The Pier

I am only here because this place is close to the place want to be. I could not find anywhere to stay in the towns of the cliff-side Cinque Terre, so I settle for La Spezia, the next big city. In the evening I wander the streets looking for anything marginally interesting. At Piazza Europa I stand for a while and watch the spot lit fountain. Groups of two or three or four young people amble about the piazza and after a moment of watching I realize that they are all heading towards the bay. I follow.

Across the avenue behind the fountain I find more teenagers, a lot more actually. Like some invisible piper is playing some silent song that is calling them all to this one pier. I do not hear the piper’s music, but I follow anyway to see where it leads. Everyone in La Spezia between the age of 15 and 18 seems to be here on the pier past the parked cars and Vespas on the shore. As we walk I feel as though we have joined some sort of massive exodus – or more realistically, as though we are all headed for a party, or some high school dance or prom, waiting just a few hundred meters away. Scattered along the south side of the pier, old men fish in the waters of the bay. Sometimes their wives sit nearby, waiting. The young and old ignore each other in mutual apathy.

We march on, the teen lemmings and I, to the buzz of teen chatter. I can’t understand everything that’s being said, but I get the impression that teenagers talking freely amongst themselves make the same sound in every language, a sound full of energy, still childlike but directed for the first time by newfound goals of preening, pride and popularity. Pubescent rituals weed out the weak in Darwinian social evolutions. Halfway down the pier where the crowd is at its thickest, the first groups of three, of four, of five, stop and turn back. I keep going, following wondering what I am doing, where I am going. More turn back. The crowd thins. It is darker here, on the second half of the pier, quieter. The lights of La Spezia twinkle back on shore with the teens teeming there. The nearer I get to the end of the pier the fewer groups I notice around me. The boats docked near the end look bigger. Fewer men fish.

At the end of the pier only the lights from the boats and the twinkling stars of streetlights across the bay, light our progress. The groups of three and four have turned back to shore and only couples walk the last hundred meters hand in hand, arm in arm, embracing in the dim light of the La Spezia night. And suddenly I have become a voyeur, out of place amongst these boys and girls staring into the fires of each other’s eyes. My eyes have no match to stare into and so they look for somewhere else to rest and settle on the rubble piled on the north side of the pier - discarded body parts of once proud buildings. I turn and head back to shore. I do not think about the young lovers’ pier as I escape as I came, quietly and alone. I think of fishermen. I think of old buildings. I think to myself “I am only here because this place is close to the place I want to be.”