Tales from the slow lane
Some of the most compelling adventures I’ve ever read about are
buried in a nondescript
– even determinedly boring – website found at
www.crazyguyonabike.com.
Tales from the slow lane
Some of the most compelling adventures I’ve ever read about are buried in a nondescript – even determinedly boring – website found at www.crazyguyonabike.com.
The site is tended faithfully by a guy named Neil Gunton. We’ve not met, but we do correspond occasionally. He runs the site from the Midwest, where his wife is now studying social work. Prior to that, he lived for a time in Oregon, a place they might hope to return to.
But that’s not the point. The point of crazyguy or CGOAB – as insiders call it – is people’s stories. And the point of my writing about it now is wrapped up in an idealistic young man with a freshly minted diploma.
Tsuo Hann Law graduated from Duke University in North Carolina, packed the belongings he had not sold or given away, flew to Southern California and climbed on his bicycle. Never mind that he could barely ride the thing. At first, he fell over with alarming frequency.
He’d never been camping. Young, brash and unprepared, he just pedaled his way home – to Malaysia.
As Internet access and time permitted, he filed reports from the road. That’s the point of crazyguy. People write from libraries and Pocketmail devices, detailing the triumphs and crises that go with traveling on two wheels.
Law’s account reads like something written by a starry-eyed kid, one whose first language is not English.
He left on May 28 of last year, and on March 11, entered his home country. In between, he crossed the United States, Western Europe, a host of former East Bloc countries most of us couldn’t find on a map, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. Kind of makes Marco Polo look like a piker, doesn’t he?
Traveling via bike through places even the “Lonely Planet” people may not have heard of may not be everyone’s idea of an adventure. We can all imagine that phone call home, when Law announced that he was on his way home – but that it might take a while.
The attraction of CGOAB, for me, is the variety of perspectives, of how people see places familiar and unfamiliar to us. There’s the account of Jene-Paul Lemieux and his adventure through our neck of the woods. His story of stumbling, exhausted and out of options, into Mission San Miguel and refuge is genuine literature.
John Egan is fond of striking out across the West’s most barren landscapes. He’s stayed at Mercey Hot Springs and ventured solo deep into the Nevada desert.
Then there’s Hank Raines, whose prose conveys clearly that he’s a different sort of person. First, when Raines left on continent-spanning pedals, he did so in the company of his two Jack Russell terriers. Anyone who’s ever had a passing acquaintance with one of these dogs knows that cooping two of them up in a box on the back of a slow-moving bike for weeks at a time is a very, very bad idea.
Raines would find himself lost, after dark, with no lights, looking for a place to stay time and again.
But, in a powerful testament to the people of America, it worked out and the odd little trio made it home ready to pack up and leave again.
The journals are shot through with photos from the road. I’d think that even though those who would never be tempted to throw a leg over a bike would find the dispatches filed from the slow lanes of the world’s back roads pretty compelling stuff.
