This week's blog was supposed to fill in the blanks on the conceptual ride I wrote about several months ago. The ride through the Great Basin to Tonopah and Lee Vining and then after Yosemite to see my sister Kathy in Fresno. I attempted, and that is the operative word, this ride this past Sunday and needless to say, the events of the day were not what I expected when I left the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. This week I was also going to discuss Eugene O'Neill, the American Playwright I know best, I have almost all of his plays in written form and two of them on DVD's and another one somewhere, on an old VHS tape.
But so much for the best of plans and intentions and as the day broke down, in every sense of the word, including terrific rain and lightning and at the end of the day hail, I remembered a line from one of Henry Jame's early novels, the American, where the doomed but beautiful woman; actually a fairly common literary convention, especially to Jame's, says to Christopher Newsome, the rich and lonely protagonist of the Tale, “And All The Mice Are In Chains.”
Apparently, when I last replaced Spark plugs in my bike, I either cross threaded one of them, or it was not tightened enough. As I was wending my way on my beloved Highway 6, about sixty miles from Tonopah, the spark plug unwound itself and shot out the side of the right hand cylinder. This bike has a compression ratio of 12.5 to 1 and even with Ear Plugs and music going, the noise was severe. The Engine died and I pulled in the clutch and looked for a place to get off the road. As I got off the bike about 15 feet away was what I first thought to be a dog, but it turned out it was a coyote and it was very surprised by me being there and took off rather rudely. On my old R1100RS I always carried a couple of spark plugs with me, but on this bike I hadn't really even thought of doing that. From now on, I am always going to have at least one spare spark plug with me. I restarted the engine and began to ride with one fully functioning cylinder and the other one with little compression but with one spark still working. Each of the two cylinders on this bike, have two spark plugs. The bike had very little torque at low RP M's and I really couldn't ride in any gear above about 4th. But, I was at least heading toward Tonopah. This BMW has a count down display for gas, rather than a gauge. From now on I will always believe what it says, for indeed I did run out of gas when it told me I would. By this time the slight drizzle of rain was replaced by thunder, lightning and just before I ran out of gas the second time, hail.
Normally my bike gets somewhere in the upper forties to sometimes well over 50 miles per gallon. But in the configuration I was riding in I wasn't even getting half that. I ran out of gas. The first person who stopped was on a BMW Bike and was heading home to Ely. He didn't have any spare gas and neither one of us could raise a signal on our cell phones. After he left two young guys with a trailer full of ATV'S stopped and they had plenty of extra gas, They gave me about two gallons of gas and offered me more and also would not take any money for the gas, they said it was their good deed for the day. I should have taken them up on the additional gas, for I ran out about 3 miles from Tonopah, as the computer told me I would and this time 3 guys on KTM's stopped and from their off road riding they had extra gas, This got me into Tonopah.
I have stayed in Tonopah on several times, and once when I was with someone, stayed in the Clown Motel. I hate Clown's big time and I dreaded the first time I took Caitlin to the circus. It turns out that she thought clown were weird and one of the first things I asked her about Dan, her future husband, after she became involved with him, was what he thought about Clown's. I also stayed years ago in the Old Mitzpah Hotel, which is now closed and for sale. It was 1975 and I was on my way from Las Vegas, where my then girlfriend was from and we were in her Opel GT, it did not have enough head room for me, and in addition she had her pet raccoon in a cage and it never liked me at all. We were on our way to the UC Davis campus to look at the Vet tech program for her. But I digress and should get back to my most recent stay in the great town of Tonopah.
I stayed at a Motel my good friend's stayed at in May on their way to the 49er rally in Mariposa. They mentioned their was a Mexican restaurant across the street and I hadn't eaten since Oat meal early Sunday morning. So I had dinner there as well. I was hopeful that once I got a new spark plug I would be back on the road. I had decided that even though I was closer to Fresno than SLC, I would return to SLC on the bike and then leave again for Fresno, in my diesel TDI. I couldn't go to NAPA until after 8:00 AM PDT the next morning. I tried to get a good night's sleep.
Suffice it to say, the threads of the cylinder head are shot and I ended up having to rent a U haul Truck. In all the year's I have been riding this is the first time I have been stranded out of State with a bike and only the second time, not counting my accident, that I haven't returned home on my bike.
I am going to take some time to figure out the best way to fix the thread problems on the bike. I suspect I am done riding for this season. I will leave my discourse on O'Neill for another time. But just for a moment think about what it would have been like to know that it was because of your birth that your mother became a morphine addict, that if another child hadn't died, you might not have been born and add to that Irish Catholic Guilt and you have the seeds of in my opinion the Greatest American Playwright. His father was the great actor James O'Neill and he appeared as the Count of Monticristo over 6 thousand times.
