You had to be there: A remarkable woman’s courageous journey

Finding what I consider a good read is for me always fraught with difficulty. Despite the fact that so many of our younger members of American society seem unable to stay focused on anything that is written for longer than it takes to make a Tweet, the number of good books published these days…both by the recognised ‘major’ publishing houses or by the new ‘print-on-demand’ services…has never been greater.

With so much available to read these days, selecting a truly illuminating and engaging book to peruse is therefore often a somewhat daunting challenge. This is especially true since so much effort is elicited by authors in locating and selecting cover art that will reach out to seize a prospective reader’s attention by the throat. A book may be tedious, extremely difficult to plough through or so abstruse in its explorations of content that one is tempted early-on to simply set it aside, but a cleverly selected cover may still tempt a casual browser to purchase a book that one sets about to read, bereft of any helpful reviews that may provide clues as to what to expect, often hoping for the best.

One such recent book was author Scott Anderson’s rather brilliant narrative that analyses T.E. Lawrence’s fascinating involvement in Arabian self-determination of the early 1900s, titled ‘Lawrence in Arabia’ (2014, Anchor Books). Anderson’s book, skillfully, engagingly written and excellently referenced, was one of those books that I found myself quite literally unable to put down. So much so, that I engaged in a practice I am normally quite reluctant to resort to: underlining passages and making copious marginal notes on its pages. Of course, I only deface books in this irritating manner that are paperbound and usually make a strenuous effort to locate a suitably pristine copy of the same title in a hardbound binding for inclusion in my library, since for some odd and curious reason I have never been quite able to explain to myself, hardbound books are to me sacred relics worthy of a greater degree of veneration than their paperbound counterparts. Go figure. I am an admitted hard-core bibliophile, so this co-dependent compulsion may go hand-in-glove with that peculiar affliction.

Another book of this high-calibre status is academician and journalist author Robert Fisk’s magnum opus (1110 pages) on the history of what we know as ‘the Middle East’, titled ‘The Great War for Civilisation’ (2005, Alfred A. Knopf). Both of these two books are, in my considered opinion, absolutely mandatory for anyone who has either lived in that desert region or who maintains an interest in the seething conflicts and antagonisms that characterise the past history Arab civilization, both traditionally and right up to the present. Anyone who endeavors earnestly to understand the many complex ‘whys’ of ever-inept Western involvements in that region’s culture and politics, or the underlying passions of its peoples that regularly spark a flame among its inhabitants, should definitely read both of these books. In my case, with a long-abiding interest in T.E. Lawrence (surely one of the most enigmatic and controversial characters on the eventful, immediate post-1900 world stage), these two books provide invaluable further insights into both Lawrence’s complex personality and the British Imperial, colonial mindset that his contemporaries arose from.

Besides, as a fellow motorcyclist, I’ve always had a biased interest in his choice of recreational vehicles…in this case, a Brough Superior SS100, acknowledged by experts on classic motorized two-wheeled expressions of vehicular design to be one of the finest examples of 1920/30s technology of that period.

But my intent here and now is not to discuss Lawrence’s multi-faceted personality nor his valiant efforts to thwart the Entente Cordial’s nefarious plan (to plunder the spoils of the defeated Ottoman Empire, under the misbegotten aegis of the deceitful Sykes-Picot Agreement). Rather I want to mention a rather unusual and courageous young woman of 23, a native of Great Britain and daughter of a fairly well-to-do upper middle-class family, named Elspeth Beard, who accomplished what most men at that time would only dream wistfully of doing: circumnavigate the globe on a motorcycle. She has written a fantastic book about her two-year-long journey around the world titled 'Lone Rider' (Octane Press, 2017) and I heartily recommend it to all of you.

Beard, in her early formative 20s at that time, sought release from the chaffing constraints of an eclectic (if conservative) set of parents. To say her father was somewhat eccentric is a gross understatement; photographs of him in her book reveal a slightly incongruous proto-Bohemian who, nevertheless, was a successful doctor of medicine with a well-established practice in London. Congenital chauvinist that I am, I can’t help but mention that despite his somewhat awkward appearance, his daughter (Elspeth) was an exceptionally striking and pretty young woman, with the sort of pleasing looks, long hair and inherent style that mark out those of her 70s British generational peers who came from privileged circumstances.

Beard’s association with motorcycles began, in a time when almost all British motorcyclists were male, with a two-stroke Yamaha YB100, one of those fast but noisy puddle-jumpers of the 60s and early 70s that most die-hard motorcycle buffs love to sneeringly dismiss and overlook (in favor of quieter four-stroke machines). The picture she presents to us of her on her first bike is one of calm, self-assuredness, a person who looks to be as comfortable on a motorcycle as she would at an upper-class high-tea in Chelsea. I have little doubt that this image grabbed the attention of a small number of keen appreciators of female comeliness, although I am equally certain that the vast majority of young men on motorcycles (the British insist on quaintly referring to them as ‘motorbikes’) in those days of black-jacketed café racers, regarded her as an unwelcome intruder on traditionally male turf.

Despite this palpable adverse male reactivity, Beard fell in love with the same qualities that appeal to everyone ever attracted to motorcycles: the freedom they provide, the raw, sensual pleasures of feeling the wind fresh in one’s face and the exciting mobility offered by two-wheeled vehicles.

It wasn’t long before a former boyfriend (who was also a motorcyclista), sensing her fascination with motorcycles, pointed out a used BMW R60/6 (600 ccs displacement) owned by a friend, who wished to sell it. It had slightly under 35,000 miles on the clock already, but given the renown German engineering expertise reflected in it, she instantly fell in love with it. For those of you who are not motorcycle buffs, BMW motorcycles have always stood proudly apart from the rest of the pack, famous as they were for their four-stroke, flat opposed cylinder engines and quiet shaft-driven rear wheel differential. BMW enjoyed many prior decades of history as a manufacturer of sturdy, reliable (and even a bit stylishly ‘frusty’) powered two-wheeled vehicles that began in the early 1900s and continues to this day.

With solidly conservative attributes such as a ‘hard’ rear-end (until rear springs were added) and black utilitarian paint, BMW bikes established a name for themselves as a legacy statement of high-quality German design engineering that attracted a very particular type of person, back in the post-war era. Of course, during the war, BMW (Bayerische Motorenwerke) had turned its attention to the manufacture of aircraft engines for the German Luftwaffe, although its motorcycles continued to be made for use by the German Wehrmacht in all theatres of the conflict, where they performed admirably in all climates and geographical extremes.

As a normally hormone-possessed young female of that era, Beard had a few intense relationships with young male admirers, but it’s safe to say that as a self-assured, slightly headstrong woman, she suffered from a slightly more complex set of relationship complexities than most of her peers. At any rate (and she does a fantastic job of explaining and illustrating a few of these in her book), after the young man (‘Alex’) she was going with inexplicably ‘dumped her’ (with the classical, time-honored “It’s me, not you!” exit line), she hit on the idea of taking her BMW on a world tour to assuage her initial emotionally intense sense of loss.

Despite the fact that this had never been done by a woman before (and by very few men, as well up to that time), she resolved to ride her bike around the world, driving across all the continents (except Antarctica) and began preparations for the trip.

Complicating things at this time, she developed an acquaintance with another young man named Mark, who was not a motorcyclist but was in fact an engineering student she had met, who had an altogether different personality from the more adventurous and exciting Alex. Mark seems to have fallen hard for Beard, professing his passionate love for her in one of those awkward manners most guaranteed to drive many self-possessed women away: a profession of complete and utter devotion.

Beard was at that time still quite profoundly distraught by Alex’s inexplicable withdrawal from their relationship and was also intent on escaping from the grief caused for her by it by setting forth on her anticipated riding adventure as soon as possible, hence she tried very conscientiously to discourage Mark, by repeatedly setting forth reasons why she wasn’t ready for another romantic relationship.

Mark wouldn’t be deterred in his slavish, somewhat naïve pursuit of Beard, much to her dismay, but while she appreciated the quiet, serious nature of Mark (a fellow her conservative mother highly approved of, naturally) and his ambition to make a successful career of his engineering abilities, all that mattered to her at that moment was setting out on her circumnavigation of the globe.

Thus, leaving Mark behind in England, she departed and set out for New York, shipping her BMW to the NYC port by freighter in advance and planning to stay initially with friends there. The plan was to ride across the USA, then leave Los Angeles by boat for Australia, where she hoped to obtain temporary employment in an architectural capacity as an intern (she had completed a year of advanced study in architecture at that point).

While in the US, Mark sent her a letter indicating that he had arranged to quit his job and would be joining her in Sydney, where he wished to link-up with her again. This was not altogether a happy discovery for Beard, since she wasn’t at all sure that Mark was the right person for her, despite his relentless and ardent pursuit. However, link-up they did and thereafter travelled to some extent together before she left him once more (after a number of months), this time with somewhat more money in her pocket to continue her cycle trip and continued across Australia, driving north to Townsville, then west to Three Ways, turning south to Alice Springs and Ayer’s Rock, then further south to Port Augusta and thence west across the bleak Nullakor Plain to Coogardie, ending up in Perth.

Beard once again met and joined up with Mark after transiting to Sumatra, Indonesia and SEA, and the time they spent together on this part of her trip and while traveling from Madras to the Nepali border in India brought her to a new appreciation for Mark and his perseverance, among other things: something that seems logically to be the product of some intense mutual experiences together, there.

Once at the Nepali border, she left Mark again, and continued by herself through Nepal, where she met another BMW motorcyclist named ‘Robert’, A Dutch fellow, who was also traveling along the same route by coincidence. Finding Robert a perfect riding partner, they continued the rest of the way (west through India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and then through Europe to the UK again) sharing mutual adventures and mishaps that boggle the mind and stupefy the imagination.

Given that these nations are some of the most chauvinistic, primitively provincial and sexist countries on the planet, it is hard to imagine any single Western woman daring to travel across any of them, even accompanied by a male. Not surprisingly, however, Beard found Robert quite an amicable partner and it wasn’t long before thoughts of Mark began to fade and she developed a stronger and much deeper regard for the new man in her life.

Brevity mandates the above short summary of her route, but I can’t even begin to describe the absolutely incredible experiences Beard experienced in her 35,000-mile ride around the world. If you can think of it, chances are good that she lived through it: instances of extreme, over-the-top male chauvinism, repeated sexual assaults, gender bias, numerous mechanical break-downs along the route, an aborted pregnancy and miscarriage, sickness and ill-health, severe culture-shock, catastrophic near-disasters, bizarre road accidents (several times resulting in major injuries that required hospitalization), unbelievable customs SNAFUs, nightmarish border crossings and insane drivers, all in some of the most inhospitable and trying circumstances conceivable.

I know that the above description makes her journey sound easy, skimming over all this lightly here as I have had to do, but Beard is, in addition to being a formidably courageous woman and skilled BMW mechanic (all self-taught…she could dissemble her entire machine and rebuild it using parts made from coat hangers, if need be…aided merely by a Haynes Auto Guide she took with her), also a consummate writer possessed of gobs of writing skill and literary talent.

As such, her book is therefore one that (as I mentioned earlier) is exceptionally hard to put down. I found that when I was reading it, I would be impatient with myself if I failed to make it through any less than two chapters at a sitting, such was the repeated anticipation she builds in her readers: “Will she make it through this one!?” And for someone like me, who suffers with adult ADD (a latent remnant from childhood), that’s saying quite a lot, I can assure you. I was riveted.

This book, therefore, is one that demands to be read by anyone, man and women alike, without qualification.

When Beard finally made it back to the UK, she subsequently found that the intensely shared experiences she had had on the last major segment of the trip with Robert had diminished somewhat in her re-acclimitisation to UK domestic life and she found her affections for Mark gaining renewed strength once more. Eventually, feeling that Mark was the right person for her after all, she got back together with him and soon after had his child. Unfortunately, as a very time-pressed graduate student, and despite the fact that she had pointedly demanded that Mark shoulder fully 50% of the burden of taking care of the child, Mark quickly proved himself unsuited to the task of shouldering the responsibilities consequent to being a parental role-model and she eventually left him.

Thus, Beard never married, despite a barely supressed and deep affection for her traveling companion Robert (when explains the circumstances of all this in her book). Eventually she graduated from her architectural studies and became a noteworthy architect in London, purchasing a striking old Victorian era brick water tower and renovating it into a remarkable personal residence for herself, simultaneously therein establishing a professional reputation for masterfully innovative architectural restorations.

Beard still rides her motorcycles today (she still has the original 1974 BMW R60/9 that she made her remarkable two-year trip on, as well as a much newer BMW bike) and is looked upon by other motorcyclists in the UK as a sort of Godmother to UK motorcycle culture.

There is talk of her story being made into a film and what constitutes the core of another, related anecdote is the fact that immediately after her return to the UK, she found that no one was to the slightest degree interested in what she had accomplished in her arduous world-tour. Not only was no one interested in the story (neither friends nor the media), they all appeared completely unable of even beginning to comprehend the magnitude of what she had accomplished…all by herself, for the most part.

This observation struck a resonant chord in me, since despite my 15 years of not quite as extreme, but still quite exotic experience in the Middle East, I have never found anyone who has expressed the slightest interest in or understanding of what I myself had gone through in my interactions with the Arab world. In my many efforts to explain a few of these encounters to friends and through some of my writings, I have again and again been completely baffled to discover that no one seems at all interested in hearing about any of my own adventures (largely in the 80s and 90s, a term of professional service that included the original Gulf War 1 of 1991). It often seemed to me as if, in doing do, I were speaking a foreign language that was largely incomprehensible to most people I met, caught up and totally absorbed as they were in their largely rather drab and mundane, day-to-day routines.

Beard, after encountering this same inexplicable lack of interest by others in her incredible journey, eventually laid her trip to rest inside her head and got on with her new life as a successful architect. It wasn’t until some 20+ years later that someone finally evidenced interest in her amazing story and thus her book was composed and printed many years after the experience had actually taken place.

Reflecting on my own puzzlement over the lack of imagination possessed by my personal circle of friends in the United States, I frequently gave this perplexing matter much thought, settling for writing down many of my own adventures in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in various articles (many of which appear on my website) purely for my own sake. This is probably a reflection of my belief that someone, somehow may in future yet find something of interest in them.

Eventually it dawned on me that this sort of disengagement from the experiences of others is quite frequently the result of ordinary human behavior and a human tendency to lack more than superficial empathy for the compelling experiences of others. I suppose this nuance is a reflection of the solitary insularity so many people have acquired in this age of intensely narcissistic self-absorption, a protective emotional distancing that others often seem to affect from the affairs of strangers, even when those affairs may be remarkably different from their own and/or uniquely interesting.

This same mechanism appears to lie at the core of the serious difficulties so many soldiers have of fitting successfully back into the mundane, humdrum and bland routines of ordinary civilian life after having perhaps undergone unimaginably horrific, violent and brutal excesses of modern warfare. PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, known in previous eras by many other names (‘shell-shock’, ‘battle fatigue’, ‘soldier’s heart’, etc.), has only relatively recently been recognised as a serious psychological syndrome, but regardless of the descriptive term employed to describe it, one chief behavioral manifestation of those who suffer from PTSD is the inability to relate their experiences to others in a meaningful manner.

As a result, many seriously disaffected soldiers clamp a tight lid on their experiences and give up completely on trying to expiate these personal demons by sharing with others, despite the fact that doing so often helps overcome to a significant extent much of the intense psychological pain and suffering that such terrible experiences generate. Many of our returning combat warriors from the unfortunate Vietnam war were substantially afflicted with severe PTSD and initially found, in almost all cases, that when they tried to share their experiences with non-soldiers, they were politely but subtlely rebuffed by disinterested civilians. Fortunately, this perplexing status quo was recognised by the Veterans Administration and peer counseling treatment provided in response to it often works wonders in effectively addressing this affliction.

So too, is it with many other singular, possibly life-changing experiences people have undergone that are not necessarily associated with extreme violence and trauma, but may nevertheless be inherently interesting and productive of worthwhile insights and reflection. Beard certainly encountered this phenomenon after her return home. I have become used to the same familiar genuine lack of apparent interest in my own adventures among the Arab peoples by my peers, but now I understand the dynamic underlying this response far more completely than I did and, following Beard’s example, have ‘gotten on with my life’ as she did.

To a significant extent, the old aphorism “You had to be there” (to appreciate it) is absolutely true, since much of what constitutes the factual reality of what one may have experienced as an individual is so often completely removed from the concerns and awareness of less adventurous peers, sometimes even beyond their imagining, that you might as well be speaking an indecipherable foreign language.

Regrettably, in terms of my own friends and colleagues of former expatriate days in the Southwest Asian region (AKA: ‘Middle East’), so many have failed to stay in touch or have dropped away that I often feel quite aesthetically isolated from greater society at large. Curiously, I had a strong premonition back then that I would hate to have to return eventually from my overseas sojourns, having developed (while an expatriate) a profound conviction that I was more of a citizen of the entire world than a partisan inhabitant of a particular nation. That disappointment over having to return to the crass materialism and 'lumpen proletariate' mentality of mainsstream American pop culture has never faded, sad to say.

It is interesting to note that astronauts and cosmonauts have also developed a similar transcendent appreciation for the overall ‘unity’ of humankind, a sense that all of us share a small planet in a vast universe, upon setting forth into space. This state of enhanced awareness is a common result of expanded worldly experience that explorers have remarked upon from time immemorial, but how much more profound it must be when one is gazing down upon an earth that is hundreds of thousands of miles distant! To a much lesser but still quite appreciable extent, this is the effect that Beard acquired in her travels and it is the very same sense I (and so many others, doubtless, who have traveled extensively) have acquired.

As a writer and communicator for whom ‘literary connection’ via the written word is like life-blood itself, the fact that the vast majority of Americans lack this greater awareness of humanity's collective soul greatly saddens me when I stop to ruminate on the matter for any length of time. And it is probably this motivating factor that chiefly inspires Beard, myself and so many others who have written of their travels, that spurs us experiential ‘pilgrims’ forward in our efforts to draw the uninitiated masses into our expanded conversational colloquy.

Social detachment can be and often is an impactful social force to contend with when one confronts the fact that others may not evidence much interest in endeavors such as these cited here, but given the fact that so many people are so self-absorbed and disinterested in the rich diversity that life offers (insularly encapsulated in our age of intensely self-absorbed narcissism), this remains a problem that everyone who has lived an exceptional, out-of-the-ordinary life must resolve for his or her self. If one is not skillful enough to write and publish an accomplished narrative along these lines (and I am certainly not one of them, sadly having only a modest and quite mediocre talent for word-slinging proficiency) as beard has, and if one is unfortunate enough to have no interested grand-children to relate some of one’s adventures to, one ultimately has to reconcile this unhappy fact of existence as best one may. And that often results in a sense of loneliness.

At any rate, I heartily recommend Elspeth Beard’s fantastic account of her round-the-world journey to all of you, without reservation. We can’t all pluck up our courage and face the uncertainties of other profoundly different cultures as Beard did, but we can all enjoy them vicariously and comfortably in a favorite armchair. After all, experience in the greater world that lies about us is what defines much of our ability to make sense of what human life really consists of and the amazing potentials of our species; above all else, it enables us to develop deeper, critically valuable understandings about ourselves and our place on what is clearly an increasingly small and ever more crowded planet.

Yes, one ideally has to ‘be there’ to understand fully and completely, but exceptionally engaging narrative accounts such as Beard’s definitely make us wiser, more well-rounded and more broadly aware of the many fantastic possibilities that await us beyond our own, probably much more limited immediate experience!

They’re also frequently (as in her case) a simply GREAT read, too!