Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Tribune
March 31, 2020
A former chief deputy U.S. marshal, author Marc Cameron was selected in 2016 to continue the Tom Clancy series of Jack Ryan thrillers. The New York Times bestseller’s latest novel is “Stone Cross (An Arliss Cutter Novel)” (Kensington, $26). Splitting his time between Eagle River, Alaska, and Rarotonga in the Cook Islands — Cameron says some of his fondest travel memories are of those with his family. “My youngest son and I rode our motorcycles from Texas to Alaska a few years ago,” he says. “That trip will always be one of the high points of my life. I’d love to take a motorcycle journey around Australia, factoring in enough time to wander down side roads and meet people along the way.” For more information, check out his website and his Facebook.
Q. Have your travels impacted the settings in your books?
A. Travel often impacts where I set the books. I was in Juneau, Alaska, researching an upcoming Arliss Cutter thriller. I spent five days hiking in the Tongass National Forest and exploring abandoned gold mines. I’ve lived in Alaska for 21 years, but there are elements of those mines and the expansive rain forest that were completely new to me. Many of the places I’ve visited with my Yupik and Inupiat friends ended up as setting and plot in “Stone Cross.” I used to travel a lot when I was with the U.S. Marshals. I’ve spent a good deal of time in D.C. and New York and love to set scenes in areas just outside where tourists usually go. Recent trips to Japan and Buenos Aires both changed the way I’d imagined the plot and setting and sent me in entirely new directions in the books. I knew I wanted to set a bit of a plot in and around a sort of red-light district in Tokyo called Kabukicho. Up until that trip, I’d not even heard of the area known as Golden Gai, with its ramshackle, pre-WWII era buildings. Of course, I had to put it in a book.
Q. What was the first trip you took as a child?
A. My parents took my sister and me on a long road trip from Texas through Yellowstone National Park and the Pacific Northwest when I was about eight. That’s the first time I remember going on a trip that was not strictly to visit family. I could not get enough of the ocean, even then, and it has been calling me back ever since. Incidentally, I also started to write on that trip. My dad was not much for listening to music while he drove, so I entertained myself in the back seat by writing little stories.
Q. Where are your favorite weekend getaways?
A. My wife and I enjoy getting out of town and camping in Alaska. We rented an RV this fall and drove north for about eight hours to camp a week at our favorite fly-fishing river. We also enjoy renting a sailboat in Seward, Alaska, and exploring points beyond Resurrection Bay for a few days each year.
Q. If you’ve ever gone away for the holidays, which was the best trip?
A. Two years ago, we took our three kids, their significant others, our three small grandchildren, my sister and my parents to Rarotonga over Christmas. We arrived on a Sunday morning, Christmas Eve. Many of the stores close on Sunday, so we were worried about finding a place to get enough food to feed everyone. A lovely friend named Mii shopped for us prior to our arrival and had our fridges and pantries stocked before we got there. Having all of us there, eating a Christmas dinner of spaghetti on our covered veranda at Lagoon Breeze surrounded by coconut palms and frangipani blossoms will always be one of my favorite memories.
Q. Do you speak any foreign languages?
A. I am conversant in Japanese. I understand quite a bit of Spanish, much of it picked up during my law enforcement years in Texas. I pick up languages fairly easily when I travel, but then lose them when I come home and don’t use them every day. I love languages, though, and try to drill down on the cultural part of the language like idioms when I write about a certain part of the world. It helps to understand the people.
Q. Where would you like to go that you have never been to before?
A. I’ve always wanted to see Australia. We get close, but I have yet to make it all the way over.
Q. What is your guilty pleasure when you’re on the road?
A. Those gut-bomb fried burritos at gas stations. My eldest son and I trailered a couple of horses from Texas to Idaho one spring when he was nine years old. We camped along the way. He’s a healthy guy now, super fit and in med school, but on that trip one of his favorite meals was a ginormous 44-ounce Dr Pepper and a fried gas-station burrito. Sometimes I stop for a burrito just to think about that trip. Good times.
Q. What is your best vacation memory?
A. I’m blessed to have many good ones — but here’s one that comes to mind. Several years ago, my wife and I were in the little town of Fujinomiya, near Mt. Fuji. We’d eaten ramen at a mountainside café, bought a bag of giant white peaches and stopped at a little store to buy some ice cream before returning to Tokyo. On our way out, I pointed to a sign by the door that said the store also sold hachimitsu — honey. My wife is an avid beekeeper, so she started looking around for hives behind the building while I studied the peach trees. Before I knew it, my wife, who speaks zero Japanese, was engaged in a long, conversation of pantomimed hand signals, grunts and buzzing sounds about honey production with a man beside the store. Neither one could speak the other’s language, but each understood bees — and that was enough for them to communicate very well. It was a cool lesson on common ground.
© 2020 JAE-HA KIM
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
