As far as you can go on land

This is the story of how I got to Tucson, Arizona and what happened there.

When I was 21 I wanted to explore the world. Not the whole world, just as far as I could go on land.  I decided to go to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. I was frustrated with University and the  idea that everyone around me seemed to be giving all their attention to surviving, little to learning, and nothing to living. So I left school, saved money, bought a motorcycle and went.

I travelled alone. My purpose was to find the meaning of life. I didn't bring a map.

I can't start from the beginning, too much happened, so I will begin in Mulegé, Baja California Sur, Mexico.

Davide, my flamenco guitar instructor, suggested when I should leave. “Wednesday night,” he said mysteriously, after practice.  “...is a good night to travel.”

He talked like a sage at times. So I just let it sit. But a few days later when I was pushing my bike out to the highway in the moonlight the sense in his words came to me.  It was moonlight. You could see like it was day time. And the roads were eerily empty, the weekend traffic hadn't started yet.

It was not uncommon to see vehicles racing down the road without headlights on the Baja Coast. In fact I had done a 17 hour grocery run in a van without the benefit of headlights just a few weeks before. A full moon aided travellers.

I couldn't say if Davide knew I had plans to leave yet or if he was talking about his own plans to leave.

At any rate I needed to leave Mulegé, and while I was sorry about leaving without saying goodbye, I needed to get out of there.

In a perfect world I would have just went south and took a ferry from Cabo San Lucas to the mainland, but I desperately need a clutch cable, and there wasn't a shop in Mexico that carried the piece I needed.

It's a little more than 600 miles from Mulegé to San Diego. I left Wednesday night and arrived in San Diego midday Friday.

So this was an unwanted and expensive detour. But by this time my approach was admittedly non-linear, a week at a monastery, driving a piece of the Baja 1000 race course, a month feeding donkeys and cooking the books at a Mexican resort. My goal was still Argentina, but the important thing was to experience things, to meet people. To live.

Without a clutch, driving a motorcycle is tricky. It is jerky, graceless, and dangerous. My bike was heavy with gear and that made starting out without the aid of a hill awkward. There are lots of pieces of a motorcycle that aren't completely necessary to its operation, but a clutch isn't one of them. In spite of this I'd travelled about a thousand miles without the benefit of a clutch, but not having a clutch was getting in the way of my idea of being a smooth operator. Both literally and figuratively.

In San Diego I drove straight to the dealership. Lo and behold, as if they had been expecting a visitation from a time traveller from 1978, the year my motorcycle  rolled off the assembly line, they had the part in stock and on hand. The parts guy offered to book a time to have it installed, but it was an operation I was waiting to perform. To have it installed at this point would have been sacrilege.

To say that I was attached to the bike would have been an understatement. Fear, love, hate. It was all there. It wasn't a pet object to me. It was a crazy lover that I knew was trying to kill me. It was the one I'd trust taking a hair pin turn laid down flat like it was resting on the pavement, only it was moving so fast that there were only inches to spare across two lanes of traffic shoulder to shoulder. Sometimes I'd notice sparks flying from the footpegs as they grazed the ground.

To American onlookers it was a silly looking affair, so much gear stacked on top of a tiny, donkey-shaped Japanese machine. Few people would consider taking such a huge trip on a motorcycle so small and under powered. But to me the bike was beautiful in the way a pocketknife is beautiful. Simple, spare, all utility.  Despite it's simplicity, this bike threatened my life daily.

With a tiny toolkit pieced together from pawnshops and second hand stores I could pretty much tear down the entire bike. In the parking lot, I went over the same motions I had made two months before, but this time, replacing the cable assembly with the right one. With the new clutch cable, it was like a new bike.



A trip to the city meant a stay in a hostel, and the cost was unnerving. I was beginning to worry about my ability to complete the trip with the funds I had left. $25 USD for a bunk. It was robbery. And what did I get? A night with a bunch of starry-eyed travellers pretending to have real life experiences with other starry eyed travellers. I didn't have the time or patience to connect with these fakes.

Out there on the street, that was real. If I had had more time I would have found a place to camp in some abandoned building or vacant lot. I would have met the people of the street and warmed my hands around a fire burning in a barrel. That's what I told myself, though I had never done any of those things.

In the morning I was glad to leave. I brought my gear out to the bike and loaded up. I was putting on my helmet when someone from behind me asked me about my license plate.

"You've got roses on your license plate? What's that about?"

I turned around to see a 30 something man with a beard.

“I'm from Alberta,” I explained. “It's a province in Canada. We've all got roses on our licence plate there.”

“Oh yeah," he said. "Where you headed to?"

“Mexico.”

He was instantly alarmed.

“Damn, son, it's dangerous down there.”

I asked him if he had ever been 'down there.'

“No,” he replied, as if it were proof backing up his story. “That's how bad it is.”

Beside being security guard at a mall, his job appeared to be convincing random travellers not to go to Mexico. He asked me if I'd have a coffee with him.

He was a caricature of an American and I liked him for it. His name was Reginald.

It was amazing, this guy's perception of Mexico; it wasn't 5 km from where we stood, but he thought it was some kind hell on earth. Anarchy and death. Random acts of violence.

Over coffee he continued to preach about the dangers of Mexico. He also offered me a place to stay and a reference for a security job in San Diego. Not a bad opportunity by my metric: a random job in a city I knew nothing about. But it didn't feel right, a little too milk toast. Too safe. I had idled for more than a month in Mulege, and I just wanted to get moving. America was an uninteresting and expensive detour, Mexico was interesting and inexpensive.

Reginald saw I was still set on Mexico and changed his tactics.

He started talking about Tucson. If I was headed East to the Gulf Coast, why wouldn't I head through the states on those fast American highways?  Wouldn't that actually save me time overall?

It made sense. If I made my own food and camped illegally it would be fast and pretty cheap, maybe cheaper.

And there was that name, Tucson.

It was like a poem.

“Oh,” he expounded, “It's a beautiful little college town, mild climate, friendly people. Beautiful college girls.”

Images of college girls sunbathing played in my mind.

I told him it was too expensive state side, and that his fears of Mexico were unfounded. We finished our coffees and I thanked him.

He waved goodbye as I eased the bike into first gear. The newly repaired clutch made starting out effortless.

Two intersections later I pulled up at a light and a beautiful woman crossed the street a few feet from my bike. I got her attention and asked,  “If I was going to go to Tuscon which way would I go?"

"Turn left and watch for a sign," she said.

"What will the sign say?" I asked.

"Tuscon," she smiled, and continued walking.

Reginald would never know it, but his magic had worked. And in Tucson things would go in a completely new direction.