Port Costa, a tiny 1880's berg that time and technology passed by, overlooks the Carquinez Straight and over into Benicia, where the wealthy live. It's snug, tucked into rolling hills and blends into the shoreline making it nearly invisible. "I guess that's how it missed progress. Lost in time while surrounded by a sugar refinery, oil refineries and other hustling activities only an hour outside San Francisco.”

Sam rode to the former port town on weekends occasionally, whenever he was in an introspective mood. He sat at one of the two outdoor tables a few yards from the massive concrete building that housed the bar and restaurant. The tables were a half-dozen steps up on a dilapidated patio overlooking the dirt parking lot. He studied the unimproved warehouse with its eighteen-eighty-six cornerstone and the shabby, empty hotel across the street with its eighteen eighties look. Both were well known to bikers.

The bar in the three-story concrete warehouse was not decorated in the usual sense. It merely housed a bizarre, eclectic accumulation of dusty antique junk/treasures, several one-of-a-kind (thankfully) wall/ceiling hangings, all without regard to decor, symmetry or care. The poorly lit fireproof structure, built to store grain for loading onto ships way back in the good old days, survived countless natural calamities. It was this unkempt, unique ambiance that apparently appealed to motorcyclists. “It looks like someone gave a garage sale and no one showed up," Sam said. "Looks like the cobwebs were here at the turn of the century, too." He thought he felt a faint sense of Steinbeck's Cannery Row in Monterey drift in, but quickly dismissed the absurdity.

The barmaid was a sharp spoken, in-control, buxom women with humor well suited for interacting with macho bikers. She smiled, had a talent for her job and wore tank tops that surrendered when she bent over to pick up bottles of beer for customers from the under-the-counter fridge. Her shorts however, would have been much better off, long.

Always ready with a joke for the inevitable wisecracking from the Harley clientele, she served up the three hundred or more brands of beer claimed to be available according to the chalkboard on the wall.

Sam's vantage offered a clear view of the waterfront where multi-million dollar yachts and racing boats with tobacco and beer company sponsors mixed it up with ocean going freighters carrying cars from Japan to the harbor across the narrows. Jeers, gestures and obscenities flew from the Harley riders when one of those huge freighters would glide by loaded with Japanese cars, pushed by a chugging tug boat.

A mix of yachts, sailboats, speedboats and jet skis seemed to play tag in the wakes of the larger craft highlighted by the bright weekend sunshine. Sailboats took full advantage of the swift breezes along the Straight as bloated sails sliced them through endless white caps.

These same breezes cooled the leathered bikers, coolly displaying their cool machines under century old trees in the unimproved parking lot.

And a railroad runs through it. Two sets of tracks, Southern Pacific and Amtrak, separate the parking lot from the rocky shoreline where intrepid fishermen try their patience casting for bites. Some seem content to sit and wait, watching their line for that telltale perturbation.

Diesel engines pulling long lines of rattling rail cars were common, often eliciting spontaneous hand waving and lifting of drinks in salute from many of the revelers as engineers sounded their air horns.

The pace of arriving motorcycles picked up, each adding to the glare of the sun reflecting from polished chrome and waxed paint. The roar from throttle twisting announced arrivals and departures of panheads, shovel head classics and new, gleaming, fully outfitted touring extravaganzas, many with unmuffled exhaust pipes begging attention and ringing ears. Sidecars and trikes always generated conversations. The accumulated dollar value of the dusty parking lot went up exponentially. Its axle wrenching potholes were a factor in a recent accident, according to the biker at the next table.

Sam already missed Ann. He examined the label on his bottle of ale and fingered the label, rubbing it and catching it with his thumbnail. Sam dropped Ann off at Buchannan Airport to catch a twin engine charter to Carson City to be maid of honor at her sister's wedding. "Gonna be lonesome for a few days," he sighed.

Sam looked up from his bottle and examined the mix of Harleys parked just beyond the elevated patio. "Must be fifty-five to sixty bikes here, maybe more," he mumbled. "And a ton of chrome."

He stole a look at his old Gold Wing parked at the far end of the lot under a tree getting coats of dust from the coming and going Harleys.

His 83 touring sled looked like an old man's bike compared to those chrome ponies. But his was as comfortable as riding the living room couch. The Harley cruisers with small, narrow, styled seats are only good for an hour or so out on the back roads before the butt develops another crack. Don't know how women on the back seats can do it.

Touring through Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, Utah or South Dakota wouldn't work out on one of those cruisers, I'd be butt broken. Hope Ann's flight through the Sierra Nevada and that landing went okay. Should be a message on the machine when I get home.

The biker at the next table was a talkative guy, about fifty, wearing sunglasses and had a long but unobtrusive salt and pepper pony tail down his back. It was wrapped with a rubber band at three equidistant places from the back of his head. He smoked Marlboros and drank Bud. An ad man's dream come true, Sam mused. He was relating a tale to two younger mustachioed riders in sleeveless undershirts displaying fresh shoulder tattoos.

"Yup, about three weeks ago some guy came barrelin' in here in an old pick-up truck, hit into one of those pot holes out there, lost control and ran into three cars in the lot. There are rarely any cops here, they leave us pretty much alone but we had two CHPs here that time. The driver was buzzed out on something, I think. His eyes looked a little too turned on to me. The cops drug him away. Usually this place is pretty quiet. Well, I don't mean quiet, quiet. I mean the cops don't bother this place much. It's plenty noisy here on the weekends, as you can tell."

One of the two younger bikers asked the Marlboro/Bud man about the green dresser Harley parked in front of Sam and just below the patio fence where they were sitting.

"That's mine."

"Wow, that's a beaut."

"Yup, it's a ninety-six hog. Paid sixteen grand for it and put eight thow in custom parts and chrome into it. I got a twenty-five thousand dollar bike sittin' right there," he said as he tilted his head back and poured beer into his open mouth.

Duly impressed, Buck, the larger of the two asked, "How much to insure it?"

"Six hundred a year. That's only for the bike as I bought it. The extras aren't covered. It would cost a hundred a month to insure it as it stands right there.

I don't have an Old Lady or any kids or a house, or nothin' like that. I rent. I'm unemployed now but I was workin' for Chevron, made seventy thousand, and bought this bike. I plan to keep it forever. I might get other bikes, but I'll hold onto this one." He pulled a hand rolled cigarette from his flip-top box and lit it with some care, shielding the match from the breeze. He drew on it, held in the smoke, and looked to the other two guys and offered it. Buck accepted. He drew on it, held it, and choked. Bud-man took the butt back and inhaled. Sam couldn't believe what he was seeing.

Bud-man offered Sam a tug on his J. "You don't look like a guy who would smoke this, but would you like a drag?"

"No thanks, appreciate it though."

Bud-man put his boots up on the fence in front of him and took a long swallow of beer. "Alcohol jacks you up, but a joint cools you out. Love the view from here." He removed his sunglasses and looked out over the busy parking lot through the dust, past the tracks, to the sun drenched golden hills beyond the water. "Pretty view," he said. He finished the joint, put the stub back in the box, then lit up a cigarette.

Sam held back any comments. My God, he thought. His eyes. How can he see with them? They're as bloodshot as hell.

"Yup, my old lady and I broke up a few years back," Bud-man went on. "She claimed she saw Jesus in a bubble and He told her to junk everything and go out and do good for people. Hey, I don't mind a few goofy comments when you're trippin' out, but she was clean and cold sober when she said that. God, she never got out of the sixties. Bummer"

Sam got up, went over and leaned on the fence and watched the activity in the parking lot. Leather jackets and vests were coming off and going on in different locations in the milieu. Beer, margaritas and assorted drinks in half quart, glass Mason canning jars were being consumed with varying degrees of avidity.

Bursts of laughter and handshakes accompanied many of the interacting groups as friends met and parted.

The biker babes were lookin' good, Sam thought. Damn, I miss Ann. Most of the women looked comfortable in their leathers, while some neophytes appeared ill at ease in their new ensembles. Although most bikers wore black leather, the requisite uniform d'jour, T-shirts with an HD emblem and jeans were the second choice followed by tight, faded shirts identifying Sturgis and several California locales. Women in T-shirts and short cut-off jeans elevated the atmosphere to enthusiastic voyeurism.

Sam watched heads turn in unison as eyes soaked in some of the more gifted feminine talent meandering from bike to bike. Expressions left no doubt about art appreciation. Testosterone City, Sam thought. Right here in beautiful downtown nowhere.

Sam ached for Ann. He went into the bar passed the pool table to the jukebox. He broke into a half-stifled laugh. "Jesus, these are the oldest tunes I've ever seen. The Andrew Sisters? Gad, World War Two songs, stuff from the sixties and seventies, Frank Sinatra's oldies, wow. These are great." He dropped quarters into the machine, punched in some numbers and the Mills Brothers, Paper Doll, thundered into the room.

Sam leaned on the jukebox, closed his eyes, lowered his head and shook it side to side, getting lost in the slow tempo of the music. Memories deluged his consciousness. An upwelling of long submerged, utterly forgotten recollections flooded over him like a tidal wave from a broken dam. He sensed being back in his folk's home as a kid. He remembered his family by the piano singing popular hits of the day, and his dad playing those seventy-eight RPM breakable records on the old Admiral phonograph. Sam choked up a bit, turned and went back outside.

"I gotta get back home, see if Ann called." Amid the matrix of Harleys, leather and dust, he picked his way through technical discussions of one model's advantages over another, bawdy jokes, drinks, and ear-splitting, throaty exhausts from revving engines.

One of the very few riders on an old imported touring bike quietly wheeled his way though the brown dusty air of the two block town and out onto the mountain road to home and an answering machine.