I posted a mundane reply to a question on another forum recently in which I shared a bit of practical knowledge gleaned during a trip to the Yukon and Alaska. But it jogged my memory of that journey and a story that my travelling companions and I were told. By chance, two years later I came across a rather sad end to the tale.

When friends and others express puzzlement as to why I would want to travel by motorcycle in my advancing age I've taken to pointing out that Che Guevara did not write the Car Diaries. A two wheeled voyage is a social experience. People seem to have a compulsion to talk to you. So when we pulled in to Dawson Peaks Northern Resort, some ten clicks southeast of Teslin in the Yukon Territory, the owner, a man with an extraordinarily varied background, sat down to talk. Despite the grand name this is a modest cafe on the Alaska Highway with a few cabins, some camping areas, good food and a 'motorcycle friendly" sign gracing the entrance. Drop in if you're in the neighbourhood.

He told us about an incident which occurred some years earlier involving a man who had walked into the cafe. He truly meant walked, as in walking the Alaska Highway as part of a walk around the entire world. The walker's name was Tom Stone which meant nothing to me until a later comment rang a bell.
Stone ended up staying at Dawson Peaks for a while, doing odd jobs in exchange for a place to stay. He then walked on southward heading to his home in Vermont. Each day after Stone's departure, for a couple of weeks, the owner would pack up a freshly baked cinnamon roll, find a willing customer who was driving south and send the roll down the road with instructions to look for a man who was walking around the world and to deliver the roll to him.

At one point in this narrative the owner mentioned that Stone had spent some time in Cambodia searching for information concerning his older brother who had disappeared in that country during the Vietnam war. I'm very interested in photography and, for many years, have served on the board of a public gallery devoted primarily to that medium. At that point I realized that the walker's brother must have been Dana Stone, a photographer who went missing in Cambodia in 1970 together with another photojournalist, Sean Flynn. Flynn was the son of the Hollywood icon Erroll Flynn. He and Dana Stone were famous for riding motorcyles to where the action was in order to beat out the competition. They were riding bikes when stopped and taken away, likely by Viet Cong or Khmer Rouge. The pair were never seen again but evidence eventually surfaced to indicate that they had been executed.

On returning to Vancouver I was curious to find out if the walker had made it to his destination and, indeed the power of the internet led me to an article confirming that he had, after 8 years and 29 countries.

Today it occurred to me to post this story. It's marginally about motorcycles but substantially about hitting the road, physically and spiritually, which is was this site seems to be at least partly about. It also occurred to me to return to the internet to refresh a few facts. One final and unfortunate fact revealed itself. A year ago Tom Stone was killed in Afghanistan at the age of 52 while serving with the American military. Ironically, I came across this information while the media here in Canada are full of reports concerning the deaths, in Afghanistan, of six Canadian soliders in one incident several days ago and two more today.

And there you go.

Normw