Leaving Bisbee was the beginning of a 2,000 mile loop, all of it centered around the normal errands people do around town. My town, however, was a helluva lot bigger: like half of the American Southwest kind of big. Since this was business and not pleasure though, it meant using the interstate, aka the superslab.
I have written many times about my disdain for I-5. I have traveled between Los Angeles and Sacramento countless times. The main routes that take you up and down California are Pacific Coast Highway (hwy 1), Hwy 101, I-5, Hwy 99, and Hwy 395 goes east toward Reno. I-5 is the main corridor, burning a straight line through California’s Central Valley and the monotonous stretches of dead grass and nut farms.
And so I went, taking the long ride west on I-10, overnighting again at Silverwood Lake, then taking Hwy 138 up to the Grapevine, the pass between LA and the Central Valley. I-5 was slightly more interesting because the rains had added wetland in a few places, but for the most part it was the same hypnotically straight road, punctuated by the same oasis’ of gas stations and fast food restaurants.
South of I-10, at the Avondale Airport.
Eventually I crossed Hwy 152 to Gilroy, and up to San Jose. There I was able to stay with my friend Sean, who was a huge help beyond just giving me a place to crash. The medical procedure was an endoscopy and colonoscopy, and I had to have a “responsible adult” due to the anesthesia. So Sean took time out of his day to drive me up to the VA hospital. Unfortunately the VA managed to miss a medication I was on that would react with anesthesia. They wanted to reschedule but I rode 950-miles and there was NO WAY I was going to reschedule.
The only thing you need to know is that having someone ram a camera on a tube down your throat all the way to your stomach is unpleasant. If you can’t find your happy place in the face of something like that, you’re bound to panic. I survived, but I’ll be damned if I do that again. The upside was after that ordeal, having someone run a camera up your butt-hole all the way to your colon is a breeze. I could write this friggin’ story while someone does a colonoscopy on me. The downside– which is actually good news– was there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with me.
I managed to obliterate my rear tire on this stretch. Fortunately Sean knew the owner at Spirit Motorcycles of San Jose, who moved me to the front of the line and got me sorted.
I already knew this. My GI problems aren’t cancer. They started while in Iraq, which was 2005. If I have stomach or colon cancer, I think I’d know by now, since being dead makes it hard to go about your day. The short story is that modern science is probably the wrong tool. By design science isolates all variables, changes one, and observes the result. I believe the problem is my gut biome as a whole. Testing and finding no bad bacteria doesn’t prove you have a correct balance of the good bacteria. Reckon I need to find some old Chinese dude to give me some herbs or something.
Either way, I got a CT scan and the camera work done so my doctor would be happy. In the end I think it did zero good for me, other than spending some time with my buddy Sean and his family. He is a solid dude and we have a lot in common despite having different personalities and life trajectories. Those tend to be the people that give me life insight without me even realizing it. When someone is as much different to you as they are similar, you can reflect on how you relate to yourself without noticing you’re doing it.
Sean is a solid dude. He’s one of those guys you can count on because he is reliable as a state of being, not conditionally based on what you can do for him.
But just as quickly as I arrived, I was off. Across the Central Valley and up-and-over the Sierras. Here I met up with my buddy Scott, an kindred spirit indeed. We’re as much different as alike I suppose, as we both live autonomous lives but for different reasons. Scott was in the middle of tearing a camping trailer down to the frame (literally, it was just the frame, axles, and wheels) to rebuild it and live in it.
Ranger the chicken– the most wiley chicken I’ve ever met– is still escaping cages but somehow not getting eaten by birds of prey.
Scott had moved all of my stuff out of storage while I was doing the Veterans Charity Ride, so I had to grab the key to the new unit from him. I spent a few hours reorganizing it, dropping things off, and grabbing some winter gear to bring back south with me. I was also able to help him get two of his vehicles running: an ATV with a pinhole in the carburetor diaphragm, and a BMW F650 motorcycle that just needed a kick in the ass to get started. That bike has some kind of problem that stops it from getting enough gas, so Scott has more work to do, but at least it was running.
Aaaaannnnnnd….poof, I was riding south again. I took Hwy 395 so as to avoid Nevada, because I hate the whole damned state. I have my reasons. Many, many reasons. The ride was splendid despite being a long and tiring one. California managed to give me a proper goodbye though, asking $7.29/gallon for 91-octane gas just before I crossed into Nevada.
I spent longer in Vegas than I planned to, as I ran into some work helping develop a TV script. It was fairly quick work but since most of the scenes were developed I was able to contribute a lot to the characters, adding in science-ey jargon and a few quips to try and bring their individual personalities out. It put some cash in my pocket which I really need, as I’ve turned in all of one (yes, one) article this entire year. I’m just floating on VA disability payments, but that means I fall behind most months and dip into savings. I need to replenish the coffers and probably need to do it by diversifying and taking more varied writing work.
Last time I worked for multiple outlets I spent as much time trying to get paid as I did pitching to outlets to get work, and doing a little writing in between. I have plenty of work lined up with one outlet right now, but it is a struggle to do assembly-line style writing, or to do any type of writing day-in, day-out. It’s a main reason I never looked for a staff position at a newspaper or magazine. That is hero-level work to do that much writing, over and over, without instant burnout.
After leaving Las Vegas (good movie by the way) I bombed straight down to Bisbee. The run down Hwy 93 is starting to turn into the I-5 slog; the same damn road and the same damn traffic. It’s slightly different since you cross Route 66 and hit both Phoenix and Tuscon on the way, then turn south on a 2-lane and pass through Tombstone to get to Bisbee. Just the same, it’s all desert and always the same.
I did manage to have a change on this trip, as a lane closure backed up traffic so bad Google Maps sent me down to Pinal Airpark, a long-term storage for airliners, and often their final destination before being scrapped. It also sent me past the Marana Regional Airport, which I had no idea existed, let alone that it had dozens of old warbirds stored there. I’ll leave you with a slide show. Most of the planes were Navy or Marine Corps veterans. There were several Vietnam-era ground attack planes called the A-4 Skyhawk, though they had been converted into two-seat trainers, changing them to TA-4J Skyhawks.
There were some transport planes too. The C-1 Trader was the last airplane with piston-engines to operate on aircraft carriers. They brought people and supplies from shore to ship until 1988, along with being used as aerial tankers and electronic warfare planes. In short, unless you geek out on airplanes, you’ve never heard of them.
Just the same this detour let me take some cool pictures. The only pictures after that I have are uninteresting to non-motorcyclists. But hey, they relate to good news! The “death noise” my DR650 Suzuki was making had me canceling my plans to go to Mexico. It was a very difficult noise to reproduce while sitting still, making it impossible to pinpoint its exact location. It also didn’t act like other noises. I’ve been at this long enough to know– even from a distance as a vehicle passes by– what a weird noise is specifically. Piston slap, ping, cam chain tensioners, collapsed lifters, rod knock, bad pullies, or just a loose heat shield…they all give a tell-tale note.
This did not. It was like piston slap but that noise can be made reliably by playing with the throttle and listening to the engine under different loads. I’m not trying to give a lesson here; I’m just saying that after more than 20 years of being around engines– from outboard boat engines to forklifts to jet engines to weedwackers to race engines– I had not heard a sound that acted like this.
I replaced a part called the cam chain tensioner because its seal was leaking anyway and a new part was only $30. It didn’t stop the sound, but I was able to find a steep hill and put the engine under a heavy load at lower speeds, and I go the death-noise to show up. It did sound like it was coming from the engine, but it was not happening at the same speed the engine was running at: it was happening at the speed the wheels were turning.
I examined the rear wheel and the drive chain. BINGO. The drive chain had been obliterated. I had installed the rear wheel slightly kicked to the left, so the rear sprocket did not align perfectly with the chain. This caused the chain to be chewed up by the sprocket, and eventually wear enough to flop around and slap against other parts of the bike. The death-noise was the chain hitting a small tab on the swingarm, which it only did at certain speeds, and of course the sound is one-of-a-kind.
I realigned things and soaked the chain in lubricant, but I’ll be damned if I buy a new one just yet. When I get back from Mexico I’ll need a chain and a rear tire, since I’m racing from Barstow to Vegas in late November. I want the parts to be new for that.
The main goal now is: go to Mexico, look at possible places to winter, then come back to Bisbee and prep for the Brstow-to-Vegas event. After it is over, I’ll need a solution for the winter, which I better have in stone by then. Camping in the winter sucks. It’s a slow grind where the sun’s position is what dictates what you do, and there is not much sun for the northern hemisphere. But winter plans are a topic for another installment.
Johnny Killmore 