This morning’s ride takes me around the Lexington Reservoir, a few miles from Los Gatos. The Alma Bridge Road runs completely around this waterbody, creeping around its nooks and crannies as it passes trailheads and overlooks. I stop nostalgically by the boathouse of the Los Gatos Rowing Club where my daughter used to row, to look over at the teams pulling furiously in the water.
Lexington Reservoir was created in the early 1950s by damming the Los Gatos Creek in an attempt to replenish the groundwater depleted by the expanding orchards in the county. The reservoir submerged the two towns of Lexington and Alma that had grown to support travel—first by stagecoach and then by railroad—across the mountains to Santa Cruz.
Lexington was a halfway stop for stagecoaches to take on two extra horses to get over the treacherous mountains and was best known for the grisly 1883 murder of an elderly resident to get at his stashed gold. Gentler Alma ran a large hostel for travelers that amicably served grizzly bear meat.
Since remnants of the ghost towns may still be seen today when water levels are really low, I stop and observe a few times but only see water, eroded banks, and the occasional driftwood bleached out by the sun.
I pass a sign that reads: Newt Xing. Several species of newts (a type of salamander) are native to the area and come down from the hills in winter to breed in the water. This road cuts right through their migration path and thousands are run over each year. Newts have a lifespan of around fourteen years, long enough that an annual massacre could decimate a local population.
I recall The Ancestors Tale where noted evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins presents the concept of a ring species—a connected series of neighboring populations, stretched around a ring, that can successfully interbreed with their neighbors, until you reach some part of the ring where genetic differences have accumulated sufficiently to make adjacent populations too distantly related to interbreed. I’ve always found this a breathtaking illustration—almost a proof—of evolution and speciation, that demonstrates across space what is usually enacted over time.
Dawkins had cited a certain species of California newts as an example of a ring species, leaving me wondering if the little guys that cross this road might be able to do it with their neighbors across the mountains.
Riding back though Los Gatos, I see the white tent roofs of the busy Farmers Market and decide to stop by and take a look.
One of the nicest reasons to ride a motorcycle is the ease of finding parking spots. The bike takes up little space so you could just turn towards the street and back it in between two parked cars. Your exit remains easy. Not sure about the cars. Or you could just park in any no-parking red-zone area and no one really throws a fuming fit.
Now there are two easy ways to squeeze some extra performance out of a motorcycle, short of turning yourself into a grease monkey and letting loose on the mechanicals.
Fuel additives is one way. Should you look around, you will find plenty of products: octane boosters, enzyme fuel treatments, fuel system deep cleaners, and hydrocarbon boson actuators. OK, I made the last one up, but you get the idea. No! Higher octane gas does nothing for an engine, unless it is already pinging or knocking. Any engine with a specific compression ratio needs a minimum octane rating to prevent combustion before ignition, due to high compression and heat. Thus high compression engines sip high octane gas. But adding anything above what’s asked is about as clever as dropping dollar bills directly into your tank and expecting escape velocity.
There are more scams to part bikers from their money than there are actual bikers.
A second and simpler path to performance is to fuel up the rider and that’s the one I take. I stop by the Mexican stall and stand in line to get a tamale. When asked, I spring for the spicy sauce which I assure you is worth at least one octane upgrade. I sit on a park bench and watch kids and dogs frolic in the morning sun.
A cute family is sitting in front of me: a boy under two, along with his parents and a grandparent. I wave at the little fellow and despite his mother’s encouragement, he doesn’t wave back. He’s wearing a tiny 49ers Future Draft Pick jersey, his father dons a red Joe Montana shirt, while his mother’s got the hat. Like medieval knights, this family is wearing their fealty, although I must admit that from where I sat I couldn’t tell what grandma had put on.
The original Forty Niners were lucky gold miners because time had sandwiched them between 1848 and 1850, two dates of considerable significance. The former marked the start of the California Gold Rush, while the latter marked the year California became a state and miners now had to contend with taxes and land rights. Thus the Niners were early enough to avoid competition and could simply stick a pan into a river bed and pull out gold that was theirs to keep.
So when California got its football team almost a century later, it could have done far worse—than 49ers—to pick out a name that would confer good luck and ample fortune.
No Farmers Market is complete without a stand-up musician and I can hear him now. He’s been moving easily across genres and periods. But he’s also considerably off-pitch and had he not been standing still, I might have graciously pinned it on the Doppler effect.
Earlier, he was doing Luis Fonsi’s Despacito, then Billy Joel, and now he’s singing an unlikely song that I recognize as Land Down Under by an 80s Aussie band called Men at Work.
My brain associates songs with time and specific people. When I hear Billy Joel’s You May be Right, I always think of Amar, my good friend and dorm neighbor, who depended on the Piano Man’s tunes to get him through problems sets in structural mechanics. Land Down Under reminds me of quick-witted Murali, a hilarious college mate who played it incessantly and fatefully wound up teaching Down Under for some years. Despacito evokes my older daughter from her senior year at high school, improvising the piano.
I walk over to the musician’s tent and see him accompanying himself on a guitar, while a tenor sax stands up on a floor stand. So that was him playing the sax too! Now that takes talent. I chide myself for my prior hasty judgment and drop a dollar into his donation box as a token of my contrition.
I stop by at Great Bear Coffee to get a cup of their proud roast and call it a morning.