Evan Balkan - Vanished!: Explorers Forever Lost

Copyright 2008 by Evan Balkan

All rights reserved

Published by Menasha Ridge Press

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

First edition, first printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Balkan, Evan, 1972

Vanished!: explorers forever lost/by Evan Balkan. 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-89732-983-5

ISBN-10: 0-89732-983-X

1. ExplorersUnited StatesBiography. 2. ExplorersEngland

Biography. I. Title.

G200.B25 2007

910.92'273dc22

2007031159

Text and cover design by Travis Bryant

Cover photograph by Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

Author photograph

photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

photo courtesy of the University of Utah

Indexing by Galen Schroeder

Menasha Ridge Press

P.O. Box 43673

Birmingham, Alabama 35243

www.menasharidge.com

For Erik. Heres to the great tripsand always returning home.

About the Author

Evan Balkan teaches writing at the Community College of Baltimore County. His fiction and nonfiction, mostly in the areas of travel and outdoor recreation, have been published throughout the United States as well as in Canada, England, and Australia. A graduate of Towson, George Mason, and Johns Hopkins universities, he is also the author of 60 Hikes within 60 Miles: Baltimore (Menasha Ridge Press). He lives in Lutherville, Maryland, with his wife, Shelly, and daughters, Amelia and Molly.

[A] voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes

On one everlasting Whisper day and night repeatedso:

Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges

Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!

Rudyard Kipling, The Explorer

Preface

I had just graduated from college, and the time was ripe for setting offso I embarked on a circle trek around Western Europe. I left in the summer and didnt return home until November. It was only the second time I had left the country.

During that trip, I fell in with some interesting characters. There was an Aussie named Paul who spent a solid fifteen to twenty minutes each morning ritualistically clearing his throat, upper chest, and sinuses. It created a repellent din, a churning of internal mechanisms designed, best I could tell, to awaken the recently dead.

In Galway, Ireland, Pauls ceremony was preceded several times during the night by the spectacle of a German somnambulist who screamed maniacally before settling into a paroxysm of giggles. In the predawn darkness, I managed to nod off for an hour before being awakened by a massive, filthy foot from the upper bunk feeling its way for the floor and finding my face instead. It was all terribly annoying at the time, but these bits became memories as precious to me as those of first descending into Londons tube, climbing the Eiffel Tower, visiting the Prado in Madrid, or trekking along the pass from Italy through northwest Slovenia to Austria. All of it was, at the time, my grand adventure, an experience that required me to step out of my comfort zone and gleefully imbibe whatever this foreign world promised megood or bad. In the end, it was all good.

There would be many subsequent trips inside and outside the United States, these with the benefit of more savvy packing on my part. Instead of lugging forty pounds through a dozen countries, I would lighten my load by jettisoning such superfluous items as Q-tips and realizing that three T-shirts was plenty: wear each one two or three times, and manage to wash them once or twice along the way. Trips these days are tailored to the companywhether Im traveling with my wife, with the kids, with my brother, or with friends, the scenery and the expectations change accordingly. But in each casein every single onethere is a common denominator: each time I leave my home and purposefully immerse myself in something foreigneven if the changes are as subtle as, say, the slight cultural shift involved in leaving my home in Baltimore and visiting the CarolinasIm forced to confront something out of my immediate comfort zone, and Im forced to change what would otherwise be the easy routine of home.

Of course, routine is underrated; the vast majority of the worlds population strives to reach something resembling the comfortable routine that Ive come to enjoy: wake early, get the kids ready for day care, spend an hour or two at home writing or reading, and trace the familiar route to my work at the college. At night, my wife, kids, and I meet at the dinner table, reveling in the closeness were lucky to share.

Sometimes I stand back and look at it all, and as sleep-deprived and kid-crazied as I get at times, I thank whatever lucky stars aligned to give me the scene I have before me. Family, friends, work, creative pursuitsits all there just as I want it.

But if Im honestand youll forgive me here for a bit of therapeutic admissionI have to acknowledge The Itch. The Itch is something every person stricken with wanderlust knows about. Its the thing that makes you wake at night, go grab the oversize atlas off the shelf, and run your finger along the hippie trail from Varanasi to Kabul. You look at those lines on the page, the great blank spaces, the megalopolises represented by stars and bolded script, and you wonder what they look like in person. You start to plan, to figure out a way to get to those places. At once, there in a chilly room bumping up against three in the morning, you decide that seeing Angkor Wat is suddenly the most important thing in the world. And you look on those who would think youre crazy for doing so with something like pitywhat do they know anyway?

Actually, I dont feel pity for such people. Instead, in a way I envy them. After all, Im quite certain that they dont lie awake at night as I have, feeling somehow incomplete because theyve never trekked to the top of Mount Roraima, the meeting point of Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana. They havent sleepwalked through days until the desire, the need to make it to that spot, slowly melts away until seeing the destination is something that I can live without, only to have it replaced by the need to get to someplace else.

My brother and I sometimes engage in little travel competitionswho has been to more countries (me), oceans (him), seas (me), continents (him), etc. But these are just games, and we both know it. (Besides, when we get to a place together, such as Peru, the fact that we add to our lists simultaneously is more thrilling than anything else.) After all, one of the most memorable places Ive ever been wasnt abroad; it was in the desert Southwest of this country. What matters is not to add to the checklist, but to have a life transformed by a place that forces you to question everything you know. I once met a guy from Burkina Faso who asked me if in the area where I grew up, there was rock all over the ground. I finally figured out that he was talking about sidewalks. Imagine that: pouring concrete over the perfectly fine ground for no other reason than to protect my shoes from getting dirty. Indeed, I walk out my door, get in the car, drive, park, and walk into a building at work, never once touching the earth. Whether this is an unnecessary and gross extravagance or a simple luxury I should be grateful for, Im not sure. But I do know that after that conversation with the fellow from Burkina Faso, I never had a walk that wasnt colored by his very simple question that was, in its way, one of the most complex things Ive ever pondered.