In 1966, veteran motorcycle traveller Ken Craven set off alone through the American West on a borrowed Triumph Thunderbird. His adventure took him across desert landscapes, over remote roads and into a Mexican hospital following an unexpected encounter.
Once in a while we come across a story from way back that we feel is worth repeating. Here veteran traveller and, course, the man behind the luggage that still bears his name, Ken Craven tells of his 1966 lone trip through some of the Old West of the USA on a Thunderbird borrowed from the Triumph dealers in Pasadena, California.
A Sheriff’s office, two trading posts and a timber-built hotel with brass spittoons on the floor; Julian is a town which tries hard to preserve its Old West atmosphere. And why not? I’m all for tradition.
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Here, away from the coast, the day is sizzling hot and clear from the moment the sun rises, Triumph engine burbling happily, I set off with the reborn conviction that no other form of transport is so exhilarating or gave give such a sense of freedom as a big solo.
Big trees with grey drooping branches, bushier trees with brilliant yellow blooms, all exotic and foreign. Now a sign., ‘Penalty for litter, $500’ and beyond it an unsightly car cemetery piles high with wrecks. Civilization, if you call it that, has come to the old West!
It was an exception, though, and for countless miles of glorious countryside I had the road almost to myself, opposite a wooden portal over a lane, indicating the X-Bar Ranch, I stopped at a vantage point which disclosed range upon range of hills; beyond was the desert and a tabletop mountain – anything up to 100 miles away but sharply outlined in the dry atmosphere.
Intending the photograph the Triumph against this magnificent panorama, I stepped back into the shrubbery. Something nipped my leg; a twig or a bramble, I thought – but, back on the road, my right shin began to burn and I could feel my leg swelling inside my sock.
It was 30 miles on or thereabouts to the next café (air-conditioned, of course, and with the usual soft drink bar and lunch counter).
In all these sparsely inhabited regions the isolated café is a social gather place – an equivalent of the old-time saloon – where the locals for up to 20 miles around greet each other with warmth and affection.
The stranger is accepted immediately without formalities, so I turned to the leather-faced old-timer next to me and asked his opinion about the discoloured lump, now half the size of an orange on my leg.
“You’ve bin bit!” he pronounced. After a fair amount of discussion, he and his cronies reached the unanimous diagnosis that I had been the target of a Black Widow spider. “But don’t worry,” they added. “T’ain’t fatal – leastwise, not often. We’ll drive you to the doctor. About 60 miles from here.”
However, I didn’t want to part company with the Triumph and I gathered that there was a clinic at Tecate, just across the Mexican frontier and only about 10 miles away.
As I rode on, a car followed me at a tactful distance, the driver waving as I pulled in at the frontier post.
In the dusty, wide street which is most of Tecate, there were more people than I had seen in the whole time since leaving the suburbs of Los Angeles.
There were mokes pulling carts, a fee ancient and battered taxis waiting for scarce customers and any number of dark-skinned men in sombreros, looking surprisingly like typical illustrations of Mexicans.
The bungalow hospital appeared efficient and well-equipped inside and the doctor insisted I should be kept in for treatment. A nurse suggested that I bring the bike into the room and offered to help me push it up the steps!
Some 24 hours later, though not fully recovered, and despite protests from the nurse, I paid my bill and left. I was not willing to sacrifice more time out of my precious five days. Anyway I had made up for lost sleep and certainly my Spanish was less rusty than it had been.
The road to Mexicali climbs through eroded hills and castle-like formations. Heatwaves shimmer off the rock walls and when the road descends to the salt flats it is lost to view a short distance ahead in an almost permanent mirage.
But even this waste land manages to support life; there were occasional palm trees near the road with, under each palm, several partly dismantled old cars plus one doubtful runner.
From the dust, noise and intense heat of Mexicali town centre I took refuge in an eating house which, through the window, had looked cool and inviting. Inside, though, it was just as hot as the streets and, because of steaming vats, humid into the bargain. Even the mixed salad was a disillusionment, for it contained liberal quantities of chopped red peppers.
I decided to make for the sterilized and air-conditioned comforts of the USA again. Crossing into Arizona at San Luis, I aimed for Organ Pipe National Memorial, involving a long desert trek and a night at a motel – a building refrigerated to such a degree that I was glad to wear my Harris tweed jacket, an unlikely garment which, luckily, I had packed with my luggage.
At Gila Bend, 70 miles on, one turns off Highway 80 down a dead straight road through fascinating, eroded mountains. As I rode along, a sand devil – a miniature whirlwind caused by intense heat – veered around in front of me and deposited a smoke bush on the road. I only just managed to miss this unexpected hazard.
Through the organ pipe area is desert, it has a short season of rain each year and cacti of many times (some with brilliant flowers) store up the moisture and so adapt themselves to nature. At the park headquarters a helpful ecologist suggested I try the 18-mile Ajo circuit. “But take care,” he warned. “A fellow on a Honda slid off a few weeks ago – and he was almost dehydrated by the time our evening patrol picked him up.”
It was almost a command that I should check my water flask was full and, handing me a booklet on desert survival, he wished me an enjoyable ride.
I set off over the rough track, through a wonderful garden of cacti, down and over dried-up stream beds and past weird rock formations.
Here the significance of the warning began to emerge. In such a world, there is an awareness of the perils of a single false move. The machine becomes almost a living thing, which you can either love or hate depending on its reliability or temperament.
Happily, the Triumph and I were on the best of terms; I spoke to her, just as old Westerners would have spoken to their steeds, and she handled to perfection over the loose stones.
In our British Isles, I doubt if it is possible to escape completely from mechanical noise or background murmur of some sort. But here was a glorious absence of sound, with the occasional cry of a bird a punctuation mark in a poem of silence.
Heat, which can be overpowering when it touches 80 degrees on a thundery day at home, was here something to be relished after a claustrophobic winter and the snow-covered spring I had left behind only ten days before.
My 1300-mile circuit which landed me back at the Pasadena starting point makes scant impression when sketched on a map of the American continent.
A week letter, after a jet journey, I was enjoying a shorter jaunt on a borrowed Bonneville in New Jersey; they call that the garden state and the name is appropriate. There, the spring flowers were just coming into bloom – a month behind England, even though New Jersey is 1000 miles south of these islands.
An immense slice of territory lies between my two sets of tyre marks, and I will be going back, I hope, to fill in the gap. Above all, I want to see a lot more of that arid, lonely region way out west.
They say the desert bug bites hard and deep. Maybe it was that which bit me, not a Black Widow!
Original article: Old Bike Mart
