Xiaoying
Devra Murphy, the Irish woman who rode her bicycle through Eurasia, died last month at the age of 90. Irish President Michael Higgins has praised her as "a unique contribution to shared human experience and values". She wrote 26 travel books in her lifetime, documenting her travels in more than 30 countries. One of them, "Where the Indus Is Young," published by the People's Literature Press in 2016, tells the story of her taking her six-year-old daughter deep into Baltistan, the birthplace of the Indus, in the cold winter of 1974, accompanied by only an old maharan.
Devra Murphy
In 2016, people's literature publishing house published "Where the Indus Is Young" by Devra Murphy
Many people may think that what happened to traveling to more than 30 countries, before the epidemic, an ordinary travel blogger gave himself the label of walking 40 countries. But Murphy is special in three ways.
The first is that her family is not well off. Born and raised in Lismore, Watfordshire, Ireland, at the age of one, her mother contracted rheumatoid arthritis, Murphy dropped out of school at the age of 14 for family reasons and had been caring for her sick mother, who was over 30 when her mother died and began her long-term travel plans. Before that, she was eager to travel abroad, "like elasticity being stretched to its limits."
In the era she grew up in and in that town, some children went to school barefoot, hunger was common, and from time to time there was a relative in the family who died of tuberculosis. She said of herself, "Hardship and poverty in youth are the best training for this way of traveling." I grew up knowing that material wealth and physical comfort should never be confused with success, achievement, and security. "On my tenth birthday, my parents gave me a used bike and my grandfather sent me a used atlas. Although I have never owned a bike before, I am already an avid cyclist and shortly after my birthday I am determined to ride to India one day. I never forgot the exact place where this decision was made, on a steep hill near Lismore. Halfway up the mountainside, I looked proudly at my legs, slowly pushed the pedals, and thought, "If I do this long enough, I can go to India." ”
Her love of walking was innate, not out of a quest for enjoyment, nor out of comparison with her peers or satisfaction with vanity. This impulse, suppressed by poverty and family circumstances, gushes out as soon as the opportunity arises, ignores other difficulties, and lasts a lifetime.
Devra Murphy, 1965 in India.
Second, she is really practicing minimalist travel, not staying in luxury hotels or even hotels, and her preferred way of walking seems more puzzling to many people: walking, riding mules, riding bicycles. Her other two more famous works are "Riding Alone with Me to the End of the World" and "Riding a Mule to Ethiopia". She has always believed that if you want to write about the object of your observation, "you have to sleep on the floor of their house." She considers her childhood experience in the Irish countryside to prepare her for the inconveniences of the journey, and she once spent about 64 pounds (about 520 yuan) on a six-month trip to India, which is simply unbelievable. In her book, she once said of a 25-year-old American male tourist she met on a trip, "For them, travel is more about 'leaving' than 'going', they look empty, unhappy, confused, pitifully eager to be companiond, but afraid to give themselves to any ideal or career or other individual." 」 Although this statement is a bit harsh, it is also in the heart of the modern people's spirit.
The third is that she travels with her daughter. This doesn't sound special, especially since the pre-epidemic study tour, an emerging middle-class education method, has once risen. Murphy has always been a single mother, and although the father of her daughter Rachel is not invisible, the two are not married and have always been raised by Murphy. Before her daughter was five years old, her walking was interrupted for 5 years, during which she did other work to accumulate financial resources to prepare for the next trip, and when her daughter was six years old, she began to take her daughter on the road, the first time in Pakistan, where conditions were extremely difficult. During this experience, it was written into the book "Where the Indus Is Young".
In the book, she made a list of her four months of equipment, including "a cotton snow coat, two sweaters, a pair of casual pants, two wool vests, a pair of socks, a pair of piping boots, a flannel shirt, a wool tights, a thick coat with a woolen hat, a hard riding hat with a belt, a duck down sleeping bag, an inflatable cushion, and a toy squirrel."
In the book, Murphy himself summed up the experience of traveling with a baby, "I personally believe that children from five to seven years old are more able to adapt to hard travel, because children under five years old are not mature enough to cope with health risks; Children over the age of seven are less able to adapt to the inconveniences of life and various strange customs with a lofty attitude; Around the age of eight, children have established their own views on life (and are often strong) and are not very willing to follow the guidance of their parents." This is a very personal perspective of observation, I don't know how the majority of parents with babies feel after reading it. She doesn't seem to pay much attention to "educating" her children on the go, unlike most parents. But the journey itself is an education, and Rachel in the book is very precocious.
Another special feature of Murphy is that because he grew up in the countryside and received a limited education, although he read a lot of books on his own, he was still incompatible with "high-class writing". Unlike some travel writers who have a local fixer to do everything, Murphy often travels to a place alone. She is a shy person, and she can chat with anyone on the road, which may be a gift or an acquired habit, but it will undoubtedly help her to integrate into any kind of harsh environment while gaining the kindness of strangers.
Devra Murphy in her later years
However, Murphy is not a person who goes on the road with a hot brain, although she can endure hardships, she is always fully prepared before each trip. She also practiced firing an automatic pistol on the hills of Watfordshire, which later helped her drive away wolves and thieves on foot and walk. Later in her travels and writing, she became increasingly concerned with political subjects. She traveled through the United States on a greyhound bus, past Three Mile Island, the site of America's worst nuclear power accident in 1979, and wrote Nuclear Stakes, Race to the Finish (1982). She then traveled to Kenya and Zimbabwe during the AIDS epidemic, post-revolutionary Romania, post-genocide Rwanda, and the post-war Balkans.
After a fall in Jerusalem, the nearly 80-year-old Murphy underwent hip replacement surgery, coupled with arthritis and emphysema, and finally confined Murphy to her simple house in Lismore, a 17th-century building, and even so, she still maintained the habit of swimming in the river every day, and Murphy lived to the age of 90, which can be said to be a life that has achieved personal desires to the extreme.
Editor-in-Charge: Ying Xu
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang