The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb

Preface

(PREFACE Dana and Ginger Lamb were adventurers in an age that liked mixing myth with reality, at least when it came to entertainment. During the Great Depression, when real-life newlyweds might hope at best for a week alone in a borrowed cottage, the Lambs set off on a three-year honeymoon down the coast from southern California to Panama, making their way in a sixteen-foot canoe to prove how survival skills could see them through any number of challenges. Covered by the national press, they returned as celebrities to write a bestseller about their exploits (Enchanted Vagabonds, 1938) and to start a career in the burgeoning field of film-lecturing. The public loved them, for their success showed how tough times needn't get one down. The Lambs were not professional explorers, and drew on no resources other than those they could carry or improvise from nature. But they pulled it off, having the time of their lives and making a career of it as well, as their dream of self-sufficiency became a marketable public image. Ever needful of new material, this dauntless couple undertook another expedition, leaving in 1940 for a hardscrabble journey through Mexico's villages and into its jungles.World War II allowed them to return there as special employees of the FBI, spying on presumed Axis activities south of the border at the behest of their ix PREFACE most prominent fan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their friendship with FDR was publicized and their espionage work hinted at, once again making the Lambs seem larger than life. After the war, Dana and Ginger took further journeys in search of Mayan ruins, leading to another bestseller, Quest for the Lost City (1951). Hollywood turned their book into a feature film starring the Lambs as themselves. Yet another quest followed, this time for the fabled lost mission of Santa Isabel in the wilds of Baja California.By 1962, when they settled into semiretirement, they'd sealed their reputation as America's favorite couple for boldly exotic travel. To the generation of counterculturalists emerging just a few years later, the Lambs would serve as an inspiration for self-reliance well beyond the bounds of conventional society. Did Dana and Ginger Lamb really sail all the way to Panama in a tiny homemade boat? Was their lost city actually lost, and did the similarly lost mission in the Baja turn up where they hoped it would? Strictly speaking, no. Authorities have wondered at the factual content of their stories, sometimes with justification. But a review of the Lambs' work today shows how specific objectives were never their real goal: image-making was, especially images that could be at once educational and entertaining. They were the trailblazers , the Lambs liked to tell themselves; let the scientists follow. The fascination lay in getting there, and Dana and Ginger Lamb could show how to do it. Theirs was, after all, the last era in which average people did most of their distant journeying in arm chairs: listening to Lowell Thomas on the radio, tracking William Albert Robinson's cruises in the newspapers, reading the great travel literature of the time, and—once they owned television sets—watching shows such as I Search for Adventure, the "Adventureland" segments of Sunday night's Disneyland, and Bold Journey (on which the Lambs appeared in 1959). At the movies, audiences could thrill to feature documentaries such as Kon-Tiki andJungle Headhunters. If they wished, people could meet adventurers firsthand in library X PREFACE auditoriums and high school gyms, where film-lecturers presented their programs on a regular basis. Some of these presenters were colorful characters indeed, appearing in costume with artifacts brought back from far away. But just as appealing and more commonly accessible were Dana and Ginger Lamb—a married couple, just like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy, Lunt and Fontanne, Burns and Allen, Ozzie and Harriet, the Castles, and many other show business pairs who'd made the husband-and-wife format so attractive for all types of entertainment. Yes, these folks were stars. But they also shared a household and did dozens of things just like their adoring public. The Lambs showed how practically any healthy couple, if they put their minds to it, could learn techniques for survival and train themselves to go adventuring on their own. Despite the lure of their titles, the...