Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Mar 14, 2004

Part 4: Santa Cruz, California

Good judgement comes from experience.

Experience comes from bad judgement.

I came flying round the corner, realized I was heading for the ditch, and slammed on the brakes.

Crud. Gravel.

Whoops. How did I get to be upside-down, anyway?

It was my birthday on March 14th, and I had the use of a friend’s apartment in Santa Cruz for the weekend. On Friday night, Don and I got to bed kind of late, and I set the alarm for six. When it went off, there was no waking up my husband, so, drawing on past experience, I figured that it wasn’t worth waiting, and I’d just head off on my own to Santa Cruz.

This was a Big Deal: my first over-forty-miles solo ride since I took up riding again in August 2002, and my first ever trip to the coast. I felt I’d progressed far enough to give it a try.

So I went. It was eight o’clock by the time I got out the door…but I was alert and ready to go. I filled up Arnie, and off we rode.

Highway 101 was deserted at that time of the morning. With a big silly grin and a real sense of excitement, I crossed the sweeping, elegant bridge to join highway 92.

Bikers have a euphemism for roads that are a little more challenging that you were expecting: “intense.” These are roads that get your heart pounding and the adrenaline flowing. I found 92 quite intense–it was much steeper and much more wiggledy than I remembered from car trips and riding on back. This was my first time as rider, and I held my own. I permitted myself a quick grin of satisfaction as I crossed Crystal Springs Dam…but I was concentrating so hard that the scenery was nothing more than a blur.

Even so early in the morning, by the time I hit the hill over Half Moon Bay, traffic was bumper-to-bumper. For the next hour or so, I got plenty of practice of slow-speed clutch control and hill starts. Lucky me.

And there I was, making a left onto Highway One for the first time ever. Wooooooo-hooooooo! I felt proud and exhilarated, basking in a strong sense of achievement to finally be riding the coastal highway. After all, I’d only been living here, near the ocean, for seven and a half years–and this was the first time I’d made it over to the Pacific on my own!

Just a mile or so out, I hit fog. Lots of oozing cold gray fog. Up until then it had been sunny and bright: I was still wearing my shades. As it somebody had flipped a switch, my vision was gone–my glasses were covered in condensation, it was too dark for shades, and visibility was about three car-lengths. To see anything at all, I had to lean my head forward and peer over the top of my glasses–and I wear those glasses for a reason! Add to this the fact that, with careful preparation and foresight, I’d left my warm over-jacket at home, I was chilled, worried, and in trouble.

Then someone started to tailgate me.

The conditions were so severe that I couldn’t stop safely anywhere. I knew that if I pulled off onto the side, there was a good chance I’d dump my bike in gravel or sand. I’d passed several state beaches before I even knew they were coming. I was scared, my body tense and hunched over the frame, my gaze fixed on the road. But I did know that Pomponio State Beach was coming up, and I did know that the aggressive idiot behind me was coming up too, so when I got there I made a sharp right turn to get him off my tail.

Next to blind by that point, it was only with some kind of sixth sense that I realized I’d gone wide and was heading for a ditch. On went the brakes.

Crud. Gravel.

Whoops. How did I get to be upside-down, anyway?

OK: no panic; no pain. Those Bohn pants really worked! My feet were stuck under bike; I yanked one out, and was just working on the other when two nice young Californian men who’d been having a picnic in the fog came running up. “Are you okay? Hurt?”

I shook my head no as they righted the bike for me, refusing to go away until they believed I really was okay. I re-seated my saddlebags, thrown clear off the bike, gibbering about what had happened in a voice propelled by adrenaline. Then I noticed the sheared-off mirror: damn. I picked that up, too. Feeling stiff and sore, I got back into the saddle. Arnie started right up; gingerly I rode into the parking lot. I inspected the bike carefully, taking stock of the damage and forcing myself to calm down. Then I ate my banana, now mildly squashed: the hit of energy and solid ballast finished the job of getting me grounded again.

Aside from some scratches, a bent (but working) indicator stalk, one missing mirror and another bent so far round that only a wrench would have any hope of adjusting it, the bike seemed all right. I contemplated the what-next.

I could go back forty or so miles.

I could go forward forty or so miles.

I could take 84, direct route, but twisty and steep-ish. I was already fatigued and cold; the choice was a no-brainer. I had to move on, and quickly, before my strained muscles started to seize. I needed to get where I was going.

With shades safely put away, I rode to the bottom of the exit slope, where I could see down the highway. Riding with excessive caution now, and not trusting the gravel at the top, instead of messing with hill starts and stop signs, I waited until I could see that all was clear, and pulled right out.

It took me another two hours to travel the forty miles to Santa Cruz. Whenever I found a stretch with two lanes, I slowed down to let the cars pass…but not many did. Most of the time I had very little idea who was behind me–I had to peer over the top of my glasses the whole way, and I had no mirrors. The Pacific Ocean was a kind of ghost sea, hidden by mist and barely glimpsed, an aside to the serious business of getting there in one piece.

On the outskirts of Santa Cruz the fog lifted and out came the sunshine. Exhausted and frazzled, it took many map stops and several bad turns to reach my destination. I seemed incapable of retaining more than one turn or intersection in my mind at a time. It was good to arrive.

Now, the kooky bit.

Last year in February, Don and I had a minor car accident where another driver decided that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he could merge into us. For some time beforehand, I had been “expecting” to have an accident, and when it happened it was calm, not serious, and nobody was hurt.

I had been having exactly the same feeling about my riding. “I’m due to drop my bike.” Part of it was to do with my growing confidence-bordering-on-cockiness (danger, Will Robinson!) and part of it was just plain intuition–something I suspect that we motorcyclists develop quite a lot of. (You know how you just know that someone’s going to cut you off? Like that.)

And when the accident happened, I wasn’t remotely afraid, or worried. It was calm, slow, and not particularly serious.

I had also been muttering about how annoying it was to have two mismatched mirrors: one of them enlarged and the other merely reflected. Well, I guess the universe fixed that for me. “Be careful what you ask for.”

I dumped my bags on the floor, peeled off my motorcycle kit and cleaned up. Then I wandered off into town. After all, the real purpose of this trip had not been to crash; it was to hunt down landmarks to their lair!

There are many beautiful Victorian buildings in Santa Cruz, all on various landmark registers. They look like Easter cakes with their pastel colours and fancy fretwork–they are something out of a different age. I checked out a couple of the ones that were on a street not far away. Three new landmarks and I didn’t have to walk more than a few steps between them!

I wandered down a steep hill with a nice view of the ocean and wharf. I was very tired and really not in the mood for anything much, so I walked slowly and let everything wash over me. When I stopped to call home, I got only an answering machine.

The boardwalk was busy and the day had turned out hot. I found one plaque for the boardwalk, but not the one I wanted. My lethargy was so great that I couldn’t even bring myself to lift my camera up and take pictures. I gave up, figuring that if I were going to landmark-hunt I should at least do it when I could summon up a little energy!

There followed a very quiet afternoon. I didn’t go anywhere and I sat and read a book. No TV, no computer, little bit of radio. It was strange: one surrounds oneself in noise, so when there is an almost total lack of it, different circuits, such as the one that allows me to write, began to kick in almost immediately. I seem to write best to the sound of silence.

I waited for Don to show up, but he didn’t. About six o’clock I went to call again, feeling unhappy. I got the answering machine again. I started to feel both annoyed, and worried. This was much more stressful than crashing my motorcycle. With the motorcycle I knew pretty much right away what the deal was with my damage and the bike’s damage. With this, not being able to get in touch, I had no idea if work had just expanded to fill all available space…or if he’d had an accident. I had no way of knowing.

In direct contravention to my previous observations on silence, I wished I had a cellphone. The mellow afternoon deteriorated into a worried evening, and I ate canned spaghetti, which were smiley-shaped: not at all how I felt.

And finally, because I had woken up so early, I decided that I would just go to bed, and get up early, and leave on Sunday to see if I could find out what happened. By nine o’clock I was in bed. About an hour later there was a knock at the door and Don showed up.

It had been work, and he’d had to go in and do major fire extinguishing. I was just relieved that he was there. He’d brought spare oil and fix-it kits for Arnie, just in case, and a hug. Life was suddenly good again. He took me on back to the supermarket. My birthday dinner was pizza and beer, just after midnight on the 14th of March, and it was perfect. We sat and talked, and looked at the pretty, huge Victorians in the distance, their windows lit up for all the world like a scene from Cinderella; and I played with my birthday present, a sparkly blue GPS unit.

Later on Sunday we woke up to a bright, warm day. I was hungry and wanted coffee, so suggested to Don that we head off to the boardwalk and get breakfast. Then I tried to stand up.

Ow. My muscles had seized up overnight. My neck was stiff from leaning it forward to peer over my glasses, and my abdomen, legs and arms hurt from riding tensed-up. I had bruises from the fall. I creaked like a ninety-year-old instead of a fresh new thirty-four-year-old.

Hobbling, first we went and looked for the local landmarks: while my body obviously hadn’t regenerated overnight, my enthusiasm had. I didn’t photograph the private homes, but photographed their plaques and took GPS coordinates, learning about my new gadget, and meeting the local furball at the youth hostel, which also happened to be the Carmelita Apartments, a registered landmark.

Santa Cruz Youth Hostel/Carmelita Landmark

We headed down the hill to the Beach Front cafe. It was lovely–crowded–its walls smothered in framed “Life” magazine covers and artwork. We were told it would be a fifteen-minute wait, but it was only five or so, and then we picked breakfast Ã -la-carte. My “short stack” of pancakes turned out to be two plate-sized pancakes, thick and fluffy with oodles of syrup. I joked about being glad to have not ordered the tall stack, and the long-haired young guy who served us said, “Yeah, totally!”

Don and I had a chuckle about the California Surf Dude, speaking Surf Dude Californian.

When we were finished, it was back to the boardwalk for us. It wasn’t really open yet, but already the weather was getting hot and the crowds were wandering in. I located the official boardwalk plaque just next to the one which showcased the original boards–I’d been right there the day before, so spaced out that I’d never seen it. So I got my pictures, and took pictures of the boardwalk, and the various other plaques thereabouts, with or without penguins; and I played with my new GPS toy, whoops, unit, slipped a book onto one of the many benches, and declined to walk on the beach and get my boots full of sand.

Quest landmarks: one. Oh well!