I did my best to disconnect from my accustomed telemetry mode and look up from the tachometer and straighten up from the road every once in a while. In between turns I snatched glances into the yawning gulfs in the distance. I wished I was riding passenger and not having to drive; even smog ridden, the emptinesses framed by twisted granite castles were grand. Images flooded in, from a half forgotten anime movie...sunbursts of colored rock, towering pyramidal fastnesses. I arced round cliff after cliff, expecting at any turn to find a steam-powered blimp hanging in midair.
The road elevation signs kept reading higher and higher. 6000, then 7000 feet. The air was cold, the birds twittered in the silence, the asphalt hummed beneath the tires.
California 2, at least the western part, is basically 45 miles of linked sweepers along the crest of the Angeles Forest mountains above LA (Sierra Madres?) The pavement is smooth and of high quality, so that where there are no rocks on the road, an expert rider can hold sustained speeds of 75-80 mph. But there are usually rocks on the road, and few of us motorcyclists are truly expert at lines and brake points, myself included.
So I'm usually to be found puttering along somewhere in the vicinity of speed limit in the far right wheel-track, waving people by one group after the next. (When nobody is looking though I will find a nice low gear and dive into a curve, grinding a little bit more off my boot toe. Like that group of green fish I got stuck with in a long curve. I was uncomfortable letting them pass me in that curve, so applied the lash and dug in tight. I bet there's a visible bootmark all-ll the way through the apex. It's amazing how much grip a worn-out, leaking Tourance rear tire can muster)
Even cruising along, I'm struck by how different one's impression of the world is at succeeding 30 degree angles of bank. One may get a GREAT view of the bottom of the canyon because there one is, hanging over the edge of it. One becomes very intimate with all the little bits of debris along the side of the road and one wonders to oneself what their stories are - discarded camera batteries, childs' tennis shoes. Redwood trees smell much different from sagebrush and scrub at the lower altitudes; the air smells very different. And of course on the other side, the sky side, there is the coldly iridiscent mackerel sky, the Face of the Earth sculpted in granite glowering down upon one. (That's all the stuff one sees before one slows down some more and begins applying imagination and memories from the aforementioned anime-movies to the scenery....)
