Farming and the Vespa

When, in my youth I wasn't playing the role of a young Catholic gentleman scholar in an English boarding school I was busy playing in the fields and mountains of Umbria. It was a wild dichotomy, from pin striped school uniform to the sandals and shorts of a Fellini-esque dusty summer escapism among the corn stalks and ribald jokes of Italian peasants. As I grew older I learned strange and arcane styles of work that I never did want to put into practice full time, but that now, 40 years on, seem like skills learned on the dark side of another planet. How to plough a field with oxen. Sowing wheat by hand. Milking a cow. Minding a flock of sheep. Biblical stuff. Perhaps those Bible stories made more sense to my precocious Catholic mind because I understood, literally, what was meant by separating sheep from goats, and crushing grapes to make wine, and the flavor of unleavened bread.

It was all stuff that I lived with from day to day. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I didn't depend on these skills to live or feed anyone. I saw them employed, I learned them in a dilettante-ish sort of way and I shared moments in the field with men who wore leather skin without a second thought for skin cancer. or the wrinkles of old age. My favorite task, myself a confirmed scion of a wealthy family, a dilettante like Paris Hilton on TV, was plowing a field. Ploughing you may not know, is usually accomplished in the Fall, after the harvest is gathered, the wheat sold and the straw piled high in conical haystacks like dunces hats. Harvesting is always celebrated in books and the arts, but that's because it's a collective experience and one of joy- money in the bank!

Ploughing is a solitary past time, in olden days a man worked with his oxen yoked to the ploughshare ( I told you it was Biblical stuff), and in more modern times that same man ignored the blandishments, the siren song of cows and harnessed horsepower to his plowshare in the form of a bright orange Fiat tractor. And with that tractor and even a single bladed plow an incompetent like me could turn soil at a rate far in excess of the most skilled peasant ploughman and his oxen. And that ploughing brought with it satisfaction. I like ploughing because I enjoyed the proximity to the machine, the power of the caterpillar tracks clanking and the sight of the blade neatly slicing through the turf and exposing an endless wedge of rich brown soil। At the end of the day you could see the work done and measure the brownness of the soil against the grayish green of the morning's field. It was good work.

I was put in mind of the olden days of farm work not simply because of my recent historic visit back to Umbria after a 25-year absence, but because, more prosaically I was cleaning my Vespa the other afternoon.

Unlike Autumn in Central Italy, summer in the FloridaKeys is a hot humid and breathless affair. Not here do we smell fresh soil, wet leaves and the cooling breezes of the change of season. I keep the Vespa under my stilt home, out of the burning, disfiguring sun, and I polish my red buzz bomb. I like polishing it because I have found the right tools for the job, and those tools produce a shiny red carcass where the scooter body previously was faded and dull with dust. Like plowing a field where sometimes a corner is left unturned I occasionally leave a wedge of dusty Vespa undone through carelessness, and on the Vintage Red Vespa body, the wedge of dust smears like a dull stain of remorse and I rush to take another pass with the soft cloth and rub All Kleer over the opaque patch. While I wipe out the dust, I'm put in mind of those far off days of my youth, my unhappy days punctuated by ploughing pleasure, and my pleasure filled days today, punctuated by the requirement, from time to time, to be annoyed or alone or frustrated, and it all falls away even now, with a rag, some goop and a shiny Vespa to show for my efforts.

The Risk Continuum

It is de rigeur on the web these days to read about the appalling risk we take when we go out on the highways on only two wheels. To read these comments is to be forced to the conclusion that appearing on the highway on as little as two wheels is a death wish. Particularly if one is not wearing ATTGAT . Even more so if one is so foolish as to ride on small wheels like these: ATTGAT sounds ugly, but it simply means all the gear all the time. As with any abbreviation its does not specify what "all" is in either case. Nevertheless this subject is focused upon so intently that it doesn't take long to figure out what it really means. It means risk reduction from the outside. Its advocates mean well but as advocates frequently do, they see only a small picture while they preach so hard. Watch someone die in bed of a lingering disease and decapitation has its good side.

People who ride with all the gear all the time note that they are the objects of derision but such derision leads them to adopt a preachy tione that can be desperately annoying and to a contrarian such as myself leads me to think harder about wearing sandals while riding. I read on one blog the notion that because a motorcyclist is riding not-ATTGAT at 70 mph he just wants to die. As though the author has some divine dispensation from death thanks to a kevlar-lined jacket.

It has been pointed out that one would do well to wear a helmet while driving a car where head injuries are as fatal as those suffered by motorcyclists, but it doesn't look as dangerous inside a car and it definitely would look sillier. So no apostle of ATTGAT suggests a helmet in a car. Except race car drivers who also wear flame proof suits

I wear a modest open faced helmet which is a bad risk factor for my jaw, I wear gloves, and I try to carry a great deal of concentration. I don't ride on ice but I do ride on smaller wheels than the average motorcycle; mine are 12 inches at the front and 13 inches at the back and a lot of people with no knowledge will tell you I am taking my life into my own hands. What a nice place to put one's life!

So why not ATTGAT myself? I could spend a thousand dollars on the gear, but its not the expense. Its hot in South Florida, but they do sell vented gear. People think all the gear looks odd all the time, but I don't care what others think. No the reason I don't ATTGAT comes from somewhere else. Buggered if I know exactly where though. Force of habit perhaps, or the proverbial old dog and new tricks, something like that. Perhaps partly it comes from the discomfort and the complexity of a life bound in kevlar.

One of the amazing things about modern automobiles is their convenience. Not only are they climate controlled and sound deadened, they offer a stable platform to travel in, to make phone calls from and to eat lunch. Having said all that why bother with two wheels? Why bother to sit out in the rain and sun and not be able to take a phone call? Technically i suppose I could take a call with hands-off equipment but the point is that more than ever a motorcycle or scooter offers a respite from all this.

And the ability to just jump on and take off heightens the liberation that a scooter provides. And a death wish I suppose though I don't see it that way.

Speed kills, cell phones render drivers of cages irresponsible, its only a matter of time until you fall and so on.

I have seen the needle pegged at 96 on the turnpike (possibly 87 "real" miles per hour) but I'm usually trundling along between 50 and 70 on my daily rounds. Dangerous? I suppose it could be. Yesterday I was riding in Big Pine and a car stopped in front of me to turn left. It was an older model Cadillac with faint brake lights and it gave me a fright- but I slowed, and swerved round it, in control and focused once again on the road. Had I been tailgating....As it is I have 37 years experience riding in all sorts of conditions and making all kinds of mistakes. Experience counts for more than even I realise. Its by exposing myself to the inexperienced on the web that I learn how much I already do know. I have yet to exhibit a death wish.


I have sailed a great many miles and have answered numerous fears about pirates and storms and getting lost and drowning and on and on. Not many people ever asked about the most joyous moment afloat, or the most beautiful sight or the deepest satisfaction. They make it a point to reassure themselves that by failing to act on their "dreams" they are being sensible.


Of course when one chooses to live in the Florida Keys one opens oneself up to that other charge of recklessness and foolhardiness. When I was a California resident it was earthquakes that kept my interlocutors engaged. Now its hurricanes, and all I can say is that i do my best to be prepared, and isn't it nice that the rest of the time the weather down here is so delightful?

I could be living in Missouri and facing the New Madrid fault, or drowning in monsoon flood waters in Bangladesh or Britain. Instead I live in paradise, they say.


I write these words in hopes that they may inspire me when and if I lose everything to a storm or mobility to a wreck. Its not a challenge to Fate its an acknowledgement that life itself is a risk and there is no way out but Death. I reinforce my belief that the only way to cope is to do one's best. I am luckier than some, their taste for adventure is such that they can only cross the boredom threshold by actually putting their lives at risk. They are the true risk takers, mountaineers, parachutists, record setters of an extreme type. I just ride a scooter for fun, until the end of the road, wherever that may be.

Mr Hitchens and the Woman of Religion

Christopher Hitchens' column in the latest edition of Vanity Fair celebrates the ascension of his latest tome to the heights of the bestseller lists. I dare say this is the first time in my reading life I have bought a book, a hardbound book no less, at the time of its attaining stardom. My usual style is to stumble across a bestseller long after it is forgotten. In this case I bought the book before I took off for Europe in June.

I bought The Great Deluge to read on the trip, and think about the submersion of New Orleans, which vies with Austin in my pantheon of Best Places to Live. Vied. While I was at Voltaire books in Key West I stumbled across a yellow covered book with the Satanist's name splashed across it. I have been familiar with Hitchens since the long lost era when he wrote for the Nation magazine. Eventually he fell out with the Nation owing to a perceived slide to the right. I, however, viewed his slide more as an acknowledgement of his new found curmudgeonliness, which allowed him to slide into apostasy ( support for the invasion of Iraq was his downfall).

One can only empathize with a man, born and raised in Britain who comes to the US and takes on the plain spoken, boring orthodoxy of a multi-cultural melting pot where humor is, at its mildest, risque, and at its best, "enraging." Hitchens values thinking for oneself and thus it is inevitable that he should end up plowing a path all on his lonesome. But not, apparently as lonesome as he must have first thought.

Indeed in the article he notes that at least half the audience in his book tour's varied stops seemed to think they alone were atheists in their communities. And Hitchens' sense of wonderment at his book's success implies the same about himself in America at large. I suppose he might be Satan but he writes like a man possessed not of the desire to talk down to his audience but of a man convinced that erudition is at large in America. Good for him, and in this picture by William Anthony in this month's Vanity Fair, he seems like your average, common-or-garden, rumpled English intellectual, now proudly waving the banner of US citizenship. Not at all satanic.

Upon diving into God Is Not Great I found a text that articulated for me, more precisely, more eruditely and more completely my own reasons for loss of faith.


I work with a two women who fit into this debate almost perfectly. One, the Mother, is a young mother of four married to a man of Christian puritanism that would it seems puts him high in the Boer orthodoxy of 19th century South Africa. He it is who lays down the law in the family and she it is who is subservient. I have endeavored to keep my feelings on the subject quiet, going so far as to remove the cover from my hardback when it has accompanied me to the workplace. I don't know the Mother that well as she only works with me occasionally, on her overtime shifts.

My other female co-worker is my regular companion on Bravo night shift. She grew up in a harsh uncompromising, but surprisingly variable series of religious edicts from her mother. She fled home and sought refuge in a world of disorder and unconventional living. From that she followed her older, and more passive sister, to Key West and fell into the lap of a good, hidebound job. This daughter repudiates religion in all its forms and coercions.

The daughter worships at the altar of modern living, television, and lives a restrained life such as monastic orders would approve, moderation in all things, faithfulness in matters intimate, and a work ethic that would gain the approval of the slacker Benjamin Franklin. Yet the mention of religion and all its ethical codes gets her out of her chair.

One night we stumbled across a magazine carried to work by the Mother, for her edification. It contained the Christian rendition of one of those banal magazine quizzes, which usually ask something ridiculous like how hard do you please men, and in this case qualified "men" as the Son of Man. With predictable results when the daughter got ahold of the quiz.

The Christian mother took it well, as I spluttered and tried to shut the Atheist up. On the other hand the mother says "fuck" more freely at work than I would expect her to be able to do at home. Perhaps working gives her not only money (to take the children to that den of homoeroticism, Disneyland) but also an outlet from the strictures of the Church.

Its odd to me to find confirmation of Hitchen's intellectual stance in my own workplace, the stark confrontation of abused religious victim and abused religious codependant. Even in my own family, my formerly staunchly anti-clerical brother-in-law, now a grandfather, takes his family meekly to Mass each Sunday, finding time to marvel at the preaching power of the parish's new African priest. Such is the shortage of priests that even in the seat of Catholicism, the former Papal States, they import priests from Africa.

When I was a child I believed God was an old white man with a long white beard and he peered at us through pinholes in a cardboard box, and in that box the earth and the sky were suspended. It seems odd to me that people, as educated as me, still hold this fundamental belief, and worse yet spend time and treasure seeking to prove the unprovable. I think its true that no matter how little we believe, those among us that do express a belief in a god, any god, are expressing a fear of death.

I have often imagined my own death, my departure on that journey to a borne from which no traveler returns, as the saying goes. It seems more satisfactory and productive to spend less time imagining and more time enjoying. Is this what they mean by God's Bounty?

The Moods of Highway One

The road stares back at me across the clumps of mangroves, the green punctuation spots in the blues and browns of salt water. I can see a sliver of silver on the horizon which marks the Niles Channel Bridge, and at night its navigation lights are the white and reds of ant-vehicles running industriously too and from Key West.



From the top of the bridge itself I can see turquoise water, blue skies, white clouds and spilled green paint where dots of mangroves bled into a smear across the water. My house is hidden by more greenery, tall trees, all leafy and a different shades of green than the mangroves. My neighbor's three-storey white column marks my house. At night he likes to light up the island with his prison search lights which frighten evil-doers away, along with the wildlife and the night sky.



I keep waiting for the day that I grow bored with a drive to work that can only follow one, winding road. All the things that Highway One isn't are the things I keep waiting to long for. It isn't a winding mountain road, overhung with deciduous trees going yellow in the Fall and bursting with green, yet a different, fresher shade of green, in the Spring. Highway One isn't a thread of black winding through fields and farms, dipping to the streams and rising to the hard rocky humps of dirt, twisting in an effort to get away from your wheels. Highway One fails altogether to lose itself in an arid landscape of colored rocks, oranges at dawn, yellows at noon and gold at dusk before slipping away into a purple darkness at night. Highway One runs straight and true, and wobbles slightly at every bridge as it clambers up onto the cement surface over the waters, then drops back to the limestone causeway a few feet above the tide line.



I ride this road a million times a month, and I never tire of it. I ride bits and pieces of the road at different times and it never frightens me. I look forward with a thrill of anticipation when I know a trip to Miami is in the offing. Drop me on any piece of the 120 mile highway and I can tell you reasonably enough where I am within a mile or two, or an island or two.



I know the Sheriff's car in Layton is decommissioned and parked there to frighten then speeders. I also know the car that's actually occupied likes to hunt from the sole remaining grocery store, or the entrance to the dump just south of the town.



I know the Majestic gas station marks the start of endless miles of two lane highway where passing is impossible and one might as well wait patiently behind the dreaming visitors who find 50mph just a little too fast to pass the delights of neon and commerce in Paradise. The exotic promise of America's only Caribbean Islands (...with a highway attached- unlike America's real Caribbean Islands in the Virgins and Puerto Rico).



The piece of Highway One I know best is of course the ribbon I ride back and forth to work. Its the piece of road that sticks its neck furthest out into the Straits of Florida, so far, that when cruise ship passengers land at the end of the road they are astonished to find the same day's Miami newspaper for sale on the docks. They marvel at our currency ( the US dollar, rara avis) and wonder who governs the bustling community they have "sailed" to. Paradise loves to foster delusion. Perhaps paradise is delusion when seen from the inside.



And yet, for me, the illusion of Paradise remains real and in my grasp. No matter how many times I slip my helmet on my head, and my gloves on my hand prior to heading out on the ribbon to delusion, I get a little thrill. Today may be the day I have the perfect ride. Today perhaps I will see that which I have yet to see on the road, whatever that may be.



Last week I took off in a downpour, my wife shaking her head at my insistence on riding in the rain, and potentially sitting at work all night in damp clothes. The rain cleared in three miles and I stopped to strip off my clammy rain suit, and as I stood by the side of the road, a cool post rain storm breeze tugging at my shirt, I knew I was where I wanted to be, on the Overseas Highway- one road in and one road out. No more roads needed.

Vespas

It all started out in the Fall of my 12th birthday with the arrival in my life of a bright orange Vespa 50. It was my mother's surprise birthday gift which she announced to me on our way from the airport, sitting in the back of a cab, 20th century Roman ruins flashing by in the background, the Rome of Fellini, though I knew it not at the time.
It would have taken so little to pose boy and machine in the middle of those hillsides, but I guess it never occurred to me to get off and stop riding for what we call today a photo-op, even had I known what that meant.

I was appalled by the gift of such magnificence, I didn't now what to say, a vehicle of my own put me in the world of the self-propelled. This at a time when in Umbria most of my neighbors were still hoping for their first car as their cared for their oxen, ploughed fields by animal power and went to church on foot. I felt like a yokel attempting to assimilate the gift of an automobile- catapulted far above my station wondering what the consensus would be were my peers to hear of my promotion to motorized driver.

It served me well, taking me all over the Umbrian hillsides of my childhood, for I was no more than a child. I rode that orange machine every vacation I spent in Umbria, and at the end of each I put the Vespa away under cover and there it waited for my next release from boarding school in England. And I have no memory of regrets or longing when I put away the Vespa, put away my shorts and pulled out my pinstriped pants, black tie and black jacket- the accoutrement's of the Young Catholic Gentleman Downside Abbey struggled to make of me.

My sister, one of twins, went out with a young man who rode a Vespa, a sky blue 125cc, and it was there I took my first ride on a scooter, my sister in back sidesaddle, her husband-to-be steering and me, from time to time, 8 years old and standing proudly holding the handlebars in front. 41 years on the Vespa is still there, clean and covered awaiting its owners decision to give in to modern helmet laws and take her for a spin in the 21st century. He has little to say of the halcyon days of his youth, except to point out that the machine he courted my sister on was never very fast. "And now I've got to wear a helmet to go slow," and he shrugs, unsentimental farmer that he is.

When I first saw my sister after 25 years away from her home she took me with pride to see the old machine, freshly painted and ready to go. "We still have it," she said shyly. And I found the foot board on the left hand side where she rested her feet riding sidesaddle, a practice forbidden in my home state of Florida, a place where paradoxically one may ride without a helmet!

Time passed and the fad for off road motorcycles swept the Italian countryside. I sold the orange Vespa and traded its reliable power and its comfort for a manly 50cc Beta, an offroad rocket that pleased me at the time and took me on goat trails inaccessible to my Vespa, but that eventually gave way to a real motorcycle, a road machine, and I took those trail riding skills with me on my journeys.

Vespas always hovered on the periphery of my vision and when I read about Roberto Patrignani's trip overland by Vespa to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 I decided to take a trip by Vespa too. 6 months I spent crossing the US and Mexico in 1981 on a P200E I bought in New York. I rode south, my first brush with Florida and visited Vespa Ft Lauderdale for a service and they repaired an electrical glitch, under warranty and in 24 hours! I wasn't even surprised because Vespa was always known as a world wide operation. And there in the background you can see they were still selling orange Vespas, just as I remembered mine, even though these, the height of modernity sported turn signals and mirrors.

That journey across America was perhaps the most enjoyable trip i ever took on two wheels, a journey marked by encounters, a lack of drama, and more photos than I had ever previously bothered to take, it marked a turning point and a year later I was re-united with the white P200E in California ready to start a new life together.

By 1989 I was older and no wiser. I sold my P200E after years of service and thousands of miles commuting. Vespa in the US had folded operations, the Vespa shop in Los Gatos had long closed and I thought I was holding onto a relic. Anyway I was leaving Santa Cruz and California on my boat and had no room for my elderly, outmoded two wheeler...

...Nowadays I promise my wife I would no more sell my Vespa than I would a kidney. It may be late but I have learned my lesson and my GTS is mine till the bitter end, and perhaps when I am immolated at last, my elderly, outmoded 250cc Vespa will go with me

And with it the memories of its predecessors who left such a mark in my memory that I never have looked at a Vespa since without longing. What an odd obession.

Harry Potter and the Short Attention Span

When first it came out I pretty much ignored the children's book. My wife pays more attention to fads and was given a copy of the first book. She liked it and suggested I might. I preferred not to break the habits of a lifetime and only got around to reading a sudden best-seller long after it's public desirability had peaked.

It has always been true for me that books fell into my orbit only after everyone else had finished with them, and so it was with the first Harry Potter book. Imagine my surprise when the novel reflected so much of my strange English life early on, buried in an educational establishment fronted by magicians claiming all sorts of supernatural powers hidden beneath their black magical robes. Harry Potter resonated with me.

I read the second novel in the series, generally a disappointment when a sequel travels a path previously trodden and thus requires less exposition. Hogwarts was less mysterious and thus less interesting.

The third book allowed me to drift away from the plot whatever it was. Since then I have failed to follow the ramblings of the boy magician, ignored calls for his anti-Christian banning and managed not to wonder how it is the author becomes as rich as the queen of England. Yes indeed as the cliche will have it; we inhabit a strange world.

(Me, Mexico 1981, Vespa P200E).

Evading Harry Potter and not remembering my time at Downside School in England between 1971 and 1975, has become harder with the publication of the last book in the series and all the attendant noise. Living so far from the world of my school days has made the Potter story a valuable aid to providing strangers a short cut to my youth.
"Yes," I say, " my school days were like those of Harry Potter."
"Including the magic?" they ask with hopeful disbelief in their voices. Everyone wants magic, against all logic that it cannot exist.
"Yes, " I add solemnly. "With the magic."
Of course it was magical, getting up before dawn, and walking silently, like a thief down long empty corridors. magical because my presence afoot and alert was with legal cause, I was en route to the most magical mystery of them all- transubstantiation.
I was educated from the age of 13 to the age of 17 by Benedictine monks, men sworn to poverty who lived splendidly in the monastery, to which was attached my boarding school. Daily they went about monastic duties gliding silently through cloisters, down corridors and into choir stalls. And there by the dawn's early light, aided by the warm glow of candles we celebrated together the magical transformation of bread into God.
That's more magic than Harry Potter ever managed.
Like Harry Potter, the magic of that period has faded; too many pre-dawn masses, I dare say, similar in all respects to a surfeit of bestsellers: just too rich a diet for my mundane mind. Magic has lost its appeal, and I'm the poorer for it.