Small Motorcycles

I bought my first motorcycle in the Fall of 1975 when I was weeks away from turning 18. I was in Italy and I had previously passed my British motorcycle test which allowed me to ride a full sized motorcycle at 17 so when a  friend told me this fire engine red MV Agusta was for sale I was ready to buy and ride. Looking back I wonder at myself, because I added some plastic saddle bags and  backpack and took off across Europe on it to see my family in England. Just like that. The bike did fine, and remarkably enough so did my 18 year old spine riding long days on the cafe racer.

So when I read about what  bike do you need to travel I am firmly in the camp that whatever you have will do. Naturally there are some that carry more stuff or have more comfortable seats and as always cost a lot more. But Modern motorcycles are amazing, reliable and requiring little maintenance, well built and well equipped compared to the tractors we rode  40 years ago. And as if to cheer me up a whole bunch of new small motorcycles are coming onto the market to cheer American riders up. BMW  has shocked everyone with this 310 to be shown off at the big motorbike show EICMA in Milan this week:

The BMW is supposedly part of a drive by European and US manufacturers to penetrate the Indian market, which is huge with a burgeoning middle class and a population moving from scooters to motorcycles. They have tons of models as do other south east Asian and Latin American countries that we never see. However in order to generate brand loyalty and create exciting new models foreigners have to get over a massive import tax on foreign machines levied by the Indian Government. So they build their Indian market bikes in India. Triumph had plans to do the same and scrapped their proposed 350 single. KTM from Austria has a joint venture in India building a 200cc single and a 390cc version has made it to the States:

In order to seduce Indian youth the bikes are modern looking with all modern conveniences but for the US market some people think old fashioned looking small bikes will tug at heart strings, like Genuine's new 400 which looks like small Triumph Bonneville single with twin exhausts. I like the looks of it though spoked wheels and tires with tubes are a drag in this day and age when you repair a flat roadside if it's tubeless.

I owned Yamaha's SR500 in 1979 and riode it around West Africa for half a year and had a grand old time. They still make it in Japan where it's restricted to 400cc capacity to allow younger riders to buy it and it is apparently popular. They've sold a few since they re-introduced it last year in the US despite the lack of electric start and a price tag of fully  six thousand dollars.  I want one tubed tires and all!

Goodness there are a lot of smaller motorcycles appearing in the US and now Sym , known for it's scooters is going to be offering a rather attractive 300cc motorcycle. They haven't given any detials but it's supposed to be a more capable motorcycle than their 150cc Wolf. With 300 cc engines motorcycles should be able to get up to around 80 miles per hour and thus make them able to ride comfortably with traffic on freeways. The Sym looks good too with solid wheels and tubeless tires. Extra points for that!

Suzuki brought a well built 250 single to the US market a few years ago, rather ahead of the popularity curve and it is still offered for sale here. I liked it a lot when it first appeared as it enjoys all the usual benefits of economy and simplicity but it never generated much after market accessories, not even a luggage rack which I think is a shame.

Suzuki also brought this 250 to the US to not very glowing reviews. Its a water cooled twin with not terribly exciting performance though it does enjoy the robotic looks that are supposedly popular in this day and age. Personally I think its a look only its mother could love but I am old and form another era.

Honda has been having success with a 300cc scooter but their new range of motorcycles between 300cc and 500cc offered as standards like this 300 and as boy racer bikes too are proving popular as well. I look back at my early motorcycles and it seems a shame to me that these bikes will be reserved for short hops and Sunday rides and maybe the odd commute when they could do so much more for so little money. Scooter riders argue that scooters are more practical but  luggage and a windshield can make these motorcycles just as capable of hauling home the groceries. Plus you get a machine that will take you anywhere and offer spirited riding with a gearbox and excellent fuel economy.

If you want a really old bike the modernized Royal Enfield from India is as close as it gets alongside the more reliable Yamaha SR400. I think the Enfields are cute but they suffer from poor reliability and high maintenance requirements. I looked at how long it takes to do an oil change on these beats and they have multiple steps opening various parts of the engine for what should be a simple operation. The old foges that buy these tend to tinker more than ride. But they look and sound pretty for more than six grand.

Last among the new small bikes is the one that has been there forever. The Ninja 300 twin was sold for years and years as  a 250, capable of racing on the track or traveling to Alaska, and commuting at speeds close to a hundred miles an hour. The new 300cc is better than ever they say and still winning converts. Just another splendid choice in a whole new array of motor y les in the US. IT's a good time to be riding.

After I sold the MV Agusta I bought a Moto Morini 350 in 1977 and that year I rode it across North Africa and Spain to England with adapted luggage, no spare parts, no proper riding clothing, tubed tires and not a lot of money. No internet either for advice or to hear from people advising against my hare brained plans. I had a blast camping as I went on my little v-twin cafe racer. It didn't seem so little at the time and I rode it at similar speeds to those I ride today on my 900cc Bonneville.

I can't say I wish I were young again because I like myself at my age. But I hope youngsters will take advantage of these great bikes in this modern age to have adventures and do what they can with what they have and not worry  about size; it really doesn't matter. 

The Mercenary

I was in the south of France in the summer of 1978, riding my Morini 350 twin and it was hot and sticky and dry and I was not ready to ride far. With frequent stops and a lot of lane splitting I got stuck in traffic in all sorts of exotic places, St Tropez heads the list of any self respecting tourist in the South of France, but I was not impressed. My bike had clip-on handlebars forcing me to ride in a crouch, while my tank bag kept flopping from side to side so that I had to hold it in place with my forearms which got sweaty from the contact. Thus it was that all I could think about was finding shade and water, trapped in the long line of cars inching to nowhere. Shade and water meant I had to escape to the hills, so I abandoned any pretensions of hanging with the rich and infamous on the beach and I rode for the hills.It was hot work even when I gained elevation and there were still slow poke cars on the roads to prevent me moving smoothly at speed, but I got more of a cooling breeze the higher I went so things improved gradually. Besides, even loaded with luggage the Morini was great fun to ride. Nowadays a 350cc V-twin on tires that seem no wider than beach cruiser bicycles tires would not appear to be much good for riding anywhere out of sight of home, but that Morini took me to North Africa and all over northern Europe over the course of three years that I owned it. Eventually a friend of mine rode it off the road after he nagged me to death asking to ride it and that was the end of that.

I found a campground much like the one pictured above, a bunch of camping trailers mixed in with space for tents and tons of people everywhere on their much anticipated summer vacations. I picked a spot and put up my bright blue two person tent. Inside I lay next to my belonging and everything was suffused in blue but it was not restful. It was hot and airless and bright under the southern sun under a blue plastic flysheet. I stood outside the tent and breathed in fresh,untainted hot summer air.

"Hey! You hot?" the man in the cool shady awning stretched out next to his roulotte waved a piece of delicious looking red fruit. Sure I said, sucked in to his orbit by the shade and his smile. I was young and innocentg and took everything and everyone at face value. We sat and talked while his wife, unseen, clattered dishes in the travel trailer behind us.

We talked about where we were from, me from Italy he from Paris. We talked motorcycles and I told him how bored I was by life down on the farm. "I escaped that," he said, "by joining the Legion." Huh? "I've been everywhere," he said. He talked about the Congo and Algeria, he talked of fishing in the Indian Ocean and driving trucks in jungles and deserts. He saw me looking at his hand. "That was never a problem," he said and I could believe it as I had not noticed his weird lobster claw fingers for the longest time. "I grew up like that," he said looking at the huge deformed pink thumb and the wadded up single finger that grew out of the stump of his hand. "The Legion never minded when they understood I could do anything anyone else did." He spoke in answer to my unspoken question.

His wife, a pretty, slim woman in a summer dress with the good manners of a middle class Frenchwoman came out and invited me to dinner. We ate at the table under the awning by the light of a gas lamp and the conversation continued late into the night. My host was what we call a "contractor" who ran his own company providing services and "personnel" around the world. I was fascinated and a little scared. "He isn't always so kind," his wife said smiling, as he told a story against himself of some close shave in as former French tropical colony. Implicit in her comment was the suggestion of severity if not savagery. he grinned the mirth of the amoral.

Had the Internet existed back then I could have looked up the hereditary condition called ectrodactyly which is caused in hands or feet by some chromosomal alteration. I could have looked him on faceboomk perhaps, under gunmen for hire, governments overthrown on demand... As it was I watched his lobster claw in open fascination and admiration of his ability to ignore daily complexity even when using a deformed hand. He was amused by my fascination at his stories of derring-do and by his dexterity with the hand. "You need to get out of the farm and see the world. Come and work for me." The suggestion shocked me.

He renewed it the next morning. "I'll show you the world," he smiled as he poured me a coffee. I got on my motorcycle and fled after thanking him profusely.

I wonder what might have happened to me had I thrown my customary caution to the wind. Probably nothing much as I never did see myself as a dog of war. On the other hand...who knows what lies within any of us and perhaps I would have made a bloodthirty mercenary with the best of them. How odd are the crossroads we pass, and ignore, in the journey of life.

Oliver Reed And the Motorcycle Chain

The snug at the Red Lion Inn was as empty as it should have been considering the hour, long after closing time. I had been tending bar that evening and the well known actor Oliver Reed had shown up with a friend for dinner in the restaurant which was part of the pub complex. After the restaurant emptied and the bar closed Reed and his buddy settled at a corner table and called out for drinks. That suited me, because he was never a bad tipper but he was exceptional when drunk and Reed loved to drink loudly and publicly. The story made the rounds more than once about the time he parked his convertible with the roof down during lunch and came back to find it filled with rain water. They drank, I served and the lights went down and eventually Chef came out and joined them for a little night natter.I had run away from home that year of 1978, packing my few immediate needs in the saddlebags of my Moto Morini 350 Sport (an identical machine is reproduced in the picture above) and riding out to answer the advertisement in the Dorking Advertiser for a live-in barman at the Red Lion Inn on the A25 in Ockley. Somehow I got the job, perhaps because the disreputable bunch of ruffians I hung out with had their weekly motorcycle club meetings there. In among the ranks of the Yamahas and Suzukis I rode a highly strung 105 mph "exotic" Italian V-twin, a six speed, kick start only, fire engine red little rocket that was known for it's tenacious road holding and relatively narrow power band and rough paint quality. I lived on my Moto Morini There-and-a-Half. It was my life and it was who I was, "Mick Morini" they called me. Once I called myself that by accident and never lived it down. Then I got the job at the Red Lion, my refuge from a rather unhappy home life.

I had washed up in England in 1977 after riding round the Mediterranean from Italy to North Africa to Spain and by ferry (shown above) to England where I arrived with seven pounds ($35) in my pocket and no plans. I took up residence in the time honored way at home, as one does, and joined a motorcycle club to make friends. Motorcycling in England in the 1970s was a fabulous mucky way to get around at a time when cars were finally affordable after the petrol crisis of the early decade. I wore a waxed cotton jacket and calf length boots topped with long white socks which were curled over the boots to stop the socks slipping down into the boot. Our uniforms were those of the Rockers of the 1950s and more famously 1960s. I have no photos of that period in my life anymore but these were the kinds of people we youngsters were trying to imitate:In fact when I rode off the ferry from Spain a crowd of scooters met me on the seafront, much to my delight as I had always enjoyed riding my Vespa in Italy. This was a different culture as the Mods were also in a revival mode at the time and they mistook me for their arch nemesis, a man on a motorcycle. They gave chase and when I realised what their intentions were my little 350cc pocket rocket left them in the dust, even laden as it was with my tent and clothes and expectations of a new, English life. The modernists and their scooters banished all thoughts of Vespas from my mind as I struggled to adapt to this Anglo-Saxon way of life.

In some respects I was overly sensitive at that age, and that combined with a general inability to cope with the most basic requirements of daily living, gave my life a rather surreal quality. I had been educated in the cloisters of Downside School, a leading Catholic boarding school which by no measure gave adequate preparation for "life outside" and then I had lived the hermetical life of a cash starved landed squire in Italy roaming around in a vast, 50 room lonely castle all by myself. Now I was in England, an unwanted cuckoo in the family nest with no visible life skills at all. I had no idea how to rent a place to live, I had no idea how to apply for a job. Budgeting and shopping were the vaguest of mysteries to me. I liked to ride my motorcycle and I wanted to live in the thick of things for a while. Oh and I needed a job.

My stepfather the barrister disapproved of my motorcycle, not least because my mother his ex-wife dead now these six years had always loved motorcycles. She bought me my first Vespa 50 when I was 12 years old. "One day" she said, pointing to a man in leather alongside a large motorcycle "I want to see you like that." She had also hankered for me to learn to play the church organ. I got the motorcycle thing going but the organ never did happen. I learned the tuba instead, then she got a brain tumor and died leaving me to navigate a family that despised all she stood for. I got a job, lived at home and rode with the Ockley Motorcycle Club which met at the Red Lion Inn (pictured above) in the quaint little village of Ockley.

I remember one night we went to a pub that I thought was called the Green Alligator (but I suspect was the Queen Adelaide in South London) where the warm summer evening deteriorated into a fight. I had no idea what was happening but I was in the middle of a series of beer bottle volleys flying overhead and someone shouting "Put the boot in'im!" It was an evening when an electric starter on my exotic Italian v-twin would have been enormously beneficial. As it was the leaders of the club took the brunt of the ire of the irritated patrons (about what I do not know), but suddenly, after fiddling with the kick start for what seemed forever, I felt the exhilaration of being on the run once again and outpacing once again whatever angry people were behind us. My motorcycle literally was my life. Our little group of riders was formed and disappeared long before computing and the Internet and I have no pictures from that era. We were actually quite respectable but we were emulating our predecessors, pictured above, though our motorcycles were newer and cleaner than those of the 1960's and though they seemed "modern" to us they were about as antiquated to the modern era as those 1960's big British twins looked to us. We rode as a group to the coast, Brighton as tradition dictated, we went to motorcycle races and we raced each other on roads that, looking back seem free of congestion and uncomplicated compared to modern traffic jams and electronic radar and all the controls that the 21st century tries to impose. My ghastly summer of 1977 turned out quite well.

Thanks to the Ockley Motorcycle Club I ended up meeting Oliver Reed, a name forgotten by now, but who was at the time a movie star of Hollywood proportions. He owned Broome Hall just up the street from the little village of Ockley and he liked to go drinking and carousing; in fact he was famous for it. So much so he had a hard time not getting banned from pubs where he made an excessive nuisance of himself. In those days being famous did not excuse you if you were an asshole and Oliver Reed was larger than life, sometimes in a good way and sometimes not so good.It happened that I met him in both moods and it came about like this. I had held down a couple of jobs that summer, based from my stepfather's very nice house in the country. I started out cleaning windows for a good wage in the nearby town of Dorking. This was a job that involved getting up early, riding into town in all weathers and swapping my motorcycle for the interior of a foul smelling van lined with pictures of naked women and all the gear needed to wash windows. I got twenty eight pounds a week ($140 at the time) and the money kept me in beer and petrol quite nicely down at the motorcycle club. But I had a terrible fear of heights and dangling off a window ledge three or more stories high was a terrible trial for me. I got fired, in the nicest possible way from my very first job ("Not a job for you, Squire!" the foreman grinned at his upper class twit apprentice). Then I went underground, a much happier situation, stocking the trucks in a grocery warehouse for the Cullen food store chain. Eventually from the dark recesses of the warehouse I worked my way up to driver's assistant riding the trucks through the pre-dawn London streets delivering yuppie food to the yuppie grocery stores of Cullen's. It paid less but it was way less stressful. I had already figured out that a low stress life was the one for me.

However the stress in my life came at home. My drifting was not viewed sympathetically even though I was young and working and learning to make my own way in the world. I had no career and no goal and my lack of proper values made me the object of scorn from a man who had reached the pinnacle of his legal career in London. My stepfather was the top tax attorney in England, author of textbooks on the subject, famous for the size of his brain. His offspring rode a motorcycle in an era when motorcycles were decidedly greasy and not suburban respectable. I discovered they were looking for a bar tender at the Red Lion and the job came with a room. When I announced my imminent departure I thought I was doing my father favor but he erupted in a volcanic fury that only hastened my departure. I never went "home" again. The bar at the pub became my home.

The Red Lion exists no more, they've renamed it and it is no doubt nothing of what it once was. I was not much good but I stumbled through the tasks of my new trade. I focused on the fact I no longer lived at home and that was good. That the restaurant staff were all French and unhappy at being in exile made my life a misery. The chef was Lenny Henry/Gareth Blackstock mad and I found stress levels were inching back up in my life, not quite to window washing levels, but close. There was also the fact that this job paid not much thanks to the live-in accommodation. I did rather wonder what on earth my next move might be. This was clearly temporary, my Morini and I had to consider our future and Italy was calling me back.

Thanks to his banning everywhere else Oliver Reed was quite well behaved, if generally highly intoxicated, when he came by the Red Lion. He was loud and thought he was very funny, and sometime he was. In fact leaving the top down on his expensive car in a rain storm looked funny from a poor youth's perspective. Trailing anxious court hangers-on looked odd to one used to managing nicely alone but as his lifestyle dictated he always seemed to have crowds of people dangling off his coat tails, letting him pick up the tab for their lives. Reed often came in late, a lonely man who enjoyed the company of the mad head chef, a man of similar temper to Reed, only less famous.

That night the three men in the darkened bar were talking loudly as drunk men do, and I was on duty so I was obliged to stay and hover in the back ground, pretending to clean up but making no noise to disturb their conversation. They talked a lot of talk of which I remember none, except when they got on the subject of horses. One of the three, Reed's friend was connected to the horse racing world, the one Dick Francis the novelist used to write about. He had a horse racing tip to share and his reedy voice penetrated the dark recess of the long closed bar. "Put your money on..." I can't even remember what the name of the horse was, though thanks to the magic of the Internet I discovered the Derby winner in 1978 was this fine beast laboring under the undignified name of Shirley Heights.

"I happen to know this one is going to win big," the voice announced in the darkness "put everything you've got on it." I was jolted awake and at my end of the bar I took notes.

Like I said my departure from the sceptered isle was only a matter of time. The motorcycle club notwithstanding I knew I had to go back to Italy and figure out a new approach to life. England clearly held nothing for me and I had to figure out a way to get back to what I was forced to consider my home. I had not much money and all my riding meant my 1977 Moto Morini needed some money spent before making a fifteen hundred mile journey across Europe. Aside from the usual oil change I desperately needed a new final drive chain. Meanwhile I barely had the fare to get myself and bike on the ferry to France. I was not saving much cash at all at my job and at this rate I would never have enough to leave. I ate, I slept and I puzzled my dead end existence. I had barely enough money saved to refurbish the bike, but I had no money at all to make a journey. I had no prospects of making more. Money was becoming my obsession. Money.

I would like to make it clear that I abhor gambling. the idea of throwing valuable assets away on a turn of the dice or a lucky chance just seems incredibly dumb to me, and what I did next seems incredibly idiotic, in retrospect, but I can fairly blame desperation for my move. At the critical moments in my life desperation has always been at my elbow to push me into action. The next day before we opened I went to the Post Office and withdrew every penny of savings I had and took the small pile of cash down to the bookmakers. In England off site gambling has a long and honorable history. It is not some backstreet illegal operation, even though the net result generally is the fleecing of the poorer elements of society. I had never been to a betting parlor in my life but I went in like a pro, put it all down to win on the damned horse and paid my taxes up front so my winnings, guaranteed by the greatest actor in England (by now I was so worked up Oliver Reed had become my definitive source of this spectacular horse tip) would be all mine, tax free. In England if you pay the tax on the bet the winnings are tax free, if not then you pay tax on the winnings. I wanted it all.

I left the bookmakers, a place just like the one shown above, in a state of ecstatic expectation, like a man with a date, only my date was with a betting slip, not a mere woman. The days went by, the odds on the horses changed but I had my early tip and all I had to do now was wait for the horse to win. I had no money at all now though I had a place to live and I could raid the inn's kitchen for food. My motorcycle had done it's duty and it stood by with an empty fuel tank and elastic useless chain waiting for my horse to come in.

If I am to be believed that gambling is a mug's game and I didn't enjoy it one bit, gambling with a purpose was even worse. The longer I waited for the horses to get their wretched race done the more I wound myself up waiting for the race to be over. My secret bet was weighing me down at work where I dared not say a word. The unhappy French waiters would have crucified me with their cruel joy had my last penny been flushed down the drain by a second placed horse. Finally race day came and I sat by my radio like a spy waiting for his Morse Code signal to send him into action. Oh my god! The fucking horse WON! I couldn't believe it. The little betting slip I held in my hand was worth somewhere north of two hundred pounds (a thousand bucks in the currency exchange of the day). Suddenly my prospects blossomed in front of me like a cheesy movie- sunshine, the open road, all Europe laid out at my feet... I was On The Road.

There was the small matter of cashing my winnings and spending a portion at the Moto Morini dealer in Dorking (one actually existed) and then I simply had to announce I was quiting. It was the first time in my life I discovered that much though they may despise you, your co-workers will be the first to despise you even more for having the nuts to break out and go your own way. I had thought they would be pleased to see the last of the inexperienced bar nerd and his fire engine red pride and joy; instead they seemed even more bitter and angry that I had my ticket out of their lives. I recall looking back at that departure from England as the first time I ever left on a major trip with absolutely no qualms whatsoever. I had tons of money, my bike was in tip top shape and my camping gear was all strapped on. I was going to Andorra in the Pyrenees. I have always had a passion for experiencing the obscure and pointless, and the smuggling haven of Andorra was about as obscure and pointlkess a destination as any that I could have chosen. It was perfect. In a continent of strict borders Andorra waved anyone in from France or Spain and with all the tax free smuggled goods they could carry. A pound went a long way in this tax haven.At some point in this tale the horror has to kick in- lost money, theft, falling off the motorcycle, epic bad weather....but failure never did kick in for once in my young life. I took the overnight ferry to Dieppe from Newhaven, as smooth a ride as any I've had across the Channel and from there the Morini and I wound our way down through France to the single valley tiny principality in the mountains. I camped, I ate like a king on my winnings and I rode the winding back roads all the way to the mountains of southern France. I cruised Spain to Barcelona and wound my way round the southern coast of France back to Italy and back to a predictably cold welcome from the other half of my family that didn't ever really warm to the idea of sharing my eccentric life with me in Italy. Three long years later I again planned my escape, the final one this time, and at the age of 23 I landed in the US and never looked back. Still riding a motorcycle and still grateful to Oliver Reed for his horse racing tip that got me back on the road to adventure.

Photos from the Internet.

Germans I Have Met

Africa 1979

"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.