In the Land of Fruits and Juices

by Katherine Wyrick

I was reared on stories of the madcap, dizzying adventures of my mother, then Helen Downie, and her friend, Ellen Ann Ragsdale; the tales of their travels cast a kind of spell on me as a child, one that lingers to this day. The following account isn’t intended to be a comprehensive one, but rather a few snapshots of a bygone era when it was unusual, if not unheard of, for two young women to go gallivanting so fearlessly across the globe.

They began as unlikely employees of Arkansas Parks and Tourism, tasked with promoting travel in the state (which they knew little about despite growing up there). They smiled politely while handing out brochures at boat shows and took part in interviews (see photo below). During one, they were asked, “Why visit Arkansas if you’re not interested in hunting and fishing?” They replied, “Don’t.” In answer to the question, “What sort of fish might one catch?,” they responded , straight-faced and authoritatively, “white-faced bass.” (Inept state employees perhaps, but quite skilled at making each other laugh, wildly—then and for years to come.)

Tired of life in “The Natural State,” the two soon began to feel the full force of their wanderlust and decided to head west towards Colorado, where they worked the first season ever of Snowmass. Their cafeteria jobs provided them with free lift tickets which they used to ski the bunny slopes (rather inexpertly). During their breakfast shift, they came up with their own catchphrase to greet guests: “Welcome to the land of fruits and juices!”

“When the season was over, everyone said ‘let’s go to California!,” my mom recalls. So they did. “Then they said, ‘let’s go to Hawaii!’ So they did. They abandoned Ellen Ann’s maroon Pontiac in a restaurant parking lot (to be retrieved later by her beleaguered father from Russellville who found it littered in parking tickets like so many fallen leaves).

In Honolulu, they got jobs at The Royal Hawaiian working banquets. They met with success on a trial run, independently hoisting their empty trays aloft, but the main event was another story. “Everyone else marched out with precision, trays held high, while we staggered out on either side of a single tray heavy with desserts.”

From there they hopped over to Japan, “I guess we were going around the world by then; I think the tickets were under $900, and you could only go one way and had to stay between certain latitudes.” They’d met a Japanese businessman in Aspen who said to call if they were ever in Tokyo. He took them to one of the city’s finest restaurants where they insisted he order for them. A waiter summarily wheeled over a lovely aquarium from across the room (surely decorative) and with an audible pop, removed a sea slug-like creature from its side and presented it to them on a plate.

Each encounter lead to the next, yielding exciting experiences at every turn and cracking the world wide open. POP!

“We were girls on our own, and people were so nice to us. We met people who worked Esso. They gave us names in Africa. It was a different world then. People were glad to meet Americans. You felt safe and protected BECAUSE you were an American.”

The next stepping stone was Cambodia. “There was really just one place to stay near Angkor Wat, an old guest house. We rode our bikes there and explored the ruins. The the sun went down quickly on our ride back.” She also recalled how they smuggled an entire roasted chicken into a movie theater and ate the whole thing, picking the bones clean.

At some point, they met at attaché from the Russian embassy who invited them for drinks. Over cocktails at his office, he proudly showed them a propaganda reel of happy peasants working in the field as they exchanged sidelong glances.

While in Siem Reap, my mom awoke one morning to the chanting of saffron robed Buddhist monks passing by the palm trees outside her window. “It was at that moment that I thought ‘you really are in a foreign place now.’” She also recalls hearing a far different sound—bombing in the distance, a reminder that they were in a country on the precipice of war.

They were then off to mind-blowing India where they met up with hoteliers Bikki and Tikki Oberoi. “Bikki was married to a pretty blonde German . . . They invited us to a picnic which was served on a beautiful oriental rug spread on the ground, surrounded by staff all in white.” Not the sort of red-and-white checked blanket and straw basket affair they’d envisioned.

They later headed north to Kashmir to stay with a couple who they’d met in Delhi, a sad-eyed French model married to a Dutch UN peacekeeper. “They lived on a houseboat on Dal Lake, and we stayed a few days. The mountains were so beautiful, and little boats would come by in the morning selling fresh flowers and bread. It was very isolated . . . the wife seemed lonely and the marriage troubled.”

“One scary thing that happened while we were there was that one day we got off the boat to wander Kashmir, and this group of children started following us. One picked up a rock and threw it, and the others followed. In that moment, I thought ‘this is how people get stoned to death.’”

From Kashmir, they traveled to Nepal, “the most exotic, strangest place I’ve ever been.”

“I remember sitting in a pagoda in the town square reading a letter from my mother that I’d received via American Express. It read: ‘Please come home and get your teaching certificate; I don’t know what to tell people.’”

By this time, there had been a mail strike, and they hadn’t been in touch with their families for almost six weeks. When they returned to Delhi, the front desk clerk at their hotel said there was an urgent message waiting for them. It said, “Do You know the whereabouts of Miss Helen Kelsey or a Miss Ellen Ann Ragsdale?” The sender? Senator J. William Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee.

Next stop, Africa . . . where they met a group of hunters (one an Austrian prince) over drinks at the famed Thorn Tree Hotel in Nairobi. “They invited us to go on safari with them, so we went. Things like that just happened.”

While in Kenya, Ellen Ann fell madly in love, so they extended their stay, getting jobs at an ad agency modeling mattresses and Arrow shirts. They both wore falls in their hair in keeping with the style of the day.

The lovestruck Ellen Ann stayed in Kenya while my mom traveled to Ethiopia on her own. She went to a marketplace to buy Coptic crosses, textiles, and art (a painting from that trip hangs in my house today—see below—a cartoon-like depiction of Haile Selassie’s supposed lineage.) “It was said that he was descended from the Queen of Sheba,” my mom explains. Ellen Ann and my mom had endless standing jokes (many of which endure to this day); the one inspired by this trip was that when they found something highly dubious or strange, they would say, “That’s haile selassie.”

When their time in Africa drew to a close, they took off for Tel Aviv, Beirut, and Egypt (not necessarily in that order). They rode camels around the pyramids in Cairo and marveled at the beautiful city that was Beirut. “You understood why people called Beirut the ‘Paris of the Middle East’ . . . it had these magnificent boulevards . . . an Englishman took us under his wing and showed us the city.” At some point during this time, all of their pictures were confiscated at a border crossing, forcing them to rely mostly on memory alone for the years to come.

While skiing in Kitzbuhel, Austria, they met the author Michael Mewshaw and his wife Linda, true expats who became life-long friends. Michael overheard a cute, animated blonde with a thick southern accent speaking into a payphone and introduced himself.

My mom then went to visit a beau (my dad) in Wurzburg, Germany. On a picnic in a bucolic field— between readings of A Shropshire Lad—she got a bee sting on her forehead, and my future father gallantly came to her rescue, making a poultice with tobacco from his rolled cigarette to put on her brow. It wasn’t the look she was going for, but was appreciated nonetheless.

Maybe if not for that bee sting and the ensuing act of tenderness, I wouldn’t be here at all. Who knows? It would be another few years, and many more adventures, before they’d find each other again—this time in Paris, my dad sitting astride a motorcycle, a Herald Tribune tucked under his arm and a tear in the knee of his seersucker pants . . . and this time a different sort of journey would begin.