Ryan Murdock's Road Wisdom

Ryan Murdock's pursuit of travel writing and adventure has taken him to 42 countries (and counting) including Mongolia, Nicaragua, and North Korea, by Russian jeep, motorcycle, dugout canoe, horse and camel. He has a keen interest in marginal regions, in nomadic peoples, and in places where cultures meet and sometimes clash. He is an Associate Editor of Outpost Magazine, Canada’s national travel magazine, and is hard at work on the first in a string of projected books.

Ryan chose travel literature as a medium because it can be so many things: autobiography, history, anthropology, adventure, memoir, narrative, and even a catharsis... The best travel writing is all of these at once.

He cites such disparate artists as Paul Theroux, Lawrence Durrell, Rimbaud, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton and most importantly lyricist/musician/poet/painter Steve Kilbey of The Church as his major influences, and he strives to bring the depth and richness of prose poetry to the descriptive aspects of his craft.

Outpost Magazine Features

Provence and Languedoc, France

"French Connection" July/August 2008.

Excerpt:

The big gloomy mansion was easy to find, but it had since been sold and divided into two flats. I stood peering over the metal gate, ringing the bell, hoping to be allowed to just walk around the yard, but no one was home. It looked lonely and empty, still crushed by the loss of Claude, Larry’s third wife. Despite the joys and adventures of his Pan-like youth, and despite being remembered as quick to laugh and a witty conversationalist, his later years were lonely ones.

Standing there outside the wall, I realized that Durrell had lived two very different lives: the ideal sort of world that he would have liked to experience, the one he expressed in his books, and the quieter, lonelier life that he actually led. In the end, the life he was able to create didn’t match the vision in his head, the vision expressed by his work. But did that necessarily mean that he had failed? What if you put the best of yourself into your writing – poetry, your ability to love, optimism and hope - and what’s left over is what’s left for your day to day life? Is the sum of a life measured by the people one touches directly, or is it measured by the ripples that one leaves behind, which continue to touch life after life long after you’re gone? Given the option, which one would you choose?

Lost in thought and feeling a bit melancholy, we paused to photograph the River Vidourle, where a group of old men whiling away the afternoon beneath a plane tree began clowning around for the camera. When Anita turned the lens on them, the whole town opened up to us.

Also in this issue, the book review column World Writes by Ryan Murdock.

Wadi Rum, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

"Sands of Time" July/August 2007.

Excerpt:

As we ride in silence I’m struck by the realization that the desert is characterized by an absence of smell. I brush against a tiny sage plant and its potent scent casts the world into sudden color, reawakening my olfactory antennae and startling me with its vividness. I’d so attuned to the background that I’d forgotten we were traveling through a monochrome world.

In a similar sense I will discover that my photos of the trip look faked. The whites and greens of my clothing contrast so dramatically with the earthtone world through which we move that I seem cut and pasted from another image entirely.

It isn’t that the desert lacks color or variety. The rocks are veined with streaks of clay and ebony. They’re swathed in soft pinks, corals, scarlets and oranges, colors that the sun bleaches to a washed-out red and white at noon, and that the waning of the day fills with shadows and contrasts. There’s ample variety to delight the eye. It’s just that the manufactured, vibrant hues of the outside world don’t belong there. Neither, truly, do we.

Also in this issue, the Summer Road Trip Supplement, with "Introduction", "Croatian Island Hopping", "The Sun-Baked Southwest", and "Rock Star Road Trip" by Ryan Murdock.

The Canol Trail, Northwest Territories, Canada

"Walking The Line" March/April 2007.

Excerpt:

The bottom dropped out and the river tore us from the shore.

“Go back!” Colin yelled.

“Swim!” I shouted back. It was too late for second thoughts.

I clung to the rope with the desperate knowledge that to let go was to lose our food, maps, tent and dry clothing. I pulled with the other arm, gasping spasmodically from the searing cold, unable to catch a breath. After what seemed an eternity, I looked downriver. We were still in the middle. I thought for sure we’d be swept away.

I swung myself around to the back, grabbed on with both hands, and kicked for all I was worth. When I was beginning to think that I could kick no more I heard Colin yell, “I can touch bottom.” We waded the rest of the way to shore and heaved the raft onto the rocks. The cold bite of the wind brought a different kind of misery.

The Badlands of South Dakota and the Crazy Horse Memorial

"Almost a Desert, Never the Same" March/April 2006. 10th Anniversary Issue.

Excerpt:

I slid a bottle of beer from the case in the back of the truck and climbed over the railing. I edged out along a crumbly ridge to sit alone on a projecting finger, suspended over the void. As the sun went down the landscape changed, the shadows altering depths and flats, putting on one final show.

It was a fitting place to end our journey. It all made sense now. The land had revealed some of the hidden things, and those hidden things were wrapped unalterably with time: layer upon layer, as visible as the sedimentation in the walls and spires below.

The nature of South Dakota is a hidden one, but it contains much for those with eyes to see it. The Black Hills abounds in sacred places visible only to the Lakota. The Badlands reveals eons of geological time to the gaze of the rock hound. The historian sees layers of civilization, from Indian to settler to tourist, imprinted on every abandoned town and theme park. Korczak Ziolkowski even saw the shape of Crazy Horse hidden in a mountain. The modern Cold War history of South Dakota is hidden too, in the hundreds of Minuteman missile silos that lay waiting beneath the peaceful prairie sod.

But the story of South Dakota isn’t linear. That hidden past is here all around us, ghosted like double exposures layer upon layer in a distortion of temporal space and distance akin to the Badlands disorienting visuals. The past and the present exist simultaneously and, standing on that windblown overlook, I am just a memory of my future selves ghosted on the fractured screen of this Dakota view.

Panama / South Dakota

"Chicken Bus-ing" and "Badlands Rising" July/August 2005. Road Trip Issue.

Taklamakan Desert, Xinjiang, China

"Taklamakan: The Worst Desert in the World" May/June 2005.

Excerpt:

Desert travel blurs all time sense. I don't know if it's the motion of the camel or the endless monotony of the scenery. The mind works on two levels simultaneously. The automatic level is watching the route, choosing a path, adjusting for balance. The other level is flowing along rivers of memory, through labyrinths of thought, reliving past events and acting out future possibilities.

Day after endless desert day we plodded through the burning, shifting sands. I watched as the course of my life played itself out in the theatre of my mind. My past unrolled like a film. All the twisting convolutions of happenstance, all the chance meetings and unforeseen events that led me there to desert sands half a world away. I reeled into the future and played out possibilities, stopping to reel back and play out new paths.

Abdul Rahim called a halt. A two-hour ride lasted six by the clock. The desert sun melts time as easily as it does plastic.

Excerpt:

We emerged from the desert at the tree line where we'd left. An old mosque, half buried by creeping dunes, sat surrounded by mounds distinguished from other sand hills by faded flag-draped sticks that crackled and snapped in the storm. The hills were the graves of Muslim heroes felled in ancient battles with the Buddhists.

The sand blew a gale that obscured the sky. A straggle of villagers stumbled toward the mosque through knee-deep drifts. Muslim women clutched their veils as they staggered along the blown-over road to answer the call to prayer. The sand whipped their clothes and faces, blasting the colour and the youth from them.

We rode out of a solid wall of blowing sand: wind-whipped and ragged, sand peppered in my beard and stippling my face. Villagers stopped to watch the apocalyptic site, a caravan staggering out of the very jaws of death. Was it a post-nuclear vision of the future or a Silk Road vision of the past? The desert had once again stripped away time.

Eye Weekly Travel Columns

Ryan took over the Travel column of Eye Weekly, a hip Toronto alternative weekly paper of current events and listings, for seven months. Following are links to all of his columns.

Why We Travel December 6, 2006

Trip Preparation November 23, 2006

Psychogeography November 16, 2006

Tribal Tattooing November 9, 2006

The Mayan World November 2, 2006

Jungle Travel October 26, 2006

Desert Travel October 19, 2006

Pirates of the Caribbean October 12, 2006

Volunteer Travel October 5, 2006

Travel by Freighter September 28, 2006

Travel in Bear Country September 21, 2006

Temple Travel September 14, 2006