1985: V-Boost, a comet and Oatman.
1985 – The year of many firsts. January itself contains: The first mobile phone call made in Britain, Ronald Reagan took office for a second time, Japan launched a satellite at Halley’s Comet, The Boss released Born In The USA, and a record cold snap paralyzed the US’s citrus crop for the year. And that’s just a handful of the action!
By July, Whitney Houston had released her first album, Cherry Coke was introduced, Madonna had two hit singles (and appears in Penthouse), the first internet domain is established, Back to the Future is released, PlayBoy quits stapling its centerfolds (yay), two Live-Aid concerts unite the globe, and of most importance to our story – Route 66 is decommissioned and removed from the United States Highway System.
On June 27, 1985 the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials voted to decertify the highway and remove all of its signs. The famous route was only in use for 59 years, but it became embedded in American pop culture thanks to songs, films and literature. One of the most famous instances is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which coined the name “the Mother Road” for the 2448 mile stretch of pavement.
Norbert Nagel, Mörfelden-Walldorf, Germany, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The V-MAX, Yamaha’s power cruiser that debuted in 1985, was designed by Akira Araki after he saw some “Bridge Races” in Mississippi. He wanted to design a bike that could beat everything around it in a straight line, in a short amount of time (say the span of a bridge) and that’s exactly what he did. It accomplished its pavement-blistering power via the v-boost system. It also threw all consideration of Reagan’s and Harley-Davidsons’ M.o.H.M.I. tariffs out the window with the massive 1198cc V4 that remained largely unchanged for 20 years.
Oatman, AZ plays a part in today’s story. Oatman is located 5 hours north of the banks of the Gila River where the Oatman family was murdered after refusing to trade or share supplies with a band of Yavapais. The story of the “Oatman massacre” and the tale of Olive, the only surviving family member to have lived with a Mohave tribe, meant that the name was associated widely with the Arizona desert in general.
Finally, Halley’s comet plays a pivotal yet subtle role in the following tale. It is the impetus for the journey and the events that unfold.
Sit back, pull up an appropriate beverage, take a deep breath and climb into the saddle of the VMAX. After all, this is your story.
“Painted Desert, Arizon” by Matt Kieffer is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Why the hell am I even riding through this desert?” you mutter in your helmet. Your new helmet by the way. You went out and bought this new Bell Star II just a month ago. The locals are looking at you like you’re nuts, stuffing your head in a bucket like that when there’s sunshine, pine trees and crisp Arizona air to breathe.
“You must have college smarts if you need to protect yer brain in that contraption”, the older attendant cajoled at the last Mobil station where you gassed up.
What they don’t know is that you recently finished (at least the important parts) of the Motorcycle Accident Cause Factors and identification of countermeasures. Volume 1: technical report… also known as the Hurt Report due to one of the authors being named Hugh Hurt Jr. The findings caused you to immediately go out and buy this sweet new helmet, and a pair of gloves.
You’re also thankful that your bike has an automatic headlight, something that came up frequently in this report. Probably factors driven by older models still on the road. Once switchable on the older bikes, they are now mandated. You think perhaps thanks to some scathing article in a journal somewhere by that Goodnik, Ralph Nader. He has been demanding safety standards all over the auto industry for 20 years now.
You slide out of the saddle and stretch your legs. You leave your bike running because you just need to check the map again while you let the blood return to your backside. You rifle through your satchel and pull out your faithful Rand McNally. You also have a Thomas Guide for when you’re in Southern California, and a map that you picked up at the AAA office when you went to insure your motorcycle. The Hurt report really had more of an impact on you than you’d like to admit. That’s the only explanation you find for why you’re in the middle of the desert clad in a new helmet and gloves sporting a new insurance policy. Three things that you didn’t even own a month ago.
Thanks to the charts that you found in the 300s pages, you even have a denim jacket rolled up and strapped to the rear seat.
With all of the thrust that the snarling V4 makes, it’s a wonder that the jacket is still there when you turn to verify its existence. It’s more of a testament to the strength of your strap and the stepped seat than anything else. The fierce rumble that has been the background symphony for the last hour purrs like a docile beast as it idles in the afternoon sun.
Yep. That didn’t take long. You really didn’t need to check anything. Oatman is the only town on this stretch of road for miles and miles… and it’s hardly a town at that. Some call it a living ghost town. Based on the small dot designating it on the map, you decide that it’s a living ghost community at best. Poltergeist just came out a couple years ago almost exactly to the day. When you get to Oatman you’ll determine if it would pass their scrutiny as a town.
You stash the maps neatly in your satchel pocket and slide back into the cockpit of your land rocket readying yourself to blast toward the heavens. The VMAX is a big bike that likes to go fast, and the straighter the road the better. You ditched I-40 in Seligman. Seligman, or what’s left of it, vanished almost as quickly as it came into view.
A dusty little redneck town back there in the middle of nowhere, which was once probably a welcome oasis 20 years ago before I-40 bypassed most of Rte 66. At least there’s still an exit and enough to stop for if you’re a hungry or curious traveler. That’s more than some of the distant, abandoned towns that you’ve spotted from the new interstate could hope for. They were 100% dependent on the highway guiding travelers past their front doors. Fuel was what decided your fate and the purpose for your stop.
Leaving Seligman, a quick check for Smokeys yielded nothing, so you opened up the V4 almost all the way to Kingman. The V-Boost felt euphoric and you achieved triple digits on the speedometer before you so much as blinked. This powerband hits harder than Don Mattingly, and once you pass 6000 rpm, life has an all new meaning. As the servo opens the V-Boost butterflies, the engine has a second life – not unlike your uncle Don at your family potlucks after the Schlitz kicks in, only with ten times the vigor of uncle Don when he hits the dance floor. Needless to say, you had to stop at Kingman for fuel. 1198cc V4s do not sip gas at full chat.
Oatman Highway Sitgreaves Pass Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
From Kingman it was another rip across a wide open valley – likely a flood plain or ancient river bed – toward the Black Mountains and your target. You just stopped to check your map right after some ruins, which you determined to be the old Cool Springs Station, and resume your climb into new vistas. As you work your way across the vestigial flats of the valley you can already see the crosses and roadside altars beginning to add up.
This road and scenery remind you of the Steven Spielberg film DUEL, but the twists, turns and cheap, sphincter-clinching thrills remind you of Action Park. The VMAX handles well for a beefy machine, and you’re handling the sweepers at a good pace, but you won’t be laying into the V-Boost anytime soon despite the capable suspension and triple-disc stopping power.
As the road begins to twist and tilt upward into the jagged, volcanic rock of the Black Mountains, you drop the VMAX down a gear. The snarling V4 settles into a steady, resonant thrum. Without the distraction of straight-line speed, the desert starts to crowd in on you.
You pass a rusted, bullet-riddled sign pointing toward the old gold mining claims. The air out here doesn’t feel like the valley anymore; it feels heavy, trapped in the steep canyon walls. You look up at the dark ridges, and for a second, you get the distinct, prickling sensation that you are being watched—not by a modern bandit, but by the very eyes that watched the pioneer wagons creak through these exact same choke points a hundred and thirty years ago.
The road is cracked and baked, an old worn leather-looking band stretching between alternating rock walls and sagebrush. You surmise that the lack of traffic and the lack of maintenance go hand-in-hand in like the age-old chicken and egg conundrum. A couple more roadside crosses and signs riddled with bullet holes don’t exactly feel like the red carpet has been rolled out for you. All this for a comet? Oh yeah, you haven’t even told us about that part yet..
You drop the VMAX down into second gear as Route 66 narrows, tilting aggressively up into the jagged, sun-bleached throat of the Black Mountains. There are no guardrails here. Just a sheer drop to your right and a wall of crumbling volcanic rock to your left. You have to muscle the bike into the corners, leaning your weight hard into the handlebars to force the heavy machine to track through the hairpins.
You round a blind, shadowed switchback—and your vision fills with sudden movement, red mist and the imminent darkening vignette as tunnel vision sets in… the comet will have to wait.
Your fingers clutch the front brake lever; your right boot stomps the rear pedal. The front forks dive violently. The rear tire breaks traction on the loose gravel littering the apex, fish-tailing slightly before the heavy bike shudders to a halt just inches from a wall of absolute indifference.
Standing dead-center in the road is a trio of wild burros.
They don’t bolt. They don’t even flinch at the low, aggressive rumble of your water-cooled V4 engine. The largest one, a scarred gray jack with long, notched ears, slowly turns its head. Its eyes are completely black, deep, and ancient. It looks right through your expensive Bell Star II helmet, sizing you up as just another passing flash of metal.
You kill the engine. The sudden silence that crashes down on the canyon is deafening. In the heat, you can hear the faint tick-tick-tick of the cooling exhaust.
As you sit there, sweating in your heavy denim jacket, staring down these feral descendants of the 19th-century gold miners, you realize you aren’t alone. A low stone wall—the ruins of an old roadside altar—sits just off the shoulder. Battered by decades of desert wind, a faded metal sign glints in the sun. Sitgreaves Pass.
“Along Old Rt. 66, Sitgreaves Pass, Oatman, AZ 2005” by Don Graham is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
As you catch your breath and remove your helmet, the burros turn and disappear like ghosts over the ridge. You kick your bike into first and idle it over to the gravel shoulder at the outside apex of the turn.
The sun-beaten pavement forms a perfect U at this switchback, but this ridge that it sits on is shaped more like a V.
The shoulder extends out like a veranda over the steep, tight canyon below. There are several crosses and some painted rocks down in the crook at the bottom. You have a 180º view of the canyon, and reckon that you’re at the zenith of the Black Mountains.. At least on Route 66.
Now you know why this desolate stretch of highway was abandoned and bypassed by I-40. The rusted wreckage of a Ford Pinto lies twisted down in the canyon to the north, and the remains of some large panel truck is crushed and wedged between some rocks to the southwest. From what’s left of the roof rack and the square front end, you surmise that it’s the last generation Chevy Suburban before they redesigned it a couple years ago.
That’s when your eyes catch the burros moving along the hillside below, and over another ridge to the southwest. The road snakes down into the canyon behind you, and you hope it doesn’t cross their path again. You could have very easily been down there with the wreckage and the crosses and joined yourself with the paint on the rocks at the bottom of the steep canyon wall. Jesus. The Hurt Report didnt have any statistics on burros and ghost towns.
You take one last look out over the canyons and the mountains that jut up out of the desert floor. Down there somewhere you know is Oatman. Only a couple miles away, it might as well be another century away, sitting in this ancient land that has barely changed while humankind has already arrived, thrived and abandoned it for exploits elsewhere.
You take one last look out over the arid patchwork of stone, creosote, sand, brittlebush and volcanic rock outcroppings before strapping on the lid one more time and making your way down the remnants of Route 66. The burros, automotive wreckage and legions of crosses that lie below you in the canyon stay heavy on your mind.
Ivan Salas from Inglewood CA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
You slide onto a stool at the heavy oak bar, your eyes drifting to a framed, sepia-toned photograph on the wall behind the register. It’s a young woman, her eyes wild and haunted, looking out from a past that feels uncomfortably close. But it’s her face that catches you—a thick, dark tattoo of five vertical lines bars her chin from her lower lip to her jawline.
“That’s Olive,” a gravelly voice says.
The bartender slides a sweat-beaded bottle of Coors across the wood. He’s wearing an old trucker hat, his skin cured to leather by the Mohave sun. He nods toward the frame. “Most folks think this town was named after some old miner. It wasn’t. It was named for her family. Or what was left of ’em.”
He reaches under the bar and pulls out a brittle, dog-eared paperback with a faded red cover: Life Among the Indians.
“1851,” the bartender says, tapping the cover with a thick thumb. “Her family was traveling by wagon train. Out here, just past the river, the Yavapais came upon ’em. Got mad when her daddy wouldn’t share tobacco and food. Clubbed the whole family to death right in the dirt. ‘Cept’n Olive and her little sister Mary Ann. They took ‘em for slaves. Treated ‘em real bad. Their 15 year old brother survived and made his way back to civilization. Never was able to rally much support in favor of findin’ his sisters.”
He wipes a bead of perspiration from his brow with the rolled-up sleeve of his well-worn shirt. He takes a swig of some brown liquid from a bottle and continues,
“The Yavapais had ‘em for about a year. Some Mohaves come along and seen how the Yavapais was a treatin’ ‘em. It took a couple tries, but finally they were able to convince the Yavapai to trade the girls for some horses, beads and blankets and vegetables.
The Mohave chief’s wife clothed ‘em and treated ‘em real nice. Marked ’em up with that blue cactus ink so they could pass on to the afterlife. They kindly adopted them into the Oach clan I guess you could say. Mary Ann starved to death in the mountains with some others in the tribe. Real bad drought of 1858. Olive stayed four more years with the Mohaves, until white emigrants started noticin’ a white girl with indians when they come close to the wagon trains. “
You feel as if you were to look outside, you would see her bright face flitting through the bustling, dusty street as Mohaves traded with travelers reaching down from the drivers seats of their wagons as they reluctantly swapped supplies with the half-naked natives.
His gritty voice snaps you out of your daydream,
“Eventually a chief-type named ‘eecheeyaratav’ hinted toward sending her home to her people so as not to make the settlers angry. They dropped her off at Fort Yuma after getting their horses, blankets and beads back from the new Americans, of course. Can you imagine being adopted at 14 and sent back home at 19? By Gawd, it’d be so dall gern confusing!”
You look down at your brand-new, high-tech leather riding gloves resting on the bar, then back up at the photograph of the girl who was traded for blankets. The contrast makes the VMAX outside feel like a spaceship parked in a graveyard.
“They say the ghosts of the old wagon trails still walk the ridges at night,” the bartender adds casually, wiping down the bar with a gray rag. “Looking for the graves they never got. You out here scouting fro anything in particular?”
“Oh, uh – yeah space. I mean a comet. A comet from space.”
He squints one eye and beneath his thick beard you see him smirk a little.
“A what from where? Are you lookin’ for something that fell from space? Like them UFOs in New Mexico a few years back?” His squint becomes a full on eye closure, and his head tilts slightly to the side like an old sheepdog.
“Uh, well -uh, no. Not like a UFO in New Mexico.” Before you can continue he blurts out,
“Well good Gawd damn! For a second I thought you’s one of them weirdo space freaks!”
“Well, uh… I mean it is for space. Freaks. I guess space freaks. Yeah it’s for space freaks.”
“AUGH! NOT SPACE FREAKS!” he groans. He makes a disgusted face, uses the gray rag to wipe his forehead and takes a solid pull from the bottle of brown liquor.
You explain to the old timer that you are out here in the western desert looking for dark sky areas. A group of astronomers from Sedona have hired you to scout locations that meet certain criteria. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific just concluded their annual conference in Flagstaff a week ago near the Lowell Observatory.
Supposedly there is a comet that visits earth every 76 years, and they predict that it will show itself in the western skies next year.
They have tasked you with scouting several locations for possible amateur viewings but also a location that is suitable for photos, nighttime long-exposure photography, and frankly – some place that looks kinda cool. They are trying to get a couple photographers from National Geographic and a few other Astronomy publications to cover the literal once-in-a-lifetime event.
So the place has to be dark, but also feature some great backdrops and landscapes. You have seen quite a few spots that made the list, but you felt that this stretch of Route 66 would be a perfect candidate since it has been officially decommissioned this year thanks to I-40.
The bar tender makes a sour face and his eyes drop down at that statement. By the looks of him, he’s been here for a long time, and he’s seen the good times and the bad.
You two banter a while longer, at least another beer’s worth, and talk about space, comets, motorcycles – things which seem to confound him; and he talks of miners, travellers and the crosses – all the damn crosses – that litter the mountains.
Photo: unattributed, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Finally the conversation comes back around to Oatman.
“So did the Oatman massacre happen right here on the main road? Route 66?”, you ask.
“Oh, hell no.” replies the old bartender. “That happened five hours south of here on the banks of the Gila River. Out in the middle of literal nowhere. The name Oatman just floats around the Mohave like a ghost on a dust cloud. This town was originally called Vivian”, he chuckles. With that bit of information you drop a few bucks on the bar, be he refuses to let you pay.
“Thanks, partner. I think I’ve really found something here, today. Say, what was your name again?”
“Lorenzo,” he smiles, “Lorenzo Sitgreaves.”
“Like the pass up the hill!” you chirp.
“Yep, just like the pass up the hill,” he beams.
You step out into the afternoon sun. Your thirst is quenched, your heart and mind are full, and your mission is complete. Oatman. You look around at the empty town. The buildings are quaint, the history is rich and there is not a street lamp in sight. It will be a perfect base camp for the Astronomical Society if the Pacific’s comet coverage and viewing event. Now to pilot the VMAX towards Needles for the night and a well deserved hotel bed.
You turn to go back in and ask Lorenzo if there’s a good place for supper on the way out of town. As you step up onto the wooden porch it looks pretty dark inside. You reach for the door handle, but it doesn’t turn. “Huh?” You give it another twist, but it’s locked solid. “What the heck, I was just in here”. You give a couple knocks, but there’s no answer. You knock a little harder and shout, “Lorenzo?”, but there’s no reply.
You press your face against the glass window on the door, and there’s no sign of life inside.
On the bar you can still see one of your beer bottles. Next to it is an old bottle, covered in dust with a cobweb on the side cleaving it to the bartop. Next to it an old, tattered gray rag. Chills run down your spine.
Just then a noise from behind startles you.
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to pester you none”, a kind-faced gentleman says to you. “Are you looking for someone?”
You glance back into the bar for a moment and return your gaze to the stranger. “Oh, Yeah.. uh, I was going to ask Lorenzo if there was a good place to grab an early supper.”
“Lorenzo?” the stranger asks.
“Oh, uh yeah. We were just hanging out for a bit after I rolled into town.”
“I see,” replied the stranger, “well, uh… no one named Lorenzo works there.” he stated. “This bar has actually been closed since, oh shoot – ‘71 I reckon.”
Your jaw drops open slightly. You’re incredulous, but you’re also speechless.
“You owner uses it for storage mostly.”
“Lorenzo?” you ask.
“No. Nobody named Lorenzo that I know. They are a retired biologist. Local to the southwest. Spent the 60s and 70s looking for jaguars in New Mexico, armadillos in Arizona ringtails in California. And all sorts of other local animals as far as I can remember.”
You don’t argue, you just walk slowly back to the VMAX in utter disbelief. Maybe you’ve been out in the heat too long; maybe it was the near-death experience with the burros; maybe it was the dark claustrophobic air of the Black Mountains… whatever has happened here today, maybe it’s just best to leave it alone and head on your way.
You thank the stranger, mount the VMAX for one last time today, and as you leave the hills and burros of Oatman behind, you feel a pull not to leave this place of dust and empty sky. You’ll return when the comet does. This story is not over.
By the time that you hit the valley floor, the sun has declined in the western sky, and you feel the shudder of life as the V-Boost opens and carries you across this dusty plain toward the Colorado River, the California border, and maybe… some answers.