A journey home

Jon Beck took a detour on his way home from a job in South Carolina. He flew to New York, bought a motorcycle in Vermont, hugged the coast up toward Maine, then rolled down to Florida and finally cross country back to California.

It was a journey that touched on two of his deepest loves — his wife and being on a bike.

Beck is a photographer from Huntington Beach, a Christian who met his wife AnaLidia Beck on a mission trip to a school and home for the deaf — which raised and taught her — in Mexico.

The job that landed him in South Carolina? Shooting publicity stills for a documentary on that school and home, Rancho Sordo Mudo. The film, “Hearing Everett,” is an inspirational documentary about Ed Everett, a man who took his wife and seven children from South Carolina to Mexico to start Rancho Sordo Mudo in the ’60s, Beck said. The photographer’s journey home was loosely based on the family’s route, he said.

“I followed the original route that the family took as best as I can estimate it,” he said. “I went as far as the border of Baja.”

Beck marveled at how much survived from the time the family struck out on a mission of charity that has defined them for the last 40 years.

“I photographed the original church that the family was members at” before they left, he said. “At the barbershop they used to go to, it was like time stopped since the ’60s. One of the employees there knew Ed Everett.”

Going through the South, he was surprised to find the occasional town where “If you stop, you go back 200 years, not just the structures but the actual society. People are still mad at Lincoln.”

A 1997 Independent article profiled the Becks, who married in their teens after seeing each other only six times but beat the odds and formed a marriage crossing boundaries that has now lasted 15 years.

“We were too young, from completely different economic backgrounds, there were linguistic barriers and disability,” Beck said. “Literally the sixth or seventh time we saw each other was our wedding day. And I had no special skills or insight or ability that would allow me to do something like this.”

Asked if anything had changed in the past 10 years, Beck said he picked up a new hobby that took over a piece of his life: “10 years ago, I hadn’t even ridden a motorcycle before.”