| Travel has a way of tempting us with a solution to life’s problems. Bored with Calgary? Travel. End a relationship? Solace is on the horizon. Lose a job? Get out of here. Unsatisfied? Hit the road. Nothing seems to be more remedy to what’s wrong here, than to go somewhere else and find out, first hand, what’s wrong everywhere.
It is a romantic thought – troubles receding behind into distance and memory, the road rising and rolling ahead as you move forward to new possibilities and new opportunities. Travel brings that excited dissonance that comes from being far from home, a pack on your back and boots on your feet, looking up to skies that contain not the same comforting shapes and patterns you live under, but an umbrella of stars that tell different myths, different stories, and are scattered here and far in different skies.
Jeremy Kroeker, who currently splits his time between Canmore and Calgary, where he teaches motorcycling classes, has spent a considerable chunk of his adult life logging these experiences. He has rappelled into forest fires as a rap-attack crew member, taken mountaineering classes in Austria, worked maintenance in a refugee camp in Bosnia during the Balkan War and travelled through Europe and the Middle East, spending one very bleak-sounding Christmas Eve sleeping on the concrete of a train station platform in Germany, while drunks and hobos relieved themselves in his general vicinity.
Kroeker’s most recent major trip is the topic of a book he has recently self-published. Motorcycle Therapy is a tongue-in-cheek, self-effacing and comical memoir of a four-month-long ride with a friend through Central and South America, each on motorcycle. In the book, Kroeker chronicles planning the trip and setting out south after getting dumped, hoping perhaps to drown out heartache and depression with the colours, cacophony and challenge of motorcycling through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, subsisting mostly on a diet of eggs and rice.
It is apparent that some people should never spend long periods of time together under the stress and duress of travel in exotic lands, and core to Motorcycle Therapy is the steadily escalating animosity between Kroeker and his companion, Trevor Martens, whom he had met on a previous adventure. The further south the two go, the more strained their relationship becomes, with minor personality tics in each becoming more and more aggravating to the other. The two need to get along but fight instead, annoyances magnified and multiplied by the seemingly endless bureaucracy of the countries travelled through, and the overall hardship of living out of saddlebags for such an extended period of time in the heat and humidity of an equatorial climate.
Kroeker’s frank, self-confessed and remarkable inability to socialize naturally with women further evolves the story, built-up with anecdotes from previous journeys and bolstered with events that occur on the trip – such as his confession that a chief motivation in learning Spanish was to find out how to say "I am hot," as opposed to "I am horny." In reading Kroeker’s recurring and somewhat embarrassing meetings with women, one starts to develop an understanding of what might have motivated his girlfriend to have run off with another guy – the event that had touched off the trip in the first place. In fairness, though, Kroeker is never creepy or crass in these instances, instead coming across as endearing in an awkward, socially autistic way. In person, he is charming, full of stories and modest in a self-deprecating manner. These qualities come through in the writing. The story was completed evenings and weekends over the course of two years following his arrival home, and self-published with his own money and a loan.
Books about trips on motorcycles are often constructed around themes of self-discovery, growth and rebirth. Motorcycle Therapy is true to form in this sense, but unique in others. Yes, Kroeker’s journey is undertaken as an escape, a travelling education of self – what Robert Pirsig calls, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a "Chautauqua" – and yet there is a distinct lack of clichéd, high-brow philosophical posturing in Kroeker’s writing. Therapy is instead an enjoyable and honest story of a road trip, built around the author’s introspections and candid awareness of his own, and others’, character flaws. Kroeker doesn’t hesitate to admit that for all his travels and consideration of self, he hasn’t really changed, and likely won’t.
He recently embarked on a signing and speaking tour through the prairies of Mennonite Manitoba, in and around the area that he grew up, to raise funds towards the costs of publishing, and towards his next trip, to Tierra del Fuego, the "End of the World" and southernmost tip of the continent, in remote Patagonia, Argentina.
For more information on Jeremy and his next trip, go to www.jeremykroeker.com. Motorcycle Therapy is available at several Calgary bookstores and motorcycle shops, or online at www.trafford.com. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.