An Unlikely Journey

By Charles Pankow

★★★ A journey that expects the unexpected ★★★

Charlie wasn't interested in following the status quo life trajectory that was expected of him. A spoon-fed kid of the 60s, he was not.

As young as seven he knew that the path he would take in life was not preordained by those around him--least of all his father--that life was about finding your own path.

Over the course of his life, Charlie has hitch-hiked his way across the Western Hemisphere--from Canada to Tierra del Fuego--and had a few brushes with death. He later traveled the globe via his own specialized travel business. Along the way he has loved, lost and learned, and is ready to share his lessons with the world.

Charlie's road ahead was not orthodox. It was full of unexpected escapades. Strap yourself in and prepare to take an adventure on rugged river adventures down the Amazon, through sharp turns in the Andes, with predators in Colombia, challenges on the Giza Plateau in Egypt, and much, much more.

Experience the unexpected!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Pankow
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201303907

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Y ou’re going to be a bum!

My father hurled this prediction at me like a lightning bolt. He was upset at my decision to leave the University of Washington in Seattle. With his encouragement and financial backing, I had undertaken a five-year degree that incorporated civil engineering, architecture, and business management—the field in which he and his father found great success. Unfortunately, I now realized I wasn’t interested in it, and Dad wasn’t about to pay for a degree in liberal arts—not that any field appealed to me.

Liberal arts doesn’t prepare you for a career, Dad pointed out, quite reasonably. You can read books in your spare time. You need a degree that will lead to a good income that will allow you to marry, have a home, and family. If you’re not interested in construction or engineering, choose another discipline. But one that will get you started in the right direction.

I understand, I said.

But I didn’t. Not really. My grades were average at best, and I didn’t love what I was studying. I had decided to leave school to play professional baseball, a decision he couldn’t fathom, even when I pointed out the potential riches of a major league salary.

That’s a bad gamble, Chip.

It was a gamble all right, but one I felt I had a decent shot at, and I knew I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t try; a decision he couldn’t comprehend.

Chip, you’re over twenty. Boys your age are well underway in preparing for their careers. A doctor, lawyer, architect, business. Something!

His face was turning crimson. He was convinced I was shiftless. I was afraid that anything I might say in my defense would only further infuriate him.

I could see you taking maybe a year off, before settling down, he went on. A lot of youngsters do something like that, say, before their junior or senior year. Is that what you want to do?

I also want to travel.

Dad frowned, exasperated. Baseball and travel? A double handicap!

I had a vision of my future self as a citizen of the world, wise in its ways and knowledgeable about its components. A career would emerge, but it couldn’t be forced on me through some preordained discipline. l wasn’t a sheep.

It’s natural to want to travel, my father continued. I did at your age, too. But we have to be sensible. Think of your future.

He paused and gave me a hard look. These father-son talks were always awkward for me, but I could see this one was just as difficult for him.

That is, if you want to have one, he added. I do, Dad. I do.

Well, then, show it!

Sadly, that was impossible. I knew the immediate future I wanted. I was already planning a trip after the baseball season, to a country whose spell I’d fallen under as a child— Mexico.

I will graduate, I assured him.

Doesn’t seem that way to me!

He didn’t believe me, nor could I blame him. I had disappointed him before. And he was always upset if he didn’t get his way. Dad expected his children to follow his firm outlook on how life should be lived. It was an unfortunate roll of the genetic dice that his eldest son was born to wander. I give my father a lot of credit for modeling responsible parenting, but I also had a responsibility to my own dreams.

So we argued. A wall of bitterness arose between us. Then he floored me with his next statement:

I have to tell you, Chip, I don’t believe in handing down wealth from one generation to the next. You have to earn your own way in this life.

There it was. A threat of dispossession. I was taken aback by the abruptness of it, but wasn’t surprised that he held this belief. He must have seen the effect it had on me.

Think about it, Chip. And get a grip.

I will, Dad. But in my own way.

That was the wrong thing to say. I knew it the second I said it. But we both knew that I meant it.

Dad just gave me a despairing look and walked away. Once again, we were at an impasse.

Mexico was looming larger and larger.

1

A BOY FROM ALTADENA

No one could have predicted I would turn out as I did. I had a perfectly traditional childhood, did fine in school, got along with the neighborhood kids—I was neither a rebel nor an upstart. In fact, I was shy. However, I silently questioned everything and instinctively held back from accepting the values of my well-meaning parents and teachers. As I grew up, I began thirsting for adventure and discovery rather than a safe, parentally approved path.

Ironically, I was born because of a rebellion against parental authority.

Doris Herman, of Chicago, Illinois, met Charles Pankow Jr., of South Bend, Indiana, when they were both sixteen at Eagle Lake, Michigan, where her parents had a summer cottage. They fell in love. By 1945, Doris was working on her RN (Bachelors in Nursing) at Northwestern University, and Charles on his civil engineering degree at Purdue University. Nevertheless, Gilmore Herman didn’t think much of his daughter’s boyfriend (though his wife Rue adored him). It’s unclear how Charles’s parents felt about the relationship. In September of that year, Charles and Doris headed north and eloped at a justice of the peace in Racine, Wisconsin. My mom’s best friend Bonnie was the sole bridesmaid and witness.

Doris Pankow was summarily banished for a year from the nursing program and the women’s dormitory. Charles had been commissioned in the Navy while at Purdue, and was deployed to Japan for post-war operations: mop-up and public relations. After one year, he returned with a lovely kimono for his bride, rice paper paintings of Japanese landscapes, and photos of people with foreign faces and clothing, all of which would one day fascinate his firstborn, and fire my desire to see the world.

At the end of 1946 my parents were reunited, and both finished their degrees. Upon graduation, the Navy sent Dad to Lake Union, Seattle to complete his hitch. Mom joined him. In late 1947 they moved to a cozy home on Woodbury Road in Altadena, California, where I was born in July of 1948. California’s post-war boom seemed promising to my father, who had wanted to construct buildings since he was a child.

My dad’s mentor was his father, the first Charles J. Pankow, a graduate of the University of Illinois in architecture, who had served as a lieutenant on the front lines in France in World War I. Grandpa Charles managed several major construction projects before becoming building superintendent for Notre Dame Stadium from 1929-30, meeting regularly with Knute Rockne, legendary coach of the Fighting Irish. It was a complex job that was completed in record time for that era. During World War II, the United States government assigned him to build army and navy installations around the country.

Grandpa advised Dad to first work for a structural engineering company to gain strong foundational experience—advice he took. He worked in downtown Los Angeles in 1949, designing public infrastructure buildings, but hated it: the work was boring. After two years, he moved on to Peter Kiewit Sons Inc. of Omaha, whose projects included the recent Mulholland Pass along the San Diego Freeway. Dad would work for them in Arcadia for twelve years, until I was in my teens.

Set along the slopes of the majestic San Gabriel Mountains, some 1,800 feet above sea level and fifteen miles as the crow flies from downtown Los Angeles, Altadena was a great place to grow up. They didn’t know it at the time, but when they built their first house against those foothills on Alta Pine Drive, at the top of Lake Avenue, they sure picked a winner. Altadena will forever hold a fond place in my heart. It was the foundation for one American family, their dreams, and the dreams of their children.

When we moved into the newly built house in 1949, my brother Rick was on the way. Alta Pine Drive had some 42 lots, and the final house wouldn’t go up until 1960. I got to know the 26 boys and four girls living on our street— only eight years separated the oldest from the youngest. There were five sets of three boys and three sets of two boys. We became one of the five sets when my youngest brother, Steve, was born in 1952. Our neighborhood was the picture of suburban stability: almost everyone I knew lived there until the age of eighteen, and many longer than that.

In 1953, when I was four, tragedy struck: Mom was diagnosed with polio. This was before the Salk vaccine, and there was no cure. Dad couldn’t afford to put her in a hospital, but he thought if Rick and I knew she was in the house, we would sneak in to see her and contract the disease. So, he didn’t tell us where she was, or allow us into their bedroom. That was Dad.

I cried for Mom constantly, to no avail. Older women dressed in white uniforms would come in and out of our home at different times of the day, and they never told us that our mom was quarantined in the back bedroom. We only knew she was gone, and no one would say why. I didn’t see much of my dad. Later, I learned he was working two jobs to cover medical expenses.

The only time we got kid food was when Grandpa Gilmore took us to Junior’s Cafe on Lake Avenue for hamburgers and milkshakes.

Grandpa also gave me my first taste of travel, taking me to Knott’s Berry Farm. He also showed me where they filmed so many old westerns: Vasquez Rocks, named after a notorious 1880s bandit; and the movie ranch Corriganville, now a park in Simi Valley. Naturally, I wanted to be a cowboy.

A year later, towards the end of kindergarten, my brothers and I were taken to the back bedroom—and there was Mom! She had recovered, and was crying with joy. Soon, we were all crying. We thought she was dead—and now miraculously, she was alive again! Suddenly, the whole world was okay! By the time I finished kindergarten, Mom was feeling better.

Dad was constantly working. He kept trying to convince his employer to expand into office and residential buildings. Finally, the boss created a small team to bid on jobs in Southern California. Over time, with his keen engineering skills and creative energy, Dad became manager of Kiewit’s building division.

2

BITTEN BY THE TRAVEL BUG

In June of 1954, I boarded the Santa Fe Chief in downtown Pasadena with my maternal grandparents for a six-week cross-country train trip to see our far-flung relatives. My mom needed a break, and I was old enough to travel.

I was fascinated by the train, how high we were above the ground, and how such a massive piece of metal could hurtle through the countryside so fast. Yet I wanted the train to go slower so I could drink in every detail. I vowed to myself that someday I’d come back to this countryside for a better look.

I’m sure I had more questions for my grandparents than they wanted to hear or bother answering. There was a dining car that we went to three times a day. I could eat whatever I wanted.

Is dessert all you’re ever going to eat? my grandma asked as I pounded it down.

Yeah, as long as I’m with you! I replied, wiping the chocolate sauce from my chin with my sleeve.

Grandpa Gilmore, or Gil, as everyone called him, was tall with thinning white hair. He was a gregarious man; a friendly talker who rarely exhibited shyness. Grandma Rue was sweet and gentle. Traveling by train must have stirred memories for her: from 1914-16, Rue and three other women were famed as the Ionian Serenaders, a vaudeville act performed in hotels, small theaters, and county fairs across America. They were singers and musicians, and Grandma was the storyteller, and the manager, of the group. They all lived out of one big trunk that they hauled with them by train, bus, streetcar, and yes, they occasionally put their thumbs out to flag a ride. They made it to all 48 states. It was an unusual adventure in that era for four women in their twenties. My grandma never discussed this with me, though she lived until I was eighteen years old. I must have gotten some of my love of travel from Rue.

Our first stop was Chicago, from where Gil and Rue hailed. Next, was South Bend, Indiana, to where we drove. My grandmother brought out her world atlas and showed me the different states and our destinations. I couldn’t read yet, but I pored over maps of other countries, wondering which ones I’d see first.

Just across the state line, we stopped and waited for my paternal grandparents. I didn’t remember ever meeting them before: Grandpa Charles had white hair and a low, gruff voice, and was quiet most of the time. Grandma Bess had brown, very curly hair. She was talkative and was happy to have me, but she had a hearing aid, and had a hard time understanding me. I experienced my first thunderstorm there—I was amazed by all the lightning and thunder. The rain came down so hard my grandfather couldn’t see the road. Everything got pitch black. We pulled over to wait out the storm under a gas station roof. Grandpa rented a bike for me in South Bend, where I raced on sidewalks and through alleys in ways I don’t think six-year-old boys are still allowed to do.

Grandpa Gil doted on me, doing his best to relive his childhood vicariously. His own, I learned later, was no bed of roses. He had a tough father who caused him to run away from home at the age of fourteen. However, Gil was resourceful and found a way to survive on his own. Without child labor laws in 1904, he was able to find many jobs. Armed with an affable character in place of formal education, he eventually became president of a small steel company in Indiana in the late 1930s.

We made it back home in time for me to enjoy a month of summer with my neighborhood friends. I had just turned six. There were 30 kids on my block, ten of whom became my regular gang. We were ragtag kids, like a baby boomer version of the ’40s Bowery Boys: hard-charging, fun-loving, competitive. We climbed and fell out of every tree on our block.

We played baseball and had picnics in neighboring Farnsworth Park, which also had an auditorium where we enjoyed 16 mm movies on hot summer days, as we lay on the cool concrete floor. We celebrated birthdays at Farnsworth nearly every month, and played our Little League games on that diamond.

The mountains and canyons were our greatest source of adventure. We would take long hikes up the trails or right up the firebreaks when we found the trails too slow. We would scamper up to the top of Echo Mountain, or ascend the steep Sunset Ridge Trail, then head over that ridge to Mount Lowe, at 6,000 feet elevation. Our parents never worried, as long as we made it home for dinner.

We explored caves. We climbed tall trees to pick mistletoe to sell to neighbors at Christmastime. And we had fights: castor bean fights, olive fights, orange fights, dirt clod fights and, when the blood ran hot, even rock fights. But we were a close gang of friends, and I’m proud and grateful that many of us still are.

The closest I ever came to buying the farm was when I was about eleven. While climbing the eastern escarpment of Echo Mountain, I lost my grip and nearly fell 40 feet to jagged boulders. Lucky and stupid continued to battle over my fate for many decades... until stupid gradually disappeared.

Mom and Dad were both raised in socially conservative environments. Their parents went through World War I and the Great Depression. Children of European immigrants they raised their children—my parents—with expectations of higher education and upward mobility. I can now understand Mom and Dad’s disappointment, watching me march to the beat of a different drummer.

Mom homeschooled us in subjects like geography and math where she felt our education was lacking. Thanks to her, I became quick at computing numbers and knew how to read a map.

My parents never had arguments or discussions in front of us. We weren’t allowed to show our emotions, particularly around my dad. Because he didn’t express his feelings, our emotional learning was minimal. But they impressed on me the importance of integrity and taking others into consideration.

My father was neither nostalgic nor romantic. You knew what he wanted from you. His focus served him well in business, but not so much with his family. He was the guy who, with one look, could make us toe the line in a nanosecond. He never threatened force. He didn’t need to. We were afraid of him all of the time.

I’ve never felt as wise as my dad, but I felt more human than he appeared to me.

I had an epiphany when I was seven, before I knew what an epiphany was. I had a sudden feeling of awe, realizing that I was alive. A sense of incredulity swept over me that I could be here as a separate thinking person. I wondered why I was here, and why me? How can this individual entity be possible, alone and independently operating, separate from all the others?

Amazing and wonderful! I laughed like I never had before. It came from a deep-down place, as if my soul was expressing its gratitude. I had a sense of peace and an overwhelming confidence that no matter what I did in my life, everything would be fine—everything would be fine—it stuck in my head unlike anything else in my youth. It was my first glimpse of a spiritual awareness that would become clearer to me as I got older.

Naturally, I didn’t tell anyone about this for a long time. Who could I have told?

3

COLORADO, THE SOUTHWEST, AND MEXICO

In July 1957, three years after my epic train odyssey, our family took a road trip to see my dad’s sister, Mary, and her family in Ouray, a small mining town in the San Juan Range of the Rockies in southwestern Colorado. Our four-door 1956 Pontiac equipped with a big V-8 engine headed east on US 66. This engine was just what my dad needed for passing the hundreds of big trucks and slow cars in our path on the two-lane blacktop through California, Arizona, and New Mexico. There were no interstates in 1957.

The intense summer heat of the desert didn’t bother us much as kids. The Painted Desert in Arizona fired my imagination with its multitude of colors, fossilized wood, and stark beauty. I ran from log to petrified log, rapping my knuckles on them to verify that each was indeed made of stone.

The landscape then changed as we swung north towards Colorado, and entered a geological museum of stone monuments carved by eons of wind and rain. Granite and sandstone pillars and mesas, flat as tables on top, loomed on the horizon.

The landmark I remember most vividly was Shiprock, a majestic formation rising over 1,500 feet above the desert floor. Located in the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico, its peak was just over 7,000 feet above sea level. Eerie and beautiful, to my eye it looked less like a clipper ship than a gigantic stone pipe organ, lower in the middle, reaching sharp peaks at each end. From another angle, I thought it resembled a fossilized cathedral.

Ouray had fewer than one thousand inhabitants in 1957. Most were involved in silver or gold mining. My dad’s sister, Mary, had married Frank Bell, a mining engineer who brought her to Ouray from Indiana in the 1940s.

Nestled in a small valley at 7,800 feet elevation, Ouray has been called the Switzerland of America because of its majestic peaks (up to 13,000 feet) and picturesque waterfalls. The only way in or out was through narrow gaps to the north and south where the highway had been chiseled out of bedrock. Ouray was the perfect place for a nine-year-old boy to explore. My thirteen-year-old cousin, Sherry, was a willing guide for me and my brother Rick. I especially enjoyed the giant hot sulfur springs pool on the north side of town.

Do you like music? Sherry asked me one day.

I like when my dad plays the piano, I replied. Of course, Dad’s favorite music was Rodgers & Hammerstein show tunes, which didn’t prepare me for what I heard next.

Here, listen to this, she said, putting a 45 RPM single on her record player. It was Elvis Presley. Imagine hearing Elvis for the first time, singing Hound Dog, and Don’t Be Cruel.

I was hooked on rock and roll ever after. I later got a crystal set radio so I could listen to KFWB, Los Angeles’s first rock station—and, of course, Dodger games. Grandpa Gil and Grandma Rue got me an Elvis record for Christmas, Jailhouse Rock. But Dad would never be a rock fan: Turn off that syncopated noise! was his standard reaction.

We next made our way south to El Paso, Texas and crossed the border into Juárez, Mexico, where I had the best tacos I’d ever tasted. I never saw much else of Juárez except for some narrow streets and rollicking cantinas, but it was my first international trip—and it put me on track for the much bigger adventure I would later have in Mexico.

To this day, Carlsbad Caverns—our next stop—is one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been. I gaped up at the huge caves with their ancient stalactites, like stone spears poking down at us from the cave ceiling, and the stalagmites thrusting from the floor beside us. The expansive caverns were cold, wet, dimly lit—and downright scary to a nine-year-old. But it was not the last time in my travels that I would feel both fear and unforgettable awe.

4

SCHOOL, LITTLE LEAGUE, AND MY NEWSPAPER CAREER

Loma Alta Elementary was a half-mile walk from our home. It was constructed around the same time as our home, and like all new schools in post-war California, was clean, spacious, and modern as could be. Back then, the public expected nothing less. We kids certainly had no idea that anyone anywhere had less.

Unfortunately, my public school education was dominated by my desire to escape its regimentation. I felt the pressure to conform, starting in the first grade. Things went downhill from there, snowballing until I crashed out of it at top speed upon graduating high school. The only thing that kept me from dropping out was the fear of God—or, more accurately, of my parents.

My academic career was undistinguished. I had average grades. And while I agreed that education was key, I didn’t buy into their necessary path of prescribed learning. I tried to vent my frustration. I laughed at the wrong times. I ignored instructions. I annoyed everyone and felt bad about it afterward. And always, I wanted to run away from home.

My strict upbringing meant I would not openly rebel. I knew my parents believed education was in my best interest. Yet for me, school was an unnatural impediment to life. I didn’t yet have the confidence to act on this belief, so my soul was caged, not just by parents and teachers, but by my own guilt and sense of responsibility. That I made it all the way through high school seething like this still amazes me.

When I was eighteen, I underwent a battery of tests for a week at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to identify where my interests and aptitudes lay. Two weeks later, I met with the vocational counselor who had analyzed my results. He was a man of about 60 who might well have asked himself what choices in life had led him to the cramped, windowless office in which he worked. Instead, he peered across his desk at me with intense curiosity, plainly trying to comprehend what kind of person had given these answers.

Your tests revealed some, uh, unusual vocational interests.

Such as? I was waiting to hear that I was suited to be a bouncer for junior high school dances or a microbiologist on the moon.

International arms dealer was one. Nightclub owner was the other standout.

I saw these listed right on his sheet. Other potential careers which fit my self-image better were explorer and inventor. But I was more bewildered after he provided this information than before.

I did consider becoming an international arms dealer for a hot minute. As a profession, it sounded unorthodox, dangerous, exciting, lucrative… and no doubt it would require nerves of steel. None of these things seemed a drawback to me. Did UCLA offer courses in this discipline? They did not. How did one get started? My counselor hadn’t a clue.

Of course, even back in elementary school, I had a dream career. But I only got to work on it after school and on weekends.

In the beginning, we were all eight and nine-year-old boys standing on a field getting our first look at our coach, Mr. Phillips. Man, he was old, we thought. Maybe 50. It was our first day with our ball team, a lower division of Little League. Mr. Phillips wanted to know what he had in the way of a team. First, he lined us all up, handed each boy a ball, and told him to throw it as far as he could. He took the three boys who threw the ball the farthest and said, You’re our pitchers.

The pitching mound was where I ended up… and I loved it. I loved the act of pitching. And I also lived for the chance to race under a fly ball and grab