The Chinese have a saying that a journey begins with a single step. In my case, it began in naivety, progressed accidentally to actuality then somehow secured its place in my memory bank through sheer happenstance, perseverance and dumb luck.
Like some wonderful party that can’t be replicated even if all the same participants gathered together once again; a journey is really a time capsule. It’s a sliver of space in one’s life that gives birth to either good memories or bad, to wonderful thoughts or sad reflections. Yet, it always remains locked in that serendipitous turn of events which can never be changed, replicated or replaced. Whatever happened did happen. Whatever was gained can’t be changed even if it later becomes lost on in a fog of future events.
The idea for my two-wheeled journey north was born early one Sunday morning in some unnamed dive bar on North Beach, San Francisco, circ. 1964.
It was a motley assortment of drugstore cowboys, fast food aficionados and one kid with two years of college under his belt. Each of us ruminating on about our release from military service a monumental two years away. This was long before “Easy Rider” spoke to my generation of the daddy of all road trips and my own sojourn to Danmark which was still years into my future.
Our conversation was a once telling; a lot of young recruit bullshit, bravado and at its core ‘what were we going to do after the service?’ Return to college. Head out for Europe. Stay in San Francisco or hit the road just like Jack Kerouac did in “On the Road.”
The more sober philosophers among us thought we should get on with our lives. Go back home after our hitch was up, get an education, marry our high school sweetheart and settle down to the good old standard American life. The more inebriated among us thought otherwise. Another round of beers and an impromptu survey was taken. The open road garnered first place with Europe a close second. Returning home to suburban tranquility didn’t even register.
Some of my comrades without arms were already open road desperados. One guy had a big-ass Triumph 650cc motor-cycle with enough horsepower to fly between San Francisco to Los Angeles in record time. He went down to the city of angels almost every weekend to see his girlfriend.
A couple of guys had souped-up cars they’d brought to the Presidio from back home. But soon one fellow was shipped off to Vietnam and another got transferred to Okinawa. As the hours dragged on, several more wannabes disappeared and that effectively took most of the gang out of the picture. I was the only one left with my Vespa motor scooter and some exaggerated, romantic notions of the open road still spinning around in my head.
A dream had been planted in my plastic brain that resonated throughout my body. I decided I might as well hit the asphalt highway right then and there instead of waiting another two years before my release was up. My destination would be the distant lands north of the Golden Gate Bridge. At that point, they were just shadowy mounds of gray that kissed the skyline outside my office window.
This was the old Northern California countryside before multiple ballot propositions changed the political and social landscape and a bulging San Francisco spilled its inhabitants far and wide; spilling out across the bay to once tiny hamlets like Sausalito, Mount Tamaulipas and Stinson Beach. It was a time when cows roamed empty fields amid gun emplacements that still protected San Francisco Bay from Japanese battleships.
A time when only a few small enclaves of new housing slashed into the green hillsides. An era, before satellites, when radar stations scanned the northern skies for raiders from Russia. A time when the only sound heard was the putt-putt of my tiny Italian engine against a wind blowing oceanside and birds on high, floating silently in the sea breeze.
So one Monday morning, instead of heading to work at the Command Information Office, I saddled up my trusty stead, wrapped supplies on the saddle rack and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge for points north.
After I had braved the crazy traffic on the bridge, I swung north to the tiny enclave of Sausalito. Even back then Sausalito was a very special place. During the war, the Navy had installed a host of ship maintenance facilities. By the sixties, those had all disappeared but a lot of the ship workers had stayed. They were joined by displaced beats and hippies from across the bay. Together they made Sausalito an eclectic community, a growing artist colony and home to the funky and weird.
I got my regular cup of Joe and sat on the dock, peering out across the bay back to my new life in khaki and I wondered where the road might take me next. Otis Redding, where were you?
On my way out of town, I spotted this inlet where fancy cars were parked in front and yachts in back. It was a novel idea at the time, priceless in this day and age.
Later that morning, I stopped at the Christian Brothers winery. I didn’t see any of my old high school teachers there but a couple of glasses of vino did wonders for the rest of my trip that afternoon.
The first sign of encroaching humanity. The pristine countryside of Sausalito was becoming just another suburb of San Francisco.
Some rundown motel among the sequoias was my refuge for that first night. Exhausted, dirty and yet feeling exhilarated. Note the sleeping bag I had hauled along. What was I thinking?
This was one of dozens of inlets along the coast road where the sea had dumped its collection of driftwood and debris on land. I’m sure there were treasures down there but I never stopped to investigate.
I was so tempted to ride down to this house to see who lived there. I can’t image a more remote, mysterious and wonderful place to live. It was probably some writer toiling on the great American novel and suffering the pangs of a broken love affair.
Back along the bay, I came across this new military housing complex being built. The view out their front door was to die for.
But more fascinating was the old-World War Two defensive installations that ran up and down the bayside. A concrete collection of pillboxes, command centers and the foundations for large cannons which would have been pointed out to sea.
Then, behind those old fortifications was a new radar facility and cameras pointed down at the kid on a scooter who was peering back up at them.
I was lost and didn’t really care. I had gas to go and wanderlust running rampant through my veins.
By the end of the week, I was flying with wild abandon. I only crashed once, taking a curve too fast on wet leaves and ending up in a gully sans my glasses, hat and pride. The scooter was okay except for the mud and leaves that coated its undercarriage with brown muck. I found my glasses, picked the dirt out of my teeth and climbed back up on the saddle again.
After a week of meandering the bays and inlets, the back roads and tiny towns hugging the coast, I immerged out of a grove of redwood trees and found myself by some main artery that fed humanity back down toward the bay area. I used that as a beacon to head back south and my home base.
The trip was quickly forgotten and soon became a fading memory overshadowed by a multitude of other life events. Yet somehow those old slides followed me around for another forty-six years until a friend suggested I transfer them to digital. After gathering dust for forty plus years, those images took me back to a time when I was young and free and full of wondrous ideas and aspirations.
My California coastal tour was the first of several road trips. That was then, this is now. But back then, it was my first time skirting asphalt and concrete, tasting the grit and grime of the open road and opening my virgin mind to all kinds of possibilities. Some of which actually came true.
The scooter has been replaced with an E-bike and wonderous jaunts around the neighborhood, down the road and getting lost all over again. It’s not the same as my insane Vespa opened up flat out but it gives me the satisfaction of cruising along and taking in the world as I please.
I realize now that during my trip I was living in the moment…what Buddhists all mindfulness. Today we would translate that as conscious living. In his book “Wherever You Go There You Are – mindfulness meditation in everyday life,” author Jon Kabat-Zinn talks about mindfulness as enlightening and liberating work. “It is enlightening in that it literally allows us to see more clearly, and therefore come to understand more deeply, areas in our lives that we were out of touch with or unwilling to look at.”
I’m doing the same thing with my E-bike. Life can be strange that way.
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