[Lifestyle] The man who walked around the world: Tom Turcich on his seven-year search for the meaning of life

[Mr.Hacker]

 

At the age of 17, Tom Turcich had enjoyed a good life so far. He had wonderful parents, great friends, did well at school and was a gifted sportsman. But two things gnawed away at him: he thought he was too timid, and he was terrified of death. As a little boy, he would run down the stairs at night to check that his parents were still alive. At the age of 11, he’d lie in bed trying to simulate death so he could prepare for it. “I’d lose the sensation of my body,” he says, “and I would cover my ears and close my eyes so I couldn’t see and couldn’t hear, and I’d try to imagine what death was like. But then you can’t because you’re thinking. And there’s no thinking in death.”

 

Then, in 2006, his life was turned on its head. Turcich remembers every detail. He was in a car with three friends – Nick, Kevin and Fitz. Kevin was driving his father’s convertible. Back then, the boys used to hang out with a group of girls who were in the year below at school in Haddon Township, New Jersey. There was Shannon who was going out with Kevin, Ann Marie, Amanda and Jess. They’d grown up together, been friends since they were seven or eight, and they were as close as close can be.

 

The radio was blasting and the boys were having a good time when Kevin got a call from Shannon. He was distraught. “Kevin yelled for the music to be turned down and said, ‘Ann Marie has died.’” Sixteen-year-old Ann Marie had been killed in a jetski accident. They drove to Shannon’s house. “We sat in the front yard. There were maybe 10 of us, we were in a circle and everybody’s crying, unsure what to do. That night I lay in bed and I remember feeling this fog. It lasted about six months.”

 

Not only was Turcich petrified of death, he now knew he could die at any moment. Hardest of all was reconciling that it had happened to somebody like Ann Marie. “She was super-clever and exceptionally kind,” says Turcich. “Ann Marie was nice to the point it drove me crazy when I was younger because you could never get her to say anything mean. When we were hanging out I would prod her, trying to get her to say anything not generous.”

 

I thought: if Ann Marie can die, who is a better person than I am, then for sure I can go at the same time

He never succeeded. Not only did Turcich lose an amazing friend, but the accident left him questioning the meaning of life, and reinforced his fear of death. In short, he had the ultimate teenage existential crisis. “I thought: if Ann Marie can die, who is definitely a better student and better person than I am, then for sure I can go at the same time. That’s why it really hit home.”

 

Turcich went into a decline. “It brought all those unresolved questions flooding back. I thought: OK, you’ve got to solve this problem just to go about your life.” What was the problem? “That death can come at any time – arbitrarily and instantly. It was like, with this knowledge, how do you live? What do you do? How do you integrate that fact into your life?”

 

He was stuck for an answer. Then one day at college, the students watched Dead Poets Society, the film about a teacher called John Keating, played by Robin Williams, who inspires his students through his love of literature. Just as the movie’s seminal speech about seizing the day – carpe diem – and living an extraordinary life had a huge impact on the students in the movie, so it also did on Turcich.

 

He watched the film again and again, asking himself how best he could seize the day and make his life extraordinary. It struck him for the first time that he could shape his future rather than simply let it happen to him. From then on, he did just that. He won a place in the school swimming team, performed in a one-act play, returned to playing tennis and became school champion, all the time wearing the blue “AML” bracelet his school had designed as a tribute to Ann Marie Lynch. He finally conquered his passivity when he braved his first kiss, after three (nervous) dates with a girl called Britney.

 

That kiss proved to be an epiphany. “It was like the birth of the universe in my head,” he says. “All of a sudden I could see all the possibilities expanding out. It finally clicked: the actions you take really can affect your life.” Turcich decided he was going to seize the day by getting out of safe, friendly Haddon Township, with its po[CENSORED]tion of roughly 15,000, and seeing the world.

 

 

He started to make plans. He didn’t want to just see a bit of the world: if possible, he was going to see all of it. “Because the world is complex and vast, and because my general temperament is pretty timid and more towards the shy side, I wanted to be forced into adventure. The point of adventure is it’s uncomfortable and you have to grow in it.

 

“I had $1,000 in my bank account so I needed to find a cheap way to travel, and that led me to the guys who had walked around the world.” He read up about Steve Newman (an American who circumnavigated the globe on foot over four years in the late 1980s) and Karl Bushby (a British ex-paratrooper who set off in 1998 and is still walking today), and now he had his answer. “It seemed to solve everything I wanted out of life,” he says.

 

As in Dead Poets Society, the students in his class shared a deep friendship and trust. When they had to give end-of-year talks to each other, Turcich announced his plan to walk the world. His friends were “genuinely supportive” – and then he told his parents. As a young man, his father, also called Tom, had seized the day: he headed off to Hawaii at the age of 20 and spent four years spear-fishing, working on a sugarcane plantation and living under a tarp in the woods on a tiny plot of land. He met Turcich’s mother, Catherine, at the tail-end of his trip.

 

Tom Sr, who now runs a catering business, remembers how badly affected his son was by Ann Marie’s death. “That really threw him through a loop,” he tells me over the phone from Haddon Township. “It just turned a switch on. Ooof! Boy, if that can happen at 16 I better get living, you know. And all of a sudden, he became real.” Tom Sr thought the world walk was an inspired idea. “For me it was like, go – adventure!”

 

But his wife, Catherine, an artist, was less enthusiastic. What did she think when her son first mentioned the walk? “Hahahaha!” She’s got a lovely bright laugh. “I thought how naive he was. Does he actually think he’s going to walk around the world? I just thought it was a crazy idea, a passing whim.” She pauses. “But Tommy was always somebody who’d get an idea and follow it through. He stuck to a challenge.”

 

“She was like, ‘You’re 17 and this is just a 17-year-old’s idea,’” Turcich says. And she was right. But he wasn’t planning to act on his idea just yet. For the next few years he rarely mentioned it to anybody. He knew that many would dismiss him as fanciful at best. “I don’t like people who just talk about the things they’re going to do,” he says.

 

For the next eight years, Turcich quietly worked away at making it a reality. He graduated with a degree in psychology and philosophy from Moravian University in Pennsylvania, and made a living installing solar panels until he turned 25, at which point he quit and worked as a waiter in a restaurant and at an insurance firm doing data entry.

 

 

All the while, Turcich was busy making his final preparations. He would endlessly study maps, working out the best routes. Much of it depended on practicalities such as which countries insisted on a visa. He decided to walk to Argentina for the first leg of his trip. Shortly before he was due to leave he met yet another Tom, Tom Marchetty, who customised a baby buggy for his travels. The buggy would hold all his essentials – tent, sleeping bag, laptop, camera, batteries, plastic food crate (partly to hold his food, partly to insulate the smell from animals), water bottles, six pairs of socks, four pairs of underwear, a pair of trousers, a pair of shorts, long-sleeved shirt and short-sleeved shirt, wool shirt, hoodie, jacket and waterproof shoes.

 

[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/11/the-man-who-walked-around-the-world-tom-turcich-seven-year-search-meaning-of-life}