Brian Cycles For Freedom

I met Brian Summerfield on a road so straight and long, it pushed the horizon beyond sight. Sweat dripped off sun-burnt legs as they pumped the pedals. His face, sculpted into Grand Canyon crevasses by the furious unrelenting sun held the same dust which coated his baggage-laden bike, reflecting the flesh-sapping dryness of Australia.

I hailed him and he slowed down. The sinewy legs, so long on automatic stopped their endless locomotion. Friendly blue eyes looked at me; mirrors within mirrors.

Brian's expressive eyes takes you with them into memories colored by unending miles of road and track, through dusty frontier towns and harsh Australian bush. They introduce people with lifestyles unique in the world living in isolated homesteads, stations and stores. They had dripped tears and beamed joy, pain and energy but most of all, they poured out a passion for a desperate people in a far distant land.
Australia is big. It's not just a country but a continent and a hot, thirsty, demanding one. Cycling around Australia is a feat that requires more then just fitness and endurance. It needs a passion; for it's the heart that provides purpose and the bones that keep moving when the mind and flesh has given up. And they will want to give up; it's almost a certainty.

Surprisingly, Brian is a grandfather of two, something I would never have guessed. Grandfathers just don't do these sorts of epic adventures-do they? Brian confronts peoples' ideas of what it means to live a purposeful life way beyond the 'career' (the usual benchmark of achievement) has finished.

Taking early retirement in the late 1990's, Brian backpacked around the world ending up in Tibet. "I had little knowledge of the plight of the Tibetan people then" he explains.