Complacency Stinks!
Grand tour by bicycle
On my 75th (topic of previous Unfettered Ideation), the novelist Elayne Audrey Becker, who happens to be my daughter, gave me a thoughtful gift: two journals to write in. To write longhand about myself.
Yikes!
The last time I wrote longhand about myself was in January 1974. It was a cold day in New York Harbor. With a tiny diary in my panniers, I boarded a freighter bound for Spain.
Actually, not! The next day, over a disgusting maritime breakfast, I learned the ship was going to Philadelphia and then returning to Brooklyn. Wha? I got off.
My panniers were accessories for a Peugeot PX-10: my chosen steed for riding beyond the pale in quest of grail. Sleek, white and Reynolds-light at 21 pounds: a 10-speed with pencil-thin sew-ups.
It was an odd choice for my ride around the world on a bicycle. I loved it.
Months earlier, as my friend Raymond O’Kane and I finished our English majors at NYU, living mostly in our 23-year-old heads, we had decided to “make a break for it” and see the world, all of it. Neither of us owned a bike, so we purchased two on 14th Street near First Avenue in Manhattan.
Idealists though we were, we chose travel by bicycle for practical reasons: cheap (we were poor); slow (for smelling the roses instead of looking through windows); risky (wild adventure rather than vacation). After months of training we were barely fit but raring to start.
We flew to Málaga and slowly wobbled down the Costa del Sol towards Gibraltar. Unsteadily at first. When our Primus stove exploded one night in our tent, we switched to Campingaz to avoid starvation and incineration. In Algeciras we boarded a ferry.
This time our ship went where it was supposed to go, and we sailed to Tangier, Morocco. Our plan was to spiral across North Africa west to east, the first leg of our circumnavigation of the Mediterranean Sea.
Soon after crossing the border into Algeria, Raymond had an accident. That was bad.
Three days in a chaotic hospital in Tlemcen healed Raymond’s superficial wounds but crushed his spirit. The same three days in a camping ground, eating street food and using public toilets, destroyed my bowels. I was later told it was dysentery.
I was miserable, yes, very, but not about to see a doctor in Tlemcen!
As so often happens when hardship erodes civility, I parted ways with Raymond in Algiers and have not seen him since. I rode out of the city, alone on my bicycle, by this time able to pedal 100 miles a day including stops for sightseeing.
Still sick to my stomach of course (mind over matter).
My eastward journey was interrupted when a cordial Libyan man in Tunis said that I would certainly be murdered if I rode into his country. As an English major, I was naive about history and politics more recent than 1900. Finding a target on my back was shocking.
I wasn’t scared, really; in those days my default was “fearless,” but I didn’t want to miss seeing the rest of the world for the sake of being buried in Benghazi. I flew over the sand dunes of Libya to Cairo and resumed riding along the Nile.
From Egypt I flew to Cyprus where I ate cornflakes for a week to regain my digestion. Though scientifically ridiculous, somehow that worked!
Soon after that I arrived in Haifa on a boat: healthy, randy and looking forward to the opposite sex. In Arab countries most women had been covered head to toe in loose-fitting robes.
I had forgotten there was an opposite sex; and that was fine while I had the runs all the time. But now?
The first thing I noticed when I disembarked in Israel was young women in combat fatigues. Much as I favored sexual and gender equality in all things, I was saddened by female soldiers. No way I was going to flirt with buff girls carrying weapons!
Instead I fell in love with Nutella.
With Israel now stamped in my passport, Lebanon and Syria were off limits. So after touring the Holy Land, I flew to Greece. In Athens a helpful bike repairman fitted my PX-10 with a new rear wheel for tube type tires that wouldn’t puncture as often as sew-ups. What a relief!
Also in Greece, I got my first look at old-world machismo. Damned unpleasant way for men to behave.
The rest of my grand tour was both long and truncated. I finished circling the Mediterranean, crisscrossed Western Europe, and when I reached Scandinavia I decided to go west.
I was no longer fired up about spending three weeks on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Though it wasn’t Putin’s Russia then, it was something just as bad: the Soviet Union. No foreigners riding bicycles were permitted on the tundra!
I boarded an overnight ferry in Bergen, Norway, bound for Newcastle.
As autumn came on, riding through the snow in Scotland, heading south for a flight “home” (I no longer had one), I experienced another major pivot. This one was between the liberal exercise of wanderlust and the pursuit of a career.
As in high school, the life that continued after my pivot was so different that it practically belonged to another person. I hung up my PX-10. I still have it, but I haven’t ridden it in ages. My white steed was put out to pasture!
This is a good place to pause. I may decide to revisit dramatic bits of my grand tour and say more about them. It was adventure in every sense of the word, chock full of risks and roses. But enough is enough for now.
What followed the tour was unrelated.
Oh, and before I stop, shall I explain how “complacency stinks”?
My adventure was christened the B&O Expedition, after its easy riders Becker and O’Kane. Those two sparks, who lived mostly in there literary heads, were rebelliously uncomplacent.
The B&O tagline was complacency stinks! And for me, 50 years later, it still does.
