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.
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