UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Friday, December 1, 1995
5A
'The World is My Home'
Continued from Page 1A
Many Micronesian islands use a barter system, so accounting for the use of all the money is giving Washington bureaucrats fits. Endacott will be a mediator, more or less, between the United States and Micronesia.
"I'll be putting out fires between the two governments," he says.
Being in Lawrence for the last four months made him restless and eager to get back to his sailboat, to his island, to his life.
Endacott is admittedly out of his element in Lawrence, his hometown.
"It's a place where I don't fit in anymore," Endacott says. "I'm expected to mesh with family, friends and society, but it's not that easy."
He returned because his father, Phil Endacott, former head of housekeeping at KU, had heart surgery in July. The younger Endacott dropped everything in Pohnpei and left.
Even though he grew up here, he says he feels out of place, out of breath, out of touch.
"Stretching back to memories of before I left was like trying to remember another life." Endacott savs.
Doug Byers, a friend of Endacott's since the fourth grade, says his friend has been a risk-taker since elementary school. Byers vividly remembers riding double on Endacott's Schwinn Scramber bicycle down the steepest hill in the neighborhood.
"He didn't even give me a chance to say no," Byers says. "We wiped out in a big ditch at the bottom. I was
scared to death, and he was just laughing all the way."
Most of what Endacott remembers about his four and a half years at KU is, well, not exactly educationally oriented.
Traipsing illegally through the steam tunnels under the campus. Leading tours up and into water towers around town. Staying in Lewis Hall, a women's residence hall, for a week, completely undetected.
But those weren't his glory days. Those adventures were only primers for the ones to come.
For the last six years, Endacott's been traveling, with no particular
itinerary, time frame or destination. Just traveling to see the world because he, says it's there.
Endacott's obsession with faraway places began with elementary school daydreams. Byers remembers the two of them reading about the Oval mines in Australia.
Being 10 years old, their travel options were limited. But Byers and Endacott concocted fantastic plans anyway. Some 20 years later, Endacott's daydreams have turned into a sailboat, a life of adventure and a job as a tropical island's state planner.
And by the way, he's been to those Opal mines in Australia.
"We all went to college and got jobs," says Byers, studio manager for Mercy Records. "He's doing all the things we talked about. All of us who know him live our lives vicariously through him. We were partners in his daydreams."
Ask Endacott why he travels and a look of annoyance twists his face. He knows the answer won't be good enough, but he tries to appease the questioner.
No, he's not trying to get to every country so he can add to some thimbles-from-around-the-world collection.
No, he doesn't know where he's going next.
He says he's traveling because he needs freedom and novelty. Because he needs something more than a desk job and a house in the suburbs. And no, he won't try to explain it all again.
He started taking mini road trips as soon as he got his driver's license. He and close friend David Jess would leave on Friday nights, after work at the K-Mart Distribution Center near Lawrence. They'd pick a direction and start driving, often with no destination in mind.
"It was, like, grab a case of beer, a radar detector, an extra shirt and go," Endacott says.
Preparation for a road trip through the wilds of Mexico consisted of packing a rented Volkswagen Bug full of Tequila and bananas, getting a map and taking off through the back roads.
He left Lawrence on March 19, 1989, headed for Hong Kong with a backpack he'd packed in 30 minutes, the clothes on his back and about $550 to his name.
For a while, the trips were enough.
But by the time Endacott graduated from KU in 1898, he needed something more.
"In the beginning, I was running away." Endacott admits. "I knew I was fed up, but I couldn't give a rational reason why. I, myself, didn't know where I was going or what I was doing."
Jess, who works as a Canadian Rockies tour guide six months a year, comes as close as anyone to understanding why Endacott had to go.
"I don't think he's traveling to escape anything," Jess says. "I think he's seeking something."
Everyone thought Endacott would return, eventually. "He told us he'd like to travel for a year and then he'd be back," says his mother, Jan Endacott. "That was six years ago."
Not even her son knew that traveling would become his life. Not at first, anyway.
"After about two months, I knew I was never coming back," Endacott says. "This is my life now."
"He doesn't look rugged. He looks more like a Republican."
With a slim build, closely trimmed beard and thinning brown hair, he's not the Hollywood version of a world traveler and adventurer extraordinaire.
"He doesn't look rugged," Byers says, laughing. "He looks more like a Republican."
But Endacott's never been a slave to "supposed to s." For the first two years of the trim that turned into he
Doug Byers afriend of Endacott since the fourth grade
life, Endacott traveled through Asia, riding down glaciers on backpacks, paying off drivers to be smuggled, Indiana Jones-style, into restricted areas of the Tibetan Plateau and setting foot in at least 15 countries along the way.
After two years in Asia, Endacott took a job in Japan teaching English to business people. It paid fairly well, and his parents felt better knowing he had a phone. But Endacott, always itching for adventure, knew it wouldn't be a career.
Near the end of two years, the company he worked for was going down the tubes. His hair was thinning. Stress-induced aches and pains left him sore. Cigarette
smoking left him short of breath.
Depositing his paycheck one day, it occurred to him that he was making enough money to buy a sailboat. Not for pleasure cruising. Not as a token of superiority.
He wanted to teach himself to sail and to head for the open ocean.
"For the first time I was really interested in something that was going to happen, something that wasn't a dream for later," he recalls.
In the few months before he left for New Zealand, the sailing capital of the world, Endacott poured over books and magazines, trying to see what kind of a boat he would need and what he could afford. He also studied diesel engines, fiberglass and sails, anything he could get his hands on that related to sailing.
"It was mania," he says "I had more energy and more drive than ever before in my life. I couldn't not be studying boats."
He left Japan and headed for New Zealand. After a few weeks, he bought a used, 26-foot Raven sailboat called the Kut Above.
The last postcard Byers got said, "Bought a sailboat,
teaching myself to sail."
Byers thought, "This will surely kill him."
Endacott set out to sea on his maiden voyage June 24, 1994. He figured the voyage to Fiji would take about 20 days. Forty-three days after his departure, Endacott motored into to Suva, Fiji. By that time he was on the Coast Guard's list of boats presumed missing.
Aside from Endacott's first passage to Fiji, he's sailed alone. His boat doesn't have a two-way radio or even much of a life raft. If something goes wrong at sea, Endacott's the only one who can save himself.
Tom Leininger / KANSAN
That ultimate self-reliance is what Endacott loves about sailing. It's something he couldn't find in Kansas.
"Here, it's not real. You wake up every day, go to work
Thirty-year-old Paul Endacott, a graduate of the University of Kansas, has traveled to far points on the globe, sometimes with a sailboat as his only transportation. Endacott's travels took him to Micronesia, a group of islands about 3,000 miles southwest of the Hawaiian islands, where he returned recently to be an economic planner.
and do what people expect you to do," Endacott says.
"There's nothing in that that seems real to me. But every second out there seems real."
On Endacott's second and longest voyage — 45 days from Lautoka, Fiji, to Kosrae, Micronesia — was also his hardest. Fierce storms tossed his boat several hundred miles off course.
Fear was not an option. He had to hold the tiller, put up the storm sails, throw out the sea drogue and keep the boat from capsizing.
"The boat is your life," Endacott says. "If you lose it, you're dead. So you think of the boat first."
In the midst of the confusion, knowing that each breath could be his last, he says he never lost hope.
"There were times it just looked like I wasn't going to win," Endacott says. "I felt like the odds weren't with me at times, but I never gave up."
When he felt closest to losing everything, he says he thought of his parents.
"I was sad that they were going to be upset, and they'd be wondering for months if I was dead or alive," Endacott says. "They might never know. It would be so difficult for them."
Endacott's passion for the unknown hasn't subsided. After his two-year contract with Pohnpei ends, he'll no doubt sail off to another island, another adventure
"I still feel like I'm 23 with my whole life ahead of me," Endacott says.
At a time when most people have settled into careers and creating a family, Rudcott is free.
And that's the way he says he'll stay until he dies.
"If I was in a nowhere job stuck someplace, I'd start shrinking and I'd die at an early age," Endacott says. "To live like that after the life I've known would be very difficult."
Hanging on while letting go
Not many Lawrence parents have their very own Coast Guard representative. But the Endacott doe
That's because their son Paul sails the Pacific Ocean in a 26-foot boat, alone.
"Ialways say we accept it—until he's late again," says Fendrick's mother, Jim.
Paul and his brother, Lance, always came first in their parents' lives. Piul Endacott always a good job in California in 1971 and moved his family to Lawrence because he didn't have enough time to speed with his two sons.
The Endacotts started their own cleaning business and built their lives around the boys.
They were cub scout leaders, little league coaches and involved in most aspects of their sons' lives.
Endacott says his parents have supported him unconditionally. "That security has made it easy to go out and take chances."
Jan Endacott remembers a statement by an 11-year-old Paul that was, in retrospect, quite prophetic.
"One thing, Mom," he said. "I'm going to try everything because I don't want to say when I get old that there's something I should have done."
When Endacott left in 1989, his parents didn't know traveling would become his life.
"It became more obvious as time went on. And he'd say, 'The world is my home,' and that makes sense to us," Phil Endacott says.
Even though Endacott's half way around the world, he's never far from home.
"Ialways feel like Paul's here. He's so much a part of us," Jan Endacott says. "We just have all the faith in the world in him."
NOW THERE'S A NEW WAY TO BRING HOME THE BACON.
There are three ways to bring home the boise. But the most interesting way has to be the new Biscoff Bar menu at Taco Bell. That's because food was too cheap in the boise. We then took them into the Taco Bell!
NEW SIZZLIN'
BACON MENU
INTRODUCING THE
**specialty** - the BTL Tart Taco, the Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito, and the Closed Chef Burrito. So bring them home on all of it. The best part is, you get a slathering bacon either way.
THE BORDER CALLS
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