CHAPTER 2

THE PLAN PRE-VISITED

the hole in the fence

INDEED,

Times have changed

and the conditions of hitch-hiking

have dramatically changed along with them.

A possible alteration

--carrying a frightening potential menace--

was told to me,

at the outset of my voyage, during that port storm at Calais,

by an experienced hitch-hiker

in the ground floor lounge

of the

Port Authority's Building:

"In France, now,

there is a 10,000 franc fine for hitching on the motorway."

(This bit of information which i didnt completely trust

hit me pretty hard.

'Asking for lifts

at motorway Service Stations'

is my favorite hitching method for this French route.)

He suggested i do what he does.

He only hitches just BEFORE the pay-booth entrances to the Motorway.

Technically, he is not ON the motorway.

Maybe someday i will.

So far i have been fortunate

doing what i do.

When the necessity to change is confronting me in the real,

i shall change. So far i have been fortunate.

Twice, in this last month, in the South of France,

i had to slink out of sight:

from

a cruising police van

in my first fright-encounter with this menace.

The second, and only other similar fright,

came from

a team --two motorcycle police--

buzzing into the Service Station,

cruising slowly, slowly.

They decided, then,

to become pedestrian

and wander about, each in his separate trajectory,

to silently, dangerously amble around

through the interior spaces of the Station.

I was able, again, to tip-toe out of their sight,

take a long crap in the crapper

to emerge later. Thankfully, they had gone.

 

But that was in the South of France.

In The North, here,

between Paris and Calais,

i had never, ever, in all my years of hitching, encountered

police.

In this phase of my hitch-hiking voyage,

other menaces are

more probable.

In any case, i can do nothing about the police menace beforehand

except to be

passport-in-order,

clean as a whistle,

attractively dressed.

In the past, the worst that 's happened to me

was to be driven in their police car to a motorway exit.

Having checked out the fact that i was not an escaped murderer,

they didnt, beyond that, give a damn.

There was not even an accompanying verbal menace.

They expected me to start my hitch-hiking onto the motorway

as soon as they motored out of sight.

--For what else could i do, without a car in the middle of nowhere,

and one very good strip of road,

with loads of cars and trucks going to where i want to go,

--called The Motorway--

alive and kicking just in front of me.--

Once, i was transported off the motorway,

dumped,

and

told where to hitch to get back onto the motorway.

Their reasoning was:

"Inside a car, you are O.K. on the motorway.

You are technically no longer hitching."

They were only always doing their required job,

Upholding The Billion Laws the common man is subject to.

Upholding, blindly,

"No hitch-hiking allowed on the motorway."

WHERE AM I?

I am on my return voyage.

I had made it into Paris from the South via Lyon a week ago

and have been staying with my Parisian friends, Bob and Julie.

It is time now for the return

to my home base in England.

I now expect changes in my hitching conditions.

The chessboard has already shown me its alterability.

Using a pause in my Parisian life to prepare my future,

i decide to check out

my standard, secret, best solution

for getting out of Paris,

going North on the Motorway.

But why should i have a secret solution in France?

To know why,

we must look for

--cherchez...

... la femme! the woman!")

In France,

if you are a man, and therefore not a woman ,

with no one else around,

standing on the side of the road soliciting lifts

takes hours and hours

before some car stops for

you.

I had stood several times

at the side of the road with dozens of others,

using the known, standard locations,

standard formulai,

--learnt from travel guides--

to hitch-hike out of Paris.

Those were my innocent days.

In the summer time, three feet separate you

from the hitch-hiker on the right,

and three feet separate you from the hitch-hiker on the left.

And the drivers drive by,

and their flow lines

do not come within 50 feet

from where we,

--the standard, side-of-the-road hitch-hikers--

are gesturing, futilely gesturing.

 

And i stand there and stand.

And some cars separate off from the flow

and come ambling... low throttle... towards us...

...and cruise alongside,

somehow, nearly always, stopping

in front of

a

a woman.

I realized quickly

(quickly relative to the mass of hitch-hikers who seem content to stand and wait,

not quickly relative to the few ,

who, like myself,

enjoy the challenge of doing things differently,

doing things one's own way)

that my hitching energies

should only start

when these gals have all flown-the-coup

and i have somewhat fairer competition.

Other hitch-hiking males seem to be fair competition.

But that's all the praise i can give it.

If only one other male is hitching,

i strike up a deal with him:

that whoever gets a lift first

would ask the driver if he could take the other as well.

This lessens the competitiveness.

makes living more cooperative, therefore, more pleasant.

 

But, if there are three or four of us males around,

it takes five times as long to get a lift.

Somehow, we don't aid one another.

It is better to be alone.

Unhappily,

and this is a fault in myself

i experience

the presence of other hitch-hikers

as, truly, a downer.

This objectively-competitive aspect of hitch-hiking, i truly don't like.

Therefore, i had to find a unique solution that no-one knew.

Moreover, the standard solution had another great shortcoming:

It didn't satisfy

my larger sense of self.

MY STANDARD

UN-STANDARD-SOLUTION

My solution involves getting,

by public transport,

to the first, northbound motorway Service Station out of Paris,

and there, anywhere in the Station's forecourt,

talk individually to the drivers.

Talking, letting the other get a glimmer of my unique resonances,

gives me a better than even chance

at a 'YES' response.

Year's ago --indeed beyond my memory of how i did it--

i had figured out how to get to a particular Service Station

on the motorway going North out of Paris.

I had gone through a complicated, search process.

It was not information available through usual channels.

Motorway Service Stations

are generally

tucked away in the countryside,

way out, beyond the city limits,

tucked too distant for anyone without a car.

So, usually the idea of

searching for A Service Station inside a city,

is a futile one

and, thus,

not even thought of.

This particular Service Station is unusual,

being actually inside of Paris.

It stands back to back with

a massive, many-building,

housing project.

This housing project stood up the road from a bus stop

on the no. 149 bus-route

which wove its passengers through tin-fenced industrial

estates

and other humanly bleak, treeless, proudless

stretches

in the

periphery of very poor, very working-class Paris.

For years on end, looking through the 149 bus window,

absorbing this bleak landscape moving by,

i would visually be surprised by clumps of

Publicity and Political Announcements

pasted up by the local

French

Communist Party,

and sort of see them

as small, isolated, flower beds

strewn here and there in this grey-grainy,

human

desert.

No other signs or advertisements were around.

Nowhere in central Paris was the local Communist Party so

dominant.

Nowhere in central Paris was System Glitter so dim.

No doubt, this has changed too.

I think the Communist Party has been politically routed in France.

I know The Soviet Union, its loving parent, is no more.

It died 5 years ago, at 75 years of age.

To get to that 149 bus

to take me to that housing project,

i need to take the Metro to the north-east corner of Paris.

Looking at the Metro map i realize that

i can get from Bob and Julie's to my Metro destination

along two routes.

I choose to take the shortest one,

simply judged by the number of stops,

--though it had one more change-station than its alternative.

 

If for some reason this 'shortest' path

proved unexpectedly

difficult,

i could return by the other route, checking it out in reverse.

PATH COMPLEXITIES

At the Metro station, 'Fort d'Aubervilliers',

one stop before the terminal, i exit as i had always done.

But this time without the heavy weight of a ruck sack.

This 'shortest metro path'

the one that i just took,

i now know, has complexities

not shown by The Metro-Stations Map.

 

At Stalingrad station, where i make a change of trains,

there are four flights of stairs to go down

and unusually long, long corridors to walk through

and finally several flights of stairs to go up.

My cart with wheels

--my ten year old, trustworthy wheeled, rucksack-carrier--

can magically transform the heavy

task

of carrying my heavy rucksack along the

flat corridors

into nearly-unconscious, nearly-dainty,

handle-

pulling.

But, in descending and ascending stairs,

i would have to support and guide all its weight,

including the cart's sturdy frame and wheels.

What extra work that meant!

Therefore, changing at Stalingrad, with its too many stairs,

is to be rejected,

except in

emergencies.

When hitch-hiking,

all excess work is to be avoided if possible.

You never know how much energy might be demanded at some

future time.

As for my particular self, I'm no longer a young guy.

My 59 years require me to always be looking out

for energy-conserving solutions.

At my age,

living marginal styles of life,

requires me to be wiser, more scientific

than my youthful,

--more body-powerful--

self

needed to be.

BUS BLUES

At the Metro station, 'Fort d'Aubervilliers',

one stop before the terminal, i exit as i had always done.

But this time

without the

heavy weight of a ruck sack.

Light. I feel light and real good.

Adventure. This is what exhilarates me. Makes me young.

Bounding out of the station,

i go in the direction of the no. 149 bus stall;

just like i had done tens of times before.

There's a bus in the old 149 stall.

It seems ready to leave.

I'd better jump on first

and then, moving or not,

question the driver.

 

But getting closer to it, i realize its not the no.149,

nor is he preparing to leave that instant.

So, i jump on and,

lovingly,

tell my dilemma to the driver:

"Pardon me. I'm searching for the no149 bus

which goes to the stop 'Henri Barbusse'

which used to start exactly from here."

And the driver matter-of-factly tells me:

"That bus route has been discontinued.

I go to a stop called 'Henri Barbusse',

but it is in the

...(and here he mentions an unrecognizable name).

There's another bus that goes to a stop

called 'Henri Barbusse' in the Corneuve."

That name, 'Corneuve' rings a bell.

I think it was the name of the working class district

the no.149 wended through.

"Go to the office and ask someone there!", he counsels me.

Striking out through the quiet, nearly empty, desolate, open-air,

bus station,

I pass the broken shell of the old office on the way to the new

one.

I'm excited.

Its a lucky thing i decided to check this route out first

without the weight of the rucksack

and the implicit pressure that 'being on the road'

means for me.

For, once on the road, i don't like to turn back.

TURNING BACK

Only once in my hitch-hiking life,

committed to the road, did i ever return to home base.

The cause of my checkmate had been fundamentally

rhythmic.

The particular time of the week

in a post-holiday time of the year

had eliminated lorry traffic leaving England.

I was a couple of days too early.

i was at my special Service Station in England

--where lorry drivers crossing The Channel congregate--

20 miles north of Dover.

This was when Dover was a hitch-hiker's dead end for going to the continent. If one found oneself at Dover, the only thing left to do was to pay the exorbitant price of the ferry, and on the ferry search for a lift.

Though it had taken three hours of difficult, hitch-hiking

to get to this special Service Station,

I had to except the obvious.

I went all the way back to my friend John in London

to pass a couple of days

before again setting out.

With

a no turn-back principle pressing on me,

every local problem has to be solved on the spot.

Forward progress has to be made.

This pressure acts like a humming motor in my body.

With it running, sleep is impossible.

Forward progress has to be made.

Today,

being an exploratory trial,

i have the luxury of

lots of time to spend

-- if necessary, i could return tomorrow to continue exploring--

and no heavy burdens to bear

--not even am i carrying

my usual plastic bag

with a book and a notebook within it.

A pure sense of adventure

surges happily within the deepnesses of my fibers.

I am in search of information.

Am i hitch-hiking?

Has my real hitch-hiking begun

with this dry run?

Not asking for a lift,

i am asking for information.

And maybe i am also posing a larger question:

Are all life's projects, like this one, preparable for?

What a deserted part of the universe!

What a sense of empty devastation this bus station posesses!

Maybe this bus station is closing down?

A KNOWLEDGE GUY

I enter the office without knocking.

Two guys are in it.

One, the younger, is standing in front of an open, internal office.

The other, seated behind the only desk in the internal office,

immediately radiates to me

a sense of pride in his own

knowledge.

 

But the standing guy,

probably a bus driver,

with the excitement of someone escaping boredom,

dives into serving me:

into finding the number of a bus going

to the old no.149's stop, 'Henri Barbusse'.

He grabs a map

out of a pile of old, identical-looking

bus-route maps

discarded in the corner of the office,

studies it, and says,

"This map is no good" ,

and turns to the guy

to whom i would have instinctively, originally turned

--the knowledge-solid-looking guy behind the desk--

and poses the question

that the knowledge guy must have already heard

me pose

when i first came in.

Quick and quiet as inhaling ,

cool as a guy who knows he knows,

knowledge guy

tells me

with absolute surety

that the no. 249 bus now travels on the old 149 route.

That, the boarding stop i want,

can be gotten to

at the next Metro stop, 'Quatre Chemins',

two stops before the terminus.

There, at the corner, i must catch the 249 going towards Grugny.

So out into the open air i fly,

still lightheaded and still enjoying this adventure.

Indeed, enjoying it more,

as more and more it becomes apparent

that what i am doing is absolutely

necessary.

And were i to have skipped this preparatory enactment,

i would be in the same predicament i now find myself in,

but with the painful addition of my rucksack heavy-weighting me.

I would have been obliged to lug it down and up

flights

of more Metro stairs

than my calculations foresaw,

and,also, on top of the extra physical demand,

the tense, mental demand to keep my attention fixed on

guarding it.

At this recent revelation of where i now had to go,

were i to have had my heavy rucksack,

i would have

begun to shrug

my not-yet-aching shoulders,

shrugged them for a half-a-minute or a minute at most,

and then, accepting unbudgeable reality, got myself together

and shoulder on

having lossed a little enthusiasm for a minute or two.

After all, on the road, there is no turning back.

"Fare Forward, Voyager!" is its primary principle.

God only knows what further changes have been made

on my hitch-hiking

chessboard!

Into the changing waves i leap.

Into the unchanging Metro hole

to the side of Fort d'Aubervilliers'

bus station

---a bus station i i probably will never see

again---

and, now, once more down into the humming guts of the Metro

system,

to be whisked one stop.

EXITING QUATRE CHEMINS,

spews me out into a teeming street of people.

Immigrant population. North Africans for the

most part. Wow! What an atmospheric change from the bleak bus

station one stop away.

It's almost freaky. Like the discontinuities in an acid trip.

Through the breaks in the crowd

and inside the heavy, grey mist submerging us,

i see

a halal meat shop. Wow!

And then looking around me, i spot another immigrant foodshop

whose foreigness, also, resonates with my sense of adventure.

I tell myself that i shall stock-up on food for the voyage exactly in

this neighborhood. What an extra treat!

Besides, i know that it shall be as money-cheap

as i could expect here in

France.

Around the corner i find the bus stop

and, with the help of a black-African grandmother, its direction to Grugny is

confirmed.

I'm on my way again.

The kids around me

--for mostly they are kids going or coming from secondary school--

are first generation french kids

with parents from black Central Africa or arab North Africa.

They are handsome, strong,

excited and abubble with their youthful intrigues.

I'm an invisible, elderly person for them.

The perfect social location for observing.

I feel that,

and i feel the urgency of my quest:

to arrive at Henri Barbusse,

and i feel, also, my traditional need to look out the window.

So i get caught in-between

and can't now give you another line about these youth,

nor about the neighborhood we were to pass through.

The bus comes. Everybody piles on in an un-queued, noisy rush

and i, the last to climb on,

easily pose the Henri Barbusse bus-stop question

and receive the busdriver's certainty-making answer,

"It's a forty minute bus ride. I'll tell you when."

CLOSING IN

And off we go.

And after a forty minute or so bus ride,

i begin to recognize the neighborhood.

And there, up the road, is my stop.

Its name has changed to the longer name,

"Mermoz,

Henri Barbusse".

But it's the same stop.

I recognize the corner,

and the supermarket

in which i always bought food for the voyage.

Quickly, i walk to the housing project.

And all the while i am asking myself if there are any changes.

 

If there are, they ain't evident.

I recognize and don't recognize the buildings.

What remains similar is the general layout

and the atmosphere of the neighborhood.

Real tranquil. Real quiet.

Its been misty all day. Now it's just starting to lightly rain.

Because i'm not carrying anything

and because i am going back to Bob and Julie's

--where i could dry my clothes on the electric heaters--

the rain isn't a major annoyance for me.

Just another feature of this adventure.

Were this to be the real hitching day,

this rain would be more than an annoyance.

Getting wet means usually staying wet

which means asking drivers to take a sloppy, wet being

into their dry and clean,

private space.

Such a proposition is a no-goer in France.

Everybody in the street, wherever i had gone this last month,

wore spotless clothes.

Only the SDF's broke this code of dress.

And i'm sure they have a hell of a time hitch-hiking.

(As for what the SDF's are, i'll get to that later on in this writing.)

NEW european CATEGORY as a sign of the times

and Dressing Styles as people signals

No why wait?

Didn't i hear of NFA's in England? Sure.

Both letter-triplets began frequently to appear

in people's current jargon

about the same time.

In the last five years.

A sign of the times.

'No Fixed Abode' and 'Sans Domicile Fixe'

mean the same thing

with the same nuance: an incurable disease.

SDF's and NFA's are individuals who bear this social disease.

They have an aversion to being immobilised

via the possession

of

an immobilized 'home'.

Because NFA's or SDF's are roughing it,

--sleeping in abandoned buildings--

--parks--

their style of dress

best suitable

is not best suitable for a house dweller.

An SDF's dress accepts dirt.

It would be, for them, energy-consuming madness

to maintain

spotless dayly dress.

For fixed abode people, spotlessness is easy and pleasant.

For them 'Cleanliness is next to Godliness.'

They are 'instinctually' repulsed by dirt.

But dirt and ruggedness, of necessity almost, accompanies social adventure.

Thus, 'instinctually' is bred into 'Good People' an aversion to real adventure.

Thus, 'instinctually' is THE SYSTEM maintained within us.

The other side of the coin,

the side of THE SYSTEM'S RULERS,

is the side i haven't taken but have read about:

Ghandi, in the 1920's,

--as a young man, studying to be a barrister

in one of London's, hoity-toity, Inns of Court--

frugally spent his money and meticulously kept his accounts.

 

A very great slice of his week's expenses,

--many-fold greater than his food bill--

was his laundry bill!

The social rules required him to be

as immaculately clean as a Baron or a Duke.

Two and three clean and ironed shirts per day.

Several changes of suits per day, etc., etc.

Of course, these are the standards

of those who wouldn't ever conceive

of doing their own laundry.

Such 'immaculate cleanliness' revolts me.

I met it in meeting the British Barrister Class.

And i met it once in the immaculate house of a Baroness.

She had three effective slaves, called 'servants'

to insure the immaculateness of her outward show.

 

'Immaculateness' for me is associated with Tyranny.

So dress is effectively waving a flag:

telling the driver how the hitch-hiker lives,

telling the other who one is.

The guys, with the homelessness label,

radiate independence. They are playing their own game.

They don't care what the other's response is

to the way they dress.

I admire them.

When i encounter them, i put myself in question.

unlikely DRESS

In one part of my hitch so far,

--i have forgotten exactly where--

i encountered this guy who seemed to be attached

to two luggage valices

in the same way as i was attached to my rucksack.

This was on the forecourt of a Service Station.

No one but hitch-hikers would carry their luggage with them.

What astonished me about this hitch-hiker

was the unlikely dress he wore.

He had on a very clean, well pressed, suit,

with white shirt and tie. He was well shaved

and, in a nutshell, dressed for white-collar work.

I met him at two separate Service Stations.

He didn't want to talk.

He waved me away.

He was about forty years old.

He was more successful at hitch-hiking than i.

He got a lift before me twice.

But i didn't study his technique.

Of this i am sorry.

I am certain that i would have learned something.

But i was in a rush and i saw him, mildly, as a competitor.

Styles. Ohh the various styles that exist!

My style is to be clean and shaven and neat

and at-ease and well-spoken.

No suit. Leisure time clothes.

A perfectly reasonable, happy guy.

BACK TO THE PRESENT

So i am walking on the housing project's paths and sometimes on its muddy lawns,

wending my way through this vaste estate,

super aware of the specific dangers that might exist here:

the security guards of this housing project

and young bands of kids itching for excitement.

I see neither. Its a peaceful scene.

And then a backround roar of cars and trucks

suddenly penetrates my awareness.

The roar is coming from behind a twenty-foot-high mound of dirt,

left over from the days of the housing project's original construction,

and, now, by always-at-it Nature, irregularly grassed over.

I remember this mound!

Yeah. Yeah. I'm arriving!

Up and over the muddy mound my body, unbridled, surges.

Yes. There is the motorway!

And

Yes. There is the Service Station!

But it looks dead. The lights are out.

A discarded-looking car slouches, as though it were ill,

on one of the Station's asphalt paths.

 

Yet, there is some activity. A car pulls in.

I can see it

through the wire fence

and the tall bushes growing on the Service's side of the fence.

I see the driver going to the Service's store to pay for his petrol.

And now here he comes, driving his petrol-fed beast out into the

motorway roar.

But before he could fuse with the raging flow,

cruising slowly, outbound,on the Service's exit road,

he passes near me.

His car-number plate has '66' as its regional part.

That's not from here. Plates from this part of Paris have 92 or 93.

So, there is non-local traffic using this Services. But not much.

What a difference between now and what i knew to be

the usual flow through it years ago.

But why get upset? Everything changes.

Let me now see how i can solve this next, local problem:

getting into the station area.

WORKING ON A CHANGING CONSTANT

Getting into the Service's private space has always been the problem here.

Its management, evidently, does not invite pedestrians.

It says "No Passage!!!"

with a mute, 5 foot-high and spiked, wire fence.

Sometimes my found solution to their mute "No Passage"

was a big, nearly invisible flap,

--clipped out of the wire fence--

which moved aside as you took hold of one of its free edges.

This was the royal road.

But the next time i would come through,

i would find that royal road repaired

and find, twenty yards further on,

a new, small, squeezable-through hole clipped out.

The local kids, i suppose, are my benefactors.

I don't have a clue why they make these holes,

Maybe, they want to extend their game-play beyond the fence?

Maybe, they want to get on the motorway?

Maybe, they want to get into the Service Station

--which lies on the same side of the fence

as the motorway?

Some of their mates might have cars

and to rendez-vous with them

in the Services car park

requires such fence-surgery.

Anyway, for one reason or other,

they,

like me,

want to get to the other side of this fence.

I am humbly thankful

that the concrete world's logic

allows many alternative uses

for one and the 'same' thing.

The freedom achieved by the local children

--to not be blocked, in their play, by a fence---

extends my freedom as well.

And, with regret, i know that

as the children's world shrinks down, shrinks away

from the vacant lots and other, uncivilized stretches,

so my freedom shrinks as well

--from the vacant lots and other, uncivilized stretches.

I am losing my freedom to enter the undefined.

Fences are being put up nearly everywhere.

Every space is becoming function-specific

by the unrelenting application of success-minded energies.

Children have, no longer, space to freely play.

"Every space is Private Property"

according to the State's

Holy Law

and developing Private Property requires

Planning Permission given by State Administrators,

and Planning Permission requires

explicit naming of its usage.

And so the sane world of perfectly insane people

increasingly strangle their own childrens' freedom

and believe they are only preventing

black, murky 'chaos' from seeping in.

All adventurers travelling marginal routes

must depend on accidental gifts of the marginalized.

When i discover a new hole in the fence,

i become happy as any

kid.

This local problem of getting into the Service's area,

for the moment, amounts to nothing more

than getting to the other side of this wire fence.

This obstacle is moderately formidable;

it is five feet high

and topped by spikes

--the woven fence's endwires

sharpened into

upright points.

This obstacle was my original reason

for setting off today without baggage.

Maybe

the hole in the fence

i had used four years ago is no

longer there?

This was the only local obstacle whose solution

had varied many, many times.

And these solutions, these holes in the fence,

were created by

others.

I merely found these holes. I didn't create them.

And, i had also found

that the hole in the fence i had last used

was usually professionally corrected;

professional, social guardians of the fence were also at work .

My mission,

as i unconsciously first understood it,

in my earliest glimmers of a need lurking here,

was to find out if

a hole in the fence

is waiting for me,

and, if not, figure a way around this obstacle fence,

without the burden of the heavy rucksack.

So here i am --in a rain starting to beat down--

before the fence

that i have to pass through or

climb over.

Let me see what it has to offer.

I spot a first possibility!

At its corner, where the motorway fence joins the Service area fence,

the fence is bashed downwards.

A simple step-up on this crushed part

and one could easily jump down on the other side.

No doubt, this was a much used hole in the fence.

It looks well worn. Approaching, to closely examine this easy route over,

i recognize,

within the mangled mesh of crushed down, wire fencing,

windings of barbed wire.

Fucking hell! The guardians of the fence at work again.

But they didn't reweave the damaged fence

--remake the fence anew--

as they would have standardly done for as long as i remember.

As though they were short of money,

they only have cheaply enwrapped some barbed wire into the partially crushed fence,

making it perilous to risk climbing over. (Perhaps, their penury is

related to the dead-look of the Station?)

In any case, that's that

hole in the fence plugged.

Not totally.

Maybe i can find something to cover the whole mess,

protecting me as i climb over it?

Let me try to find the new hole in the fence.

Later, i'll search for something to cover this barbed-wire mess.

Continuing my study of the fence,

i discover,

30 feet away, the motorway fence has been worked on from below

by my benefactors,

who i am now supposing to be pretty young,

because this particular hole in the fence

seems inadequately small,

sufficient for ten year olds, but hardly more.

The bottom section flaps up a bit.

If i had to, i think i could crawl under it.

I would have to spread newspapers and plastic bags

to keep me clean of the heavy, clay mud.

I'd have to open my rucksack and push its contents under

piecemeal.

But that's all i would have to do.

This hole in the fence is potentially usable.

I go further along the motorway fence

to see what else it might offer me.

Fifteen feet further,

where the clay mud has black grease marbling through it,

and rusty, greasy motorbike detritus scattered here and there,

a cut-down, 10 foot sapling,

with its roots still well-anchored in the ground,

stands adjacent to the fence.

The fence's spiked top here has been pounded into horizontality.

My benefactors at work.

You can now stand on its flattened top

and jump the five feet to reach the ground.

And you can get to stand on its top

by first stepping

onto one of the remaining branch stubs

sticking conveniently out of this remnant tree.

Your easy second step is to the top of the fence.

Your third step is the jump out

beyond the six-inch horizontal

spikes.

But i'm 59 years' old.

Jumping those 5 feet,

even though i would land on soft , clay soil,

seems a little risky.

I haven't jumped from heights greater than 3 feet in years.

I'd have to do some preparatory exercises

before i took on this five-foot jump.

I truly don't have a clue as to how my body would react to such a

shock.

To jump without preparation,

would be a most unscientific move for me,

though, no doubt,

it is a ridiculously, easy demand on young adults.

But, voila, a second solution comes to my mind.

If i could cover

the horizontally bent spikes

with some heavy cloth,

i could roll on my stomach

over the fence's spiked-edge top.

So, both,

the meshed, bob-wire hole in the fence

and

the hole in the fence next to the tree,

need some material to clothe its sharp points,

its barbed-wire spikes.

And there's the crawl-under hole in the fence

which needs newspapers to spread over the clay mud.

Not a bad haul of holes in the fence!

And that's without mentioning

the five feet jump, hole in the fence,

that i might unscientifically go for,

if trapped here with no viable

alternatives.

Though the rain is still beating down,

i decide to reconnoitre the unknown-to-me,

backside of the Service Station,

where it abuts, further on, on this housing project.

Maybe, there --where i never, ever, had reason to go--

is an unobstructed way in?

Maybe the world is fundamentally ironic?

Maybe, through all these years of solution-finding, my puffed

pride

 

was

 

founded upon

a trivial

ignorance?

I back plod, returning toward the Station,

alongside this very real, physical restriction to my path liberty

(now taking the form of a wire fence)

...to where

the wire fence

no longer separates me from the motorway

but becomes, after making a right angle,

the proper guardian fence of the Service Station...

....through it, i see the Service Station building,

its petrol pumps and a few cars--

plod...

...to where

the wire fence attaches to a 15 foot high, impregnable

concrete wall.

I pass a heavy, steel door embedded in the wall.

It's locked and obviously an unbeatable obstacle.

So on i continue; the rain still mildly pelting down.

I am concentrated. A real problem.

I still haven't found a definite route into the Services.

The obstacle to my entrance is now this 20 foot high, concrete

wall,

forming here an awesome, continuous back-boundary

of

the Service Station's area.

Dynamite or serious climbing gear seems the only solution here.

In this dreary part of the housing project, the arse-end part,

car-parking seems to be its sole purpose.

But what's this?

A mud and grass and thorn-bush covered, 10 foot embankment,

--another leftover from the days of the project's construction--

flows up the side of the wall to nearly half its height.

I decide to climb on it. Who knows what i might see from on top?

Maybe a real easy solution might be staring me in the face?

With my mind filled by this hopeful fantasy,

i climb between its thorn bushes till the very top

and find absolutely nothing hopeful.

But lo and behold, as i am climbing down again,

carefully pushing the thorned branches to the side,

i spot a man's black suitjacket lying in the mud.

Its completely fucked with mud and water

and years of unidentifiable crud.

But, picking it up, i realize,

"this suitjacket is just the heavy material i need

to cover the fence's horizontal spikes

adjacent to the remnant sapling."

And it could also help cover the meshed,barbed wire

if i decide for that hole in the fence.

The rain has started to come down heavier than ever.

I make for a momentary shelter

in one of the ground-level,

open, basement-like areas

below one of the houses of the housing project.

A housing project employee,

busy with his own work, passes by

without even seeing me.

I guess this part of the world is as anonymous as

any street in the teeming center of

Paris,

or, this guy is cool enough to fool me

and is making detailed, mental notes of strangers

hanging around.

Anyway, he goes and the rain, five minutes later,

appears just as indifferent to me. That is to say the rain

departs.

Only puddles remain, and soaking wet, muddy clay.

Ten feet from the remnant sapling adjacent to the fence

i throw the suitjacket into the grimy mud.

"Nobody would be wanting to use that", i reason.

It'll be here for me in a couple of days.

I must definitely carry a little load of newspapers to cover the

jacket

so that i can belly over it without getting dirty.

A solution more or less exists now.

In the passion of the actual hitching day,

climbing that fence should be quick and relatively easy.

Good.

ONE MORE LOOK

But let me take one more look at that Service Station.

Let me see if i can see what is happening.

There's been great changes since last i was here.

This Station has gotten dangerously quiet.

It almost doesn't seem to be in business.

The blazing lights,

heralding from far a Service Station for motorway drivers,

creating an island of life in grey, rainy days, like this,

are missing. Only the shop shows a glimmer of light.

I walk over to the Service's side of the fence

and peer through it and through the bushes behind it

into the Service area.

It still looks dead. Nearly abandoned.

Though cars, at times, enter it...get petrol

and drive pass me into the roar of the motorway,

it still doesn't seem alive.

Is it?

Suddenly, i spot a figure moving through the still architecture

of this nearly abandoned world.

He is wearing a wornout, red-speckled uniform.

An attendant of the Services.

He walks to a green metal bin.

A hand-painted word is splashed in white on one of its sides.

I don't read it. Its an irrelevance for me.

The attendant throws something in the green bin.

He has now begun his return movement probably back to the store.

He's the nearest he's going to be, to me, now.

Why don't i scream out?

Why not?

"Hey!!! Msieu..."

and the moving impersonal figure turns

and walks directly towards me

and magically grows into a young, smiling guy.

He's about twenty four or twenty five years old.

The separation between us reduces to ten feet

of bushes, grey air, and the

wire fence.

"Hi! Is this place working?"...

He looks at me. He doesn't understand.

Why doesn't he understand?

O God, i'm talking in english!

Switching into french with a somewhat, accented english-american

accent,

"Pardon. j'ai parle anglais. Je voulais savoir..." ,

and he, in french, cuts into what i am saying, no doubt because i

am taking a long time saying it --as though i was some novice at

the language-- and, smiling, says in french,

" You want to hitch-hike?"

and i answer with an enthusiastic "Yes!".

He quickly then says,

"I'll come out here and open the door for you

when you give me a ring."

"What's your telephone number?"

"483 9476"

"What's your name?"

"Eric. I work from 6 AM to 2 PM.

Only Sundays and Mondays I don't work."

"Thanx Eric! Thanx!"

What a 'hole in the fence' i've discovered!

Wow. It's as good as i've ever had.

Wow.

Though my body wants to celebrate

my mind does not let me loose.

I must still,

according to its reasoning,

find a telephone

to use the morning,

of my return here.

MAGNETIC FRAUD

"Wow", "Wow", "Wow," my mind repeats to me.

Walking back and feeling like i'm galloping back.

Because I don't remember seeing a phone booth on my way here,

i don't follow the same return path through the housing project.

My body is surging

like a huge, young doberman straining at the leash.

I can see nothing

but passing, vague outlines of the

project's greybuildings.

I can concentrate on nothing

but the driving desire to find a phone booth.

And, as if by magic, a phone booth appears

exactly where i exit from the housing project

and step onto the pavement of the road

running along the project's front side.

This local problem,

'Find the Telephone Booth from which to call Eric in the morning',

is not completely solved.

You need a phone card

to phone now in France from a public booth.

It used to be the coins of the Republic that gave life to a public

telephone. Now, in these four years absence,

the keys to the telephonic Republic have been switched.

Magnetic cards, now,

miraculously dialogue with

the modern telephone's computer mind

and, perhaps, even more miraculously

lets itself be altered by the telephone machine.

We are obliged to carry these nearly live things

around in our pockets in order to use the public phone.

Just think,

if each public accessible utility required a different card?

And if a finite number of different cards

satisfied all of one's money-purchasable wants,

Why not unify the different cards into one card?

(No problem for today's technology.)

It would be a universal money card!

Each person on the planet carrying one or two or three, ...

Who shall be allowed more than one?

What's obvious is that one's money agilities

would multiply immensely with more than one magnetic address.

It would be as valuable as a legitimate, different second name would be

in today's bank-account game,

or, in today's State Passeport game.

Who sets the rules, wins the game.

In computer systems,

What may the common person query?

Can i query and receive the method

as to how to add or subtract memory in the Universal Store,

creating

second addresses?

Surely , some persons shall be able to do that

in order to account for births and deaths.

If i possessed this answer, then i would be able to give it to my friends.

So there must be a rule which determines who can have this answer.

But then i know:

Who sets the rules, wins the game.

Is there, of necessity, a European-wide mafia of money?

Is this mafia pushing us into Europe?,

pushing us into a single currency continent?

Money, originally precious stones,

then precious metals,

then specially printed, special paper

and now, in the ultra-modern world-to-be

is fairy-like transformed into

information

in

magnetic memory.

Who controls this magnetic memory?

( Will the ultimate, substantive difference

between me and a billionaire

become

a different, rearrangeable arrangement of 0's and 1's?,

and the rearrangement doable in an unguarded

microsecond?,

converting £365.000 000 000 to £365 000 000 000.

Give me the language used,

access to the operating system

and i, overnight,

can make billionaires of my friends

with no difficulty.

What imaginative thievery we are inviting for the twenty first century! )

Who sets the rules, wins the game.

WHO CONTROLS THE MEMORY

WINS THE GAME

 

What an obvious GLOBAL fraud!

OR , maybe it was always fraud and we never cottoned on?

Infinite Depth and Uncertainty

So i will need a workable phone-card the morning of my leap

into hitching North out of Paris.

And i know that the phone-card in my pocket

must be nearly out of units. I never read the

phone booth's dim-written, liquid-crystal read-out,

--its computerized message to my phone-card--

telling me how many calls i have left.

For some reason, there is a block in my soul

against having anything to do with this message.

I can decide to get a new card.

But it's quite a lot of loot to pay for security

I probably will never have further use for it on this voyage.

My use of the phone in France is rare.

Or, i can jump into the unknown.

"I'll risk it" i say to myself.

Because i do not delve further

to determine whether i have a working phone card or not,

i am puttting my global hitch-hiking problem in jeopardy.

In failing to pose an additional local problem,

"Is my phone-card working?"

i am accepting risk.

"But the risk is actually small.

I will always be able to rig up a telephone call to Eric.

I'm sure of that".

I refuse to think further on this uncertainty.

Away, Thought! Away to other problems!

You have to leave some problems somewhat unsolved,

or you'll go out of your head.

There's an infinite depth to each 'thing' in the Universe,

and therefore, an infinite depth to every practical problem.

If i try to dive into every hole and corner

of my global hitch- hiking problem,

into the local problems of the local problems, ad infinitum,

i would never reach the first day's real hitch-hike. I'd go mad.

Confronted by uncertainty,

my intuition vibrates to me a feeling of

security or

insecurity.

I can delve no further than to listen to my feelings.

I feel sure about solving 'the telephone call to Eric' problem.

TRAPPED IN MY OWN SUCCESS

So i start my walk back

to the 'Marmoz, Henri Barbusse', no.249 bus stop.

The street is vibrant with people.

I am still elated by my successes.

My being is autonomously moving, with an unforced, confidence,

from one problem to the

next.

i have the feeling i can penetrate any obstacle.

.

My mind naturally turns to the return voyage,

which as i know

is the exact reverse motion

of the real voyage i shall take.

"These kids and adults walking the streets now

must know the best way into the heart of Paris.

They live here. They are the geniuses of transport locally.

Why don't i ask one of them?"

and sure enough ... the first guy i stop gives me

without a milisecond of hesitation

the information i sought.

"Walk that way and that way to the tramstop

and then go a few tramstops to 'Corneuve'.

There's the Metro."

I was using the wisdom learned in the1960's.

Trust the people. They know.

I follow, without hesitations, the directions

that this guy (and, in confirmation,

another guy at the tram station) gives me

and refuse

the infinite number of diverting choices

beckoning me,

-----at each instant of my return---

to go in search of something else,

to get away from this hitch-hiking madness.

For my sensitive part of me

is not satisfied by the life of the conquerer.

It craves nourishment.

It reacts to an unknown neighborhood seen through the tram

window:

"Why don't i explore that for an hour?"

But the sensitive part of me

is only asking questions and not commanding.

i push my body into the tramway

not allowing my desire for freedom

to get the upper

hand.

Hitch-hiking from here to Calais is my urgent problem.

Everything else is veiled irresponsibility.

I step off the tramway

and the entrance-hole

to the Station, 'Corneuve, 8 Mai' is ten steps in front of me.

I look at the large and alive shopping district surrounding me.

I feel a bit cheated.

I am tempted to break this obsessional drive.

But something within refuses dialogue and pushes me forward.

It has taken control and refuses

to stop and look and love and experience

this unknown-to-me corner of the world.

It won't let me. I must rush onwards;

concentrate only upon my immediate priority

and refuse to bend before my 'fickle' desires.

I am not free as i would like to be.

I am being driven by something within.

I thought it was my higher mind.

But now i recognize that this willful base is of other material.

It brooks no questions. It is not of the higher, imaginative mind.

It commands me

'To determine, in practice,

the best, initial location

for hitch-hiking Paris to London'.

My mind and my body are subservient to this willful me.

It is this willful me that triggers my panics

when things go a little wrong.

It doesn't like to think. It likes to do.

It definitely has to do with a profound and serious sense of security.

And, for the moment, my security is entirely housed in hitch-hiking.

PLACES AND THINGS TO BE FORGOTTEN

The Metro terminates at 'Corneuve 8 Mai'.

'Fort d'Aubervilliers' and 'Quatre Chemins'

are its next two Stations.

The Metro station i have to aim for,

from now on, in hitch-hiking Paris to London,

is 'Corneuve 8 Mai'.

Goodbye to Fort d'Aubervilliers and its bus station!

Goodbye to the 149 and the 249 buses!

Its tramway action for me. And am i not better off?

The tramcar is smooth and speedy. The ride just 5 minutes long!

HOW MODERN TECHNOLOGY BRUSHES THE OLD AWAY!

Palais Royale or Stalingrad?

Still working backwards...

I now have the problem of the best route to take.