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| The Far Side
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| Recently inducted into the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame, Master Ryan Murdock is a world-class coach and if that’s not enough he’s also a travel writer and explorer who’s been to 27 countries, seeing the world from the exotic perspective of camel, horse, Russian jeep, motorcycle and dugout canoe.
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When Ryan Murdock was six or seven years old he and a couple of neighbor kids slipped away when no one was looking and walked to the far side of town, some place he’d never been before.
He felt as if he’d traveled to the ends of the earth—and he liked it. It was exciting, not knowing where he was or which way was home, his whereabouts a secret from everyone.
That little boy’s early experiment with self-expression, freedom and independence, however modest—his hometown of Prescott, Ontario isn’t exactly Bali Hai after all—proved prescient, a novice flirtation with the kind of adventure that today constitutes both personal manifesto and modus operandi for the youthful world explorer.
“I was always independent and content to do my own thing. Even as a very young child I was reportedly quiet and was happy to amuse myself, spending hours in an adventurous imaginative world with star wars action figures or miniature cars… Imagination played an extremely important role in my life... I spent so many hours and years lying on the bed of my little room in my family’s house, staring out the window, dreaming of doing heroic deeds, of adventures in far off places, of fights heroically won, and of saving the girl. It was such a contrast to my external life back then. I tended to be quiet and introverted, except among friends. It may sound strange and perhaps megalomaniacal, but some part of me always knew that I would never have a ‘normal’ or conventional life. That ‘getting a job’ and having a family and a house in the suburbs would never be for me. Dreaming was just a way of passing the time until I was old enough to bring that to fruition.”
A voracious reader as a child, Murdock, who still consumes at least 100 pages of text a day (“I’m bookish but I can fight real well.”), while not particularly athletic in a conventional competitive sense, loved the outdoors, enjoying his annual fishing trip to Dalhousie Lake with his dad for instance and thrived on personal challenge.
“I was drawn to wild untouched places and I was thrilled at being alone and left to my own wits…I went through a period of intense reading of survival and woodcraft type books around the eighth to tenth grade, and did a lot of camping with my friend Rob Wilson. We would take only a hatchet to make a lean-to (tents were for wimps!) and a book of edible wild plants. We were allowed one can of baked beans each, and after that we had to fend for ourselves. Of course we were usually tired and hungry after being eaten by mosquitoes all night, sleeping in the open and living off foraged tea! But we never admitted it.”
Intelligent and well-read, Murdock waged a war of attrition against teachers and authority in general—high school the chosen field of battle where he “…hung out with the cool kids, flunked courses and got kicked out a lot. Of course it was always for creative things – multistage pranks and stupid things that we plotted for weeks. We had a keen intuitive grasp of psychology and could manipulate teachers and adults in ways much older than our years. I took great satisfaction in pulling off an elaborate scheme and not getting caught, or better yet having them know that I was behind it but being unable to prove anything. From about grade seven through most of high school I was in trouble a great deal for that sort of thing – mostly pushing against authority and senseless constraints. I wanted to be left alone to do my own thing, and I resented being pushed.”
His indifference didn’t extend to martial arts, which he took up at age 15. It was a good fit and training regularly, voraciously studying, he quickly rose through the ranks. He also demonstrated an early talent for writing—was so good in fact, he was falsely accused of plagiarism by skeptical teachers.
In 2000, university behind him, Murdock was itching to see the world and took his first real trip, traveling alone through the seven countries of Central America. He bought a ticket to Panama City and out of Belize, part of an unconscious strategy to ensure completion.
“I was so naïve. I had no idea what I was getting into… No one knew where I’d be or where I was going (except vaguely north), because I didn’t know either. It was nothing like I expected. It changed my entire notion of travel, it shattered my self-image and it completely changed the way that I saw myself and the world. I guess it also made me prone to more of the same – once you’ve glimpsed such things you can never really go back. I tried to fit in on my return, but I was never really ‘employable’ (in the conventional sense) again. I just couldn’t play the game anymore, couldn’t fit into the nine-to-five grind, because I had seen through it. That and so much more.”
The trip to Central America was pivotal—it helped him develop a sustaining self-confidence and it forced him to confront, in the most vivid terms, the solitariness and incumbent vulnerabilities of the choice he’d made.
“Sitting [in Panama City] completely alone in that tiny hotel room, in a place where I didn’t speak the language, with the street noise – loud engines, shouting people, a couple gunshots – coming in through the window, I realized that I had gotten in way over my head. I had never felt so alone and I didn’t know how I’d make it through. All I could see were the months and months that stretched ahead. It was all a blank. Total uncertainty. Think about what that means. Our lives are composed of routines that we take for granted – work times, school times, TV shows, regular meals, brushing one’s teeth… These comforting routines lend shape to our lives, give us some sort of structured reality, and connect us to the lives around us. In a single stroke I had severed all of that. I had no idea what the next day would hold, or even the next hour. It was terrifying. Of course all of that turmoil passed with the light of dawn, but it was a long, long night.”
Intensely curious, Murdock, who recently led Outpost Magazine’s expedition to the Canol Heritage Trail, a 355-km long trek in the North West Territories, is committed to an authentic experience of the world, part of what delineates him from the casual vacationer.
“The vacationer goes to a foreign place and does the same things that they do at home, only cheaper. They drink more, sit around… I’d much rather visit a grocery store and lose myself in the strange things on the shelves than take a guided tour.”
His desire to travel met with a lot of opposition along the way—most people were discouraging and even disapproving—predictably, he endured a lot of knee-jerk admonitions to get a real job.
“My dad always supported my martial art training and my travels, though I don’t think he ever understood them. I think he was initially hurt and puzzled that I didn’t take up hockey or baseball, two sports that he excelled at. Later, he was just happy to see me doing something active. Regardless, he always supported my training, drove me to classes week after week and to seminars in other cities, and he spent his free time building crazy training contraptions to my designs. He supported my travels in the same way. Slipping me cash when I was building up to a trip, driving me to the airport…”
Of course, Murdock isn’t likely to be found around the buffet bar on a cruise ship to Paradise Island anytime soon, preferring instead: “…the vast tractless jungle of the Mosquito Coast [on a Nicaraguan freighter]…taking a short cut across a treacherous untraveled expanse of the south Gobi desert…the desert air unmarred by moisture and there was no ambient light—there wasn’t a soul for hundreds of miles…Island hopping along Croatia’s Adriatic Coast…[his] backdrop the bleached bony spine of the mainland that towers over the islands and the sea and in the distance the slow clonk of sheep bells.”
While the physical trials of adventure travel can be grueling, Murdock, an introvert by nature is ultimately more challenged by the mental—he is human, after all, and as fond of creature comfort and routine as the rest of us.
“Of course once that plane glides in, or once I get that first whiff of diesel smoke from third world streets, the curiosity and the enthusiasm bubble up again. It’s visceral – I feel it as a lightness, a certain very distinctive spring in my step. I can handle the physical discomforts of travel – the aches and pains, the endless monotony of waiting, the illnesses. I think my early martial arts training really helped in that, because it was so brutal. The beatings that we took and that we gave each other as a part of the day to day training were worse than anything I would encounter out there. It was a toughening process that served me well later on in unexpected ways, though of course it came with a cost.”
While not averse to risk, he resists the adrenaline-junkie label, preferring to describe his travel compulsion as an aspect of his attraction to life as opposed to life’s dangers.
In what he calls a “travel coup,” Murdock is one of few outsiders to have firsthand experience of North Korea.
“So much has been written about the place, so much of it speculation based on scant eyewitness reports. I felt that it was important to see it for myself. It was like stepping onto a stage set where everything is faked for your benefit (and much of it was). It was a place of Stalinism taken to the furthest extremes, where the party controlled the ‘truth’ and where we were bombarded with constant propaganda. It was a chance to step into the pages of a totalitarian nightmare – but then to step back out again…I can’t begin to describe the total disconnect with the outside world. We were totally cut off, nothing else existed, and by the end of a week we began to doubt that it ever had.”
Martial arts—he’s an RMAX head coach—have played an enormously affecting role in shaping both his life and his travel, giving him the confidence to explore obscure worlds within worlds.
“It taught me strategy, craftiness, never to give too much away (i.e. put on the naïve face and bumble through rather than confront; hide certain skills and only reveal them suddenly if needed), and it also gave me the ability to fight my way out when necessary—and it has been necessary on a few occasions. It changes the way that you carry yourself. Assailants are looking for a victim. When you flip that switch and ‘turn it on’ they sense your willingness and your ability to fight, and they walk the other way.
“Martial art training has also allowed me to shrug more off. I can let a lot slide off, because I know that it’s easy to hurt people and that it’s far more difficult and generous to walk away. You can shrug off a great deal when you have nothing to prove. It may sound odd, but when treated badly (on the road and in some of the miserable jobs that I held) I sometimes took comfort in the fact that I could clear the room of those people if I decided to. Knowing that they couldn’t physically hurt me, what did it matter what nasty things they said, how they treated me or what they thought of me?”
An ambitious and poetic writer of rare insight, Murdock is currently at work on the first volume of a multi-volume “fictionalized autobiography,” the seeming dichotomy of the title imposed in deference to the notorious unreliability of memory.
“I wonder sometimes what came first, the stories or the intention to one day write them? It seems that in a sense I’ve always lived posthumously. Even in the midst of troubles a part of me knew that this incident that I was caught up in would make a great story later and that I had to go through with it. I could always take this view of myself from above looking down on the scene and I could laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, even when I’d really gotten myself into trouble. I could always see the comedy of it in the third person. My whole life I was also motivated by the notion that I didn’t want to be one of those people who always toes the line, who never breaks a rule, and who therefore grows old without having any stories to tell.”
Traveling fleet and light has taught Murdock a thing or two—he’s realized how little he needs to be happy and comfortable and he’s learned to distinguish what’s important from what’s trivial.
“As for added knowledge, travel does give you a perspective on the wider world. It seems obvious to say it, but you realize that your philosophy and the philosophy and moral code of your culture don’t apply everywhere else. People live differently and they get along just fine. The harshest culture shock is the one that you experience on returning home. It causes you to question everything and to reject some of what you’d always taken for granted, foundational beliefs of your culture and your society. You come to realize what shaky intellectual ground we are all actually standing on.”
Nothing worthwhile comes cheap or easy and Murdock has paid a price for indulging his enthusiasms and inner voice. The road has been financially rocky—he’s endured loneliness, mental and physical hardship, compromised time and interrupted personal relationships.
So is it worth it?
“The question doesn’t really have much bearing for me. I never felt that I had a choice. The prospects of success or failure never entered into my decisions. This was just something that I would do and I never saw any other alternative. I didn’t know whether I would succeed or fail. That never entered into the equation. But I knew that I would do.
“Sure, at one time perhaps I could have made a successful career in some government office (I graduated university with highest honors and a double major, after all), plodding away in the daytime and reading books and dreaming at night, dreaming about the things that I would never do, taking my two weeks holidays each year in the places accessible to those with short vacations. I guess I could have taken that path, and perhaps I almost did—if I had never gone to Central America.”
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