Scooter News Scooter Riding Optimist Fourteen Years in the Making, the Acclaimed Story About the Author’s Two-year Journey Will Soon Be Available Online – For Free
Tom
Victoria, BC, Canada – November 27, 2007 --
You hit a crossroads in life and you ask yourself: Now what? As a shy, unemployed, broke, divorced and virtually homeless father, former law-clerk-turned-writer /photographer Thomas Martin Smith decided to seek new perspectives on a career, life, and love. The advice from his renowned photographer mentor Ivor Sharp was simple: “Go around the world.”
“It was inspiring, but also terrifying,” Tom said. But after reflection and research, Tom decided to go for it. Just weeks before departure, however, a training accident cancelled his plan to go by mountain bike. The late Jimmy Bedford, former Chief of the Journalism & Creative Writing Department, University of Alaska, suggested going by motorscooter. So it was that Tom, who had never ridden a motorcycle or motorscooter before, nor had been outside “the protective womb of North America,” became a self-styled ambassador-in-blue-jeans and rode Melawend (a motorscooter he named for his daughters, Melanie and Wendy) through 29 countries arranging informational exchanges between communities he visited his hometown of Fort Erie, Ontario, site of the busiest crossing between the USA and Canada.
“A trip that was to last one year evolved into a two-year odyssey,” Tom said. He began his journey Europe-bound just fourteen days after Reactor 4 at Chernobyl exploded, resulting in the world’s worst nuclear accident. In Paris, police searched Tom and he ran with frightened citizens during the “September bombings” that rocked the French capital in 1986. Though seen more as a vehicle for urban commuting, Melawend tackled numerous terrestrial challenges including the Alps in Switzerland, virgin desert in northern Sudan, and the “blast-furnace” of India’s Madhya Pradesh. Tom survived ravaging disease and three accidents on his scooter.
Aside from riding through spectacular environments, Tom said his journey “came alive through encounters with people and animals.” He met people of diverse backgrounds including elementary and college students, teachers, governors, generals, Bedouins, beggars, hookers, conservationists, everyday families, a Hollywood movie star, and a “cosmic philosopher,” Tom shook hands with Pope John Paul. A lion kissed him. In downtown Nairobi, secret police detained him with others in a small holding room that had a barred window – twenty-four stories up. At the UN in New York, Tom was given a press conference and a personal tour by Fred Eckhard, the now former Spokesman for the UN Secretary-General. “Help along the way came from rich and poor alike,” he said.
But he was not entirely alone on his journey. To help him with his writing, Tom took along a mentor - Ernest Hemingway - figuratively, of course, by referring to his copy of By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, which he carried with him throughout the journey. After Tom and Melawend were struck by a car the first day out in England, a passenger in the car said, "Someone is with you."
But getting home safely was not the end of it. “In making the journey,” Tom said, “I gained such a profound education in the world and the self that I spent the next twelve years writing the book about it.”
See Tom's website for further details http://www.melawend.com
published 2/12/2007 |