Living The Dream On A Mean Machine

The question was plain enough: Well, Mr Henderson, would you prefer a motor home or a Harley-Davidson motor bike?" Since our destination was western US, the answer seemed simple. I had visions of speeding over the roads on a massive, throbbing machine, wind in hair, living the American Dream.

In the end, my colleague and I took both. We packed them up in Los Angeles and took turns with them as we swung through Nevada, Utah and Arizona, returning to California along that most legendary of all highways, Route 66.

The Harley was a Heritage Softail, a remake of the 1950s' Hardtail frames. Its older styling included one of those huge, round headlights, a tall windscreen, and an acreage of chrome. But it had the best of modern technology with a belt drive, hidden rear suspension and five-speed transmission. It was no sewing machine on wheels, either: the 1340cc engine was the size of a small car's. As for the motor home, that was nearly as big as my London flat. I supposed that if we got tired of riding the Harley, we could always drive it inside and stow away in a cupboard.

 

Once we had cleared LA's endless suburbia, the Harley came into its own. It growled at the open roads of the Mojave desert as they vanished into the heat haze. The only other signs of human life were windscreens glinting in the distance and the odd shredded tyre at the roadside.

The Mojave is so desolate and hot that General Patton used it during WWII to train troops for North Africa. Only 100 years ago, it was frontier territory. Gold prospectors staked their claims and with them came a crowd of railwaymen, speculators and carpet-baggers.

Then, too, there were the itinerant cowboys. Indeed, I began to feel like one myself as we progressed. I thought of the Harley as my trusty steed, a feeling reinforced by a seat resembling a saddle and black-leather saddle bags. Certainly, it was a heavy beast to ride.

Driving into Nevada, the landscape proved so impressive that it really did feel like cruising into a post card. The mountains rose around us in extraordinary colours: vibrant orange, chocolate brown and faded magenta. Las Vegas came and went like an inexplicable mirage in the desert, an unaccountable oddity clustered around a vast pyramid of glass: dry storms flashed and scratched the distant mountains with their lightening forks.

Across the Utah border (helmet off; there is no law requiring one in this state), we headed for the Zion National Park. The walls of the canyons closed in around us. Sheer-sided and pearly white, like a range of massive, ragged teeth, they plummeted hundreds of feet to rust-coloured gums stacked with rubble resulting from the continuing splits and cracks of water erosion. Cranking the Harley through the gears in these conditions felt a bit like driving a tank. It puttered around the hairpin bends and then produced sonorous reverberations as it raced through narrow clefts in the rock.

Since the Hell's Angels are said to be the descendants of cowboys, I expected to come across them at some stage. As I was filling up one morning near the Arizona border, the petrol station was buffeted by a deafening roar as 10 bikes, all Harleys, cruised into the forecourt.

A couple of the riders glanced over and nodded greetings. Curiously, they were all neater and cleaner than I expected. We fell into conversation, about Harleys and the Dream and I realised, they were not quite what I had been expecting.

One of them, Jerry summed it up. Its a mid-life thing, really," he said. When we realised that golf on a Saturday afternoon just wasn't working out, a group of us took to biking. We're on a hairy-legs tour this weekend. Got no women with us." They left with another mighty roar.

After peering down into the Grand Canyon (somehow mountain scenery like this is more spectacular when you are looking up at it, rather than down), we arrived at Route 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona. The Mother Road, as it was known, has a fond place in the American memory. It was the artery that fed California as thousands of displaced farm workers from the midwest headed towards the west coast in the 1930s and '40s. Steinbeck told the story in The Grapes of Wrath.

Much of the old Route 66 has been replaced by modern highways (mostly Interstate 40), but original sections do remain. They are great to drive, without the traffic, and they are studded with one-street towns, broken-down petrol stations with ancient, chunky pumps, and motels, many with hefty enamel and neon signs that cast you back 40 years.

I found a latter-day cowboy in the end. He roared past me on a Harley Sportster on a twisting section of the road near the California border. I caught up with him in Oatman: Jake, a Vietnam veteran (he wore the T-shirt anyway) who obviously had never quite settled. Dressed in his soiled denims and bandanna, he was on a day out from Lake Havasu City, now home to the old London bridges.

Oatman once was a goldmining sector but now trades as a goldrush town. There was a (real) wedding going on, which involved the bridegroom being kidnapped by cowboys and then led back by the sheriff with a rope around his neck to his waiting bride at the street-side altar.

Jake decided: Well, it's kinda hookey, I reckon, but it's kinda fun, too." He waved goodbye and, with a rasping, metallic roar and a spray of gravel, headed back towards home. Me? I headed off west. Into the sunset, of course.