The Most Complete Freedom

As the sun slipped behind the jagged peaks of the Andes Mountains, Keith Jackson pedaled a dinged-up bicycle along a road outside of Ushuaia, Argentina.

Gripping handlebars wrapped in tattered tape, Keith crept along the road, careful to avoid potholes and loose rocks that could further damage a bicycle that he feared would not last another 20 miles.

When the road ended, Keith continued straight ahead until his front tire touched the waters off the southern tip of South America.

At 19, on March 31, 1975, he became one of the few people to complete an 18,000-mile bicycle ride from Alaska to southern Argentina. Throughout the trip, in a journal that was excerpted in The Sentinel (the Winston-Salem Journal's sister paper that closed in 1985), Keith chronicled what had become a spiritual odyssey in words that belied his youth.

Keith had reason to exult. He had ridden solo for all but the first 3,000 miles, in what he believed to be a record nine months. He had endured sickness, loneliness and a harrowing, some might say suicidal, journey through a snake-infested jungle.

But here on this mossy bank, he felt empty.

"No cannons, no horns, my heart isn't pounding. I'm not smiling," Keith wrote. "I have reached the road's end."

After gathering stones, he set out to pedal back into town. One last time, he turned to the sea and allowed himself a moment of triumph. Impulsively, he thrust his fist in the air and shouted: "We did it!"

Keith returned to a hero's welcome in Winston-Salem. Mayor Franklin Shirley proclaimed June 23, 1975, Keith Jackson Day and presented him with a key to the city. His family threw a big party for him at their home on Westover Avenue.

Adventure's end

Restless and soaring with confidence, Keith soon dreamed up new excursions, including a ride from South Africa to northern Finland.

But those dreams would never be realized.

Seventeen months after his return, Keith died in a motorcycle wreck in Charlotte, two weeks after his 21st birthday.

Thirty-five years after his epic adventure, friends and family well with emotion as they recall a charismatic individualist who found his greatest joy on the open road.

Pat Taylor of Moore County (a former general manager of the Journal) roomed with Keith while they were students at UNC Charlotte.

"You know how you feel a spiritual presence from someone who really gets it? It was the same thing with Keith. Instead of a spiritual energy in a religious sense, he had an almost electrical energy that flowed through him," Taylor said.

The fourth of Edith and Bruce Jackson's eight children, Keith was industrious and self-reliant at a young age. Once, he picked some roses from a bush, marched up to the house, rang the doorbell and tried to sell people their own roses, recalled his mother, Edith Gilbert, who is 89 and lives in Raleigh.

Later, he sold pens, knives and handkerchiefs to businessmen in downtown Winston-Salem, a skill he likely picked up from his father, who sold vacuum cleaners. His father later suffered a mental breakdown, and in the spring of 1969, committed suicide when Keith was 13.

His younger sister, Jan Sumerel, who lives in San Jose, Calif., said the family was traumatized, but she is not sure that her father's death is what pushed Keith to live on the edge.

"It didn't make him need to live more fully," Sumerel said. "I think it was more like, 'Why stop at this point in my life? Why not do as much as possible?'"

Around this time, Keith's wanderlust kicked into gear. At 14, he hiked the Appalachian Trail from North Carolina to New England by himself. Two years later, with $60 in his pocket, he made his way to Alaska and back by hitching rides on airplanes.

A free spirit who loved books and photography, Keith danced to the beat of his own drummer, said his siblings, all of whom have moved from Winston-Salem.

Clear intentions

As a freshman at UNC Charlotte, Keith wrote "Alaska to Chile" in bubble letters on a piece of paper and tacked it up next to a world map on his dorm-room wall.

The idea to attempt a Hemistour — as this ride is called — likely originated with a May 1973 National Geographic article about two couples making such a ride. The article, which highlighted the struggles and wonders in Alaska and the Yukon, would have appealed to Keith's hunger for challenges.

He was also tired of school.

"I think he couldn't live in a box," said Mark Lawrence, a younger brother who lives in Washington. "Keith was not one of those guys who could sit at a desk. I think he got bored and wondered: 'What next?'"

For several months, Keith pored over maps, wrote letters to consulates, arranged to earn academic credits in several subjects and worked odd jobs to pay for the trip.

On June 9, 1974, Keith, by now a muscular young man with apple cheeks and a passing resemblance to Greg Brady, arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, and penned his first journal entry:

"I feel as though I must be one of the very few who can experience the sensation of a dream unfolding into reality."

A little company

Keith was delighted to find Keith Klehm, a high-school friend, waiting for him in the Anchorage airport. After assembling their packs and bicycles — Keith rode a Nishiki he called Mr. Binkley — they set off down the mud-caked and rock-strewn roads of the backcountry, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and tennis shoes, each loaded down with about 30 pounds of gear.

Although they suffered their share of hardships, including 1,200 miles of rutted gravel roads and some near-misses with logging trucks, they lived a Huckleberry Finn existence, each day rich with unpredictability.

Klehm left the ride in San Francisco to return to college, leaving Keith as a solo rider. While in northern California, he called Howie Cohen, who ran West Coast Cycle, the distribution center for Nishiki bicycles. Keith hoped Cohen would sponsor him.

Cohen, who now lives in Colorado, has clear memories of Keith.

"I told him: I get inquiries for sponsorships all the time, and I want to tell you something about me. If you have long hair, you might as well just pass on by," Cohen recalled. "A couple of days later, Keith came to my office and had a lovely charisma. And he had gotten a haircut. You could see the white skin all around where his long hair had been."

Cohen and his staff refurbished Mr. Binkley and gave Keith some bicycle clothes.

Rough patches

Keith hit a low point in the deserts of northern Mexico, where he churned out 100-mile days in 120-degree heat and battled sickness and loneliness.

Although he nearly quit, the slog through the desert disciplined him. Each mile brought something new — a broken chain, a queasy stomach, prickly border guards, another hill. Yet, he viewed the world that unfurled before him with wide-eyed wonder.

"Each day I live I see reason to live one hundred more," he wrote on Sept. 27.

His remained in good spirits as he rolled into Panama. On Oct. 28, 1974, he marked his 19th birthday in the Panama Canal Zone in his journal: "For four months now I have experienced freedom, the most complete freedom I have ever known."

In Panama, with 8,000 miles remaining, Keith steeled himself for the trip's greatest obstacle — the Darien Gap, a densely vegetated and swampy jungle that could swallow a person.

Since entering Mexico, Keith had followed the Pan American Highway, a network of roads that would lead him to the tail of South America.

The road ended about 60 miles south of Panama City and picked back up 300 miles away, north of Medellin, Colombia.

All bicyclists must make a choice if they want to complete a Hemistour — they can fly over the jungle, ferry around it or hitch their bikes to their backs and walk through it.

Keith pondered his choices for a few days, but he was stubborn in his determination to finish the trip without motorized assistance. He would walk through the jungle.

Although he faithfully wrote in his journal, some entries are sketchy. As best can be determined, Keith headed into the jungle around Nov. 10, loaded down with 60 pounds of gear.

Progress was slow. When the vegetation was too thick for him to carry his bicycle and pack, he bushwhacked a path with a machete then returned for his gear. In the suffocating humidity, he covered about 100 yards in an hour.

The jungle was a maze of unending misery. Through day-long downpours and searing heat, he inched along on trails that abruptly ended or circled back to where he slept the night before. Knee-deep mud gripped his boots with such suction that he sometimes had to use his hands to lift each foot. Eventually, he ditched the boots and walked barefoot.

Penniless, after his paying guides who later quit, and unable to walk further because of infected feet, Keith took a boat from the village of Titumate to Turbo, Colombia, and rebuilt his bike with the help of parts supplied by Cohen.

With the worst behind, Keith returned to his bicycle, logging long days on narrow roads that snaked up the Andes. Along the way, he relished the views of the Pacific Ocean and bucolic scenes of Indians tilling their fields — and endeared himself to strangers who patched his jeans and fed him breakfast.

Pedaling for days into 60-mph headwinds in Chile, Keith began to dream of soft beds and hot showers. Other days, he mourned the end of the trip.

"There will be other trips," he wrote four days before reaching Ushuaia. "Of that I am sure."

Back home

Life was going well for Keith in the fall of 1976. He was in his final year at UNC Charlotte, had a girlfriend and was compiling his journal into book. He also was excited to put school behind him and set off on more escapades.

On Nov. 5, 1976, he left his off-campus apartment and took off on his motorcycle. Cresting a hill on N.C. 49 around sunset, he slammed into the back of a stalled car and suffered massive internal injuries. He never regained consciousness.

Given Keith's physical strength and zeal for life, friends and family clung to the hope that this was another obstacle that Keith could conquer.

Harry Lawrence, a younger brother who lives in Raleigh, watched bedside as Keith withered away.

"He was fighting, fighting. Keith was such a fighter," Lawrence said, his voice choked with emotion. "A tough guy."

On the ninth day of his coma, his mother saw a tear roll fall from Keith's eye. Not long after, he died of a heart attack.

"I always thought of him dying at the peak of a wave," she said.

Friends and family continue to draw strength from Keith.

"I remember him telling me, 'Mark, if you can believe it, you can do it,'" his brother, Mark Lawrence, recalled. "That little speech has inspired me throughout my whole life."

Pat Taylor keeps a wool cap that Keith wore on the trip.

"I think his greatness, if you will, has always been an inspiration. If he could do that, most of us could do more than we think," Taylor said. "None of us will ever forget him."

Keith's final legacy is a book that his mother compiled from the trip's journal. Keith's Incredible Journey, which was published in 1984, is a moving account of a young man who understood at an early age that it is better to live than exist.

"The accomplishment is one of many," Keith wrote that day on the quiet shore of Ushuaia Bay, "but for myself and those who shared it with me, it was one more demonstration of the fact that man is only as limited as he believes himself to be."

— lo'donnell@wsjournal.com

727-7420