The downside of Italian Cliff Driving

The trip down from the ski resort a couple of days later unfolded at a remarkably accelerated pace from that on the way up. The Italians didn't worry about the possibility of rear ending anyone on these roads, since in a typical example of Italian style team work, they all drove at exactly the same speed.

Every few kilometers there was a pullout carved into the wall side of the road where the carabinieri would pull people over for speeding. (Don't ask me how the logistics of this would work on a skinny two-lane cliffside road -- I have mercifully forgotten.)
Since they couldn't pull everyone over, they would randomly nab whoever was speeding by them when they finished issuing the ticket to the previous person. Luckily, on that particular afternoon, that was us. Though Elvio was visibly bummed, I on the other hand felt deeply grateful for a fifteen minute interval in which death was not a serious possibility.

The cop takes Elvio's license and walks back to his patrol Fiat. Elvio turns to me and asks if I have any cash (something he never, ever did, he always paid for everything). I check my pockets and turn up 5,000 lire (about $5.00, which would've been 15 or so in today's money). He adds it to some cash of his own and finally the cop comes back and hands Elvio a ticket through the window and tells him the name of the nearest obscure mountain village where he can pick up his license when he shows up with the absurd amount of money written on the ticket. Elvio asks the cop if it would be cheaper if he just paid it now. The cop executes a shoulder shrugging, eye rolling, hand gesture combo, accompanied by the Italian version of the word Duh, which I can't possibly reproduce in writing. Elvio hands him the cash and the cop walks back up to his car and retrieves the license.

In Italy the road cops take your license away when you commit an infraction and you only get it back when you show up with the money for the fine. This means that after issuing a ticket the cop watches as you drive off without your license, thereby committing another infraction. Such is the logic of the Italian mind you've heard so much about. (Things may be different today, but why would they be?)

Elvio revved up the washing machine and we resumed puttering down the hill at a much reduced speed, along with other drivers slowed down by the increasing frequency of the carabinieri along the road. Elvio said that besides saving a scandalous amount of money, we'd also spared ourselves a long road trip back to find the indicated village where we'd have to disturb some lone employee of a carefully hidden motorized vehicles office who would rummage around a while looking for the confiscated license and would eventually tell us to try again another day.

Next: are any of these people wearing seat belts?

Cliff Driving, continued...

While the Italians are famous for slowing way down at the table, that doesn't happen on the open road. Is it a backlash from having to drive bumpety-whippety-jerky style the entire time they're in the city? Maybe. The reason hardly matters -- the effect is an insane level of risk.

Are the Italians afraid on the little mountain cliff roads? No they are not. Why not? because on each curve there's a convex mirror mounted on a pole, making it possible to see what's coming around the corner. Why worry? What more could you need?

Since the way to Roccaraso was uphill and we were riding in a Fiat 500 washing machine, we didn't go horribly fast on the way there. That gave me plenty of time to gaze out the windows and take in the stupendous views of the terrain we might land in if we or the opposing drivers failed to make one of the curves. Against a foreground of crosses and memorial shrines marking the departure points of previous travellers, the expansive panorama was made fleetingly more expansive at periodic breaks in the masonry guard rails.

Next: the down side of the trip

Cliff Driving

Italians are skilled at building roads on the sides of steep cliffs, having developed infallible methods over the centuries. (Did you know that a bunch of Italians were brought over here to Oregon to build the Old Columbia River Highway?)

The mountains of Italy are snaked with these roads, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. On one side you have a cliff going up, and to the other you have the cliff going down. If you depart from the road, those are your options -- into, or off of. You might think that with that kind of margin for error, the Italian would become, at least temporarily, a different kind of driver, but you would be wrong.

It's too late at night for me to go on, but at least there's your introducion. To be continued....

Crazy but not stupid

The one precaution we took was for Elvio to park the motorcycle down the road by the church when he came to pick me up. We may have been born yesterday, but not the day before yesterday. We could safely hypothesize (see? safety wasn't the absolute furthest thing from our minds) that for him to come roaring into the courtyard of our building on that thing would be unpopular with my parents.

They weren't microparenting enough to notice that on some dates we strolled out of the courtyard on foot instead of puttering out in the little Fiat. My parents had way too many kids, most of whom were misbehaving horridly, to focus in on any of my innocuous details. They were much too other-preoccupied to wonder, Hm, where's Elvio's car? Why would he choose to park out on the street where it's impossible to find a spot when he can be guaranteed a spot in the courtyard?

I'm lucky that since we usually went out in groups, the motorcycle wasn't the default mode of transportation. I'm lucky that he probably shared that thing with his two brothers, so it wasn't available as much as it could have been. I'm lucky that when we went up to the mountains to go skiing, the vehicle of choice was the Fiat.

Up in the mountains, quite another kind of safety challenge was underway. While far away in another hemisphere tourists were flocking to Acapulco to witness the famed cliff diving, Italians were engaged in an even more extreme sport, known only to themselves and the occasional scared witless American.

Come with me to the cliffside roads of Italy and experience the chilling wonders of Italian cliff driving.

The other vehicle

The thing I loved fourth most about Elvio was that he was not unduly preoccupied with being a man-man. Gender roles were all a big joke to him. He was prone to burst into song, usually mock opera, changing the words from Joe Green's Rigoletto, "La donna é mobile," which meant basically women change their minds at the drop of a hat, to "La donna é un mobile," which meant woman is a piece of furniture. Everything was lampoon material, including trends, social mores, male competitiveness -- and the like.

That's why I found it so peculiar to discover how crucially important it was to him to own a motorcycle the size of a horse. Equally perplexing was how he could've afforded such a thing in his sketchy state of employment. Somehow he acquired the thing and began showing up with it when we went out by ourselves. It took every ounce of his strength just to push it off the kickstand, but once he got it rolling, he was in hog heaven. There was no mention of helmets. What was the use of being on a motorcycle if your friends wouldn't recognize you roaring by with your hair flying in the wind and a girl on the back?

In reviewing my mental strategy for consenting to passenger-hood during my Italy years, I now recognize that it's exactly the same attitude one adopts when climbing into the buggy of an amusement park ride. Does one say, Where's my helmet? Does one say Do you have a license for this? Does one say Have you had safety training for this? No. One hops in willy-nilly with the unquestioned assumption that if this thing weren't safe, it wouldn't be allowed to operate.

So that's what I did. I hopped on, willy-nilly. I trusted the Italian driver to know how to drive like an Italian. Today I wouldn't. Today my mature mind would go further, and notice that Italians have ambulances and hospitals and graveyards just like everybody else, and that would be an indication of something.

We did take one small precaution, however.....

Driving with Miss Doozie, Part 2

Just when I was contemplating the effectiveness of car extraction by horse cart, a blue land rover pulled up behind it. The Mennonites deferred to a higher horse power and trotted away.

The license plate on the land rover said PRICE, which was good news and bad news. The good part was that he had a jeep, a cable, and a wench, even, and could probably help us. The not-so-good part was that he might mention it to my parents, since they knew each other. My father was the Big Cheese at the American Consulate, and this was the Big Cheese of British Honduras: Prime Minister George Price.

He and his driver pulled us right out of that mud, as if they'd done it a million times. I declined to introduce myself, thinking that if I remained silent he might take us for wayward tourists. They helped us climb out the driver side window and back up onto the road to lighten the weight, and I watched mutely as the two men who knew what they were doing got dirty in our behalf.

I didn't mention the incident to my father because I thought he'd decide my driving skills were not sufficient to handle Belize. Though the front left fender had been bent upward by the pulling, my strategy was to hose down the car and pretend nothing had happened. I considered it a small lie of omission, and an easy one, considering my father's lack of observation skills on the domestic front. I wasn't trying to deceive him, I simply thought that to a person who could walk into a living room and not notice that the furniture had been rearranged, a minor shift in the shape of a car wouldn't matter.

A few weeks later, though the bend was on the side of the car away from the house, where my father never trod, Pop noticed. He didn't ask what had happened, as if somehow he knew already. His only point was, "I don't understand why you didn't tell me." He seemed horribly hurt, and I felt crummy about it. Not crummy enough to apologize, apparently, but crummy nonetheless.

Not only crummy, but dumb, too.

I'd forgotten about the consular license plates, which may or may not have remained covered in mud. And there was that other clue: we were the only Volvo in Belize. What was wrong with me? I don't know -- a lack of observation skills?

Today I'd do it all so differently. I'd say "Hellooooo Mr. Price, I'm _____'s daughter! So nice of you to stop, I can't tell you how much I appreciate it." Later I'd tell the whole story to my parents, after which they would express sympathy, not anger, and they'd send Mr Price a nice gift, and it would've become a "funny story" in the anthology of family tales.

But this is now, and that was then.
I for one am glad youth is over. I wasn't my best self.

Driving with Miss Doozie

I brought my buddy Dann down with me and planned to practice on my parents' 1966 Volvo manual shift sedan. The very same Volvo we'd bought in Canada in 1966, had driven across the Atlantic in 1971, had stuffed with our family of eight and driven around Naples, had now ended up with us in British Honduras. Old and bulbous, but good. Why buy a new car when the old one will do the job?

Of the two highways in the country, the Hummingbird Highway going North to South, and the Western Highway going ... yup, you guessed it -- West to East, we set out west along the Western Highway with no particular destination, just so I could practice driving in a straight line with very little traffic to worry about. I forgot about the fact that a flat surface is also a requirement for the inexperienced driver.

The road rolled out unbending in front of us, shoulderless through the swamplands on either side, whimsically changing its surface from dirt to gravel and back to dirt again, with an occasional, inexplicable length of heavily pot-holed asphalt. Fifteen miles out (= a hundred in bad-road miles), the car began weaving back and forth all on its own for no reason whatsoever -- like a fish -- in a random act of car-ness which I later learned is known as fish-tailing. My attempts to correct each swerve by instinctively steering in its opposite direction proved the opposite of helpful, as did the unintelligible instructions yelled by Dann from the passenger seat. Wider and wider went the swerves until, like a frog to the lily pad, the car hopped sideways off the road and plopped into the deep mud.

We immediately sank halfway up to the doorhandles and all I could do was sit there staring ahead of us at the bog and launch a royal navy fleet of super annoyed sounding words. Dann muttered something about watching my language, which further annoyed me -- like who was he to talk -- but when he succeeded in directing my attention out my window, I understood his concern. A face looked in -- a concerned face. A woman's face with brown hair pulled back in a bun and tucked into a small white bonnet; a benevolent face, the face of a person undeserving of being anywhere in the vicinity of such profanity.

"Can we help?" she was asking, leaning down to us.

Beyond her on the road I could see the vehicle she'd stepped out of: a horse cart. With horse attached. Was it one horse, or two? I don't remember. These were the Mennonites, seen frequently around Belize in those years -- the ones known as the Horse & Buggy Mennonites, and the others known as the Rubber Tire Mennonites. Both were helpful, industrious, self-sufficient people who kept to themselves and tread light on the earth.

She peered in while I sat there trying to answer the question. Could they help? I didn't know. How many horses does it take to pull a car out of the mud?

to be continued........

OK, Car-Heads -- Watch THIS!

The link below has got to be the best ad out there for bike safety awareness. It's a commercial that is running in the UK right now.

http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

Driving Lessons

When I got back to Eugene I called some driving schools and started scrimping like crazy to save up the $130 dollar tuition (which wasn't exactly peanuts in 1975). I hadn't dared ask Pop for the money when I was in Belize because he would've offered to teach me himself. My siblings thought I was being extravagant, but I forged right ahead. If there was even the slightest chance driving skills could be transmitted genetically, I was determined to head them off at the pass.

The interesting quirk about my father was that in spite of his blissful oblivion to his own driving errors, he was hyper attuned to even the remotest possibility of anyone else's driving errors. As a passenger he would constantly seem to hallucinate some situation of imminent slaughter and would flip into an absolute panic, suddenly grabbing the dashboard with both hands and gasping horrifically. And my mother, or whoever was driving, would say, "What? what?" half expecting to hear a baby carriage crunching under the car, and honestly, you couldn't even find what he was gasping at. There'd be like maybe a pedestrian stepping off the curb half a block ahead, or something... or a car inching forward at a left turn signal, clocking .05 miles an hour. I never understood how someone could panic over a non-event and yet remain oblivious in the face of repeated life-threatening danger. (As the nuns were fond of saying, "It's a mystery.")

The teacher from the yellow pages picked me up at my dwelling in his small yellow standard with Student Driver written all over it. (After the jungle jeep experience, I insisted on stick shift.) He was the calmest man. About Pop's age. His head was tall, hairless, and pointed, and since I don't remember his name I'll call him Mr. Conehead, since the Coneheads are a people close to my heart. Because he was calm, and because I knew he had an extra brake over on his side, I was calm. Having had up until then a limited number of adult male role models in my life, I was utterly fascinated by the spectre of a Man of Calm.

To this day, I remember everything Mr. Conehead said. Like how when you turn, you're supposed to stay in the near lane, not wang out into the far lane where there might be a car already, coming right up on you. "Now, don't get sloppy!" he'd warn as he honed in on the finer points. I still hear him saying that when I execute certain maneuvers. Everywhere I look I see other drivers making these bubus he warned against, without the palest idea they're doing anything wrong, and I think to myself, "There goes another poor soul who didn't have Mr.Conehead."

You can learn to drive, but you don't really know how till you've practiced for about a year. If possible, you need to practice out of view and preferably out of range of the overly civilized world. That's why I thought that Belize would be a good place to do that, and went back down there.

How I learned to drive

Actually there are two parts to this story: 1. Driving Lessons, and 2. Driving Practice.

As for learning, there wasn't that much to it. I knew beyond a doubt that I didn't want my parents teaching me. My mother was a self-avowed non-teacher, and my father drove like a maniac -- and I don't mean that in a good way. Not like one of the colorful Italian maniacs I was discussing yesterday, but more like a general, all-purpose, universal, one-size-fits-all, certifiable maniac. A hazard to humankind all over the globe for the entire span of his career. I don't say that out of disrespect, but out of respect for the truth. People can have their faults, but after a certain point it's one's duty to warn others.

I could say a lot of good things about him, but at the moment the topic is driving. My mother tells a story about a Neapolitan traffic tangle in which a madman leaps out of another car and prances around my parents' car in a rage, wielding a hatchet. Even the first time I heard the story, my reaction was that the man probably had a good reason.

When I was about 32 he ran a stop sign through a busy street with me in the passenger seat. I looked to my right to see three lanes of cars screeching to a halt beside me. Pop didn't notice, but continued merrily through the intersection without a scratch.

I suddenly realized for the first time that I had a choice. I don't know why it took me that long. I made a silent vow never again to ride in a car that he was driving. I never told him that -- it would have hurt his feelings -- I just silently arranged it.

Next I'll do part one, Driving Lessons, and after that I'll do part 2, Driving Practice. Part 2 is a little hairy -- some of you may want to close your eyes.

Why I learned to drive

A year after I left Naples, my parents moved to Belize City, British Honduras - an unusual and little known corner on the map of Cental America where I didn't mind visiting them as often as possible during their four years there. The first time I went, I met their jungle friend who'd run away from his British parents in India at the age of 16 and lived "out in the bush." He grew his own food and ran a rehabilitation camp for injured and orphaned wild animals. At my mother's suggestion, he invited me on an outing innocuously referred to by everyone involved as a "hike."

We arrived at the base of the hills in a blue landrover, one of the few kinds of vehicles one dared drive on Belizean dirt roads. The smooth, neatly groomed and lined-with-cedar-chips trails I knew in Oregon were not part of this picture. Here, one hacked one's own trail, using a machete. Tarzan was taking me to his most secret inner-jungle discovery, and though he'd hacked a path to it frequently and recently, the ravenous jungle overgrowth had left no trace of it.

He took the lead, flailing through the shrubbery like a human weed-eater. I found it taxing just to follow along without a wielding a weapon. I needed all four limbs to keep moving forward, since ground would routinely give way to rot underneath, leaving you up to your knees in a hole. You had to constantly squelch the instinct to grab onto something as you were falling because many of the available handholds were the thick stems of some kind of evil tree covered with inch-long spines. Somehow, in spite of the frequency of my plunges into the earth, I managed not to grab onto one. Tarzan was falling too. There was no other way to advance, short of a helicopter. Very unlike hiking, this was like some altogether new "extreme sport" consisting of a series of uphill falls alternating with digging oneself out of earthen pits.

I am much too squeamish to describe the exact way in which Tarzan, whose real name was Richard, injured himself on the machete when he fell into one of these sinkholes. Let us just say that blood flowed copiously and we needed to get back to the jeep immediately. Fortunately, we hadn't made much headway up the hill, and the trek back, downhill along the already cleared path with holes clearly visible, went much faster.

But when we arrived at the vehicle and he tossed me the keys I had to deliver the unpopular information that I couldn't drive. So Richard drove himself, one-armed, operating both the stick shift and the wheel, handling the rises and falls of the ground like a bronco rider, with me bouncing and whiplashing along beside him trying to keep my head from smacking the ceiling or frame of the car by alternately gripping the beltless seat, grabbing the dashboard, and encircling an arm around my head. We made it back to the so-called road, and from then on he artfully slolomed potholes at top speed till we reached the mere suggestion of a town, where we found a concrete block clinic with two nurses on duty and no anasthesia on hand. I waited in the hall, squeezing my head while Richard screamed his head off under the needle.

True, knowing how to drive wouldn't have prevented Richard's accident -- but I sure could've been a lot more helpful afterwards. Besides, things could have been a lot worse. I decided I'd work on it. Learning to drive is another story, which I'll tell you if you beg me. What I problably won't tell, at least on this blog because it's too long, is the story of my second attempt at this expedition. Yes, I know not how I got talked into it, but I went back, this time with Richard and Richard's friend. We made it to the secret destination this time. I found out why it needed to be so secret. It may still be a secret, but I doubt it the way Belize (new name) has been relentlessly discovered by the outside world since then.

But if you want to hear about driving lessons, I might be able to fit that in. Not as harrowing, perhaps, but a story nonetheless.

Why I didn't learn to drive

My last teen years were spent in Naples Italy, where I held these truths to be self evident:
1. To drive there successfully, you have to be insane.
2. If you're going to be the perpetually frightened passenger, you will become insane.

I slipped into the role of the relaxed, unfrightened passenger, and kept my sanity. By the time I actually turned 18, driving age in Italy, I was majorly not interested in taking the wheel. My parents were fine with me being stuffed into smoke-filled Fiat 500s with six or seven Italians and being driven around by maniacs. Neither I nor my parents worried, because clearly these people knew how to drive like maniacs correctly -- unlike the occasional American or German driver seen on the streets, immediately identifiable by their attempts to drive cautiously, causing near accidents right and left.

I left Italy at nineteen to attend university in Oregon. I lived in the dorms and had no need or desire to drive anywhere. When I eventually moved off campus I got a bike. By this time I'm about twenty, so now you know why I hadn't learned to drive thus far. I thought I was safer not driving -- until I travelled about a couple thousand miles southward. That's where I changed my mind.

The next episode will reveal: Why in the end I finally did learn to drive.

The Roads of Hell are lined with Moving Vans.

I've been somewhat involved in my sister's move out of Oregon. What little spare time I've had went to that instead of blogging. And I can assure you it wasn't a "bike move" as featured in my blog last summer [see archives August 13, 14, 15, 2006]. No, this move was highly motorized every step of the way -- and like most moves, a never ending nightmare.

I know one thing about hell -- it's a place where you have to pack up every possession you've ever acquired, and move it to another dwelling. When you get there, you have to unpack it all and set up house. The minute you finish that, you have to pack it all back up again and move to yet another destination..... and on and on, into eternity.

As the Flexcar slogan goes (I think): "Sometimes, you just need a car." Had I not finally given in and developed the skill of driving a car, I would've been no help at all this last week. In my teen years, unlike other kids who wanted nothing more than to learn to drive, I was determined to have nothing to do with it. Later on I'll explain what happens when you can't drive and your Tarzanesque jungle guide falls on his sword a million miles from civilization. But right now I'm going to bed.

Cyclist bolts from path of mud for fling with slothdom

You might have noticed I haven’t posted in a while. Sometimes people need a break. Then maybe they realize that the slovenly life they thought they coveted isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. At which point they’re happy to go back to their nice predictable routine, which was put in place for a reason. Or more likely, a hundred reasons. Now they remember what those reasons were.

The truth of it is, I broke down and drove my car for three days last week. There, I said it.

And it didn’t stop there. Once I’d gone that far, everything really went to hell in a handbasket: On Saturday morning I drove my car to the gym. Stupidest thing in the world, right? Wait. I know what you’re thinking: that after driving to the gym, I spent my gym time on the stationary bicycle, right? Nope. Worse. Are you ready? By the time I got to the gym, the inside of my car was so warm and toasty that I notched the seat back, curled up in a ball, and read a book for an hour. Then I drove home.

Ha!
(So far, you are the only one that knows this.)

Look. The weather has been inhuman. I can’t take this freezing cold, all-permeating wetness. Wednesday I used the excuse that I had to schlep a bunch of heavy and awkward items. Thursday my excuse was that I needed to go to a far-away appointment in the middle of the afternoon which on a bike would have taken forever. Friday evening when I left my hideout it was raining just as hard as it was when I left home that morning, only now it was dark on top of it. Remember the formula Lindi and I came up with? Dark + rain + traffic = no bike. So I felt 90% justified in having brought my car – the missing 10% comes from the fact that I could’ve taken the bus. Which I didn’t feel like. If you’re going to throw all your principles to the wind, you might as well do a complete job of it till you get it out of your system.

After a few days of car life, I remember that I didn’t start this bike thing only for virtuous reasons like saving the planet. Another reason was that I thought it would help with my sleeping problems, which it has. Some of my sleeping problems are that (1) I can’t sleep; (2) I get that notorious “jumpy-leg” syndrome, which means that I feel an overwhelming desire to ferociously drum my heels into the footboard of the bed. Getting rid of the feeling by simply giving into that desire proved to be super unpopular with Lindi, so I had to come up with another strategy. I found that riding my bike for a total of an hour a day almost completely took care of it, and I rarely get it anymore. But by last Friday night, after three days of not riding, jumpy-leg was back -- and my sleep endangered anew.

As a reward, apparently, for my “just say no to this weather” attitude, today is balmy, with sporadic sun through random clouds. It's the kind of day when even the most die-hard car drivers would rather be out on a bike.

As you pedal your way around the city trying not to get killed, here’s a question to ponder till I get back to you: Can an 84 year old man with Alzeimer’s waltz into the DMV and obtain a driver’s license?