We hit the tarmac running. Dropped out of the sky like two athletic raindrops, backpacks and all, not even a slight buckling of the knees. At least that’s what it felt like as we slowly taxied to the terminal. A short flight from Belfast to Europe’s capital of clean vice and stroopwafels and we were on our way. No nagging sadness from apron strings severed, no second thoughts, just the wide eyed unknown.
Amsterdam turned out to be a place of few lessons. We only stayed for a couple of days and in that time I had my first taste of street performing: Arnie, or was it Arno, ah who cares. When from Rome right? Arnie’s voice loud and clear introduced the show, shared our grand plans for travel throughout this wondrous continent and charmed the wallets loose in pedestrian pockets. His skill with devil sticks was as good as I’d seen, he knew what he was doing. By contrast my trembling, sweaty palmed sax playing bludgeoned the ear and made children cry. A flower by the monument in Dam Square, once dazzled and beguiled by the great blue beyond, wilted from the earth never to return. Never have I been so grateful to the police for putting an end to my activities. That night we slept on a plush triangle of grass beside a motorway on-ramp, to me it felt like a memory-foam masterpiece.
The next day I enrolled in hitch-hiking academy: Arnie dived into a near by bin only coming up for air when he’d found a cardboard box. Expertly he gutted and dissected the catch harvesting the usable parts. He printed the words TRUCK STOP, barely fitting the P (as is tradition) and we were ready to go. It wasn’t long before we got picked up by a guy who was unremarkable other than his remark that his dreadlocks made Arnie look dangerous and it was my non-threatening Amish beard that swayed him to pull over. Take note psychopaths.
He dropped us a little farther down the motorway. Now I’ve said I wouldn’t use real names but this is an exception. This man deserves first name immortality for his heroic deeds. The evening was drawing on and our patients had ran thin when a car parked up beside us. Rodger, you saint among saints. He explained he couldn’t take us as he was already late to meet a friend, but that he loved what we were doing and dreamed of taking to the road one day himself. “You guys need a gift from Amsterdam,” he’d said hoisting a carrier bag into view, and damn if that bag didn’t smell good. Easily enough weed to tide us over til we got to Spain. With a smile, a handshake and a tear rising in my eye our White Knight of the Dam drove into the sunset. As quick as he’d arrived he was gone and the world was a better place in his wake. Rodger.
It was dark by the time we got to the truck stop but Arnie wasn’t done yet. He soon found a driver headed to Paris and we settled in for an overnight journey. Long haul truckers are the life blood of the hitch hiking scene, they get us to where we want to go and we break the monotony on long jobs. It’s a win win, one that will sadly die when self-driving technology comes to the fore. All I now remember of the driver is his admirable temper and his aid in securing another ride with one of his collogues to the Spanish boarder. One thousand something kilometres devoured in a single night of broken conversation and restless sleep.
We found ourselves in a small town just south of the Pyrenees, spent the day finding food and raiding a bodega for a cheap five litres of wine. After making camp on a hill just out of town we spent the evening around a fire getting rat-assed and talking shit as gloomy clouds broke against the distant mountains.
Most memories flit away to nothing like sparks thrown from a camp fire, but others, be they good or ill, burrow down like a tick until they are embedded so deeply they become indistinguishable from the self that bares them. The amount of cloud whipped mountain vistas I’ve seen since that day god only knows and of those the ones I recall so vividly number, probably, in the tens. Is it then the emotion that casts this moment in concrete? The feeling that this was it! This was reality! Free from the prescribed, empty and unappealing paths of society’s apparent whim. Or is it the overarching plot that grew from that feeling? That that moment was the first sense tickling affirmation of there being a grander road to forge than school, career, pension and death. A first tantalising toe dip into a current requiring only trust, attention and the will to say yes to embrace. The strange attractor hidden in the chaos.
The next days would see us to Granada. A couple of nights in Barcelona were more or less uneventful. We stayed a night with one of Arne’s friends. Pedro lived in a suburban shack atop a mountain and getting there showed me just how little the party lifestyle had physically prepared me to travel. When we reached the abode I was little more than a wheezing, sweaty, red-faced mess even with Arnie shouldering my backpack most of the way there.
Pedro seemed a quiet, solitary soul who lived only with his pets; a dog; a rat and a mouse. The next day, after a night of spliffs and banter, Arnie and I made ready to leave. Before we left though, Pedro wanted to show me his mouse and so, dog in tow, rat in hand he led me down the side of the shack to a small cage. As we hunkered down I could see the curious and tiny beast emerge from the shredded paper, nose twitching in anticipation. Wide smiled with a glint in his eye Pedro nodded towards the cute rodent then opened a hatch in the cage roof. Carefully he scooped his docile friend up toward his face and mimed a series of small kisses. He smiled as a new thought occurred to him and brought both hands closer together so the rat and mouse could have a look at each other. It happened faster than the eye could see. The rat lashed out and tore out the mouse’s throat, it was dead in seconds. Pedro made a sound that was all at once angry, betrayed, grief-stricken and confused. Oh so gently he lay the tiny corpse back in it’s bed of paper while holding the rat at arm’s length from it’s victim. Arnie and I watched on, dumb-struck and sympathetic as the man’s tear filled eyed regarded the modest prone form. Some long moments later we said our farewells, the last I seen of Pedro was his disappearing into the shack asking pained and bewildered questions of his remaining rodent companion.
Another memory tick burrowed so deep as to never leave me. One of natures cold facts or eye warming tragedies, as if the two could ever be divorced. The feeling of that moment still has the power to move me, still triggers a swell of sadness. A villainless crime where the only true culprit is childlike hope and naivety. Someone told me not long ago that either you learn yourself or the world will teach you. I think those were the words quested for by the feelings Pedro’s loss awoke in me back then. Those and something like: nature will not be denied by belief, nor hope, nor even love. Cold lessons in warm tragedies.
Later that day after trying our hand at hitching we decided on busing it to Granada. The place were we would eventually part ways after months of staying there. A place of truly frigid lessons, hellish tragedies and a metric fuck ton of fun.
Freedom and Modern Musing 