Ordinary is not a word you’d use to describe award-winning journalist Maggie Downs—not unless you put “extra” in front of it.
I can’t tell you all the reasons why, but I can tell you an awful lot about the girl who has written for The New York Times, flown via helicopter with a team to deliver a donated organ, and penned a memoir called Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother’s) Lifetime. It’s a love letter, and a story of courage, on many levels. And it’s all beautifully wrapped up in some wild and crazy adventures.
Born in Macon, Ga., Downs is an Air Force brat, but before her first memory was formed, Dad was transferred to the great state of Ohio, the birthplace of eight presidents and Drew Carey. She has a brother and a sister, each more than 10 years older than she, so after age 7, she was basically an only child.
Little Maggie Downs was into the “girl investigative reporter” genre, devouring all the Harriet the Spy books. Harriet, you may recall, always carried a notebook and pencil with her. Grown-up Maggie Downs does the same, but at home, she recently “graduated” from longhand to an old 1980s word processor. That’s her idea of compromising with technology.
She tells me and my recorder that the only time she uses a recording device is when the interviewee might be a little sus—like the time she interviewed Larry Flynt, but that “turned out to be the most memorable interview I’ve ever conducted.”
I find myself wishing I could ditch the recorder and just take notes like Brenda Starr or Maggie Downs, but it’s really hard. Plus, even I can’t read my handwriting anymore.
The family wasn’t rich. There was Dad’s military career, and Mom got work that was mostly labor-intensive. After a long day, mother and daughter would visit faraway places in the glossy pages of the National Geographic. “Someday,” Mom would softly say.
By most societal standards, writers are considered to be a little bit quirky, or a lot quirky, but we wear it proudly like a badge, so joke’s on you. And Downs has worn hers from a young age. When other little girls were fashioning clothes for their Barbies, Downs was “making magazines for my Cabbage Patch dolls or writing little books (for them).” When her Cabbage Patch days were over, she joined the color guard, the school newspaper and drama club, while also performing in local theater. As a senior, she was voted most dramatic. When asked, she’s not sure if it was for her acting or just in general. “Maybe both,” she says with a wry smile.
We’re meeting (too) early, because Downs is dropping her 9-year-old son off at school. We have a sobering moment discussing parenting in a world increasingly filled with danger, and I ask what she does to combat her fears.
“It is about embracing optimism,” she tells me.
Back when she was in college, working on her degree in magazine journalism, she got the awful news that Mom had been diagnosed, at the age of 56, with Alzheimer’s. Instead of pursuing her dream as a travel writer, or writing for a big magazine, upon graduation, Downs took a job with a local newspaper.
After a few cocktails at a late-night party, Downs said yes to something that would change her life. As she stood on the tarp at the sky-diving academy ruing that tipsy decision, she decided she’d just go through with it. Then she saw him, and said, “I’ll jump with anyone but that guy,” pointing to the one who “looked like he was crazy, like he just stepped out of a Mountain Dew ad.”
Years ago, Maggie Downs had signed up to be a donor on the bone-marrow registry. “The odds of matching with a stranger are like winning the lottery,” she tells me. Downs won that lottery, happily donating her bone marrow to a stranger.
Of course she married him. But that will happen much later. Just in case you’re wondering: She did jump—and then she jumped 300 more times.
By 2005, Downs was in need of a change. As the paper’s police reporter, she started her day in the afternoon. “I would call all the different police departments and go to the courthouse and see what was going on. But then if there was a shooting or a body dredged from the river, I would go. It became too depressing.”
Downs acknowledges that reporting is an important job, and her award-winning journalism shows she did it well. But she’d always thought she’d write for, say, Rolling Stone—not cover the morgue. So when she saw a lifestyles opening at The Desert Sun, with Skydive Perris not too far away, she jumped.
In 2008, something that never happens happened. Years ago, she’d signed up to be a donor on the bone-marrow registry. “The odds of matching with a stranger are like winning the lottery,” she tells me. That’s the year when Downs won that lottery, happily donating her bone marrow to a stranger.
Two years later, when Mom barely knew who her daughter was, Downs was spending too much time lingering on memory lane, lost in the days when Mom gazed at photos and said. “Someday.” Those flashbacks came with a profound revelation: “I’m doing the same thing she did—I’m putting off my life.” She quit the newspaper, and just as suddenly was flooded with the terrible anticipation of losing her mother, grieving her all too soon.
So … this badass took off on a one-year journey to all the places Mom only visited on glossy pages. Lest you think she stayed in five-star hotels, she had a scant $10,000 to last the year. It was all she had. She volunteered and picked up odd work as she roamed the pages of the National Geographic on foot.
But you know what the National Geographic didn’t have? Ever? People getting attacked by monkeys in a rainforest in Bolivia.
Yeah, that happened. Seriously, read the book.
Learn more at Maggieink.com.