A friend is in danger. I postponed the motorcycle journey.

A friend in Peru has suffered a medical emergency and has asked for my help. I read the 'Help' email one hour before leaving, after kissing Grandma on the cheek, hugging the family dog, and packing stray junk into the bike that would weigh it down an extra 140 pounds for the run on Baja. It couldn't have been planned better by a Hollywood writer. Water bottles were packed with ice, a special lunch was on top, and I only needed to put on the helmet and start the ignition, but here was a trip-ending crisis.

I desperately tried to ignore her plea but it needled my conscience.

Here is the road to Tecate. A bunch of Border Patrol were watching those hills. When I stopped to ask them directions they tailed me afterwards and ran my plates. They must have been taught in the 'hardened criminals always ask cops for directions' school of thought.

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See that little hill just above the motorcycle? I camped to the right of it. There was a quarry nearby. During the night I heard about 75 yards away what seemed like a drunken man running through the brush with tin cans strapped to his legs. I stood up and shouted "Hey!" and pointed the flashlight in the direction of the noise, but it had left.

After 150 miles, and two Tecates in the "Old Highway Cafe" talking with a retired private eye, this quarry campsite seemed fine. While lying in the desert night only six miles from the Mexican border, I mulled over my friend's message. Mosquitos dusted my chin. It was clear that although I could pack my trip gear up and save it for later, I couldn't pack my friend up as dispassionately.

In the morning I treated myself to a huge scrambled eggs breakfast, then called a close friend of mine from a gas station phone. I spoke with him and got his advice. Doing the right thing all too often means sacrificing something beautiful for greater good. Shortly thereafter I turned around, in plain view of the Mexican mountains, and headed north.

Those mountains may have been as distant as the moon, for they were as beautiful. We'll touch them in 2008, is the plan. Until then, I will be in South America sooner than expected, with an airline ticket, working, caring for my friend, and maybe, just maybe, getting my toes wet in some beach sand.

Before we know what smacked us I'll be back RIDING THE BIKE and writing this blog. Look for a link that will continue the story until the motorcycle journey proper resumes. I will return to this blog.

Ethan

Somewhere waiting
Go and find it
Go and look beyond the ranges
Lost and waiting for you,
Go!

Kipling

Being a new Deputy Sheriff, I couldn't wait to go put troubles out and serve the innocent. Sure, there'd be boredom and paperwork at times. But there'd be moments beyond the routine, when the principles I fought for became stunningly clear.

After graduation in July 2006, I wrote "Anything But Jail" in caps across the top of my assignment form. I was going to excel, right? Mile and a half in 8:52 minutes, Spanish proficiency, college degree, push-up champ; but then the news arrived from the academy commander, standing prim and tall in front of our spit-shined class: you've been assigned for a year to the local jail.

Jail is part DMV, part submarine, and part dog pound.

I was a terrible jailer. I secretly craved crisis, just to break the interminable dullness. Instead, I worked scrubbing fecal matter from air vents, in a never ending quest to make every day of operation as flawless as the last. The place stank of feet, urine and vomit. I chained and unchained inmates for court, searched child molesters' pants for contraband and counted food trays, while friends from the academy on patrol knocked down doors to high class cathouses and sped with lights and sirens to 'shots fired' calls.

Working the central control station one day during a 6AM-6PM shift, I caught a glimpse of mountains and blue sky at the corner of a surveillance screen. The sky! I'd return to that monitor and, squinting, watch the wind in the fronds of a palm, thinking of the day I'd be out of the fishbowl.

I turned in my badge after three months of this, but not before a sergeant came to his own opinion from watching me that I was in danger of eating my gun out of loneliness and despair. I saved them the worry--30,000 county dollars of training and investment walked out the door into the autumn night.

I was ready to storm the Bastille, not escort punks to the shower.

It's funny, but there are those who find their stride from fighting an impossible foe, climbing a peak or embarking on an impossible task. There are others who know full well that this road leads to folly and content themselves to guarding the home fires. Give me the crusades, even in folly. I'd rather be thirsty and horseless in Damascus than fat in France. If this touches you in any way, know that you are not alone.

Prepare to confront the unknown with the few tools you carry. If failure stalks, stalk it back, with unpredictability and chaos as friendly familiars at your side. Dream of tree frogs in the fetid night, jungle air pulsing with lightning. Live, standing, as a man, and fall when you are done.

While mulling this over I'd go on runs for ten miles up my favorite desert canyon, here in California. Night would fall halfway, and the coyotes would come out in the underbrush and call to each other as I felt my way through thickets and deep sand. I would return to the trailer exhausted but blissful, and sit on the cinderblock front steps and pop a beer, and contemplate the dark mass of Martinez Mountain under the stars.

There is a little Mexican ranch I passed while on these runs, surrounded by palmetto groves. It smelled of orange trees, and peacocks would cry in their jaunty feminine way.

There is a family there, and once I heard dad asking his girls in Spanish if they wanted to go into town for the fair, while their mother told them it would be fine. They had three dogs, one with a spot around her eye, and they would go to the fence and bark as I ran by. This place represents Mexico to me somehow, and although I leave in one day I will pause on the motorcycle long enough to say goodbye to this little grove, with the little house and the chevy parked in front. I will savor their little separate peace on my way south.

Hasta luego

The angel said
"If we fail this time
It'd be a failure of imagination."
Then she placed the world
Gently into the palm of your hand.
---unknown author

Some people know who they are, where they're from, or where they're going. I know who I am and where I'm from, but not where I'm going.
All writers suffer from the urge to explain themselves to an uncomprehending world. Travel writers are slightly different. They wear a changing cloak and dance between the boundaries of this world. A travel writer is a shape shifter, a rogue, the wind. Like a war correspondent, they drink tea with chaos, chat up disaster, all to break imagined frontiers and bring that great crazy endless war that is life to the reader's front door in the morning. Ahh, you say sipping morning coffee, Kabuchikan has attacked Kerjukistan again. I'm glad our man is there.
Call this anti-luxury-travel-journalism. There's already too much of a market for semipornographic tales of life in Tuscan sun-kissed vineyards, where locals are charactured as quaint archetypes who do laundry for beautiful people who bravely explore new wines from the inside of their mouths. You know the type of article--found usually in glossy magazines like Conde Nast in megabookstores. "Travel on only $95 a day!" the headline screams. That is travel porn. It doesn't exist, and if it does, it carries no emotional involvement with what travel is all about. If you're looking for beachfront property in the New Costa Rica, indentured maid included, stop reading right now. Travel is about meeting odd people, eating strange food, getting lost, and sleeping in colorful places, not a melange of milquetoast mutterings.
All good trips begin with loss. This was no exception, but it was only a license plate. One afternoon I went outside and Poof! Gone. Better it happened in California than in the outskirts of Cupavaca, Mexico. It was probably stolen.

I went on the maiden voyage to Berkeley, California, to test everything and make sure it worked. Before this I was a motorcycle virgin. Afterward, an eager acolyte in the human love affair with things that go!
I followed the Pearblossom Highway through rolling hills and high desert from Palm Springs around Los Angeles to reach Highway 1, that famous trail up the coast. However, night fell and left me stranded in the coastal mountains on the 166, with a burger in my belly and half a bottle of water. There was a sign for a campground off the highway: 6 miles.
The road was patched and strewn with gravel. From darkness loomed shapes at 15 mph--cows. Up I went, past an empty power substation lit against the neon sky. Soon the road curved into a tree-filled hollow, where the sound of rushing water filled the air. The campground! I put on my highbeam and surprised a deer which, with shining eyes, sprang into the woods. A chill ran up my back--was I the only one there?
Something didn't feel right, despite the fact that I've camped often by myself. Maybe I shouldn't have read that book about the Zodiac killer right before leaving? I puttered around on the soft leaves in the darkness, but felt eyes on the back of my neck all the while. So, moving on, I found a winding dirt track into the National Forest 45 miles down the road, where I set up camp on a moonlit promontory a mile from the highway. At 5 AM a GMC truck blasted around the corner, waking me from a sound sleep next to my bike and giving me a dose of fight-or-flight, but it passed in a haze of gravel and exhaust, and no serial killer sprang out of the shadows. Still, there is no worse feeling than being surprised in a strange place while sleeping rough.
When I got up at six the view was breathtaking. Down below a graceful bridge spanned the valley. Oaks perched on the hillside and little birds played in the grass. A place never seems threatening once you've spent the night there. That dark shape that looked like a crouching mountain lion?--A bush.

I followed the 1 up the coast to Berkeley, but dropped the bike on the side of the road when juggling my camera.

As a silver crown victoria passed I jumped up from scrambling in the roadside gravel and looked casually seawards, as if having the motorcycle on its side was the most natural thing. Then, once the car drifted around the corner I jumped back to my ant's labor.

Berkeley means eavesdropping on graduate students' conversation at Cafe Strada and wandering the campus in the afternoon, soaking as if in a warm bath in the diffuse aura of knowledge. (I promise I'll return, beautiful town. I fell in love with you a long time ago.) From his high apartment my cousin Jonathan and his girlfriend Lauren watched with me the sun sink to San Francisco, then we drank grasshoppers and ate fried trout with seasoned rice.
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On the return trip I followed the 25 past Pinnacles National Monument.

The road turned into one lane.

I didn't see another vehicle for an hour. Instead, quail, vultures and rodents scattered from the dry grass at the road's edge.

Then I got lost in some badlands, after dark, led astray looking for a place to eat. If there had been a trail of breadcrumbs I would have followed it. The road turned to dirt. A small sign said "paved road, 6 miles". Behold, there was a paved road, but it wasn't marked. Red eyed dogs jumped out of the night. I could see no porchlights, only a ghostly valley lit by the rising moon. I passed an oil spout flaring in the night, then finally emerged on a dry plain where several small oil towns strewn with floodlights belched fumes.
I searched for a leafy orchard to make camp for the night, further down the central valley. The first had a flashing blue light above a sign that said "Los Lobos Project" in narrow letters, with an arrow pointing up a dirt road. I had a vision of pulling up to a great mansion, with vampires, something out of the "Rocky Horror Picture Show".
Back and forth I roamed like a bug-splattered goldilocks. The first orchard had been sprayed with pesticide, the second had drifts of deep sand that I didn't see until I bottomed out, and the third had oil wells pumping among the trees--I slid the bike under a tree and pitched tent. All night long the place echoed with the moan and thump of diesel machinery. I had two energy bars for dinner, and washed them down with the last of the water.

Operating under the premise that motorcycles and trucks are male, and cars female, I have decided to christen the motorcycle with a male name. Perhaps you have an idea? Something literary would be best. All I know is that, when I ride, Valkeries sing and the heavens open up. When I park and take off the helmet, the Valkeries continue to sing. They go "Wheeeeeeeeiiinngg", and if you tell me I need to take a shower, I shout indignantly "Why should I flee to make a bower?"

Light sky, dark land
Night after full moon

Motorcycle does not
Start
Push it down the
Road
Plead with engine's elves
"Make it go!"

Hello, my name is Ethan Applegarth and I am about to head south through Mexico to parts unknown, on a bike I barely know, through places I've never been, to meet people I've never seen. Let me introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste: I like spicy eggs rolled in steaming hot tortillas and feisty women who like to dance. I'm carrying more books than clothes, including "Don Quixote", "Sailing Alone Around the World" and "Notes from the Underground", and more clothes than spare parts, including some gear oil, wrenches, coolant, and a couple of fuses and spark plugs.
Somewhere to the south under the stars of this desert ranch near Palm Springs there begins a vast land, filled with excitement and danger, loneliness and redemption. Come with me as the journey begins, as the front wheel of my motorcycle turns southward, I open the throttle, and the morning sky opens up over Baja.
I will not be wearing anything colorful made out of velcro or spandex. My entire life savings would not even purchase a used BMW or Dakar-styled machine. GPS? Gravel, Puke and Snow. I'm wearing my old police boots and using a map and compass to plot the way. If it rains I get wet. If it's cold I shiver. If I get mugged I chase 'em with a tire iron. I'm coming, Mexico. God help Mexico!
For two months now the imminent departure has been "two weeks away". Family and friends grumble as I wait for the last mail-ordered items and motorcycle title to arrive for my old maroon and silver Kawasaki 500 LTD. "I'm leaving, really, I am." Like standing halfway in freezing water, it's easy to stop. (You men reading this will understand) Sometimes you just need to tuck up your shorts and jump the rest of the way in for dear life.