Lois on the Loose

In the foreword to Around the Bend (again), Bruce Reeve wrote “What’s really fun for Max is writing about whatever he damn well pleases. In the past this has even included science fiction and romance novels, which remain stuffed in a drawer somewhere ...” The six diverse stories tucked in between the covers of Unresolved Connections have all spent time in that drawer, or at least its mental equivalent. In each, the reader is invited down uncommon roads to places rarely visited. Reality remains an occasional travelling companion throughout but rarely dictates the route or circumstance, and never does it get in the way of the telling. Accompanying the words are several of Max’s own illustrations, each a coinage of his mind spent whenever he felt the need. Or the desire. Unresolved Connections invites a reader to abandon disbelief and come travel with Max to fantastical places unburdened by the restraints of known horizons, places that until recently were only found in a drawer somewhere.

In 2005, motorcycle journalist Dan Walsh rode out of London on a Yamaha XT Desert Rat, headed for Africa. From Dakar to Ghana to South Africa, then on to North and South America, he kept his readers posted about his travels, along the way earning the label “the savior of motorcycle writing.” Whether he’s delivering judgments ("Chile will always be South America’s supermodel sister--very beautiful but too long, too skinny, and too expensive to ride, and despite the groovy exterior, unpleasantly right-wing underneath.") or just describing another day on the road ("I get my bum pinched by a tranny, my pocket picked by a grifter and get a gun pulled on me by a one-eyed, one-armed midget who’s upset cause I winked at him.”), these reports from the gonzo frontier of motorcycle travel are never less than Technicolor, adrenaline-soaked, and coruscatingly funny. Lyrical, edgy, fraught with danger, despair and surreal highs and lows--this is a travelogue like no other. Walsh’s postings take readers to Buenos Aires (where “revolutionary” means the angry poor invading the presidential palace, not a really small phone that’s also a camera) and across the sub-Saharan savannah (like riding across a piece of toast with a mouthful of crackers); they feature Walsh being mistaken for a bum in New York, bashed by deadly tequila in Mexico, contracting typhoid in a dilapidated Bolivian hotel, biking “The Most Beautiful Road in the World” in Peru, being kidnapped in Kenya and finding downtown Soweto about as threatening as Stockport. And again and again they reveal Dan Walsh as the rightful heir to Ted Simon as the pre-eminent biker-rebel of our generation.