Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
er happen again for practical reasons, with a world so much more aware of what might go
wrong. But back then it was all right.
I traveled with a fellow student, a poet and adventurer, David Rayall, though David was
more attuned to verse than horizons. A wanton intellect and surly thinker, David already
shaved twice a day at twenty and was good and goddamn ready for a liberal dash of worldly
spice in his cadence and meter. He envisioned pubs abuzz with lively discourse, literary an-
notation and Joycean ambience. From within the din he would find meaning and transpose it
to lyric and round it out with artistry.
We found a pension in Russell Square—actually found it in
Europe on $5 a Day
, the stu-
dent adventure bible of those days. Everyone read it religiously, because if you got careless for
a blink, you were on your way to purgatory at $10, $12, even $20 on a single day with eighty-
nine days to go. Fuck that.
On a lark, without a care, out in the world, on our own with nowhere and everywhere to
go, we cruised London at random for the next few days. By chance we happened onto
Pride &
Clark, Dealers of Fine Motors
, including four-wheeled motors and a vast array of two-wheeled
motors. The motorcycling scene then was three-tiered and simple. Hondas weren't exactly for
pussies, not like they would become later, with massive plastic engine covers and Winnebago
travel trunks, the pinstripes, stuffed toys, reverse gear and the ultimate insult to the road gods:
trailers. In fact, many high-mile riders over the years first felt the magic of motorcycling on a
Honda. My first taste was a Super 90, soon followed by a dose of 160 Superhawk—it seemed
like a major machine at the time, especially with a name of Superhawk. Both those Hondas
belonged to a friend, one of the first kids at our high school to discover pot, so he didn't mind
sharing his motorcycles. I probably had fifty or a hundred miles on those rides, enough to
want back into that dimension soon and often. It was a feeling, systemic, in the bloodstream
straight away for some of us. Wanting in became a craving, which, in youth, became the ob-
jective of life. Honda came out with a big, clunky 400cc model about then, but it had none of
the pizzazz, color or flair of the British bikes.
Harley Davidson was still decades away from the mass market—not yet glommed on
to the vast underbelly of suburbia. In the years ahead Harley Davidson would capture key
market segments, beginning with young, urban professionals with oodles of leverage. Then
came the overweight, hen-pecked crowd craving identity other than the one that befell them.
Unavoidably, a tawdry disjunction emerged between appearance and reality, as the byways
got crowded with suburban desperados—stable, secure guys with a hundred fifty bucks down
and permission from the wife. Motorcycle traffic would get thick with non-riders—poseurs
with props. Men seeking meaning would cast cash to the wind, to suit up for “the lifestyle;”
live to ride, ride to live, with leathers and fringe, conchos and triple chrome bolts and cover
plates, the patches and pins proclaiming Genuine Harley Davidson. Do you really need nine
hundred pounds and 1600 cc for the short trip to the fern bar, to back in for the admiration of
