It’s something you’ve talked of doing as long as I’ve known you.’
‘I’m too old,’ I said.
‘So? Get young again. Get out from behind your desk. Show that an old man can make it. And don’t dare write a polemic’.
Polemic is wifely code for obsessive and boring – our sons are more forthright.
And my wife is correct: I have been behind my desk for too long. Writing fiction, I have been seeing through my protagonists’ eyes, living their traumas. Time has come to raise and risk again my own head above the parapet, see with my own eyes, experience my own adventure. Latin America is tempting. I am obsessed by its history.
I wrote the best part of two novels in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. Two 16th century mansions form the Hostal San Nicolas de Ovando. The manager set a trestle table in the tower. The river lay below. I would imagine those first tiny Spanish ships lying at anchor. I would imagine sunlight flashing on breast plates and helmets, the strike of steel-shod boots. They were small men, the Conquistadors. Most had little education. They were filled with superstitions. How could such men in such small numbers capture vast Empires? I have read modern historians. I find them wanting in explanations. Though what do I know? I’m a high school drop-out. And I admit to prejudice. My great grandfather was a famous Spanish terrorist – El Tigre del Maestrazgo. His mother was executed by firing squad. He conquered much of Spain.
Cortés set out from Veracruz and conquered Mexico. I intend to travel all the way south from Veracruz to Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego. Cortés rode a horse. A Honda 125 will do me fine. All I wish to conquer are my fears. I have faith in the bike. I am less sure of my heart. Will it cope with the rigours of the Altiplano?
More positively, I may lose weight.
1906: My father sits beneath a thorn tree in northern Kenya. He and his business partner Jack Riddle have been in Ethiopia buying horses. They travel with sixty porters and livestock. Jack is scouting ahead for water. My father writes in his diary a reminder to order a new dressing case from Asprey, a Bond Street purveyor of luxury goods – hairbrushes, clothes brush, beaver-hair shaving brush, cut-throat razors, all with ivory handles. My father will supply the ivory.
2006: I buy a used green shirt and Clancy Brothers sweater at the Age Concern shop in Hereford. My wife asks whether I plan auditioning for a job as a garden gnome. I retort that I am flying to Boston with Aer Lingus and hope for an upgrade.
I fail with the upgrade. However, the immigration officer at Boston’s airport is Irish American and appreciates the sweater. He asks what I plan doing in the US. I plan travelling by train to Dallas, crossing into Mexico by bus, buying a motorcycle in Veracruz, Mexico, and riding to Tierra del Fuego. The immigration officer is two years short of retirement. He checks my date of birth.
‘You’re seventy-three.’
‘So?’ I say.
‘What type of bike?’ he asks.
A Honda 125.’
‘For real? A 125?’ He grins. ‘That’s a pizza delivery bike. You think you’ll make it?’
I have doubts but what else should I do with the last years of my life? Sit at home and watch TV?
The immigration officer stamps my passport. ‘What does your wife think?’
‘She’s pleased to have me out from underfoot.’
My ex is more concerned. We have been separated for twenty-five years. She collects me from the airport and drives me to her home in Providence, Rhode Island. In the car, she says, ‘This thing you’re planning is really dumb. I’ve been talking with people. They all say it’s dumb. I mean, going through Colombia and places. And the roads, the way those people drive. You’ll get yourself killed.’
I take the bus next day to my adopted daughter’s home in Duchess County, New York. Anya reiterates the imagined dangers. I have a history of heart attacks. Why deliberately put myself at risk?
‘It’s a man thing,’ I explain.
And why take a train south to Dallas? No one takes trains.
I am about to write about the Americas. I need to see the US rather than fly over it at comfortable bombing height.
Dallas, Friday 28 April
My forty-eight-hour train journey from New York ends late afternoon in Dallas, Texas. I have slept in a chair the past two nights. Don Weempe collects me at the Amtrak station. Don and Jane and their daughter, Elspeth, are old friends who visit England regularly. I haven’t visited Dallas in eight years. Dallas is a great city and the Weempes are generous and considerate hosts. So why does Don plot my death?
Don is a heavy-built six-foot-four-inch good ol’ boy, third-generation Dallas, a graduate of Texas A&M University. He makes his money spreading concrete over Texas. He and three friends plan leaving tomorrow at five in the morning on a bike trip. Texas is big and Texans ride big bikes – too big for an old Brit, even a Brit preparing to ride from Veracruz, Mexico, to Tierra del Fuego. In Texas, a Honda 125 doesn’t rate as a bike.
I am to follow the weekend bikers in Don’s Hummer with their gear. The Hummer is in Don’s front drive. It looks huge. It is huge. Back home I drive a fourteen-year-old Honda Accord. My sons are ashamed to be seen by their friends in what they describe as a ‘Granny car’. They tilt the seat flat and pretend to be reading a newspaper. Now I lie awake worrying that I won’t be able to handle something as big as the Hummer. I worry that I won’t be able to keep up with the bikes. I know that Don has a Harley, leather seats and studs. I’ll meet the other three riders in the morning.
Texas everywhere, Saturday 29 April
Five in the morning and Don reverses the Hummer out of the drive. I climb in behind the wheel. Big! Wide! Scary! Home in England, my sons tease me endlessly for driving slowly and holding up the traffic. Now I must follow Don on a Harley and Jack, an airline pilot, on a BMW GS 650.
Rain falls steadily. I hope it will slow the bikers down.
It doesn’t.
I follow their tail lights onto the freeway. We speed through Fort Worth and halt for breakfast around seven. Paul joins us, a lawyer on a vast Honda cruiser with a seat the size of a sofa. The bike is a recent purchase. Paul has all the kit: suit with armour plate, million-dollar boots. Unfortunately his boots have filled with water.
We turn off the freeway onto country roads wide enough to be motorways back home. No cops, and the speed edges up. The bikes out-accelerate and out-corner the Hummer. I lose a hundred yards or more on each bend and have to work at catching up. The speedometer touches eighty, eighty-five, ninety miles an hour. My sons won’t believe
