My motorcycle had burnt-out, somewhere just short of St Jean de Luz and I walked with it alongside me. This hadn't frustrated me but some guys had taken mercy, recognising my surf allegiance and so I hitched with the bike and board, hanging out the back of their pick-up. They were a few Basque country bronzed, sinewy guys with raffish hair and deep eyes, wanting the sea; pausing to watch her roll and glisten. Making for short life stories and about places along the coast, the throngs at La Zurriola and the lissome in Biarritz; about freedom, the waves, and maybe a vague story of loss by their words but a truer story of escape intimate in their bodies, but stories, that in the end didn't go anywhere. Sometimes the company of people can remind you of a warm place by the fire or breathing again to the pace of normality and of the far distances since.
My mind had drifted again; imprints with the feeling of gentle breeze. "Like the winds that come and goes, let them flow through your mind." Passing a few rag-tag surfers looking like strays on land. I had become used to the outside roads, it was easy and solitary. Some stops, along the way, there might seem that ready place to stay, because things seemed pleasant and everyday and stable, but always, I ended back on my motorcycle and the engine already sounding, on it's way to somewhere.
Terra firma, fixed in its ways. But the water, so vast and always moving. Once on the water far off shore, the ocean wave would gather and I would wait, as it rolled towards me.
