Tom Foran Clark

It was in New England in the summer -- a perfect place and time for idle contemplation. Still unclear to Emery, who'd just got through four years at UMass, Amherst, was what he’d actually gone to college for. His father had insisted it hadn’t been to get an education but to develop character. "Burn!" he'd told his son on leaving Massachusetts to go to Hollywood. ("Write," said Emery's departing mother.)

"Burn." By this he knew his dad meant he should catch fire: Richard Mark Emery should shine. According to the father, the son didn’t need to do anything in particular to get there except to be, most honestly and deeply and completely, himself. "Heraclitean fire is at the heart of everything," his father had often told him. "It is burning ever, even when we sleep. Whether we daydream or sleep deeply, the fire is burning, the cosmos doing its ongoing work. Search within," his father had advised, echoing Heraclitus once more on parting, "and be open when help comes."

Lying in the backyard hammock of a western Massachusetts friend that drizzly, humid afternoon, Emery contemplated possibile scenarios in his mind's eye. There was so much to know and be and do. Outside of the aching, overarching desire to mate with goddesses -- the sacred siren phantasms of his ineluctable lust or craving, screaming genes -- Emery didn’t know what he wanted. He only knew that he wanted. How he wanted! He felt his will was less a fire than a flood in him, rising high over the banks. The urge, the urge, the urge. But, what to do? What to do?

One idea rose up with sudden force and clarity: Emery would board a boat bound for Europe. He'd go to foreign shores among total strangers and walk everywhere. He’d go to sea and see the old world and its treasures with his own eyes. He'd walk from Amsterdam to Paris, then on to Florence and to Rome, turning north to Munich, Copenhagen, Stockholm -- those havens -- and meet girls here and there and revel in the art and architecture all along the way.

Walking was a means of transportation he could afford -- he hadn’t saved much. He was hoping to earn wages, to be a worker on the cargo ship carrying him, but it didn’t happen like that. Emery sold his bookshelves, stereo, pots and pans, and mandolin. A westward traveling pal drove his Volkswagen, brimful of books and things, to his folks in Hollywood. He bought a backpack and boat fare for about the same price as a one-way airplane ticket and was soon one of eight passengers in four cabins on a Rotterdam-bound Polish freighter.

The M/SR Polansky departed from Wilmington, North Carolina in fierce weather on a stormy September morning in 1999, while it was still dark out. With high winds lashing at the boat, lightning cracking the sky, and thunder rumbling over the ocean, the ship was loosed from its moorings. The boat tipped and rocked, creaking, churning up waves as it sliced its set course across the angry, turbulent surface of the deep, calm sea.

Eight days later, in glistening sunshine, the ship arrived in Holland. From Rotterdam, Emery took a train to Amsterdam where, for the better part of a week, he walked in art museums. Then he hitchhiked to Paris and, after eight or nine swirling days amid its miracles, Emery made his way south to the village of Grez-sur-Loing at the edge of the Fontainbleau forest, where he got a job at a quaint bookshop called The George Sand. There Emery pitched in, helping the proprietor Walt Lowen, a Don Quixote look-alike, in exchange for bathroom privileges, a couch to sleep on, and lessons in bookselling.

The bookseller's apprentice was unpacking boxes at the front of the store in the second week of his apprenticeship when a lanky, deeply tanned guy in a way-oversized beige fur-trapper's coat (with the thick wool lining of it pushing out not only at his neck but also at his wrists) extended a telescopic lens from the camera at his belly and, crouching down to take a photo of the aqueduct over the river, suddenly fell sideways. Flat on his back on the sidewalk, the guy raised his fist and swore at the blue sky, God in heaven, Jesus Christ, the apostles and the saints, the world’s unfairness, injustice in general and, in particular, this indignity.

Emery rushed out to help the fallen character get up. He had brown eyes and brown hair with just light downy hair on his golden face. He was slightly taller than his rescuer, who was six feet tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, with black hair and, on most days, a red-brown beard. Behind the big front windows of The George Sand, Walt Lowen -- with a salt-and-pepper goatee and harshly etched, sallow face -- scowled and made vivid, large, unsubtle gestures indicating, "Move away from the shop! Move! Move! Go on!"

Emery led the guy across the street to the café of the Hotel Chevillon where, over a few cups of café au lait he calmed himself. Then the coffee got him talking. He spoke of his recently arriving in Grez-sur-Loing after a delightful week of baby-sitting the three beautiful daughters of an aristocratic couple living in a huge wedding-cake of a mansion in Brussels, Belgium before going on to Paris from which he’d wandered into the woods of Fontainbleau and stumbled into Grez. He said he’d been born in Canada but as an infant had been abandoned by his parents who’d moved from Montreal to Quebec, then to Trois-Saumons, and on to Riviére-Du-Loup, then still further east and north of these to yet more distant realms higher on the St. Lawrence River. "I was sent by my mother and father to be raised by my aunt and uncle -- my father’s brother and his second wife -- in Lawrence, Massachusetts."

"Get out of here! I was born in Massachusetts -- out in the west -- in West Derry."

"I was raised in Lawrence, and that’s my name: Lawrence Dulac Pike. You've heard of Lawrence of Arabia, no? Well, I’m Lawrence of Lawrence, but everybody calls me Pike." The two shook hands.

"Everybody calls me Emery. My folks insist they named me Richard Mark Emery after the actor Richard Widmark. Why they dropped the ‘Wid’ in Widmark, I don’t know -- just whimsically, I suppose." Emery told Pike he’d decided to hit the road after his folks had moved west to California, to a suburb a stone's throw from Hollywood. "I felt I had four choices -- stay in West Derry, move to Los Angeles, walk the Appalachian Trail, or board a freighter bound for Europe."

Pike said he knew about whimsy. "Everybody’s all over the place, telling me what not to do. This absolutely has not helped me -- it has not dog-gone helped at all." Pike had made a plan: he was going to ride a bike south through Spain to Morocco, then east across North Africa to Italy.

"A bike," Emery pondered. "That's a thought. Pike, I'll join you if you start in Italy and do the journey backwards."