Eastwards and Far by Chris Lee-Francis – #ABookADayInMay Day 27

I think I stumbled across Eastwards and Far (2023) by Chris Lee-Francis on Lee-Francis’s Twitter profile, and was intrigued enough to order a copy pronto. As a memoir of cycling across Canada, it combines something I love reading about (Canada) with something I felt fairly ambivalent reading about (cycling) – but, on balance, I liked the idea of seeing Canada through the eyes of an adventurous traveller enough to give it a go. It’s been 25 years since I got a bicycle and I feel, if anything, less likely to get on one after reading Eastwards and Far, but I loved the experience of reading it.

Lee-Francis got the idea while cycling around Ontario in 2013. He spotted a sign for the Trans Canada Trail, and wondered if it would be possible to cycle all the way from Vancouver to the furthest West point of the enormous country – only later realising that the trail wouldn’t be completed until 2017. That gave time for a plan to formulate – and he and has friend Kristian ended up starting their three-month journey in Vancouver by the middle of 2017 (a third friend wasn’t able to get three months off work, so joined in for the final month). Eastwards and Far developed from the journals that Lee-Francis took during that time – turning into an endurance travelogue, documenting the experiences, the beauty, and the Canadians they met along the way.

For the most part, there are not significant dramas. Along the way, some vital belongings go missing, there is a near encounter with a bear, and misreading of a map leaves them with only six eggs to eat and nowhere to buy food – but this is not a memoir about overcoming great hazards and dangers. Rather, it is a memoir of the wonders that can be encountered by undertaking something like this. The highs and lows of battling all weathers and environments to achieve something momentous. And, above all, the interest and kindness of strangers. There are countless people along the way who may only appear for a few paragraphs or a page, but are indelliby part of the men’s experience – whether offering food, somewhere to camp, or simply company.

As the stories continued I realised our bikes had let us skip several layers of social interaction usually required to be sitting in someone’s kitchen talking as friends. A few hours ago we’d not yet met. Now, after nothing more than asking where we could safely violate several byelaws to spend a night sleeping rough without getting caught, we’d been invited over the threshold into their home.

There are definitely amusing moments in Eastwards and Far, but it isn’t played for laughs. This is no attempt to create a Three Men in a Boat style narrative. I’d, instead, describe the tone as warm. Chris Lee-Francis comes across as a thoroughly decent guy – and I suspect a lot of the kindness he and Kristian receive from strangers is because of that decency, and a capacity and willingness to embrace positives encountered every day. What else would possess someone to cycle for thousands of miles?

Of course, hearing about the challenge probably raises lots of logistical questions in your mind – and I enjoyed learning about the answers, particularly the Very Canadian ones. How, for instance, do you deter bears?

At the end of each day in bear country, when you’re nice and relaxed, tent ready and waiting, with a meal and maybe a beer inside you, comes the time to hang your food bags from a nearby tree.

The collective recommendations of friends, park rangers, information pamphlets, and numerous other knowledgeable sources was to suspect all food and cooking gear at least four metres off the ground, a safe distance from camp. Sounds easy, but this part of the day had often become more of a rigmarole than I felt it should’ve been.

The first step was to establish how far away to hang the bags. Received wisdom says at least a hundred metres, which we measured early in the trip to estimating Kristian’s running speed, calculating how long it would take him to run that far, and me timing him while he sprinted off into the distance. Bags would be suspended from a suitable tree somewhere beyond the perimeter.

“That was twelve seconds!” I called to Kristian the first night we did this. “Probably not a hundred metres?”

He looked wounded. “It could be!” he called back.

“Isn’t the world record just under ten?!”

“True! I guess the ground is quite uneven!” He ran a bit further and stopped again.

“That looks good! Probably fourteen seconds total?!” We used this time on subsequent nights.

One aspect that intrigued me, and wasn’t covered in any detail, was what it was like to spend three months constantly with a friend – and high-endurance three months, too. There are very few people I could spend that much time with, without going mad or severing the friendship. The two men seem to still be firm friends by the end, so it was obviously a success – and perhaps scarcely a cross word was spoken between them on the trip. Or perhaps Lee-Francis drew a veil over it.

He keeps the pace up well through the narrative. Something that could have become quite repetitive is somehow compulsive to read – even though he resists any urge to introduce sustained jeopardy. There is never really any doubt that the cyclists will complete their challenge, and do so in one piece. By avoiding any false tension, we can instead enjoy the journey as an adventure into curiosity. I’m still unlikely to ever get back on a bike, let alone undertake any significant challenges, but I really enjoyed reading about it from the comfort of my sofa.

As a sidenote, Eastwards and Far is by some distance the best-quality self-published book I’ve ever come across – French flaps and all! I would have appreciated the font being a little larger, as it is quite tiny, but it was certainly readable. If you’d like to read it yourself, you can get hold of it from Chris Lee-Francis’s website.