Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
We walked along the Seine, maybe waiting for art to imitate life or vice versa, or maybe
for a radical intellectual demonstration to break out on the occasion of our presence at the
Sorbonne. David soon agreed, however, that Paris could not be met on $5 a day. He too would
travel west-southwest to Biarritz, but not on back, no offense. He just couldn't take it. He
would take the train since he'd budgeted that part of it in his $5 a day. And he liked the train,
always had, after all.
And that was that. We parted company the next morning with a handshake and an agree-
ment to meet up again, somewhere, maybe. I still marvel at the image of myself, alone on a
BSA Lightning Rocket, maneuvering Paris. My motorcycle experience to date was the ride
from London, plus a few miles on borrowed Hondas, plus about two hundred more miles on
a Honda Dream.
I would have gone farther on the Dream, but it kept breaking down. I bought that one, my
first motorcycle, in '67 in Memphis. It was a 305cc parallel twin, its pistons not sequentially
timed but moving together, like a single jug split into two that for some reason never worked
for Honda. I bought mine chopped with megaphone pipes; it looked so cool to a teenager, and
I was still in a flush from my Superhawk experience. My Dream had probably run a few laps
around the moon with some side trips across the Sea of Tranquility. But when the guy fired it
up it went
WOMMMAAA!
I was smitten then too, and for the few miles it ran I got more ex-
posed to the fundamentals of motorcycling. For starters, you can't steer one even if you want
to. On my first curve (in town) I had to pull over to see why the handlebars were frozen. It was
the self-preservation instinct overpowering the triple tree and preventing me from “turning”
the handlebars. You have to lean a motorcycle to get it to turn. Now I know, kind of.
Mechanical thoughts and solitude filled in through the thinning refuse of urban Paris
south and west toward Bordeaux, through a series of small towns till I got tired late in the
afternoon and stopped. I used my high school French well enough to find a
chambre
to
louer
for the
nuit
. I remember that room as small and wood paneled up the sides and along the
roofline too, on the second floor overlooking some narrow streets and other houses. It would
have been unusable space in America, the United States of, but a typical frog family squeezed
a few francs out of it.
The stuffy confinement and loneliness became oppressive and overwhelming, as if the
French didn't care. Maybe they didn't, but they weren't the cause of my pain. It was a night of
molting, of coming into the world, as everyone must leave the world, alone. Sleep came early,
like a blessing.
The morning was better, warmer and livelier after coffee and a pastry. I mounted up for
Biarritz.
The road to Bordeaux was also solitary, but with a pastoral backdrop and movement it was
old home week. Maybe a night was all I needed; the route felt right, peopled with farmers and
truckers and bartenders who know about coming off the road for a smoke and a wine to ease
