A Wild, Memorable Trip Along the Pacific Coast

Such is the passage of time, the dreadful metronome plowing forward keeping its pace, measuring out our remaining days toward our end. Time is uniform for every soul; a day, is a day, is a ticking away day. God tracks our days, life’s invisible odometer set from the beginning to expire at a mileage unknown to us. Who is able to stop the meter of time? There is no ceasing it, no killing the march, no rolling back of life’s odometer avoiding our conclusion.

But there is a way to pause it, to ever so briefly suspend the turning of life’s odometer. God cannot be tricked, but there is a part of time He does not count against us. It came to me in a river.

Northwest temperatures exceeding 110 degrees turned us into self-imposed prisoners under air conditioned house arrest. So we ran from the heat like someone left the prison door unguarded, packing our bikes with camping gear and fleeing west towards Pacific Blue and her bliss of craggy shoreline, misty mornings and cool temperatures.

We arrived in Tillamook, Dave “White Girl” Wensveen and I with our matched set of blood red Honda VFR 800s strapped with camping gear, to our overnight stay in a covered wagon, appropriate accommodations for Oregon explorers like us. Although the mode of travel might be different, our spirit was the same, even if the covered wagon had Wi-Fi.

It was an odd road, perfect blacktop laid over a land stripped bare by clearcutting. What used to be forest was now a sea of stumps passing to the horizon as if Paul Bunyan swung a giant sickle three feet off the ground leveling everything at once. In the ditch to the side was a freshly wrecked truck.

The twisted mass of sheet metal and glass was upside down in the deep roadside ditch, wheels up like a dying cockroach, roof caved in, glass busted out and one occupant still inside. Over our helmet communicators I told Dave we were stopping. He knew it was first responder time, but he had done this with me before. Bikes parked I walked to the wreckage through thick blackberry bushes.

Blackberry bushes have their roots in the pits of hell. Thorns are nature’s barbed wire as they permeate every twisted, gnarled vine weaving a web of bloody consequences. I walked on top of them in full gear for protection, laid my jacket on the bushes for a makeshift examination table and encouraged the passenger to get out of the car. She did not want to get out. Really?

After much coaxing she crawled out of the crushed cab of the truck, stood up and instantly dropped unconscious. Once passed out on my jacket she regained awareness as “White Girl” and I lifted her to the road and an ambulance arrived soon thereafter. I consulted with the medics and they took her away.

Day two into our odyssey and the bizarre was just beginning.

Brixy Bridge, Pacific Coast Highway. Photo by Getty Images/Aurora Creative

Riding next to the ocean for days on end would seem like being forced to eat your favorite food for every meal, every day: it sounds like a good idea but eventually you just get sick it. While that may be true of food, it is not true of the ocean.

Hugging the Pacific Coast on a motorcycle day after day is like falling in love with a rock and roll song: there is the initial attraction, the hook, the hypnotic chorus you can’t get out of your head so you listen again, and again, and again, digging deeper, noticing more, unlocking another layer of meaning until the song reaches down, way down to your core, talking to the very depths of who you are. The Pacific Ocean is that: nature at her best, on repeat, all day, every day, getting better each time you listen to her blue music, a song written just for you.

Each morning Dave “White Girl” Wensveen and I sang the song of the Pacific Blue, peeling ourselves out of warm sleeping bags into misty morning chill, stowing our camping gear, lighting the heated grips and turning on the heated jackets which was ironic considering that back home torrid heat was melting asphalt into black goo.

We would ride until early evening, pitch our tents, celebrate the day then crawl back into our sleeping bags and fall asleep to the song of the waves, nature’s white noise, her best rock and roll song, sang to us the same way all night, every night.

So we kept hugging the shoreline southbound until Dave mused through our communicators that the place reminded him of the Isle Of Man. Squinting, I could see what he meant. Waves crashed against shear cliffs to our right spraying their salty foam into fine mist. Cliffs lined the shore flattening out to green pastureland dotted with rocky crags where green grass thrust up through them, splitting the giant rocks into multiple smaller rocks giving the land a sense of age, like it took eons for that tender grass to split those mighty stones. I was one herd of sheep, one warm beer, one Manx Gaelic accent away from being convinced I was on the grand old Isle Of Man.

No. You savor it. You relish it like it’s your last meal, last song or the last thing you will ever see or ever do, you drink it up, lap it up and belt it out with every fiber in your being like it’s the last, best thing you will ever enjoy.

For someone I know, it nearly was. And we were going to see him.

It was spring of 2020 when Hutch called to inform me that his son, my close friend Currie had been in a motorcycle crash. Typically, Hutch’s conversations and mine are half motorcycles, one quarter laughter and one quarter sailor expletives belted out machine gun style like Yosemite Sam hit in the wedding vegetables with a bowling ball. That day, his tone was somber.

A deer had jumped in front of his son, and while Currie avoided the deer he couldn’t avoid the chain link fence with the top wire. Currie walked away with severe left forearm and hand damage, narrowly missing the top wire with his neck which would have resulted in me crying and drinking tequila at his funeral. He was thankful to be alive. Riding was a distant, hazy dream.

Dave and I were asking Currie to do exactly that, to get back on the bike and ride hard. Currie and I hadn’t ridden together since the Colorado 500 where for a week he was my late tequila night best friend and 5:30 am wretched alarm clock. For Currie, riding with us would either be therapy or misery. I should never have worried.

Currie lives in the wooded hills north of Santa Cruz so we followed him as we weaved our way to Alice’s Restaurant. Who knew these hills were paved gold? Dizzying successions of gently climbing sweepers meandered between the trees while Currie set a brisk pace, impressive for a man with a half functional clutch wrist and fresh memories of impact. Dave and I were humbled by his resiliency and speed but most of all, his love for the ride. Currie is a fast friend.

Tuesday was it’s own self-imposed hell but of the non-alcoholic variety. Aufderheide happened, an obscure Oregon road hard to find on GPS and harder to find on a map, and I wish we had never found it.

It was my idea to use it to head north and as anyone who rides with me knows, all of my ideas are great ideas. Aufderheide is a frost heaved, potholed, tree tunneled, ridiculous joke of a road, a place our pair of sport bikes had no business being. We lacked the suspension travel to soak up the bumps, the space to avoid the heaves and vision to see the pot holes as the tree tunnel blocked the scorching daytime heat but also the daylight we needed to see the hazards. And I ignored the road closed sign.

We decided on the dirt route. How hard could it be?

Packed dirt made up the first hundred yards, not easy but doable on a VFR800 burdened with camping gear like a pack mule. Then the gravel started, then deep gravel, then potholes, dust, a minor creek crossing, ruts, more gravel, deeper ruts and more sentence enhancers shouted by Dave through our helmet communicators as the late day heat mixed with my stress causing sweat to bead on my forehead, drip off the tip of my nose and puddle at the bottom of my helmet.

Damned be the first one of us to speak the obvious: if we put a wheel wrong, made one tiny mistake, had one minor lapse of judgement, hit one rock the wrong way or failed to recover one grave slide we would be either be practicing our 500 pound deadlifts in full gear or spending the night, maybe multiple nights out in the middle of,…well,…where the f*#@ing hell are we? Dave was doing a stellar job of expanding my sailor mouth vocabulary. Hutch would have been proud.

Here it is…

Ted