The Bridge Over Troubled Water

The Bridge Over Troubled Water

The year was 1970. The world had just lived through a difficult transitional decade of the 60’s. Students at Kent State had died on the campus. A cow pasture in Bethel, New York had been trampled by more than 400,000 young people seeking love and harmony and the best rock and folk music of the day. Both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Ted Kennedy was busy extricating himself from his bridge over the troubled water of Chappaquiddick. America had landed at the Sea of Tranquility on the moon, but nothing about those times vaguely resembled tranquil days of peace, love and harmony. I was bursting forth onto the world at the ripe age of sixteen. I had an Italian drivers license that I had gotten without ever demonstrating an ability to drive a vehicle, but rather just a knowledge of common street signs since to do more would have cut into the inspector’s midday meal and siesta (yes, Rome still closed down from 1pm until 5pm every “work” day). I also had $1,000 in American Express Traveller’s Checks (remember those), which I had paid for with cash at the AMEX offices at Piazza de Spagna. I was heading on a charter flight from Ciampino Airport in Rome to Gatwick Airport in London to pick-up a Triumph TR6R Tiger motorcycle at Elite Motors. I went on my own (not a blink of concern from my mother), handled the transaction on my own (the bike was registered in my name with export British plates) and planned my own schedule and trip to get back to Rome over the Thanksgiving weekend so that I wouldn’t miss any school on Monday. Remember, these were pre-cellular days and I was basically incommunicado for three days at an age where most Americans kids have a 10pm weekend curfew.

When people wonder about my ease and comfort in foreign countries of all sorts, I harken back to that solo trip in 1970 that forced me to find my comfort zone in the land of the unknown. When I arrived in London I didn’t even have a hotel reservation (something I would never dream of doing today). I found a guest house near Paddington Station, having taken the train in from Gatwick (what cab fare I had, I planned to use the next day to find Elite Motors). I spent about six hours at the dealership doing paperwork and getting basic accessories like a luggage rack attached to the bike. When I think of the thousands of accessories one gets or considers getting on a modern motorcycle, its hilarious how little there was in terms of options available for a bike like that. It didn’t matter, I was on an Adrenalin rush of the sort that allows you to ignore weather, wrong-side-of-the-road driving and a general lack of knowledge about where I was going. Somehow I managed to get myself to Dover for the last ferry over the English Channel (no Chunnel yet), only it wasn’t to Calais as I had been expecting, but to Boulonge, 35 Kms to the south. I didn’t have a hotel reservation there anyway, so no matter. I found a roadside motel and slept with one eye out the window all night to make sure my new beauty remained in my possession.

By 6am I gave up trying to sleep and just hopped onto the bike and set off in the general direction of Rome. That meant driving towards Lyon and hanging a left towards Geneva in order to make my way to the Monte Blanc Tunnel. There were no troubled waters to cross from France to Switzerland to Italy, even in those pre-EU days, but there was a long tunnel in late November under a large and snowy Alp. I did not see a car coming or going all the way through the 11.6km tunnel. That is an eerie feeling to say the least. In fact, it got somewhat surreal and I think I came close to hallucinating from the blandness of the tunnel walls and lack of other stimulation. But then I popped out in Aosta and the briskness of the chill in the air immediately woke me up. Luckily, there was no snow on the road. What wasn’t so lucky was the rain downpour I had to drive through in Milan as I beelined it to the Autostrada south. I learned about aquaplaning on a British twin and was reminded to slow down. If you Google Map from Boulogne-sur-Mer to Rome, you get a very straight line of 1,031 miles. Fifty years ago that route was 1,200 miles, so there has clearly been some road changes over that time. I had left at 6am and I pulled into my garage in Rome at midnight. Eighteen hours through every kind of weather and 1,200 miles. That means I averaged over 65 mph and since I only stopped for gas as needed, in those days of no speed limits in Europe, it was quite achievable. At the age of sixteen, I wasn’t even sore. Adrenalin is as good a drug as any pharmacology sold at Woodstock.

That was my defining 1970 event. I crossed no bridges of note, there were no troubled water of consequence and I was not weary, feeling small and had no tears in my eyes. As for friends, they could be found in Rome, but they fully understood the lust for a British twin and were anxiously awaiting my return to get an opportunity to ride a Triumph. Since those simple days, life has gotten much more complicated and every road seems to have some sort of bridge to cross and plenty of troubled water in need of easing my mind over.

This thought came to me today as I have begun to finalize the building of my very first bridge. Not only does it not cross troubled water, but it crosses no water whatsoever, only the feint promise of water. It is an eight-foot wooden bridge sold as an unassembled garden bridge. After assembly, I had Handy Brad look over the intended point of crossing of the dry faux creek bed, that was made as a landscape feature. As is his habit, Handy Brad was having none of my slapdash balancing of the bridge on the existing rocks. He put in two concrete piers on either side of the creek bed that have rebar in them and could support the Brooklyn Bridge. The decomposed granite on either side of the bridge gives the impression of a friendly casual garden bridge, but I’ve walked over that bridge and it could carry P.T. Barnum’ s circus elephants across it (for those of you who know that particular bit of Brooklyn Bridge lore).

What would I say about troubled water and the need to bridge it? I would say that there is always troubled water in life and there is no way to avoid it under the best of circumstances. The trick is to find a way across and to not let troubled water put you on your head. The only troubled water on this hillside made itself known to me this morning. I got an email from the state of California telling me that my voter registration had been cancelled. I immediately called the state voter number indicated and got a live person, who after getting my particulars, said she could not see my data and that I should call the County of San Diego voter registration office. As annoying as that was, I did so and got another real live person. He confirmed my registration and noted that the state had cancelled some duplicate and inexplicable older registration. He assured me that I would get my mail-in ballot after a October 5th and had three ways to use that to vote by mail, by ballot Dropbox or by taking it to a polling place on Election Day. There is no mail-in vote fraud problem and this episode personalized that knowledge for me today. So, my personal bridge over troubled water on this hilltop gets me solidly to a better place and assures me that there is no troubled water to cross.