"I think your motorcycle will be okay," said the wizened German RVer as we stood outside his Mercedes van parked in a Tunisian oasis. "You?" he paused,"you may not.You may break down out there." He shook his white stubbly chin at the vastness beyond the little oasis.
This was not a traveler who stood on ceremony, and he didn't allow politeness to come between him and his tongue. Such was my state of mind that I didn't snap back at him and go build my own camp fire. No, I sat down in the cold night sand and listened to his gravelly voice tell me about his own litany of previous Saharan crossings. "I always wanted my own home along," he said, implicitly turning his nose up at my self contained single cylinder Yamaha SR500. Everything I did seemed to engender the old man's ire. Looking back he must have got off on telling the young fool exactly where he was going wrong and how his Teutonic level of preparedness was the antidote to my fuzzy logistics.
I envied him his self contained world, his retirement checks that allowed him to wander his winters in North Africa. I had yet to meet the North American snowbird phenomenon of driving south to avoid snow; to find a European doing such a thing was a novelty for a sheltered youth like myself. I was on a massive adventure, testing my 21 summers of life. Secretly I also envied him his contentment- he wasn't heading east into Algeria and then south into the Sahara. In his dotage he was piddling the entire winter away in the safe, easy environs of Tozeur. I was scared and uncertain and I took his guff.
Call me co-dependant but I missed his sneers when finally I took off and headed out into the desert alone.
France 1978
I remember it as a hot summer, though in one's memory summers are always long and hot when one was young. I was riding down the Rhone Valley heading back to Italy after a year in England, spent bouncing between jobs, getting thrown out one last time from my step father's house and making friends with feckless motorcyclists who grew into middle aged respectability before ever I did. I was riding a red and black Moto Morini 350, an entirely unsuitable tourer, lightly loaded with panniers and a luggage rack, where up front it had clip-ons and a small bubble cockpit fairing, and the only means of starting was a kick starter. It was, in a world filled with chromed electric start Honda 400 Fours an oddity, a fast nimble oddity. I loved it.
The campground I pulled into that particular evening was dusty and crowded, we were all swathed in multi-colored nylon, riding, driving, pedalling, our vacations away. I fell in with a man sprawled comfortably in the shade of a tent adjoining his RV. He looked like a sheik, fanned, electrically, while his nubile young wife poured copious glasses of lemonade for him. I think he took pity on me and waved me in out of the sun and the dust.
It was a good place to sit. So I sat and listened as he laughed about the size of my tent and the dust in my camping spot. the lemonade was delicious.
"You like my hand?" he laughed, waving a grossly deformed crab claw in the air. I had been trying not to stare. The flesh of the thumb was gross and over sized, while the only finger on his hand was equally large and looked for all the world like a crab pincer with a delicate white nail growing on the tip.
"This hasn't stopped me from doing anything," he said. And he told me wild stories of dramas taking place in countries I had read about in the newspapers. He talked of fighting in the French Foreign Legion and pulled out black and white pictures of a man with a crab claw in military fatigues. It was terribly Beau Geste.
"I make good money," he laughed some more, breaking the romantic spell. "Still?" I stuttered.
"Oh yes," he said dreamily. "Lots, but I have no photographs of that part of it." And he winked.
I left the next morning, folding and loading my tent before he sauntered out of the RV into the shade tent and thrust a small cup of coffee into my hand. "Sure you don't want a life of adventure?" he asked. I shook my head. He scared me.
I never did figure if he was bluffing lying or bullshitting, but from time to time I wonder if he was opening a new door in my life through which I lacked the nerve to step.
Austria 1976
I had never been to Austria before but I liked what I saw. The mountains were out of the movies, stark backdrops to winding green valleys littered with pointy roofed homes, neatly cropped fields and smooth roads. It had been a long ride north from my home, and I was riding the first true motorcycle I had ever bought. This MV was like the Moto Morini,in that it was totally unsuitable, but because it preceded the Morini it was even less suitable to the tasks I set before it. Like the Morini, the MV Agusta 350 was a push rod twin, but with the cylinders set in parallel not in a Vee. I had hung bags off the back and because it was the motorcycle I had, it was the motorcycle I travelled with. It seemed to work out, perhaps because i knew no better. Nor had I ever heard of ipods, blue teeth or gps, so I neither missed them nor craved them.
My family was gathering near Innsbruck for some function I can't recall but I had promised to show up. I had no car so they were going to have to put up with my boy racer, fire engine red motorcycle.
All I had to do was get there. The long slow climb through the Alps was as much as fun as it could be, winding uphill on a motorcycle designed to be ridden on mountain roads. The ride down was even better as I had passed through customs (an arduous undertaking in those days for a badly dressed dirty young tramp) and the air got warmer the lower I got.
The MV ran just fine but I was young and worried and a long way from home so I fiddled excessively with the chain and got lots of oil on myself and ultimately on my clothes.
My step father had made a reservation for me at a guest house and by some miracle I found it. I remember a Heidi house with a pointed roof, big shutters thrown back from the windows and geraniums in window boxes underneath them. I climbed off the MV, slowly letting go of the clip on handlebars and gently propping the scarlet torpedo on its center stand, the only stand it had. The silence was deafening, because in addition to its other unsuitable characteristics, the MV had suffered at the hands of a previous owner who preferred a loud exhaust and he had gone out of his way to make this little 350cc loud.
The lady of the guest house came to the door, just another glorious vision of Austrian womanhood, a country populated by more than its share of beauties I found. She looked down at me leaning against her door jamb in the bright sunlight and said nothing. She looked down and up and down, and slowly, in a voice filled with disbelief: "Gruss Gott!" which is the traditional Austrian greeting, a catholic form of how-do-you-do that roughly translated means "God's Greetings!"
"Gruss Gott," I said back wearily, summoning up my modest amount of German to ask if she had my room. It had been along exciting day, my first crossing an international border on my own motorcycle. Her head nodded but her voice disagreed.
"Schmutzig!" she said indignantly. I was too dirty to cross her threshold and so, instead of Thor the god of thunder entering her impeccable home it was a small boy in his underwear who hobbled into the cool dark interior, clutching a large bundle of motorcycle clothing. Clothing that would mark him for the rest of his life.
My stepfather took this harmless story and seared it into my brain by introducing me everywhere as his schmutzig son, that summer and then explaining in excruciating depth how i got the exotic nickname. he was so mean its no surprise I ended up emigrating. And motorcycling, if that was what helped to piss him off.
