Vanished!: Explorers Forever Lost

by Evan L. Balkan

Overview

True and harrowing accounts of adventurers who never came home

Some adventures end in glory, others in obituaries. Instead of receiving laurels and a parade, the adventurers in Vanished! met infamy on a road with no return. Immerse yourself in these gripping accounts of explorers who ventured forth—then simply disappeared. Their fates? We’ll never know. Vanished! draws you into seven page-turning accounts, including one that contains new details of Amelia Earhart’s unsolved disappearance over the vast Pacific. Head to Mexico with Ambrose Bierce, forever lost but not forgotten. Ride the wild Colorado with honeymooners Glen and Bessie Hyde, presumably drowned but whose bodies have never been found. Author Evan Balkan brings these stories to life, and death, in spine-tingling descriptions. Whether murder, sabotage, or just plain bad luck, these are true tales of adventure gone bad, of explorers vanished, forever lost.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780897329835
Publisher:	Menasha Ridge Press
Publication date:	10/28/2007
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

All Good Gringos Go To Heaven When Shot: Ambrose Bierce

“A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him.”—Ambrose Bierce, “The Stranger”

A graying gringo wanders the anarchic wilds of northern Mexico. Obstinate streaks of russet hair hint at his Irish ancestry and lend him a temperamental hue that colors his cynical view of the world. He is looking for the legendary Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. This is a bold proposition in itself. Does he not realize that any man asking after Villa, even one sympathetic to Villa’s revolutionary zeal, could easily be taken for a spy? Even more to the point, does he not realize that his fair skin and American citizenship make this possibility even more likely in the eyes of Villa’s defenders—as well as his detractors? After all, this man’s own American government would soon come to support one of Villa’s rivals. Poking around in this manner could be enough to get anyone killed.

Then again, maybe the tough old gringo ingratiates himself with the young ideologues, and maybe he impresses them with his bravado and his marksmanship. He is a Civil War veteran after all—even sustained a head wound at Kennesaw Mountain. But somewhere during this Mexican campaign, he falls. Is it pneumonia that gets him? Or the more romantic firing squad, the fusilamiento?

This is no anonymous man, by the way. This man is a famous writer; now, as he stares down the firing squad, do his own words, from his most famous story, come back to him?

Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by—it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and—he knew not why— apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.

Was this heightened awareness, what one of his own fictional characters has experienced, now happening to him? Was this why he was smiling at the soldiers who stood thirty paces off and held their guns rock steady at his heart? Because he had been right all along, that at the final moments of a man’s life, he can feel the very flap of a moth’s wing like a screaming gale? Was this why he was smiling? Or was it because this was—in his view—a damned fine way to die, the best way there was?

Imagine if it happened today: a renowned American writer, whose titles include “One of the Missing” and “Mysterious Disappearances,” heads off into a lawless frontier and vanishes. What would follow would be a media sensation of epic proportions. Because it happened to Ambrose Bierce in 1914, we know for sure that he is dead. But how it happened, and where his remains lie—these are still, and will probably always be, unanswered questions.

Bierce, most famous in his day for The Devil’s Dictionary and today for the psychologically realist and oft-anthologized “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” began life unhappily. He was born on June 24, 1842. His family moved to a farm outside Warsaw, Ohio, when the boy was just four. There, he suffered through the relentless chores required by the farmstead and by his stern father, who didn’t hesitate to beat the boy mercilessly.

In later years, Bierce wryly referenced the farm in his parody of Samuel Woodworth’s 1818 poem “The Old Oaken Bucket,” which begins, “How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood, / When fond recollection presents them to view! / The orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wildwood, / And ev’ry loved spot which my infancy knew.” Bierce’s version: “With what anguish of mind I remember my childhood, / Recalled in the light of a knowledge since gained; / The malarious farm, the wet, fungus grown wildwood, / The chills then contracted that since have remained.”

Table of Contents

About the Author

Preface

Foreword By Richard Bangs

1. All Good Gringos Go to Heaven When Shot: Ambrose Bierce
2. No Fear of Failure: Percy Fawcett
3. The Honeymooners: Glen and Bessie Hyde
4. The Deep Peace of the Wild: Everett Ruess
5. The Aviators: Amelia Earhart and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
6. Lost Scion: Michael Rockefeller
7. A Fine Kind of Madness: Johnny Waterman

Index