Motorcycle touring through California, rolling over the tire tracks of Hunter S. Thompson, Steve McQueen, and the guy from “My Name is Earl.”
photo: Mark Doherty
photo: Mark Doherty
“I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head, but in a matter of minutes I’d be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz . . .” –Hunter S. Thompson, “Midnight on the Coast Highway.”
We’re going from Zero to Zero in 10 days. That is, we’re starting at Zero Motorcycles, makers of cutting-edge electric bikes just outside Santa Cruz, California, and ending with pit stops to meet vintage custom bike builders in L.A. such as Shinya Kimura, originator of “Zero-style.” We’ll see what the future of motorcycling looks like while paying homage to its past. We’ll travel a couple of thousand kilometres of California desert in between, arcing inland and down the eastern spine of the Sierra Nevada. Motorcycling, after all, is the way to see California, and not because it’s still 30ºC in mid-October. But because it’s part of the lore that feeds California’s magic – its myths, its movies.
I’ve just picked up Mark, photographer and good friend, right from the San Francisco airport. Now our 500 kilograms of man, machine and personal effects are thrumming along the 101 heading south, dodging traffic. We’re new to this bike, learning on the job, and, in our hurry, trying not to – as the Good Doctor put it – meet the Sausage Creature as we ride two-up on our beefy BMW R1200GS Adventure. The bike is wasp-like, aggressive looking and as solid as a tank. It feels like a Hummer on two wheels. It also has a robotic manga/anime-like quality to it. When we pull into our Santa Cruz appointment’s office lot to park in the shade, I half expect it to unfold like a Transformer and clomp away.
Inside, the generic building feels like a combination Silicon Valley startup and aerospace factory. Upstairs are a lot of cubicles and men in chinos, desks littered with aluminum motorcycle chasses and design mockups. Downstairs, tattooed forearms turn wrenches, but there’s a noticeable lack of oil spills and no blat of engines being tuned in the belly of what has become the darling of North America’s burgeoning electric motorbike industry. Even the Governator himself has pulled a photo-op on one of Zero’s 270-pound dynamos (the other end of the spectrum from the 1990 Harley Davidson Fat Boy Schwartznegger straddled in Terminator 2).
In its first year of production, Zero Motorcycles sold just a few dozen bikes (half of which went to green-conscious Canada, mostly to B.C.ers). But in two years since it has added 54 employees and surpassed the 1,000-motorcycle mark. According to Director of Marketing Scot Harden, it also has serious VC backing and sales projections like a hockey stick. “They’re not just evolutionary,” he brags of Zero’s electro-rockets, “they’re revolutionary.”
That’s not marketing bravado from an eco-prosthelytizer, either. It comes from a man, now in his mid-’50s, who has jockeyed fossil-fuel-burning engines professionally for almost 40 years. An American Motorcycle Association (AMA) Hall of Famer, he won his share of Baja 500s and Baja 1000s before going on to manage factory race teams for KTM and BMW/Husqvarna. And from his moustache down to his cowboy boots, Harden’s still that desert rider who has ridden over a quarter of million miles off-road, racing and touring all over Africa and North and South America. To have a die-hard from the old guard hitch his wagon to electric is an incredible vote of confidence. “It’s the future,” he asserts, with conviction. “Somewhere down the line, every other bike on the road will be electric.”
Waiting for our rides to be prepped for a test drive, the talk drifts from motorcycles to movies. The film script Steve McQueen was working on when he died is being revived, and Zero Motorcycles may have a cameo. Harden remembers being 14, bumping along the Nevada desert on his dirt bike to catch the 1971 classic On Any Sunday by Bruce Brown. The documentary filmmaker, already famous for 1966 surfer ode Endless Summer, had applied his same gentle touch to the burgeoning subculture of motorcycling, with the support of Hollywood leading man and avid rider Steve McQueen. The coolest man alive undoubtedly influenced a whole generation of riders. And transfixed by what he saw on the screen, Harden was one of those kids, hiding in the theatre bathroom to watch back-to-back screenings. “Yeah, that movie,” he says, “changed my life.”
We’re soon accelerating into the forested hills for a spin. Zero’s street-legal bikes are twist and go, no gear-shifting necessary. The power delivery is even and sprightly, the bikes nimble. The only noise is the wind through my helmet and almost-silent whirr of moving parts. Even though we’ve just stepped off a 1200cc BMW touring bike, these electric mounts don’t feel like they lack for guts. Flying along sun-dappled country laneways, the sensation is of a free ride – propelled without any exertion or discernible form of combustion. The fun factor is ridiculous. “That’s the proof right there,” says Harden, pointing to my stupidly fat grin when I pull up next to him.
The next morning, Mark and I make the pilgrimage to Hollister, self-proclaimed “birthplace of the American Biker,” about 80 kilometres south. The town of 35,000 is the quiet backdrop of the first biker movie ever made, The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando on – not a Harley as one might expect for this American film classic – but some British iron, Brando’s own personal 1950 Triumph Thunderbird. The film was inspired by a real-life event with fewer terrorized townies than portrayed in the movie. It was a rowdy weekend, a Gypsy Tour the AMA organized over the 1947 Independence Day weekend to bring together motorcycle clubs. But magnified by the media, including a staged photo in Life magazine, of a slovenly biker double-fisting atop his cycle, crankcase deep in beer bottles and a fictionalized account of the event in Harpers magazine, the rally swiftly rose to the level of myth.
Today there is nothing much to see in Hollister, though the drive up from the coast truly makes it more about the journey than the destination. Hwy. 152 yields some sinuous track, and we exchange salutes with other motorcyclists winding it out back down to sea level. In town we hit a taqueria, then wander through Johnny’s Bar, peering up at black-and-white photos of a bonafide motorcycle club, the Booze Fighters (led by founder Wino Willie Forkner), before heading back down for another run through the S-curves.
As Bruce Brown narrates in Any Given Sunday, “the most fun in all of motorcycling is to load up your bike in a pickup truck and head out into the country . . . which, two days later, is exactly what we do. Our friend Matt Schober in Bishop has borrowed trail bikes for us, and we load the three vintage Hondas onto a trailer and fill the bed with gear and supplies. Mark and Matt jump in the cab. I ride escort on the GS. Then we’re off, with no real, set plan.
There’s something unmistakably dramatic about the Eastern Sierra. Days are spent going from familiar loops that Matt knows well, to poking around the edges of the map he’s always wanted to explore. At night we make camp amongst the sage at 7,000 feet and wake to frost on our sleeping bags. One night we grab an outdoor tub site at Benton Hot Springs and soak for as long as humanly possible while a rare rain shower passes, leaving a sky bright with clouds of stars.
We climb old pack-horse trails, built to service mines up in the hills. We bounce the bikes through whoop de whoops and stream beds, up steep banks and down tracks rolling with melon-sized rocks. Riding sweeping single track up high in the Glass Mountains, we gain wide-open views of the desert floor and the White Mountains across the valley. Up here, the colours achieve an extra degree of vibrancy. Stands of trembling aspen, orange and mint-green shimmer in the wind. We rest to find graffiti carved by shepherds into the white trunks, one actually dated, 1916.
We come across bent pine, hundreds of years old, trunks gnarled into bonsai twists. The grain of the silver wood forms bold, swirling patterns, as if hammered from precious metals by Issey Miyake rather than blast-polished by sun and wind. A raptor circles in a sky so saturated in colour it’s a midnight blue.
For two days we see no one else, save for a hand waving from a lone truck passing by. Down low we roam volcanic tablelands, encountering Paiute petroglyphs in slot canyons, and poke our heads into abandoned mineshafts shored up with rickety timbers. Tracks turn to red volcanic pumice, hemmed in with bitter brush and sage. A single pine in a field strikes as noble a figure as is possible for something inanimate. A single cloud puff hovers off a peak like an exclamation point.
We drop back to the valley and past salt flats and fresh desert springs, oases, vibrant with life. After a week on the bikes, wearing all our armour in this heat, we walk bowlegged like cowboys and smell like bags of hockey equipment. We strip down and jump into a slough to cool off.
It’s time to head south. We stop in for an obligatory burrito at the Big Pine Chevron, a gas station harbouring a full Mexican kitchen in the back. We pass motels advertising “Clean N’Quiet,” “Cable & HBO.” Convenience stores announce simply, “Gasoline. Beer.” Hook-and-bullet shops bear such classic neon signs as fish on a line arcing out of the water, in Western boardwalk towns from the era of Norman Rockwell. Always to our right, the bleached-bone pinnacles of the Sierra Nevada, to our left, Death Valley. And now, just to the west, the highest point in the contiguous U.S., Mount Whitney, and a hundred miles east, the lowest – Badwater Basin.
Our entry into the morass that is L.A. comes past dusk, the worst possible time to be driving into an unfamiliar city. We try to keep with the flow in a six-lane freeway – its surface rough and strewn with detritus – while trying to read the exit signs. An ominous shroud of smog cloaks the city, the Sausage Creature lurks in the shadows. But we arrive just fine and on time to meet Mark’s parents, in town on their way home to Europe. His father had been a “ton-up” boy, one of the original café racers who roared around London’s ring roads, a blur of black leather on a Norton. His mother had ridden as well. Their honeymoon was a motorcycle tour through Yugoslavia. There riding days are long past but you can tell the way that they eye the bike, they wouldn’t mind having a go on the Beemer. Early the next morning finds us back out on the freeways, working like a rally-car team, Mark yelling navigation in my ear.
With seven days of Sierra Nevada mountain and desert riding behind us, we’re headed for the L.A. suburb of Azusa. Its languid strip of car parts dealers and non-descript garages, interspersed with the odd tattoo parlour, and at least one artist’s studio: Shinya Kimura’s Chabott Engineering. We spot bikes in various states of completeness or deconstruction spilling out from one of the doorways and figure we’ve found it. Once sun-blinded eyes adjust to the dimness within, there’s then the sense that this is not your regular garage. It has the feel of an artist’s atelier, albeit an artist who works with greasy parts. His garage is complete with a loft gallery, tastefully appointed with antique furniture and leather chairs, design books, a couple completed masterpieces of motorcycle design and more black-and-white photos on display.
One of the world’s more distinctive motorcycle builders, Kimura left the motorcycle company he helped found in Japan, Zero Engineering, and later expanded to Las Vegas. Now in his late 40s, he also moved from the systematic production of his signature Zero-style bikes – characterized by a rigid gooseneck frame, pre-’84 Harley engine, springer forks and spoked wheels – to one-offs that he doesn’t even sketch before building.
Kimura’s Zero bikes have been featured in the likes of 2008 Hollywood bluckbuster Iron Man, but his latest creations are more likely to appear in a Terry Gilliam indie film or Jeunet & Caro’s The City of Lost Children – or even more probably in a museum of modern art or a Chelsea gallery. He named his first company “Zero” to signify the beginning. And 17 years later, he’s progressed to a whole other plane. Producing just two or three bikes a year, he works like a sculptor, taking inspiration from materials at hand to “grow” each bike organically and producing designs that are at once retro and futuristic, reverent and iconoclastic, sophisticated steam-punk.
Parts are welded from sheet metal, hammered out with a mallet, then ground down. Salvaged materials – burnished with age and use – and his custom parts blend perfectly. The bikes embody a wabi-sabi aesthetic, rough but elegant. They’re built to be ridden but something makes me reluctant to even touch them. Not because the surfaces and lines are so austere, but because they’re works of art – to handle them seems disrespectful. Kimaru’s buyers have no such compunction, of course; the bikes are as much about function as form. He’s raced his works at Bonneville, the Utah salt flats where speed records are set, The World’s Fastest Indian was filmed and that iconic motorcycle the Triumph Bonneville derived its name.
As much as building bikes, Kimura loves to ride. He recently completed the U.S. motorcycle gumball race, a coast-to-coast challenge on pre-1916 bikes – in his case, a 1915 Indian. It’s sitting there next to us, not much more than an old-style bicycle frame with an engine strapped to it, nothing cushioning the metal of its single saddle seat except well-worn leather. My ass hurts just looking at it. Except for two days spent drilling and wiring a cylinder head together, Kimura rode it cross-country 16 days straight.
He takes us out for ride, in his backyard test track on his latest project. Why he has chosen this otherwise non-descript locale to open a workshop becomes suddenly clear when, five minutes later, we’re hauling up a mountain road off a lush reservoir valley in Angeles National Forest. Kumara’s riding a recent commission based on a 1947 Harley Davidson design: swept-forward, restrained, ape-hanger-style handle bars, balloon tires and what looks like a miniature diving helmet housing the front light, secured by brass rivets to the top of the gas tank. The rear light is a bulbous brushed-steel-and brass unit fronted by a red Cyclops-eye. With its sinuous brace arms, it is somehow reminiscent of the killer bots in the Matrix. Shifting is achieved with the jockey shifter located under the rider’s left thigh, necessitating a little hitch to one side to switch gears. Meanwhile, Mark and I ride on the latest in computerized German engineering to hit the hardtop, swaddled in ballistic nylon, plastic body armour and boots. Kimura wears a thin white leather racing jacket over blue Dickies and low-cut Chuck Taylors. We’re riding side-by-side but travelling in two different movies.
Our last stop is across town at the studio of one of Kimura’s contemporaries, a designer with a similar bent, if different style. We cross over the dry L.A. River and dead end in another industrial district, where amid high, chain link fences topped with barbed wire and rusting corrugated metal is a structure unusually elegant for a warehouse, neatly painted in an understated grey, with a charcoal rollup gate and red accent door. Clean cut, late 30s, Ian Barry has stayed late to meet us; we’ve arrived on a Friday afternoon; the staff have already left for the weekend.
Barry founded Falcon Motorcycles about eight years after quitting his job as a programmer and setting up a workshop in a tent in a friend’s driveway (he lived in another tent in the backyard). Since then, his custom bikes have met with enough success that he’s now housed in this appropriately epic warehouse space in east L.A., and stepping off the street into the workshop is like stepping into the pages of Dwell Magazine.
Where Kimura’s workshop is a dark, organic warren of bike parts, tools and machinery, Barry’s is bright and airy, with high ceilings and natural light. Eight-foot windows pivot open to access breeze and garden, an oasis of greenery in a savannah of concrete. Inspiration lines the walls, from art deco posters to line drawings of plants. But it’s quickly apparent that real work goes on here. As with Kimura’s garage, there are bikes in various states of production and, on the wide slats of wood-flooring, a couple of finished masterworks.
We start with the first in Barry’s Concept 10 collection, The Bullet – a glossy board-track racer representing thousands of hours of labour, almost every part custom fabricated or reworked. Snapped up by film and TV actor Jason Lee (star of My Name Is Earl), it launched Barry’s career as a bike builder by winning Best Custom at the 2008 Legend of the Motorcycle Concours in Half Moon Bay. The Bullet’s frame and engine are from a 1950 Triumph Thunderbird, the same model and year as Marlon Brando’s bike in The Wild One, which gets us talking about where Mark and I started 10 days ago.
As it turns out, Barry grew up in Santa Cruz. He’s also familiar with Zero Motorcycles. To my surprise, for someone so obsessed with bikes created more than 50 years ago, he’s also keen to get out and test-drive an electric model. “I like what they’re doing. I think it’s great,” he says, “Anybody who has a problem with the idea of an electric bike is just wrapped up in nostalgia. It’s a giant leap if it creates a better performing, better-handling machine.”
I ask if he’d drop an electric engine into one of his vintage frames, like musician Neil Young putting an electric engine into his 1959 Lincoln Continental. “I wouldn’t do it,” says Ian, shaking his head. But he does explain what he is hoping to do with an electric engine. With his Concept 10 collection, he’s making one of each of the major British marks (Velocette, Ariel, Norton, AJS, BSA, Rudge, Brough, Vincent, and the two Triumphs he’s already built) to learn everything he can about traditional fabrication techniques. Then, hopefully, “that will get carried forward into developing a chassis around an electric engine. But I won’t use an old bike,” he says, “I’ll start from scratch.” We thought that we were making a one-way trip by motorcycle though California. In the end, it seems, we’ve made a loop.