camera56
Well-known member
This first appeared in www.midliferider.com
Ted Simon sits comfortably at the table reserved for motorcycle Gods, "long distance division." I say "comfortably" in reference to his unassailable adventure credentials and iconic book Jupiter's Travels. By every account I've read he's actually a bit embarrassed by all the accolades. 78,000 miles over four years through 45 countries on a Triumph no less is one hell of an accomplishment. He has inspired legions of others to head off on their own heroic journeys, perhaps most famously, Ewan McGregor and Charlie Borman of Long Way Round and Long Way Down fame.
I've been wading through what I previously described as the "canon of motorcycle literature," a term and list of my own creation, for various reasons, not the least of which is that it feels important to hear the voices and imagine the vistas. These books were written with an eye on an audience and perhaps even a payday, but first and foremost they exist as a necessary part of the author's journey. The fact that they make it past a publisher and onto a shelf is more a comment on the publisher than anything else. But to my point: They've been written, they've been published, and I want to honor the whole of it.
To that weighty set-up, let me add more. I say this with no disrespect, but motorcycle-journey books finds their primary audience with aficionados . . . if you're not keen on bikes, you'd never know about these books much less read them. An obvious exception is Prisig's break-out book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book, depending on your point of view, that has very little to do with riding motorcycles.
Jupiter's Travels falls into another category of books completely. Yes, the motorcycle figures prominently in the sense that it's the mode of travel, much as Rocinante is the hero's vehicle in both Don Quixote and Travels With Charlie, both literally and figuratively. But in all cases, it's just the vehicle. While this is arguably true of plenty of other motorcycle related books, the sweep and depth of Ted's story and storytelling move Jupiter's Travels into a special class of literature that anyone interested in journeying should read.
The short version of the long story follows standard journey fair. Ted feels compelled to load up a motorcycle, in this case a Triumph, the last of the wounded British lions, and use it to travel down Europe, over to Tunisia, across the top of Africa, and from there to South Africa. In an echo of the Shakleford expedition to the South Pole (beginning as WW I commenced), Ted steps off in the lee of the '73 Arab/Israeli war. Not the best time to be riding through Arab-Africa.
This first part of the trip occupies a big part of Ted's story telling as perhaps it should. I've never ridden Ted-miles, but I can tell you from experience that the first part of the trip always seems to contain the real emotional, spiritual, and even physical depth for the rest of the journey. Themes are established. Tones are set. Precursor experiences are laid in like new hay.
In the final acts of a long trip, your attention to the richness and detail of the moments and miles flickers and flees. In the first miles, days, or weeks, you notice and catalog everything. Once you turn for home, you focus on finishing . . . which could feel like a good or bad thing just depending. As you head out, your focus is on the wonder of it all. On the way home, you wonder if you really got what you went for. You worry about hanging onto what was special. On the way out, everything has the capacity to be special, to be revealing, to tap some existential root that's lay dormant.
Ted's journey continues, after an interregnum at sea, in a Brazilian jail . . . his journey, not his forward progress. If Jupiter's Travels weren't a journal and instead was written as a piece of fiction, this would have been a necessary opening to the story's second act. Heroic literature requires a wrenching test of the traveler's intentions, fortitude, and commitment. While the trial is often framed in terms of the end goal, it is truly about the hero's sense of self. "Why are you really on this trip?" "What are you looking for?" "Do you not know that what you seek is already inside you?"
Once again mobile, Ted works his way down through Brazil and ultimately, in another echo, this time of Che Guevara's adventures, up the western side of South and Central America, to Northern California, there to pass a pleasant season communing and falling in love.
Based on how the book opens--with the story of how Ted came to be called Jupiter in a town in India--you would expect that the spiritual and mechanical axis of the book would turn on his time in India, which in my reading it really doesn't. By this time in the telling, the story has taken on a quicker pace, an urging along that tracks the turmoil and doubts that often accompany the turning towards home. In classic heroic literature, this is the point where the hero faces a test bigger than actually winning the obvious prize . . . going home and facing people who didn't travel; integrating the new learnings with the old doings. You never get the sense that Ted found the depths he was looking for in the epicenter of new age yearning, which is not to say that he found nothing in India.
Finally, Ted turns home; actually it's more like a gallop. The miles through the various 'Stans disappear in a flash of paragraphs where before pages barely did the job. And then, just like that, the roar of the Triumph is quited for the last time. The years of packing and packaging an entire life into the confines of what could be carried on a bike no sane person would have ridden further than the next town over were finally at an end. We readers have the benefit of experiencing the entire sweep of the enterprise in the few days it takes to read the book. Reading Ted's closing stanzas, you feel how hard he struggles to remember the opening verses of his epic and what they meant against the wildly conflicting emotions of finally being back. In much smaller ways, any of us who have headed out with the thought of finding something, vs. simply seeing stuff, know the feeling.
Ted Simon sits comfortably at the table reserved for motorcycle Gods, "long distance division." I say "comfortably" in reference to his unassailable adventure credentials and iconic book Jupiter's Travels. By every account I've read he's actually a bit embarrassed by all the accolades. 78,000 miles over four years through 45 countries on a Triumph no less is one hell of an accomplishment. He has inspired legions of others to head off on their own heroic journeys, perhaps most famously, Ewan McGregor and Charlie Borman of Long Way Round and Long Way Down fame.
I've been wading through what I previously described as the "canon of motorcycle literature," a term and list of my own creation, for various reasons, not the least of which is that it feels important to hear the voices and imagine the vistas. These books were written with an eye on an audience and perhaps even a payday, but first and foremost they exist as a necessary part of the author's journey. The fact that they make it past a publisher and onto a shelf is more a comment on the publisher than anything else. But to my point: They've been written, they've been published, and I want to honor the whole of it.
To that weighty set-up, let me add more. I say this with no disrespect, but motorcycle-journey books finds their primary audience with aficionados . . . if you're not keen on bikes, you'd never know about these books much less read them. An obvious exception is Prisig's break-out book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book, depending on your point of view, that has very little to do with riding motorcycles.
Jupiter's Travels falls into another category of books completely. Yes, the motorcycle figures prominently in the sense that it's the mode of travel, much as Rocinante is the hero's vehicle in both Don Quixote and Travels With Charlie, both literally and figuratively. But in all cases, it's just the vehicle. While this is arguably true of plenty of other motorcycle related books, the sweep and depth of Ted's story and storytelling move Jupiter's Travels into a special class of literature that anyone interested in journeying should read.
The short version of the long story follows standard journey fair. Ted feels compelled to load up a motorcycle, in this case a Triumph, the last of the wounded British lions, and use it to travel down Europe, over to Tunisia, across the top of Africa, and from there to South Africa. In an echo of the Shakleford expedition to the South Pole (beginning as WW I commenced), Ted steps off in the lee of the '73 Arab/Israeli war. Not the best time to be riding through Arab-Africa.
This first part of the trip occupies a big part of Ted's story telling as perhaps it should. I've never ridden Ted-miles, but I can tell you from experience that the first part of the trip always seems to contain the real emotional, spiritual, and even physical depth for the rest of the journey. Themes are established. Tones are set. Precursor experiences are laid in like new hay.
In the final acts of a long trip, your attention to the richness and detail of the moments and miles flickers and flees. In the first miles, days, or weeks, you notice and catalog everything. Once you turn for home, you focus on finishing . . . which could feel like a good or bad thing just depending. As you head out, your focus is on the wonder of it all. On the way home, you wonder if you really got what you went for. You worry about hanging onto what was special. On the way out, everything has the capacity to be special, to be revealing, to tap some existential root that's lay dormant.
Ted's journey continues, after an interregnum at sea, in a Brazilian jail . . . his journey, not his forward progress. If Jupiter's Travels weren't a journal and instead was written as a piece of fiction, this would have been a necessary opening to the story's second act. Heroic literature requires a wrenching test of the traveler's intentions, fortitude, and commitment. While the trial is often framed in terms of the end goal, it is truly about the hero's sense of self. "Why are you really on this trip?" "What are you looking for?" "Do you not know that what you seek is already inside you?"
Once again mobile, Ted works his way down through Brazil and ultimately, in another echo, this time of Che Guevara's adventures, up the western side of South and Central America, to Northern California, there to pass a pleasant season communing and falling in love.
Based on how the book opens--with the story of how Ted came to be called Jupiter in a town in India--you would expect that the spiritual and mechanical axis of the book would turn on his time in India, which in my reading it really doesn't. By this time in the telling, the story has taken on a quicker pace, an urging along that tracks the turmoil and doubts that often accompany the turning towards home. In classic heroic literature, this is the point where the hero faces a test bigger than actually winning the obvious prize . . . going home and facing people who didn't travel; integrating the new learnings with the old doings. You never get the sense that Ted found the depths he was looking for in the epicenter of new age yearning, which is not to say that he found nothing in India.
Finally, Ted turns home; actually it's more like a gallop. The miles through the various 'Stans disappear in a flash of paragraphs where before pages barely did the job. And then, just like that, the roar of the Triumph is quited for the last time. The years of packing and packaging an entire life into the confines of what could be carried on a bike no sane person would have ridden further than the next town over were finally at an end. We readers have the benefit of experiencing the entire sweep of the enterprise in the few days it takes to read the book. Reading Ted's closing stanzas, you feel how hard he struggles to remember the opening verses of his epic and what they meant against the wildly conflicting emotions of finally being back. In much smaller ways, any of us who have headed out with the thought of finding something, vs. simply seeing stuff, know the feeling.
