The Longest Ride
by Emilio Scotto
Motorbooks

Emilio Scotto's first day in the US, he was pulled over for speeding on the Honda Gold Wing motorcycle he'd ridden across the Arizona border. Five minutes after he was issued his first U.S. speeding ticket, the same officer stopped him again and wrote him another ticket. Scotto collected one more ticket still, for a total of three, before the end of the day. He didn't learn that the speed limit was fifty-five miles per hour until the cop who gave him his third ticket gestured toward a speed limit sign.

By the time he reached Los Angeles, Scotto had been driving his motorcycle for months, all the way from Buenos Aires. He had survived an encounter with a gang of Sandanistas and made friends with a Brazilian Indian chief who sported a necklace of boiled human heads, but he hadn't yet been stopped for speeding. This was in 1986, when Scotto neither spoke English nor had the money to pay his traffic fines.

Some twenty years later, Scotto's English has improved. So have his financial prospects: he is under contract to develop a reality television show based on his journey, a round-the-world trek which continued around the U.S. and through Africa, Asia and Australia, and took ten years to complete. Under the gaze of trembling, mud-stained cameras, teams of aspiring road hounds will embark on their own motorcycle quests. In advance of the show, Scotto has published The Longest Ride: My 10-year 500,000 Mile Motorcycle Journey a coffee table book that recounts his trip.

When he was growing up in Argentina, poor and intermittently homeless, Scotto would often flip through an atlas he'd received from his mother, fantasizing about traveling around the world. By the time he turned thirty, he had advanced safely to the lower middle class and was earning American dollars working as a sales representative for Pfizer in Buenos Aires. In 1984, when a spike in the dollar to peso exchange rate made him briefly rich, he purchased his Gold Wing, a luxury touring model (which he later christened "Black Princess"), for a fraction of one of his paychecks. He quit his job to pursue his childhood dream.

Scotto's book, which is formatted in double-column text, is the latest offering in an unheralded but surprisingly fertile genre, the motorcycle memoir. Che Guevera's Motorcycle Diaries may be the most influential title. Others include Riding with Rilke, a road meditation by the Canadian academic, Ted Bishop, and the Wall Street baron Jim Rogers' idiosyncratic account of the global markets he explored on his BMW, Investment Biker. In each of these books, the motorcycle navigates an intellectual journey. This is not the case, unfortunately, in The Longest Ride. Though Scotto occasionally plays amateur anthropologist, observing how citizens of the African country Guinea Bissau, where crash helmets are scarce but required for riding a scooter, wear plastic salad bowls instead, and theorizing that a complete lack of Coca Cola is the surest sign that a country is in disarray, his curiosity about the world never equals his commitment to adventure. Or perhaps it is sometimes merely suffocated by his pedestrian prose (a Texas cop reminds him of a "Chihuahua with hiccups"; a Honduran soldier reminds him of "A run-down basketball player in a dwarf's uniform"). Scotto wastes his rare vantage as a first-hand witness of many of the wars that raged in the developing world in the 1980s — in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Chad, Somalia, Libya and Cameroon, among many other countries. He pays less attention to geo-politics than to the women who dot his route. It's hard not to imagine how good this book might have been if a better equipped writer — say, William Vollman or Joan Didion — had stolen his Gold Wing somewhere in Peru.

Some of the best adventure writing (Peter Mathiessen's Snow Leopard comes to mind) balances an account of the adventure itself with meditations on the sacrifices the adventurer has made, what has been left behind. Scotto, while occasionally (and clumsily) inserting a reference to his Argentine girlfriend (whom he will later marry while still on the road) doesn't even gesture toward all the pleasures and responsibilities he has avoided and sacrificed. Clearly, he trusts that the vicarious experience of his trip is all his readers will ask; after all, hasn't everyone fantasized about traveling around the world? Some readers, however, will wish that Scotto had sublimated his wanderlust and kept his job at Pfizer.

Then again, that story wouldn't play on TV.

— Michael Rymer (michaelrobertrymer@yahoo.com)