1997 June RunThe Search for Jeff

Prologue

This run is lit by myths, just as our lives are. Ask Joseph Campbell if you don't believe me. The myth that powers this run is that we "follow the front wheel." Well, that's true in its most literal sense because we never ride backwards. And even when we fall over I guess the side of the front wheel leads the way. We like to think we go where the front wheel takes us. Of course it is not true.

This myth is a conceit. It is a conceit of middle aged professionals to think that we take 10 days out of our usual lives and become wisps of the road blown by the prevailing wind no matter how much we need to believe we do. Maybe 25 or 30 years ago we could and did. Not now.

How do we get away? Jeff, being a builder, maybe can leave when he wants but I doubt it, even though not much anywhere gets built on time. And, like the ad says, "The first week we'll tear out your kitchen, open the walls and the roof and then mysteriously disappear for ten days." Will one of Jeff's customers be hoping it doesn't rain while we are gone?

Bill is the regional vice president of an international bank, owned by people of color who I know to be racists. Bill schedules a vacation and he gets it. Customers who want the multimillion dollar loans he doles out? Tell ‘em it's in committee or that you are waiting for the appraisal.

For me it's very easy. I am driven by my calendar and I need only to tell my secretary when I'm going as long as I tell her at least six months in advance. As soon as the words "June Run" are punched into the computerized calendar, nothing else can happen that week. Ten days without the boss? An unrepentant sinner has a better chance of sneaking through the pearly gates than a court clerk does of getting my secretary to agree to put a trial on my calendar during the June Run.

It is hardest for Mike. Mike births babies. He needs to know 9 months in advance so he can spend ten days, 9 months before we go, keeping his patients from getting pregnant. He must have a way, because he does get away. I don't know how he does it but I always think of the billions of sterile fruit flies California releases to keep fertile fruit flies from reproducing. Just how many men does Mike know in Marin County that have had vasectomies? Does he drop condoms from helicopters? Put something in the water? Telemarketers calling at bedtime instead of dinner time?

Most years we pay homage to the myth. We load the bikes, leave Mike's driveway in Petaluma and go to Three Cooks to eat breakfast and look at the map. Not this year. Bill arranged for Allied Van Lines to pick up the bikes in Pt. Reyes and ship them to Cascade BMW in Seattle for $200 per bike. For some reason buried in the Code of Federal Regulations, it would have been much more to send them somewhere more that 1200 miles away. Seattle is good though and we got round trip tickets on Southwest Airlines that were cheaper than one-way from Sacramento to Seattle.

The movers were scheduled. The ride to the airport was scheduled. The flight was scheduled. The ride from the airport was scheduled. We were scheduled. We were on a run.

Davis, CA to Porpoise Bay, BC

We all had arrived at Bill's oldest daughter's house in Davis the night before. In Coarsegold, unless you have a good and accommodating friend who can cook and take a joke, you cannot get on the phone and be on the couch eating Chinese from white paper cartons 30 minutes later, which is what Bill and I and our wives did last night while we waited for Jeff and Mike to come.

Jeff arrived while we were eating. Mike called about three hours later and asked Bill for directions from Petaluma to Davis. Bill is always willing to think the worst of us when it comes to on-time issues and when the shrinks wrote the section in the DSM-IV-R about those struggling to repress their type-A personalities, they only had to look at their notes on Bill. Bill muttered when he got off the phone with Mike but rolled on the floor laughing when Mike and his family pulled into the driveway 4 minutes later. The mood was festive and we went to bed like children on Christmas Eve.

In the morning Scott Davis, no relation to the city as far as I know and wearing a red BMW Motorcycles baseball cap, arrives to take us to the Sacramento Airport. I fly a lot and have never seen a plane leave before its scheduled departure but Bill has us scheduled to arrive an hour and a half early at the airport.

We sit at the wing exits, two rows of three seats facing each other. It feels like the first class lounge. An attractive blond surgical nurse sits between me and Bill and is soon dishing dirt on the plastic surgeon she works for in North San Diego County. Bill tells her Mike is a doctor and she apologizes if she has offended him in any way. Mike knows enough doctors to know she is probably only telling the truth and nothing but. But, when he tells her that doctor was his roomie in medical school, she turns white. It is not true and, after a good laugh, she realizes it will be safe for her to return to work.

At Seattle-Tacoma airport, President Miles Miller of the Internet BMW Riders and also wearing a red BMW Motorcycles baseball hat, is waiting to pick us up and take us to Cascade BMW. I make a mental note to get to the bottom of this hat coincidence. Did I mention Bill had scheduled this pick up? Miles is great and had come in from Bainbridge Island to meet us.

The bikes are waiting for us at Cascade. The shipper had insisted the bikes be empty of gas when shipped and Cascade squirts some in so we can leave. Cascade is a beautiful dealer ship and treated us well. They received and stored our bikes for a day or 2 for no charge. Jeff's rebuilt and refurbished R90S with red pinstripes and lots of polished aluminum draws a lot of interest. Under the guise of an open house to sell the new cruisers, Cascade throws a welcoming lunch for us of barbecued brats and root beer, so we hit the road happy and full.

We consider heading into downtown Seattle, where I have never been, but the traffic and congestion encourages us to immediately head to Canada. I find the Seattle area unsettling. I lived most of my life in LA and know full well that there are cities and there are forests but I also know that the forests are not supposed to be in the cities. I-5 is packed with cars. It's early Saturday afternoon and the traffic is bumper to bumper and barely moving. Jeff spots a Gold Wing broken down by the side of the road and pulls over. Jeff rebuilds the guy's carburetors and probably fashions new diaphragms out of a condom the guy had in is wallet.

We clear the urban area and cut over to the Chukanut coast. We stop, pee on the side of the road and are as happy as if we had all just heard the best joke we had ever heard. It's a nice road and ultimately leads us back to I-5. We hit the end of I-5 and promise the border guards to help God save the Queen, if necessary, and at least while we are there. Vancouver is beautiful but we don't stop until Horseshoe Bay.

We eat oysters on the half shell, fish and chips and drink microbrewed beer in sight of the ferry landing. Bill pulls internet-downloaded ferry schedules from his tank bag and gets nervous when Mike, Jeff and I get a second round of beers. It's about 7:00 pm, the ferry is scheduled to leave in 15 minutes and we're still a good two hundred yards away. Remarkably, we finish the beers and still make the ferry, although we were the last to get on as it turns out we have to back track a mile or two up the highway and back to get around the fences to the ferry.

In Porpoise Bay, well after 9 pm and in the dusk, we find a Patel Motel. Depesh Patel, the proprietor, offers us a room for about $70 Canadian and in keeping with our longstanding practice, Jeff goes to smell the room. He reports the room smells good but that the beds are fulls, not queens. We are willing to share beds on this run but as good as friends as we are we draw the line against full size beds. We prepare to leave and Depesh offers an additional room for only $8. We stay, drink coffee in the bar next door and return to our rooms when glass starts breaking and drunks start yelling.

Porpoise Bay to Nanaimo, Vancouver Island

Vancouver Island to Lillooet, BC

Lillooet to Harrison Hot Springs

In the morning Mike leads us to a German bakery he saw on his run that morning. I had seen it the night before on my walk but kept the information to myself. I knew they wouldn't have good hash browns there.

Outside the bakery we talk to a Mountie carrying a bag of pastries to his RCMP patrol car. I look around for King, his Husky, but don't see it. The Mountie is open, friendly and eager to talk about pastry and roads. He is completely unguarded in his body language and he fails to recognize us as perps or violators, past, present or future. What is lacking in this man's training? Why isn't he treating us like pond scum? He needs a seminar south of the border. He has only his badge and gun in common with his cynical and suspicious counterparts on the CHP. The Chippies blame their ill-temper on the public they serve on a daily basis but can the public in British Columbia be that different or the public in California that bad?

The apple strudel for breakfast is the best pastry I‘ve ever eaten. Sweet and buttery. Not too much clove. The cinnamon roll is forgettable. There are framed baking awards on the walls from Germany and they were clearly deserved. Our server was a sweet girl of about 12 and we tip her lavishly. Her boss was her mom and she took that role too seriously for me. If this sweet girl needs to be treated this harshly, I'd hate to see how her evil sister is treated. I hope she gets to keep the tip.

From Lillooet we continue north on Hwy 99. Hwy 99 in the San Joaquin Valley of California has carried me nearly every summer of my life to the southern Sierra and the Kern River for family vacations. I am eager to see its end in British Columbia.

We travel through high desert sweepers and past a blue lake, shade cloth covered ginseng, and irrigated alfalfa fields. Just past a dude ranch, Hwy 99 ends as it hits Hwy 97. We stop and take pictures of each other next to the end sign.

Mild sweepers on Hwy 97 take us to Cache Creek where we stop and eat croissants and drink diet Pepsis in a grocery store while a half dozen locals and store employees sit at plastic tables and play keno, watching the numbers come in on a video monitor above the empty checkout stand. Cache Creek has borrowed the best Bakersfield has to offer. We don't like it and don't stay long.

The road reaches the Frazer River Canyon. The canyon and river are big. The road is good and lightly traveled.

We do not know it but we are on a collision course with Harrison Hot Springs. Shortly after we leave the Frazer and start heading towards the border and our expected rendezvous with Jeff, a road sign reads: "Harrison 29 km" and in smaller letters, which might even be in parenthesis, the words "Hot Springs." Mike was in the lead and though I do not see even a twitch of Mike's helmet towards the sign, I know it is not possible for Mike to miss a sign for a hot springs and not possible for Mike to pass a hot springs without gently suggesting we check it out.

Before we stop to confer, which I know we will do because all our decisions are made by consensus, I also know where we will go as surely as I know where the sun will rise the next morning. As much as we all profess to be free agents in charge of our own destiny, our course for the rest of the day was set when a highway department bureaucrat, years earlier, decided to put that parenthetical remark on that sign between the Frazer and the border.

Harrison Hot Springs sits at the south end of a 50 mile long natural lake on the Lillooet River. I never expect or hope to see the Black Forest, or any other part of Germany, but this town, the buildings, the esplanade along the lake front and the tree covered mountains could easily be in Germany from the pictures I've seen. Every menu in every restaurant window claims to have Black Forest ham and the streets are filled with tourists talking German.

I realize this is probably just an unwarranted ugly prejudice I have. It could just be that I watched too many World War II movies on tv while a child but it is more likely that because I was in love with a Jewish girl when I read Scheer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I am never comfortable around people speaking German. Why would they leave Germany and come half way around the world to an ersatz German village to eat pig meat they could have gotten at home? When in London, I never go into McDonalds. Well, hardly ever. Sometimes I do want to have ice in my diet cola.

My only comfort around all these Germans is the thought that if enough of them are here, perhaps we can finish the century without another world war.

We check in at what appears to be the cheapest and oldest motel on the esplanade. Bill is sick and lies on the couch watching tv. The inside of the bathroom door has been severely clawed. I think some unfortunate wiener dog did it. Bill thinks it was the more unfortunate child of a German tourist and writes a poem commemorating the event which he leaves pinned to the door, although he knows it is not likely to survive the maid the next morning. Mike goes to check out the hot springs, which turn out to be mostly closed. He finds Japanese tourists doing some ritualized hand washing in the only part still open and joins them.

I sit on a bench on the esplanade for a couple of hours, thinking about the possibility of Sasquatches in the mountains around the lake and the certainty of German tourists behind me.

Harrison Hot Springs to Port Angeles, WA

Port Angeles to Netarts, OR

Netarts to Gold Beach, CA

Gold Beach to Coarsegold, CA

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