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Defenders were made for adventures, like this trip from Alaska.
My affliction began gradually, and in retrospect at an age
too young to be considered a mid-life crisis. First came
BMX bikes, then mountain bikes, then rock-climbing, then
kayaking—really, anything outdoors would do. I had a
serious allergy to pavement.
Then, while driving back to college in 1994, I passed
the Land Rover dealership in Santa Barbara and spotted a
vehicle unlike any other, slowly revolving on a rotating
display. Even from my fleeting vantage point on Highway
101, I could tell that it was overbuilt. Boxy in shape, it
was not for everyone, but it was for me.
Over the next 13 years I graduated college, secured and
quit my first real job, enrolled at medical school, moved
to Oregon for my residency program, got married, and
bought a house. But my disease was never in remission,
only barely under control. I explored remote parts of
Oregon from the saddle of a BMW 650GS dual sport bike.
I found off-road motorbiking a solitary sport; I could
not share it with friends, including my wife, Jessie. Then,
in the summer of ’07, while riding the BMW down fire
roads in the Mt. Hood National Forest, I passed a soft-top
Defender. Inside sat a family, including a dog, whizzing by
me with wide grins and waving hands. With visions of that
boxy car from ’94 spinning through my mind, my disease
resurfaced in a full-blown relapse.
After several months of scanning Craigslist and online
forums, I found what I was looking for in November ’07—
a ’94 Coniston Green soft-top Defender 90, in good
condition, with a spare tire mounted on the bonnet. The
only hitch was that it was 2,565 miles away, in Alaska.
“Hey, weren’t these vehicles built for adventures?”
I asked myself. I presented the same question in rhetorical
form to Jessie. By this point in our marriage I had learned
that the greater her skepticism, the better my idea! After a
few phone calls to Ross Brudenell, the Defender’s owner,
I hatched a plan for us to fly to Anchorage and then drive
and ferry the Defender back to Portland.
Not long after came the happy discovery of Jessie’s
pregnancy, and for a moment, the best laid plans of….well,
you know the rest. Too late—in my mind I had already hit
the road through the Yukon in my new Defender. Time for
a new plan!
“It was like the Make A Wish Foundation called me,” my
dad told me when I met him in the airport in
Anchorage. Since being diagnosed with cancer several
years prior, he had become somewhat of an
armchair-explorer. My mother worried about his driving,
and the chemotherapy sometimes exhausted him. But
when I called him five days earlier, he didn’t hesitate to
accept the offer of an adventure.
rovers magazine / 39