Rider wants life to show time's value

Jeff Brown lives by the motto of living life to the fullest because there is no guarantee how long you will have. He didn't know how prophetic those words would turn out to be.

Mr. Brown, 60, has taken his unique motorcycle-car hybrids he calls "trikes" to all 50 states during the past three years. A month ago, after enduring stomach pains, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that has spread throughout his lungs, and he is now in hospice care.

"The whole idea was to inspire people, whether young or old, to be all they can be, and to live every day as if it were their last," Mr. Brown said, his voice rasping from recent treatments. "Little did I know that mine would be cut short. It's a real strange thing to happen to you. I always thought I would have more than a few weeks."

Now, he is in a desperate race to go back to Hawaii for a final visit. His friend Rusty Eskew of Graystone Ranch is trying to work with the airline to let him fly (there is a concern about Mr. Brown forming a blood clot in his legs during the long flight) and to transfer his hospice care there.

When he leaves, Mr. Brown will take quite a legacy with him, said friend Flint Keller, of Milledgeville, who went to motorcycle rallies with him.

"He's done more than most people ever dreamed of doing," Mr. Keller said. "He's seen more country and met more people and done things his own way more than 99 percent of the people in the country."

People laughed at him when he first proposed the hybrid, made from a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle.

"When somebody laughs at me, it makes me stronger," he said. In fact, it became his mission.

"It took me a bunch of years to realize who I was and that my purpose in life was to make people smile," Mr. Brown said. "Even if they were laughing at me."

He dyed his beard blue for the same reason he built the unique trike -- people found it interesting.

"If they saw the same old thing every single day they'd be so bored," said Mr. Brown, who blogs as "Bluebeard."

And the trike proved to be practical: Living and sleeping in the car section allowed him to get out on the road cheaply.

"I always had a dream to travel," Mr. Brown said. "I had to create a way to travel because I didn't have any money."

He lived off sandwiches and slept in Wal-Mart parking lots. He would hold up a sign seeking donations and made new friends wherever he stopped. He has rolls of cardboard covered with signatures from across the country and from around the world.

"Greeting from Iceland," Viola wrote. Others chipped in from Namibia, Austria, Colombia.

"A lady from China, she walked up to me and said, 'I'm proud of you. I'm proud of what you're doing, representing your country and traveling around, telling people about your country.' "

The trip up to Alaska was fascinating, he said.

"That was incredible," Mr. Brown said. "It was like barren land that almost no man has ever touched."

Once there, he made enough friends to get him to the last state, Hawaii, Mr. Eskew said. Mr. Brown held up a sign asking for donations, and the people in Alaska raised enough to put him and his trike on a boat to the islands, he said. After several months in Hawaii, "when he got ready to leave, the people of Hawaii raised money to fly him from Hawaii back to Los Angeles," Mr. Eskew said.

THERE HAVE BEEN "thousands and thousands and thousands" of people along the way, including Mr. T and an actor playing Superman, Mr. Brown said. But when he starts to talk about them, the tears come again and he hides his face in his hands.

"There's people out there that," he says as he breaks down, "I'll never see again that helped me survive through the whole thing. Unconditional love. I'm just a stranger. I have to tell you, there's so many good people out there."

Like the night in the middle of Montana -- "literally nowhere" -- when a generator burned out and he pulled into a Wal-Mart parking lot around 11 p.m., thinking, "Where the hell am I going to get a generator for a '68 Volkswagen?"

Into the parking lot came a man in an old Volkswagen.

"He said, 'Let me look in my toolbox,' " Mr. Brown said, smiling at the memory. "He opened the toolbox and there it was."

During his three years on the road, he broke down 35 times.

"And every breakdown I had, I got through it with a smile, no matter how hard it was. You know why?" Mr. Brown asked. "Because I had time. Time is everything. Time is everything in life. If you have time, you will work it out."

NOW THAT HIS is running short, he wants to pass along what he learned on a long journey around the country he loves. One lesson is that for every bad person, there are 50 good ones, he said.

"Maybe 100 good, maybe a thousand good" to one bad, he said.

Once, he told Mr. Eskew that his journey would have been better if he had started with money.

"I simply said, 'Jeff, think about this. If you had money, that every town you went to you stayed in a motel, think of how many thousands of people that you would never have gotten the pleasure of meeting' because he went to Wal-Mart parking lots and places," Mr. Eskew said. "He was where people go."

Sometimes he would go to where someone had always wanted to visit and send back pictures, Mr. Eskew said.

"Jeff lived the dream for someone else because most people today won't get in their car or on their bicycle or on their motorcycle that they built, and strike out to go all the way across the country, with no money," he said. "It's a man living a dream.

Mr. Brown sits outside on his friend's ranch in Hephzibah, with goats braying in a nearby pen, and looks at the trikes parked on the grass. There is another lesson there.

"Whatever you build, you don't have to build it to look like somebody else's," Mr. Brown said. Those trikes, all built with recycled parts from scrap yards, won more than 30 trophies, although some motorcycle enthusiasts didn't care for them, he said.

"I went to a couple of Harley events, and they were irritated that I did that to a Harley," he said, smiling.

There is perhaps a final lesson he wants to be certain he leaves behind.

"Make sure that, somewhere in there, you tell people to live their lives," Mr. Brown said. "Don't be afraid to do it. Just go out there and do it because a lifetime is very short."

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.