When we hear about people being "bit by the travel bug," we think of them as having an appreciation of new places — not necessarily a compulsion to get up and go. The two go hand in hand for Tyler Wetherall, a travel writer who, as a child, moved 13 times across five countries and used a name that was different than the one on her passport. When she was nine years old, she learned why: Her father was a fugitive and the family was running from the FBI. Find out more about this episode at Fathomaway.com.
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Yeah. I remember being aware that it was potentially very dangerous and that we might be caught, and equally at the same time, there's this sense of us all being in it together, and I think that that in some way protects you from some of the fear. Welcome to A Way to Go, a production of I Heart Radio and Fathom. I'm Geralin Gerba and I'm Pavio Rosatti. When we hear about people being bit by the travel bug, we think of them as having an appreciation of new places, not necessarily a compulsion to get up and go, but the to go hand in hand. For today's guest, Tyler Wetherall, a travel writer who is groomed for the itinerant lifestyle from birth. Tyler's family mom, dad, brother, and sister moved house, as she likes to say, thirteen times across five countries in just the first nine years of her life. She country hop between the US, Italy, the South of France, Portugal, England and beyond, learning Portuguese phrases, skiing the French Alps, scuba diving in St. Lucia. It was exciting and adventurous, and a little bit vague too, as she wasn't quite sure why she was moving so much and why she was using a name that was different than the one on her passport. She learned the truth when she was nine years old. Her father was a fugitive and the family was running from the FBI. Tyler, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You wrote that before you knew the truth about your life, you knew all this moving was strange. But like the strangeness how so? I guess as a kid, you always want to be a bit different, you know, we come up with these fantasies about what our life might actually be like. I don't know that you're your parents are really aliens or whatever is that you come up with. And and I guess as a kid, even then, I kind of liked that there was something that made me different from other people. Um. I like that people thought it was a bit odd and would ask questions like, oh, I if you moved so much? But weirdly, it never made me really question what was happening, not deeply did you have any answer when they would say why are you moving so much? I gave the same answers that my parents gave and never really questioned them. And even while giving different answers. And that's the strange thing about being the kids. You just accept your reality as as normal. You don't know anything else, and it takes meeting other people and comparing your life to others for you to start going, wait, this doesn't this doesn't add up. So I'd say my dad was a businessman and that we left America because they wanted us to experience the world. Um, and my mom wanted us to have an English education, which worked pretty well. Um, that kind of thing, but it was always different. You wrote a book about your experience. It's called No Way Home, a memoir of Life on the Run that explores all these secrets from your past. You divide your story into two sections, Before and after. You were just a child when you found out that your father was one of the kingpins of a drug a tale that had smuggled tons of time arijuana into the United States in the early nineteen eighties. Well, now can you talk about that moment of change and how you perceived the world after. When I was nine years old, I came home from school one day and found there to be two strangers in our front room. And I remember at the time, me and my sister were suspicious of this. We we saw them, and we had this uncanny sense that something was going to go wrong. Um and Mom came outside and told us to go stay with a friend that night. It was a few days after that and we didn't think much of it afterwards, when she called me and my sister down into her bedroom one morning, we weren't going to go to school that day, and she explained that our father was a fugitive and he was on the run from the FBI. We'd all spent our entire childhood's on the run. She wouldn't tell us what he had done at that point. She said that was for him to explain whenever he was ready, but that he had got into trouble once again and he'd had to leave. She didn't know where he was, and she didn't know how long it be until we could see him again. So that was the real split for for us, kind of begging the hairs on my stand. Sorry, you were nine years old, right, Did you know what the word fugitive meant? I don't know if I did, though I do remember we went out to watch the movie The Fugitive in case of the wrong impression of what Dad's life was like, but I think soon you soon learned what it was. I remember her saying, going on the run, I remember being quite abstract the idea of the specifics of what he had done or what it really meant. Like, I didn't think about prison, I didn't think about necessarily him being taken from us in that way. I approached as a nine year old does. My dad was gone and I missed him, and I was hurt that he had lied to us about who he really was and who we were. How was your mother when she told you? Was she upset? Was she did? She try to be really calm to keep you and you're st calm. My mom is super stoic and strong and um she English, yes, um, and so she didn't She didn't want to panic us. So she definitely had like us, like a steely calm and a reassurance to her. But she was definitely shaken and certainly having both. You know, afterwards, I've learned that it was an incredibly disruptive and terrifying experience to have the trouble that they had believed was long in our past come back all those years later. Because by that point, did your father think that part of his life was over. Yes, we were living under false identities successfully and it had been years since there had been any type of problem, So as far as they believed, that had stopped looking for us, um and we could have carried on as we were. You know, my parents are separated, so there had been casualties to it, but we looked like it was all going to be okay at that point, which was just double the shock for your mother at that time that day, in that conversation with you guys, Yes, and I think a lot of fear as well what it was going to mean for us and for the family. She learned soon after that we were under surveillance that are in probable probability. Our phones were tapped and we didn't know if the house was or the car was, and we were being followed home from school. And I think those moments are are very anxiety and do see it's it's pretty frightening, and you don't know, she didn't want us to ever see her be arrested, or for Dad to be arrested in front of us and to have that trauma. You know, she was trying to protect us as best as she could from that trauma. And I think she was. She was scared. Were you aware that you were being followed and that your phones may have been bugged? Did you know any of us as a child who did you learn this as an adult later? No, she told us because we had to be careful what we were to say about dad. So we would talk about him when I would go for walks in the countryside, and that's when we feel safe to to talk about it. But other than that, we didn't talk about it at home or we're given very strict instructions not to talk to our friends, um and if someone were to approach us and try to start a conversation, um, not to not to say anything about that. So I found one of the most anxiety inducing parts of the book for me of your story was these moments when you were desperately trying to connect with your your father and your mother was really trying to make good on letting your father still have this relationship with you, even though he was on the lamb, And so you would wait until nightfall and and walk through the woods to a pay phone in the middle of nowhere and all huddle inside until the phone rang. I mean, how did that feel? What was that like? It's funny looking back on those moments, and they seem so it feels so surreal to think that that already happened. It seems like it's out of a movie. Yes, I mean those moments. I'm like, I feel so disconnected from it now, but in many ways because I've come so far from that moment. But I remember being aware that it was potentially very dangerous and that we might be caught, and equally, at the same time, there's this sense of us all being in it together, and I think that that in some way protects you from some of the fear. There was one particular time when we first were in the phone booth together and it was the first ever phone call that we'd arranged in secret to have with Dad, and none of us know how much danger is it this is, or how heavy the surveillance is. And just as we're waiting for the phone to ring, a police car pulls up to the phone booth and we all like, this is it. This is you know, they're they're here to catch us. Mom's gonna get arrested, They're gonna find Dad. Everything we've been frightened ev is going to happen. And it was the police got just as a three point turn and and drives awake, and and all of us like heaved this collective side of relief. And then and then the phone rings, and would get this distant voice of my father come and say hi, talking to us as if it was any other phone call that we had had in our child a speaking to her dad. He never he didn't know how much Mom had told us, and he would just chat to us about our lives, about school, about our friends. He never said where he was or he never he took a bit about what he was doing, but it was just to stay connected. One other thing that really was remarkable to me was the anecdote about your mother arranging for you to see your father, and it was just you and your sister traveling. Was it from England to France, being ferried by strangers along the way. Yes, I mean my mom actually put up quite a bit of resistance. My dad is I guess that's why he was gould of. His line of work is very persuasive and he has inherent belief that everything's going to be okay. So Dad convinced her to help arrange for us to see him. How old were you at this point ten very and your sister was twelve or twelve, very little, And so he arranged for his next door neighbor to come have a meet. So I think we met him in a pub in the countryside, somewhere where we wouldn't be followed. This long protracted journey we took to get there. The mom hands us over. Her heart is breaking. We see her crying. She doesn't everything in her all her motherhood, doesn't want to do this, but she does. She always believed it was important for us sever relationship with her dad, and and dad loved us and he wanted a relationship with us. She didn't want to stand in the way of that, so she made these sacrifices to help facilitate that that relationship. And she handed us to this guy who he hadn't met, but he hangry, had a cold at the time, so he was blowing his nose the whole time, and it was our job to peel oranges for him while he was driving in hand us the oranges in the front seat. So we instantly felt quite bonded to him, and we liked him. He was a good man. He did a good thing for us, and he drove us to the ferry and then we got the ferry over to France. I was vomiting the whole way, a terrible motion, sickness. And then we drive from from the ferry to to Paris. Was someone there to pick you up or was your father there to pick you up? No, we took the car, the car ferry over. So this gentleman with the oranges who was sneezing, took you the whole way. He took us the whole way out, and he took us all the way to Paris, where we met with Dad, who was so worried about every stage of that journey, whether we would get stopped or apprehended, or or that he would you have any trouble traveling with two girls that aren't his own, and all these various potential hazards. And and then we met with Dad in Paris, and again you know Dad had this way of I remember that trip has been incredibly glamorous. It was I'm going shopping and eating moon freet and feeling like I was having an adventure as my father. Were you anxious on the journey over or was this just this is a nice man who you're taking a trip with on the ferry. Other than the vomiting on the ferry over that fairy made me sick too, Yes, terrible. I was the anxiety I remember, oddly is lesser about us being caught, though I did feel that it was. I was worried about seeing my father again. Um, that's interesting. We were, we are and we were incredibly close. How long had it been since you had seen him? At this point it had been at least several months I can't remember exactly. Definitely several months, if not longer, which feels much longer when you're a child. Definitely, prior to that, we'd visit him every other weekend. We'd go down to London where he lived from our house and in the West Country, and would spend the weekend with him. So he was very active part of our lives until he went away. So to go for a few months of that scene and was was pretty dramatic for us. Were your parents separated when this happened? Yes, they separated after we've arrived back in England. They separated when I was five. Mom had had enough, understandably, so that adds another layer of drama to when she has to gather you around to tell you the man, I'm separated from who I've worked through all this anger with. Now the problems were coming back. I need to protect my kids and and and this is You're such a nice, well adjusted lady. Our listeners can see you. So I just want to paint a picture. If you have an idea of what a child who grows up as a fugitive looks like. I want to do a one eighty, because you are the picture of an English rose. And your and your parents as well, seemed very glamorous. Your mother was a model at one point. She really was a spontaneous woman. Your father seems like it's kind of a badass, like on a motorcycle, was skiing, was always doing really glamorous thing. I think he had a mustache at one point. It's like very hip looking. So yes, so not exactly what you would imagine from your average um drug kingpin. I guess no. They didn't really fit this aeotypes. You know. My dad's middle class New Yorker, college educated. He worked on Wall Street, but it was the sixties and so he smoked a lot of part had a wild time in the sort of heyday of New York. I met my mom, who was a young model there at the time, and for wildly in love with each other, and he started investing in getting high grades. Part delivered to New York to him was like, how do we get the struke that we're all taking and enjoying and have a great time and get rich? And then that industry was just a lot more fun to him than his job on Wall Street. He never really was a nine to five guy, and that ended up taking over his life. But he in his head it was a business thing, you know, he felt it was gonna be legalized any minute, and so he was applying his Wall Street ideas to the drug business. Just why it became so successful. I think it's very logical in your telling of the story and very cinematic. Have you sold the movie rights to your book? We're working on it. Another nomadic part of truly of the story is the trip that tipped off the Feds and eventually got your father arrested, And you tell us a little bit about that. That was my twelfth birthday, so Dad and I always spent my birthdays together. And at this point, so he's been running for over two years after one close call when he was hiding out in France, he decides he's not run far enough, and he goes and ends up in St. Lucia, and there he starts actually working. He works in a in a hotel as a manager, and life seems almost kind of normal for him. And he's traveling at that point with his his young girlfriend and he invites us out to go see him in saying this show and it's been long enough. We kind of were like, again, maybe maybe this is it. Maybe it's gonna be okay now. And we've been going out to visit him on our school holidays wherever he was, and we've gotten me and my sister pretty adept at that up. My brother seven and a half years older, so he was kind of having a different experience, and me and my sister, we know, we had this whole plane routine. We knew exactly what we're doing going on in these long distance flights, so it wasn't even we were excited about St. Lucia. That was the main thing about this trip. And we went out there for a week in half term, and while we were there, someone tipped off the authorities that Dad and I always spent my birthday together. So on my birthday they went and raided our home in in Bath in England and pulled my mom in for questioning, searched the whole house and we're looking for some evidence of where we were, and eventually found what must have been maybe a print out of tickets too. We we don't know exactly, but we assume it must have been something that we had left that showed that we were in St. Michia, and they basically sent it was a joint effort between Scotland Yard and the FBI. I think into polar involved as well at some point, and they sent some people to come arrest him, and Mom managed to get word to us on the island and called as we were just about to leave for my breathday dinner and said that they were coming and Dad had to get us off the island and get himself off the island. She didn't care about that at that point. I think she just wanted to get us home safely back with her And did you leave safely? Yeah? So did your father get arrested? Not straight away? Um, he was very good at that By that point. You've got to think at this point he's been on the run for a decade of his life. So our entire childhood, and he we don't go for dinner. We have a very worried night where we were waiting for the first flight off the island. He sends me and my sister in a taxi and we had this moment where he comes halfway in the taxi with us, and then he gets out and we're we're in a banana field and he's just got a little sports bag with him, and he tells the taxi driver to take us to the airport and we say goodbye, and I just have this image in my mind of looking out the back of the taxi and seeing my dad waving with a sports bag throne of her shoulder at dawn, and having no idea if I was going to see him again, or when I did, what that would be like. We knew it was the end of the road. There was no way mom was going to let us go see him again after a close call like that, and that for him as well, he hed run out of options. There was nowhere else to go. He'd given up everything. At that point, What are you running for? You know, if you can't see your family, it's so wild. When your father did finally get caught, was everyone just relieved that it was all over and like the jig was up and you didn't have to hide anymore. I mean, it just must have been such a crazy heavy burden to bear at that point. Yeah, I think we were. There's definitely an element of relief, I think from from my mom and the reason she stuck at it for so long, because We've talked about this a lot, and I've always sort of, you know, looking back, she was like, oh, I should have given him he straight away. It would have saved us all a lot heartache, um and and him as well, or everybody. It was right from the very get go of going on the run with three young children was a crazy proposition. But at the time she didn't want them to win. She'd seen, you know that they pursued us through her life and she felt like the FBI. She didn't want the FBI to win after all this time, We've been fighting for so long and they would lost so much and to just give in I felt impossible. And I think for Dad too, that kept him, That kept him running. It became the new normal. It became the new normal, the fight. You forget that you're that maybe you don't have to that there's another option you could choose not to. And when he got caught, we definitely were relieved. I think my mom and my sister more so than me. Prison was frightening. And was he sent back to prison in the United States? Yes, And you were still living in bath in your face with this this real unknown, Like I didn't know anyone who was in prison. We didn't have any visual reference apart from what you see on TV in the movies, and that's pretty good. It's not good. It's not good at all. And we didn't know how long he was facing because at first his sentence it could have been really very severe because the new drug laws of draconian in the US, you're looking at life sentences for trafficking, and that was terrifying. So from this point on, visits with your father involve visits to a prison. I'm guessing what was your relationship like with your father afterwards? So we went to see dad every summer in our school holidays. He was in prison out in California. That was a strange circularity to it. You're going to prison the place where most of your crimes were committed, but that was also where I was born and I've never been back. So this this sense of kind of reincountering yourself, which is really interesting, and being in a place called ostensibly that's home America. I mean, I'm officially American. I've never spent any time in the States. My my books called no Way Home. It's this whole idea of what does home mean and and how do you find it when you've lived such a nomadic life and had these big threatchering moments in your life that I think many people can relate to. So I would returned to the States, and I was curious about it. I was curious to be a sort of American version of myself. But it was very surreal. You have the UNI visit prison at the weekends, so we'd go out to whatever small California town where the prisons are and stay in a motel with a friend of the family and see dad for two days. I think that the prisoning it's like seven hours a day. Um, we're in a prison visiting sort of picnic carrier, which is kind of bizarre as well as if you kind of squint, you cannot see all the barbed wire and sort of pretend you're just having a picnic and all the men happened to be wearing the same thing, um which we would do money? Would you eat food at this vending machine? And you have this long stint of time sat together with not much else to do but talk, and we played cards, and in those visits we covered a lot of the ground that I think has helped us heal the anger and resentments that had built over that time. Because for me, from the point where I felt like we were on it together and I was rooting for Dad and I wanted him to come out with this the hero of the story. It was in when he was in prison that he told us the nature of his crimes. And I wasn't bothered about the drugs. You know, in part this part of me as a teenagers like, oh, that's pretty cool. My dad was a pot smoggler. But there was another part of me was like, why didn't you quit when you had kids? Like once you had a family, how could you risk this? How did you make a decision that risked you being part of my life in a meaningful way? And that made me really angry, and I behaved in all the ways angry teenagers behave, and I was a pretty wild kid. Did you ever become a pot smoker. Yeah, for sure. So it isn't as though you were rebel. You know, teenagers typically rebel against what their parents were doing and what they were about, and so no, I think I kind of set out to be as bad as I could be. It's like, okay, if you he's hard to beat that in terms of your father in prison, he's a drug smuggler. I was like, all right, I can I'll push this, And luckily I had my moment guide me, and who understood the nature of rebellious teenagers, having been one herself, and guided me through that time in my life very safely and out the other side. During those prison visits, Dad and I would talk and he had a chance to explain what he'd done and why, and decisions he had made, and and work towards some level of forgiveness. But I don't think we got there really fully, not until working on this book together. What's your relationship with him? Like now, I mean, it's wonderful, he's were incredibly close. Where is he He's just moved to Florida in fact, can you tell us yes? Yes again, No, he's he's he's out the other side. He's living illegal, happy life. Is he doing something totally boring? He's a financial manager. It's pretty funny too about his roots, I guess, and you know, the stock market as well as kind of just like legal form of gambling, and absolutely a whole was basically gambling. It's not really surprised that you became a travel writer. I would think that all that moving around would mean that it's it feels very natural to kind of keep doing it, and having that unconventional childhood has made you eager to explore. So can you talk about some of the life lessons from childhood that you've applied to how you approach travel today. Weirdly, I never made the connection until actually relatively recently, not until someone read an early draft of my book. I was like, Oh, it's you know it, isn't it funny that you turned out to be a travel right? I was like, oh, of course, And it never even I never put those things together. But yes, I I think I've just I'm very comfortable you can drop me pretty much anywhere in the world and I will figure out how all that place works, and I will find my feet pretty quickly. And I think that's a wonderful gift um and oddly, I think for my my brother's actually and maybe my sisters in extent search for some of the stability, and they're more conventional family life than I think than I have. But for me, I kind of took to this rhythm of traveling. I've been on the road, and oddly they were much better at doing it. When we were younger. I complained constantly and hated moving house and they just kind of got on with it, went to many more schools than I did. They definitely got the brunt of it because they were older, so they have been schooled when we were going through all the various countries. But for me, somehow, I left my first big trip in our seventeen on my own, and I just fell in love with being on the road and the experiences that you found and the version of yourself that you found there as well. Tell us some of the places you've been in the last year or so. I just got back from a magical trip to East Africa. So I was in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda. Was that your first time there? It was? And went to Rwanda. I'm so Enviousali is now one of my favorite places I've ever been. There's just an incredible art scene there that's happening, and it's really exciting, and I'm the whole trip was it was one of those big life ticks really to go see. Yes, they did. Um, It's been a lifelong ambition to go to it, and I feel very lucky that I got the chance to. And then I just turned about my heels. Actually went straight to leban On on a story there, and that was kind of a sort of big pivot to be to go from Kenya to London to leban On in the space of a week. A week maybe it's yeah, but again I land and I get out on the road and I talked to people and and then it makes sense somehow. I'm sure there's downsides to it too. Do you do any travel with any members of your family. Yes, Me and my sister have traveled a lot together. We actually both quit our jobs and moved to South America when I was twenty four and had a big six months, beautiful journey there all over South America. We based ourselves in Buenos Aires. And then come on, when you're twenty four years old, how much fun did you guys have? It was? It was wonderful lots of late nights dancing. Yeah, it's not even late nights in Buenos Aires. It's like early mornings. When I am. We had like acclimatize, like you don't eat to midnight. We could just stick to a London schedule. You're just doing it in the other Atmisphere. It's very that's very good advice. When when we had first talked on the phone, you had mentioned the phrase over developed runaway complex, which I just thought was a really clever self diagnosis. What does that mean? I feel like I have a propensity as and when things become a little bit difficult to think in, the solution is leaving, and by leaving, like oh, this is quite painful what I'm going through right now, I know what I'll do. I'll go to Cuba, or things aren't working out quite the way i'd like to, I'll move to New York or whatever the problem is. I find the solution is generally leaving the country. Travelers therapy, though, is the other way of looking at that. I like that that's a more positive spin than I'm not the last half full. Yeah I need that, but doesn't work for you. I feel like it's worked out so far, and maybe partly because of that perspective that you find when you're traveling, so whatever is that you're going through sometimes and luckily for me, I've never had to address the kind of problems that my parents were addressing when they went on the on the run. Maybe for me it's possible to solve the type of problems that I'm encountering by traveling. Tyler, It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, and thank you so much for sharing this unbelievable story with us that I really do hope gets made into a movie one day. Your book, which I'm sure everybody's gonna want to pick up, is called No Way Home, a memoir of life on the run. Can people find you on the socials? Do you post? Do you tweet? Do you can? We follow adventures at? Tyler writes, is probably the best face to find me. T Y L E R w R I T E S. That is great. Thank you so much for having me. This is being fun and that's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please subscribe, and you know, leave us a five star review. Oh Wait Ago is a production of I Heart Radio and Fathom You can find the details we talked about in the show notes and on our website fathom away dot com. Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter when you're there. You can get in touch with us anytime at podcast at fathom away dot com and follow us on all social media at at fathom Way to Go. Please tag your best travel photos hashtag travel with fathom. If you want to really go deep on the travel inspiration, pick up a copy of our book, Travel Anywhere and Avoid being a tourist. I'm Jarrelyn Gerba and I'm Pavio Rosatti, and we'd like to thank our producer, editor and mixer Marcy to Pena and our executive producer, Christopher Hasiotis. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast Asked, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows h m hm