Coos Bay to Eureka. Down to the Sea We Must

Awake at 3:30 in Coos Bay Oregon. The Sidecar outfit is sitting outside, under its cover, awaiting today’s ride. It is cold this morning, in the 40’s and there is a thin fog everywhere, not enough to occlude vision, but sufficient to take the edges off of every image.

I start out waiting on the sidewalk at an auto parts store, for them to open at 8 so I can purchase a few wrenches. The F650 is leaking oil like a Brit-bike and the first thing to check will be the various drain plugs and banjo fittings. When I finally get in to buy the tools and then lay in the parking lot to try tightening the plugs, none of them are actually loose. Still the oil comes and I know not from where. Well, I’ve had Brit bikes and ridden them everywhere while they leaked, so this one will just have to do likewise until I can sort this out.

Heading south down Highway 101, the sea, when I can see it, is on my right and the old song “The Terror of Highway 101” is stuck firmly in my head, playing on repeat. “He wore black denim trousers and motorcycle boots, and a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back. He had a hopped up ‘ sickle, that took off like a gun, that fool was the terror of highway 101″ I can recite the rest of the verses if you’d like. A song from 1955 that I last listened to in about 1958 on the jukebox at the table in a restaurant in Ashland KY, THAT I can remember. What I had for dinner last night, or what I did with the motel room key, not so much.

Soon I’m crossing the border into California, that fabled land where everything is always perfect, from the starlet”s makeup and artificially enhanced appendages, to the star’s coiffure, and certainly the weather. When the movie stars are driving their convertibles down the coast, it’s always 75 degrees and sunny. When I’m here it’s 45, overcast and fogged in so that the high breakers seem to be coming out of nowhere to crash on the beach. Still, I have a huge smile on my face and sometimes I even laugh out loud in my helmet. I’m on a sidecar rig on 101 going down the California coast. It would take a lot worse than a cold fog to dampen that feeling.

I make a stop in Crescent City to locate the Post Office and mail an envelope back to a stamp-collecting friend so that he’ll have one from here. In my wandering around, it seems that the more run-down section of town is the one closest to the shore. There are houses that haven’t seen paint or a helping hand in quite a while within sight of the crashing surf. There is a wide beach with beautiful rock-strewn shallow area, with the waves breaking a hundred yards or so out, where one could see oneself walking along with a dog and some sort of string music playing softly in the background. (The musicians might have a hard time hanging on to the sheet music in the constant wind, but that never seems a concern in the movies.)

Soon the road is enclosed in the redwood forests, the impossibly tall and straight trees standing right up next to the blacktop in places as if they were creeping slowly onto the surface to take back what is rightly theirs. We humans have built this path through the woods, but our time here is so fleeting in the lifespan of a redwood, that they have only to be patient, to wait us out and then it can be all one thing again. I’ve been seeing signs for the “Trees of Mystery” exhibit for quite a while, but when I get to the “museum”, I see the 40 foot tall Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues, looking like a grade school art project gone wild, and I give it a miss.

Just past Klamath, I veer off to the west as the road goes slightly east so that I can ease through some of the Redwood state parks. There seem to be several of them, with different names, but transition is seamless as the blacktop meanders through the forest. I pull into a trailhead marked “Big Tree” and think of the person who named it. Not sure if it was a complete lack of imagination or just that when immersed in this place, that is the only description that can come to mind.

In Orick, there is the Palm Cafe with its neon sign advertising “homemade pies”, so I must stop. It is exactly the kind of place I like to find on these trips, a cafe in a very small town where the staff seem to be just waiting for a chance to show off their skills to a hungry tourist. The waitress tells me that the apple pie was just made this morning, but she also had a variety of others to choose from. I go with the apple and I am temporarily in the time warp that excellent pie provides. The moment slows to a crawl while I savor each bite, and then suddenly it’s gone. Men at the next table want to engage the sidecar driver in conversation, but I have disappeared for the moment until now, when I can rejoin the real world. They hear that I am from Kentucky, headed back that way now, but it is a foreign place to them. All they can find to say about it is “Bluegrass State” but that is enough.

101 comes back to the shore soon after Crick and follows the twisty contours the ocean has left with its constant stealing of bits from the land. Taking the curves is a completely different sensation on the sidecar outfit….not better, not worse, just different. There is not yet for me a flow, the swinging back and forth in smooth arcs that a two wheeler provides. I’m hoping that will come, in its own way, with experience. I have learned that “hanging off” makes a major difference, reducing the steering effort and, I hope, the stress on the machine. My rear tire seems to be melting, with visible wear in just the hundreds of miles I’ve traveled. So I go into turns with my butt off the seat inside the curve, my torso completely to the left or right of the windshield and my arms extended. It is a workout and I’m not sure what other drivers on the road behind me or coming the other way think I’m doing. I’m not sure myself. But slowly I seem to be getting the hang (literally) of it. Still, I’m going at a pace that would be quite slow for a solo machine, so I pull over frequently to let cars and trucks go by. And that’s a good thing. Even at my advanced age, I might be, were I solo, going by this scenery too quickly to take it in. The rig makes me slow down and think about what I’m doing, what I’m seeing and experiencing. Yet another of its virtues.

At Patrick’s Point, the road becomes a highway for real, not just in name, splitting into four lanes. It still wiggles a bit around the shoreline, but the speed limit (for cars, not touring sidecars) is 65. I stay at 55 or 60, in the right lane. There are frequent turnouts now, “Vista Points”, each with cars nosed into the fence and people just standing and staring out at the surf. I stop often to do the same. I suppose it’s cliche, but we humans have been doing this for thousands of years and I think, no matter what technology brings us for amusements, we will keep doing it for as long as we’re here.

It’s getting to be late afternoon and the sun is strong, though struggling at times through the mist that hangs in the air. I’m struggling too, trying to stay focused on all of the things I still have to think about while riding the rig, so when Eureka appears, I call it a day. A tour up and down its streets shows me an old town, with “painted lady” houses along the shoreline, buildings in the main city that were modern in the 50’s but now a bit faded, and some signs of urban decay already well advanced. A Quality Inn beckons, with a reasonable rate and a nice room and I park for the night.

Just down the street from the motel is Restaurant 301, with excellent roasted Brussels Sprouts with walnuts, pan seared salmon with roasted veggies and a small cup of butterscotch pudding for dessert. I eat too much then walk back to my bed where I’m soon asleep.