BUZZ BOOK:
Three Cents a Mile
Mark Mooney was in his late 20s in the late 1970s, living in The Bronx and working at a newspaper in Long Island, when he decided to quit it all. He sold his possessions — even his prized motorcycle — and took a oneway flight to London. For the next two years, he hoofed his way around Europe, across the Middle East, and through south Asia before “settling” in Thailand for several months. It’s an epic journey he wrote about in his self-published memoir, “Three Cents a Mile.” The title comes from a calculation Mooney did about the cost of his journey: traveling 41,000 miles for some $1,400 comes to 3 cents a mile. “The bargain of a lifetime,” Mooney wrote in his book. Mooney died last week of prostate cancer; a journalist to the end, he wrote his own obituary, which was published on Medium.com. “I was 66 and glad to be done with the damn disease.”
It was a life well lived, full of adventure. “I don’t think such a journey is possible today, certainly not the route that I took,” Mooney wrote in an e-mail to The Post last month. “Even within Europe, the euro economy would make it harder for an American to bum around picking up odd jobs.”
Odd indeed: He found himself cleaning out the Parisian basement of an art center once owned by Isadora Duncan’s brother. He huddled on a cold Scottish hillock, sifting through rocks as part of an archaeological dig, and he sold his plasma in Greece. Mooney made good money picking apples in Avignon. That is, until he came down with typhoid fever and had to spend the better part of a month in a French hospital. Per Mooney, even in France, hospital food sucks. Most harrowing, perhaps, was his bus ride across Iran in February 1979. On the day Mooney set out for Iran, an English language paper ran the headline “Tehran Disintegrates Into Chaos in Day of Fire and Blood.” Undeterred, Mooney set off through Turkey on his way to Pakistan, via a country in turmoil. The bus sometimes sported a picture of the shah, sometimes a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, depending on the loyalties of the localities through which it passed. When the bus finally arrived in Pakistan, it was Feb. 10, 1979. The next day, the ayatollah seized power. “The road through Iran was now closed,” Mooney wrote. Mooney’s trip is the kind of adventure that young Westerners no longer have. Not that people don’t go to far-flung places on the cheap — they do. But they no longer do so privately. Nowadays, Mooney wrote, “the temptation for instant communication, to get advice, GPS markings, or send that sunset photo would deeply alter the adventure.”