Youth Hostel, Marina di Massa, Italy. It's still there!
I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.
-Augustus, Roman Emperor
-Augustus, Roman Emperor
When lifts were difficult to get as a pair, Twan and I hitched singly and met at our chosen destination, so that I was alone when I reached the youth hostel at Marina di Massa in Italy
Trudging through a gateway, I glimpsed a girl ahead just joining my path in the sunlit hostel garden. Her hair was long and blonde with a fringe above the eyes, and she wore a pair of navy bellbottom trousers. When she glanced back and called, “Bonjour,” I caught up with her. Why was such an exquisitely pretty girl with such limpid blue eyes saying hello to me? Girls with a face like hers generally minced by with their noses in the air.
Trudging through a gateway, I glimpsed a girl ahead just joining my path in the sunlit hostel garden. Her hair was long and blonde with a fringe above the eyes, and she wore a pair of navy bellbottom trousers. When she glanced back and called, “Bonjour,” I caught up with her. Why was such an exquisitely pretty girl with such limpid blue eyes saying hello to me? Girls with a face like hers generally minced by with their noses in the air.
“Bonjour,” I returned
warmly. “Do you speak English?”
She did. Not too competently, it seemed, but her English was better than my French – and so
charmingly spoken too. For something to say, I asked where the reception desk was.
When she’d pointed out the way with a reply – si charmante! – I asked a second question – and then a third, and a
fourth too, until at last I came up with her name. It was Melissa, and she lived
in Lyon .
She was an art student, she said, holidaying in Marina
What a shame. That
would leave me little time to get to know her, and I badly wanted to do that. And
then she was gone – for she had ‘things to do’, she said.
The hostel was
sited right by the seaside, with access to a strip of beach and a lagoon formed
by a semi-circular ring of rocks.
The hostel grounds, the sea, the ring of rocks and the lagoon
An amusing detail I recall is that the place was managed by an energetic middle aged couple known to all the hostellers as ‘Mama’
and ‘Papa’, terms of endearment showing they were much loved. Both were short
and fat. Every morning at eight, Mama would waddle into the boys’ dormitory, anxious
to start the morning’s cleaning, and draw the bedclothes from forms still frozen in
sleep. If the body thus exposed was clad in just its underpants, as many were,
she would take a step back in mock surprise and cry, “Oh, nudo! nudo!”
I wondered wryly
if Papa had the enviable task of plucking covers from slumbering girls and calling out,
“Oh, nudo! nudo!”
One afternoon
when Twan was gone somewhere, I was on the beach chatting with an American fellow who nodded at the invading waves crashing in plumes of spray on the
great ring of rocks that served as a breakwater.
“Why don’t we go
for a swim out there?” he suggested.
I voiced my doubts.
Any aquatics of mine had been limited to the inert waters of a public swimming
pool or to the tame waves of Lake Winnipeg . In both cases my feet had been firmly planted on the bottom. Would
it be wise to commit my limited swimming skills to that choppy wash?
But my companion,
glowing with confidence, spurned my doubts. It would be all right, he said.
Anyway, he would be there to help if I got into trouble. The patronising tone
of that remark I took as a slur on my virility, so I felt compelled to accept the challenge.
“Okay,” I mumbled,
waving my reluctance away.
Following his
lead in swimming across the lagoon, I clambered onto the rocks and surveyed the churning
and creaming advance of massive waves.
"Well, I don’t
think…" was all I got to mouth of my misgivings before my guarantor just launched himself off the rocks and plunged into the swell. He broke surfaced at once, swam seaward several
yards and shouted,
“Come on in! It’s really good!”
“Come on in! It’s really good!”
Okay… If he
could do it, so could I.
Steeling myself
for the plunge, I jumped…
Sea and sky vanished at once. Suddenly I was wallowing in the dark, straining vainly to touch a toe
to bottom. I threshed water strenuously, and when I broke surface an invading wave was looming before my eyes. Twisting my head behind, I spied a glimmering ridge of rocks. Where was my
companion? But I had to escape that mass of boulders fast or risk collision with
it on the face of that foaming breaker.
This was no
swimming pool or lake. It was a heaving sea that needed to be repelled. Here
there was no paddling on your back and lazy looking at the sky like I had done as a child on Lake Winnipeg. You had
to battle with these waves and master them – or they would master you! At fifteen
or twenty yards out, my strength and breath were gone, and he who had sworn to ‘be there’ if I needed any help, was an absent actor in this pathetic
drama of sea and human folly. My only option now was to make a frank confession
of failure and attempt a return to the rocks.
I began the
struggle back, but lacked any real faith that I could make it. The sky I’d glimpsed with
every breath on my outward course now vanished for measurable seconds, for every wave immersed my head, while my ears hissed as I hung in the liquid element.
After the second or third immersion, I broke the surface once more to spit a broken
protest to my invisible companion, but I suspected when I went down
again that he who’d coaxed me into this fix only supposed I was playing the
fool.
“I can’t get
back!” I shouted at the sky when I came up again and went down directly, swallowing
a quantity of water.
Is this it then?
I reflected, suspended in a sightless, aqueous limbo with that desolate hissing
in my ears. Is this the end? Is this how it is to end? Was I born and did I grow
up and did I come to Europe just for this?
And was the thinking
of thoughts such as these what people meant when they said your whole life passes
before your eyes when you are about to die?
When I came up
again, I saw the rocks quite close, and then I felt the push of a hand on my
back. But more than that long overdue effort, it was a surge of sea that rammed
my chest against a yellow rock, glimmering with a beard of green seaweed and razor-sharp
with shards of barnacle shells. But now I had a hold on solid rock, and I meant
to keep it! I pushed back against the swell and looked down at my torso, stiffening
my arms to resist another breaker that came crashing over my shoulders. I saw
that my chest was bleeding with multiple pinpricks. But the wave failed to
submerge me.
Bleeding was I?
How wonderful! Lovely red blood to show I was alive!
I hauled myself to the summit of the rocks before the next surge, while my Olympic champion companion launched himself into
open water again. He’d very likely learned to swim in the Pacific, I reasoned,
and wished to show what a wonderful aquanaut he was. However, I was less
impressed by his swimming than I was by his utter unreliability.
Leaving this
scene of uneasy memory, I trod cautiously across the rocks and dropped into the calm
waters opposite and side stroked back to the shore, where I sat on the sand and
thought for a long time.
The lagoon and the ring of rocks
It wasn’t long
before Twan came up with another dodge to economise. It seems he’d heard that
if you assured Mama and Papa you had no money, they would allow you to sleep in an outbuilding free of charge. I told
him I wouldn’t like to pull the wool over their eyes like that, but he said he
would do the talking, so the next night we moved into a hut with no beds and
slept on an old mattress on the floor.
Several times
before Melissa left for home I ran into her and tried to make the most of the
opportunity offered, but after a fleeting chat she was always off somewhere to
do something or other. I could never engage her attention for more than fifteen
minutes together and began to think she was just teasing me when, just before she
left, she gave me her address and said she’d be pleased to receive a
visit from me if I ever came to Lyon. If? I would make it a sacred duty to do
so!
When Twan and I
left Marina Rome Pisa
In Rome
Roman Colosseum
Some chunks of
marble remained in the forum, that’s true, but the fallen walls and the rows of
broken pillars tufted with weeds and wild flowers silhouetted against the sky,
such as I’d seen in pictures – the forum of my imagination, that is, – eluded
me. Eluded me, I realised much later, as a consequence of policies to make of
timeless remains profitable modern tourist attractions.
Roman Forum
Saint Peter’s, I
had to admit, was mostly made of marble, and the place did impress me.
Saint Peter’s Basilica
I know it did because I sent a postcard home immortalising my thoughts about it: ‘It must
have cost a bomb to build’, I wrote. But when Twan and I attempted to rest from
sightseeing by seating ourselves on the front steps, we were
promptly pressed to clear out by one of the Pope’s Swiss Guards.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will
give you rest” (Matthew 1128-29).
What hypocrisy! Saint
Peter’s Basilica was one of just two public buildings in the whole of Western Europe where we were refused a little bit of rest. The other one, I described earlier: the Casino at Monte Carlo
We visited the Victor Emmanuel Monument,
Victor Emmanuel Monument
Well, you could
hardly miss it. I thought the structure impressive at the time. Horses! Chariots! Wings! – Lots
of things to set one's fantasy aflame: a throng of columns, pretentious
dimensions, extravagant mass. What more could you want?
And that’s it: Rome
Another postcard
home announced departure for Venice
On the road alone to Venice, Florence
Michelangelo's ‘David'
But this time my reaction was not: “Oh, nudo! nudo!” This time I looked and learned, and marvelled to see how the sculptor had fashioned from hard marble a figure that looked so human, right down to the muscles that swelled in the hands and the fingers that curled on the thigh.
At dusk that day I was deposited on the roadside in the low-lying land somewhere west of Venice
Twan and I were in search of no special sights in Venice because we knew of none, but took pleasure instead in the arrant quaintness and strangeness of a city built on water, distinguished by its
labyrinth of shimmering canals and the vast expanse of Saint Mark’s Square.
Saint Mark’s Square, Venice
A trivial detail
of our leave-taking of the town lingered with me because a subsequent event riveted
it in my memory. Two girls, plain of face and pale of complexion, were seated on the
waterbus that bore us ashore, each with a hand clasped in the two hands of a tanned
Italian lad. Holiday romances evidently.
On agreement with my travelling companion to meat at Innsbruck in Austria, I found myself
in early afternoon wandering along a road somewhere near Bolzano, when a
car turned upon the shoulder and its driver, a sergeant in the American Army, as
it turned out, offered me a lift. It seemed he was stationed in Italy
The sky was
golden and the sun was low when I returned to the road, empty of traffic
now, and twilight had arrived when I spied two figures trekking ahead: girls.
Overtaking them, I saw they were the same pair I’d seen on the waterbus that morning
having their hands held by two Italian lads. I learned further that they were
English, and that they were hitch-hiking like I was.
We three then
trekked together, exchanging information about ourselves until the fall of
darkness, when we abandoned the road for the neighbouring turf and selected a suitable patch of earth to sleep upon. These girls were not prepared for the life of the road as I
was, for neither of them possessed even a sleeping bag. They simply stretched
themselves on the ground, while I climbed into my bag. The evening was cool,
since we were now in the foothills of the Alps , but one of the girls dropped promptly off to sleep. The other remained
awake, chatting with me. After a time we began kissing.
“I’m cold,” she
said at length.
Mine was one of
those tapered sleeping bags, as I’ve said. There was not much room inside it,
but…
“Well, you can
come in here if you want to,” I suggested hopefully.
She stirred at my
words and soon we were closely cocooned. Fate would have it that for one night
I was bound closer to this girl whose name I don’t even remember than to any other of my entire life before or since. So closely
bound in fact that love-making was an unlikely option. But that was just as
well, for I was still unsure I could accomplish the task with the necessary
panache. She was plain-looking as I’ve said, but she had a girl’s body all
right and I passed much of the night in getting to know it by touch. Indeed, I wondered how it was that such plain looks could enkindle
passions that burned so sleeplessly. Maybe she wasn’t plain
after all. Maybe that was just a prejudice.
Next morning I left the
girls to cross the Brenner Pass to Austria and go rolling down the mountains to the hostel at Innsbruck where I had arranged to meat Twan.
Modern view of the route up to the Brenner Pass
As we were once more in a land of decent beer, and again lacked any idea of what sights to see, we entered a gasthof to sample a glass or two. There, we got into talk with several locals, one of whom could speak a little English. After several beers I asked him where the toilet was. He pointed the way and, always interested in learning something of other peoples’ languages, I asked:
“How do you say ‘Where is the toilet?’ in German”?
“Vo ist der scheissehaus, bitte?” he replied with a guffaw.
The next day Twan came up with another bright idea. Outside the hostel he pointed to a mountain chain that rose steeply in green forests and grey ravines to summits of seamed and fissured peaks.
The mountain chain above the town
“Why don’t we
climb up there?” he proposed.
“Climb up there?” I said, in disbelief. “Are you
serious? What for?”
He might as well have asked me, prairie lad
that I was, to climb to a star. But he was
serious all right.
“It’d be a great view from up there,” he mused.
“But wouldn’t we need equipment?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said. “We could just walk up.”
“But what about if it gets dark while we’re
up there?” was the next question.
“We’ll just sleep up there,” he said
simply.
Once again I
stifled my doubts and agreed, hoping I wasn’t making a mistake like I did at
Marina di Massa.
After paying our
accounts at the hostel, we made for the bottom of the ski run to begin the ascent
of this first mountain I’d ever tried to climb in my life. The way was open and
the slope gentle on the zigzagging path leading up to the top of the ski run, but
once or twice a cable car came creeping and squeaking up behind us and passed
overhead with wagging heads hanging out of windows and hands flapping. They were mocking
us!
The cable car and the zigzagging path (modern photo)
In late afternoon we came upon a green-painted alpine chalet at the top of the ski lift. Creeping up to a window and peering inside, we saw several fellows seated at benches with bottles of beer and glasses on tables before them. Well, what a discovery that was! For ours was truly thirsty work!
We strode in,
got a bottle and glass each from the bar and took seats at a table. The
prices here were a bit steep, we agreed – like the landscape – since the beer
would have had to be hauled up by cable car, but what a wonderfully rustic place
this was, high on a mountainside.
Modern photo taken at the alpine chalet where we had a drink
It was dusk when we stumbled out and climbed above the chalet before squeezing into our bags for sleep, feet facing the vale.
Well, I know something about mountains now. Thunderstorms tend to hang about them, so that we were lucky to find ourselves dry in the morning.
Now we mounted beyond the place where the last shrunken tree marked the impending end of slanting earth and the start of sheer, upright rock, and worked our way everlastingly upward with hands as well as feet, higher and higher, into the steep and rocky heights, till at last we stood on a saddle, where the chasm of another valley opened eerily before our eyes, ghostly-looking through swirls of mist. And then, turning our eyes back to the path we had climbed, our sight fell headlong down vertiginous steeps to a green and yellow patchwork quilt that enveloped a vast panorama of many roofs, red and brown, and the tiny spires of the town. Heady with success, we surveyed the world at our feet as from the seat of gods.
Now we mounted beyond the place where the last shrunken tree marked the impending end of slanting earth and the start of sheer, upright rock, and worked our way everlastingly upward with hands as well as feet, higher and higher, into the steep and rocky heights, till at last we stood on a saddle, where the chasm of another valley opened eerily before our eyes, ghostly-looking through swirls of mist. And then, turning our eyes back to the path we had climbed, our sight fell headlong down vertiginous steeps to a green and yellow patchwork quilt that enveloped a vast panorama of many roofs, red and brown, and the tiny spires of the town. Heady with success, we surveyed the world at our feet as from the seat of gods.
Where we had climbed to
When at last we'd descended from the mountainside in the late afternoon or evening - for dusk comes early in the mountains - we found that the hostel was full for the night, owing to the arrival of a coach party that day. That was a blow. We'd spent last night lying up on a mountainside and now we found that tonight we'd have no beds in which to lay our weary heads. To make matters worse, a fine rain began to fall. We had to find some cover for the night.
After tramping around the town for a time in quest of shelter, we drew up in front of a door in a back alleyway that had just been left ajar. Gently drawing it open and stepping inside, we viewed a vestibule with a concrete floor, an interior door and a dim bulb suspended from the ceiling. The rest of the dwelling was dark and soundless. Could we sleep here for the nigh? we wondered aloud. For sure, we would have rejected such an idea had rain not been falling outside and had we not been dead beat after our mountain climbing adventure. Reluctantly, we unrolled our sleeping bags and settled for sleep on a floor of dense inflexible cement.
But, weary as I was, sleep eluded me. I lay on my concrete bed, gazing up at the dim bulb suspended from the sealing and just waiting in dread for the click of a door handle and the entry of the owner. I mean, what would we say? Twan wasn’t sleeping either. Neither of us felt at ease here. We talked the problem over in low tones for a time, cursing that coachload of usurpers who had stolen our beds, when suddenly Twan came up with the idea of returning to the hostel and sleeping in their coach. After all, it might be open. In that era of rare crime not all doors were locked and bolted, even for the night.
Dragging our flagging forms from our bags again and strapping them to our rucksacks, we abandoned this uneasy sanctuary and returned to the hostel and the vacant coach.
And tried the
door.
It was unlocked!
Ecstatic, we
climbed inside and plodded along the central aisle to the rear, where Twan flipped a
coin for the privilege of sleeping on the back seat. He won and laid his bed in
unrestricted space, while I tried to occupy a pair of seats. I twisted and turned
for a time, trying to coil myself around the central armrest, but ended by stretching out on the floor with my feet to the front.
In the morning, I
awoke to the sound of a sudden thud, caused by someone rolling open the front
door. I raised my head and looked over my blue cocoon of a sleeping bag between
the rows of looming seats to the windscreen beyond, bright with a new day. Someone
was about to come in. What was I going to say? What was I going to say? … I
couldn’t think of a single thing.
Then a man appeared
and reached for an item beside the driver’s seat, and, without looking down
the aisle, got out again! We decided to rouse ourselves now and avoid pushing
our luck too far.
That day, we hitched
to Feldkirch, spending the night in the hostel there, and the following morning
we visited Liechtenstein Zurich Lausanne Lake Geneva .
Next day, we
were in Germany Austria Italy Spain France Paris
Now funds were running low and we were both thinking ahead to the future. Twan had decided to head for Iceland to raise some cash by working in the island’s fish-canning factories, as rumour said it was possible to do, and then get a cheap flight back to Canada on Icelandic Airways, while I would be going to Lyon to meet Melissa and possibly earn a little money by working in the vineyards of southern France.
Now funds were running low and we were both thinking ahead to the future. Twan had decided to head for Iceland to raise some cash by working in the island’s fish-canning factories, as rumour said it was possible to do, and then get a cheap flight back to Canada on Icelandic Airways, while I would be going to Lyon to meet Melissa and possibly earn a little money by working in the vineyards of southern France.
But before that happened I
would head north to visit two Canadian Army bases, where a couple of former
Winnipegers I knew were now posted. Thus Twan and I would travel together as
far as Düsseldorf, before parting to go our separate ways again.
We spent two
nights at the hostel in Frankfurt , but what we did there for a whole day I would be amazed to know,
and we arrived in Düsseldorf on August 17th. The youth hostel there was
of colossal size and spotless, as all German hostels apparently were. In fact
it looked more like a big hotel than a youth hostel, but the drawback was that
rules were strictly enforced. You had to be in bed with the lights out at 9:30 pm , for example, and you had to do some chores in the morning.
And now I said good-bye to my travelling companion. We had travelled many, many miles together, and we had shared
a great many memorable experiences. What I remember most about him was that he
had a dynamic zest for life and some courage in the face of it. He seemed to
know instinctively what I was just beginning to learn: that some of the most
valuable experiences in life entail an element of risk, but if you keep a cool
head about you, you won’t come to much harm. He had a lively sense of humour too.
Once or twice on our journey we had quarrelled, that’s true. As an instance I recall a bitter exchange we had on a road nearAix-en-Provence
Once or twice on our journey we had quarrelled, that’s true. As an instance I recall a bitter exchange we had on a road near
We
got along exceptionally well, in fact. I couldn’t have asked for a
better travelling companion.
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