Non-Fiction

Story: 2021, Week 18 – A Motorcycle Story: Jasmine

Not actually Jasmine. But same model, same year, same color. *sigh*

One of last week’s Five Things was Bring A Trailer and in the description, I mentioned a recent auction they had for a 1974 Honda CB360G motorcycle in practically mint condition. Since watching the walk-around video in the listing and listening to the engine settle into its sewing-machine like parallel-twin cadence, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about my old 1974 CB360T, or, as I called her, Jasmine. Remembering exploits on that thing remind me of the crazy, idealistic, reckless kid I was. There’s the old saying, “God looks out for old folks and fools,” well… I wasn’t an old man, but somehow I survived that transition from teenager to “adult” on that CB360 — which, I will note, had the same birthday as I did: October, 1974.

That wasn’t the first thing I noticed when I saw the motorcycle. Shawn had just gotten off at Orchard Supply Hardware and one of his coworkers was selling it. I noticed the color first – a teal green. It was the nineties, after all, and I don’t know how that color went over in 1974, but in the early nineties it fit right in. I also noticed it wasn’t running. Shawn was confident we could get it running easily. One of the mistakes I’d made was trusting Shawn’s mechanical acumen. I mean, he told us he rebuilt the engine in his Chevy stepside pickup himself and that was a lot more than any of us did, so…

I usually refer to the CB360 as my first motorcycle, but that’s not quite true. The summer after my dad died, I picked up a smaller Honda CB200. That first motorcycle was short lived. It was 1991 and we nicknamed that CB200 “Perot” because you never knew if it would run or not — nothing as evergreen as a 90’s political joke. It wasn’t long, though, until Perot wouldn’t go into first gear. Shawn said we could fix it. It would be easy. We’d have to “crack the cases” to get to the transmission, but that was fine. We started dissembling the bike, then we pulled the engine. To keep track of what nut and bolt went where, Shawn had a great system: everything went into a bucket. One bucket. All. The. Nuts. And. Bolts.

Perot (my Perot) never ran again. We never did crack the case. And knowing what goes into that process, it’s for the best.

But I suspect Shawn was feeling a little guilty for Perot’s fate when we looked at the CB360. “It’s just the carbs – we can rebuild those!” he said. I still believed him. Come to think of it, his truck never did seem to run perfectly. But I didn’t think about that then. We got it back to the garage at the house on Bonita we had moved to not too many months back and started working. True enough, it was just the carbs. Though, I think I managed to mess up the rebuild of at least one. But I learned. And soon enough Jasmine coughed to life.

So a note on the name “Jasmine.” Given when I got her (again, early nineties) I think most of my friends believed I had named the motorcycle after princess Jasmine in the Disney animated movie “Aladdin.” Not true. No, there was a flowering jasmine bush outside my window and in the morning I loved waking up to the smell of jasmine coming in through my (always) open window. Similarly, working on the motorcycle I found myself drawn to the smells of things in the garage – the metallic tang of used motor oil, the stale funk of old gasoline, the acerbic sting of carb cleaner. It wasn’t some kind of “Let’s huff fumes!” attraction, it was more that this was the olfactory imprint of the mechanical world, of a well-used garage and tools, and I was falling in love with it, like I had fallen in love with the morning scent of that jasmine bush. Jasmine. That’s where it comes from.

In high school I had the luxury of not relying on Jasmine as my primary transportation. I had a car (oh, stories there…), and I even acquired an old Spanish moped that my mom sewed a tiger striped seat cover for, I hose clamped a golf flag to the back, and with my Little Mermaid lunchbox bungied onto the front rack I’d mosey to school more often than not with my Birkenstock-clad feet stretched out on the running boards.

Yeah, I was that kid.

But I sold my car to pay for part of the first year at UCSC, and the moped wasn’t going to make it to Santa Cruz, so anytime I wanted to go farther than the bus would take me I had to rely on Jasmine. For a kid born in 1974, I was just coming into my own in 1993. But for a Honda twin of the same age, it was vintage. And I was pushing it way beyond what I should have…

The RA of my dorm that first year, Sol, and his friends were putting together the Cigar Aficionado club. It was their way of sort of putting a finger in the eye of the UC Santa Cruz hippie image, and I wanted in. I told my then-girlfriend about it and she couldn’t have more strenuously objected. She thought it was disgusting and how could I even think about it? That was a long-distance relationship that carried over from high school. She had gone to UC Berkeley, and I to UC Santa Cruz. I cared about her opinion even if she wasn’t there and I told Sol in the dining hall at lunch I wasn’t going to take part in that night’s first gathering. I still vividly remember what he said: “Jordy,” he had this cadence and presence that reminded me of Vito Corleone even though he was from Fremont, California, “I totally understand.” Dramatic pause. “But I’m going get an extra cigar for you in case you change your mind before tonight.” I thanked him, but assured him I wouldn’t be there.

After lunch I decided to take advantage of the gorgeous fall day and go for a ride. I still try to go back to Santa Cruz in the fall because the smell of the leaves mixed with the sea breeze… it’s utterly intoxicating. My mom forbid me to take the underpowered motorcycle on the notoriously dangerous Highway 17, so I knew well the serpentine Highway 9 that ran through the Santa Cruz mountains from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz, meandering through little towns among the redwoods. But on the other side of town ran Empire Grade, a road I’d never heard of (this was way before I could trace it on Google Maps) but looked inviting. I strapped on my helmet, zipped up my leather jacket and pointed Jasmine up Empire Grade.

We passed the West Entrance to campus and the road swept up and carried us out of sight. As the road climbed parts of it reminded me of the roads around Lake Tahoe where, only a few years before I’d ridden my bicycle with the redwoods giving way to pines as the road traced the ridge between the coast and the inner forests. Where the bike was underpowered on a contemporary freeway, this road with its gentle sweeping curves and undulating rises and falls were a perfect match and I was enjoying the hell out of it. I came over a rise and twisted the throttle to gain a little more momentum for the next rise ahead… and the throttle cable snapped.

I coasted to the side of the road and realized, for the first time in my life, I was stranded. The University lay at least a dozen miles back down the road. There were no cell phones back then, and even now there’s relatively no service up there. I was screwed. I locked my bike and tried hitchhiking – I’d already seen plenty of folks around campus hitchhiking into town and even if the notion scared the crap out of me what choice did I have? But it wasn’t a well-traveled road, and the dozen or so cars that passed didn’t even slow.

I went back to the bike and tried to reassess the problem. The Honda CB360 has a parallel twin engine with two carbs behind the cylinders with a little wheel between them that housed the throttle cable. Twist the grip, the cable gets pulled, the carbs open to let in more gas and air. The motorcycle still ran just fine. It just… idled, and that was it. But maybe I could feather the clutch to get a little motion and even if I had to push uphill, there were enough downhills that maybe I could coast it back – I mean it was Empire Grade after all. So I sat astride the bike, kick started it to life (the optional electric starter had long since died), pulled in the clutch, stepped down into first, and tried feathering the clutch. It… really didn’t work. But… you know… if I could get my hand down under the seat just so… between the carbs and the crankcase… if I could move my fingers in there between the carbs and push that wheel….

Vroom!

Holy crap.

Half bent over the right side of the bike, I manipulated the throttle again and, sure enough, the RPMs went up. I experimentally let the clutch out a little as I hunched over and gave it a little gas and… I was moving again! Yes, I only one hand on the handlebars. And, yes, I had the other arm contorted under my seat, but, goddamnit, I was moving again! I could make it home!

I knew it was crazy dangerous at the time. How do I know I knew? Because at some point as the wan light of the ancient Honda’s halogen headlight split the growing dusk descending on Empire Grade that night, my reptile hind-brain decided it was the appropriate time to start singing the theme to “Indiana Jones And The Raiders Of The Lost Ark.” As I awkwardly steered the bike around curves with one arm I bellowed, “Duh duh duh-duh, duh duh duh! Duh de duh DUH, duh de DUH DUH DUH!” like a wildman.

I made it back through the East entrance and up the panoramic sweeping Coolidge Drive. I managed to turn in to Stevenson College, and pulled into the narrow motorcycle parking below my dorm. Only then did I extricate my arm from mechanical linkage and flipped the engine kill button. The headlight darkened as I turned the key off and I sat there in the twilight listening to the heat ticking of the quiescent engine and what I just did, the insanity of what I just managed to do swept over me like a cold wave of “What the hell were you thinking?!” The adrenaline that fueled my Indiana Jones bellowing body had drained and I was shaking.

I don’t remember dropping my helmet and jacket in my room, but I must have. I do remember making a beeline for the dining hall where Sol was finishing dinner. I walked up to the table and he stopped talking to someone mid-conversation. “Jordy,” he said, “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“Sol,” I said, “I’m going to have that goddamned cigar tonight.”

I did, too. A Macanudo Portofino. It was divine.

I’ve got myriad Jasmine stories – the time I didn’t take her to the nude beach, the time I took her rear wheel on the bus over the hill to get a replacement tire, the time Owen and I rode it over the aforementioned Highway 17 TOGETHER…  yeah… crazy.

A few years later I got a new used bike and Jasmine languished under a tarp until I could find time and money to properly restore her. As these things do, it never happened. Fortunately, my friend Mark was interested in getting into motorcycling and was wondering what a good starter bike might be. Funny, I said, I happen to have one…

31 Ghosts 2019: October 1 – Seeing the Unseen

Photo by Jack Antal on Unsplash

It’s October again and you know what that means… It’s time for 31 Ghosts! This is the third year I endeavor to bring you a ghost story every day of the month through All Hallows’ Eve. The yellowing leaves are starting to fall, the temperature (at least at night) is growing chilly as the days get shorter and the shadows grow longer.

Earlier this year I moved back into downtown Guerneville. My buddy’s lower unit had taken on four feet of water and his tenant left town almost as quickly as the floodwaters. Before the flood and before that tenant, my friend’s boys lived down here off and on. They talked about at least two ghosts down here — one that haunted towards the back of this lower level near the bathroom and the other… the other had some definite ideas about what to watch on the TV. They said they’d have activity when they started watching scary movies — lights flickering, bumps, cold spots. One of the boys’ friends claimed a ghost kept whispering in his ear that they shouldn’t be watching scary movies so vehemently that he had to seek psychiatric help afterwards. Missed like a month of school. Wasn’t the same afterwards…

I lived down here then for about six weeks between houses. With a huge dog and two cats in one room, it was easy to blame any unexplained noises on the cats or the dog… even if they were in the same room with me. The hallway light flickered on occasion, but that constituted the paranormal experiences I had in my first time here.

Fern and I came to help as soon as we could after the water receded. That first weekend was a mess of hauling out soaking debris and pulling down soggy drywall. Numerous times coming in and out I swear I saw a cat out of my corner of my eye. Nothing definite — I’d tell you it was a black cat, but I don’t know that I caught enough of its slinky figure moving among the tools, mops, and buckets to really be sure. But it wasn’t a single time. Power was shut off, there was still standing water, maybe it was just a trick of light, but I kept seeing that cat.

It brought be back to the middle of February, 2014. We were told my mom wouldn’t last the night, so racing to the airport turned into a forced quiet of unknown in an airplane hurtling through the night. We made it. Long after midnight we got to the hospital bed set up in the family room of my mom’s small home. She was sleeping. My sister Jenny asked if Jack, Jay, or I would stay with mom overnight and I volunteered immediately. Jenny had already made the hospice nurse, Augustina, get some rest and in short order I was alone with my mom. Wracked with an obscenely fast-moving cancer diagnosed less than three weeks earlier she lay unconscious. The only sounds in the room came from the rise and fall of the mechanical oxygen machine. The only light shone a weak orange glow from the bulb about the range in the adjoining kitchen.

“Jenny and Jill said I should sleep. The aid said I should sleep (she just came out and said it again),” I wrote in my journal. “Not now. Now I feel I need to be present. She’s drugged asleep, I know that. But she’d do it for me. I will sleep later. Now breaths are finite and even if it’s just watching her, so be it.

“Oh, and the ghosts,” I wrote. “Sitting here watching her there are shadows flittering at the edge of my peripheral vision. I feel people standing behind me – that uncanny feeling. I can’t discern who it is/ they are, but it’s unmistakable.” There was a cat there that morning. I saw it slip around the coffee table and move around the bed. At least one other person told me later they had seen a cat in the room another time. My mom didn’t have a cat.

I’d mentioned in the first 31 Ghosts entry my dad died on October 1. I remember very vividly as a teenager watching my dad in his last days seem to unwind like a watchspring, making statements that didn’t make any sense in context… or maybe they did. Once, I remember, he startled and demanded, “I need the key!”

“What key, dad?”

“I need the key, goddamnit, I need the key!”

“Dad, there’s no key.”

He was desperate now, “I need the key to open the door! I need the key!”

Maybe he was seeing the final door he wouldn’t get to for another few days.

My mom’s last morning she lay mostly unconscious, incoherent. “Around 3 in the morning Augustina was resting on the couch next to my mom. Suddenly mom woke up with a cry of ‘Nana! Nana, wait!’ She turned to Augustina and said, ‘I have to go now. Tell my family I love them.’ And then she lapsed into the state she was in before.” She died twelve hours later.

I still see them both – mom and dad – in dreams, mostly. A smell of my mom’s favorite hand lotion sometimes. I hear my dad laugh. Ghosts. Shadows…

It’s October again. The living have had the last eleven months, so I’m taking this one for the dead. 31 Ghosts has begun.

The Port Chicago Disaster: 75 years.

Seventy-five years ago today World War II raged across Europe and the Pacific and two liberty ships sat side-by-side at a pier at the Port Chicago munitions depot on the shore of Suisun Bay. The SS Quinault Victory sat with empty cargo holds having arrived at the docks that day after taking on fuel at the Shell refinery in Martinez. The other side of the pier, however, was a hive of activity as Navy personnel worked furiously to load the SS E.A. Bryan with explosives bound for the Pacific theater.

At 10:18pm an ominous sound rent the din of loading. “A metallic sound and rending timbers, such as made by a falling boom,” one survivor reported. An small explosion followed, and then, seconds later the SS E.A. Bryan vaporized as the munitions detonated causing a fireball hurled flaming scrap over 12,000 feet into the air. A seismograph at UC Berkeley 20 miles away registered the blast as a 3.2 magnitude earthquake, and the explosion was felt as far away as San Jose and Santa Rosa. Debris was reported to have fallen in towns ten or more miles away. The blast picked up the enormous SS Quinault Victory and tossed it into the bay where it landed 500 feet away upside down and facing the opposite direction.

All 320 men on the pier died instantly. Of those deaths, nearly two-thirds were African-Americans.

This is what happened 75 years ago today and, sadly, has been largely forgotten. What led up to the explosion and what followed changed the military, race-relations, and the nation.

The site of the explosion is now the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial. You can visit the quiet memorial on the shore, but it’s not easy. Or popular: overseen by the National Park Service, only 653 people visited the memorial in 2018 making it the fifth least-visited place in the National Park system. By contrast, the roadless Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in the desolate western edge of Alaska logged three times as many visitors in 2018 (though, a “nearby” park, the Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve way out on the Aleutian peninsula came in as the least visited place with only 100 visitors). I was lucky (and tenacious) enough to be one of those 653 visitors.

Boxcars full of ammo were queed in revetments prior to being towed onto the pier for ship loading.

The lack of visitation isn’t wholly owing to lack of remembrance. The monument is on the grounds of the still-active Concord Naval Weapons Station. Visiting begins with inquiring about when you can visit as swaths of the calendar are blocked out due to maneuvers on the base. I made my appointment two months ahead of time, in January, only to be called back in February and told that date would have to be rescheduled due to base schedule changes; I could come in May or later that week. I moved around my work schedule and took February 23rd off.  Oh, and you don’t park anywhere near the memorial or base. No, the tour begins in Martinez at the John Muir House (National Historical Site, almost 47,000 visitors last year) with a brief video describing the conditions leading up to the explosion, the explosion itself, and the tumultuous aftermath. Then you’re loaded into a van and shuttled to the site with a brief stop at the base’s visitor center to register your visit. If that’s not enough of a reminder that you’re visit is being monitored, when we got out of the van our ranger pointed down the shore past a razor-wire topped fence to a new pier with a container crane and instructed us to avoid taking any pictures that include that active pier because your camera (or phone) could be confiscated by base security at the end of the trip – he’d seen it happen.

But immediately after, the gravity monument itself takes over. Burnt stubs of timber still peak out of the water as if standing sentry, the only remains of the pier. There are interpretive plaques explaining what we’d already seen in the video. The names of the men who died are listed. There is a hunk of quarter-inch plate steel blasted from the Bryan and crumpled like tissue paper. There are replicas of some of the shells the men were loading at the time of the explosion. An American flag flaps in the shifting winds. Above all, it is quiet. The sounds of work at the Navel Weapons Station seem far away. You hear the waves. Birds. The wind through the few trees on the site. It is a solemn place.

In the aftermath of the explosion, while the destruction was still being sorted through, the Navy sought to get back to work – there was, after all, still a war going on. Several of the remaining divisions of sea sailors were relocated to Mare Island, and on August 8, just three weeks after the explosion, they were ordered to load the USS Sangay. They refused. Conditions – which were abysmal and extremely dangerous – hadn’t changed. The 328 men were still justifiably shaken and resolved not to put themselves back into a situation that killed their friends and comrades. After their (white) superiors upbraided them about their “duty” and the potential consequences of their actions, 70 agreed to go to work. The remaining 258 They were arrested on charges of mutiny. They were moved onto an make-shift prison barge off shore built to hold 75 men. Eventually 50 men, were charged with disobeying orders and making a mutiny “with a deliberate purpose and intent to override superior military authority”. Because the US was at war, they were facing a death penalty.

The trial of the “Port Chicago 50”, as they had become known, shared headline space in newspapers with the ongoing war overseas. The proceedings were held on Treasure Island. Future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall represented the NAACP on the defense. In the end, all 50 were found guilty and sentences ranged from eight to 15 years of hard labor. The sentences were later reduced, and the men spent about a year and a half in prison.

Over the years efforts have been made to exonerate the men. They were working under egregious conditions, woefully under-trained and pushed past exhaustion to meet unattainable deadlines with harsh penalties for failure. Several of them men refused to work not out of safety concerns but because they were physically injured. Subsequent investigations showed just how racially biased their accusers were. And yet 75 years after the explosion that killed their friends, their memories are still besmirched by the convictions (none are still alive, the last survivor died a few years ago).

On July 12th, Congressman Mark DeSaulnie attached an amendment to the yearly National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 2500) to exonerate the Port Chicago 50. The bill passed 220-197 and moves to the Senate.

Visiting the memorial may become easier as well. On July 2nd the Navy turned over 2,200 acres of the Concord Naval Weapons Station to the East Bay Regional Park District. I’ve been using the name “Concord Naval Weapons Station” but that’s not technically correct. The Concord Naval Weapons Station was technically closed. The active portions are split between the inland “Detachment of the Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach” (for now; this, too, is scheduled to be closed) and the tidal section is now known as “Military Ocean Terminal Concord” operated by the Army. It’s the inland area that is being turned over to eventually become housing, businesses, a college campus, as well as Concord Hills Regional Park , which will receive the lions share of the acreage. The National Park Service is also hoping to set up a dedicated interpretive center for the monument there, too, with permanent educational displays about the disaster and the Port Chicago 50.

For further reading I’d recommend starting with the surprisingly detailed Wikipedia entry. From there,
The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History by Robert L. Allen is considered the definitive text on the subject.  

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Steve Sheinkin focuses well on the aftermath, trial, and repercussions.

James Campbell’s The Color of War: How One Battle Broke Japan and Another Changed America sets the explosion against what he calls the decisive battle of the war in the pacific, the battle of Saipan – which also occurred in July 1944.

There are a number of pieces out this week discussing the 75th anniversary. This one from NBC Bay Area offers a nice interview with one of the sailors at Port Chicago that night.