Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Well, yes, they could catch anyone on a motorcycle with a backwards hippy on back hold-
ing onto a flag as big a quilt lashed to a small tree. Quicker witted in the survival realm than I
was in romance, I had two or three turns before the jig would be up, so I took a narrow street
into a narrow alley and told Skinny to get off.
Naturally, he resisted, pleading that I could not just leave him there, assuring me that it
would not be cool, no way, man, no fucking way. I kicked out the side stand, pulled my knife
and cut the bindings between the tree and the motorcycle and the tree and the flag and told
him to hang on, which he gladly did, ditching the tree and stuffing as much of the flag as
would fit under his shirt.
We hightailed it around the back way with Skinny facing front, calling directions. I fol-
lowed his directions, knowing he could be no worse than me at navigating. Sure enough, we
popped from the density onto a familiar road and made the campground in minutes. The oth-
ers drifted in over the next hour, and another day of jubilation officially began with another
adventure notched—a patriotic one. So fire the fucking pipes and man the wine bottles. Oh,
say, can you see?
That afternoon the motorcycle campers had to move. The last toilet had clogged and
backed. The showers were cut off. All bathing was constricted to the creek, and the creek was
getting funky to a hundred yards down. The only part of camp life not deteriorating was John
and Jane, who seemed like a settled couple so intimately joined that a glance told the tale. They
looked calm and content as old married folk with one big difference: riding the wild rooster
nightly with abandon, at first light to help them start a brand new day and casually in mid-af-
ternoon to sustain their humility and gratitude. It was like they'd met only days ago.
The next two days blurred on toxic sludge and sunburn, sweat and dust and victory fa-
tigue. The night of the sixth shaped up as a barnburner—or a brain burner. All those decades
ago we were still a decade or two prior to the massive death of nature worldwide. Yet even then
we saw symptoms of the end. I suspected that nobody in a half-mile radius had actually read
The Sun Also Rises
, in which a sadly wounded war veteran seeks redemption in Pamplona. But
most of the campers had heard something about the topic, like Ernest Hemingway wrote it,
and it was cool. The end. The night before the running of the bulls was a debauchery, a binge-
drunk by thousands of people clamoring madly to be something other than themselves. The
festival had been debauched by then, and it's way more fucked now, nothing at all like the fest-
ival of the soul it once was. Maybe the
Fiesta de San Fermin
was destined to degrade, given the
abuse of the bulls and the spread of humanity.
By sunrise on the seventh, I felt shot at and missed and shit at and hit. Up by six to get
ready for the big doings in town, we could only get up, walk a few paces and take a whiz. No
showers. No coffee. No breakfast—no worries, because nobody was ready for solid food any-
way. We had nothing to do, really, but throw a leg over and ride the few miles into town and
park and shuffle down to where we could watch.
