THE JUDE OBSCURE

What happens when you don a wig to circumnavigate the world on a Honda VFR750? You can’t stop moving. Meet the artist who became addicted to leaving places.

- PIPPA DE BRUYN

I’m guessing that, ultimately, it’s losing the fear of death that gives you freedom. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not there yet,’ wrote motorbike adventurer Veronica Feeling in an early missive from her solo circumnavigation of the world. Wearing a canary-yellow biker suit and a long blonde wig, Feeling completed a loop through 22 European countries before heading east, roaring her turquoise Honda VFR750 across some of the world’s most inhospitable regions, from Vladivostok to South Korea, Los Angeles to Tennessee. Fifty thousand miles and two years later it appears the rootless adventurer finally achieved the liberation she alluded to in Berlin. In a stunt-turned-suicide, Feeling was filmed riding her Honda into the Hudson River wearing concrete boots – the ‘final splash’ in her epic journey.

‘It seemed to many that Veronica Feeling slowly lost her grip riding across North America over the last few months,’ wrote Alice Klar in a final ‘RIP Veronica’ entry on Feeling’s blog. ‘As a close friend and the executor of her will, my guess is she’d simply had enough.’

Having donated Feeling’s bike, suit, wig and travel bag to the Motorcyclepedia Museum in Newburgh NY, Klar returned to Berlin. Dark brown hair clipped short, Klar – a boat builder – was somewhat of an anomaly. Always dressed in black, hers was a life in the shadows. Yet she shared remarkable resemblances with her recently deceased flamboyant friend. The same gap-toothed grin, the same strong hands and steely gaze. The same birth date. A year later, Klar, too, was dead. Or rather renounced, relinquished, abandoned. In her place, a new heroine: Yolanda Strip, ‘intrepid pilot of the Southern skies’, born to fly.