more so and in full view. That bike was much harder to right when it fell because of the way the weight was distributed so there I was like a jackass struggling and struggling and being defeated by it.’

She laughed and laughed and then asked what had happened.

‘Eventually someone came to help me,’ I said. ‘Someone always came to help.’

As we rode back to the condo, Jess pointed from behind me at another motorcycle that was parked.

‘What’s that?’ she shouted over the drumming of the motor and the silencing of the earplugs.

I look to where she pointed and saw a bright neon cord that connected the handlebar to the wheel of the motorcycle.

‘It’s so you don’t forget to remove the disc lock and drive off!’ I shouted in reply, knowing that this would set her off on a new wave of laugher.

As she laughed, I made a show of slinked in my seat as a sign of defeat and then I rebounded and waved her off with a sharp hand gesture as if to say, ‘Ok! Ok! Quite enough of that!’

After the market we visited the REI flagship store but we discovered that we were both completely saturated after all the shopping during the preparation for the trip. We slogged around the enormous store as if going through the motions and then flopped ourselves down on a bench beside the outdoors-inspired jungle gym in the kids play area.

‘This trip has ripped the love of REI out of me!’ I said.

 ‘I’m sure it’s just temporary,’ Jess said. ‘It’s not as fun when you have everything you need.’

The next day I set out to perform an oil change on Jess’s bike. It was her bike so Jess felt compelled to supervise – my word – or participate – her word – in the process and she was – I can honestly admit in hindsight – actually very patient with me. She helped where she could but mostly she ‘kept company’.

‘Here!’ I said at one frustrated moment, offering her the greasy Allen wrench in my hand, ‘You show me.’

Her face took on an expression of disgust as though the tool that I offered her smelled very foul and she said, ‘No, no, love. You’re doing very well.’

I returned to the task at hand, thinking that I had silenced my commentator at least temporarily, but within moments the observations continued.

‘You know your version of helping and keeping company is not the same as mine,’ I said at length.

‘It was the same when I used to help my father with things,’ she said. ‘But at least my father used to work a lot faster!’

I grunted and she laughed and we continued on as we had for the rest of the afternoon.

In the evening, when I had finished and had cleaned the spills, bottled the used oil, and disposed of the old filter and sundry waste, I realized in hindsight just how easy the process had really been and how pathetically I had second-guessed my way through it. It was the first oil change I had done on either bike because I was not smart enough to do it just for the practice before we started the trip. During my first motorcycle trip, I had pulled apart my Yamaha cruiser – by necessity and far more often than I cared to – without much concern about doing more harm than good or being able to piece it back together. But the few intervening years in Africa had been surprisingly non-mechanical and, more importantly to my mind, this was a brand new BMW and so certainly – I had convinced myself – it was beyond my basic mechanical knowhow. Fortunately, there was plenty of quiet in the parking garage of Megan and Marshall’s condo so that I could struggle and agonize – in the peace and quiet that Jessica allowed me – over each and every step of the process.

In the evening, after we had showered and made friends again, we met Tim and his girlfriend Carey for dinner in the neighborhood. At first Carey seemed decidedly unenthusiastic about being out for dinner with these strangers that were crashing at Megan and Marshall’s place. She explained that it had been a frustrating day of collaborating on a project, but she quickly put work behind her and turned out to be very charming. They are both photojournalists and described very interesting projects that they had been working on. She described one of the projects that had taken her to Papua New Guinea to investigate issues connected to gender based violence. On a whim I asked if she had met my friend Miranda who was there at the same time working for an NGO. It turned out that she knew Miranda quite well and they still kept in touch.

‘Miranda was great,’ Carey said and then hesitated before suggesting, ‘I think she was maybe a bit burned out.’

‘You should see how I am after just a year in a place and she was there for three,’ I said. ‘Also she’s quite dry.’

It was a very engaging dinner conversation, made longer but never dull because of the slow service and because I was the last one to receive my meal.

‘Greg eats so slowly,’ Jess explained quit unnecessarily. ‘He chews each bite fifty times.’

‘She used to count,’ I said, making the best of it now that the unflattering subject was breeched. ‘She would stare at me and I would see her lips moving and when I swallowed she would announce a number. It was like she was dealing roulette.’

After dinner, Tim and Carey pointed us in a direction to see the nightlife in the neighborhood and we said goodbye.

‘Those are the kind of people we could be friends with,’ Jess said. ‘They have interesting things going on and it was better talking to them than most of the people we meet doing aid work.’

‘Yeah, and the good ones you meet are always either coming or going or you’re coming or going.’

I thought about this as we walked.

‘I used to think that I would travel and live in all these places and have friends all over the world. But I’m absolutely rubbish at keeping in touch no matter what I try.’

‘I know. Me too,’ Jess said.

‘So it’s like I go place to place making friends and then losing them,’ I said. ‘What a depressing thought.’

‘We’ll do better,’ she said. ‘We’ll help each other.’

It sounded good the way all vague, sweeping declarations do, and it was even better because she said it with much conviction.
‘Ok, let’s do,’ I said and I decided to feel better about it as we walked into the area where the bars and music clubs and the sidewalks were alive with so many people.

Your First Impression Is The Truest

Day 5-11 – Clearlake, CA, USA to Seattle, WA – 2,752 km

A few miles past the park entrance Jess signaled and then pulled off at the turnout. I followed and pulled off alongside her.

         ‘It’s getting too cold,’ she shouted over the sound of the idling motorcycles and through the muffling of the earphones and the crash helmets. ‘There’s frost on the road and look at the snow on the cars coming back this way.’

         ‘Ok, you turn back. It’s only a few more miles. I’m going to go on as far as I can and if it gets too bad, I’ll turn back. Otherwise, I’ll meet you at the lodge that we passed just before the entrance to the park,’ I said.

         She considered this and, although she did not like for me to go on, she relented. I watched her make a U-turn across the highway and return the way we came. Then I pulled onto the highway and continue the ascent towards Rim Village, which is the first access to Crater Lake from the south entrance to the national park.

         As I rode further into the elevation I noticed that the temperature reading on my onboard computer display had begun to flash. At first I thought something was wrong with the computer but then I remembered the tutorial I had received from the dealership two months before.

‘It’s programmed to flash when the temperature drops to three Celsius degrees above freezing to warn the rider of possible hazardous road conditions,’ Bob from BMW of Ventura County had explained.

‘Let’s hope we’re never riding in cold enough weather to test that,’ I had replied, figuring that the trip would take us into the cold but to freezing.

Now it was flashing as he had said it would and the flashing made me more nervous about the rode conditions up ahead.

Since we had left Clearlake – a couple hours north of San Francisco – a few days before, I noticed that the conditions were changing noticeably from the still warm weather of Southern and Central California. After Clearlake we had gone north and east away from the coast and back into the Sierra Nevada mountains where we stopped for the night at a motel along Highway 89 just outside Lassen Volcanic National Park. The next day, as we followed 89 through the national park, we saw patches of snow alongside the highway and the temperature reached down to the mid forties. This was cold enough for me to break out my winter riding gloves for the first time but otherwise I wore only a thin base layer and a sweater under my riding jacket. Despite the cold, Lassen was our favorite national park so far on the trip because the cold air made the rock and lakes feel somehow crystalline and it felt very serene because there were few visitors on the road.

After Lassen, we connected with the I-5 at Mt Shasta town and we continued to Weed where we intended to take the 97 north into Oregon and to Crater Lake. While stopped at a filling station in Weed, we spoke with another BMW rider who was coming from Eugene in the general direction we were headed.

‘It’s really windy between here and Yreka. I was riding like this the whole way,’ he said, demonstrating a steep lean with his hand. ‘I was really getting knocked around from the gusts.’

Jess stared at the angle of the rider’s hand and she listen to his description with rapt attention. After she had learned from him what she could, she began searching her iPhone for information about the wind conditions ahead on the 97.

‘There is a wind advisory until tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should stay here.’

‘I’d rather stay in Klamath Falls, otherwise it’s too short of a riding day,’ I said. ‘Let’s go forward and we can always turn back if it gets bad.’

She looked at me with a dubious expression.

‘He was coming down the interstate. Maybe it’s less windy on the 97,’ I said.

It turned out that it was no less windy on the 97 because a storm was sweeping across the entire northeast. As we entered the town, we noticed the wind was considerably stronger than it had been south on the interstate and heading north the winds were probably 30 to 40 mph with gusts maybe half again as strong. Out on the highway, there was a sign that warned of ‘Gusty area next 1 mile’ but we quickly discovered that the high winds extended far beyond the stated limit. After a few miles and several strong gusts that jolted her from the line she was riding, Jess pulled over to the shoulder.

‘I’m not doing this,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back.’

We turned around and rode slowly back to the town, stopping at the first motel along the main street. It was kind of a dump but at least it was cheap and we had a beautiful view of Mt Shasta from our room on the second floor. It was forecasted to rain during that evening and the day that followed and the winds would get stronger before they abated late the next night. When we woke up the next morning and it was still raining and the wind was blowing in strong gusts, it was an easy decision to stay in Weed for a proper rest day. The weather followed the forecast and the winds were so strong throughout the day that sometimes, after a particularly strong gust, I glanced out the window to make sure our motorbikes were still upright even though they were sheltered by the motel, which acted as a good wind break.

The windstorm broke early the next morning so that it was much calmer and only drizzled intermittently as we loaded the gear onto our bikes and lubed the chains. It was very cold all that morning and, after a blueberry scone and a hot chocolate, we changed into all our remaining layers of clothes in the parking lot of a bakery in Klamath Falls just over the Oregon border. Back on the highway the winds were strong again at Upper Klamath Lake and then the temperature began to plunge even lower after we turned onto the 62 and began to ascend towards Crater Lake.

Now as Jess was heading back to the lodge and I was ascending to Rim Village at Crater Lake, my bike’s display was showing the temperature getting closer and closer to freezing and the snow I was seeing on the hillsides above the road was creeping closer and closer onto the shoulders. After a couple more miles the snow was stacked along the sides and center lane divider but the tarmac remained clear where the vehicle tires cut parallel tracks. A mile or so from Rim Village everything was snowed over but I continued ascending because the signs showed that I was so close to this goal, which had suddenly become important to me beyond all reasonable proportion. Also, I decided, my traction felt surprisingly good as long as I controlled my speed and stayed in the trail of the car ahead of me.

Coming around a final tight bend, the hillside opened to a bleach white parking lot of snow-covered cars and a few groups of people walking briskly with hands deeply planted into jacket pockets. I maneuvered through the parking lot avoiding the piled snow and patches of slush as best as I could and then I parked beside a truck in a space with quick access out of the lot. The display showed that the temperature was several degrees below freezing before I turned off the bike and began to walk to the path where there was a lookout. Through the haze I could see the lake and Wizard Island in the middle of it. The clearing held just long enough to snap a photograph and then the fog thickened and the island disappeared.

As the fog thickened, the snow that had been falling lightly now began to fall much more heavily and this made me nervous about the road conditions for my descent back to the lodge. Growing increasingly nervous, I hurried back to my bike and hit the ignition. The first mile or two of the descent I rode mostly in first gear, feeling more confident about my traction at higher engine speeds. At lower elevation it was not quite as cold but the snow was falling there too. Despite the bike’s heated grips set to high, my fingertips were tingling from the cold. When I approached the lodge just outside the park, I saw Jess standing outside waving to me.

‘I’m so glad you turned around when you did!’ I said. ‘I really got myself into a fix up there.’

Inside the lodge as we ate a cup of hot soup I told her about the cold and the snow and the winding road up to Rim Village and back down again.

‘It’s still snowing down here,’ she said after I finished, ‘so we should probably go in case it’s going to get worse.’

The road that skirts the crater and connects Highway 62 at the south entrance to 138 at the north was closed past Rim Village and, besides, we wouldn’t have had any intention of going back up through the snow. So we returned the way we came, taking the 62 back to Chiloquin where we reconnected with the 97 and then went north to Bend. At Bend we found a nice motel, which felt disproportionately luxurious for the poor quality of our accommodations in Weed. After a hot shower and a rest, we went to the very lovely downtown for our first evening of nice dinning out. Back at the motel, warmed from the glass of wine but then chilled again from the ride, Jessica set the thermostat so that now I was properly broiling.

‘Babe, why are you all clammy?’ she said.

‘Maybe because you’ve made it like an oven in here,’ I said.

We bickered back and forth about the temperature until we reached a stalemate and then I changed the subject.

‘I really like what I’ve seen of it here,’ I said.

‘You mean Bend?’ she said. ‘Yeah it’s nice but what would we do here?’

‘I don’t know but we should think more about where we would be happy to live,’ I said. ‘Otherwise, we might as well go back to Africa where we can easily get work but will probably not enjoy where we are living.’

‘Yeah, maybe so,’ she said and, after considering it for a moment longer, ‘Let’s don’t think more about it right now. I’m not ready to think about what we’ll do after the trip.’

The next day we rode 40 miles north to Madras where we took Highway 26 northeast past Mt Hood on the way to Portland. All morning it was cold and rainy weather riding and we wore all the layers of clothing we had to stay warm and comfortable on the bikes. At the closest stretch of highway near Mt Hood where the road ascended to it’s highest elevation the temperature dropped to freezing and the raining became snow. At Government Camp we pulled over at a filling station for a cup of hot coffee and we asked the attendant about the conditions up ahead.

‘It’s like this for another two miles or so and then you go down and it’s only raining,’ he said.

‘So better to press on forward than turn back?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, you’re better off going forward,’ he said. ‘You’re most of the way through it now.’

We stayed in the filling station for a few more minutes, sipping at our coffees, until we noticed that the snow was coming down more heavily and blanketing the road more quickly than the highway traffic could clear it away.

‘Let’s go now before it get’s worse,’ Jess said emphatically.

Back outside, we found that in the ten minutes we had been away the bikes had been thickly covered in snow. The sight of the snow-covered bikes was a least as nerve-wracking as the snowy highway beside which they stood. As we put on our gloves and helmets, three motorcyclists that we had passed and been passed by at several points throughout the day pulled into the filling station and parked alongside us.

‘It’s really bad out there,’ the one who pulled up nearest to me said.

‘The guy inside said it goes back to raining a couple miles further on from here,’ I said. ‘He said from here you start to descend.’

‘Yeah but can we make it that far?’ he said as though deferring the decision to me.

‘We’re going to try to push through it because it’s only getting worse here,’ I said.

The biker repeated what I had said to his mates and after a moments discussion they were back on their bikes and turning onto the highway. Now Jess was on her bike with the engine on and waiting for me but I was having trouble with one of my riding gloves. My hand had gotten wet while fixing the strap of my helmet and, when I tried to slip it into the glove, the wetness had seeped into the lining. Somehow this made the lining stick against my skin so that my fingers could not settle into place. After a few more tries, I looked back and saw that Jess was in earnest. So with my hand deep enough into the glove to wrap around the grip and clutch lever, I pressed the electric starter and followed her out onto the highway.

The ground was slushy around the filling station but the traction was better on the highway because the traffic was helping to keep the snow from turning to ice inside the lane. Even worse than the conditions on the road, the snow came down like a blasting flurry traveling at 50 mph and, with the ice that collected on the windshield and helmet visor, the visibility was extremely low. The several miles of gradual descent away from Government Camp seemed to stretch over a very long time for the snow and the cold and the poor visibility. Then suddenly we were out of the snow and back in the cold, drenching, wonderful rain and we were very relieved. A few kilometers ahead at the town of Zigzag I signaled to pull over so that I could adjust my gloved hand to fit like something better than a flipper. The rain, which was at first a relief, and the cold followed us the 45 miles into Portland so that once we had found a motel and were off our bikes, we were decidedly against going back out for dinner and assertively for staying in and ordering a pizza.

That evening, as we stuffed the pizza into our hungry, exhausted faces, I thought about how incredibly Jess had held up and kept high spirits throughout the day and especially during the most precarious moments in through the snow.

‘When we pulled into the filling station at Government Camp, I was petrified to pull alongside you because I thought you’d be pissed because I was the one who wanted to take the route past Mt Hood,’ I said.

‘No, that’s when I’m very good – in those situations,’ she said. ‘That’s why I thought to keep going to more and more dangerous places.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure you were great that time when you were caught in the fighting in South Sudan,’ I said. ‘Anyway, as we were coming down I kept thinking how great it was that you were smiling and that you weren’t pissed because then I could just worry about riding my own motorcycle through it.’

We were fully prepared to fall in love with Portland because we had heard good things about it from a variety of people. We decided to stay over the next day to visit downtown and to drop in on my former employer in Liberia, which is headquartered here. But all through the next day it was overcast and rained and, when we tried to ride downtown, it poured so heavily on us that we had to turn back because there would have been no way and nothing to sightsee once we were there.

‘It’s so dependent on timing and circumstance when you’re traveling like this, isn’t it?’ I said when we were back in our motel, hanging up our sopping jeans and blow-drying our iPhones, which had been caught in our jeans during the downpour. ‘I mean if we had come a day or two earlier or later, maybe we would have loved it here.’

We turned out the lights to this thought and for a while I lay awake thinking about it. At first I felt unsettled with the idea that maybe the glimpse you would get of a place would be very far off the mark and that you would leave carrying away a misconception. Then I thought that maybe this misconception would somehow taint the trip – like maybe how passing Mt Hood when it was too cloudy or snowy to see it would take something away from the experience of the trip. But then I thought about how I had read that often your first impression is the truest because it forms before your conscious mind can make a confusion of it. Also – and what impressed me more so that after I passed into a comfortable sleep – I decided that the glimpses that you get and the impressions they form are what make the places you pass uniquely yours and not what someone who came before tells you it is. The glimpses form a string of impressions and together they are what make the trip yours and no one else’s – uniquely and independently and very specially yours – even when so many other motorcyclists have come before you.

The next morning we detoured through the downtown of Portland before we connected with the I-5 north. It was still overcast and it looked rather dreary even though it was no longer raining. I didn’t love it as I was prepared to but I liked what I saw – maybe, I thought, the same way but no more or less than I would have liked it had I visited it under any other weather conditions or circumstances. After this briefest glimpse of Portland, we made a beeline for Seattle, reluctantly but decidedly bypassing Mt St Helens and Mt Rainier because the weather conditions were still unfavorable and we had had enough of traveling winding mountain highways through heavy rain and snow – at least for now.