Early weather forecasts said the whole state would be blazing hot that day, but dawn in San Francisco was typically foggy. I overslept, and in the rush to get moving I forgot my camera. There was no time for breakfast but I ate a peanut-butter sandwich while loading the car. . . sleeping bag and beer cooler in back, tape recorder in front, and under the driver’s seat an unloaded Luger. I kept the clip in my pocket, thinking it might be useful if things got out of hand. Press cards are nice things to have, but in riot situations a pistol is the best kind of safe-conduct pass.
By the time I left my apartment it was almost eight, and somewhere on the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, I heard the first radio bulletin:
The Sierra community of Bass Lake is bracing this morning for a reported invasion of the notorious Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. Heavily armed police and sheriffs deputies are stationed on all roads leading to Bass Lake. Madera County sheriff, Marlin Young, reports helicopters and other emergency forces standing by. Neighboring law enforcement agencies, including the Kern County sheriff’s Canine Patrol, have been alerted and are ready to move. Recent reports say the Hell’s Angels are massing in Oakland and San Bernardino. Stay tuned for further details.
Among those who made a point of staying tuned that morning were several thousand unarmed taxpayers en route to spend the holiday in the vicinity of Bass Lake and Yosemite. They had just got under way, most of them still irritable and sleepy from last-minute packing and hurrying the children through breakfast. . . when their car radios crackled a warning that they were headed right into the vortex of what might soon be a combat zone. They had read about Laconia and other Hell’s Angels outbursts, but in print the menace had always seemed distant — terrifying, to be sure, and real in its way, but with none of that sour-stomach fright that comes with the realization that this time it’s you. Tomorrow’s newspapers won’t be talking about people being beaten and terrorized three thousand miles away, but right exactly where you and your family are planning to spend the weekend.
The Hell’s Angels. . . blood, gang rape. . . glance over at your wife, your children in the back seat, could you protect them against a gang of young toughs gone wild on booze and drugs?. . . remember those pictures ? Big ugly street-fighters not even afraid of police, loving a fight, swinging chains and big wrenches, knives — no mercy at all.
The bridge was crowded with vacationers getting an early start. I was running late by twenty or thirty minutes, and when I got to the toll plaza at the Oakland end of the bridge I asked the gatekeeper if any Hell’s Angels had passed through before me. The dirty sonsabitches are right over there, he said with a wave of his hand. I didn’t know what he was talking about until some two hundred yards past the gate, when I suddenly passed a large cluster of people and motorcycles grouped around a gray pickup truck with a swastika painted on the side. They seemed to materialize out of the fog, and the sight was having a bad effect on traffic.
There are seventeen eastbound toll gates on the bridge, and traffic coming out of them is funneled into only three exits, with everyone scrambling for position in a short, high-speed run between the toll plaza and the traffic dividers about a half mile away. This stretch is hazardous on a clear afternoon, but in the fog of a holiday morning and with a Dread Spectacle suddenly looming beside the road the scramble was worse than usual. Horns sounded all around me as cars swerved and slowed down; heads snapped to the right; it was the same kind of traffic disruption that occurs near a serious accident, and many a driver went off on the wrong ramp that morning after staring too long at the monster rally that — if he’d been listening to his radio — he’d been warned about just moments before. And now here it was, in the stinking, tattooed flesh. . . the Menace.