Death-defying traveler simply follows destiny

Since I hadn’t heard from the irrepressible Ben Amadeus Ryan Hvar in almost two years, I figured Maine’s Santa to the Balkans had either died once again or was lying in a hospital somewhere overseas and dreaming up his next adventure.

Having chronicled his goodwill missions over the last several years as Maine’s toy-toting ambassador to the war-ravaged children of Yugoslavia, I’ve learned to expect the unexpected. After all, I once got his official flat-line EKG and an accompanying death notice in the mail from a Croatian hospital. His life-affirming phone call came shortly after. Hvar’s life is a running history of such dramatic and surreal oddities.

So I was glad to get a brief letter from the man recently, informing me that he had, in fact, completed an eight-week odyssey through four countries and seven hospitals, defying death the whole way.

“But sorry, no obituary!” he wrote.

Then, a couple of days ago, I got a phone message from a reporter in New Jersey, where Hvar was born 63 years ago as Ben Garcia. Seems that Hvar’s lawyer friend and longtime admirer in New Jersey had seen fit to nominate him for an award given by a humanitarian foundation in that state. The reporter, in the incredulous tone everyone uses upon learning of Hvar’s exotic life, wanted to ask me a few questions for a feature he was writing about the Old Orchard Beach motel owner. I didn’t get back to the reporter immediately, thinking he might ask me to recount some of the highlights of Hvar’s epic biography. Where would I start?

I suppose I could tell him about Hvar’s days as an ice dancer at Madison Square Garden and as a cruise-ship entertainer, then segue into the time he ran out of gas and crashed his airplane during a trans-Atlantic race, a stunning bit of bravado that got him a lot of publicity in the English papers. I’d have to mention Hvar’s paratrooper days, when his parachute failed and he plunged 1,250 feet onto a sand hill, breaking 40 bones and blowing out his eardrums. And how could I leave out Hvar’s two entries in the Guinness Book of World Records, once for being married in an ambulance while suffering one of his many heart attacks and again for riding a lawn mower from Maine to California in honor of American troops in Vietnam?

And when the talk turned to the war in the Balkans, and his tireless missions of mercy there, I could always provide color to the story by listing some of the items of battle detritus I’ve received in the mail over the years – the bomb fragments, Slovenian money, Croatian army medals and military-issue candy bars – that Hvar sent in lieu of postcards.

Just thinking about it all made me tired. So I decided to call Hvar first to catch up on his latest exploits and congratulate him on being recognized as a humanitarian in his native state.

“I’m so embarrassed,” Hvar said in that quacking, breathless voice that is powered by one lung and a seriously damaged heart. I could hear him rustling through his papers. “Listen to this,” he went on with a sigh. “The award is given to uncommon people who do uncommon things for the common good, or something like that. I don’t want awards for what I do. And now the paper wants to do a story on my life, when all I want to talk about is the national tree. That’s what’s consuming me right now.”

Hvar said his extraordinary adventures are behind him; he wants the All-American Tree to be his living legacy. It started a few years back when Hvar, appropriately anticipating his death, asked the governors of all 50 states, as well as the representatives of five U.S. territories and Washington, D.C., to send him a pound of native soil that would serve as patriotic bedding for his grave on Hvar, the Croatian island whose name he

adopted. He even supplied the baggies. George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, held out for a while, until Hvar wrote back to explain that he merely “wanted soil, not oil.” Once he got his all-American soil, and media attention that included a spot on Paul Harvey’s radio program, Hvar pondered the potential of his unique collection and began germinating new patriotic uses for it.

Two years ago, on Flag Day, he planted a Maine maple seed in that true all-American soil mix and watched it sprout. As it flourished, it grew from a common maple into Hvar’s vision of n historic tree, a living, breathing symbol of America itself. Hvar then waged a letter-writing campaign to make others see the greatness he saw in that tree – the country’s first, bona fide national tree.

Then last Christmas, he went to Croatia again, where he donned his Santa suit and rode a donkey-driven cart into the town of Hvar, handing out toys to 700 children. Laid low by heart problems again, he eventually wound up back in a Washington, D.C., hospital. While listening to the radio last month, he heard about a National Arbor Day Foundation contest asking Americans to vote for a national tree species.

“It was perfect,” he said excitedly over the phone. “I’ve already got America’s national tree! What tree could be better suited for that honor than the little maple? It’s incredible how it’s all come together.”

Getting out the word on the 14-inch sapling, which has since put down roots in a relative’s yard in Mechanicsville, N.Y., will require all the energy that Hvar is able to muster these days. His heart defibrillator keeps acting up, which can be a real problem when you’re in the middle of a letter-writing campaign to convince congresspeople around the country why the little maple tree deserves to be planted on the White House lawn. Hvar had planned to publicize the project with yet another trip on a lawn mower – an intercontinental journey, this time – but that idea has been put on hold for a while. His ailing heart might give out again, possibly for good this time.

“Some people might think I’m eccentric, but I wouldn’t call it that,” Hvar said. “I don’t think I’m eccentric at all. I just feel like I’m following my destiny, wherever it might take me, no matter what others might think. Then I just thank God and marvel at the way things turn out. I’m a very lucky guy.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Wednesday and Saturday.