Fred Birchmore and I are very different. Fred, for example, is dead. I, as of this writing at least, am not. And in 1935 and 1936, Fred rode a one-speed bicycle 25,000 miles across 40 counties. Some people tried to kill him because bike riding was obviously wizardry. Others tried to kill him because he was Jewish. (He wasn't.) Or just because they found killing strangers entertaining, and they didn't have TV.

Unlike Fred, I generally shun activities where death seems more likely than survival. I particularly avoid situations where I might get eaten by a lion or strangled by a python large enough to swallow a deer; I'm quite strict about that.

Fred however, biked across Europe — Norwegian glaciers, militaristic Nazis, Swiss Alps, rude Frenchmen and all. Running out of Europe, he swung down to Egypt, then across the Sinai. On a bicycle! Across the desert! There were no bike repair shops in the Sinai desert. There were, however, leopards and wolves and venomous vipers and scorpions and — oh, yeah — miles and miles of desert. Who would think this was a good idea? Later, after Fred finished dodging bullets through Palestine and biking through the Syrian desert, the Syrian government decided it was so dangerous that they made it a crime, which was like making a law against drinking paint. It shouldn't really be necessary.

Except for the anti-wizard and the anti-Jewish and the anti-stranger types who wanted to murder him, Fred made friends almost everywhere. He ate local food — possibly including snake saliva scraped from the body of a deer swallowed by a python. Who could resist? He often stayed with local families. Still, in Afghanistan, he concluded, "the primary pastime of the people is quarreling." They told him he was the first foreigner to travel across tribal Afghanistan and live. They didn't seem happy about that.

They also related "calmly and with all sincerity and faith" the story of one of their national heroes, the George Washington, or maybe the Attila the Hun of Afghanistan. This guy was fighting his way into a city with a sword in each hand when a defender had the good sense to chop off his head. According to the Afghanis, the headless corpse fought on for two more miles before collapsing. His head was enshrined in one place, his body in another. When we were considering invading Afghanistan, it might have been helpful to know that this was one of their role models.

Afghanistan marked the end of the easy part of Fred's little jaunt. Then, it was the primeval forests of Asia and India, the highlands of the Himalayas, and the jungles of Indochina. Roads were often flooded with mud and debris. Lions stalked him. Wolves circled him as he slept. Giant pythons dropped down from the trees. You can see how this would be fun.

The occasional village often swarmed with disease, and locals practiced colorful ancient customs, like human sacrifice. Or devil worship, logically figuring that good spirits, being good, wouldn't hurt them. The evil spirits were the ones they needed to worship and appease. It's a strategy some use with certain politicians today. Usually unsuccessfully.

In the face of all this — sometimes carrying the bike more than riding it — Fred kept moving with an almost insane persistence. ("Almost" may be debatable.)

The title of his 1939 book, "Around the World on a Bicycle", is an exaggeration. Even Fred couldn't bike across an ocean. I can't say his trip needed doing. Python spit didn't turn out to cure cancer. Still, his story is a mind-boggling adventure across a vanished world. It would be unbelievable if he hadn't documented it with hundreds of photos. And today, along with the Hope Diamond, The Spirit of St. Louis and at least one giant squid eye, the Smithsonian holds Fred's bike.

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Photo credit: Viktor Bystrov at Unsplash