Customer Reviews

I See by My Outfit: Cross-Country by Scooter, an Adventure

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This is an early 60's memoir of two young, scruffy, life-long friends making a cross-country road trip on scooters. The dialog is first-rate, funny patter. But along with the lighthearted moments are the fascinating vignettes of the people that they meet along the way. Like Peter and his friend, Phil, we are drawn into the lives of these brief aquaintances for a few hours, perhaps only minutes, and must continue the journey, never knowing what the rest of their life story will be.

For this re-release, Mr. Beagle has added an afterward, telling what happened after he and Phil reached their destination, how their lives changed and how those changes affected their friendship. This addendum was particularly poignant since Mr. Beagle reflects on some unsettling post-journey developments with the insight and wisdom acquired in the succeeding 39 years.

I read this book back when it was new and I was very young, long before I knew Beagle by way of "The Last Unicorn". It was the first road book I ever read and he swept me away. I've since driven across America four or five times, and the spirits of Peter and Phil always go with me. Just looking at this new listing makes my feet itch to go. Time to read it again.

My older son is 17 now and talking of journeys; I'm ordering a copy for him.

This was a very good read. I love motorcycle riding and camping along the way and that's just what these guys did. Set in the mid 1960s on small Vespa style scooters, the author takes short, 50 to 150 mile, daily scoots from small town to small town meeting a lot of interesting people along the way. Today a trip from coast to coast might take 5 days but they spend weeks getting from New York City to Menlo Park in California. Any adventure rider should enjoy this book.

Great little autobiography of crosscountry trek on scooter BI [Before Interstates] Droll, charming, unforgettabale

I first read the original version when I was in high school in the early 1970's. It was a memorable book for me then. It remains an extremely well-written story about touring America. It a story about adventuring, discovering the country, opening yourself up to real adventure and the kindness of strangers, and the love of motor scooters as a means of transport. The author and his friend rode the classic Heinkel Tourist scooters. It inspired my own dream of doing a cross country motor scooter tour. A few years after I read it, I hitched alone across the 2/3 of the nation; it was a similar positive and challenging experience. Otherwise that dream stayed dormant for decades. Fast forward to a few years ago - I bought an early edition of the book on Amazon and reread it. Wonderful - the story hadn't lost anything with time; a classic story about the optimism of youth and the 1960's. Now at 52, I purchased a 2007 Vespa GTS three months ago and I'm learning how to ride as a total beginner (with much more caution that I would have had at 18!). The dream is still alive...the back roads of America await.

For a much more serious but equally interesting book about two-wheeled touring, I also recommend the 1970's classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

Known mainly for his wonderful fantasy fiction, Peter Beagle here shows that he is simply a wonderful writer, period. Reading Beagle's grocery list would probably be more entertaining than reading most other writer's fictions. This book is hard to find, but is well worth tracking down.

As with Beagle's best fiction work, this book is full of humanity and intimacy, as Beagle is never afraid to show the people underneath the bluster (himself included). Their hopes and fears are revealed for us as the trip progresses, quietly, in Beagle's simple but elegant prose. It's a road story, a travelogue, but more explicitly than most such books it's a story of the people making the trip and the brief but memorable touches they have on the lives of the people met during the journey.

That's not to say the journey gets short shrift; indeed, travelling inexpensively by scooter gives Beagle and his friend a greater awareness of the scenery than enjoyed by the typical traveler, from the wide-open views offered by the scooters to sleeping on the ground. By the end of the story the scooters have emerged as characters in their own right -- at times difficult and reluctant and at times boon companions. Just like the travellers themselves.

"I see by my outfit that I am a cowboy;
If you had an outfit, you could be a cowboy, too." was the theme from "Laredo" which the two young men used as they set out on a real-life adventure of riding motor scooters from New York to San Francisco. Peter and his friend, Phil, in their early twenties decided it was time to spread their wings and see some of the American countryside, and how better to do it than to play "cowboy" on a scooters called Jenny and Couchette.

They traveled that April through Scranton, Pennsylvania where they huddled in the cold in sleeping bags. They had a route planned out to take them through Cleveland, Ohio, Ann Arbor, Michigan; then, Indianapolis, St. Louis on to Kansas City. The street signs along the way help to keep the reader located on the layout of the land. They met strangers when they took rest stops who became friends, like the elderly couple in Boulder City.

They were awed by the Rockies and the Grand Canyon, overcome a bit by the vast Mojave Desert stretching silently and mysterious as they rode in the dead of night -- to a small-scale diner. There they met Mary A. and Bryan who no doubt used them on their web site to make fun of them, as they do other un-knowing people; they are the original internet bullies. This was the trip they had been planning since they were four years old, and along the way the found the cowboy hats they would have worn back then.

The adventures these young men had reminds you of John Steinbeck's TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY. From the desert, they moved on to Fresno and Menlo Park in San Francisco. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, Peter lived in Paris and traveled in Italy, England and France. His first novel was A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE. He had a trio about his favorite animal: IMMORTAL UNICORN, THE LAST UNICORN and THE UNICORN SONATA. As a young writer, Peter was described as a 'genuine nonconformist brave enough to venture where others might fear to tread." Apparently, even in his imagination, he had always been adventurous, to his detriment, if he by chance encountered that old hag in Dallas/Fort Worth whose hobby is to slander others.