There we were, my brother John and I, eating dinner at The Orchid Grill, having reached the end of a day on the road. We had begun at 5∶45 AM with breakfast at Express-o Yourself in Enumclaw, Washington, stopped for lunch at Pine Tavern in Bend, Oregon (good Reuben sandwich), and pulled up for the night in the driveway of Bestway Inn in Grants Pass, Oregon, after 571 miles astride our motorcycles. We had seen the moon over Mount Rainier through the gelid dawn as we dashed to the ne plus ultra of the Chinook Scenic Byway fiddling with the controls on our heated clothing, and later 96° from the ambient thermisters as we transited the last miles of broiled asphalt of the Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway. This was the first of a multiple‐day trip to Central California, and, though we have been in and out of the Pacific Northwest many times on our bikes, there is always much to see and memories to refresh as we leave our domestic corner of the land. Today had been no different, though we had little to say of this movement toward the exit. An observer might have claimed such was axiomatic, that the swaddling of familiarity dulls the wit for novelty and thus is conversation made langourous, but no one who travels would agree. Though Blaise Pascal admonishes us that old impressions (are) capable of misleading us, the sensations that comfort a traveler are a private matter, a range of embrocations, tinctures, syrups, and tisanes to be applied where ministration is wanted. We do not speak of such things. Such things abide. To give rein to desultory chat at the conclusion of a day spent outward bound from home is to husband the richness of the occasion.

Breakfast the next day at Wildwood Crossing in Etna, California, consisted of the best croissant sandwich I am ever going to eat. The search has ended. The sandwich was hot with layers of flavors from gooey cheeses, butter, homemade sausage, and a flawlessly cooked egg, prepared using an essentially inenarrable mastery of a griddle and a transcendent pastry into which all was confided. John had found this small‐town outpost on the map, and the whole deal — family place, tiny, bustling, good smells, middle of nowhere — is now at the top of the list when it becomes necessary to explain why we do not eat at national franchise restaurants when on the road: it concretized the Platonic ideal of a local dining establishment.

We had hit the road at 5∶00 AM and ridden into California through Happy Camp, where I had last been in 2012 on the way to a visit with my daughter, and which was still a quiet and isolated community holding its breath and hoping the speculative developers of the world will continue to overlook this Shangri‐La not far from the wealth and covetousness of Silicon Valley. The town was founded on the shore of the Klamath River in 1851 by a group of prospectors, and even now it is home to only a few more than 1,000 souls. Use of the river is the focus of controversy among prospectors, conservation groups, the California government, the U.S. government, and the Karuk, Hupa, and Yuro people, but such dissonance is concealed when one is merely passing through. One sees that it is a beautiful place and moves on, questing for more.

Lunch was a burrito at Aztec Grill in Willow Creek, California; it was only the second road meal we had ever eaten from a gas station, and it was actually not bad. (I have previously described the original such meal.) Shortly after lunch headed west on State Route 299 I mistakenly agreed to give an intersecting Forest Service road a try and off we went to chase the hoodoo. We were by‐and‐by so remote in a godforsaken burning forest that SPOT could not find a satellite to talk to for 4½ hours. Somewhere on this shadeless goat path at the confluence of the Gorda, North American, and Pacific lithospheric plates, my bike told me it was 100° on the sunward side of my helmet, which I had already worked out for myself. In California, one is never more than 13 miles from a road, but that is as measured from all of its mountaintops and deserts. Once on this Forest Service road, any such calculation had become nonsensical, and we seemed destined to plunge eternally toward the inexhaustible vanishing point, observed through the scopes of rifles held by illicit pot farmers and feral libertarians, in a land where a compass has no cardinal direction and a map has no meaning. I had no cell phone signal, thus could not summon a helicopter to come return me to civilization. And so on we went. And on. The goat path at last began to descend from the ridge line and became a rutted wagon trail. Pockets of homes materialized in the chaparral, huddled together for mutual protection from the wraiths that wandered the hilltops screaming throughout each night, and a Subaru appeared on the road before us. The rutted trail gave way to graded chip seal, and a school bus stop ahead sign was posted at the roadside not far beyond. As if we had not earlier dissolved into the aether and now emerged from a warp in the fabric, with nary a pause to reflect upon our return from the quintessence, we arrived at U.S. Route 101 and chose the southbound onramp.

Downhill from Leggett, California, we went upon California State Route 1, which would be our guide for the next three days, pulling up at Overtime Brewing Company in Fort Bragg, California, for a dinner of fine jambalaya. The restaurant was small and busy, the service good, and the crowd youthful. Each of its members appeared to be shirking a responsibility to instead share a meal with a friend or loved one in the way people who live in the redwood mists have done for centuries. Of course, each also held a smart phone to leash themselves to the everlasting blast of news of rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem, lacerating the temporal bulwark of this outpost distant from the centers of outrage. In an afternoon we had traveled from the kingdom of the alienated to that of the incurably preoccupied.

There is a line in Civilization and Its Discontents in which Freud invites the reader to think about Rome not as a geographic space but as a psychic space where the entirety of its history is manifest.¹ The traveler seizes on this idea as a means perhaps of tabulating the kaleidoscopic bricolages of memories presenting themselves with each bend along the frequented precincts of the long road, but eventually agrees that the phantasms and faults of human memory cannot be platted using only the spatial dimensions of perception. One sees that memory is an unreliable witness, given to false testimonies and exaggerated claims, a melange of the real and invention and sham anamnesis. At best, the traveler is free to contrive a deus ex machina to pacify the will to make sense of it all, this presque vu informed by the discontinuously repeated solving of the problem of a given twist of the road, which though unchanged must be solved anew, and upon which an infant memory is lodged within the crowded psychic space. I have barnstormed the California coast many times across decades and attest only to the indelibility of desire to do so again, to add to the overflowing cup of memory yet more impressions of surf, shadow, smell, sound, and the sublime theory of being present. I slept the sleep of the peripatetic.

The resumption of our southbound passage on State Route 1 the following morning after breakfast at Headlands Coffeehouse was attended by low clouds and anticipation. When I think of California, I think first of my daughter, followed by the Golden Gate Bridge, and this was the day to cross the bridge. We cut throttle through Mendocino, Little River, Albion, and Point Arena, and stopped at Point Reyes Station for a lunch of pizza at Cafe Reyes before arriving at the approaches to the bridge.

My first visit to San Francisco was as a boy, of which I recall only vague impressions of the streetscape from the family Volkswagen. In the past four decades, I have spent sufficient time in the city to explore its popular attractions, eat at its famous restaurants, watch the Giants beat the Dodgers at Candlestick Park, and enjoy many more of its lesser charms. Stopping at the Marin Headlands on the way in or out of the city is a ceremonial act of melancholy I allow myself. Time is kind to memory, but does not ease it from its burden of regrets, nor rob it of its trove of cheer. On this day, we stopped and I was gladdened to be upon the threshold of returning to a place where memory had no small measure of presence.

Many, many years ago, I would frequently drive into the Marina District of San Francisco for an evening of fondue and poetry readings or live jazz at a club downstairs in Ghirardelli Square. Those evenings always drew me to imagine the acme of the beats of Jack Kerouac and his generation (Ginsberg introduced his poem Howl shortly before I was born) and how gripping I found their stories, who rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio. The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen coined the term beatnik in 1958 as a pejorative label (Caen was happily provincial), and in those prodigious moments of homage to their legacy, I discovered in myself a kindred notion of belonging outside of the establishment that remains unabridged to this day, where I observe that no one still grieves for Herb Caen. My life has not been altogether conventional, and I took the above picture the day we arrived in the city while communing with the entirety of its span since I first dipped bread into cheese here those decades ago. I felt at ease.

I made the unfortunate choice of guiding us to dine at Castagnola’s, which, because it is located on the Wharf and thus immediately suspect as a haven of canned goods and microwaved delicacies, won me over by reminding me how much I loved A. Sabella’s, a four‐generation family business that closed over a decade ago and where I ate filet of sole frequently and contentedly while gazing out its magnificent arched windows overlooking the Bay, one block over and now an Applebee’s. This place was not the same. At all. I was too embarrassed even to apologize for my choice of restaurants.

We were on the road late in the morning, leaving San Francisco for a short cruise to Monterey. We stopped for lunch at Whale City Bakery, because the building was painted mustard yellow, the parking lot was full, and a crowd was dining al fresco while seeming to throw a neighborhood picnic bound by the verge of the highway. I had a burger that was substantial, delicious, and messy — as God intended — while sitting in a throng of happy people lounging in the sun and listening to the squeaky front door spring, the conversations at the adjacent tables, the parents cooing at their children as they were being strapped into their bicycle‐drawn carriers, and the noise of the traffic from which we had only just withdrawn. If eating at Castagnola’s had been like clinging to the safety bar on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride while the car was aflame and scenes from Hieronymus Bosch were projected onto the walls, this had been like answering a knock at the door and discovering Publisher’s Clearing House waiting on the porch with a camera crew.

There once was a Nobel Prize winner in Literature who was born and raised in Salinas, California, the Monterey County seat. Many of his best‐known novels used the surrounding territory as their setting; the subject of one such moved the city of Monterey to rename a street after the title of the book. We spent the night at The Monterey Hotel (est. 1904), a mile past the marina to the plaza where a statue of the writer poses midway along that famous street. Sitting at the bar for dinner at Alvarado Street Brewery & Grill, two doors down the sidewalk from the hotel, I had pizza; its toppings as listed on the menu were pork belly, garlic cream, mozzarella, pickled chiles, oranges, cilantro, and hoisin. I could not help but shake my head at the prospect of eating those things in that combination cooked on top of dough, but, as it was unmistakably a descendant of Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck, I had to try it. I ended up chuckling with each bite because it was irresistible not to do so: the food was faithful to its origins and astonishingly good. After dinner, I strolled to the statue in the plaza on the street the Nobel Prize winner had immortalized, who had encouraged the future to embrace changes to the neighborhood where the sardines were canned, not to fix it in time as if were a fossil, where I waited for the hour of pearl — the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men, and he would have meant the same thing. — John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (1945)

Somewhere south of Bixby Bridge the next morning driving toward Mexico on the Big Sur Coast Highway, we were passed by a Porsche Carrera GT, one of 1,270 ever made. I had already thought to myself several times don’t see too many of those earlier in the day in the vicinity of Carmel‐by‐the‐Sea, because there it seemed as if the automobiles presented at the Concours on the Avenue a few weeks earlier were still plying local roads in the way of a museum that has spilled into the street, and, when the Porsche motored by on the open highway, its presence was almost impossible, yet entirely unsurprising. Now, I thought, I have seen it all.

The Santa Lucia Mountains to our left as we drove south form the steepest coastal slope in the contiguous United States and were a barrier to early Spanish explorers. Even today, the rugged terrain hampers trade between the coast and interior: clinging to the upland side of the beach, the community of Gorda, with a single gas station known to collect some of the highest prices on the central coast of California, is twenty miles from the electric grid — everything runs on generators. The Garmin said the Whale Watchers Cafe in Gorda was the only restaurant we were going to see any time soon, so we pulled over and asked to be served lunch on their veranda. My chicken sandwich made me glad to have stopped. The air was scented with brine.

If I had a dollar for every time over the years someone has connected my brother and I with our motorcycles parked nearby and approached us excitedly asking which of us owns the Triumph, I would have a lot of dollars, including one collected as we were eating lunch on this day. John says the appeal is that the Triumph brand has cachet and their designs are attention‐getting. I parry by claiming the interest is because people are amazed someone would actually buy one of them, let alone leave home on it, in the way one might have clamored to meet the commander of the Hindenburg*.

We soon were riding on the San Luis Obispo North Coast Byway toward Morro Bay, our destination for the night, and easy to spy as the juxtaposed trio of 450‐foot‐tall smokestacks from the shuttered Dynegy Power Plant and 581‐foot Morro Rock were landmarks difficult to overlook. Morro Rock is one of 23 remnant necks of extinct volcanoes in a chain that runs from Morro Bay to San Luis Obisbo; the power plant is an international modernist building that today could not be located as it was within a few yards of the shoreline, but for over 60 years now it has dominated the local view to the ocean. When I asked the desk clerk at La Serena Inn if she knew what industry the smokestacks seen from the lobby window supported, she said she had no idea, but that lapse in local knowledge had not caused us to miss our exit.

The Marine Life Institute here is known as the Jewel of Morro Bay and is where Dory in the 2016 Pixar film Finding Dory was born. It is just down the street from Giovanni’s Fish Market, where we walked up for dinner and sat outside at a picnic table to enjoy it in the cool early evening weather, and whence it was a few steps to the marina beyond which Morro Rock was shrouded in fog. This was our last look at the Pacific, as the next morning we were to turn toward the Central Valley of California and begin the northward tramp toward home.

We hustled into Sun N Buns Bakery & Espresso Bar for a caffeine dose at the crack of early the next day and then proceeded on our way to find breakfast. We joined the oak woodlands overland to Atascadero; spied over the shoulder of the Salinas River until diverging at El Paso de Robles; then jumped the San Adreas Fault en route to Fresno and beyond. As we meandered into the hills northeast of Fresno, I found myself amazed at the traffic volume. The cars and trucks did not seem to be full of families headed to Yosemite National Park, nor were there suburbs absorbing the rush, and nothing in my recollection from trips this way decades earlier suggested why so many were crowding the highway beyond the city. It was then that we rounded a corner and Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino appeared, and the highway relinquished much of its consignment of traffic to the vast casino parking lot that had been built in 2003. A reminder of how many years had passed since I had been in these hills was unwelcome, and we raced out ahead of the onrush of time before finally succumbing to our appetites at The Cool Bean Cafe in Oakhurst.

A left turn after breakfast placed our wheels onto Highway 49 — The Golden Chain Highway — to lead us through historical locations and landmarks of the California Gold Rush, including Angels Camp, where Simon Wheeler narrated the story of the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County.² In these foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains my youthful self rode along with me and reminisced about events and people to which I had once, at least, attached importance enough to recall this hot afternoon many years later. We stopped for lunch at Diamondback Grill in Sonora, a town where some of those youthful memories had been born and where I had last stayed in 2015, then continued our tour northward as the ghosts of more such memories flocked to count the gray hairs on my head. Upon arriving in Placerville, we tossed our gear into rooms at the Cary House Hotel, powdered our noses, and then joined my daughter for dinner at Manderes just down the road in Folsom. I count it as among the best of days when one such includes a visit with my daughter, so this was a very fine day, indeed.

John and I heard the barn doors open in western Washington while eating breakfast next morning in Placerville at Centro Coffee House, and away we flew like the down of a thistle, past Sutter’s Mill at Coloma where James Marshall found gold on January 24, 1848, and once again into the great Central Valley until Oroville, where we launched ourselves up the Feather River on State Route 70. The ride through the Feather Canyon is a favorite because the scenery is gorgeous, and the highway rambles along the river in view of the Feather River Route, built by George Jay Gould and his Western Pacific Railroad, opened in 1909 and still in use today, including the Pulga Bridges, the Tobin Bridges, and the Keddie Wye, the world’s only railroad wye with two legs on bridges that meet in a tunnel. Wind gusts in the canyon through Jarbo Gap can exceed 100 MPH, but today the weather was cool and sunny. Beyond the canyon, we visited Anna’s Cafe in Greenville for lunch, having previously stopped to eat in 2009 and knowing good food was to be found inside (French Dip sandwich? Yes, please!), then continued on the road around the backside of Lassen Volcanic National Park, where we had climbed Lassen Peak along with brother Bill many years ago. The first rain of our trip fell as we were on the Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway outside Burney, and kept us wet with showers again in Mcdoel and Klamath Falls, Oregon. The day ended at Gino’s Cafe & Sports Bar in Klamath Falls for dinner.

My notes for the day include the observation that the hotel toilet was from a prison. At some point in the middle of the night, one of the guests took to strolling around outside, loudly hawking up phlegm. That went on for quite a while, costing me sleep and helping make the ringing of the alarm later not the most welcome of sounds. On balance, I do not believe I will be patronizing the establishment in the future.

We were on the road early and retraced much of our route through Oregon from the first day of the trip. We stopped for sandwiches in Madras, Oregon, at Great Earth Cafe & Market, which was full of good smells when we walked in the door and where the staff were happy to see everyone. The throttle hand becomes heavier as the distance to home decreases, so we motored along quite briskly, enjoying a sunny afternoon and the promise of arriving home as the miles counted down. This had been an excellent adventure, and we are certain to help ourselves to another.

* Max Pruss (September 13, 1891 – November 28, 1960)

Update November 10, 2018
On October 3, we rode past the place in the Feather Canyon where a wildfire originated this week that has destroyed the city of Paradise. Today the fire has been classified as the most destructive in California state history.

Just east of Paradise is a small community named Magalia, which, from its founding circa 1849 until 1862, was known as Dogtown. On April 12, 1859, a 54‐pound, 2‐ounce gold nugget was found near Dogtown. Labeled the Dogtown Nugget, it was sent to the San Francisco Mint, melted down to 49‐and‐one‐half pounds, and netted $10,690. It was the largest gold nugget ever found in North America, and its discovery led to a local festival known as Gold Nugget Days. The Gold Nugget Museum has its home in Paradise, and I once stood on the sidewalk in Paradise enjoying the Gold Nugget Parade. Those sidewalks today are the scene of disaster on a scale I could not have imagined while watching a small town celebrate its history.

I am glad for the memory of a beautiful autumn afternoon riding my motorcycle along the Feather River, but it is a memory that today sharpens my sorrow over the destruction and loss of life caused by the fire.

Then there is this gormless asshole:

There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2018

The man is a disgrace.

Update August 8, 2021
On August 4, 2021, the town of Greenville, California (pop. 2010: 1,129) was largely destroyed by the Dixie Fire, the largest non‐complex wildfire in California state history.

The above screen capture from an Associated Press video of the aftermath of the fire shows the still‐burning remains of Anna’s Cafe, where we ate lunch during this trip on October 3, 2018. News reports from nearby Susanville, California, place the current restaurant owner, Christi Hazleton, at an evacuation camp at Lassen Community College.