Unfortunately, the photographer had none of these, so he was kept in jail for three days, fined $167 for obstructing justice and released with a warning to keep out of Madera County for the rest of his natural life. Before being taken away, he gave me the keys to his new Sunbeam roadster and said he had $2,000 worth of camera equipment in the trunk. He didn’t know me at all, and certainly there was nothing in my scraggy appearance to indicate that I would do anything but sell both the car and the equipment at the first opportunity. But he was not in a solid position; his only alternative was to let the car sit on the road for three days. Luckily, he had picked up two hitchhikers earlier in the day, who said they’d hopped a freight from Los Angeles up to Fresno and then set out by thumb to see what was happening with the Hell’s Angels. They agreed to drive the Sunbeam down to Madera, where the photographer was taken for booking. For some reason they followed me right to the jail. They could have fled down any side road. Nobody knew their names or where they might go, and the owner of the car was not in any position to start filing complaints.
At the jail we were told that nobody could speak to the prisoner until his bail had been posted. It was $275 and the only bondsman available refused to touch the case. He said there were too many bums running around loose that weekend. They parked the Sunbeam on the street, and while one went inside to give the keys to the desk sergeant a cop who’d been at the accident drove up and said I was going to be arrested for vagrancy the next time he laid eyes on me.
It didn’t seem worth arguing about, so I dropped the hitchhikers on 101 and drove north for about an hour, until I was sure the Madera county line was somewhere behind me. Then I found a back road next to an airport and went to sleep. The next morning I thought about going back to Bass Lake, but I didn’t feel like spending the day scrounging beers and listening to the same dull noise.
I ate breakfast with a bunch of farmers in a diner on 101, then drove on to San Francisco. The holiday traffic was slow, but the only real bottleneck was in Tracy, where a large crowd had turned out for a hot-rod show. Somewhere west of Oakland I picked up two boys who said they were running away from a Job Corps camp. They didn’t know exactly where they wanted to go, but one of them said he had a cousin up the coast in Ukiah, and they thought they’d go there for a while. I gave them a pack of cigarettes and let them off at a stoplight in Oakland.
Monday morning’s newspapers were full of riot stories. The Los Angeles Times ran a king-size, eight-column headline:
HOLIDAY RIOTING — TEAR GAS, TROOPS QUELL YOUTHS — FOUR RESORTS IN MIDWEST DISRUPTED BY BATTLES OF CROWDS AND POLICE.
A front-page story in The New York Times said;
YOUTH RIOTS ERUPT IN THREE STATES: 25 HURT, 325 HELD — OVERNIGHT OUTBREAKS ENGULF FOUR RESORTS. 200 SEIZED IN LAKE GEORGE TURMOIL.
It seemed like the only people who hadn’t erupted on the Fourth of July were the Hell’s Angels. Both San Francisco papers took note of this. A Chronical headline said: HELL’S ANGELS FRONT ALL QUIET. But the Examiner gave the screw an extra turn: COPS CLIP WINGS OF ANGELS, MEEK CYCLISTS QUIT MADERA.
The only motorcycle story was a United Press dispatch from Sioux City, Iowa. It was very brief:
A 30-member motorcycle gang called the Outlaw Club of the Midwest left this city of 90,500 today after harassing its citizens over the holiday weekend. They blocked traffic, rode on sidewalks and played hide-and-seek with squad cars. A spokesman for the gang said they came to Sioux City to give it a little class.
The Chronicle story on the Angels said police in Madera County were still undecided on what to do about the restraining order. Apparently something had gone haywire, for the order called for the Angels to appear in Madera County Superior Court on July 16 or be permanently barred from the county. Police feared there might be trouble, said the article, because the gang threatened to remain in Bass Lake until July 16 or return on that date with reinforcements. County officials were faced with a choice between dismissing the order entirely or hosting another run — and Barger said they had every intention of going back to argue their case. Needless to say, the order was done away with. It had been a bummer from the start, and not even the cops charged with enforcing it knew what it meant. The final press comment on the Bass Lake Saga appeared in the Examiner, under a small headline: A VICTORY FOR HELL’S ANGELS. It said the order had been dismissed at the request of the district attorney, the same man who’d hatched it two weeks earlier.