The news that Karl Bushby has arrived back in England, after 27 years walking an unbroken line from the southern tip of Patagonia towards his home in Yorkshire, has really thrown me.
The only thing in the universe that has been going for almost as long as Karl’s Goliath Expedition is my own fascination with his journey.
Karl began walking in 1999, right at the red-hot epicentre of my youthful realisation that I did not want to follow all my university friends into a normal graduate life. Around that time, my resolve was focusing like a sunbeam through a magnifying glass towards a different path.
And what Karl began at the tail end of the last century was exactly what I was yearning for: to attempt something extraordinary and, in doing so, try to turn your ordinary self into something harder, shinier and more polished. To prove to yourself (and the world) what you were capable of.
I was fully signed up to the notion of pushing yourself hard, and then harder still. Of living as frugally and simply as possible, and throwing yourself into all the surprises and wonders of the open road.
And so, a few years later, when I was making my own way around the planet, albeit at the lightning speed of a bicycle rather than on two feet, I was starstruck and nervous to reach out to Karl for advice about crossing Colombia, which at the time had a reputation for being recklessly dangerous for travellers like us.
I can still remember the exact computer I was sitting at, lit by a desk lamp in the middle of the night in a house in Santiago, Chile, when Karl replied with all sorts of hugely helpful information and inspiration from his own experiences there.
We were both heading north, and I really hoped we might meet along the way. But I passed somewhere near him in northern Alaska or the Yukon without our paths ever crossing. I thought of him often, though, as he continued west across Asia from Siberia, following a broadly similar route to mine, albeit in a considerably more hardcore fashion.
And now, 22 years later, Karl has arrived back in England, and I have found myself unable to concentrate and feeling weirdly emotional about his journey.
So much has happened in those years for both of us. For all of us.
Reflecting on the Goliath scale of his expedition has got me reflecting on my own life, too.
There are so many roads we can walk down in life. But way leads on to way, and you can’t go back. You can only make your choices once.
Karl’s journey raises, and magnifies, so many of the questions that have fascinated and troubled me over the years. What is the point of an expedition? What makes a journey worthwhile? What are we really searching for when we set off into the world?
There is a strange hierarchy in adventure. A short expedition somehow feels less impressive, less valid, less interesting than a longer one. The further you go, the longer you endure, the more extraordinary the achievement.
But then, at some point, perhaps a journey can become too long.
And are you living a life, or are you running away from one?
Of course, even if you’re running away from life, you’re still living a life. And perhaps it’s possible to live any sort of life while simultaneously running away from another.
Am I? Are you? Are all of us?
There’s something fascinating, too, about the structure and purpose that a great quest provides. The clear objective, the measurable progress, the almost universal recognition of what you’re trying to achieve. An expedition can give an adventurer a powerful sense of meaning and motivation for years, even decades. But what happens when it’s over? When you retire from that extraordinary condition and return to ordinary life? Is it possible that you’ll never again find quite the same sense of purpose?
There are no correct answers to any of these questions, of course. But Karl’s journey would certainly provide enough material for a very long conversation in the pub.
I’m fascinated by it in so many ways, not least because it holds up a mirror to myself and my own choices, for better and worse.
It doesn’t feel like much of a stretch of the imagination to envisage a version of my life in which I, too, had spent this entire millennium out on the open road.
Instead, my life has taken a very different course.
Thinking about Karl, who has been away from home for almost all the years since I stopped travelling around the world, has thrown into sharp relief the choices we have both made. The lives we have lived, and the lives we haven’t.
I’d really love to sit down with Karl and talk about the roads we have travelled, and the roads less travelled. About the point of adventure, and the point of life, and all those enormous questions that rattle around your head when you’re out beneath a desert full of stars.
Finding myself completely unable to concentrate, I eventually gave in. I opened a map, took my best guess at the route Karl might walk from Dover to Yorkshire, and jumped in my car to try to find him.
It was inevitably a forlorn hope, hunting for a needle in a haystack. But it turned into a strangely fascinating afternoon travelling around inside my own head, thinking about journeys taken and not taken, lives lived and not lived, and what on earth is the meaning of it all?
And now I’m sitting in a café, looking out at the rain, having given up my search, and wishing Karl well out there on the open road, heading home to all the life that awaits him there.
You’ve got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, and know when to run.
Well done, my friend.
Solvitur ambulando.
Now why the hell am I crying?
