Preface

THAT I SHOULD TAKE IT INTO MY HEAD TO CYCLE AROUND THE world, was not at all surprising to parents and friends acquainted with my past life. Though an almost helpless invalid and “sissy” for the first ten years of life, and afraid to let Mother get out of my sight, nature seemed to have endowed me with more than the usual amount of wanderlust inherent in every normal person.

At the age of two, I started out on foot around the world. Just around the corner, I turned for a last look at the old homeplace, when to my horror, I discovered that it was already out of sight. In terror, I retraced my steps and ran screaming into Mother’s sheltering arms.

At the age of ten, my first real adventure away from home was almost as disappointing as that eight years earlier. My Dad took me on an overnight camping trip nearby; I shivered through a fearful, sleepless night, listening to the screeching of owls, the chirping of crickets, the creaking of katydids, the singsong sawing together of cicada legs, and sounds of other direful denizens of the dreadful meadow wherein we had pitched our tent. Little did I dream that fourteen years later I could snore peacefully in my bamboo bed in the depths of the jungles of Indo-China, with giant snakes and man-eating tigers as my only companions.

Thereafter, until college days, I satisfied the craving for adventure by reading everything within reach from Treasure Island, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Junior Classics, to Stoddard’s Lectures, National Geographic, and other travel magazines and novels.

Early in my reading I ran across a poem which struck my fancy:

However, I soon learned that second-hand experiences are not fully satisfactory. During the next three summers, my love of nature carried me to the top of nearly every mountain of any consequence in the Appalachian Range.

The last week-end before my final examinations in the University of Georgia was spent in solitude on top of Blood Mountain in the Blue Ridge range. Invitations to commencement exercises had already been mailed, and as I was openly and notoriously advertised by the Old Home Town as the recipient of M.A. and LL.B. degrees simultaneously, the slightest slip-up in my examinations would spell tragedy. However, my mountain retreat proved to be ideal for the concentrated study which enabled me to pass the exams.

College days were marked by other experiences of a mountain-top nature, figuratively speaking. My Robinson Crusoe life in a cave on the Isle of Capri was not the first experience of this nature. For six weeks, I lived alone on a little island in Lake Junaluska. Here I had my first experience cooking potatoes in a tin-can oven in the middle of a blazing camp fire.

The following winter, the call of the open road lured me on a hitch-hiking (for the first and last time in my life) trip to Miami, Florida. Though the entire trip cost only 15 cents (the price of a package of dried figs and a cup of hot Ovaltine), it nearly ended disastrously among the Seminole Indians in the Everglades along the Tamiami Trail. Such experiences seemed to intensify, rather than to satisfy, the wanderlust.

Four years as a member of the college boxing and other athletic teams had equipped me physically for any adventure; after a semester of study as American Exchange Scholar at the University of Cologne, Germany, I was ready to set out on the long, long 25,000-mile trail on a bicycle (also 15,000 miles on the seven seas) through 40 countries around the world.

With my bed in the great Out-of-Doors, and motive power the visceral dynamics in my legs, the only expenses of the trip were for food, film for my camera, passport visas, and other incidentals.

Bucephalus, the faithful old bicycle which carried me around the world, is now resting summa cum laude in honorable retirement in the United States National Museum, in the Hall of Mechanical Heroes, alongside Colonel Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, and Admiral Byrd’s conqueror of the South Pole, the Floyd Bennett.

It may sound silly and sentimental to some, but when one’s only companion during eighteen months of awful, beautiful, and horrible experiences is a bicycle, it becomes more than a mere inanimate piece of metal—it is a real friend. When I think of the thousands of miles of jungle mud, desert sands, and rocky mountain sides my old “iron horse” had to plow over; the scores of snow-blocked passes making its life miserable in my mad mid-winter dash through the Dolomites, Bavarian, and Tyrolean Alps, and how, like old Job in the Bible, Bucephalus came through with colors flying—well, I just can’t keep from loving that old bicycle as a true friend much more trustworthy and “human” than many human beings.

After perusing this book, the reader perhaps will be generous enough to agree that something more was required of me than a maximum amount of physical endurance and a minimum exertion of common sense. The greatest single factor in the success of the trip was my faith in humanity. I went alone through the wildest regions in the world on the theory that there are more good people in the world than there are bad.

If the present volume does nothing more than substantiate this theory—to shed a little more light upon the “touch of nature which makes the whole world kin”—these pages will not have been written in vain.

And now, after writing this book of my globular wanderings, I try to bury my treasured travels in the most hidden sarcophagus of my mind. But at most unexpected times—while writing legal papers in my law office, looking over old court records, eating dinner, in the middle of a conversation with a friend about commonplace things—like a bolt from the blue, these ghosts of the past break through the lid of ordinary living with which I try in vain to hold them down, and I see a lightning flash of pictures: a camel caravan I met in an emerald vale of Central Afghanistan, a band of wolves encircling me one still starlit evening far out in Sinai Wilderness, a stormy night at the pilot wheel of my homeward bound freighter with 60-foot waves threatening to tear me off the bridge, a twilight from the apex of Cheops Pyramid on the edge of the Garden of Allah, a 3 A.M. 10-mile ride in a ricksha after seeing a Chinese show in Saigon, a certain little Norwegian mountain girl with a smile on her face and a song on her lips. So strong is the call of these haunting memories that I must clench my fists, grit my teeth, and fight them back into their coffins lest I arise and follow them once again beyond the blue horizon.

With a tinge of wistful nostalgia, I close the lid upon them and again resume my task of trying to live like a normal person just as though I had never really seen moonlight on the Matterhorn, sunrise on Sinai, Arabian nights, and Northern Lights—only dreamed of them!

F.A.B.
AUGUST 1, 1938

“May good health and happiness go with you for the rest of your journey through life on God’s beautiful Spaceship Earth.”

Sincerely,

Fred A. Birchmore