Triumphant Men

Riding a motorcycle in the mountains before the sun comes up is a tranquil experience. There’s a bit of fog and almost no one around. The bike eats up the road ahead and spits it out behind, past the fat rumble of the exhaust pipes.

I took a motorcycle ride early this morning to the town of Boulder Creek about 25 miles from home. Boulder Creek is a logging town from the late 19th century that was set up with a rail line to transport logs down to the Santa Cruz coast. The town today has just under five thousand residents and five notable citizens, says Wikipedia. When I stopped by a cafe on Main Street, it was about eight in the morning.

A bunch of old timers are sitting on chairs by the side of the road, clutching coffees and talking away the morning. One of them, likely in his eighties, sees me and shuffles up as I get off my Triumph and cap my helmet over the bar-end mirror. With no preamble whatsoever, he starts to describe in great detail the 1965 Triumph 650 that he still owns.

Over the next few minutes, I would learn how to tell a 1965 Triumph 500 from a 650 by just looking at the cooling fins. Or the mods one can make to the seat and tail to make it look like a flat-track bike.

I listen patiently. I got time.

He actually pulls out a print photo of his bike and tells me he bought it new in 1965, along with a 1957 Ford pickup (“the first Ford with the wrap-around windshield,” he insisted) as soon as he came back from the War, which of course was Vietnam. My mind wanders off ten thousand miles for a bit, before I reel it back in and tell him that I was born the year before! He smiles, almost dotingly.

I’m sitting on a single plastic chair on the street outside Jenna Sue’s Cafe, a tiny warm cafe with five flavors of freshly brewed coffee and eight varieties of bagels, that has somehow managed to stay in business despite Covid and the great fire of 2020 that ravaged this mountain town by the redwood forests. A pleasant girl in her twenties works the counter and another cheerful one handles the register and they might have had something to do with it.

A biker walks up and kicks up the stand of an off-road motorbike that’s parked next to mine and is caked with mud. Both bike and rider evoke the wild side.

“That Triumph yours?” he asks.

“Yeah!”

“That’s a good rig.”

My smile is humble acknowledgment of his good taste. I find out that he lives in the mountains and has come to buy some spare parts.

“Have a safe ride,” I say.

“Keep the rubber side down,” he grunts as he starts up and pulls away. A completely bizarre car pulls in to take his place.

One of the Triumph guy’s buddies gets up from his group and ambles up to me as I dig into my bagel loaded with way more cream cheese than my poor arteries deserve. He looks a bit like Clint Eastwood, just dialed down a turn or two. Turns out this guy is from the Boston area. I tell him I lived there as well, ages back—in Cambridge, as a matter of fact. This may have loosened his tongue but I wouldn’t hasten to assume all credit.

“Let me tell you something about Harvard,” he begins and launches into a long story. Over the next ten minutes, I learn that back in 1971 he had signed up to take a course in Astronomy at Harvard because Carl Sagan taught it. When he showed up to find some other teacher taking up the stage, he realized that Harvard had just fired Sagan, which upset him no end since learning from Sagan was his entire motivation. He still bristled from that wily ivy bait-and-switch.

“Harvard did not deserve Sagan,” he tells me. “He thought differently and that’s one thing you couldn’t do at Harvard! In fact, I knew right away I’d get a B minus in the course because I challenged everything. I once asked if the speed of light was determined by the mass at the Big Bang and they wouldn’t answer that.”

He leans forward to drill his next point directly into my skull: “B minus is a flunked score, you know?”

“Princeton listens to youngsters, Harvard doesn’t. They think they know it all,” he finished.

All done, he walks around his old car and just as he’s about to open the door, he retraces back and asks me:

“So, what’s your name?”

“Vijay!”

“Veejay?”

“Yup!”

“I’m Rick.”

He walks back around the Mazda and drives away, waving at me. I start to get ready to ride back over the mountains and join my wife and some friends for lunch a few hours later. It’s been some time since we had chaat, so I had put that down as my preference earlier.

The senior crowd near me is breaking up. Time for me to finish my long-cold coffee, get home and read the newspaper before chaat time.