On Travel
There was a difference between being a tourist and being a traveler. The essential skill for the traveler was an ability to cope with the unexpected.
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Tucked into my sleeping bag, I looked up into the clear night sky of the desert, where the nearest town was a thousand miles away. The Milky Way’s billions of stars stretched out over me in an unbroken canopy of light and I imagined that I was floating in space.
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I didn’t want to confuse the momentum of being on the road with freedom.
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There was no admiration or sense of wonderment when I explained to people what it took to do a motorcycle trip through the Sahara and down the Congo River, or wander alone in the Himalayas or live in India or on a kibbutz.
They didn’t have any geographical references or experiences that they could relate to and I stopped trying to explain.
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A trip into the deep desert could be an allegory about life, a great equalizer where the only things that mattered were a person’s skills and resilience.
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Why did I decide to travel through Africa on a motorcycle? I did it partially because I could and needed another adventure.
I understood motorcycles and motorcycle repair.
I roughed it in the Peace Corps in India for three years, trekked solo in the Himalayas, and was accustomed to living with only the basic necessities.
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1973 there weren’t any paved roads to speak of in the Congo Basin. The villages we passed weren’t electrified, had no paved roads or running water. There were no telephones and I had never seen a post office. Who would have missed us or even known that we were gone if something happened.
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In retrospect, the Congo was a scary place. When you encountered groups of soldiers, in pressed uniforms and mirror-shined paratrooper boots with heavy AK-47’s on their shoulders you made yourself invisible and realized that you were alone in the jungle and an intruder from a race that was regarded as colonial oppressors.
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There were times on the trail when I felt that if I could have been transported back to a comfortable life, I probably would have done it, but we were as far out into the middle of nowhere as there was on the planet, and we were hoping that at some point it would be easier.
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A kilometer isn’t that long. You can walk it in about ten minutes, but if you are plowing through drifting sand on a motorcycle carrying petrol, water, camping equipment, food and a passenger it can take half a day.
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At times when the going was difficult, if I could have, I would have traded my wheels for wings.
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A good trip always looks forward, but to know where you are going, you have to know where you’ve been.
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There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night. Jerry Garcia
On Life
Every experience is an opportunity to learn something.
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Every step we take, a road missed or a road taken, a word spoken or thoughtfully unspoken can change our lives forever. It’s something that we seldom reflect on or give much consideration.
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You have to leave the main road in order to find the path, lose yourself in order to find yourself, leave the path in order to become what you want to.
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I went out looking for the world and found a little bit of myself, thankful for some of the paths I’d taken, and even more thankful for a few that I missed.
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All told our lives are really just a patchwork cloth of coincidence and chance. Ultimately, there is no right path or wrong path for us to take.
How everything turns out is sometimes no more than good luck or bad luck.
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Be careful. The road you choose might be the one you’re stuck on the rest of your life, and despite how many people you surround yourself with, you have to walk it alone.
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Every major decision in our lives has a back story. No event is just a random occurrence, but is instead a sum of what has gone before. Our previous experiences define us, lead us, and give us skill sets that influence our choices.
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Life is like a house full of rooms, each one different. We can carefully select one or choose at random, or just stumble through whichever door is open.
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Once upon a time when I thought twenty-five was old age, my world was unexplored and exciting, and like every young person I thought that I was its master.
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Life is perpetual motion. We are always on a journey towards something or away from something. I was escaping from the person I might have become and what people thought I should be.
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What I saw around me were lives that resembled those of the mythological Greek king Sisyphus who was condemned to a life of pushing a huge stone uphill only to have it roll back down again.
On Why
School wasn’t for dreamers, but the Mercator projections of the world that hung in every classroom fueled mine.
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I wasn’t interested in what I could calculate with a slide rule.
I was skilled in the use of a micrometer.
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When I was being evaluated for the Peace Corps the counselor asked if I understood what resilience was. I said that, “resilience is like one of those punching bags on a stand that bounces back when you hit it.” Little did I know that it was an allegory for life.
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And he continued and asked, something I thought at the time, was a strange question. "When you die what would you like to have written on your tombstone?" "To be loved by a few, and respected by many," I answered.
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In school when I should have been parsing Latin verbs and nouns and learning how to calculate with a slide rule like my classmates, I was more interested in learning about wrenches and ratchets, pushrods and pistons, and how parts and pieces fit together.
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It took more than a little experience to have the confidence to get up on a motorcycle and ride through Africa.
On African Demographics
In the 1970s, Africa represented nine percent of the world’s population. The current figure is now twenty percent, and increasing.
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A brutal statistic: Nearly every minute a child someplace in the world dies of malaria.
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The Congo’s population was less than 20 million in 1970.
It is now 90 million and has increased fourfold.
The small villages along the river have become towns and cities and in order to feed all these people, there has been an enormous deforestation in the great rainforest belt across Central Africa.
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In Black Africa one crossed an invisible frontier where white skin was an encumbrance and I discovered how the Black people I knew experienced a white world.
I felt tolerated but not trusted, and got some firsthand knowledge in how it was to be discriminated against.
In Africa white skin wasn’t an advantage, or entitled me to anything except suspicion.
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Malaria would be one of my personal memories from the Congo. Some good luck along with the bad luck of fever and chills, was that I had been taking a malaria prophylaxis and the attack wasn’t as severe as it was among the less fortunate indigenous population.
On Dangers
There was always an element of risk in crossing the Sahara, but wasn’t it risky to ride a motorcycle on a crowded expressway at rush hour?
Or for that matter, going into a workingman’s bar in 1968 with shoulder length hair.
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There was a difference between taking a risk and being reckless. Before diving from a cliff, you wanted to know how deep the water was. You assessed the depth and made a decision to dive or not.
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It was a forest cobra, at least three meters long stretched out across the track, cut in two with a deft machete chop. It was being carried away millimeter by millimeter by thousands of army ants, two reminders of what could be crawling around in the grass where we pitched our tent.
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We were following a track along the Oubangi between Bangasuos and Bangui and camped on the riverbank to rest a for few days and watch the hippos, never realizing the risks that lurked on the river’s edge, animals that came to drink, crocodiles, serpents, and the extremely territorial hippos.
Not to mention the most dangerous threat, the mosquitoes.
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Crocodiles could wait days for unsuspecting prey like campers going down to the river to wash their clothes, dishes or themselves.
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Mosquitoes were nocturnal feeders and every time I was bitten, I wondered if that would be the bite that infected me with Malaria.
On Life Lessons
A goal in life could be, “to be loved by a few, respected by many".
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We fill ourselves with memories as we go through life. We carry them in imaginary packs strapped on our backs.
If they get too heavy, we cast some off to lighten the load and call it forgetfulness.
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Here’s a note to myself from my thoughts on the inner game of life.” It’s the expectations of others that cause us not to pursue our true selves.”
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Seek perfection in yourself, not in others.
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As a kid growing up in crowded rooms with seven brothers and sisters, how could I imagine that I’d live in a village in India, or body surf behind a tugboat in the Congo River, or cross a desert that was as large as the continental United States on a motorcycle.
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I was always an outsider straddling two worlds with a foot in each, much as I am today.
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Whatever happens in our lives seems planned, but happens more likely according to the chaos theory. The flapping of a butterfly’s wings that can change the course of the winds.
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Maybe when your time is over you won’t be thinking about what jobs you’ve had or how much you’ve acquired, but more of did I leave the place a little better, was I loved, will I be remembered.
You live as long as there is someone to remember you
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It was just a not so gentle reminder that I was never going to know everything, please everyone, or do everything right. I was just the sum of all my mistakes, but had the good fortune to learn from some of them.
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Failures were understood and expected; you were always reminded of them, after all we were Catholics of the most bigoted kind. Catholics of the most bigoted kind wanted you to always be who you are today and never what you imagined that you wanted to be.
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Every major decision in our lives has a back story. No event is just a random occurrence but is instead a sum of what has gone before. Our previous experiences define us, lead us, and give us skill sets and experience that influence our choices.
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My Peace corps years and travel in Africa began a new chapter in my life.
Maybe we are born only half ourselves until something happens.
We cross a line, open a door that we didn’t know was there, find an empty room and fill it with something we call life.
We move on imagining that we choose our doors and that we follow an agenda that we think we have decided for ourselves, but the past and present stake out our path, and the rest we call free will.
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I’m not sure how one develops a taste for certain things.
I suppose that it's the alchemy of genetics and the snatches of things we’ve seen and heard that get certain ideas into our blood stream.
I never experienced a decisive moment or epiphany that I can point to and say that this or that transformed me, "That is when I came of age."
For me, I guess, coming of age was just the slow process of maturing and the result of a chain of insights that came, not in a blaze of perception, but in a slow process where everyone I encountered and everything I did was a tile placed onto the mosaic of my life.
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Ever since I was a kid, some of my earliest memories were of wanting to see exotic and distant countries. In my imagination I had the spirit of adventure so it was a natural progression that I worked and traveled in remote places.
More Wheelspin
While I was searching through my road notes and memory for my African stories, these forgotten thoughts fluttered onto the pages like stray birds looking for a place to roost.
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I had a vague idea of destinations, a couple of maps, not really enough money, a lot of energy and youthful optimism. I mean, what could go wrong on a Twenty Five Thousand kilometer trip through Europe, across the Sahara, and into Central Africa?
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I had lived and worked three years in India, the first place where I felt like I belonged.
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Before we were back in Stockholm a year later, we had clocked Twenty Five Thousand kilometers of hard traveling. It wasn’t a trip for anyone with a nervous disposition, a sensitive rump, a finicky stomach, or a need to shower every day.
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We were about to experience how quickly the conditions could change in the jungle.
The sound of a gentle rain on the roof can be a soothing sound when you are falling asleep, but not when there is a gale blowing and the torent is pounding sideways as though it was being thrown from buckets and you realized that in the morning the trail would be deep mud.
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It was over 40 degrees centigrade (105 F) in Fort Lamy when we got there.
The desert crossing, as difficult as it was, was the easy part.
We had no local currency or food, our water jugs were empty as was our tank, and we spent a long dry hunger filled day fantasizing about all the magnificent dinners we had eaten in a time that seemed distant and foreign.
On Listening
If someone said to me it’s an impossible trip I wouldn’t have listened. It was as though I put common sense away some place.
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When traveling as exposed as we were, you listened to your intuition. We equated it to survival instinct.
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I never used my travels or my love or knowledge of motorcycles to define me. In fact, I never spoke of them. It was just something I did.
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For better or worse, I knew where I was going, and didn’t listen; “Listen” said the joyless Jesuit priest in my high school religion class and you might learn something. What did he want me to learn, to fall in line, be like him?
Is that why I was always reminded of my shortcomings and flaws, not my assets? But in some ways reprimands like that motivated me and showed me a version of a life that I didn't want any part of.
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He said you have two ears and one tongue. Listen twice as much as you speak. That was true. It took me sixty years to learn that and now I do a lot more listening than talking.
On the Desert
The desert was formless in shades of grey and beige and “La Piste,” as it was called in French, wound its way south for Three Thousand Five Hundred kilometers.
When I started out I had only a vague idea of how it was and no idea what I would find on the other end.
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The Sahara takes its name from the Arabic word for emptiness.
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Anyone who was familiar with Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs,” a list of the most basic of human requirements which are food, water shelter and rest, would never have contemplated riding through Africa on a motorcycle and sleeping in a tent in its deserts, villages and jungles.
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We didn’t live from day to day in the desert as much as we lived from oasis to oasis.
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When Sir Edmund Hillary was asked why he climbed Mt. Everest he answered “Because it was there.” When someone asked me why I crossed the Sahara on a motorcycle I answered, “because it was there and I could.”
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I haven’t followed the track too often in my life, but in the desert, it was a matter of survival, stray from it and you could end up like the dried camel carcasses we saw along the way.
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The Sahara is a wilderness that is as large as United States and traversing it left no room for invention. In life we often admire people who deviate from the beaten path and call it creativity; in the Sahara straying from the path could cost you your life.
We were intruders temporarily breaking the peace of the desert and moving on. If you weren’t disciplined the desert would discipline you. If you didn’t have self-discipline you’d learn it quickly.
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You weren’t a traveler in the desert¸ you were a visitor.
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Suivez la Piste (Follow the track) could be a metaphor for the way we are expected to live our lives, and what I suspect were the constrictions that I was rebelling against most of mine. But the Sahara was no place for me to lose sight of the track and follow my own whims. If I wandered off in search of a better trail there, I wouldn’t have a life to rebel against.