M. L. Buchman - Mid-Life Crisis on Wheels: a bicycle journey around the world

To Mac and Ruth, the best friends anyone could ever ask for, my definition of home for so many years.

To my wife and stepdaughter for expanding that definition a thousand-fold.

Cutting-edge computer systems designer. Crisis project manager. Consultant to the Fortune 100. Utter workaholic.

Before he became a writer, M.L. Matt Buchman had dreamed of traveling the world by sailboat or small plane. Not once did he think about doing it by bicycle not until he lost everything: career, house hed been remodeling for the family he never had time to find, sense of self, all of it.

Broke and burned out at thirty-five, he sold everything, climbed on his bicycle Junior, and together they headed out on a journey of unknown duration.

His one guide? Following the setting sun west.

11,000 miles through eighteen countries. A voyage of adventure, discovery, and rebuilding a life. But mostly? A journey of discovering hope and the unexpected possibilities of the future.

For reasons passing understanding, the US is the last country in the world to officially use English measurements (feet, yards, miles, pounds). The other two holdouts, Liberia and Myanmar, converted in the mid-2010s. Even the US military is using the far more sensible metric system. Most of this trip happened to me in metric, so Ill use the measurements of that time and place. For my non-traveling American readers: a meter is a fat yard and a kilometer is fat half-mile. A kilogram (kilo) is two pounds, a really heavy two pounds.

As I never got the hang of Centigrade temperatures (and in the early 1990s many places hadnt, even though they were metrified) I list both.

W hen did my journey around the world begin?

Did it begin when I was twelve and filled the blank ceiling of my room with dream images of sailing single-handed around the world?

Or perhaps at the age of twenty-five when I stood, feet braced wide against the pitching of the Lady Amalthea? She was a lovely, though rather run-down, fifty-foot, wooden ketch I had just purchased and barely knew how to handle. The journey certainly didnt start when I sold her three years later, though perhaps it came a little closer. Id finally learned that shed never been designed for deep sea and perhaps I hadnt been either. (Though I still miss her every single time the wind ripples the water.)

The journey drifted a bit nearer when a new assistant at a law firm where I was a paralegal introduced himself with, Im Christopher. Sell it all and go now. My reply was some lucid comment on the order of, Um, hi. I had no idea what he meant.

Now I do. Ive received worse advice often, but only rarely have I received better.

The best advice I ever received was a few years after the journey chronicled here.

It came from everysingle one of my friends upon their first meeting with the girlfriend who would eventually agree to become my wife. Every single one of them, including my sister, delivered it in almost identical words: If you fuck this up, were going to kill you. My wife is awesome and engenders that kind of loyalty from people with an ease that still shocks this socially awkward boy despite twenty-plus years together.

The first turning point that I can truly identify after Christophers introduction was five years later on August 23rd, 1992. (In a few moments youll see how I can pinpoint that date.)

Id just flown into Seattle for four days. It was the longest Id been back at home in six months. Id taken a half-partnership in a small, but very high-end, computer consulting firm. A dot-com before there were dot-coms or even a public Internet. I slept on planes. I ate in restaurants, sometimes in three different cities for three consecutive meals. At home was a computer network for 3:00 a.m. testing of software Id be installing the next day in Calgary or Houston. The only ones using my bed were my cats and an ex-girlfriend and her fianc who were my regular house sitters. Honestly, they lived there more than I did.

On that cool evening of August 23rd, a pounding on my front door dragged me from a hurried bowl of chili I was trying not to slop over my latest printout. Silhouetted against the late summer sun stood a specter that thankfully resolved itself into my friend George. I offered him a glass of wine; in return he assaulted me with a question.

Why are you doing this to yourself?

I was wholly unable to answer.

For the following four nights, rather than sleeping, rather than attending to the urgent programming I needed to do, I repeatedly flung myself upon the poniard of his question. I didnt even understand what he was asking, nor could I find an answer hed accept no matter how I twisted and turned. Yet for some reason, each evening I agreed to meetsometimes at my house, sometimes at hislike a Shakespearian tragic hero.

The fourth night, as I left his house, I looked aloft at the stars shining impossibly bright against the midnight sky. Understand that I love astronomy and the stars. I ran the college planetarium for four years and presented hundreds of shows there to thousands of students from schools all around the area. I often wonder why I didnt pursue that field of study.

As I breathed in, the heavy green of late summer filled my lungs. Summer was near gone. Id missed an entire season (two of them actually as Id missed spring as well). I was missing my life. I had become a workaholic, one of the ones whom Id always considered deluded. The ones Id jeered at (quietly, Im not a rude sort). Worse, I now saw that Id been that way for at least a decade.

I was thirty-four, burned out, Id thoroughly scared off the few girlfriends Id found out of the women who didnt just avoid me to begin with. I worked hard on my career and I thought that working just as hard, with just as intense a focus on a relationship, should work just as well. Right? Of course right! or not.

I began to laugh.

It was like all the folly of all the choices Id made since roughly, oh, the day I graduated fromuh, kindergarten (?) became clear in that single expanse of brilliantly starry sky.

And couldnt stop laughing.

I collapsed in hysterics on Georges front lawn, soaked in a chill dew, filling the night with my howls. The laughter continued so long and hard his wife almost called 911 before I recovered.

I faxed in my resignation the next day.

I was now the proud owner of:

• a house that Id spent every spare minute and dollar of seven years remodeling for a family Id never had time to find
• just one very expensive consultant-type suit (the rest were shredded by my ex-business partner)
• a disconnected cell phone (to have one at all in 1992 was a great anomaly; to make it work, I had three accounts with three different companies in my three major cities and had to change my phones settings from one number to the next every time I flew)