Maybe it was from that childhood I lived of feeling so free and so adventurous; but when I was in my early 20s, with not much money, I sat out to travel and my college roommate and I went
actually, I hate to say this — don’t anybody do this — but we hitchhiked and got down to Crete, and we didn’t have much money so we found a cave on the coast of Crete that we moved into.
We lived in this cave for two months and we cooked all our meals on a little kerosene stove and we went down to the village and we’d wash our clothes in the water — in the ocean water. Then one day a van came through to the town with some other kids and said, “Well, we’re going to India — come with us.” So we jumped in the van and we started traveling in this old rickety van over land.
We bought 25 pounds of dried oatmeal and put it in a box on top of the van — that was going to be our food. This sounds like a fairytale, but we started east and I ended up traveling by myself and with a few other kids and got all the way to Nepal. I went through Turkey and Syria and Lebanon and Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and India and Nepal.
Just traveling, you know
living, camping and staying among the people that we met; and never hardly spent much money. We’d go to the markets and buy a few fruits or vegetables or bread every day; and would cook on the kerosene stove — eggs; make eggs — and just lived, you know, this sort of sublime traveler’s life.
The whole time I was doing it I was reading Lord of the Rings — I have to add that. There was a copy of Lord of the Rings in the van that was all three of the trilogy and I felt like I was Frodo and we were on our adventure and we ran into problems — we were in an earthquake in Afghanistan and we got caught in a riot in Kabul where they tore apart a lot of things in our van and we were running through the streets trying to get away from a mad crowd of people based on a car accident that had happened.
We were in many stressful situations but just going on with our little trip. I got to Nepal and I got blood poisoning and I just was very, very sick. I went into a hospital that was like a missionary hospital and I was the only westerner in the hospital in a ward of Nepalese women.
It was a delirious time
I’d look out the window and I could see the Himalayas and I was living out that sort of the final throes of that Tolkien dream, in a way, where the whole trip was going to come an end and I felt like what had happened in my life — none of it really made sense suddenly.
My parents — this is so sad — my parents contacted their congressman because they hadn’t heard from me in a long time, and the congressman contacted the embassy in Nepal and I was visited by an embassy official who said, “Is there a girl here?” And I was there and I was so embarrassed.
I felt like I had just sort of lost my head and headed east and dropped my poor parents notes from different major cities where the post could get through. I came back to the states and got well, finally — it took another few months to get well — and then ended up living in California.
Didn’t quite come to my senses for a while and then my poor dad was trying so hard to incorporate my interests into a career; and he told me he’d found a travel school where I could train to be a travel agent. I came back to Washington, DC and went to this travel training school so I could be respectable.
Then one night I went to the theater to watch a musical of Jesse James at Ford’s Theater and this actor walked on stage — he was just gorgeous — playing Jesse James with a guitar, wearing boots and a cowboy hat; and I fell in love with him from the balcony. It was just my heart just
I went backstage after the show because I knew someone else in the show and I met Jesse James, and we’re about to celebrate our 32nd wedding anniversary next week.
That was Will. Will lived in New York — he was just an actor in a show in DC traveling. I went to New York to marry him; and then I finally, after being a waitress and a bartender and everything else in New York to put together a living, I started writing. I sold my first book and then I never looked back.
I had many lucky moments in my life where things should’ve gone terribly wrong where I made it; and finally found my voice in writing for children in the early ’80s.
