Writer finds adventure around every corner
Sandpoint writer Ben Olson will do almost anything to beat writer’s block, and at 25, he’s still young enough to throw the possible consequences out the window. Sometimes he goes looking for adventure, and sometimes adventure hunts him down like a Pinkerton detective on a hot trail.
“I don’t know why,” said Olson, “but it seems that something interesting always happens whenever I step out my door – usually a disaster of one kind or another.”
Olson doesn’t wait around for life to slow down. When his writing starts to sag, he takes off on a journey to – anywhere.
“I go on these trips all the time, just little wanders. There’s no real purpose, just to see what’s going on and observe. I always run out of money halfway through the trip, but I have to do this. I have to purge myself, then I come back and I’m fine. “
Last year, Olson flew to Thailand to volunteer for tsunami relief. He spent three weeks on a work crew, rebuilding and cleaning up after the devastation. One night, he drove his project coordinator to his camp on a motorbike. After dropping him off, Olson headed back to his own camp on a deserted road, through a mangrove swamp.
“Halfway to my camp, a water buffalo jumped out of the swamp and charged right at me,” Olson recalled. “I swerved and barely missed getting speared by his horns, but the bike went into a slide, and I hit a concrete barrier with my right knee going about 40 mph. I was thrown from the bike about 20 feet into a swamp and hit all kinds of stuff on the way down.”
That little adventure cost him a shattered knee, fractured arm, broken and lacerated foot, a staph infection, and 30 stitches in his head.
“But I lived through it, and now I have a few more scars and a few more stories – which is the point of everything, I guess.”
In January of this year, Olson bought a $385 Rail Pass from Amtrak. This allowed him to come and go on the train as often as he liked, anywhere, anytime for 30 days.
“It was so cheap and so easy I couldn’t believe it,” said Olson. “I mean, riding Amtrak sucks because they don’t go half the places you want to go and they’re always late and congested, but I kind of wanted that.”
For a month Olson rode the rails, getting off long enough to visit friends along the way. He wrote articles about his experiences and sent them to the Sandpoint Reader, where they were published in his absence. At one point he decided to head to Florida and go sailing with a friend. He was advised to take the rails to New Orleans and change to Jacksonville from there.
“I went to New Orleans, not even thinking it was just four months after the hurricane,” said Olson. “There were no hotels available, the tracks were washed out going to Florida, there were no lockers in the station, and the buses were full for two days with all the refugees leaving. I just laid my pack down and slept behind a factory with all this broken glass. When I woke up and decided I’d have to hitchhike to Jacksonville, like 800 miles, and I was broke.”
On the second day he accepted a ride he wished he hadn’t.
“I had two really weird guys pick me up in a row. They were like Southern homo truckers, propositioning me. One of them I had to shove and jump out of the car and run.”
At 1:30 in the morning, Olson walked 10 miles with his 70-pound pack, and with no money he was down to eating peanut butter and drinking water.
“I knew that was the climax. It was the weirdest it can get and the best it can get and there was nothing I could do to one-up that. So I decided to go home and rest.”
Back in Sandpoint, Olson gathered his train articles and sent them to every publisher and agent he could find. In April, Tom Moore of Alphar Publishing called. He wanted Olson to turn his articles into a fiction novel and have it done by June. When Olson agreed, he was e-mailed a publishing contract. Olson wrote “Wanderlost” in 37 days. It was released on July 7.
“These things just tend to happen to me,” said Olson. “I have the worst and the best luck in the world. I just never know which one is going to happen next.”