Why I Wrote Evil on the Roof of the World

Prologue Lauren Geoghegan and Jay Austin quit their Washington jobs and on July 17, 2017, began a bike trip around the world. On July 29, 2018, they biked along Highway A 385 in the Danghara District after biking through the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan along with five other cyclists. The Pamir Highway climbs to elevations of 15,000 feet and was once known as the Silk Road. One hundred kilometers south of the capital of Tajikistan, Dushanbe, five ISIS terrorists ran the cyclists down with a South Korean Daewoo sedan and brutally murdered the two Americans along with a Dutch national and a Swiss citizen. Newspapers, radio stations, and television stations in the United States and around the world would pick up the story of the two twenty-nine-year-old Americans and speculate how two highly educated, well-connected millennials from Washington, DC, had crashed into the homicidal sights of ISIS terrorists on a remote mountain highway in Tajikistan. I read Jay and Lauren’s story in the New York Times in 2018, shortly after it happened. I was intrigued. Not so much by the horrifying way they died, but the crashing together of different cultures on a deserted mountain highway in Tajikistan. I was also intrigued by what motivated Jay and Lauren to leave well-paying Washington jobs and take the road less traveled. After writing a proposal for the publisher and digging into some research, I found Jay’s declaration that “he didn’t want to waste his years in front of a small rectangular screen at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, retire at sixty-five, and then die ten years later.” This resonated with me; it fit in with Americans who have thrown a conventional life aside to pursue a life less certain. Jay and Lauren’s desire for adventure or a different American dream fits the pantheon of people looking for something beyond the safe confines of a world without risk. American history is littered with adventurers, from Amelia Earhart’s daring aerial exploration to Teddy Roosevelt heading West to the Badlands, to Jack London’s famous trek into the Yukon, to Mark Twain lighting out for the territories, to Thomas Stevens, who in 1887 biked around the world on a big wheel bicycle, all the way back to Thoreau, and up to the present day of Chris McCandless’s journey into the wilds of Alaska.