Yesterday's post ended with a reference to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Today's post will be a tribute to someone whose life was, almost literally, one of those roads.
Nobody seems to know anything about the first fifteen years of Iohan Guorguiev's life, except that he was born in Bulgaria. That's how he wanted it, according to even the people who knew him best: His classmates and friends in Canada, the country to which he moved as a teenager.
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| Iohan Guorguiev. Photo by Matt Bardeen, from the NY Times |
Most cyclists, and indeed the world, probably never would have heard of this young man who called himself "The Bike Wanderer" and was born not to follow, but to push through, "The Road Not Taken" were it not for the videos he left on his website. The first one includes this bit of repartee between him and a trucker:
What's your name?
Iohan
Where are you going?
Argentina
On your bike?
Yeah
Oh, man, I love you!
Iohan and that trucker met on a "highway" plowed on ice somewhere in the far north of Canada. Seven years later, Iohan made it to Argentina, but not to the southern tip--Tierra del Fuego--as he'd planned. I have no idea of how long a trip like that "typically" takes, but Iohan seems, at times, almost apologetic that it's taking that amount of time. Of course, one reason to take such a trip is to see what you can see and meet whom you can meet along the way which, of course, doesn't make for straight-arrow travel. But he also occasionally flew back to Canada so he could work to make money for his journey, pick up supplies and catch up with people. He would then return to wherever he'd left off and continue his trip.
That "shuttle," if you will, explains why he didn't make it to "the last stop before Antarctica," if you will. He returned to Canada in March of 2020, just in time for--you guessed it--the mess we've been in ever since, i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic. Borders shut down, which left him, and everyone else unable to leave their country. (I guess the final leg of a hemisphere-long journey is not considered "essential" travel.)
Like most of us, he probably didn't anticipate being locked down for as long as he was. Being unable to continue his journey probably exacerbated health issues, like insomnia, that seemed to have developed during the extended periods of time he spent at high altitudes. Since I never knew him and therefore cannot psychoanalyze him, I am merely speculating when I say that perhaps being deprived of the thing that kept him going also magnified some long-standing hurts or other issues, which may have had something to do with why he didn't talk about his past.
In any event, the toll of not being able to follow his heart--which, I think, is all he ever could follow--was simply too much for him. Tragically, he took his own life, at age 33, in August.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
