60horsepowerprophet

Izabella looks over the Sonoma Coast.

It was a short trip. Too short. Circumstances dictated that it be short in the first place and unlucky mechanical happenstance jumped out to make it even shorter.

On my way back to Oregon from Iowa I got a message from a gent named Jay from L.A. Jay had purchased a rare, original condition VW Bus roof rack from a guy in Boise, Idaho. Jay wanted to know if I could transport his roofrack to the West coast. A deal was struck, if he could source me a good rear bumper for my Bus, I would meet him in San Francisco with his vintage roof rack. Well, he found a bumper and I picked up the roof rack.

Friday morning at 10 a.m. I loaded the Bus up for a weekend trip to the Bay Area. I took I-5 down, which is against my religion, but even devout catholics occasionally dabble in quick and dirty sex. That was the idea, to get to the Bay area as fast as possible so that I’d have as much time as possible to bum around and see this and that.

I-5, now featuring Mt. Shasta.

It took 11 hours to get to San Mateo from Eugene. Not bad at all considering I was traveling at 55 mph and that I stopped on the side of the road for 20 minutes to inspect the transmission, level of gear oil, etc. Out there on the 5, maybe 2 hours into the haul, fourth gear decided it wasn’t going to stay selected without force. From this point forward I had to hold the gear lever into the position for fourth gear so that it wouldn’t kick itself out (which leads to the eventual loss of 4th gear altogether). If I lost 4th gear my top speed would’ve been a high revving 45 mph. No thanks.

I had spent a bit of time online before I left trying to find a nice park to camp in on the north side of the Bay. I found one, China Camp State Park, which looked pretty fantastic. The website said nothing of the park closing all of its gates at 8 p.m. Who the hell gets into a campsite before 8 p.m.? Not me. Not ever.

I don’t like to use the GPS unit. When I drive the Bus I get into a certain historical mood. I don’t want electronic gizmos, I want 1965 technology. Sometimes, though, you’ve got to let go of your pride and get sucked back up into the giant, hungry orifice of modern technology. *Schlorp!*

When I set up the GPS unit I selected British English for my language setting (American English being the other choice). A fine, scholarly English woman serves me directions on a silver tea tray. She’s no doubt a MILF. This does ease the tension of dealing with a pushy GPS unit in most cases. But the bitch was of no help at all. She sent me to two alternate campsites that no longer existed. I had to settle for a Motel 6. And why do I always get a room next to an amateur porno shoot? Luckily I found a set of small, purple foam earplugs in the pocket of my jeans left over from a show a friend’s band played back home.

Frisco bound, Saturday morning.

In the morning I checked out and headed straight for San Francisco proper. It was foggy. I couldn’t see much of the Golden Gate bridge, and the Rice-A-Roni guy was no where to be found. I programmed the corner of Haight and Ashbury into my British MILF because, well, where the hell else do you go if you’re a liberal graduate student that drives a Volkswagen Bus? There are no photos of the Haight district because it was incredibly crowded and I could find no place to park. No matter anyhow, Jay called not long after I arrived to set up a meeting place for the parts trade. He chose Candlestick Park. Fair enough. The transaction was quick, Jay and his friend were really cool guys, would have been fun to bum around San Fran with them but they had to book back to L.A. because Jay had a gig to play that night.

I’ve got a friend, a Mr. Josh Marx, who lives in the Bay Area. I gave him a ring and it was decided that we’d meet later in the day for some alcohol and conversation in Menlo Park. Before pulling out of the parking lot of Candlestick, I produced my trusty Road Atlas and scoured the map for something to do in the meantime. La Honda was about 40 minutes from San Fran and about 15 minutes from Menlo Park. I had a plan now, I was going to find Ken Kesey’s infamous cabin in the woods of La Honda, the cabin where he and the Merry Pranksters led the West Coast into a day-glo acid wave. The very same cabin where the Hell’s Angels partied with the hippies and the beats one odd day in 1965. A laundry list of my idols and/or well liked historical figures had hung out at this cabin, Ken Kesey (of course), Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsburg, Tom Wolfe and the man himself, Hunter Thompson. So, it was important I see this place.

Keeping up with the Bimmers on the way to La Honda.

The road from Menlo Park into La Honda is the kind of henious black vein that adrenaline deranged motorcyclists, back-road auto racers and other twisted speed humpers visit in the wettest of their dreams. Smooth asphalt undulates mad through the hyper intensified splendor of the great Redwood Forest. My vehicle is ill-equipped for the sort of dangerous, adolescent hooligan behavior my brain is hardwired into upon sight of such a route. I wasn’t going to keep up with the serious maniacs, obviously, but I’d be damned if I was going to fall behind the Sunday drivers. There’s a saying known far and wide among car enthusiasts, “It’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than it is to drive a fast car slow.” I’m here to tell you that’s true. It must have been a spectacle, an old VW Bus hammering the brakes late, lifting off and careening headlong from corner to corner, exhibiting a biblical amount body-roll. Fun.

I couldn’t find the cabin on my own. But that was okay, it was time to head back into Menlo Park to meet up with Josh. I turned the bus around and did the whole freak dance all over again. Met Josh at his grandmother’s house where he and his father were visiting for the weekend. Hung out and talked with his Dad for a while. Cool guy. He had Volkswagen stories to share as well as La Honda stories from the 60s. Josh and I decided to cut to grab some drinks, Josh’s dad told us to check out the Alpine Inn, an old saloon on the other side of Menlo Park.

One of the things I’ve learned from traveling around is that, in most cases, the older and shittier the bar looks the better the bar is. This was the case with the Alpine Inn, which was fairly crowded with an odd mix of Stanford students, diamond encrusted soccer Moms, work-a-holic lawyers and even a few standard suburban families. Another thing I’ve learned over the years is that the older and dirty the grill looks, the better the burger will taste. That’s just pure fact.

The blurry spectre of Josh Marx approves of driving like a dickhead.

Josh had never been out to La Honda. I still desperately wanted to find the cabin. I didn’t ease up on the road out there, I may have even pushed it a bit more. Josh was impressed with how well my clapped out old Bus took the terrible nonsense I was throwing at it. I was, too. The plan was to patronize the local watering hole (yes, it was old and shitty looking) and ask a local for directions to the cabin. I pulled the Bus into the parking lot and as I got out a 1970 Beetle covered with a graffiti paint job pulled up. The driver, a man of average build and around 45 years, began asking me questions about my Bus. I only had one question for him and I asked as soon as there was a lull in the conversation.

“This is entirely unrelated but, you wouldn’t happen to know where Ken Kesey’s old cabin is, would you?”

“Yeah, it’s just right down the road.”

“Oh, ok. Is it down that way” I asked, pointing South.

“Hop in and I’ll show you.”

Josh crammed his lanky 6-foot frame into the back seat of the Beetle and I claimed shotgun. We took off. The driver did not slow down for the curves and the Beetle soared through them with no complaint, steady and smooth.

“Did you do something to the suspension in this?”

“Yeah, it’s got front and rear sway bars, bilstein shocks and wider tires.”

“It handles great!”

“I drive this road every day, you know, I think it was a necessary upgrade.”

That little ‘70 Beetle was one of the best handling street cars I’ve ever ridden in. No shit. It gives me bad ideas for my own ‘59 Bug…

Our La Honda tour guide.

There it was, on the left side of the road and in plain view. It looked exactly like the photographs that I’d seen of it, sitting back about 100 feet into the woods on the other side of a small creek. The Bug pulled a U-turn and cut back for the bar. Josh and I exchanged a pleasant goodbye with our driver, another air-cooled Volkswagen instant friend, and decided to head back to the cabin in the Bus to grab some photos. All of which turned out blurry — I’ve got the hands of a speed addled Cowboy Neal.

Kesey's old cabin in La Honda. Why he moved from here to Eugene is beyond me.

Cured by beer. Boont Amber is particularly tasty on a beat-up wooden porch on the edge of thick redwood evening while The Doors’ “Waiting for the Sun” drifts out the opened back door. There are certain places that leave a mark on you, something you take with you when you leave. A gentle, almost imperceptible realization that this is life, that this moment, that this place is one you’ll remember over so many of the others in day-to-day life. If you hunt for these things, I tell you, you’ll miss them entirely. Wait it out, they come just like anything else worth a shit in life, by the hair of a baboons ass.

I dropped Josh at his grandma’s place after another rousing game of Bus v. Apex and boomed for Highway 1, which I intended to follow until I found a suitable campsite on the coast. And that’s where I’ll leave this entry because, what kind of maniac writes a 2000 word blog entry about a single day? Exactly.

-A

Glacier National Park. Go there soon.

That was our pick-up line, if you could even call it that.

Two summers ago my friends Devin and Dan and I set out on an epic road trip from Iowa to the Badlands to the Black Hills and, finally, to Glacier National Park in Montana. My first real taste of a seriously maniacal road trip; probably the same for them.

My friends and I as a group are generally odd. Not odd like “I wonder why Johnny has been putting on eyeliner lately.”, but “I can’t believe Johnny said that in front of Grandma!” It’s not often that this many head trauma babies get together and whoop it up later in life, but I suppose we’re lucky. What I’m trying to get across here is this general haze of absurdity that emanates whenever we get together in groups of two or more. Anyhow…

The summit of Oberlin Peak is conquered.

We made up a lot of serious dumb shit on that trip, most of which has been canonized into our general vernacular. “Ever been to Montana?” was probably the very first thing that stuck on that particular expedition. We decided very early on that if we ever ran into an attractive young lady that we would sidle up to her, play it cool and then, with a half-hearted sideways glance ask “Ever been to Montana?” The scenario played constantly in our minds and would obviously work like Everclear every time.

We weren’t entirely serious. Or, at least most of us weren’t. For some reason this oh so suave, fool proof pick-up line wasn’t altered at all when we crossed within the boarders of Montana.

Was the pick-up line tested? Not in the real world. Despite the fact that any unsuccessful attempt at romance via this pick-up line would only haunt us for an extremely short period of time, we just couldn’t get the mental bone up hard enough to try it out.

There are two doe eyed female encounters that I remember specifically on the trip.

For some reason, from mile one on this trip, it was decided that I was the guy who’d hit on/score with all the ladies. Particularly odd seeing as Dan, at the time, was the only one of us not attached to a long-term girlfriend. I believe I argued this point at least twice on the trip to no avail.

Both of these unlucky ladies we ran into in the Many Glacier area of the park, an area famous for both its beauty and its comparatively larger grizzly bear population. Coincidence?

The first girl made her appearance on the first day we drove out to Many Glacier. We had just had a phenomenal, cliche life moment following an ice blue raging river while listening to Dark Side of the Moon and were pulling into the parking lot of the Many Glacier Hotel where we were hoping to catch breakfast.

Many Glacier Hotel.

I remember pulling the car into the lot, admiring the Hotel on the passenger side, scanning for parking lot bears and then, finally, looking out the driver’s side window of the car. My eyes followed a cement stairway up to an iconic image of a beautiful creature. I must have made a face worthy of the moment’s stupification because she looked back at me, smiled and laughed. And when she smiled, no shit, the area immediately around her head became brighter. There was absolute silence in the car for a few minutes and I knew that they had seen it, too. One of us, or all of us, followed her with our eyes to the door into the hotel. She was some kind of holy incarnation of a pre-alcoholism Kirsten Dunst.

I don’t remember all of what was said, but here’s what I do remember:

Adam slowly pulls towards an empty parking space, eyes wide, mouth agape with a nearly silent “WOW.”

“Oh man, dude, did you see that? Did you see her?”

“Uh-huh.” (Eyes widened, slow vocal delivery for effect)

“Man, you gotta hit on her, dude.”

“What? Me? Why me?

“Don’t question it, just go with it.”

Well, how in hell do you argue with that?

After some degree of creeper sleuth work we decided we’d probably run into her in the restaurant area of the Hotel. Perfect, we came here for food anyhow.

We were greeted by a young, brown haired waiter. Damn. He seated us in the corner of the room near a large picture window with a fantastic vista.

“Your server will be with you shortly.” Score.

And then she approached us and the pressure was on. It was time to man up and do what needed to be done. The delusional sexual tension in the room was suffocating. But when she got to the table everything went wrong. I mean everything. Not only did I completely botch every bit of the advance by admitting that we were the guys who nearly ran into a parked Maxima staring at her in the parking lot, but I think in an effort at self depreciating humor I mentioned the word “creepy” or the phrase “creepy guys” at least twice. And, of course, that just happened to be the truth. She also didn’t live up to the holy parking lot vision that should have been left alone. She looked more like a slightly puffy D’arcy Wretsky than my glorious vision of blond perfection. But she was from Norway and she had an accent. The rest of our interactions with her were brief and awkward. That was that.

Dan contemplates suicide at Ptarmagin falls.

I was crushed. Absolutely crushed. It wasn’t because I had been heartbroken at second sight. It wasn’t because I had savagely fucked up the possibility of some shimmering, paranormal, nymphet summer fling, it was because I had fucked up the one thing that my friends were counting on me to do.

OK. It wasn’t because I let the boys down, it was the principle of the thing. This thing that was trumped up ridiculous in jest before we even knew it existed. This thing that for one absurd second had seemed so damn important.

I was hard on myself the entire day. I even took some time to write about my monumental, hair pulling disappointment in detail in my trip journal (which was inked out when I realized the monumental absurdity of this scenario two days later). That particular day we hiked six miles round trip to Iceberg Lake, a place disappointingly devoid of its namesake. Three icy cold dips into the just above freezing lake didn’t wash the shame off.

A swim in iceberg lake.

The hike back sucked hard, as hikes back are wont to do. About a half mile before we got to the car we encountered a middle aged couple and a twenty-something guy all chatting to each other on trail. Hiking in front of them, alone, was a beautiful girl with long strawberry blonde hair (which is my hair color when the sun doesn’t bleach it out). I knew I had to redeem myself. When I went to pass her on the trail I turned to her and said “You have beautiful hair.”

“Wow, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” And I pulled off my cabby hat to reveal my bleached out blonde hair, which would have been strawberry blonde had I not been out in the sun all summer. I didn’t realize the blunder in this move until I looked in the car’s review mirror. This time, though, there was laughter. The shame of the earlier screw up melted away because, right after I commented on this girl’s hair the twenty-something guy from behind her (her boyfriend) went up and held her hand. A minor success, the boyfriend was threatened.

Devin, Dan and I at our campsite in Two Medicine on the last day in GNP.

Ridiculous.

I’ve been avoiding this post for a little while. Simply because it brings this particular road venture to an official end. It should be done, I suppose.

At attention near Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho.

Replacing the dead generator with the brand new alternator turned out to be a much easier job than I really could have imagined. I pulled the Bus into Kyle’s (Bozeman AIRS member) shop at around 10 a.m. and began the small task of dissassembly. I was a bit worried about the job at this point, a lot of VW gurus were saying it would be best accomplished with the motor out. This is not as difficult to do as it is in just about any other car but, it’s a dirty, no fun job. Thankfully I was able to reach around the back of the motor to wrench the huge (36mm!) generator fan nut off. The job was relatively straight-forward. Since most of the readers of this blog aren’t of the mechanical ilk, though, I won’t write up the whole process.

Half way there!

I did run into a one issue, a rather disconcerting metal squeal noise that after a bit of tinkering and diagnosing, Kyle and I decided wasn’t enough of an issue to warrant redoing the job.

Kyle and his '59 SO-23 Westy.

I pulled out of Bozeman and back onto I-90 at around 6 p.m. Driving from this point forward was not much more than a chore. The wind in south west Montana, southern Idaho and even eastern Oregon had some sort of grudge against old VWs. If I wasn’t driving straight into this heavy wind and struggling to keep a speed of 50, I was being pushed around the highway like a new kid on the playground.

Kyle's shop.

Not much to report on the I-90 front. Mostly frivolous cursing at the wind and a few conversations with people at gas stations. I did, however, try out a bottle of five hour energy that night. That stuff is a crock of shit, it gave me two hours of energy at best! Crossed the state line into Idaho at around 11:30 p.m. and found a National Forest to camp in at around midnight. It was completely empty except for one Dodge Ram with a camper shell, and those people were asleep.

Welcome to south-central Idaho, you are now sterile!

Another reason I’m never doing five hour energy again, PARANOIA! I have no idea what’s in this stuff and I’m currently too lazy to research it but, something in there or maybe the combination of all of those things gave me ridiculous paranoia that night. I was certain that I was going to be stabbed to death that night by some crazed drifter with absolutely no motive besides general hatred of humanity. I remember constantly pulling my head up out of the sleeping bag and looking out the rear window to see what was going on outside. It was nothing every time, but for some time I was still cowering in that car. I spent a good deal of time debating which tool in the cabinet next to me would critically injure but not kill a would-be assailant. Ridiculous.

No caption necessary.

In the morning I found myself completely alone. So I covered my naked body with satanic runes made of wheel bearing grease and… There’s no reason to continue this blatantly ridiculous scenario, I just got back on the highway towards Boise. Which is where I met a guy named Mike at a VW shop to pick up an original 50s era roof rack for a guy in SoCal. We’d made a deal a few days earlier that I would pick-up and transport his rack to him in exchange for a rear bumper for my Bus.

Oh, the atomic age, how I pine for thee.

What else is there to tell? That particular part of Idaho was alright. Nothing to flip out about. More wind, of course. Eastern Oregon was about the same, only with more sage bushes.

Western Oregon had a wonderful greeting prepared for me that night, near freezing temperatures, drizzle and patches of dense fog on a slick, steep mountain pass. Yeah, I’m just as happy to see you, too, asshole.

Highway 20, eastern Oregon.

Got the Bus in my carport at midnight and immediately crashed out. Thus ends this particular journey. Depressing, both in its quite boring end and in its realization that my days of this sort of adventure are probably numbered. You see, I’ll be graduating soon and with graduation comes the realization that I have to be a “responsible, contributing citizen.” Sounds pretty shitty, doesn’t it? The real issue at hand is the titanic, bloodthirsty monster that is my student loan debt.

But there are still a few adventures of this caliber to be had. I’m not going to give up completely. But I am for tonight. Six a.m. flights come early.