Freewheeling: Riding in Italy: Book I

By Tom Foran Clark

Here, in the first book of Tom Foran Clarks four part Freewheeling series, Riding in Italy the author gives a clear nod and tip of the hat to the works of Kerouac, Pirsig, Bellow, Cervantes, and Rabelais.
Here are the adventures of two young vagabonds in Europe, Pike and Emery. Pike had made a plan, the story goes. He was going to ride a bike south through Spain to Morocco, then east across North Africa to Italy. Emery proposes, I'll join you if you start in Italy and do the journey backwards" from northern Italy south to Sicily and on to Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Spain.
They purchase their bikes in Milan, a fogbound madhouse of a million angry honking, gnashing, sideswiping cars. While Pike was content with finding an unpretentious banged and dented, wobbly, pale blue ten-speed, Emery had the proprietor of a fancy bike shop on the Corso Garibaldi show Emery a stunning Mediterranean blue new Rossignoli bicycle that immediately sent Emery's imagination reeling. And that, indeed, would be Emery's bike the bike on which he would set out freewheeling.
The author did in fact once ride a bike, with a cohort, from northern Italy south to Sicily and on to North Africa and so on -- years ago now. From that long and grueling journey sprang this finely crafted fiction. The freewheeling is not only in the events what happens in the journeys of these two young vagabonds but also in the authors exuberant telling of his tale.
As traveling companions go, Emery figured, Pike really was all right. Even something of a rare bird. In some ways, he now seemed to Emery to be even princely: Pike's long brown hair and lavish tan fur trappers coat, one hand in a pocket, one foot forward the stance of a gentleman. This recognition so warmed Emery's heart, he took Pike to breakfast. They ate, then went to Santa Maria Novella. There, before his eyes, was Masaccios masterpiece, Christ on the Cross, situated in a perfectly geometric architectural space all done using only paint. It was the skeleton painted at the bottom of the marvelous picture with which Emery connected it really got to him. There were foreign words in an inscription beneath the skeleton that he knew to mean, What you are, I once was; what I am, you will become. Emery felt not only elevated, ennobled, he felt like he was rising in the air. Emery bowed, said, Thank you, Masaccio, and went out. After that, nothing was as it had been.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503598461

Tom Foran Clark

Tom Foran Clark, a native Californian born in Burbank, went to public schools, completed his undergraduate studies in Logan, Utah, and graduate studies in Boston, Massachusetts. He has also lived in New Hampshire, Western Massachusetts, France, and Germany. Beyond his writing and vagabonding, Clark has worked, variously over the years, as a graphic artist and copy editor in advertising firms, as a quality assurance engineer for assorted eBooks and marketing firms and, occasionally, off and on, as a public library director. Long a bookman, he has for many years been the proprietor of the online bookstore The Bungalow Shop. Clark is the author of The Significance of Being Frank, a biography of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the 19th century Concord, Massachusetts schoolteacher, radical abolitionist, and chronicler and biographer of the lives and times of John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Clark is also the author of another collection of stories, The House of Great Spirit, and the novel Jacob’s Papers.

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Copyright © 2015 by Tom Foran Clark.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015913265

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5035-9848-5

   Softcover   978-1-5035-9847-8

   eBook   978-1-5035-9846-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

For Felix Meister and Friedemann Bach

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But O! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

from Kubla Khan

Chapter One

It was in New England in late summer – a perfect place and time for idle contemplation. Still unclear to Richard Emery, who’d just got through four years at UMass, Amherst, was what he’d actually gone to college for. His father had insisted it hadn’t been to get an education but to develop character. Burn! he advised his son.

Burn. By this he knew his father meant he should catch fire: Richard Mark Emery should rise and shine. According to the father, the son didn’t need to do anything in particular except to be, most honestly and deeply and completely, himself. Heraclitean fire is at the heart of everything, his father had often told him. Search your heart. Whether we run, walk, sit, daydream, or sleep deeply, the fire is burning.

Lying in the backyard hammock of a western Massachusetts friend one afternoon, Emery (he liked being called by his last name) searched his heart. There was so much to know and be and do. Outside of the aching, overarching desire to mate with goddesses – the sacred siren phantasms of his ineluctable lust or craving, screaming genes – Emery didn’t know what he wanted. He only knew that he wanted. How he wanted! He felt his will was less a fire than a flood in him, rising high over the banks. The urge, the urge, the urge. But, what to do? What to do?

One idea rose up with sudden force and clarity: Emery would board a boat bound for Europe. He’d go to foreign shores among total strangers and walk everywhere. He’d go to sea and see the old world and its treasures with his own eyes. He’d walk from Amsterdam to Paris, then on to Florence and to Rome, turning north to Munich, Copenhagen, Stockholm – those havens – and meet girls here and there and revel in the art and architecture all along the way.

Walking was a means of transportation he could afford – he hadn’t saved much. He was hoping to earn wages, to be a worker on the cargo ship carrying him, but it didn’t happen like that. Emery sold his bookshelves, stereo, pots and pans, and mandolin. He bought a backpack and boat fare for about the same price as a one-way airplane ticket and was soon one of eight passengers in four cabins on a Rotterdam-bound Polish freighter.

The M/SR Polansky departed from Wilmington, North Carolina in fierce weather on a stormy September morning, while it was still dark out. With high winds lashing at the boat, lightning cracking the sky, and thunder rumbling over the ocean, the ship was loosed from its moorings. The boat tipped and rocked, creaking, churning up waves as it sliced its set course across the angry, turbulent surface of the deep, calm sea.

Eight days later, in glistening sunshine, the ship arrived in Holland. From Rotterdam, Emery took a train to Amsterdam where, for the better part of a week, he walked in art museums. Then he hitchhiked to Paris and, after eight or nine swirling days amid its miracles, Emery made his way south to the village of Grez-sur-Loing at the edge of the Fontainbleau forest, where he got a job at a quaint bookshop called The George Sand. There Emery pitched in, helping the proprietor Walt Lowen, a Don Quixote look-alike, in exchange for bathroom privileges, a couch to sleep on, and lessons in bookselling.

The bookseller’s apprentice was unpacking boxes at the front of the store in the second week of his apprenticeship when a lanky, deeply tanned guy in a way-oversized beige fur-trapper’s coat (with the thick wool lining of it pushing out not only at his neck but also at his wrists) extended a telescopic lens from the camera at his belly and, crouching down to take a photo of the aqueduct over the river, suddenly fell sideways. Flat on his back on the sidewalk, the guy raised his fist and swore at the blue sky, God in heaven, Jesus Christ, the apostles and the saints, the world’s unfairness, injustice in general and, in particular, this indignity.

Emery rushed out to help the fallen character get up. He had brown eyes and brown hair with just light downy hair on his golden face. He was slightly taller than his rescuer, who was six feet tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, with black hair and, on most days, a red-brown beard. Behind the big front windows of The George Sand, Walt Lowen – with a salt-and-pepper goatee and harshly etched, sallow face – scowled and made vivid, large, unsubtle gestures indicating, Move away from the shop! Move! Move! Go on!

Emery led the guy across the street to the café of the Hotel Chevillon where, over a few cups of café au lait he calmed himself. Then the coffee got him talking. He spoke of his recently arriving in Grez-sur-Loing after a delightful week of baby-sitting the three beautiful daughters of an aristocratic couple living in a huge wedding-cake of a mansion in Brussels, Belgium before going on to Paris from which he’d wandered into the woods of Fontainbleau and stumbled into Grez. He said he’d been born in Canada but as an infant had been abandoned by his parents who’d moved from Montreal to Quebec, then to Trois-Saumons, and on to Riviére-Du-Loup, then still further east and north of these to yet more distant realms higher on the St. Lawrence River. I was sent by my mother and father to be raised by my aunt and uncle – my father’s brother and his second wife – in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

"Get out of here! I was born in Massachusetts – out in the west – in West Derry."

"I was raised in Lawrence, and that’s my name: Lawrence Dulac Pike. You’ve heard of Lawrence of Arabia, no? Well, I’m Lawrence of Lawrence, but everybody just calls me Pike."

The two shook hands.

Everybody calls me Emery. My folks insist they named me Richard Mark Emery after the actor Richard Widmark. Why they dropped the ‘Wid’ in Widmark, I don’t know – just whimsically, I suppose. Emery told Pike he’d decided to hit the road after his folks had moved west to California, to a suburb a stone’s throw from Hollywood. I felt I had four choices – stay in West Derry, move to Los Angeles, walk the Appalachian Trail, or board a freighter bound for Europe.

Pike said he knew about whimsy. "Everybody’s all over the place, telling me what not to do. This absolutely has not helped me – it has not dog-gone helped at all." Pike had made a plan: he was going to ride a bike south through Spain to Morocco, then east across North Africa to Italy.

A bike, Emery pondered. That’s a thought. Listen, here’s what I’m thinking, Pike. I’ll join you if you start in Italy and do the journey backwards.

Chapter Two

It was hard for Emery to say goodbye to lovely Grez-sur-Loing and The George Sand, but Walt Lowen said for sure another lousy dough-faced book lover would show up to replace him, not to worry, so Emery didn’t feel so bad. He and Pike shared a bottle of cheap red table wine by the bridge, then walked to the Garé to board a late night train going down to Monaco, a dazzling place of Baroque casinos, palms, and terraced gardens with views all out to the sparkling ocean.

The sky clouded over even as the two moved on, walking eastward along the Cote d’ Azur to the luxurious Ligurian coast of Riviera villas and chateaus. They walked all the way to San Remo, where they got a ride in a Fiat to Genoa. A second lift took them north all the way to Milan, where they were deposited, at sunset, in the gridlock of downtown – a fogbound madhouse of a million angry honking, gnashing, sideswiping cars.

Pike and Emery, finding themselves at the Romanesque Basilica of San Babila, asked a priest for directions to the Duomo, the central cathedral, a dizzying display of filigree and pinnacles, even in the spare light of just streetlamps, at the center of encroaching mayhem and confusion – streets and cars and human horde. They turned down a side street and went, piazza by piazza, out of the bustling city, through quieting neighborhoods, to the youth hostel.

In the morning, they set out in search of bikes. Pike strolled out and returned with a banged and dented, wobbly, pale blue ten-speed. On a red, embroidered carpet in front of a bike shop on Corso Garibaldi, Emery thought he saw the bike of his dreams, but things just seemed to get better from there.

This shop sold Sergio Rossignoli bicycles – and more: Cicli, Moto, Gomme, Accessori, Vendite all’ ingrosso ed al Minuto. The silver-mustachioed proprietor led Emery into his shop, and showed his his glistening array of fine bikes. He’d look from Emery’s face to a bike, and frown or smile and grasp his chin in contemplation. Then, suddenly, a look of joy spread into his face as he brought down a stunning Mediterranean blue new Rossignoli bicycle that immediately sent Emery’s imagination reeling. And that, indeed, would be Emery’s bike – the bike on which he would set out freewheeling.

With this bike, Emery bought a rack that old Giusseppi the bike-seller bolted on, over the back wheel. To that, Giusseppi strapped Emery’s backpack – then the tent to that. Emery put his other wares in a front pouch attached to the handlebars. He could have got panniers, deluxe twin front and back luggage bags, but he didn’t feel he could afford the additional expense.

Giusseppi was just checking the air pressure in Emery’s tires when Pike pulled in on his claptrap, his pack loaded with wine, cheese, canned peaches, and a dozen candles he’d got from area taverns, inns, and restaurants. Thinking Pike had showed up to sell or trade his bike, Giusseppi waved him away, conspicuously irritated. Emery managed to explain that he and Pike were going to be traveling together. The old man first shook his head, sighed heavily, and rolled his eyes. But soon Giusseppi was overcome with stronger emotions, launching the boys on their journey. It was obvious he was weeping, Pike said later, but he was trying hard not to show it – as if he were sending away his own beloved sons.

Pike and Emery rode right into the heart of Milan, where the old men argued and the women shopped, young men everywhere hovering near the bright faced girls. From the Duomo to the Piazza Scala spread a grand, elaborate gallery arcade, indoors, a covered roof arching across the tops of building walls that once were outdoors. It felt, to the two wide-eyed, eager pedlars, like they were passing through a birth canal into the great, wide world.

They passed by the Sforzesco Castle, a dim green-gray, and went to Bramante’s Cloister, then to