I forgot

 Oops, I forgot my daughter's birthday! My second daughter, Sage, was born two weeks after I finished chemotherapy to treat Hodgkin's lymphoma. My brain was rather mushy. For several years I couldn't get her birthday correct. First I was off by a month and several days, then just off by several days.  Now I do know and remember Sage's birthday. As I write this she is 12 years old. I think. Yes, that's right. Sage is an interesting kid. She was born massive, super solid, had a big head. She was energetic and enthusiastic. For her first couple years being near her head was dangerous. She loved to throw her head back when she was excited. I think she broke my nose once doing that. She gave me several gobstoppers to the jaw and almost knocked me out another time with a hand bang to the head. 

She was a character. In the foreign service, when assigned to a post abroad, we have government issued furniture. We always have these long dining room tables made from dark, heavy wood. I hate them. My kids, however, have always used at least half of these tables for art, games, school work, and simply making huge messes. These tables feature prominently in our lives and in my memory.  We returned to Shanghai after my chemo and Sage's birth, staying there another year. Sage had a highchair at the long, dark table. I guess at some point she started to resent being stuck there, or the reverse, maybe she lorded it over us from her highchair perch.  I write this because out of the blue she started doing this thing from the highchair. She would look at her big sister, mom and dad in turn with a squinched mischievous and tight lipped grin, then start huffing and puffing through her nose like demon about to explode. The first time she did this we were shocked then melted into laughter. Maybe that's why she kept it up for several more weeks. But that is how I think of Sage in her earlier years, energetic and ferocious, and mostly glowing with happy positivity except when she was a rage of anger or heartbreak. 

I remember in Brazil sword fighting with Sage. Not with real swords of course; wooden ones. Solveig and I, plus Sage, free-for-all with no sides. Sage was around age three, so Solveig around age six or seven. Either Solveig or I accidently tapped Sage on the knuckles. Not hard, but it must have surprised her. She became a force - huffing and puffing, screaming and cackling with rage and laughter, put the fear into Solveig and I as we ran all over the house to escape her unrestrained blows. That's how I member Sage in her younger years. 

She is different now. We all change. She's still very much her own spirit, does her own thing. She dropped the unabashed and exuberant force she once projected and exchanged it for a more sensitive and quiet repose. She's super creative, like Solveig, but more so. Solveig is meticulous. Sage is wild and careless, starting and finishing project after project in one short burst after another. Their creative energy is amazing, especially Sage. I can't keep up.   

At age ten Sage made a couple of length choose-your-own path adventure comics 30-50 pages long. Just one example of those creative bursts.  

Trafficked - a human story

 I haven't written anything about my current career - foreign service officer, U.S. Department of State. I'm currently at the U.S. Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique. On questionnaires requiring employment type, I normally have to choose between government worker or diplomat.  I consider myself a consular officer because that's what I've done for the last 15 years - American citizen services abroad and visa adjudications for non-citizens to travel to the USA.  In this context I've worked on some harrowing, wild situations. My girls don't understand much about what I do. Tonight the subject of the American prisoner came up. Both of my girls met him several times when we got him out of prison but still essentially under house arrest while we worked our tails off to have him repatriated to his home in the USA. He wasn't under house arrest because he had no home in Mozambique. We had him in a hotel across the street from the clinic where our panel physician is one of the directing doctors, and several doors down from the police station which manages diplomatic cases. I can't go into further details due to privacy issues. 

Anyhow, "the American prisoner" as my girls know him came up tonight. He was in a documentary on National Geographic called Trafficked., the episode about unwitting or "blind" drug mules. The journalist and producer of Trafficked, Mariana van Zeller, has a friend in Maputo who helped her put together a film crew, scout locations, etc. to do the documentary. In the process, the friend became involved with the American prisoner, communicated regularly with his daughter back in Minnesota, and helped arrange  care for the American prisoner in Machava Prison, things like food and laundry service. Without supplemental help, food in the prison is limited to two meals a day at most, and it's typically just water and paap, or water and matapa, or water and bread, just the barest of staples to survive. The prisoners also grow their own produce and corn, and there are fruit trees. 

The friend's husband is a dive instructor, which is why this all came up tonight. My younger daughter wants to do a scuba class. So we went from talking scuba to the American prisoner, and I mentioned that there was a documentary about him. My younger daughter was surprised and excited, asked if she could see it. We watched it tonight. I had watched the first half previously when I was doing consular visits to the American prisoner, but avoided watching the entire episode because I needed to keep a professional distance. Why. 

If anyone ever does read this, the answer is that the job of the American government is not to get Americans out of jail abroad. When American citizens leave the USA they become subject to the legal jurisdiction of the country they enter. Imagine if every foreign national in jail or prison in the USA had a foreign government telling judges how to rule in their national's case, or telling the jury how to reach a verdict, or telling the justice system to let their national go, unfair trial, our prisoner is innocent or your prison system is lacking and should not be allowed to detain our citizen. 

The role on an Embassy and consular officer is to provide detainees with a list of local lawyers who can represent them, who know the law in their country and how the judicial system works. In addition, the Embassy and consular officer ensure detainees are treated humanely as far as local conditions can, have access to required prescription medications, and if needed, supplemental "nutritious" food, like protein bars.Visits to pretrial and trial detainees are once per month, more when necessary. If and when American citizen detainees are found guilty, the Embassy ensures visits once every three months to the prisoner to check on their overall well-being, and in many situations pass books, learning materials, family letters and such. If lucky, maybe we can pass a pack of cigarettes or a bucket of KFC as well. In my career I've advocated for medical and family visits for detainees and prisoners, helped arrange funds to buy them food, clothing and other services that prisons systems in many countries do not provide. That's the job of family. If you are in prison in Shanghai and you are from Shanghai that makes sense. If you are from the USA and were arrested visiting Shanghai for the first time, it doesn't make much sense, and that's when the Embassy intervenes to help supply the basics.  Disappointing,right? Even infuriating? But there it is; our job is generally not to get Americans out. 

Put another way, our job is not to be finders of fact. That is the roles of investigators, police, prosecutors, judges, and the occasional jury. We do not discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. We provide services to all detainees and prisoners. In Shanghai I provided services to an American detainee and teacher who was charged with sexually molesting six of his elementary school students. Does that change anyone's calculus on the USG being responsible for springing American citizens from jail abroad? How do we determine who is innocent and who is not? We don't. I'm not even saying the teacher was guilty of that heinous crime, if it occurred at all. (You can look it up and find the various sides.) We provide basic services, ensure American citizen detainees and prisoners have access to legal representation, try to prevent overt and extreme abuse in prison, find a baseline of humanity in the situation. 

Back to the American prisoner in Maputo, Mozambique. He is out and went back home to his daughter in Minnesota. The documentary doesn't show this. It ends in February, 2024. I cannot share with you how he got out or went home. He has the right to privacy and as a government employee I cannot violate that right. My daughters know he got out because they met him while he was staying at the hotel. I visited him almost every evening to help with food. When I did not, Mariana's friend in Maputo and her husband, the scuba instructor, did. Well, the American prisoner did learn how to order take out, so in the end we were not with him every evening. But there is the right to privacy, so I shared very little about the situation and story with my girls. The documentary was the first time my younger daughter learned the story of the American prisoner whom she ate pizza with and who offered her soda. She learned about his daughter. She was impressed. She was also impressed there was a documentary about the whole thing, It's probably the first time she's felt connected to the news or something on TV, that these are real things, not just stories. My daughter is 12. 

Tonight is the first time I've reflected on the experience. There were times when the situation became excruciatingly real - especially the conversations I had with the American prisoner's daughter, and taking to his cell mates in the aftermath of the Christmas riots and prison break that left so many people dead, saying goodbye and God bless to them the day the American prisoner left Machava Prison for good, leaving those injured souls behind. The American prisoner was never a number to me, never just part of the job. None of them have been. I take on their stories and their baggage. As hard as I try to keep a professional distance, they seep into my blood.  

I'm not very healthy. My health has always been worse since becoming a foreign service officer. I guess this is one reason why. I just want to stock groceries at a Trader Joes back home, where ever home is. Somewhere in the USA. 

Dungeons and Dragons Art Review - Jeff Easley, from Masterful to Derivative

 I started this blog years ago and it found a brief following because of the D&D art. I was focused on the four great oil painters from TSR's Pit. After all that time I never dedicated a post to Jeff Easley. The man was a master. He still may be, but his best work was done 40 and 50 years ago. My absolute favorite was the first orange spine AD&D book we bought, first because of the cover below, and then the content. I loved the art inside and out. 

The book came out in 1986, four years after Jeff Easley began working at TSR. I guess he did the painting as an on demand cover, but it is so foreign to most AD&D or D&D adventures of the time. It's way more imaginative than most encounters in the game would be.What is the monstrosity clinging to the mountain top? Don't know. Makes it scarier.  This is so much more evocative than run-of-the mill D&D. The vista, with river meandering off into the sunlight, the peak rising into a thunderstorm with lightning streaking down, the old bones and treasure chest merging into earth. Note that not only one of the adventurers is doomed to be either eaten or, more likely, tossed to his death, but that another is already falling to likely death in the lower right corner of the cover. In true Easley fashion, the primary warrior's armor has no basis in reality or game mechanics. I just love this one.  It is a major departure from the great art D&D books featured in their earlier years which generally depicted scenes that could be pulled directly from the game's mechanics. I enjoy both types, but Easley's vision is just so much more imaginative. 

Here's the best Jeff Easley painting I've never seen before until writing this post:

Jeff Easley 1981 cover from the late-era pulp, Creepy, done around age 27

Jeff Easley started working for TSR in 1982 with encouragement or an invitation from his friend Larry Elmore. Wikipedia states that the masters in TSR's Pit had him painting gemstones on the borders to the Endless Quests books. Look at that gorgeous painting above. They wasted this man's talent on border decor? That did not last long though. Easley was soon working on every cover painting to AD&D's collection of orange spine books, eleven in all by my count. Every one of these paintings is a masterpiece. Check out this link to Scott Taylor's Art of the Genre that looks at his top ten of these covers. He states there are two that did not make his list. One is Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis' Dragonlance Adventures. I cannot figure out what that twelth book might be.  

Of the four greats, Easley, Elmore, Caldwell, and Parkinson, Jeff Easley stayed with TSR the longest, even doing a few covers for Wizards of the Coast when they bought D&D in 1995. But by this point Easley's hot streak was over. He was becoming derivative, going through the motions, no more creative spark. 

Jeff Easley became so Easley in style, composition, and genre that the later TSR Pit artist Tony Szczudlo was able to distill Easley exactly, almost like a paint-by-numbers. I think his intention was homage to the master, but still....

Tony Szczudlo getting every element of Jeff Easley just right. I like it. The pieces from Szczudlo that shine through are the details in the hands and face of the warrior, tatters on the cloak. Easley was not one for detailed human anatomy. 

Did I get this wrong? Are the best Jeff Easley paintings later in his career? I think it's a hard argument to make. 

Another Easley favorite of mine graced the cover to the AD&D Dungeoneer's Survival Guide. Again, it looks very little like something from Dungeons and Dragons, and aparently that's because Easley painted this before joining TSR.  Again I think this amplifies the imagination and creativity. 

Here I will stretch beyond Easley's AD&D orange spine covers. Easley painted undead skeletons and magical power better than anyone, ever, at TSR. He combines them both in this painting.

The Magister, a AD&D Forgotten Realms supplement published in 1988. 

Another example of Easley setting magical power to the canvas. This is paint, nothing digital. Very cool. It's just magical. I'd taken oil painting lessons before as a youngster and did some decent landscapes. I simply cannot imagine how he does this. 

Cover to the Dragonlance module New Beginnings, published in 1991

To my mind, Easley's cover painting to the 2nd Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide is simply the best book cover ever for TSR. 

Jeff Easley's Wizard and Dragon, first published as the cover to the AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide in 1989. 

Last of all, here is a personal favorite. I just love the look on that big guy's face. This is also Easley's best strong female figure, a rarity for him. For compaison, turn to Art of the Genre and Taylor's article When Jeff Easley Had a Girl. 

Jeff Easley's Cutting Things Down to Size, an interior the 1989 AD&D 2nd Edition Players Handbook

Coming across in all of Jeff Easley's paintings is that he makes up for the lack of true skill with human figures and even clothing with his mastery of composition, color, dynamism, and storytelling. Overall he is consistently my favorite of the four greats from TSR's Pit. 

Time Passes Again

 It's rare that I have the time and head space to reflect. This is one of those weeks, separated from family while in training  for my next assignment to Mozambique. Should I have so much time while in training? I did ask why our courses go only six hours instead of eight, and the reply was so that we could schedule consultations. I did my consultations a few months ago. Here I sit, trying to keep myself occupied and relatively active. Researching pulp artists, seeing again the huge array of beautiful paintings done by N.C. Wyeth, and making that connection again between youth and creativity. For me it was time well spent. Now if I could only be a little more creative myself.

I'm still hung up the amazing, almost divine ability for the young to create. I was listening to the song Poncho and Lefty, made famous by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard when they were in their fifties, or perhaps late forties. However, the song was written by Townes Van Zandt, and he reocrded it in 1972, around the age of 28. Lyrics to the opening verse. "Breath as hard as kerosene." Where did those words come into his mind? It's amazing. 

Living on the road my friend
Is gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron
Your breath as hard as kerosene
You weren't your mama's only boy
But her favorite one, it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye

Townes Van Zandt

I'm stuck on western music, as in "country" music, because the lyrics to so many of these songs felt lived in for many rough years, but these guys were young. Here is Mr Bojangles by Jerry Jeff Walker. He recorded the song in 1968, but must have written it some time earlier, as it was about an encounter he'd had in a New Orleans jail in 1965, when he would have been 23. These are lyrics from the second half of the song. 

We spoke in tears of fifteen years
How his dog and him
They travelled about
His dog up and died

He up and died
After twenty years he still grieves
They said i dance now at every chance and honky tonks
For drinks and tips

But most the time i spend behind these county bars
Cause i drinks a bit
He shook his head and as he shook his head
I heard someone ask please

Mr Bojangles
Mr Bojangles
Mr Bojangles
Dance

I knew a man Bojangles and he danced for you
In worn out shoes
Silver hair, a ragged shirt and baggy pants
The old soft shoe

He jumped so high
He jumped so high
Then he'd lightly touched down
Mr Bojangles
Mr Bojangles

Jerry Jeff Walker

The Creative Peak (Fades)

There is a wonderful art blog I enjoy reading called Art of the Genre. I have no idea who the author of the blog is, but he is well connected to the RPG scene and artists there-in. He also publishes RPG and fantasy art collections under The Folio. Quite a few years back, perahps a decade ago, I read a statement from the author to the effect that painters are at their prime in the early years of middle age, let's say late twenties through the thirties. After that they generally do not improve on their craft or vision, and may even begin to have a decline in their powers. 

The Folio #18, this cover is taken from an old pulp novel. 

The statement left an impression on me. As a general statement, Americans as creators and artists seem to be their most creative through their thirties, but are especially potent in their late teens to early twenties. I won't say this for the entirety of the United States' history, but certainly from World War Two onwards, as our culture has become ever more youth focused. 

Think about it. Who are our great artists over the last 75 years - music, literature, film, visual art? Music is easy because at least pop music has such a youth focus. But leave pop music aside. Hank Williams and Miles Davis dominated their respective genres of American music starting in their early 20s. Classical music is a far more complicated genre, but famous American composers Aaron Copeland and Philip Glass were both hitting their stride around age 35. But we can go well back in time. The "father of American music", Stephen Foster, was born in 1826. He wrote most of his most famous songs at the age of 24 - Camp Town Races, My Old Kentucky Home, etc. With film, look at Stephen Speilberg. He was making near full length films as a teenager. He directed Jaws at age 30. Orson Welles was directing Broadway theatre at the age of 21, did his infamous radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds at age 23, and co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane at the age of 26! For the visual arts, Andy Warhol was making a splash in New York city by the age of 26. 

So far these examples have been completely male focused. Staying with the visual arts, but going feminine, we have the long-lived painter Georgia O'Keeffe, who was embracing her style by 1915 at the age of 28. The real direction I want to take these thoughts is to fantasy pulp art. One of the early leaders was Margaret Brundage who did well known covers for Weird Tales Magazine, and was in fact the most used cover artist for the pulp mag in the 1930s. She started painting for Weird Tales at age 30. 

Three covers from Margaret Brundage. They are certainly pre-Frazetta in style but also show an early obsession withthe sensual female form, even by a female artist.

Now let's turn to the god of pulp painting, Frank Frazetta. He was already changing comic book art in his late teens with far more dynamic figures and muscleture. At age 35 he had moved on from comics and pulps and started his famous paintings for the Tarzan book covers. I'm no art expert, but to my eye Frazetta's painting style continued to evolve, peaking in the 1970s,  or perhaps 1980s with his Death Dealer series, though the general style and composition of these works were not so different from his first Conan the Barbarian painting done in 1966 at age 38. 

Early Frazetta pulp cover

Frazetta's Tarzan the Invincible, 1963, doing movement with the human figure rarely seen before.

Is there any doubt - Frazetta's Conan the Barbarian, 1966

Desperation, painted in 1971

       The Sacrifice, painted in 1980

Cat Gril II, painted in 1990

Moving backward once more, the painter N.C. Wyeth of the Brandywine School and perhaps the greatest "fantasy" artist prior to the Frazetta revolution, was doing pulp covers in his teens, and then some of his most famous western genre paitings in his early 20s, and did his enduring illustrations for Treasure Island around age 28 or 29. 

1909 pulp cover by N.C,. Wyeth, around age 27

N.C. Wyeth's Tarzan

N.C. Wyeth's take on Jim and Long John Silver

N.C. Wyeth's The Passing of Robin Hood, beautifully done around 1917, about age 35

Here I want to emphasize the point that human creativity rests mainly with the young. I didn't stumble on this maxim until I was in my 40s and feeling depleted mentally and physically, creativity largely spent. The real creative juices seem to begin flowing after we've transitioned through puberty and are ready and randy for procreation. Need more proof? Italian renaissance painters - Michael Angelo was 33 when he started painting the Sistine Chapel. Da Vinci was 30 wpphen he completed his first major painting, and painted the Last Supper of Christ at age 40. Raphael started painting chapels for popes in Rome at the age of 28, dying at age 37. Looking north to the Low Countries, Rembrandt was 36 when he painted The Night Watch. Vermeer was 33 when he painted Girl with a Pearl Earring. All of these artists were painting as youth and doing fairly amazing stuff as teens. 

I conclude that young passion and young love, and a mind (or brain) just crossing the threshold of maturity are the keys that open the flood gates of creativity. Oh to be young!

Dungeons and Dragons Art Reveiw - The Thigh Master, Clyde Caldwell

 I've come this far and can ignore this painter no longer - Clyde Caldwell. If Larry Elmore is fundamentally a painter of landscapes and Keith Parkinson a painter of trees, then Clyde Caldwell is in pure essence a painter of womanly thighs. The teenage youth I was blessed him for that. 

Clyde Caldwell was one of the four great oil painters from TSR's Pit days, and my least favorite of the bunch as I poured over D&D art.  Caldwell did some sci-fi works for TSR's Gamma World, but is most known for his high or epic fantasy works featuring scantily clad women with exposed cleavage and thighs - really well done thighs. However, as a teenager who put a lot of time into Dungeons and Dragons, my chief love and concern was creating maps. And maps make me think Caldwell. Clyde Caldwell's best paintings for TSR are the covers he did for the D&D basic rules Gazetteers. As a collection of paintings for the same product and theme, I would say they are the best art work to ever come out of TSR. It's not just that they all include maps as part of the overall composition, it's the variety in each painting that evokes senses of place, culture, adventure, danger. It is the use of color across each painting, the harmony of disparate parts coming together. The brushwork and human anatomy are good, noticeably better than his earlier work. While figures are fairly static, there is still a dynamism in the flow from one image to the next. It's great stuff. And the women are all alluring.

Below are three of the Gazetteer covers I've taken directly from Caldwell's website. None of these are my favorites, but they give an idea of the collection as a whole. The first is for The Grand Duchy of Karameikos. This was the first in the gazetteer series that TSR published, so I assume it was also Caldwell's first painting in the series. Also here are the Orcs of Thar and The Minrothad Guilds. 

The Grand Duchy of Karameikos 

The Orcs of Thar

                                                                   The Minrothad Guilds 

Good works, but not my favorites. Those come here, in the order of third, second and first faves. The images are smaller and are the actual gazetteer covers. We have the Five Shires, the Northern Reaches, and the Elves of Alfeim. Note that the last two feature thighs in classic Caldwell fashion. Note the colors.  I also love his more worldly take on halflings (hobbits) and his more aggressive take on elves. For the Northern reaches it's the colors, and the more historical Viking images juxtaposed with his awesome female warrior who appears in classic Caldwell fashion and adds the fantastic tone to the composition. 

The Five Shires

The Northern Reaches

The Elves of Alfheim 

Clyde Caldwell's The Elves of Alfheim 

Beyond the Gazetteers I'll add a few of my other Caldwell favorites, more typical of his style from early works right up to the present, although he did do covers for TSR's Ravenloft adventures that employed a similar composition style to the gazetteers around the same time period. The major changes I see over time in Caldwell's work is moving towards harder, more defined lines and more detail. I don't think his composition and capture of the human form was ever any better than the several years he did the gazetteer covers in the later 1980s and early 1990s. 

One I especially enjoyed from my teenage years found inside the AD&D 2nd Edition Player's Handbook.

One of Caldwell's famous and iconic Dagon Magazine covers.

Captured! One of my favorite Dragonlance paintings by any artist. I believe it first appeared in a calendar collection. 

This is a personal favorite and guilty pleasure due to the female character with staff. It's by no measure Caldwell's best painting and is not well know. For me there is no way around it, the gal is just sexy as hell. This is the cover to the D&D adventure Earthshaker! I'll note that the lady female figure a strong resemblance to one of Larry Elmore's common female subjects and muses, who I understand is Mrs. Elmore, his wife. 

Earthshaker!

I'll add one of Elmore's examples for comparison. I believe the title is Gold Mountains, which, besides the rocks painted gold, also points to the female figure's top. I love this painting so much that if I can ever find a decent copy of it I'll do a post dedicated to it alone.  Another interesting tidbit on Elmore is that he now paints figures from real models, whereas his earlier works, which included his wife, he painted more from his inner vision. It's no secret that his earlier works are better. Please don't take any of this as fact. These are items I vaguely recall from a TSR art book I had over thirty years ago, and in more recent years Scott Taylor's blog, Art of the Genre. 

https://artofthegenre.com/blogs/news/when-larry-elmore-had-a-gir

Gold Mountains, perhaps from a Dragon Magazine cover? The character in the middle is Snarf, from Elmore's cartoon Snarf Quest the featured in Dragon Magazine for many years. 

Hands of Doom taken directly from Caldwell's website

Finally, here we have what I think this is one of Caldwell's more ambitious paintings, and one of his best to boot. Hands of Doom depicts the tragic characters of Kitara and Lord Soth, and is another of Caldwell's paintings from a Dragonlance calendar.  Caldwell created the unusual helmet for Lord Soth, making him one of D&D's most recognizable villains. The painting also gives us a focus on calves instead of thighs. 

Book Review - Around the World on a Bicycle

A dream of mine towards the end of high school was to ride a bicycle around the world. When I'd mention this to friends, classmates, and teachers, the most common response was that it was impossible; I could not ride a bicycle across the ocean. Yes! Obviously. The idea was to ride west to east across North America, fly to Ireland, ride across Ireland and the UK then over to Norway with ferries in between. From Norway I would go through Scandinavia, south through the Baltics, then Eastern Europe to Istanbul. Next I would cycle across Asia Minor, over the Caucuses, ferry across the Caspian Sea, then onward through Central Asia to China by way of Kyrgyzstan. In China, I imagined following silk road routes but then moving every more southeast to Guan Dong Province, then halfway down Vietnam before crossing Laos to Thailand, then south again to Singapore before flying to Perth and riding across Australia to Sydney. The Pacific back to the USA would be another flight, though I dreamed of catching a ride on a cargo ship. I prepared for this journey to the extent that I found a group who of five people who planned to cycle around the would by a different route, corresponded with them for some time by snail mail.  I never pursued it further. 

This bring me to Birchmore, the old-time Germany of the Lederhosen, and Norwegian subsistence farmers. These are two images that leap to mind from the beginning of Fred Birchmore's autobiographical book telling of his bicycle adventures that started in the mid-1930s as he was doing a master's degree in Europe. The visions in his book seem impossibly far away. It's shocking how much human culture changed coming through World War Two. 

As Birchmore makes his way steadily eastward from the Balkans to Egypt, Iraq, Persia, Afghanistan and more, his descriptions seem ever more removed from the modern world. As someone who has lived in Egypt, I understand the allure of seeking the distant past in our present, feeling the timelessness of a place. How many times did I hear that Egypt had not changed for hundreds of years, or since Jesus walked the land in nearby Judea with His disciples. To some extent that yearning to see the past comes through in Birchmore's tone. However, much of it is simply pure description, and the world of the 1930s is shockingly removed from our own. 

An old friend of mine passed the Around the World on A Bicycle to me this past Christmas. We both have connections to Athens, Georgia. I heard Birchmore's name previously, largely connected with the 1996 Olympics but never with his massive bicycle rides. There are occasions in the book when he thinks back on his home in Athens before he turns his thoughts to the next horizon in front of him. Those were the passages that I could most identify with; not just those glimpses back into memory, but also the deep-seated desire to press onward into the unknown, leaving the nagging sense of loss and homesickness to the wayside.

I passed the book to my father, who is also a cyclist. I was surprised to learn that my father knew of Birchmore. Not only that - he also knew of the bicycle Birchmore used on his round the world ride. It had one gear. One gear! I thought back to the epic mountain passes that Birchmore described crossing. He never mentioned gears, perhaps because basically no one had multiple gear bicycles in the 1930s.  This man Birchmore was a beast. I am shocked yet again, this time by what no one today would even dream of doing, cycling up those passes on a heavily loaded, one-gear bicycle. And he did this in lederhosen, one pair of German leather shorts from Germany to Vietnam. Fred Birchmore, you are one of my heroes. I wish I knew more about your bicycle rides when we lived in Athens in the 1990s. I surely would have looked you up and asked for stories of your adventures, and gone on some bicycle rides.