The Kiss of the Bat

My mom used to say, "Creatures are talking to us all of the time. Are we listening?"

I listen. Last night, sitting on our dock as night settled in, there was no sound. Then the hoarse rasp of an anhinga. That is, a snakebird. Long undulant neck, long sharp beak. She nests in our paperwood trees and you can see her black sleek form against the whiter trunks. Silence.

Then the whirr of wings and something light and furry, something unknown lands on my left cheek. I feel a touch of softness. Then more whirr, and it -- whatever it is -- is gone. "What was that?"

Lorry says, "It was the largest moth I've ever seen." I'd seen it too, very briefly, and thought it was a hummingbird. But it was, in reality, the moth they call Bat in Jamaica. It kissed my cheek and hummed away into the night. I remembered Frost's line: "For once, then, something."

Last spring I mentioned a long black snake sliding up to where I sat on the dock. It kept coming. I thought it would stop. It didn't. It came right up to my big toe and sort of tasted it with its forked tongue. I got a good tickly feeling. And remembered my Navajo friend Jay telling me that he'd seen medicine men "toe herding rattlesnakes."

Once in New Mexico I was awakened by a magpie. I thought I was dreaming but when I opened my eyes there was a large black and white bird on my chest. For some reason I thought it was a she, and when I was awake enough to sit up, I did, and she flew to the open window. I followed her outside. She flew from juniper to juniper. Finally I came to the place where she wanted me to see something. Her nest. The wind had blown it down and her nestlings were scattered about on the juniper and pinon needles. I got my ladder and put the nest and the nestlings into the tree they had fallen from.

That is my story. Listen to all great and small. Believe your dreams. Feel more, talk less. Love everything, even pain, sorrow, bewilderment. Move along with your life, have no grudges. Above all, be kind and think of others instead of yourself.

Blessing of the Christmas Purr

Blessing of the Christmas Purr



According to an ancient myth, there was a mother cat present when the baby Jesus was born. There, in the dove-cooing softness of the manger, kittens were born and a cat did purr. And, it is said, that this sound has been a blessing ever since.

There are many stories about Jesus and his love of animals - especially cats. In one such tale, Jesus finds a young cat upon the road. She suffers from neglect, but Jesus speaks soothing words to her, and carries her to a village where she is fed. Afterwards, he gives the cat to a disciple, a poor widow. It is she, the story goes, who is blessed by this cat's peaceful purr.

The widow then asks Jesus, "You care for all creatures - are they not your brothers and sisters, that you love them so?"

He answers, "Verily, they come from the great household of the Father, and they draw the same breath that you draw. And whosoever cares for the least of these, and gives it food to eat, and drink in its need, he shall do the same unto me."


Such a thought touched the famous explorer, Lincoln Ellsworth, in 1935, as he flew over Antarctica, some two thousand years after Jesus' birth. Traveling across the frozen tundra of a world untouched, and even unsought, by humanity, Ellsworth wondered what fate had brought him on such a lonely mission.

As he soared above the glittery waste, unfit for man or beast, he wondered, "Why am I here on this Christmas Eve?"

Yet over the airplane's steady roar, he seemed to hear a gentler noise. It was the solitary purr of the cat he'd carried with him on this, the first 2,300 mile, single-engine airplane flight over the Antarctic.

"Yes," he confirmed, "I brought along the right mascot for the trip, a cat that has given birth to kittens this very night."

So it was, that another wayfarer was blessed by the solace of a purr on that most holy of nights, Christmas Eve.

GH & LH

Bill Worrell: Sculptor, Painter, Writer, Songwriter, Philosopher

If you love storytelling the way we do ... if you love the Southwest ... if you love mysteries and often ask, Why is that? Well, you've come to the right book: Places of Mystery, Power & Energy by Bill Worrell.

That name should ring a bell, by the way. Worrell is very well known in all the areas listed above, but he is also as down-to-earth accessible, funny, and biblically wise, literarily informed, and just generally fun to be around and to listen to. Anything he writes including brief emails and spontaneous poems is funny-bone wonderful.

We ought to know, we published Worrell's latest book, and we're so glad we did. This is our 14th year publishing Irie Books and selecting what we consider to be some of the best of the best, of which Worrell is definitely one. Imagine a campfire on the Llano River, then visualize some old timers sitting around it. When I close my eyes I see Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Rod Serling, and Dante, just back from the shadowlands, but, look, over there, the one who's entertaining them is none other than Bill Worrell, and he's no shade, hant or shadow, he's the real thing, a cowboy philosopher with a bit of Bret Hart, John Billings, J. Frank Dobie ... there I go again! That's because I just love the way Bill Worrell spins a good tale, and this new book is filled with nothing but laughs, ruminations, and rummages in the dustbins of folklore and science.

He covers such miracles of nature as the mystery of the Lubbock Lights ... the search for man's beginnings in the caves and cliffs of the Lower Pecos ... the vortexes that surround the red rocks of Sedona ... the picky little editors who inhabit the author's historic house -- they turn out to be nibbly house mice ... the ghosts in the walls of his guesthouse, Medium Cotton (we've already booked our visit!) ... the rattlesnake whisperers and bridge jumpers and all-around geniuses that Mr. Worrell calls friends, and he's got a lot, let me tell you!

I would buy this book just for the pictures and the philosophy. When you see Midge wearing a rattler for a hat -- not a hatband, the whole rattler -- you just have to read the story:

I have a photograph of a young man named Midge Davis while he was in front of the store with a rattlesnake coiled upon his head. Midge died of a rattlesnake bite a couple of years later. He was playing with what is called a "high striker". It got him in the arm two times as he was attempting to remove it from a toolbox to show it off. "Let's get you to a doctor," said one of his friends. 

Let me have a beer first," he replied. After a few sips, he said, "You boys better get me to the doctor. He got me worse than I thought. I'll be dead before you can make it, but try anyway." He was dead before they got him to the doctor.

Bill Worrell writes like it was as natural as breathing, so I would recommend this book to anyone interested in how to make sentences pull you in and keep you there. If you don't read, I would recommend that you join Bill around the campfire ... who knows who you'll meet there.

The Great Flood

"A Great Flood is coming. Soon it will cover the land. I sing so you can save yourselves," said Spotted Frog.

No sooner than we did our first performance at MBFI, the rain came, sudden and soon and washed over the streets, hitting us slantwise, topwise and every whichway wise. We entered the Hilton soaked to the bone, to the marrow, to the heart. The words of the prophecy ringing true. And the rain didn't stop there. It lashed the windows through the night, wailing and moaning.

I remember as a child listening to Carl Sandburg. "Be careful what you say, little girl. Words have proud boots and walk loudly." That is what I remember. The power of words whispered in the wind. The enchantment of words whorled across skeins of rain. In Miami. Word, sound and power!

John D. MacDonald: Thriller Master

I was remembering this morning one of the things that drew me from the mesas of New Mexico to the pine flats of Florida. A friend of mine Jonathan Huntress gave me a book by John D. MacDonald.

The interesting thing is that, at the time, I was no mystery fan. And I wasn't very much interested in Florida. I was sitting under a turquoise sky looking out at miles of chamisa, pinon pine and wide empty space.

But Jon Huntress was a very good friend and if he thought MacDonald was good, I thought I'd give him a try. I did. Forty novels later I was packing for Florida. There were daughters to see, an empty nest to get out of, and many beaches to jog and tides to swim.

This morning I picked up a well-thumbed copy of The Lonely Silver Rain by John D. MacDonald. I turned randomly to page 43. Was that old magic still there after 20 years of being a writer who lived on a barrier island myself? Was Travis McGee, Mac's hunchy and hunky hero, still as cool as the day I first met him on a mass-market page of faded ink? I shrugged. We'll see. And glanced at page 43 wherein McGee, the old salvage snoop, was going to inspect a boat tucked into the mangroves:

"At first light on Thursday morning I headed out from a place named Faulkner's Fish Camp on Ramrod Key in a wooden skiff with a 20-horse motor, beer cooler, fly dope, tackle, tackle box, ten power binoculars and a bait pail full of apprehensive shrimp. I pushed it as fast as the rig would go, and when I got to the area I got lost three or four times among the wrong islands before, at high noon, I found the channel into the little bay protected on one side by the horseshoe island and on the other by a long narrow mangrove island. There was a gentle breeze from the north, just enough to riffle the surface of the bay. She was there, and the closer I got to her, the more disreputable she looked -- like an elegant lady who had stepped into the wrong bar on New Year's Eve."

I was caught, stuck, apprehensive like those trapped bait shrimp. MacDonald had me and he was going to have his way with me for another 277 pages. It's simple, really. The reason why the guileless reader reads on. As E.M. Forster once said, it's all about turning the page.

In that moment of spellbound reading I was sent back 20 years into a turquoise day in New Mexico when, crazy as it seemed to me then, I would even consider moving to Florida. What was the old magic? 

Well, it's page-turning stuff about fish camps, mangrove keys, tackle boxes and shrimp that don't want to be in a bait pail. "I got lost three or four times among the wrong islands before, at high noon, I found the channel into the little bay ..." 

Even if you aren't interested in anything Florida has to offer, there is a universal understanding among men and women that the words "lost" and "high noon" and "channels" and "little bays" are intriguing, and you have to ask yourself that age-old question -- what happens next?

There's "gentle breeze" and "riffle", softly reassuring, but the boat McGee's looking for is "like an elegant lady who had stepped into the wrong bar on New Year's Eve." All of these got me. They got me wondering, so I read on and came to the part about the turkey buzzards we know so well down here and the carrion flies. The lady is of course the missing boat, what's in her is startling ....

"It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies."

I read on. I had to. Mac had me. If you were to ask me why, I would have to revert to type -- the creative writing teacher that I once was, the recovering teacher that I now am. The detail! The exactitude! The essence of place! The sense of something's going to happen but we don't know what it is. We want to know. But we can't ... unless we read on. And that is the secret. Each line must lead to the next. Each paragraph must fulfill its promise and lead to the one after that. And thus we ride the wave all the way to the final shore.

Mike Gleeson, Most Interesting Man in the World

Four years ago the most interesting man in the world passed into the "next experience" as he sometimes called it.

Some 25 years before, the two of us were horseback riding on a hilltop in Questa, New Mexico above the hacienda where he and his wife Michele lived. We, Lorry and I, were staying with them. I was on a leave of absence from my teaching job at Santa Fe Preparatory, and it amazed me to think I was not in the classroom. The leaves were turning, it was October, my birthday, and I was riding the range with my friend Mike Gleeson, the most interesting man in the world, and I was free as a bee on the back of a horse. How was this even possible?

Mike was a mind reader, as everyone knows who knew him. He looked over at me, saw the gleam in my eye and said with smile, "Hey, Gerry, no one said you couldn't do it." By which he meant more than I could've said at that moment or any moment, even now, but I'm going to try.

He followed this up with, "Just think, you could be stuck in some office somewhere bent over a ledger book like Bartleby the Scrivener!" And so saying he learned over the saddle horn, reins in his lap, and pretended to do some ciphering. Then he exploded with laughter and his horse whinnied and both of roared in the gold blaze of that lazy autumn afternoon.

"Now let's get some war paint," Mike said. And I suddenly remembered our mission -- to go the  secret cave where the Taosenos actually got the red rocks that, when you wetted them, made war paint. It was a mission of holiness that I was sharing with the most interesting man in the world.

God bless him, and may he be riding steeds on the heavenly mesas right now.

Ride in peace.

Too Wet for Words

This bucolic yard scene doesn't tell the tale. But sitting on the dock in lawn chairs after days of torrential rain we watch tiny bass swim over our feet. The dock's under water. And this was the dock that the builder said was built for the Unsinkable Molly Brown. Now it's sunk. The shell road in front of our house is once again a highway for fish. Our neighbor says there's a bunyip in our pond. That's a mythological Australian monster. In reality there was a bunyip in our toilet and another one in our shower. I am not not kidding. I pulled one gorgon head out of the toilet line and another out of the shower drainage pipe. Each head was thick, ugly, knotted and large, and I had to pull hard to get it out. Each grew from the water-greedy, succubus root of a shefflera tree. No bunyip this -- but monster, yes! Indeed. And more to come -- cockroaches galore hunting for dry land. Giant toads hunting for cockroaches. Bee eating Cuban tree frogs gobbling African bees.
Paperwood trees unpeeling their scrolls of white newspaper bark. Acacia trees drooping to the pond's edge covered in bright yellow blossoms. Dark tannic water, the color of molasses. Thomas Edison's banyan tree  shrouded in green fox grape vines. (Yes, lightbulb man actually planted it and the one who built our house took a cutting and it has grown taller than our roof.) The yellow-crowned night heron tree is bowing into the tannins, the bees are whistling Dixie, the alamanda bush is popping purple fuses, and everything's out of control too wet for words.