THOUGHTS ON CONTENT

Travel as an elemental thread in Lance Mason's stories is only partly due to his own escapades -- by foot, thumb, bicycle, motorcycle, tuk-tuk, trolley, train, plane, ferry, helicopter, fishing smack, banana boat, and Polish freighter. The spirit of these journeys has as much to do with his father, who joined the Navy in 1922 and served through WWII. Mason was born the following year, and Mason Snr spun him yarns, both mythical and mystical, of life on the high seas, of East Indies "hindoos" and gold-currency trading houses, of North Sea storms on the Murmansk Run, of coal-burning "battlewagons" and Valparaiso nights. His father's accounts captured the richness and valor of that rugged, swaggering era, stamping the son with the mark of the vagabond.

Later, the sea stories merged in Mason's brain with films, books, and the proto-grunge subculture of surfing, that pre-hippie nomadism tolerated if not condoned by post-Eisenhower parents on the western fringe of America. "I was born in a little beach town," Mason says, "and had my first car at fourteen, a '33 Plymouth sedan. We'd skip school, tie the boards on top, and go looking for trouble." Surfing daubed Mason with its totemic colors and cast him onto the Pacific Coast Highway, up to Haskell's Ranch and down to County Line, hiding him out in Snooker's Pool Hall, feeding him at burger joints and corner groceries. Mason's crowd was searching out what they hadn't seen, where they hadn't been, and, often as not, were frightened by what they stumbled into. "I guess the most scared I was back then was during a couple days in the Santa Barbara county jail. I was nineteen, and my cellmate was on his way to the state pen for GTA and trying to kill a cop. I didn't sleep much that weekend."

By the end of the 'Sixties, Mason was part of a throng crossing down into Mexico. Like the domestic escapades, these trips were largely unconscious of any growth benefits. "If it had anything to do with Jack Kerouac, we didn't know it at the time. We weren't down there for 'the meaning of life.' We were after strip clubs, beer, and being reckless." Moving . . . traveling . . . letting go of the ties that bind -- whether at the Tijuana bullring or an Ensenada bar, looking at the bottom of a Singapore Sling.

The road led from Mexico to Hawaii, and then to Europe. Picking up his mail in Athens, Mason ran into an old surfing friend. "Mike had been a wild ass growing up, but he'd made his way into the merchant marine as a cook on tramp steamers, husbanding his cash and traveling when he could." They drove up into the Macedonian hill country and Mike told him about trips to Alandipo, crossing the Khyber Pass to Rawalpindi, and tales of the pirates of Kalimantan. They pressed on into Turkey where Mason and his friend parted - but not for the last time. "Mike taught me a lot -- about life on the road and why retsina will never be Greece's most valued export."

Since then, Mason has lived half his life overseas -- in Brazil, the U.K., and, "by a monumental portion of good luck," New Zealand. He's been around the world half a dozen times in every direction, geographically and psychologically. And always writing, writing, trying to communicate, trying to weave sometimes alien, sometimes frenzied threads of ideas into the rich fabric of drama or romance or humor.

"One of the great things about a life of travel has been getting together with friends in faraway places - on a trout stream in New Zealand, backpacking in Patagonia, going to a Roman production of "Aida" at the Caracalla Baths. There's always material for a story somewhere. I even ran into crazy Mike, the surfer, again. He lives in Booth Bay now and runs a bed-and-breakfast there. I guess we all slow down after a while."

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