Ticket to Ride

By Philip Scott Wikel

Ticket to Ride is a timeless tale of two writers coming-of-age in the wake of a world transformed by the currents of social, political and philosophical upheaval that began in the 60s.

Ten years of war in Vietnam, a "sexual revolution" filled with mixed messages, and a wide distrust of politicians, the government, organized religion and anything considered to be part of

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Scott Wikel
• Release date: Mar 28, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450588270

Philip Scott Wikel

As the publisher of SALT magazine, a regional ocean sports magazine, Philip has gained something of a following in Southern California. He has also been published in Blue Edge magazine (which included an interview with Jack Johnson), The VC Reporter, The Surfer's Path (UK), the Ojai Visitor's guide, Fishing Stories magazine in Australia and others. Philip has worked in various fields including everything from carpentry to graphic design. He studied Comparative Literature at UC - Santa Cruz and has traveled extensively. His other writing projects include a sequel to Ticket to Ride that chronicles the life of Dylan Blake, the child of Morgan and Livy, now an adult trying to make sense of his own generation, and finding his own place within it.

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Prologue

Just Another Day - Livy Tinsley

To lead a better life, I need my love to be here.

- from Here, There And Everywhere by the Beatles

As the sun was setting over the Pacific Islands, casting it’s multi-color, thousand shaded dance on the faces of people she would never know, if only through the stories of a future, decade away lover, Olivia Tinsley (Livy) was waking to the new day. North London, having yet shed its coal-smoke past, greeted the morning like a stepmother embracing an unwanted child. But Livy’s spirit was above this, stepmother or not, she was connected to the morning. Her world was never just East Finchley. Hers was all that the equator bisected and all that lay between the poles. And while only a young girl, she knew she would bring them all to see this.

This particular morning, Saturday, December 17, 1967, was Livy’s birthday. She was turning ten today, double-digits, the first step toward young womanhood and the springtime of Psyche.

Trudy would be waiting. And the two friends, connected by a vision that stretched beyond the High street and market day, would walk above what others saw. Today their trek would take them to the Thames, a river which, in both their minds, led to the all of the oceans of the world.

They met at the corner as they did on so many other mornings, liberated from the utilitarian drabness of their council-flat homes. (This drabness should be seen as only the narrator’s point of view because neither girl could be bothered with pigeonholing themselves as being poor.) Poverty was something they saw in their parents’ eyes. It scared them, like the [Boogie Man], and solidified in them, a desire to not be poor, at least in spirit, and dreams. Dreams were what they had, a warm cloak against the morning air and their protection against their mother’s insistent urging to dress more warmly. The only warmth Livy needed today was what she saw in the floppy-haired eyes of Paul McCartney. The Beatles were in full force and she saw in them, especially in Paul, the promise of the world outside; a world full of Europe, America and the power of words to make change.

They walked along the High street, peering in the windows of the shops that had yet to open, not to appraise the wares laid out for sale in the way their mothers saw them, as objects to be possessed and kept, but as objects of discovery and promise, things that told tales of the people that created them and the lands from which they had come. In the window of the Tea shop sat boxes and tins bearing English names but the brands were so much less important than the places they had come from. Ceylon, Bombay, Jakarta and the like were names that conjured in them, fantasies and dreams of sweet-smelling air and fragrant fields of tea, places where their supposed poverty was alternatively noble, and lives built around the cultivation of these crops were simple and pleasurable and fraught with tradition, ritual, and beauty.

At Finchley Road they turned, and walked the long stretch from the here to there. A long walk for you and I, but just here to there for Livy and Trudy. Just here to there. The there being the banks of the Thames, and a bridge. And it was on this bridge, Blackfriars Bridge, looking East along the river that their conversation began. With the warm lands in their minds, their Saturday dreams took flight and Livy would often pose a question. What would this have been if it wasn’t for Norsemen and Saxons? If we two had had a say in the building up of this island?

Instead of answering, Trudy would turn inward, subconsciously erasing feudalism and Burgundian kings. She would instead picture a world where Joans’ of Arc would ride in on silver steeds and carry a message of peace. Or Emile Guillame’s, La Deliverance, an actual female nude statue standing in the middle of Finchley, holding a sword in the Battle of Marne, projecting power and grace and a vision of something other, other than the usual outcome of war, and other than a temporary half-conjured promise, but a promise of finally broaching that next world, that world where definitions are based on how well all is defined and not on the appearance of things. And while the barges and steamships of commerce rolled by she would picture a river full of music and romance, and a body of water that carried instead promise, and intangibles like adventure and freedom. These commodities would, in most cases be, under the cold eyes of the economist, trade goods, but to Trudy they weren’t simply traded goods, but an exchange of the wealth of kingdoms, kingdoms borne of diplomacy, goodwill and temperance.

Didja know Trudy... an early, maybe the first, Briton and his wife, Hwll and Akun came through here in the summer some seventy-five hundred years before Christ, on their way to Salisbury? They came down here to find a new home, somewhere warmer as the last ice age was ending. This place was full of trees but they didn’t stop. Something drove him further south. London was a forest and the Thames ran freely, wide, and big. * Trudy there was nothing here. No off-licenses, no Minis, no Austin Healeys, no Ty-phoo or Tetley, no London Times or BBC... just trees and the river. How must that’ve been?

Livy had broached this before, several times thought Trudy, but Trudy never tired of the speculation. She loved that Livy would ask it. That’s where Trudy wanted to go, away from the council flat, away from the sinking feeling that permeated it. She felt this more deeply than Livy. She could feel it creeping up around her ankles, threatening to choke her, and she, unlike Livy, felt powerless to fight it. Her only escape was through Livy’s words, and her questions, and her spirit, and her eyes, blue as nothing she’d seen. Livy was like a happy little female Buddha, smiling lovingly and defiantly at the world. It couldn’t touch her. She was wholly Psyche; nothing of Aphrodite and her sometimes steamrolling quality were present. She was fun, and hope, and promise, cheeky and detached.

"I’m ten Trudy, a decade old, ten years, double-digits. I mean, what will I mean? I’m sorry but, bloody hell, what is this councilflat-eastfinchley-povertyshite. I’m biding my time Trudy. I’m not long for here. I’m just ten but there’s work to do...

St. Paul’s. What do you think of St. Paul’s? Trudy? What do you think of St. Paul’s?"

Trudy had drifted off. She felt Livy pushing, moving, couldn’t be there for her anymore. Livy wanted too much. Trudy wanted just to talk. Livy spoke her dreams and Trudy rode on them, but Trudy couldn’t see it for herself. Livy, livy, livy, she thought. She’ll leave me here.

I think my mum got me new ballet slippers. God knows why, I’ve only done one thing right in four years. Stopped the whole class to show them I was so excited. But mum still thinks I’m going to make the Royal Ballet.

But you’re going to be a writer Livy.

Mum’s dream.

Which?

The ballet... girls don’t write, not supposed to... not girls from East Finchley.

Trudy sort of nodded in agreement and disbelief at the same time then pulled something from her coat pocket.

I wrote this for you, handing a folded sheet of paper to Livy, You’re a much better writer than me, but well, here it is. Happy Birthday.

Thanks Trudy, I suppose they’ll be more coming out of East Finchley than just ink. **

She stopped to read.

Silken voice,

silken smile

whistles on wind

all the while

sweet songs of seashells, seabirds & sandy crabs.

Transplanted manner

wide-eyed sigh

walks in whispers

under white light sky

through pretty poetry of

mustard greens and autumn sun

Lancashire castles

reproduced in sand

lyrics and verse

composed in her small hand

conversation adrift that she can’t understand

she sleeps quietly with Nana

in Nana's new land.

Thank you so much lovey. You are a love...

Livy put her arm around Trudy.

I love the look of St. Paul’s from here. It looks... well... it looks like someone cared.... but, at the same time... the constructs of it. she continued.

Construction... Trudy added.

I hate construction... said Livy.

Trudy frowned, Exactly.

They looked at each other and Trudy smiled through Livy, then both turned back toward the Thames and at a passenger ship heading downriver to Dover, the Channel and everywhere else.

Nana’s new land Livy! You can see it too.

You’re going to leave someday, Trudy finished.

They were quiet again until Livy had to speak.

My dad drank a lot again last night.

Ditto.

The two of them hugged one another.

I love you sweetie, Livy said.

I love you too, replied Trudy.

Best friends forever.

Best friends forever.

It ended like this most every time.

* gleaned from Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd

** In 1874, Henry Charles Stephens, son of the Inventor of modern ink and also known as Inky Stephens came to live here and to establish a laboratory.

Got to Get You into My Life - Morgan Blake

Get behind me satan,

quit ravishing the land

does it take the children to make you understand?

- from Donkey Jaw by America, 1972

Friday, April 28. 1975

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean there’s a small island shaped like the number eight. As the morning sun peels away its shadows, you can see, at the end of one of the volcanic fingers that stretch away from its north shore beaches, a rundown Craftsman style cottage, the home of Morgan Blake and his parents. In the morning, and in the bedroom at the back of the house, you can almost invariably find Morgan, pecking away at his typewriter, smiling and furrowing his brow, rolling in a sometimes fine frenzy.

A few vertebrae pop into place as Morgan sits up straight and away from his desk. The clock on the shelf above the typewriter reads 5:35am. He takes a deep breath, sets down his pen and thesaurus, and begins to read his composition aloud:

"As the sun set far away over East India

Signaling the pastel-end of another Naga day

In the middle of the expansive and placid Pacific

That same celestial lantern was,

Like a seasoned actor,

Quietly rehearsing its island encore,

On fire is the sky at dawn when

Gentle winds blow lightly, almost silently

Over the red and recalcitrant earth, while

The silver-tongued clouds of the night jump the color

Wheel, and shed the fleeting chill of their dark half-day

Ebony gives way to indigo as the stars seem

To disappear, invisible but never intangible.

Fingers of light strike first the great volcano

Then fill the flatland cane fields, flooding

The island with a thousand shades of shadowy green."

"There, I’ve captured morning...

Morgan Blake, the seventeen-year-old poet laureate of the islands," he said smiling.

Two

As the western peaks were unveiled by purelight of day, two tanned figures dressed in shorts and t-shirts, walked beneath the drowsy sway of the coconut palms, heading toward the sea. The two young men, one with dark hair and the other blonde, crossed the grounds of the Rinzai Zen temple. Though neither were confessed members of any denomination, this structurally intricate, eye-pleasing edifice offered an almost tangible air of higher consciousness, the essence of the East in their minds, which made them feel light and sage, like two young bodhisattvas on a spiritual sojourn. They met each morning, not through a sense of need, but because, like morning coffee, this pilgrimage was part of the morning ritual.

They had met this way since Morgan’s father had brought his family to the island in an attempt to escape the war-like turbulence of early 1970’s America. They came together to exchange stories or talk story and sometimes they would speculate about or marvel at the sea and what lay beyond; what sights, scents or sounds might be found in places like Cyprus, Indonesia or Sri Lanka. They preferred to consider the warm lands of the world because, like their parents, they were drawn to the comfortable climes, sunny places where life’s necessities could be kept to a minimum.

Their conversation came in a natural flow, with the ease of a mountain stream, and would rise and fall like the ocean swells which appeared consistently on the shallow reefs beyond the early-rising Japanese fishermen as they strung line and laid their nets in the ever-present sea. The boys did not readily acknowledge the fishermen but only focused on them between thoughts, using their deliberate and precise movements the way a musician makes use of a metronome or as one might gaze at a flickering candle flame, in profound meditation. On that particular day and within one of those particular moments, Morgan leaned forward and spoke deliberately:

Man, I can almost see the outriggers and grass huts and beautiful brown girls bathing in the sea. What must it have been like here two hundred years ago, or even a hundred? How it would have been to be Conrad, Jack London or Melville?

As he spoke, the morning sun shot warm light into the womb-like Iao Valley to the west; striking an ancient cinder cone known as the Needle, a verdant and mystical megalith rising