by David D. Schwab
It was our very first overnight motorcycle ride. Virgil, my best friend since the second grade, was riding his new, kick-start Harley-Davidson Sportster. I was riding my first big street bike, a Honda 450, and “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes” was playing on the radio everywhere we stopped. I’d seen Easy Rider, and I was ready for the open road, minus the shotgun guy. I already had the cut-off Levi jacket with the American flag sewn on the back. I had a rolled-up sleeping bag tied on the rear seat for a backrest. It was 1971, and we were riding from Lakewood, California, up the coast 300 miles to Fort Ord. Where a couple of our fraternity brothers, who had low draft numbers, were in boot camp.
We had successfully avoided the draft ourselves, with high lottery numbers, and were going to visit our friends on their first weekend leave. We left LA at “O” dark thirty and rode up the Coast Highway, arriving at the army base at noon. After asking directions from the guards at the main gate, we went looking for our friends.
“Man, those uniforms, the tanks, it looks so cool; maybe we should enlist, Virgil said.
“All that stuff about Viet Nam on TV, the killing, it doesn’t sound too cool to me,” I said. The truth was that the draw of becoming part of all this activity and all those War Hero movies we grew up with made this army thing appealing.
It was a short hurried visit. We heard another high school friend was there also and that he had lucked out and was headed for Germany and not Viet Nam like they were.
The sun was setting, and the temperature was dropping as we said our goodbyes and fired up our bikes. I could hear the lyrics from Credence Clearwater Revival, “I see a bad moon rising,” as I saw the moon shining through the Monterey Peninsula’s gnarled trees.
We were inexperienced at long-distance motorcycle rides and weren’t prepared for the cold North Coast night riding. When we reached the rest-stop at Gaviota, we were frozen and shivering. A large sign declared “No Overnight Camping Allowed.” We pretended not to see it and carried our sleeping bags up a small rise behind the bathroom building into the bushes away from the parking lot’s bright lights. A mysterious feeling of dread crossed my mind, but I was too tired and cold to care. All I wanted to do was lie down. We climbed into our bags, boots, helmets, gloves, and all. Finally I warmed up enough to fall asleep. I half-remembered car doors slamming, but I didn’t fully wake up until dawn. We climbed out of our sleeping bags, rolled them up, and headed down the trail to the parking area.
As I reached the sidewalk, I noticed a small wooden sign with an arrow pointing toward the bushes we’d just slept under. The sign read “Doggie Relief Area.”
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