With that paragraph, the reader embarks on a trip way off the beaten path: through the snowy backwoods of Alaska by dogsled and floatplane, to wrestling sharks in the South Pacific, to near brushes with death - once in a dryer, once in a helicopter - and around the world in each direction.
My cousin Mark presented me with his autobiography-in-progress (working title: Tales of Kidnap Money, a play on the family name) in a gesture of openness and honesty, which are the hallmarks of the narrative itself. Mark's tales brought old family legends to life and I saw that "wander lust" is a family heritage that has been fully realized in Mark. He has traveled around the world a couple of times, has visited or lived in 22 foreign countries and at least as many states and U.S. territories. But today, at this point in his journey, we see that there was a destination all along.
This is true of all wanderers, when their journeys are at last mapped.
Our forebears' experiences prove my point. The Ransoms were comfortably established in the American colonies when 19-year-old Charles Ransom struck out alone for the untamed west. He survived to raise a family on the wind-swept plains of western Nebraska, and on a cold December night in 1900 Charles' and Lizzie's son Bert was born. A wanderer himself, Bert grew up to be a rough rider and cowboy, and our granddaddy.
Meanwhile, fresh from Ireland the young O'Bannon brothers immediately turned their steps toward the mines and railroads in the western mountains. James became a gandy dancer (maintenance man) for the Union Pacific, living on the move as the railroad crew slowly inched west at the head of a lengthening, continent-spanning steel trail. He married the young Irish lass who cooked for the crew and in 1897, in a sod-roofed cabin on the prairie, Jimmy and Ida Bannon's eldest daughter Mabel was born.
Mabel grew up to teach school. As fate would have it, the windows of her one-room prairie schoolhouse were situated so that the students - and their teacher - could observe the dashing cowboy Bert, tall in the saddle.
You can guess where those particular paths were heading: Bert and Mabel married in Colorado and had three children. Don became our beloved uncle (pictured here with his folks), Mildred "Sis" became my mom, and Bert Jr. "Buck" became Mark's dad.
Buck sated his own thirst for adventure while raising his family, turning his pilot's license to good use as an aerobatic crop-duster, his gift of gab to a stint MC'ing a local television show and his love of a party to square-dance calling. In 1967 Buck and Aunt Betty moved their growing family to the still raw Alaskan frontier. Buck wrote:
The rest of the story is entirely Mark's. A kid with a thirst for adventure couldn't do better than Anchorage in the late 60's. Mark was thrilled, and no doubt Buck was thrilled (and Betty less so) to discover that airplanes were a big part of daily life in Anchorage:
To earn spending money Mark found work refueling float-equipped airplanes at the world's only towered "seaplane airport.":
The boy's wide-eyed enthusiasm made him a target of the old timers' wit. One day, Mark was sent to fetch a cup of hazardous and volatile "prop wash". He accomplished the errand, sweating bullets, only to find
The jibes and practical jokes that the boy endured from the oldtimers didn't dissuade him.
In high school Mark and a buddy inadvertently joined the Marines, and he returned to the lower 48 as a private with the USMC. And at the age of 18 - nearly the same age that our great-granddads left their homes and began their wanderings - Mark departed the U.S. for the first time, bound for Tokyo.
Mark learned to relish Japanese food - starting with an appetizer combo of dried squid and beer - Japanese culture and language, as he worked his way through the countryside as one of few Marine Guard patrolmen who had earned a Japanese driver's license.
Three years later, having returned to Alaska and a wife and two young sons, and the small family becoming bored with slow starvation, Mark skidded into a job on local television. With no practical experience in broadcast media, he learned by doing.
Mark: "Forty-two-year Ed Lowry will wait another two weeks before he learns his fate... Lowry, you may recall, was convicted last July of murdering his wife Cathy with a knife, dismembering her body and trying to burn the body by stuffing it into their fire place." (Camera switches to Cindy)
Cindy, smiling: "Hamburger is a good way to stretch the family food budget…"
I almost fainted.Mark learned fast, advancing at the station and becoming known around town as a "news personality". Pretty good for a neophyte.
He later became news director of KATN-TV in freezing Fairbanks. While he was there, Mark answered the call of the wild. In an example of fine adventure writing in the self-deprecating, let's-give-it-a-whirl style of Tim Cahill, Mark tells of his adventures "mushing":
In 1988, Mark was regaining his strength after a greuling bout with cancer and his wife was growing tired of the long cold winters. He sought employment somewhere warm, and chose Guam. The fifth distinct phase of his travels begins
The family journeyed from freezing Alaska to tropical Guam in one very long day.
That passage struck a chord with me, as my first thought upon studying fancy landscapes in Florida is, "Where do they store the snow?" Natives of snow country never loose their urge to prepare for the next hard weather.
Mark resumed his work as an anchor, reporter and sometimes-cameraman for Guam Cable TV while he learned to love living in the tropics. He taught Japanese at Guam's Community College (see photo), took up tropical ocean activities such as deep sea fishing, spear fishing, junk hunting and shipwreck scuba diving. In the meantime, well, news anchor and reporter was good, but then:
OK, so, Media Aide was a good gig, too. And then,
Mark's sojourn in the Senator's office included travel to Wake Island and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Australia, New Zealand and Tonga, and two trips around the world. One of my favorite passages of these years brings to life some tragic and very human events in the South Pacific:
... The Guamanians were hopelessly stranded on Wake when the Japanese strafing started and the bombs began to fall on top of them, literally a couple hours later. They helped defend the island... Four of the young men were killed in the initial attack, and the remaining 35 were taken prisoner by the Japanese and sent to camps in Shanghai, China... The 33 who remained alive at the war's end in 1945 were repatriated to Guam where their heroic story was never told, withheld from the pages of every book and article about Wake Island's defense... To a man, they fell silent for forty years.
Finally, after much prodding by the Guam Veterans Affairs Department, the US Navy finally in the late 1980s recognized the men's status as US POWs, by which time only about a dozen were still alive.
On my little Mac computer, then, I designed the brass face of the monument that now stands on Wake Island in recognition of those men. In January of 1991, along with the seven remaining ambulatory Guamanian defenders of Wake Island, Senator Mailloux and I boarded a KC-135 Air Force tanker for a flight to Wake Island. During the preflight briefing at Anderson Air Force Base on Guam, we witnessed a comical moment when one of the aging defenders, Mr. Carbullido, raised his hand after the pilot asked if there were any questions.
"Yessir," Mr. Carbullido began uncertainly. "You said we would be back here on Guam by six o'clock tonight. And that's good, because I told my wife I'd be home in time for supper. But now, can you swear to that? Because the last time someone took me to Wake, it took over three years to get back home!"Eleven months later, the Senator and his staff returned to Wake for the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, this time with only five of the aging defenders able enough to make the journey.
We mentioned scuba diving, above, and Mark's truly entertaining style when writing about blundering outdoor adventures. Here's another that, even though it's a world away from dog-sledding, is just as amusing:
Mark survived the shark. He also survived "Supertyphoon Omar," experiencing quite a lot of it outside when a well-intentioned dog rescue expedition left him locked out of the house. And he and his third wife celebrated their wedding underwater, bride and groom and preacher all in scuba gear. Another well-documented trip around the world to celebrate their honeymoon was followed by a quick and painful divorce. And then the Senator's term ended, and:
Another pivotal point of the story - for life is about stories, and good stories are about growth - occurs in the chapter entitled "The Daily Nerd Migration":
After obtaining his degree, Mark obtained his first real-life pilot's license, realizing a 35-year old goal, then moved to Arizona for the next phase, where
It also provided the fodder for his published work, the definitive "gift-of-gab" treatise "How I Learned to Sell a Lot of Cars" (by Mark E. Ransom, find it on Amazon.com with this link).
Today, Mark is considering settling down, maybe, eventually, who knows? He has earned his multi-engine pilot's license, published magazine articles on historic topics that interest him. He regales audiences from stage at square dances in the Arizona desert, and he and his lovely wife Elaine travel the west for square dances, representing their group "Cactus Corners".
I'd say so. There is no rule that states one must progress in a predefined order: book-learning, degree, career, then travel and fun. Mark simply mixed it up a bit. His method is inspiring in a way that holds out hope for the aimless.
The manuscript consists of broad brush strokes coloring pertinent historical events, and many small details and many intimate sketches. All of it adds up to a fearless acceptance of the next adventure, just there beyond the horizon. Mark seems to walk through life with his arms wide open, embracing each opportunity and enjoying each moment to the fullest. Just like his dad did, and his dad's dad, and their folks before them.
As for me, I cherish Great Grandma Ida's locket (and the pin-ball game that we all played at the Laramie house and that our parents played before us, and which is now hanging on my wall); but I often feel like an under-achiever in the adventure department. But Mark's story gave me the opportunity to realize that, although wanderlust had been a recessive trait in me, it's come to life again lately. So my heritage isn't so far removed from me after all, as I'm posting this at anchor.
So, now you know. I borrowed Mark's philosophy "Every Life is a Story" to justify collecting people's stories for these pages.
Mark, if you're reading this: finish up that manuscript and publish it soon. I'm waiting for the next chapter.
Well, ask and ye shall receive. The next chapter is being lived while we speak, as Mark is actively seeking his next career path. When reminded of his extensive resume by way of encouragement, he replied that a resume is merely a handy list of stuff one never wants to try again.
I have no doubt that Mark will come up with something interesting, that he later won't want to try again, but that shouldn't hold him back either.
Thanks, Mark!