The Perfect Vehicle by Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Author:Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1997-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

SIX

Three things are weakening: fear, sin, and travel.

—the Talmud

I interviewed Robert MacNeil over the phone, went to PBS headquarters for a batch of press releases, and sat down to the job my friend had phoned about before I left for New Hampshire with Franz: to produce a florid, idolatrous piece of hackwork on public television. I succeeded, and it ran as a color insert in the weekly magazine I had always wanted to appear in, though not in this way. Then I had the check—the one for five thousand dollars—that salves every hurt, and I began to muse over what to do with it. Windfalls, of course, must be spent immediately.

Actually, there was no contest. Riding was now a need, a creature that had to be fed. I asked Franz how much time he could take off from the shop, innocent of the fact that he could spare none, since the profit derived from owning a small motorcycle dealership was as substantial as vapor. He did not tell me he could not actually afford to leave for more than a day or two; he said that October might be passably slow, so he figured we could take a month. And then came the suffusing pleasure of planning an itinerary, living with anticipation, the almost sexual delight of the zillion details that busy up pre-trip life and begin to elevate it into the truly surreal. Franz brought out his huge collection of maps, which included the old version of the Blue Ridge Parkway guide, superior, Franz felt, to the new. He was the authority on the Ridge, which he considered one of the greatest motorcycling roads there was.

After that it was wide open. I consulted guidebooks, travel articles, friends, and long-buried desires. I had never been to the Deep South, although I had been romantically involved with the Civil War when I was a girl. I also wanted to see the Paradise Garden constructed by the Reverend Howard Finster in his Georgia backyard; Finster is an “outsider” artist who had the call to build and paint and glue and mirror over stray bits of anything. Franz wanted to visit good friends in Tallahassee, both artists, one a college teacher and bike freak as well. Someone told me about a motel in Nashville with a pool shaped like a guitar; I read about something called the “singing waters” of Pascagoula. There was the Natchez Trace Parkway, and there was food, for I longed to be in a place where every table sprouted bottles of hot sauce and biscuits came with every meal. But it was New Orleans that would be the point to which everything drew.

We got in shape by listening to Cajun music and arranging what matters needed arranging before you disappear for a month. We went to a big summer’s-end Cajun festival on the piers in New York, and when we saw that the food had been trucked up all the way from Randol’s Seafood & Restaurant in Lafayette, Louisiana, Franz and I put that on our map too, sealing the pledge in the usual way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.