Vladimir
PLEASE read the article posted below. I am embarassed to say that I didn't see, meet, or hear of Vladimir while he was in Missoula. The way this article reads, he was there at the finish but I'm not exactly clear on that. Anyway, I know several riders who have been hospitalized due to injuries incurred during motorcycling and am always upset by the news. The news of this particular rider is especially important as you'll learn as you read the article as well as the link included in the article.
SHARE this story with others... and if you can, assist Vladimir with any financial support you can offer. His most important goal now is to heal.
Injury Can't Keep Globe-trotting Biker Down
Fellow Motorcyclists Help a Deaf Belarussian After His World Tour Took a Devastating Turn
By Russell Working
Tribune staff reporter
Published November 29, 2003
PEORIA -- He was a world traveler navigating a motorcycle around a country where he couldn't read billboards or hear the sounds of traffic.
But when Vladimir Yarets, a Belarussian who cannot hear or speak, suffered a devastating road accident in Downstate McLean County on Oct. 14, he found himself in the company of friends--biker friends.
Yarets, 62, is a former mechanic who says he had logged 69,600 miles in 29 countries and all 50 American states on his aging Czech Jawa 350 before a tangle with a truck shattered his pelvis and broke bones from his left elbow
to his shins. It will be months before he walks again.
He has no insurance, reads no English and converses in a sign language system not used in the United States. Yet in the weeks he has been hospitalized at St. Francis Medical Center, a nationwide network of motorcyclists has raised cash, spread the word of his plight on the Internet and is doing its best to find him another bike.
Individual bikers and clubs ranging from the Chicago Russian Riders to the Sons of Thunder Motorcycle Ministry, a Christian organization in Normal, have contributed money, bought clothes and kept him company in his hospital room.
"It's a group that's come together out of nowhere," said Jim Winterer, 54, a Minnesota university news service director and long-distance motorcyclist who hopes Yarets can continue his attempt at a record-setting world tour.
"We're going to do whatever we can to help him do that--any way we can help with all the issues involved in the accident, getting a new bike and helping nudge things along for his healing process," Winterer said.
Yarets, who lost his hearing in infancy, explained that he began fantasizing about travel when he was a schoolboy. To communicate, he jotted answers to questions written in Russian--widely spoken in his former Soviet homeland--and amplified with gestures, miming and occasional pup-pup-pup vocalizations when he wanted to get a listener's attention.
"Since my childhood, when I was 12 years old, I loved geography," he wrote. "And I was very good at it."
He pantomimes a classroom full of dunces and a displeased teacher, which changes when he hands in a paper. The teacher's eyes widen in delight, and she pats the young Yarets on the head.
His love affair with motorcycles began in 1965, when he bought a bike and tried to get a driver's license, but Belarussian officials refused. In defiance, he set out to tour the Soviet Union, a country stretching across 11 time zones and with little more than tracks in the taiga or mountain trails in many places.
In 1974 he was on his way to Magadan, a remote northern Pacific city, when villagers tried to convince him with gestures that he was crazy to continue across a marshland after a terrible downpour had destroyed bridges, according to a 1999 article in Fakti, a Ukrainian newspaper.
"Vladimir was upset, but with the obstinacy of a Belarussian bull, he moved ahead," Fakti wrote. "It took him 10 hours to pass only 60 km [36 miles] with no roads to the next village, called Rosomakha. Sometimes he had to drag his motorcycle and all his equipment over obstacles. He carried an ax in case he met a wolf or bear. There was not a single soul around, only clouds of annoying mosquitoes. Vladimir was very scared that the night would fall before he reached the next destination."
When he returned to Belarus, motor vehicle officials were so impressed with his journeys that they granted him a driver's license--the first such honor for someone in the Soviet Union who could not speak or hear, the paper wrote.
He has since traveled across the former country, Europe, Canada, the United States and parts of the Caribbean, often staying with people he meets and accepting money to cover his travel. He spent three months in a Cuban jail when he arrived there without proper documentation, said his son, Vladimir Yarets, 34, in a phone interview from Belarus. The son said he used to puzzle over his father's love of motorcycle travel, but he has come to understand it.
"This is a passion," he said. "This was given to him from above. It's not for money or glory. There is some little devil inside him that makes him do it."
Rick Martin, 58, a forklift mechanic from Peoria, met Yarets when Martin reached Missoula, Mont., after August's Iron Butt competition, an 11,000-mile motorcycle ride around the United States. He found Yarets parked with a sign reading: "I want to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the only deaf and mute individual who has traveled all of the former Soviet Union, Europe, Africa and the Americas on a motorcycle."
"They were just in awe at what he's accomplished on such a small motorcycle," Martin said. "We had a supper, and when we came out of the supper, here he was in the back parking lot, and had all his maps and pictures laid out, kind of like a gypsy."
At St. Francis Hospital, Yarets has been a determined but challenging patient. At first, nurses couldn't even ask if he needed a cup of water, a snack or another pain pill.
"He yelled out a lot at first," said Melissa Derham, a registered nurse in the orthopedics unit. "And you didn't know if it was because he needed something, or if he was scared or in pain."
Derham, herself a motorcyclist, found translation programs on the Internet to render words into Russian. Nurses learned to read his gestures, while translators have helped from time to time by writing phrases in Russian and allowing Yarets to scribble his replies.
He is slated to leave the hospital Monday for an affiliated nursing care center. Motorcyclists set up a Web site to pass on information and raise money: www.caringbridge.com/il/vladimir/.
"He's really living the dream that we all have of just going off and riding and seeing people and places and doing this sort of thing," said Tom McIntyre, a news anchor at Peoria's WEEK-TV and a motorcycle buff. "And he's also in the same kind of situation where, if we had done that and been in an accident, we would like this kind of support system too."
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
SHARE this story with others... and if you can, assist Vladimir with any financial support you can offer. His most important goal now is to heal.
Injury Can't Keep Globe-trotting Biker Down
Fellow Motorcyclists Help a Deaf Belarussian After His World Tour Took a Devastating Turn
By Russell Working
Tribune staff reporter
Published November 29, 2003
PEORIA -- He was a world traveler navigating a motorcycle around a country where he couldn't read billboards or hear the sounds of traffic.
But when Vladimir Yarets, a Belarussian who cannot hear or speak, suffered a devastating road accident in Downstate McLean County on Oct. 14, he found himself in the company of friends--biker friends.
Yarets, 62, is a former mechanic who says he had logged 69,600 miles in 29 countries and all 50 American states on his aging Czech Jawa 350 before a tangle with a truck shattered his pelvis and broke bones from his left elbow
to his shins. It will be months before he walks again.
He has no insurance, reads no English and converses in a sign language system not used in the United States. Yet in the weeks he has been hospitalized at St. Francis Medical Center, a nationwide network of motorcyclists has raised cash, spread the word of his plight on the Internet and is doing its best to find him another bike.
Individual bikers and clubs ranging from the Chicago Russian Riders to the Sons of Thunder Motorcycle Ministry, a Christian organization in Normal, have contributed money, bought clothes and kept him company in his hospital room.
"It's a group that's come together out of nowhere," said Jim Winterer, 54, a Minnesota university news service director and long-distance motorcyclist who hopes Yarets can continue his attempt at a record-setting world tour.
"We're going to do whatever we can to help him do that--any way we can help with all the issues involved in the accident, getting a new bike and helping nudge things along for his healing process," Winterer said.
Yarets, who lost his hearing in infancy, explained that he began fantasizing about travel when he was a schoolboy. To communicate, he jotted answers to questions written in Russian--widely spoken in his former Soviet homeland--and amplified with gestures, miming and occasional pup-pup-pup vocalizations when he wanted to get a listener's attention.
"Since my childhood, when I was 12 years old, I loved geography," he wrote. "And I was very good at it."
He pantomimes a classroom full of dunces and a displeased teacher, which changes when he hands in a paper. The teacher's eyes widen in delight, and she pats the young Yarets on the head.
His love affair with motorcycles began in 1965, when he bought a bike and tried to get a driver's license, but Belarussian officials refused. In defiance, he set out to tour the Soviet Union, a country stretching across 11 time zones and with little more than tracks in the taiga or mountain trails in many places.
In 1974 he was on his way to Magadan, a remote northern Pacific city, when villagers tried to convince him with gestures that he was crazy to continue across a marshland after a terrible downpour had destroyed bridges, according to a 1999 article in Fakti, a Ukrainian newspaper.
"Vladimir was upset, but with the obstinacy of a Belarussian bull, he moved ahead," Fakti wrote. "It took him 10 hours to pass only 60 km [36 miles] with no roads to the next village, called Rosomakha. Sometimes he had to drag his motorcycle and all his equipment over obstacles. He carried an ax in case he met a wolf or bear. There was not a single soul around, only clouds of annoying mosquitoes. Vladimir was very scared that the night would fall before he reached the next destination."
When he returned to Belarus, motor vehicle officials were so impressed with his journeys that they granted him a driver's license--the first such honor for someone in the Soviet Union who could not speak or hear, the paper wrote.
He has since traveled across the former country, Europe, Canada, the United States and parts of the Caribbean, often staying with people he meets and accepting money to cover his travel. He spent three months in a Cuban jail when he arrived there without proper documentation, said his son, Vladimir Yarets, 34, in a phone interview from Belarus. The son said he used to puzzle over his father's love of motorcycle travel, but he has come to understand it.
"This is a passion," he said. "This was given to him from above. It's not for money or glory. There is some little devil inside him that makes him do it."
Rick Martin, 58, a forklift mechanic from Peoria, met Yarets when Martin reached Missoula, Mont., after August's Iron Butt competition, an 11,000-mile motorcycle ride around the United States. He found Yarets parked with a sign reading: "I want to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the only deaf and mute individual who has traveled all of the former Soviet Union, Europe, Africa and the Americas on a motorcycle."
"They were just in awe at what he's accomplished on such a small motorcycle," Martin said. "We had a supper, and when we came out of the supper, here he was in the back parking lot, and had all his maps and pictures laid out, kind of like a gypsy."
At St. Francis Hospital, Yarets has been a determined but challenging patient. At first, nurses couldn't even ask if he needed a cup of water, a snack or another pain pill.
"He yelled out a lot at first," said Melissa Derham, a registered nurse in the orthopedics unit. "And you didn't know if it was because he needed something, or if he was scared or in pain."
Derham, herself a motorcyclist, found translation programs on the Internet to render words into Russian. Nurses learned to read his gestures, while translators have helped from time to time by writing phrases in Russian and allowing Yarets to scribble his replies.
He is slated to leave the hospital Monday for an affiliated nursing care center. Motorcyclists set up a Web site to pass on information and raise money: www.caringbridge.com/il/vladimir/.
"He's really living the dream that we all have of just going off and riding and seeing people and places and doing this sort of thing," said Tom McIntyre, a news anchor at Peoria's WEEK-TV and a motorcycle buff. "And he's also in the same kind of situation where, if we had done that and been in an accident, we would like this kind of support system too."
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
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