Today would have been my mother’s 100th birthday. (The Germans are celebrating dutifully, with articles in all the newspapers, and a new book, to which I’ve contributed.) Not a famous night: ground too pebbly and hard for even my worthy sleeping pad; night arias by Joe reached a pitch at 3:40 am; our whole pitch is on an antheap (thanks, Raccoon guys) – nice big glossy friendly black ants, nothing against ’em but they’re everywhere in our baggage, and some will now visit many states of the union. Off via Georgia to Birmingham, AL, by US 11, which thankfully runs all the way next to the crowded Interstate. Drivers are even more reckless here, it seems, than in the north. We’re taking it slow, on little roads. Determined to get the fire going that kept fading last night despite the repeated doses of methylated spirits he poured on it, Joe – who requires a fire – has succeeded in getting it going nicely this morning.

…We were free. The weather suddenly relented, and we were once more underway, out of North Carolina towards Tennessee, where the storm caught up with us again, and I experienced my first hailstorm while aboard a bike, the hail rattling and banging and bouncing off the frame and the engine and my helmet. We kept going, and 220 often exhilarating miles later we reached that elusive campsite at Raccoon Mountain, outside Chattanooga, TN.

Joe is not only a fine and devoted cook but a miraculous one. A visit to a nearby Walmarts, where we staggered around a little woozily, provided the basics; then Joe produced, in the pleasantly sordid surroundings of the campsite and our own grime and weariness, a meal of steak and potatoes and salad glorious enough to please the demanding nostrils of Olympus. It was 10:30 by the time we’d eaten; 11 pm now; Joe is snoring happily; I’m less sure, with a still very noisy Memorial Day campground crowd making a rumpus all around me, when or whether I’ll sleep. It hardly matters: I had a remarkable day’s work, on the bike. Not biking work, but writing work. In the space of 15 minutes the whole of my next, alarmingly extensive project arrived, complete enough to leave only the details to be filled in (at length!). The project is a 1500-page novel (this much I knew, but it was all I knew) consisting, it transpires, of 5 300-page narratives, interleaved at first, and increasingly interwoven as the narrative proceeds; all five stories take place in different epochs and geographies distant from each other, but they start to bleed into each other as the work approaches a climax, much as memory, dream and reality bleed into each other in Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’; all are concerned, like most stories that possess me, with the commission, detection and (perhaps) punishment of crimes, and all are concerned with the ways in which violence inhabits a culture – the 5 cultures are, in turn, American, Roman, Elizabethan, my old stomping ground post-World-War-Two Europe, and a space probe, in the future; more specifically, the 5 tales share an investigation of the return of the repressed. The 50 chapters of the book (whose name is Where Every Stranger is a Ghost), ten chapters for each thread, will also be 50 radio plays, to be recorded once a week between summer 2016 and summer 2017, in and for (I hope!) the radio station where I currently host a Saturday show. Two days ago the opening chapter arrived in my head unprompted, with a link to a 2nd chapter. Motorbike travel requires intense concentration, which in turn sets free the dreaming mind. Today the entire weave of the work opened before me. None of this is of my doing, except insofar as I have petitioned the Muse, for fifty years, for her daily blessing.

Still in Asheville. Horrible storms/downpour, black as night. As Shakespeare said of his mistress: “As dark as hell, as black as night.” No rooms left in Asheville (beer festival). No nearby campgrounds. Hmm. There’s one on Raccoon Mountain (sic) in Chattanooga, 220 miles away. So. it possible to live in a 24-hour Waffle House? On 300 cups of coffee? Watch this space. (And fear not. Your heroes will overcome this. Silence only means no wi-fi…)

Our first 1000 miles completed yesterday! – exactly on time, in 5 days, leaving us two days – according to our plan – to recuperate, rest up, or investigate local attractions. Leaving Roanoke and the Knights Inn behind, we climbed back up to the Blue Ridge. Everything about the day was devilishly perfect: the best motorbiking day either of us can recall (and for Joe this includes 7 great trips, among them London to Beijing), on Blue Ridge parkway roads that made me ashamed of my earlier complaints. I’d begun to think of it as the Desolation Parkway, but south of Roanoke the sweeping panoramas are accompanied by farms and tiny villages and houses dotted here and there – signs of mountain living. The roads could have been devised for bikes, with their drunken swooping curves; the views are comparable, for majesty, only to the Rif and the Eastern Cape, of those I’ve seen – I’m sure many readers could trump them, but they’re my top two. I exempt the hills around Siena, the masterpiece of domesticated landscape; the Blue Ridge views are untamed forest, as the Parkway progresses southwards on its 450-mile journey. Only the gigantic, extinct American chestnut, once king of the American East, is sadly missing. (Attempts are being made to create a disease-proof strain, in the Far East, whence – ironically enough – the fatal disease came.)

The day began oddly with a fruitless search for fried eggs. Diner after restaurant after diner came up eggless, even when eggs were pronounced eggs, iggs or (correctly) aye-iggs. One restaurant owner, after long reflection, replied, “You mean… to eat?”. I said I was prepared – if she could face the mess – to juggle them, but eating eggs was what I’d had in mind. Finally we found a place which, after offering us an egg ONLY if served on top of a burger, surrendered to negotiations with the chef, via several intermediaries, and produced eggs – to eat. The South is, of course, another country. “Where y’all from?” asked our Waffle House waitress tonight, in Asheville. “Britain,” volunteered 4 times by me, produced only a query of “Brooklyn?”, and “England,” helpfully added by Joe, was met with utter bafflement.

The Waffle House – a franchise resisted only, so far, by South Florida, no one knows why – does of course have aye-iggs aplenty, thank the Lord. Joe has been trying out burgers, the American national dish. As I write this, thunder and lightning reign outside, weather that drove us back from our intended trip on the Smoky Mountains’ Cherohala Skyway today, and into another Super 8 motel, in Asheville, a city now deformed by the usual franchise-blight and appalling peripheral traffic. How lovely and peaceful it was, last night, when we pulled in at 8:00 pm to our lonely campsite (no one on duty there – which saved us $16), put up our respective tent, and cooked up a fine if bizarre supper of pasta and a can of chili sauce. By the time we’d finished it was 10:00 pm so we hit the hay, little expecting the tumultuous downpour that followed – a good test for our tents, which passed in style. We slept well, and stayed dry, and swept on down the Parkway this morning when we’d assembled our rain-battered gear. Packing up is long and slow when camping by motorbike, but gives a certain nomadic satisfaction. In Asheville I paid a discreet visit to the site of the old hospital where poor mad Zelda Fitzgerald was burned to death, one of the city’s sadder claims to fame.

Yesterday began with the glorious trees of the Skyline and the Blue Ridge Parkway – every last little lonesome pine on the roadside a separate explosion of warm resin in the sensorium – biking bliss. At the same time this is wilderness for pussies: look to your right, folks… civilisation – see down there? – farmland and towns; and to your left – see down there? farmland and towns. The Blue Ridge is just that: a ridge. Never out of sight of man and his works. A vision of the future when the last strips of forest are on exhibit between strips of highway. Then the future arrived a little more quickly for us. Be a wary tourist in America: Bill Bryson’s book on the Appalachian Trail warned a few years ago about the struggling National Parks Service, ignored and underfunded. The official internet site now offers fictional facilities – visitor centers, restaurants, campsites that no longer exist, locked off and as forbidding as a set of mite-and-pesticide-rotted beehives. We were suddenly threatened by violent rainstorms which also turned out to be another internet fantasy (alarmist, this time, rather than over-optimistic – not a raindrop fell), and came down off the Blue Ridge Mountains by a precipitous road into civi-lahhh-zayshun.
Manager Mr Patel (relatives all over the world – the great Patel tribe) and his assistant Jackie welcomed me to their Super 8 in Roanoke, VA. Meanwhile Joe holed up in the last room at the Knights inn – a franchise beloved of my daughter Chiara, since it was in a Knights Inn outside Kingston where we rocked up many years ago (oh the thrill of a motel to a child) when a tempest-torn tree fell on our roof and there was a danger of more of the same. The Knights Inn, run by Susie and her son Micky, both super-friendly, deserves its own photo and I’ll try to remember to get one; from its sweet delapidation Roanoke runs the gamut to a hi-rise downtown, where we wasted time in vain pursuit of Mr Patel’s recommended Indian restaurant, only to fall back at last on a Famous Anthony where Michael, our 17-year-old server, responded to my request for a much-needed beer, with his own request: “ID, please.” Cute, I thought. Not at all. He meant it. Famous Anthony restaurants have one legitimate claim (and one only) to fame: they card EVERYONE. Last night and this morning were spent being driven from phone number to phone number, from ranger to superintendent’s office to ranger and back, in search of an open campground (people come to draaahve the road, it was pointed out to me), while trying to juggle couchsurfing hosts down the line in Alabama and Mississippi, as weather and the great American road trip play havoc with precise plans. Watch this space.