I listened to the war talk and shouting for a while, then hustled down the mountain to call a Washington newspaper I was writing for at the time, to say I was ready to send one of the great riot stories of the decade. On the way down the road I passed outlaw bikes coming the other way. They’d been stopped at the Bass Lake roadblock and pointed up to the campsite. The Frisco swastika truck came by in first gear, with two bikes in the back and a third trailing twenty feet behind at the end of a long rope in a cloud of dust. Its rider was hanging on grimly behind green goggles and a handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth. Following the truck was a red Plymouth that erupted with shouts and horn blasts as I passed. I stopped, not recognizing the car, and backed up. It was Larry, Pete and Puff, the new president of the Frisco chapter. I hadn’t seen them since the night of the meeting at the DePau. Pete, the drag racer, was working as a messenger in the city, and Larry was carving totem poles out of tree stumps in other Angels’ front yards. They had broken down on the freeway near Modesto and been picked up by three pretty young girls who stopped to offer help. This was the Plymouth, and now the girls were part of the act. One was sitting on Pete’s lap in the back seat, half undressed and smiling distractedly, while I explained the problem of the campsite. They decided to push on, and I said I’d see them later in town. . . or somewhere, and at that point I thought it would probably be in jail. A very bad scene was building up. Soon the Angels would be coming down the mountain en masse, and in no mood for reasonable talk.
In the Carolinas they say hill people are different from flat-lands people, and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I’m inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I’d been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Unlike Porterville or Hollister, Bass Lake was a mountain community. . . and if the old Appalachian pattern held, the people would be much slower to anger or panic, but absolutely without reason or mercy once the fat was in the fire. Like the Angels, they would tend to fall back in an emergency on their own native sense of justice — which bears only a primitive resemblance to anything written in law books. I thought the mountain types would be far more tolerant of the Angels’ noisy showboating, but — compared to their flatlands cousins — much quicker to retaliate in kind at the first evidence of physical insult or abuse.
On the way down the mountain I heard another Monitor newscast, saying the Hell’s Angels were heading for Bass Lake and big trouble. There was also mention of a Los Angeles detective who had shot one of the suspects rounded up for questioning about the rape of his daughter the day before. The sight of the suspect being led through the hall of the police station was too much for the detective, who suddenly lost control and began firing point blank. The victim was said to be a Hell’s Angel, and newspapers on sale in Bass Lake that afternoon were headlined: HELL’S ANGEL SHOT IN RAPE CASE. (The suspect, who survived, was a twenty-one-year-old drifter. He was later absolved of any connection with either the Angels or the rape of the detective’s daughter. . . who had been selling cookbooks, door to door, when she was lured into a house known to be frequented by dragsters and hot-rod types. The detective admitted losing his head and shooting the wrong man; he later pleaded temporary insanity and was acquitted of all charges by a Los Angeles grand jury.) It took several days, however, for the press to separate the rape-shooting from the Hell’s Angels, and in the meantime the headlines added fuel to the fire. On top of the Laconia stories, including the one in Life, the radio bulletins and all the frightening predictions in the daily press — now this, a Hell’s Angels rape in Los Angeles, and just in time for the July 3 papers.